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got 13 minutes i can give you before you have to your next meeting thank you thank you thanks everybody yeah wisconis parking lot looks great it looks like that i drove in there earlier today it looks fabulous so really nice but it does look really nice so thanks everybody have a great night we'll call the meeting and without objection we're adjourned all right see some of you at the next meeting you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um i don't know a whole lot about this i have a little bit that joshua and i turn it over to you to explain or anybody else who knows some more detail about number 14. yeah so uh just thinking about again green rental housing program there's been uh i guess a different different ways that this has been envisioned um one of the really interesting conversations that i had and this was uh actually way before since everything is either after or before the pandemic uh but i think it was sometime december of last year november december of last year uh we talked with beyond the diag and uh and we were kind of brainstorming ways that we could uh that we could go ahead and really prioritize uh you know rental units that uh that basically have energy efficiency upgrades done to them um and and how we could maybe identify that so it was in the early stages i think we were kind of thinking through everything we could do one of the recommendations that had come up or the suggestions that i brought up was putting a green leaf near homes that met a certain standard um and so that way you know i think as students become more uh conscientious of uh you know everything having to do with sustainability obviously uh global warming climate change i think a lot of times uh they vote with uh you know they're much more conscientious in where they live and how you know where they choose to live and so um i mean it's kind of along those lines thinking about ways uh to promote um again people going to uh to these these units that that are more energy efficient use less energy and and produce less carbon dioxide emissions so there's a community outreach element of this then too obviously there is yeah and for those that don't know some of the new people they may not know um almost 50 of the housing units in ann arbor are so it's huge questions for josh okay if we don't hear from you then we assume that you have at least enough enough information to uh make a judgment and if not you could certainly reach out to me joshua carlene after the meeting so number 15.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so we're almost halfway through if we can keep up the pace we'll maybe be done by nine um support development of electrification energy efficiency and distributed generation pilot and i don't know exactly what this is so one of the um you know we have the the solarize program that that has gone live and one of the things that we've really been looking at is creating an electrification component of it and making sure to bundle everything together um so one of the i guess the hurdles that we face with electrification not only is it a greater cost up front to purchase a heat pump uh but then it's a a higher cost throughout the life of the heat pump because you're switching over from natural gas to electricity electricity is more expensive in the state unfortunately we just have very cheap natural gas which isn't always the case i mean boulder for example doesn't face the same issues because their natural gas prices aren't as low as ours so uh so one of the things that we've really been looking at is you know how can we go ahead and bundle these things together so if you're getting a a heat pump for example can you go ahead and do a solar panel along with the heat pump pair that with things like energy efficiency so where you're really getting the benefits and it kind of you know they play off each other you're getting the benefits of all these things working in tandem and then you know a lot of times your payback time for each of these different items goes down when you bundle them all together so that's kind of you know developing something along those lines uh we've been working internally so i've been thinking a lot about and working with michigan saves for example an electrification program uh fong who was again also on the line earlier has been working on some of the models so you know she's thinking about modeling some of these things as far as a size of homes how much electricity will they need to use what's the cost going to be and so i think that that's squarely where where this lies uh helping to to develop and really integrate these things into into what we're doing uh right now so if we can enter in column i um also that there's the financing element of this too because you know if you're going to be spending an outlay for all of this then um financing becomes uh a consideration for for most people and that's where michigan saves and potentially other financial institutions might come in yeah and you know one of the things i've realized is it goes all the way back to the supplier i mean it's one of those things where you have to work you know a lot of times contractors might not have access to heat pumps and as a consequence they'll suggest that people put in furnaces even if the person wants a heat pump so i've been in conversations with mitsubishi for example to figure out what kind of things they offer and try to see if we can integrate you know all the way through the whole supply chain uh integrate that into contractors local contractors so that way that stuff is more accessible so i really think this piece in particular there's a lot to dig into and there's a lot of pieces a lot of complexity to it but i think yeah we'll definitely um benefit a lot from from the help from the commissioners i have a question have you um looked at this issue within the context of micro zones like kind possibility of doing this within the context of a microgrid has that come up yeah and we've always i think we've always liked the idea of a microgrid i think we're uh where there's kind of a resilience factor to it so when we can do it uh with things like fire stations we always try to see you know existing microwaves what can we add to it i think it becomes a little bit more difficult when it comes to neighborhoods just because the whole dt question um and that's the challenge that we've often run into but um but i love the idea i mean we should definitely think more about it so if the i think mark's point is if legislation um changes state law that that to enable microgrids um then microgrids would become an aspect just like we said with financing microgrids could potentially become another element of this definitely take a project to the legislature and say make an exception or the public service commission give us a one-time exception to do a demonstration project you're calling this you know you you're calling it a demonstration so let's step forward i love the idea yeah let's let's do it next point um in the renewables group um i think this is really um more something that we talked about earlier um so right the proposal is in as you can see in column f that um it calls for um the city to be able to essentially bundle everybody's um aggregate um electricity demand and to put that out to bid right now this is not allowed with the monopoly that utilities have in the united states i mean this could be preempted by a municipal utility but right now that is also a huge hurdle so right now the intent is to look at this and this is really just support of the enabling legislation for community choice aggregation any comments or questions to this i think probably it's not an active uh topic it's just something that we would potentially pass resolutions on and then advocate for like mark was talking about earlier it is that john is uh active in lansing so because both representative robbie and senator irwin this is high on their list um glrea we have adopted this as part of our policy platform i've personally been lobbying on this and we've been we've been testifying that so in one of the two packages is that included in one of the packages that's one of the questions whether or not it's included one of the packages or not because it's not you know it hasn't been clearly defined but clearly the intent um you know it's it's a way around uh community soul i mean bottom line it is and so it's um there's a lot of a lot of bipartisan support for this people have gotten tired of the dte and consumers uh you know war on community solar and just and just say you know just let go of the rope let go of the rope and pick up a new rope um and community choice aggregation is the new rope so the utilities are have fallen down backwards because we let go of the community community solar thing and they're regrouping um and they're actually a little bit behind on this public service commission has had some internal meetings on this and stuff so it's moving um arlene or josh you can put in the comments column um um obtain the status of legislation um from um um yusuf or um um from jeff and again this one would benefit a lot if there was a sustainability group in in michigan that was you know a chapter or something where detroit and ann arbor and holland and lancy come together there's a lot of communities that want this um and uh then communities i should also add um to mark's point that uh you know when we first started uh looking into ccas there's a legislative component of it but then there's also different ways to implement ccas so we were talking to communities you know in california communities on the east coast each place has a different way that they've used ccas so even after you know and fingers crossed everything goes through the legislation side i think there will definitely be a role for uh developing and understanding what the program actually looks like there's so much flexibility as to what it would how it's put together yes i think there's actually a national network um for ccas that that provides um best practices lessons learned things like that that we would involve or get involved with let's go down to number 17.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um i think we can do this quickly um similar to what we talked about before with evs do the same thing with on-site generation and battery storage um i think this is basically julie's program right can we put that in the comments section um is this the solarize what is it called what's the what's the program yeah zod solarize and currently um the way that it's structured uh julie's mostly focusing on uh solar install so she brings in a solar installer who's invited by an individual they uh invite others in the neighborhood and then they do a discount so it's usually a 10 to 15 discount depending on how many people actually sign up for solar um but i think yeah and again it's kind of building off that model with things like batteries along with energy efficiency along with electrification so it's really looking at this i think you know the way the solarize was conceived was really specific and i think that they're thinking about this in a much broader sense you know kind of packaging this as a bundle i think makes a lot of sense uh from from many different angles so so um what what's julie's again can i just real quick um it's roth julie roth and i actually hosted a solarize event um last month and we had like 40 people like um another person joined my my my event and so there's two of us who are co-hosting and um right now there's just a lot of interest a tremendous amount of interest that came out of it so it's really cool um so josh you're saying that basically it's it's the idea for this is just to take the solarize event and just have it be solarized plus battery plus like that like include include more items or something and and and so that would include necessarily more vendors right like a more complexity a different yeah so one of the things that we found um with the solarize program so yeah it's been very successful a lot of adoption solar it's really great um but i think that there's a component of it where you know residents will come up afterwards and say hey you know we've heard about electrification we want to know how do we get a heat pump how do we go ahead and get uh you know whatever as a electric stove range you know a hot water heater with a heat pump attached to it and so they want all these options and the truth of the matter is is the market especially with the heat pumps in particular just isn't there yet and this gets to that conversation of knowing which contractors should we be turning to um you know i've been talking just recently i talked to michigan saves because i have a contractor list so you know who could we partner with um getting in touch with mitsubishi right so i learned we contacted mitsubishi i was working through train and mitsubishi for some things on city properties so we contacted mitsubishi you know what kind of things do they offer trainings for contractors because a lot of times contractors may not have the information as to how to install them so i think getting all of that there and the focus of solarize might still be on solar but at least there are resources uh that solarize can touch on and really offer people as they go through the process so i think that's kind of the idea okay number 18 is a number legislative issue i think we can handle it the same way where we'll check for the status i know in particular in this case it is a part of a particular package of bills and we can add what that is um and i i think it's already included in our lobbying agenda but we can um put put an update in here for that um josh on number 19 now jumping down to that is there really anything that the renewables group can do i mean are there specific tasks from the city that can say analyze this or advocate for that related to this or is this basically a project that is between the township the city and dte where the energy commission can't do a whole lot yeah at this point um it's a lot of studies that are going on and so we're meeting with dt on a semi-regular basis i don't know what there would be it's mostly just uh interconnect studies things of that nature so can can people from the commission help with the studies or or do we just hide this column for right now or this role i think yeah because it's mostly being done uh myso grid studies things of that nature so i think for now um we can i can always give updates but i think for now let's hide this then so um the next item then is number 20.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um so um i don't know let's see community solar well the action item in the plan 2.3 reads support community electric vehicle and solar bike buys um and um you know the bike part of it has already been talked about up in the transportation electrification so this is really focusing on the solar bike pi bulk buys and i don't know is this um how is this different as it's shown here in question one uh question column 1.3 is what we just talked about the solarize program how is this different than the solarize program yeah i don't really see it as different i can ask if there's any intended difference but i think it's all kind of the same as you know so maybe we just combine those also then yeah okay maybe make a note of that there we go yeah so down to 21.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um this is just something i moved down um i think we headed up above supporting the summit so i don't know that we need to do anything there unless somebody has another question or comment about it 22 provide input into okay so this is again copied and simply moved down i just this i just did this so we talked about that and the same thing with 23. again if people have questions speak up but i think we covered it 24 we talked about also outreach to schools um so um we're at my number action item number 25. um and one question that i wanted to ask is um and carleen maybe you're best able to speak to this but others certainly chime in especially some of the school people that are you know still the youth that are either in school or fresh out of school um is is does it warrant having two different community outreach groups or does it make sense that they're combined and if there's a certain communication then there's one strategy for schools and the public schools and students and their parents and a slightly different strategy for outreach for the same messaging and the same topic to a different audience an older audience or a multi-family audience i'm wondering if it really makes sense that we break out schools from outreach in general i don't know how do other people feel all right i think it should be its own a standalone um i mean what we're trying to get with schools it's one is a whole different rate structure for school so it complicates things but you know there are people who are employed by the school systems who are grappling with this too right i guess my question is how what can we do to empower them or enable them or or something and and maybe it's you know better understanding what what it is we we would like them to do we really want solar on all the schools um through our curriculums in all the schools do we want the union to have a place in the schools to transition students through do we want special courses set up by the union to take students early on and start channeling them into these things i mean my answer to all of those is yes so um if those are the kinds of things we do if we see the schools as an important part of a20 means we're going to cut their energy load provide renewables and hopefully make them more effective as a vehicle to get the rest of society to do that too you know partner around on that as well so i think it's different from community groups i think they're you know that we need a good point and i would add one other thing is we passed a billion dollar bond and so the financing is there and um for all these other community outreach groups there isn't a billion dollar bond or the equivalent so that that calls for a separate strategy probably carlene or anybody else thoughts on that it's definitely a more targeted group um and the the wide variety of opportunity just within the district um and the population as far as um infrastructure um upgrades and modifications opportunity for production renewable energy combined with um education and curriculum development um it's its own project it's it's big enough i think that uh those people who really want to focus in on uh participating and you know if they get selected to be part of the uh community um support team and um though it would be good to keep it separately okay maybe mark you and carlene um and others can go in and under the comments section and capture some of the points that we just talked about making that argument mentioned the bond mentioned some of the other things that mark talked about um i'm looking here at 2016.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
hey john i just wanted to add a brief note on the bond yeah i know that the uh they have not yet yet started uh bidding out the working yet for the construction uh for uh the the buildings i don't think it's gonna be for some time yet for that especially because of uh the the reopening plan has taken up so much of the school board's time but uh you know i don't know if we want to have some sort of and this is something that we can add in the comments um some sort of like uh you know comments uh focus thing where we have members of the energy commission speak at the ann arbor school board meeting so that we're reinforcing the importance of sustainability and making sure they're not cutting any corners to save money on uh renewable um uh where they're getting their energy from as well as the efficiency of the building so i think that might be worthwhile but um i can kind of let people know when that's uh getting close to um uh passage in that type of another thing we might do um robert is um get someone like emile lozana to make a presentation to the energy condition um even devote a meeting to that because it's so huge and um um you know we would have a different perspective than him presenting to the school board or presenting to parents or something you know we have a much much more uh experienced knowledge set and things like that so um i think we should challenge him to come and tell and lay out his plans and it can be faced but and maybe we do this you know once a year or something like that because it's so important yeah i mean especially in this instance i mean we have one opportunity to get this right with the schools because i mean this will be the buildings to uh the school district relies on for the next 30 or 40 years so i mean we got to make sure we get it right yeah and that we could we could get into this in detail and i'd be glad to help out on it but i think the schools are lacking targets and plans right now uh and so i think there's a there's a strong role for the energy commission to kind of bring that to light and help out in that situation yeah i would definitely echo that uh josh i know just from we've been as a labor federation we've been working with the schools on responsible contracting and i know they've just like in regards to like all the other kind of peripheral things you know labor issues environmental issues everything has just been pushed to the side with the reopening plan and executing that so you know especially you know the next several months into the next year you know that's uh that'll be a big thing for us to need to continue to keep on their agenda great points so um we already talked about the landfill solar project flying our number item 26 we already talked about the strategy number 27 um and under 28 and then we'll also just take a few minutes to open up for other ideas but on number 28 this is a new item and um in in the 820 plan under 2.1 um you know is electrification and this is just one element of it but um josh already talked about renewables and the rfp there and it seems to me one huge huge project is basically like almost everywhere else uh everything is heated water and air with natural gas in all of our municipal buildings and so the question is what is the strategy for electrifying hvac well the ec side is is typically electric but it's the heating part that is um um and so maybe we should all even hear that it had hot water because there obviously is hot water needs too um and so that's that's a huge project um and i don't know josh or anybody else want to comment on that okay yeah good um so just really quick uh to your point john um so if we switch number 26 from landfill solar to solar municipal buildings i think that might be really helpful especially since you know we're trying to figure that component out um i think that we could probably add something in here about energy efficiency audits as well i tried to get through some energy efficiency audits uh specifically that looked at uh some of our highest users so water treatment plant wastewater treatment plant had an engineering firm who's going to take a look at them um as per everything with the with the pandemic uh you know the the financing didn't work out for us where you know it came out quite expensive because it was an engineering firm and we didn't find a way to finance that so uh that's something else that i would love help with uh from the energy commission if we want to think about how best to proceed and do that i'd love some some ideas so thought partners on that side so you must need a new action item for that uh yeah okay did the city hire an energy manager i know they were short lists yes that's actually fong uh who is who's on the phone has mostly been towards state legislation up to this point so it's a little different than what you would traditionally by discussing the energy usage buildings yeah the the it's a little different um missy kind of wrote the description a little different than what a typical energy manager position would entail is there funds available in the office to hire an energy manager consultant who would not be an energy manager's lobbyist under the name of mg manager yeah um so so one of the things that we've uh we've looked at is um first getting an inventory so i guess to back up really quick uh one of the main issues we have here at the city and i've acknowledged this for a while now um there are a lot of band-aids so really old systems uh that are running on their last leg some of them shouldn't be running anymore so i'm surprised that they're still going boilers things of that nature um and so you know but we really don't have a very good inventory of them we had somewhat of an inventory on some of these things uh while the honeywell audit but that was a little bit of a mess yeah there were some issues with the numbers and the way that it all worked out um so you know my my intent was really to uh to bring out you know and i did an rfp energy efficiency rfp um to to pick a uh a new a new firm to do energy audits we actually uh we actually settled on someone uh they were going to do water dream plant wastewater tree and plant wheeler city hall so all of the largest users makes up i mean they were looking at mostly 50 of the city's energy usage so i was thinking biggest bang for the buck um they'd be looking at the largest users and something that honeywell never looked at so again even with the honeywell data just they mostly worked on parks things just weren't really all that uh important so um so we tried to get that through the problem is being an energy firm you know again it was on the pricier side and so trying to get that through during these times with the pandemic and cuts uh became difficult that the energy commission that we asked april baranak energy coordinator for the county to come to our meeting and present to us her her report on what she did in the last 10 years to you know reduce county building energy usage and what that entails and share her spreadsheet and show i think the members of the commission you know how how simple of a task this should be and how um what the bang for the buck is like it's it's stunning what she's been able to do and their buildings are just like ours their commissioners are just like ours you know their employees are just like ours they're energy they buy the same energy we do um and i think it's just the is just what you're saying the the fact that we don't have an inventory of the things that use energy is is stunning yeah that we're done and to your point mark it might make sense to even do it to justify what we're trying to get done because at this point you know if april can help to justify the the case for it i think that's the most uh crucial piece she could play in all this uh i mean i think that the actual process we have a pretty good sense you know doing a unified uh energy you know kind of system that looks at all the systems across the board automating a lot of it i mean april and i have talked a lot we've you know we're kind of in in conversations i think that the the blueprints there it's not very difficult i think making the case for it i think that's something i'd love to if she can come out and make the case for it i think that'd be wonderful i just want to remind you that um the thing that i believe the thing that pushed the solar project at fire station six over the edge was bringing the fire to the fire chief fire from the epsilon e to come make a presentation our commission that opened eyes and i think bringing the expert from out of town i.e the expert across the street to talk about you know energy management um it ain't lobbying i just want to go on record to say that it isn't going to lancing and lobbying and testifying it's finding out where the boiler is and seeing what's going on yeah it's it's pretty simple stuff and i think given the payback for some of these things i think it's well justified so i i would yeah welcome any help that we could get to make that point i'm sure she'd be happy to come speak okay so um this line 28 that we're talking about is also sort of combined with um 26 so it's solar on municipal buildings its energy efficiency and its electrification of heating of water and air those are you know three huge tasks um and we did have a subcommittee that met on this but it's sort of with covet and everything petered out um so there's there's certainly an opportunity here although on the other hand we have to recognize um for those of you who don't know the figure municipal greenhouse gas emissions are 1.3 of the city total so um it's you know you can see it a little bit in the ranks here the prioritization rank at 17 and um that 17 is um you know when we're looking at hvac um and heating that's only a part of of 17.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so it's um the 2.1 is for basically everything municipal wide and not just not just the heating and eating the financial reason for doing this john has gone up dramatically given the tax load on tax revenue the economy and stuff like that if we want to maintain josh's job and the things we love and keep the momentum we need money that's true i'll be honest with you i think the the money the money is there i mean if you're able to create and i've talked to missy about this uh you know we have a revolving energy fund if we use it the way that we're supposed to um we can really fund a lot of the stuff we're trying to get done to another point john that you brought up as far as the the small footprint of the of the city i do see that obviously the city has a small footprint but i do think in some ways uh you know our community centers can be really great examples and this gets to the north side project uh for community members i mean when we have uh people coming to even our solarize programs if we could offer them an example of a heat pump working you know where you say go to this community center and we'll do you know i'll personally do a tour to show you how all the pieces work and everything i think that really helps and one of the things we found even with solar when when community members are able to see it touch it feel it get a sense for it all of a sudden it goes from something that sometimes is very overwhelming to something that seems very doable so i think that there is that leading by example um and i i really do intend to make sure that the city uh is that that example that others can that's exactly what i was follow to say is just we need to we need to lead by example or with others to follow yeah yeah we can do that ourselves too and and that's also the i think the neighborhood ambassador programs is people that are that have done this themselves are willing to be ambassadors for um their neighborhood or their ward or even you know city-wide potentially so we've worked through the list and it's about um 13 or so to um nine o'clock um what what questions do people have what have we missed um even if you don't bring it up now that doesn't mean that you can't create a line up here and suggest hey i think we should do x um so um for everybody's nj as i said the funding ideas uh that i've kind of mentioned in the past and reached out to misty about uh you're in your email yep yep you could add put them in here yeah zac if you want to or jay if you want to go ahead and and edit i'll just i can um it just it drives me nuts that we don't have african representation on this commission i know that we've had sustainability meetings i've seen african-americans at those meetings i know that missy has been in touch with them stuff we need to bring that perspective closer to us to help us understand the things we may not be seeing are like our biases and not only representation but also projects that are specifically targeted to have a a significant environmental justice aspect or element to them and i agree with mark martin some of you may have missed it at the very beginning mark brought it up before we really got the meeting going well i guess we yeah that's what the meeting was going so yeah we we do need when you need projects addressing that other people's comments questions i was looking for the name of it but i think on that note i was interested in learning a little bit more about the net zero energy affordable housing um priority i guess i don't know what they're called um and if that is one that could fit into any of these or be worked on or what has been done with it so there was um there's been some work i did a kind of a sketchup of a net zero home uh broadway for some of the housing commission sites um the idea being that a lot of times the housing commission pays for the uh the energy bills um and and so you know if we can go ahead and reduce those energy bills a higher upfront cost obviously to install things like solar um but with quicker paybacks if you're able to bundle these things like i was saying earlier with uh you know heat pumps things like that energy efficiency upgrades um we were able to get the uh the the bills quite low um and i think that's you know housing commission could actually reinvest that money into new housing commission projects and and kind of paying it forward to other places um so yeah if people are interested in in joining me on that i would love to have uh the commission expertise hey josh can you can you ask um within the city if we're allowed to have programs that are specifically targeted to um certain demographic groups whether it's by income whether it's by um race whether it's by whatever you know you talked about the revolving energy fund could you have a revolving fund for energy efficiency and solar and things like that that are targeted to lower income folks where we know that their utility costs are a higher percent of their disposable income it gets getting at what mark was talking about earlier and we have a specific project and we have programs and funding that targets those people who are spending you know a significant part of their disposable income on the combination of their housing plus utilities yeah and this is where i think michigan saves and married templeton has been an incredible ally um she does things like uh revolving energy funds for communities and they've been actually working with the alice group so the kind of donut hole again low-income groups um and so we've yeah we've been working very closely with uh with mary templeton and michigan say specifically on those issues um they have a whole bunch of funding mechanisms that they use uh to make sure that there's backstops for example if people can't pay um and there's a default they're able to fill those defaults based off of you know kind of backup funds so maybe there's a particular project under community outreach together with michigan saves to to make those better known yeah yeah and i think even developing because that's uh mary really uh you know we have a very good relationship with michigan saves and mary uh turned to us to really figure out you know they're trying to develop these these uh programs so even the the actual uh developing of the program implementation um i think that's a great a great idea okay um so you guys are tired of hearing me i want to hear from you um thoughts from julian noah larry um you guys have um yet to speak up do you have any particular things um that you want to say now or again phil feel like you can go in here and put your thoughts in but i want to call on you to see if there's any questions you have or thoughts everybody really i actually have one question um like when we're looking for new applicants for the commissions do we incorporate on the different like race or different demographics of those applicants because i mean like um i believe i forgot who said it but we definitely i'm very surprised we don't have any african-american um people in this commission and i think especially when we're talking about um even schools but we're talking about like um economics in this new program that that's very important to have the other perspective and i feel that and like what we're talking about talking about today i don't feel like there's too many um areas in which i've like experienced any things that require that other uh perspective but i feel like going on forward it'd be really important to have that of other people contributing that's a great question i can try to answer it and i'd encourage all of us to think about it so um nominations that the mayor makes for energy commission are based on applications so the process doesn't really go out um don't mean that anybody actually goes out and specifically beats the bushes and um says or the mayor for example his office doesn't do it he's sort of depending on us to go out there encourage people to apply and then he with some input from us pick and nominate people for the commission so we actually among youth commissioners had people um with more diverse backgrounds than we had for the normal positions um but it is clearly something that um we all need to be working on is going out there and encouraging um people that look different than the rest of us um to be a part of this because they're going to bring in new perspectives and new ideas um and new approaches that we may not think about what's here in the second item i believe one is referring to uh like the youth participants and everything um i think i particularly could be beneficial in finding more adverts and more um effective youth participants because i'm connected to the youth community that would be outstanding and again there's i'll remind everybody you don't see it here but there is a column in the spreadsheet for resident volunteers and a good way to to get people on the hook and to get them educated about what they're doing is to work on a subcommittee and if they worked on a subcommittee they'll know about uh opportunities when openings happen on the commission though we can encourage them to apply and then they can move up from just working on a working group to actually being on the commission so i i welcome um people recruiting people that way and getting them to serve on some of these um these working groups as well as to submit applications i mean admittedly when you know when when we looked at um at larry um you know we had a certain pool of applications or applicants and and all we really had very very limited um number of people that had waved their hand and say hey i'm willing to serve on this commission and the more uh the bigger the pool and the more diverse it is the more likely that we're going to have a broader representation here so have at it john i have another question um i think it was robert george he's the labor federation rep on uh group um he was said that i'll hold him to it that there should be a way to work out this issue of union concern about volunteer labor and our need to use volunteer labor to get this done i don't know whether it fits and josh said you know he's trying to get this done too if we could formalize this under under that somehow let's convene reconvene a meeting um i know that we've had some meetings but um we haven't had meetings directly with with the labor federation um on this specific issue and and let's drive to an agreement let's get an agreement that we can hand off as a resolution to the to the city and say you should do the volunteer projects here's the agreement the draft agreement we think you should execute it and move on um robert you're you're agreeable to that um yes yes whether we stick this under with josh so we can get this done yeah i know that sounds great mark um i would i know the president of the local uh uh ibw uh local and he's uh he's a good guy very reasonable um and you know i i think that we could definitely do that i you know i don't know what type of structure you would like to see uh for that type of meeting um but you know i can definitely facilitate and be a part um and make sure we get this moving because obviously that's the big item and you know it's a relatively easy one uh for us to you know move on renewables so um yeah let's let's get this going it's it's been presented to me that's almost an unsurmountable barrier that can that can't be done so i'm i'm happy to hear you say this so josh where do you where do you want to stick this so i think yeah so i think in uh item number 26 if we change the support the landfill solar to uh just basically solar on municipal buildings okay all right yeah we can go ahead and be a sub task actually because it's not exactly element okay we i think we'd be super interested uh robert and thank you for uh for for suggesting that we would love to to work with you john are you typing in this thing can you stick yeah okay i'm you know did a task force going between the between john and mark and the labor federation and to work out agreement yeah that's that sounds great and you know josh and mark i think the biggest thing historically has been there's just been a lack of communication uh and when there's no communication people get the wrong impressions and they act in ways that you know uh offend and you know insult others and you know i think that was kind of the way i know councilmember eaton was right in the middle of it uh when this whole thing went down the last time so you know i think we open that dialogue i think we'll be able to find a conclusion that is happy it makes everybody at least content if not happy yes yes thank you very much so we're right at nine o'clock anybody else itching to say anything everybody else news are ready to snooze i have an unrelated question to this i was just wondering um with the um like council election you know the primary and then in the fall like how does that work in terms of the transition between who's on the who are the council reps on the committee like just because i haven't been on when there's been a council election before josh so and i don't know a lot of the details but i could give you some broad strokes from how i understand it um usually council members choose their commissions um so uh haner and eaton um or at least eaten at least there's gonna be some replacements um so the the new uh council members who are coming in uh will be selecting the places our bylaws have always had uh two seats so two council member seats a lot of times council members sit on a lot of different commissions um but i think yeah as the new council members come in we'll start uh we'll start knowing who who has uh selected us i guess as as the next uh council member representatives josh are sworn in um right after the uh the general election right in november yep yep so i mean that won't be their first priority but by january we might expect um well certainly we'll have one new um commission council member and depending on jeff's desires he may say oh well i want to switch to another one so we would expect by january to have at least one possibly two new council members on the commission was that your question number yeah yeah you're here so um let's try to wrap this up no i might oh no i did you have something yes sorry uh quick question i mean i'm interested in jay's suggestion about the funding um i'm just wondering where we stand with our current funding i know we had that millage and then there was this sort of agreement that we were going to use a portion of that towards energy and sustainability issues and but my understanding is that's not committed that has to come up every year and a new council could take that away any year going forward is that our understanding of how it works so um and if others know more please chime in uh from my understanding of it uh the the new council members who are coming in are pretty supportive of the things that we're trying to get done um it was much more at risk in the past um you know we had thought once the millage had been allocated to us that uh that that was it but there was some signs that there was going to be some challenges in the future but because of the elections it seems like that might not be uh as relevant so yeah i mean just very briefly um there um there were previous votes that said that um prior to the millage if the millage was passed this is the way the money would be spent but um with the change over in the council there were two votes to try to overturn that and you may recall that the mayor vetoed that that could happen again um but as josh mentioned it seems that with new council people like being seated it's unlikely to change it not just from the energy and greenhouse gas or climate perspective but also affordable housing and pedestrian and biking safety so um it's possible um but probably not probable in the next couple of years but it could change again so yeah we're getting roughly 880 000 a year from that millage rebate and just i'm sorry this is to say if there's is there a mechanism of transparency of how that money is being spent and what what the outcomes are yeah we can we can always have missy uh come and do a presentation so she's the one who who mostly does the budget allocation side of things i think it's basically just going into osi's budget isn't it i mean it's yeah and then how how how it's spent is maybe then like jeff said something we can ask missy to give us some insight into and uh ember just a preemptive question i think you probably uh had um so you have been renewed on the commission you and and uh bridget are all good to go okay so um we're at items for next agenda i mean we don't have public comment on here i don't know there's anybody else for actually from the public that's wanted to chime in we haven't i haven't seen any signal that i don't know josh have you seen anyone uh we did have and i'm assuming that might be wayne we did have one person who had called okay someone raised their hand yep there we go let's uh can you recognize him yes they should be able to uh so number one three four number one three four and it looks like there's sometimes a delay yeah i'm gonna ask to unmute and see if it hello this is ken garber i live at 28 haverhill court um yes thanks chairmerski thank you all for your hard work there's a lot on your plate um but let me just lend some urgency after a brief dip global emissions are again on the rise local emissions are way up too it's obvious to anyone that's been out biking on our roads it's scary out there once again since march when commission last met in person the city has emitted roughly 900 000 metric tons co2 equivalent greenhouse greenhouse gases that doesn't include scope 3 emissions for example the emissions cost of all the non-local food we eat and consumer goods we buy including vehicles both internal combustion and electric or the embedded emissions and the concrete and other material that's going into all the new construction underway my point is that our city is back to a meeting as usual and the global consequences of our failure are obvious just since may we've had a record heat wave in siberia with fires and melted permafrost in canada the country's last ice shelf collapsed and one quarter of bangladesh was inundated after a massive rainfall event causing several hundred deaths mostly children it's our local emissions as much as any causing this suffering the average american puts out 33 times more co2 than the average bengali and as inventor saul griffith points out we don't have 10 years to cut our emissions to keep global heating down to 1.5 degrees celsius the ipcc's sr18 report was not widely misreported it doesn't give us 11 years because of so-called committed emissions the emissions already built into the machinery that powers our world we have zero years to slash emissions two degrees celsius is probably baked in to quote griffith we need one hundred percent adoption of the correct carbon list technology and every purchasing decision starting this year that means every new car needs to be electric every heating system and hvac system needs to be heat pump driven it means every piece of generating capacity needs to be nuclear wind solar or carbon-less normal market rules can't apply commissioner cleavy made much the same point tonight just as normal market rules don't apply in our situation neither does the normal pacing of city government as commissioner mursky pointed out we need bold moves and we need them now the normal adoption curve for policy change in government doesn't get us to our a to zero target or to any world we would want to live in because we've avoided meaningful action for so long we must do everything more or less at once this seems hopeless because if we didn't take action when it was easy it's far less likely to act now when it's really really hard and speaking directly to new commissioners george and singleton it's my personal shame that my generation through our conscious inaction over the last 30 years is directly responsible responsible for the mess you've inherited you have every right to be angry with us please hold our feet to the fire when it comes to taking real action hey hey thank you for that thank you thank you ken and we we need ken's been really good about saying this at planning commission meetings at environmental commission meetings at energy commission meetings and we need to constantly remind ourselves of this and we also need to model these behaviors are well as well not just ask above everybody else so thanks i'm josh anybody else any other raised hands so just think that's it yeah two last points then before a german um we're trying to do new uh commissioner orientation and one of the things that we wanted to do i sent out an email indicating that we want to do that we have it scheduled for the 20th for julian robert and for larry and one of the things that we wanted to do is um put together a roster um and karlene put that basically together right now but we also want to put terms on there um some of this we should be able to just pull from the city but the last thing is and that's a request of you is that you um give a short give us a short bio and i don't necessarily expect they're going to read every single bio um you know all 15 or whatever as it might be but it's it's a nice handy thing to refer back to and it also hopefully like uh the icebreaker that we had from carlene will help us to get to know each other a little bit better and to act help us work together as a team so um a reminder to send in your bios um you can send them to me and to josh and carlene and then the last item is other than this task what would people like to see for the next meeting or for the next couple of meetings because sometimes it's important to plan out a meeting or two so raise your hands or just speak out if you have something that you'd like us to add to the agenda going forward and i i welcome anything from ken or anybody else too and again this this is just a standing agenda item you don't have to be limited from this so um julian or robert or anybody else if you wake up tomorrow morning and have an aha moment then you just send an email to carlene and to um josh and me and we'll we'll definitely consider it and most likely um you know i think 99 times out of 100 if not 100 times out of 100 when people suggest something we work it into the agenda anybody have anything for right now mark john i think that the new members could benefit from your presentation on smart goals as could we all so i would uh suggest that perhaps you you do that briefing again for all of us um and don't hesitate imposing that discipline 30 measures now that we've adopted that's a good point and missy has that built into a20 but we really need the discipline because frankly the culture um not only of this commission but of the city and all of us is um not really a strong to do that that's human exactly thanks for the reminder so i have a question this is bridget um i've lost track of when some of the working groups are meeting like um the building working group um josh what's the um what's the schedule for that or yeah that's a great point so i think one of the things we'll have to do is work through the excel sheet um to be able to kind of consolidate the different groups and at which point we can do a uh and i know we were supposed to do this but then the pandemic hit but we could do like a google drive and that way we can get everyone's interests so whatever groups they want to be part of and whatever subjects those groups are going to be talking about in the excel sheet i'll go ahead and put out a kind of a you know doodle poll for each of those groups so we can get a time set down so for for everybody's especially for the new people since this meeting is on tuesday evenings a lot of the meetings have been on tuesday evenings but that's not a requirement so if a group of people get together and especially if you're recruiting people from the community to work on a particular working group or on even a sub-working group that does not mean that you have to work meet on a tuesday so bridget's point is is a good one and you know we're flexible here uh john i was just wondering if um and i may have missed this but um kind of like um uh have we decided exactly what our next big project as a full commission is going to be i know we went over all of those items um but it didn't seem like we had like a discussion over uh which one we're going to take on for the next nine months like you mentioned well i would say my thought is we would discuss that in our next meeting okay now i was thinking i was thinking that would be an agenda item yes yeah absolutely so yeah your good point i should have said that so we will definitely revisit this with everybody's input and look at is there something we do as a full commission or are most of these things that are most appropriately taken up by individual groups and then followed up in on in the complete commission so we'll definitely cover that in our next meeting i have one last request and that is um it's a little bit easy um when we're on zoom to call in or to use our profile picture or whatever um but um one of the the requests from the clerk city clerk's office and i should have said this earlier is that we stay on camera um it's you know when we're in the in the public meeting people can see us um right now we haven't had this is a working session so we don't have a lot of public but we know that communication is also not just verbal it's also um you know people's facial expressions and things like that if we're meeting in council chambers they can see us um and how we react and everything else and so i would ask that we stay on camera and that we use our camera in future meetings that's just a reminder and unless somebody else has something else i'll wait count ten count to ten and if not then we'll adjourn anybody i'm a slow counter okay this energy commission meeting is adjourned it's 9 16 pay at pm thank you for your dedication but as ken pointed out um we really probably need a lot more meetings like this maybe hopefully more efficient but where we'll really have our noses to the grindstone and recognize what we need to to accomplish um because we have a huge challenge so thanks everybody have a great evening and have a good week you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um it actually looks like you are okay well i can't reach william leslie it looks like the call-in phone number is in the meeting invitation which was sent on the email since i couldn't raise him [Music] welcome to the ann arbor human rights commission um let's begin with uh introduction of our members um diana you want to start hi i'm diana cass commissioner aisha hi i'm a shigazi commissioner uh linda linda winkler commissioner pam pam dent commissioner um judah judah garber commissioner um elizabeth i'm elizabeth nelson i'm a council city council liaison and um julie julie grant i'm the other city council liaison did i get everybody out there except william william william is a guest william you want to introduce yourself just did quickly i'm william hampton i am not a city council member okay and i'm leslie stamber and i'm the chair um we're going to start this meeting as we always do with public comment and oh and heather i'm caught heather why don't you introduce yourself and tell people the um this call-in number and the rules all right um i'm heather cook i am from the city of ann arbor human resources department um and i am the guest um admin for tonight as you could say and anybody wishing to speak um during public comment um there's actually two phone numbers available to call um the first one is 877-853-5247 the second phone number option is 888.788.0099 and you will need to enter the meeting id which is 971-0416-6913 anybody who wishes to speak at public comment will have five minutes to speak and leslie i think we can just give it a couple minutes to see if anybody calls in and it'll show up on my queue okay fine so it doesn't look like we have anybody there but i can definitely let you know if anybody okay let's move on okay the first thing on our agenda is we're very happy to have william hampton who is the president of the ann arbor branch of the naacp and he is here to give us to share with us the official statement of the ann arbor branch of the naacp on criminal justice improvements and race william take it do i have to unmute myself we can hear you is he unmuted um we heard you when you spoke earlier i think you need to unmute yourself you do need to unmute yourself william if you wiggle your mouse across your screen there should be a mute button in the lower left corner oh no nope do you see anything if you move your mouse across the screen does any is there a toolbar that pops up at the bottom my mine is actually at the top right of my screen if you click on the three blue dots william on the top right of your picture it should give you an option to mute or unmute yourself um we should be able to no i guess we can unmute if you whatever you did earlier worked because we heard you i wonder if he hears us in the bottom corner it will pop up a blue thing that says unmute so there's the little microphone under your own picture i are you talking to me or william no i was just so either either way you can unmute by using the mute along the toolbar or there's usually a red microphone with a line through it and if you touch that in your own screen it should also come up with a blue yes mute or unmute option or if you have a laptop you can press the space bar and temporarily unmute he still muted i'm hitting the button on my end that says ask to unmute and i don't know if it's popping up for any if it's giving him anything um hi can you hear us william i don't know can you hear me now yes well i don't have a screen so i had to guess with that oh i have no screen presence on my on my uh computer we can see you we can hear you too you look great yeah that's awful nice of you to say thank you so much i guess the first thing i want to say is thank you so much for finding some time for me to speak to you guys um my fraternity brother from alpha phi alpha fraternity incorporated was supposed to be here with me however he has forgotten that april 12th is his anniversary with his wife mary so so he's not here obviously right but he did send a statement for me to read this short statement i'm going to read it to you that's okay sure all right okay sick good evening my name is marion hui and i've been invited to this meeting by my good friend and fraternity brother brother william b hampton as a member of behalf of fraternity incorporated and the annabel branch of the naacp now the reason why why he was invited was because there's a memorandum of understanding on this project between alpha phi f fraternity incorporated and the animal branch of the naacp he says in a strange irony uh my relationship with alpha 5 actually began as an as an act of housing discrimination at the beginning of my senior year at u of m a high school friend of mine and i reunited and planned to rent a room together we filled out the application and were told to return in one week when we returned the apartment manager told us that the owner had determined that the room would not be rented to a negro and a jew we were upset but since i had neither time nor resources i told ron to find another roommate and i sought accommodations in a house rented by alpha brothers on oakland street it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me my relationship with alpha alpha was c minute and eventually led to my meeting william in what has become a lifelong relationship i didn't complain although ron and i discussed it but i wonder if there are still those without time or resources as i was forced to seek alternative uh also facebook with discrimination today ron and i had to sense that others were isolated in cases like this obviously this is probably true otherwise commissions like yours probably would not exist this work assures that a citizen that he or she has access to someone to provide those resources in a timely manner so they will help keep us as close to equal as possible that's his statement so i'm going to read to you the official statement from the annabel branch of the naacp can you still hear me okay yes still have no screen presence but that's okay here we go from my perspective our most recent ann arbor naacp meetings have been more revealing than ever people seem to feel comfortable regarding their private thoughts and feelings for each person who shared who shared either at our meetings or directly to me i am forever grateful i have crafted an official statement from our branch which includes thoughts along with information extracted from our recent meetings feedback from the membership along with a review from our legal redress committee period each of them contributed to the formation of this statement our police departments are commonly known as paramilitary organizations some estimates state that approximately 20 percent of all police officers are military veterans it has been shared with me that at least one study indicates these ex-military veterans are two or three times more likely to deploy their firearms than non-military officers the numbers even higher for those who participated in active military service is this something that we should contribute to continue to embrace fire police departments it is our opinion that we need change in our entire criminal justice system our statement intended to promote long-term procedural changes and not simply one time only consideration is as follows the animal branch of the naacp believes there should be widespread transparency in our criminal justice system especially as it relates to race you have you may have noticed that all of the recent um high-profile incidents happened quite some time ago so that's not exactly transparent it is our position that negative background information for each of our public servants should be available for review we believe that any negative incidents including written warnings verbal warnings suspensions mandatory leaves complaints logs lodged against all law enforcement to be available for review and or action it is our contention that bad police officers should not be dismissed from one location only to reappear in another jurisdiction the tamir rice shooting in cleveland ohio comes the map he never became a a teenager he was only 12 years old because of the actions of an unqualified law enforcement officer who had been dismissed from another jurisdiction still it took over two and a half years for that one officer to be fighting we further believe that laws which allow for so-called citizens arrest should be reviewed to allow for community input right now i'm i'm thinking about amman arbury his death while jogging peacefully in a georgian neighborhood accordingly all know knock rules policies warrants were where presidents should be reviewed and are eliminated who could ever forget the horror of brianna taylor's last few moments living in louisville kentucky stand your ground policies should be reviewed for race biased potential let us not forget george zimmerman's involvement in trayvon martin's death and his subsequent acquittal for that crime it seems to us that vascular neck restraints commonly known as choke holes should be eliminated many friends and relatives have lost their lives because of this so-called necessary technique we further believe that all agencies within counties and municipalities should be reviewed for diversity makeup all race related cases including those that have police connections which have resulted in death or injury should have an outside review police unions which i support our support union should be continuously evaluated for potential bias or misconduct additionally it seems to me that police union contracts should be scrutinized more frequently than they presently are collaborations between law enforcement prosecutors and judges should have review mechanisms which includes citizen input it appears also that local coroner's officers may sometimes also be complicit in the death resulting from police involvement in some instances there should always be a mechanism for review but by other independent event evaluations all of this may seem time consuming but getting it right is more important than time served time saved qualified protective immunity for police officers although i understand why it's there should be revisited with change in math i am told that this might result in higher insurance premiums for police officers but we believe it is more important to have lives saved than saving a few dollars we demand accountability from our law enforcement officers especially whenever when it relates to a life-ended prematurity it is not enough for law enforcement persons to take a life and simply say i thought this was reasonable at the time it seems to us if we continue to normalize bad behavior it comes across in the same manner as us giving consent for that bad behavior the animal branch of the naacp will continue our partnership with the annabelle public schools to educate and to recognize our children in addition we will be persistent in our collaborations with other entities for the public good lastly we will we will vote and we will always work for the election of people who share our value by the way it pleased me that a good infusion of diversity was added to a presidential campaign recently some of this may be may appear unreachable in terms of goals however i believe that if we reach low goals the value of that success will be limited it should be our ultimate goals to make law enforcement better than it is right now and to remove law enforcement officers the u.s there may be from the streets which we walk on i believe that a more just and inclusive and equitable america is still possible we appreciate the changes which have been made in our country these changes include but are not limited to removal of confederate statues the names of bridges which bear names such as edmund pettus who was a senior officer in the confederate army and a grand dragon in the clubhouse clan that bridge name might be changed anja mayama's image has been removed boston has declared racism as a public health emergency and the governor of the state of west virginia is introducing legislation to make juneteenth a paid holland holiday for that state these are but a few recent changes but we seem seem to be moving in the right direction we have much farther to go everybody should be against racism in response to black to the black lives matter campaign we have recently heard that the retort all lives matter well everybody knows that right it is correct that all life should matter but it is it can't ever be true if black lives are marginalized therefore it pleases me that my own city of ann arbor even though they've received some pushback is now proudly flying a black lives matter flag over city hall our truly disadvantaged population who built this country will not go silently away ever again african americans who went from 100 illiterate to nearly 100 percent literate in one generation after the civil war will remain diligent in the pursuit of total equality right now african americans are the most economically underserved subgroup in america we are also per capita more likely to be victimized by the misconduct from our criminal justice system none of this is by accident we have been patient we have waited too long and suffered too much to continue to believe what the reverend dr martin luther king jr referred to as the tranquilizing drug of gradualism incredibly this statement was delivered by him well over one half century ago we believe it is too late for us to take one step at a time everything should be geared towards immediate change we are watching we will continue to observe and we will always be willing to fight for positive change thank you so much thank you there questions for william we have a copy of of what he's just read and it'll be um it'll be in the legistar it'll be in our minutes we'll attach it to our minutes um i have a question william hi it's linda winkler henry's cousin how are you hey hey funds his cousin how are you doing good um are you reading this statement um at an icpac meeting also one more time sorry are you planning to read this statement at the independent police oversight commission meeting i am but i wanted i read this statement at juneteenth uh i've got several entities that i'm going to read it at including the police oversight commission oh great okay so as a lawyer what advice do you have for me on this statement oh my goodness i mean you've always given me good advice before right linda yeah yeah well yeah i mean you make a lot of good reasonable demands requests and i i hope we you know if there's any particular way in which the human rights commission can help you uh specific specific things you can think of that we can do i hope you let us know well we have one member of the human rights commission who's a member of the naacp and it would be nice if we had more i'm not gonna call any names but uh you guys always welcome and collaboration is always better than competition when we're fighting for the same cause right and we should read his statement and and see if we can identify something we can do we can help anybody else well thank you very much for coming and you've given us a lot to think about we appreciate it thank you thank you okay minutes time to look at our minutes and get agreement on it get them right and uh pass them is everybody everybody has a copy any comments about the minutes nothing in that case we can uh entertain a motion to approve i moved to approve the minutes from uh july's meeting second june second yeah i second that thank you all in favor hi hi hi hi minutes approved hey leslie after this meeting will you email me who created the minute so i can make sure that the final version is put in legislature created this min these minutes yeah for the um the july meeting okay i i'm i guess i'm going to who oh you mean the minutes the the minutes from last meeting yeah i'm taking the bunch for this game yes uh i've got them okay in fact kelly had no he doesn't i'll send them to you okay thank you sure um asian community outreach aisha hi everyone so um you know i've still had the president of the asian american united organizations which is the kind of an umbrella organization over various asian american organizations in the nation contact us about doing something around anti-asian american sentiment and also kind of just taking a stance around racism in general they want to know what we're going to do how we're going to do it so um i've invited them to come and give a testimony at the next meeting where one of the president of united asian american organizations is going to kind of share her upbringing in ann arbor and what she's really working towards and how she sees us being able to collaborate um so she'll be attending the next meeting that would be good are you gonna talk at all about the meeting you and i had with um the initials i can't remember may pack oh yeah um no leslie and i know it's a difficult one to remember leslie and i had a meeting with the chair of the governor's uh commission for asian american affairs which is called the michigan asian pacific american affairs commission maypac and we talked to tashiki masuka and denise grimm and they also asked like you know you guys have a huge number of asian americans in ann arbor and what are kind of what are you guys doing um and we had some discussion around what we could do and collaborating with them i think it's also important for us to think about how we would connect it to a larger kind of strategy around racism and us taking a stand against racism and what that campaign may look like for various groups um so yeah it was a good meeting though we're still kind of talking back and forth about what we can do it was interesting that one of the things they focused on was um getting getting asian americans to answer the fill out the census and they've been very successful yeah which is something that we you know you don't usually think about that as a human rights issue but in fact it is and we might it might be wise of us to put out something that reminds people how important it is to do that especially people minority groups because it is the basis of all kinds of things like aid like everything like like how uh allocation of resources yeah i think something for us to think about doing something around um the census is coming to an end i believe it's at the end of august or they may have extended it because of covet i don't know if anyone knows i don't know they they actually cut it a month oh so whether i mean somebody doesn't want us to know how many people there are yeah no it's it's it's a month or so shorter than it was planned yeah i think around equity issues in general you know having people accurately counted kind of shows the breadth and the and the diversity of economic class and status within population so they found that like the more asian americans respond to the census the more clear it is that there were high levels of poverty especially among chinese americans and indian americans so i think it is something that we can think about incorporating into a larger strategy around racism and stuff like that yeah the other thing i we learned is that they don't have uh right now they don't have a standardized kind of um complaint handling and we talked about sharing that information um but they really don't have very much right now they're really just getting off the ground i think is that true i share my i think when it comes to documenting incidences of hate yeah i think there's there's always been a fight at the state level to ask like state entities to desegregate asian american data so that people can figure out like are certain religious groups being targeted more or people of certain you know nationalities being targeted more maybe that might be south asian over east asian or vice versa um but instead because of the way the census is categorized and has been for a long time data collection hasn't always caught up with that so everyone's kind of luck together so it makes response efforts and also makes like where money is allocated difficult to do in a strategic way so they've had a fragmented kind of complaint i guess a fragmented response on how to collect even incidences of hate like the state has one entity where you can call in a number department of i think hate crimes or something um under the attorney general then city of ann arbor i believe has one different universe i mean they just they're not all talking to each other well every every police force and lots of other agencies report into the federal statistics that are produced every year [Music] but no one does it very well yeah and some some of these entities don't want you to they don't want to be known as having hate crimes and so they call them other things and that's been a problem for a long time yeah yeah absolutely so that individual will be coming to our next meeting to kind of just talk about like you know what this means to them and how we may be able to tap into this any questions thank you thank you yeah that's that's um a community we we need to work with more closely i think and this gives us an opportunity um just a few comments about things that are going on that you might want updates on the aapoa collective bargaining mediation process is working sort of um there was a meeting i think last mediation last a week or two ago and there is going to be one i think next week but it's just so you know it's progressing and no one can talk about it so but but i'm assuming people are wondering how that's going julie do you anybody else sit on i don't sit on the budget and labor committees so i haven't been as looped into that so it's it's not something we're getting regular updates on by any means yeah and i don't just you can just on going you you were looking like you had something that i don't know no just like we're waiting just like your way that that that was that look like yeah yeah we're just reassuring you that it is happening yeah yeah oh no of course but these things take longer than everyone wants them to take right everything does especially in this environment um another thing that is uh that is going slowly but going is the trespass work we're doing we're meeting with i think four people from um the community police oversight commission um and one person from the community now uh who used to be on the oversight commission and isn't anymore and there are um linda and i and judah and pam i think on our our side representing um human rights commission and we're we've pretty much got a a list of things that we want to talk about with the uh chief of police and the probably city attorney maybe the city manager the city administrator when you get one um about trespass you know so we're zeroing in some people are showing it around to shelters and to housing facilities etc to see if we've missed anything and when we will always miss something this will probably always be a you know something in progress but we are moving on it and it's and it's slow too because we can't get together with the it would be nice to do that in person but we may have to do it virtually like everything else is happening just so you know it's we're still doing it um the next thing on our agenda is the fair chance ordinance and it is we'll see but it we think it's about ready to go so let's look it over together and see if there's anything that needs to be discussed has ever have people seen it and read it do you have any issues about it or any questions about it or have any thoughts about it this is something by the way that linda did a great deal of work on and so did margaret and we also had some similar ordinances from other cities to look at and this is what we came up with thoughts i just want to give keita credit too she sort of directed us to rightly and oakland and was it seattle i can't even remember now and we sort of we use the oakland model pretty much i just sort of cut and pasted a lot of what they had to say and and then margaret cleaned it up is cute is still here she hasn't been here i thought i saw her thank you keita was going to talk to um bear housing about to to get local i i look an idea locally how important this would be for our area um but i haven't heard from them keita by the way has um is recovering from um an accident a car accident and so she's not not totally feeling up to herself so this this is something that what we hope to do is if you approve it you're proving it tentatively as a as a working copy we're going to send it around to some outside people who are interested in this area certainly going to send it around to aaron numa who brought this to our attention in the first place jennifer hall who is um in our housing public i don't know whatever she is um washington housing alliance i think um [Music] pam kish from fair housing is there and if there are any other people who you think we ought to pass this by please let me know are you ready to vote on it are you is there anything you want to discuss at all before we do no then let's entertain a motion to approve it at least as a working copy i'll move to approve it as a working copy i mean i don't think we're actually voting on anything so because i think we'll need some sort of resolution to go with it we will we will okay and there may be some changes from you know when these people see it but but i'm assuming that's going to happen at the next meeting so we have a motion is there a second i second i can second thank you all in favor aye aye opposed okay let's go on to conversion therapy another ordinance a lot of work has been put into it by again wonderful linda and uh and and margaret and it is it is we i think it's better than any other ones we've seen so far um but it does draw on a lot of other ordinances in other cities can i say something please so first of all margaret hasn't actually she she worked with us initially but she hasn't really weighed in on this particular draft which um so we really just sent it to her yet was it yesterday or the day before yesterday so she's she will get back to us on that um from the last one which you might have looked at uh at the last meeting we didn't really discuss it the things that have the main thing that's changed substantively is that leslie contacted some some people in florida and got a lot of information and the city of tallahassee bans conversion therapy not only for minors but also for vulnerable adults which when you think about it makes sense um at least to us when we were talking about it so we added it and we the definition is drawn from michigan state law which you know basically defines um here i can read it to you the definition that we have in the working draft refers to the state law which defines vulnerable adults as an individual age 18 or over who because of age developmental disability mental illness or physical disability requires supervision or personal care or lacks the personal and social skills required to live independently also covers adults in foster care facilities and adults defined in the social welfare act which are adults in need of protective services uh who are uh let's see vulnerable persons suspected being or believed to be abused neglected or exploited so in general people who are not independent uh rely on other people and if those other people were to choose to give them you know to send them to a therapist a conversion therapist they wouldn't have protection against that of course somebody else would have to probably be aware of it and report it to us but anyway we just we threw it in there for now on thinking that it was worth talking about none of the other cities in michigan have that they only they're restricted to minors and all the information we have uh we've gotten from the law students and the other fellow we were dealing with who's a professor of public health um they were all just talking about minors so we haven't done any extensive looking into this so does anybody have any thoughts on that piece of it i think it's an improvement i like it good i think they need it one of the things i found out from talking to people in florida who i sort of got to by you know people referring me to people who referred me to people but florida had a had a a couple a lot of cases and it became very visible in their newspaper and it so they came from this in in a different way although i've been some people think that they're we have a lot of cases too and we just don't know about them uh but so far no one has been able to put the finger on it but it it's really a serious problem and and maybe more more visible than we know more more prevalent than we know um and what's interesting what i heard from them in florida was that they had they had a two 200 or 250 dollar penalty but they and it wasn't even a criminal penalty but it it scared people and they left the ones they knew about at least left quickly and that makes me think that the penalty that we have which is now it's criminal and it's 500 tops so i suppose it's as high it can be as high as 500 per incident right um will be enough to to frighten people off well i remember we're talking about making it a criminal misdemeanor so it would be punishable by i think it was up to 93 days in jail or and or a fine yeah that's right yeah um the other question aisha raised correctly was we probably need to take a closer look at the definition of of providers or license providers the definition that i used was the one that stephen postema had put in a draft way back when when margaret was gone um and it refers to to michigan what is it the michigan public health code the licensing code and it covers a lot of different things including trainees and people under supervision and but the question is does it cover you know other sort of certified practitioners and i don't know but i kind of think that the authority for this whole act comes from um the ability of the city and state to regulate practitioners and so if you go outside to say you know like for instance if you had a a religious person who was certified by their church to provide counseling the first amendment would prob would would probably prevent us from regulating that um so it gets tricky and i think that's probably why stephen postema used referred to the state law um on licensing but that's another thing that we need to talk to margaret about and i asked her in an email so let's see so it is almost ready and when we get those things dealt with with margaret we're hoping to send this around also and i should give you a list of people who we know to send it to and you might want to add people to that as well um you didn't have your hand raised here okay um but uh okay are we are we sad i think we should just wait to hear back from margaret circulate another draft when after she weighs in i mean aisha diana leslie and i can can see what margaret says talk about it and then share it i guess so makes sense okay um what okay if that is true the only thing that's a process question um just in terms of of when you're hoping for us to bring this to council so you want to approve it circulate it and then get feedback or draft circulate approve bring to council yeah we need a we need a better draft first okay sorry drop draft after we talk to margaret circulate uh then well maybe run maybe run by hrc get their tentative approval like we just did on fair housing fair chance housing i guess and then and then circulated to whoever might be interested i know like the jim toy center for example right people like michigan equality and human rights campaign who have all both asked for our copy just to see because they may have some changes they may they may have some good arguments about ways we could make this stronger also the law students who helped us and the public health professor we should we should probably include them okay just want to make sure i'm not neglecting my duties that's all yeah okay cool not yet no no just let me just let us know what right thank you yeah okay the last thing i have on the agenda is um the non-discrimination ordinance and if you remember the last meeting um the question was asked about the 180-day limit um where the the ordinance says that we can that somebody should file an ordinance 180 days no longer than 180 days from the time it happened or the time they would have they should have known it happened um and that after that beyond 180 days from the first time they can't file anymore and we can't look at it um i remember that keita made a case for um that it should be longer or that we should at least have a way to um to do a review a review of the incident even if we can't do an investigation and the full human rights commission complaint handling that we should sometimes you want to learn from it or sometimes you want to at least have let the person air it and record the pain of the incident that this would help is anybody having any feelings about this issue i think we should wait until i did since keita raised it uh should we wait for her for her to be here or no would be fine with me it's it's it's pretty is that okay with everybody else i said we could you could talk about it at this meeting and that's why yeah i was going to say the same thing because i'd like to hear her flesh it out because my inclination would not be to extend it or at least not indefinitely because there's a lot of reasons why you don't want to have something open forever but i'd like to hear her uh i'd like to rather have a discussion okay well then let's let's i'll leave it until the next meeting um is there any new business or any any new business we have we should deal with if not we can go on to commissioner communications and i sure you had something you wanted to announce uh it's not really an announcement and i wanted to share that you know i'm um in charge of facilitating a virtual discussion for university of michigan school social work and it's open to the school broadly and the public on uh racial equity in washington county and they're asking for you know links to historic documents policies and they've also asked for work that the human rights commission does so i'm gonna create kind of a document of resources that we can share with participants but i just wanted to see if anyone has any sort of resources they want to share something that they think i should mention uh do let me know okay and i will make sure that you have the non-discrimination ordinance and the link to our website and our flyer about how to file a claim um yeah yeah that would be explanation stuff like that okay thank you anything else that we should deal with because this is it's early but we could we could say good we could end this meeting quickly nothing well does anybody want to make a motion to adjourn i move to adjourn the meeting second second all in favor aye aye thank you folks thank you bye thanks you
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just needing to order roll call corey burgess here here jamie borland here citizens president if you please sign in the back uh you would join me for the pledge of allegiance call to the public this is the time that the public may speak to the governing board regarding issues within the jurisdiction of caring board and subject to reasonable time space and matter restrictions as the government board may establish comments will be limited to three minutes per individual unless specif specifically laid by the governing board at the conclusion of the call of the public the individual members of governing board may respond to criticism made by those who have addressed the board and he asked the staff to review a matter or may ask the matter be placed on a future agenda however the governing board cannot take action on matters that have not been noticed in advance on the agenda we have several calls in the public so let's start with our present ones first please ava smith good evening walter city elementary school board members and superintendent stewart my name is ava smith and i am a first grade teacher at desert valley elementary i want to start by saying that i'm here tonight only to ensure that you receive my voice and fears in such a way that you can hear see and feel the conviction in what i have to say my being here in person in no way shape or form indicates that i feel safe in this setting i stand here tonight to tell you that i do not feel safe teaching students in person nor do i feel that you should make the decision to reopen our brick and mortar buildings for in-person learning at this time i am here tonight to influence your discussions and possibility of making a decision to reopen our schools for in-person learning that will affect the staff that works in this district their families the students who attend our schools and their immediate and extended families my hope is that you will be considered and compassionate when carefully looking at the data metrics and statements as well as the original reopening phase plans dedicated administration leads and various committees worked for months to create a reopening plan that would ensure that we would reopen for learning in approved phases when and only when it was safe i would also recommend looking at situations regarding covid19 across our nation state and county and base your decisions on those merits including a new report from the american academy of pediatrics of a study done showing that just over 97 000 children tested positive for copic in the last two weeks of july last week a survey was sent to the parents of our district community without context to the reality of what in-person learning will look like there were inherent details missing from the two-choice question whenever bullhead city elementary schools begin in-person classes what are your current plans if parents knew the reality of what in-person learning is going to entail were informed of the details of the school day with protocols in place and if the students knew perhaps their choices would have been different it seemed to me from a parent's perspective misleading an additional mare i am for you to consider is that of your teachers their students and their families and how they truly feel when it comes to the possibility of teaching in person in the near future this is not a one-sided stakeholder situation i was very disheartened to not receive a staff survey from you our board members asking us the district teachers and staff how we feel about the idea of returning to in-person teaching whether or not we feel safe with those intentions at this time and are willing to teach in person or if we do not feel safe with teaching in person and are not willing to take that risk because we fear what that may bring upon us our students and our families could you imagine hearing one of your teachers contracting probit 19 and died or a mother who is terminally ill who is being cared for by her son who is a teacher contracting it from him and dying due to complications or a fifth grader who is suffering through the virus right now as we speak done these are the lies in your hands tonight as you move into discussing plans about reopening for in-person learning continuing the virtual platform for learning is not going to cause someone to get sick and possibly die but reopening our school buildings just might we should not take that chance and you should not want to take that risk your decision tonight your discussions tonight should not be about setting and as soon as possible for reopening and that is that it should be to make the sound and safe decision to keep our elementary school district virtual through at least the first quarter and then reassess the situation at that time i stand here tonight for colleagues who are friends of mine who are family to me for my daughter who is seven and my son who is three for my husband at home my students my first grade babies as i call them and their families who entrust me with their children's learning every single day for colleagues who had to make the decision to stay home tonight to be safe but knew that i was speaking on their behalf i am here standing with the hope with all of their hopes that you our board will protect us keep us safe and please make the right decision i ask you our board members who are meant to abide by the science and data when it comes to standardized testing and upholding educational laws and making decisions based off of those merits will you please employ those same practices with regard to the data and science that says we are not ready for in-person learning at this time will you please keep all of us safe by doing the right thing thank you for your time thank you voice features president burgess and members of the board although everyone at our school wants to be working with our students in person a number a number of our staff have shared concerns with me about student staff and community safety if we do not allow the data to drive decisions on our return to in-person learning i would like to read one of the letters written to me from our english language arts league teacher conway wood as august 17th quickly approaches i feel i need to bring my concerns and intentions to your attention a few months ago i thought it would not be possible that adults were elected to do what is best for our community's children would ever put them in harm's way if the board member if the board members of the bullhead city elementary school district vote to open our school buildings on august 17th it makes them responsible for putting our communities children teachers administration staff and all of our families at risk if i am there to greet the children i am complicit in their wrongdoing i won't cite any of the growing body of evidence that shows children can contract and transmit the virus evidence does not seem to be a concern for those who make the decisions i will state however the undeniable fact that hundreds of members of our community have the virus and that social distancing is not within a child's nature i can't see how any reasonable person would not see this as a dangerous situation i heard the mantra we could never have safety touted in board meetings in an effort to reopen the school buildings of course that is true but wouldn't it be irresponsible at the least for adults to not take steps to create the safest learning environment they can there is a solution in place the district has invested much time and money to get technology into the hands of those students who need it teachers have found creative solutions to adapting the approved curriculum into an electronic format learning is happening thanks to tremendous collaborative efforts within our district this is what happens when a community works together at best opening too soon will lead to a disputed education disrupted education for our students it is short-sighted to think otherwise we can predict that students cohorts or even an entire school may be quarantined at any given time i don't want to think about what the at worst scenario would look like if we delay in person education that the teachers have time to refine and perfect distance learning when it is safe to open and the students do come back we will have an effective educational tool at the ready for any student who has prolonged absence from our school normalcy is not an option at the start of this school year but education can happen in a safe and effective manner with patients and technology i would hate to lead the community of educators from whom i have learned so much and have grown to admire after just a few short years i would hate to leave the students and families i have just met if 500 students come through our doors on august 17th i don't think i will be there to greet them respectfully thank you we have a number of other calls to the public that we've been reading were sent to us by email i kind of invited him up amongst our board members to kind of help me get through this a little easier so i'll just go and remind them we'll move on down sound good jennifer vance wrote to us hello the concerns i have regarding the online schools are as follows the amount of assignments given is extremely excessive in many classes some teachers are assigning homework and then also about work or class work but in rel in reality it is all homework without the material being taught the 30 minute zoom session is long enough to explain instruction for assignments but not not long enough to discuss the material my kids are shutting down from being overwhelmed one assignment daily from each class can result in eight assignments a day with little to no learning the material in advance number two some teachers are using outside platforms that require registration and passwords outside of google classroom this becomes very confusing aside from that some of these outside platforms or more technical than some students are used to my family is very technically savvy and it is taking longer to figure out some of the assignments than it is to actually complete the task once figured out that is a problem not every parent can be with their children all day to help them or try to help figure it out number three the platforms used are not parent friendly parent view does not coincide with what is in google classroom my children are very independent and i have never had to hound them about schoolwork and grades they know my expectations and they do their best to uphold them however it's my responsibility to check them through parent view and it is their responsibility to come to me with questions and concerns parent view has not allowed me to be as informed as i would as i should be as far as grades and assignments missing and completed my children shut down and before we knew it they were behind and over it as parents we have to scour our emails check our kids emails check parent view check the little classroom and search for information from the district to try to keep up all the while trying to make sense of the spider web of assignments in various formats our students are shutting down sorry number four our students are shutting down they were already confused stressed and depressed and lacking true interaction from online true interaction before online school began now these emotions are even worse as they struggle to figure out their schoolwork bound to the screens of computers this is going to take a toll on their mental state their mental states and it is imperative we open our schools for those who need to be there thank you jennifer vance tanya floyd wrote to us i'd like to see someone addressing this address getting the special needs and iep children first priority to return to campus the district receives substantial funding yet this need is most difficult in this open video medium speech classes and face-to-face challenge in itself and the opportunity for misdiagnose and probably due to a distorted enunciations thank you for your time sierra de mari hello my name is sierra de mari and i'm currently in 8th grade at fox creek junior high when my school extended our spring break for a week i thought nothing of it it is now august and we're still not back in school many students myself included do much better when learning in person i understand the concerns first concerns other students parents and staff may have about purse in person school while i've always been a good student i still find it challenging to do my work entirely online for many students the school's closure has affected them both mentally and physically for instance some students went to school to avoid their home life or a bad situation with their parents students not being able to socialize with their friends has caused depression and anxiety to rape rates to raise drastically students who took the bus to school might not be able to get free meals provided by the school some students might not be able to drive to the school making it difficult to complete their assignments on an empty stomach many students including myself don't have very good internet which makes it difficult to complete the assignments in classes thank you very much for your time and please also remember that just because you're we're young our feelings are still valid and important all right our next letter thank you in advance for considering my comments below my name is dr alan barton i'm a board certified pediatrician i opened my practice in 2001 and raised five children in this community my youngest graduated from fox creek in may and is now in mojave this is a terrible time filled with terrible choices in my 19 years in practice i've never seen so much fear so much anxiety so much depression so many sleep problems that i've seen in the last month since schools were shut down as an essential worker i understand the fear our teachers have when returning to classroom however we cannot be guided by fear alone teachers who have who have significant risk factors should be allowed to teach from home with the lessons broadcast to students who are safely socially distanced in the classroom all of the teachers should take classes with the students just as nurses doctors dentists first responders and others have had to be with their patients we must put in put the needs of our children for of our students first the health crisis caused by coven is minimal compared to the health crisis that are arising due to isolation extensive time on electronics as well as parental stress and destruction of work routines to be homeless students additionally for a majority of the students the rate of serious physical health complications is lower with coping than it is with other winter viruses that we see such as influenza rsv and human pneumonia virus those children who do not test positive for coping tend to have those children who do test positive recovery tend to have mild symptoms and rapid recoveries naturally we must be smart about returning to school and there may come a time when our covered numbers increase dramatically forcing us to temporarily close school again but for now our students must be our students for our students we must open our schools coven is not going away anytime soon nor will there be a vaccine in the near future waiting until october 1st or any other arbitrary date will not make a difference our local numbers are low now and we can keep them well if we are smart we must follow guidelines for social distancing and using masks we must increase our cleaning and educating students about washing hands cove is certainly a health crisis but our children staying home being educated online is causing other health health crisis crisis that will have long lasting consequences students who have known fact risk factors or who live with family members with risk factors and even those who feel most comfortable with distance learning should be given the option of continuing 100 distance learning but the rest of our students need to be in school thank you alan j barton our next one sabrina rail good evening dr stewart i'm a parent of kindergarten kindergartner with tonight's vote coming i wanted to show my support for online learning program it's not only the children but the teachers for whom i'm for whom i'm concerned for i think our children are wonderful i think sorry i think our teachers are wonderful and doing great considering the situation the days have been long and teachers can see that the kids can see when kids need a brain break if our teachers get sick and we don't have enough of them online i don't know what we will do as parents thank you for your support in keeping kids online i know you're on our side to keep the kids and teachers all safe many parents i've spoken to agree and we shouldn't return until after winter recess keep fighting for us thank you hello honorable members and our wonderful superintendent my name is adam schulteis and i am the orchestra teacher at bullhead middle school and fox creek junior high school i have been a teacher for the past 35 years 30 years in las vegas retired and the past five years here in bullhead i am passionate about giving our students the best education we have to offer and therefore i believe that we should have our students here inside the school building for full-time in-person instruction not virtual instruction my rationale for this is as follows the american academy of pediatrics stated this is about wanting our students to get back to campuses this fall for full-time in-class instruction schools are fundamental to child adolescent development and well-being and provide our children and adolescents with academic instructions social and emotional skills safety reliable nutrition physical speech and mental health therapy and opportunities for physical activity among other benefits schools also play a critical role in addressing racial and social inequality furthermore suicide rates especially among teenagers have skyrocketed because of coe19 in conclusion many of my students have told me that they want to come back to school to have that direct contact with their teachers and interactions with their peers we need to do what's right for our students direct in-person instruction is the way to go thank you for your dedication to our youth and childhood city orchestra dear supervisors below is a comment i'd like to have entered into the public record as part of the call to the public and today's meeting an article in today's the mohawk valley daily news says that some of you want to ignore the arizona state benchmarks for reopening schools because bullhead city doesn't have enough testing capacity in a word that is nuts the lack of tests in bullhead city is a public health issue that transcends school issues and the solution isn't to find excuses to open schools without any protesting the solution is to ensure that adequate testing which results in 24 hours and immediate contact tracing is available to protect the health of all bowhead citizens including our children our teachers and other school employees let's not pretend that schools are some isil some isolated segment of our community and that the health and safety of our schools can be separated from the health of the safety of the rest of go ahead city respectively paul lacazia this is from daniel mullen i'm writing to implore you to require the use of masks for staff students and the public alike for the 2020 through 2021 school year your staff will film neither safe nor heard if you decide to make this decision with only a fraction of the parties involved in mind this isn't a decision that should be determined simply by the laws voiced voice it should be made with the safety of all in mind no employee or student should be asked to risk their own health for the convenience of others it seems highly illogical to me that you would ask one group to wear a mask while the other isn't any protection would be measured completely void as the mask wearing involved as the mask wearing individuals are still at increased risk i would also put forward that while some of the community might be anti-mask that certainly doesn't constitute the entire community not only will your staff feel unsafe but so will many parents and students causing them to avoid attendance altogether offering online school for those worried is a good idea but i fear it will encourage only the anti-math students to show up in person furthering the risk of spread for teachers staff and other students i've lived in this community my entire life and my family works in education and needles over the city of portland i value the community of the tri-state above all else it is what makes the area special to all of us please show our community that you value their health and well-being above all else daniel mullen former factory fox creek la teacher staff husband community member this is from bernadette thank you for allowing me to voice my concern regarding the reopening of mohamed elementary school district schools i'm a teacher at fox creek junior high and i moved to arizona to give assistance to my mother and her husband both have underlying health issues that are severe enough that they have chosen to stay at home leaving only for essential trips since march since i spent a great deal of time with them i too have limited my activity to essential trips i wear masculine social distancing is not possible i wash my hands frequently and use hand sanitizer i feel as though i'm abundantly careful to not bring the copic 19 virus to my family my ability to maintain this level of caution will be extremely diminished if the board of education requires in-person learning before it is safe to have students on campus many have stated there is not enough data to determine how this virus is transmitted when children are involved those case studies that indicate a decreased transmission rate among children were speaking specifically to children under the age of 10.
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good evening everybody and welcome out to our meeting tonight we'll go ahead and call this meeting to order and start with the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice i will go ahead and do a roll call and let the record reflect that all members are present and go ahead and move on to agenda item v1 i'll make a motion to approve this agenda from the consent with the governing board policy and temporarily suspend any policy with which the agenda may be inconsistent second motion made by jay leonard seconded by miss tanner let's go ahead and vote motion passes thank you all right we can go ahead and move on to action item c1 association for career and technical education of arizona uh award recipients dr kellis thank you president leonard members of the board and members of cabinet this evening we are very pleased to present this recognition to some extraordinary people and some extraordinary things that are happening in dysert and mr dean will present this recognition good evening mr president members of the governing board dr kellis and members of cabinet valley vista high school guidance counselor heather webb and dice unified school district career and technical education director jim gresaber have recently been selected as award recipients by the association for career and technical education of arizona the a c t e a z awards recognize individuals for their accomplishments and dedication to students and to career and technical education in the state of arizona miss webb was honored with the actaz career guidance award for her commitment to connecting students with opportunities for success utilizing innovation in career exploration and development as well as being an advocate for cte as a viable option for all students mr greasable was recognized as the outstanding a-c-t-e-a-z affiliate of the year for his commitment and continuous service and support of a-c-t-e-a-z and cte throughout the year mr gresaber received the award in his current role as executive committee president of acova akova is a non-profit professional association whose mission is to build community advocacy and leadership for arizona cte administrators and provide them with the skills needed to successfully lead the cte enterprise within school districts we are very proud and fortunate to recognize both ms webb and mr greece saber miss webb is here this evening and we'd like to invite the board down to congratulate her mr gresaber is actually in his office currently conducting a professional development session for west mecc's board so he's not with us but miss webb we would love for you to come up and join our board in recognition can we give a round of applause please speech uh [Laughter] ready very well done on that and mr dean you get extra points because you were able to pronounce every acronym without losing a beat that is impressive all right let's go ahead and move on to action item e1 superintendent updates oh sorry d1 audience with individuals getting ahead of myself miss densmore all right this is the time for the public to comment members of the board may not discuss items that are not specifically identified on the agenda pursuant to ars 3843101 action taken as a result of public comment will be limited to directing staff to study the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for further consideration and decision at a later date in order to facilitate accomplishing the business of the district in a timely manner a time limit of three minutes will be imposed for each individual or group addressing the board when you approach the podium please state your name for the record first one the first one we have is tiffany sage hi um my name is tiffany c and i have a son at willow canyon high school and a son at canyon ridge elementary school i just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to the teachers the staff and the administrators for working so hard to prepare for our students to begin school remotely this has definitely been a learning experience for our family just like i know it has been for many others across the district and also across the state i also know it's a learning experience for teachers as well my kids teachers have done an amazing job of modeling flexibility and patience as the kids were faced with technology issues and the teachers had back-up plans for the kids if those technology issues were present in closing i would just ask that the board dr kellis and district administration continue to use data to drive your decisions and also to keep an eye on the schools that are opening across the state and across our country thank you thank you good evening my name is christina bergeron i'd like to thank president leonard and all you guys governing board members um i just wanted to tell you how much i appreciate all the decisions that you guys have to make i know it's not difficult or it is difficult um being in my position i get to hear all the sides as i know you guys do and i believe in my heart that we're doing what is right and what is safe for our students and for our staff and i just want you guys and and cabinet to know how much i truly appreciate everything that you guys are doing and all the decisions that you have to make and all of the sides that have to go into it so i just want to tell you i appreciate you thank you anyone else excellent thank you all right now we'll go ahead and move on to action discussion item e one superintendent updates dr kellis thank you president leonard members of the board and members of cabinet um so we have made history this year is something that surely will go down in the history books as a first and hopefully last but we have made history by not starting school in person but by starting school online for 24 000 students who could have ever imagined but i i definitely will say that i have personally witnessed extraordinary teaching happening as i have been into the schools i don't go into the empty classrooms with the teachers teaching because they are engaged in teaching but i'll wave from the window and and say hi but it's just very heartwarming to see teachers fully engaged with their students online so i'd like to thank the teachers for doing something that they weren't hired to do they weren't trained to do but that they are accepting and stepping up to the challenge and doing an extraordinary job with i also want to thank another group of teachers and that is our parents who have also not been trained to fill this new role of of helping out our full-time teachers by being at home teacher aides but they are doing also an extraordinary job and we appreciate each one of them who are making extraordinary sacrifices but also making extraordinary efforts to help their kids learn not like it was in the spring but in a way that is legitimate serious um rigorous instruction every single day and we appreciate our parents for that i also just want to commend all of the staff who are helping the learning labs we offer learning labs starting monday for all students who need a place to go to to do their daily studies and we are already at and above capacity so we know that there's a great interest and i would just share that as a superintendent nobody wants to delay one more day of opening school we all want our students back the teachers the administrators we all and i'm sure the governing board as well can't wait for our students to to return and to return safely so as we are very anxiously awaiting the final guidelines from the county on the matrices for determining when it's safe to come back i'm confident that we will see a phased return to school earlier than we had expected um that being said we have a a target date of october but we are hoping that with these tracking the trends that we can return as soon as as feasibly possible so again thank you to everybody and the best is yet to come thank you excellent and thank you for that feedback i appreciate that all right we'll go ahead and move on to e2 governing board updates i'll go ahead and start um i had the opportunity to uh be with miss prichard and come and get an awesome car wash with the uh valley vista cheered squad and they they did palm sorry palm sorry uh the palm squad and uh they did an awesome job and uh it was exciting to see all of them out there and uh willing to do i i think they were a little shocked when i showed up about 10 minutes after they closed with another vehicle so their faces kind of dropped but they they all jumped in and did an amazing job so that was a lot of fun i also have an opportunity to travel around with my day job and do some safety training and just happen to be in the city of mesa so i got a little loss was on the other side of the tracks and it was interesting because i ran into a few people that were on their school board and uh they mentioned mr ken hicks and also dr kellis um so we have a a very good reputation and they were very interested in what dysart was doing and also um how are you handling things because they'd heard a lot of good things about us and apparently mr hicks has a very good reputation with some of the people on the other side of the tracks because they spoke very highly of you so it's always good to to go and see people and when you mention that you're from dysart it's it's good to see them in a positive light and see them especially people that are in uh the education field and see them light up and get excited to talk to you about what we're doing here um so that's that's exciting and we just appreciate all the support staff and everybody who is working so hard to keep things moving um i know with the support staff and them being in some of the buildings that don't have quite as many people in them there's a lot of opportunity to serve in different ways and we definitely appreciate them and recognize the teachers and also cabinet for everything that they're doing so we're really proud of you for getting this school year started an amazing way and and being such a positive force so we are dysart and uh we continue to honor and respect you for all of that you do it's all i got anybody else let's just go ahead and um and echo i'm everything that's been said really especially the way dr kellis phrased it in regard to how um we've all come together this last week and um it is so different i think that we are all a little bit leery we meaning i think every every group parents teachers even the board um as far as like okay what's it gonna look like there's so many unknowns and all we had to compare to distance learning or remote learning was spring which was more crisis so it wasn't ideal but it was the best we could do in the moment and um so everyone was a little bit leery and i'll just say how extremely impressed i am not only as a as a board member but as a parent being on that other end of helping your your student learn and get what they need um it's just so much better it was such a positive experience there were definitely you know i'm sure hiccups but um just to see the the outpouring of support through um you know the administration here and um teachers and students and parents seeing things online as far as the yes again there might have been some bumps but everyone you know is trying to find the positive in the situation and it was just heartwarming to be in the middle of a pandemic with all the negative and bad and still see people coming forward with their positive stories and showing that you know our students are still learning and they're still engaged in their lessons and so for that i just want to say thank you all for everyone who had a part in that parents students teachers staff everyone and then also want to touch on um the other piece dr carlos mentioned as far as like our learning labs to me is very important too to make sure because we have our teachers contracted but we're all worried about our support staff and i just appreciate the the how the district has been innovative and finding different ways to incorporate our bus drivers and and different classified staff to still even though we're not running our buses like normal still things for them to do to help them economically as well so um it's just a really again in the midst of a bad situation it's heartwarming at the end of the day to see so much good happening in dysart and i just want to extend my appreciation to everyone who's been a part of that that's all i have thank you anyone else i'll try to talk with this thing on um echoing the uh the same sentiments that dr kelos has says and and um president leonard and miss pritchard um i know everything that uh the board appreciates everything that that the cabinet is doing that especially the teachers are doing we we know it's it's not an easy task to take and you would rather for the kiddos to be in your classroom and right in front of you but i know we'll get there soon but there's just so many obstacles that we have to jump over and but really appreciative of everything that you've done um just wanted to update that even though we may not be attending a lot of conferences or workshops or anything there's still the opportunity to chime in on webinars i've seen webinars from ade asba asa and sba and there's so many different ones that basically anybody can look at but the different guidelines with the cdc the prevention of early intervention mental health communication of districts plans for the fall i mean there were so many different ones that we could look at and listen to and listen from other districts as well and so those have been very enlightening because even though we are in the west valley in surprise there are others that are going through the same thing that we are and so we're not alone um out here um but i also want to congratulate uh heather webb and jim graysaber um i have actually worked with heather webb [Music] selecting girl state delegates for the american legion auxiliary and she was a pleasure to work with so i know firsthand as to how she got this award she she works with the kiddos and especially mr grishaver he is mr cte and so if there's ever a sash that says mr cte i'm going to find it and get it for you so thank you both for everything you've done and that you will continue doing for cte and for dysart that's all thank you and then i don't want to sound redundant but i just i want to say thank you too to um you know getting school started um even through some of the kinks that they're what i've seen mostly is just positive attitudes and how much i appreciate that and how much i know that that can trickle into the community if they're dealing with someone that they maybe you know if they're frustrated with something that they're not getting done and then they're addressed their concerns are addressed and it's met with positivity that that really helps the community and like you said making history it's been really fun even though it's been completely different watching people post pictures of their kids still first day of school and still keeping on that tradition of and the kids are smiling and they're happy and you know it's really how we handle that and the attitude that we have will trickle to them as well and how their learning experience will be so i just appreciate from top down just appreciate all the positivity and helpfulness that you guys are providing to people so thank you just want to echo everything else that everyone else has said um you know thank you so much to all of our staff uh cabinet our our parents our students for just being resilient through all of this change myself as a big time procrastinator parent enrolled my kid at the very last minute to get his chromebook and everything else and you know even through all that chaos everyone has been so supportive and just so accepting and i'm truly proud of our district and everything that we've done and everything that we'll continue to do to make sure that we're a success with this so thank you all right we'll go ahead and move forward go ahead and move forward to item f1 get this sucker to switch over here and i'll make a motion to approve the content agenda items as presented second motion made by jay leonard seconded by don densmore let's go and vote motion passes thank you go ahead and move on to here item h1 policy governance boards monitoring of the adopted policy section one district results and foundations dr kellis thank you mr president members of the board and members of cabinet this evening we begin a new year of policy monitoring beginning with this first section one and mr croto will introduce this item thank you dr kellis um president leonard members of the board superintendent kellis cabinet and guests as dr kellis just mentioned we start tonight with our board monitoring of adoptive policies tonight we bring you section one and we have no revisions for a second for ours for section ones excuse me i'll stand for any questions you have short and sweet any questions on this all right thank you we'll go ahead and move on to h2 revision of policy pursuant to asba recommendations first reading dr kellis thank you president leonard members of the board members of cabinet faster has received some policy advisories from arizona school boards association many of these are based on new statute that require action from each of the governing boards within the state of arizona so with that mr croto will introduce these new policy recommendations thank you dr kellis president leonard members of the board superintendent kel's cabinet and guests tonight we bring to you as dr kellis has said some recommendations for revisions to three policies this will be the first read it's policy 7107.10 policy 9.7 and policy 11.1 in 7.0 the policy staff personnel security and safety we needed to add a statement about personal protective equipment this existed out of the executive order 20 20 51 and that requires the use of face coverings until the arizona department of health services determines that coverings are no longer necessary and that we had to put this into our policy so i'll stop there and have take any questions on 7-1 before i go to the next one any questions on that i'll just say that i appreciate the way that you uh worded that and made it a little bit more future proof than was recommended so definitely appreciate the insight and thought put behind that maybe we can go ahead and move on thank you next we bring to you policy 9.7 it is basic instructional program this adds a line onto it comes from house bill actually 2625 which added ars 1-319 and it makes september 25th a celebration of sandra day o'connor civic celebration day it is not a legal holiday however uh the law does make it that we dedicate a majority of a school of the school day of september 25th or the following day if it falls on a weekend uh to civics education and that is the point that we added in 9.7 i'll stand for questions on that any questions we're good thank you all right moving on to section 11.1 our first reading parent involvement in education senate bill 1061 added this section to ars 15249 which states that the department of education shall establish and post on its website the statutory handbooks of parental rights we as a school district must provide that link and in this policy in 11.1 if you look at the last bullet we've provided that wording that we're going to provide a link to the arizona department of education statutory handbook of parental rights so again that was by um statute that we have to add that and i'll stand for any questions on 11.1 any questions can i be a pain and go back to 9.7 my question high maintenance came later um do are we set to do something with that this this current school year of september 25th for that is that implemented immediately it um president leonard um miss tana yes it is implemented immediately so as we adopt this the you know this is the first reading so next boarding me it will be adopted by the governing board and it's our plan to put something into place this september 25th okay thanks excellent any other questions um just one quick one mr proto um didn't we on the uh yeah 11.1 didn't we already have something on our website president leonard missouri seat belt this is something that has been in statute for many years is that every district is required to post different elements of parental rights with regard to the educational program and so yes we do have something posted on our website as has been statutorily required okay just want to make sure thank you and president if i could just also interject based on some training that administration has received based on policies and adoption of policies it's a little bit of a procedural change moving forward if the board is comfortable with this procedural change that if there are no changes between now and the next board meeting when a second read for a policy is brought forward and that the second read would appear in the consent agenda and not as an additional action item again that's something that is completely optional and if the board is comfortable with that if the board has any reservations there's no problem putting it in a discussion action agenda item that's just some training that we have received so if there are no reservations when this reappears in two weeks at our next board meeting absent any changes to the policy between now and then it would appear in the consent agenda yeah i definitely appreciate that change and i think that that would help us move things a little more quickly so any other discussion on that but in the event we happen to have some type of questions we can't pull it off from consent absolutely any questions any further discussion that would be put as a discussion action agenda thank you great anybody else excellent thank you i think we can move forward with that all right let's go ahead and move on to h3 and information on not my kid program dr kellis thank you president leonard members of the board and members of cabinet based on a board member request this item is presented for your information and mr dean will present this item good evening president leonard members of the governing board dr kelsey members of cabinet this evening it's my pleasure to present information on the not my kid program and resources and to turn on the clicker it's all in the wrist it may be in the blinking of the eyes here in just a minute can you advance to the next screen with the computer not my kid is a local non-profit organization i'm based in scottsdale focused on providing training and intervention to youth with a focus on drug use vaping bullying suicide and internet safety their programs are for students in grades five through twelve their goal at the end of the day is to identify and prevent negative youth behavior next slide please not my kid offers online resources and parent guides on the topics that you see drug abuse alcohol abuse bullying relationships body image depression and internet safety next slide please they also offer informational parent workshops and teacher professional development on the topics that we mentioned above as well as substance use and prevention planning drug trend updates specifically addressing opioids marijuana and vaping related health concerns suicide alertness issues with depression and mental health successfully navigating internet safety body image and relationships next slide please not my kid also offers youth presentations through assemblies and classroom workshops on the same topics mentions above their program follows the imbr peer-to-peer model which is information motivation behavior skills and resources their presentations teach on a wide variety of coping skills and healthy activities for youth not my kid does offer these services at a cost um currently um the diesel unified school district has social workers in our schools that does provide or that do provide many of these services and beyond and so we'd be happy to answer any questions about what we found with not my kid or additional services that our social workers may provide as well related to not my kid information thank you for that we'll go ahead and open it up for discussion um and i'm the board member that had asked for this to be brought to uh the board for just discussion um the reason that i had asked it be brought was um several months ago we had a student that was abducted in the movie parking lot by her boyfriend and her life was taken from her and i believe the young man committed suicide the reason i ask this is because i'm not knocking social workers on what they do but they're they are very busy throughout the day and i know we have counselors that work with the students but i guess i just wanted another layer to assist parents and their students the mechanisms on how to get restraining orders or how to deal with the actual issues of somebody terrorizing you so to speak uh the coping skills like i said i know social workers do a lot of great work and everything but if there was some other layer that we could assist with um for our students to help them and i don't know what the costs are does it depend upon the number of schools does it depend upon one traveling assembly or workshop and i know we're in kobe right now but can you break that down for me mr president member sawyer seinfeld yes you are correct in um that was a horrific situation that occurred um many months ago in in the movie theater parking lot and um certainly our hearts go out to to both families involved in that um terrible terrible situation so um not my kid does break down their costs by assembly um by program piece as well um it um prices vary a bit um and we would have to get specific information on pricing we do not we did not ask specifically so as not to get into any issues with procurement down the road um but they do offer they do offer services at a pay fee with their various programs and they have a couple of different programs as well to address the questions specifically about helping families understand what resources that they have available to them in time of need how potentially could that the parents of that young lady gotten assistance in understanding how to do things like file a restraining order ordering those kinds of things we have in the past as you're aware offered various parent workshops um you know the the latest one or the last one that we did i believe was on vaping and probably the most well attended one that we've had for quite some time and that was in partnership with our local police agencies we certainly could look to continue those pieces obviously today that would look a little different than it would if we were back in school in person but we certainly could offer parent workshops with providing supports in various aspects of parenting or knowledge of where to find resources and those kinds of things we'd be happy to explore that as well or at the board's request we could also look continue to look at the pricing for what not my kid offers and explore further there um thank you mr dean and i personally i i would like for us to just look in to see what it would be because this young lady that whose life was taken she was in somebody's classroom and even though she may not have been best buds with you know another young lady that was experiencing the same type of things [Music] she you know students just may not know where to go to reach out or recognize the skills while my boyfriend is doing that to me or i see another student that i see her boyfriend is doing that damn or vice versa and um just the recognition piece because i don't want another student's life to be taken in this respect do they happen to and i'm sorry i did not get that information back to you but do they happen to um [Music] because of the um racial tensions that we've been having for these past several months do they work with that type of issues i did not see when we researched that information we did not see that specifically we certainly can contact them and ask that question directly you know when when we spoke with them and they talked about the life skills training that they have they have a program specifically geared towards alcohol and drug abuse but that topic did not come up specifically but we'll be more than happy to investigate with that as well thank you very much and president leonard um i would also uh echo what mr dean has said as we extend our sympathies to anybody who's been a victim of that kind of a relationship um all right and answer to your last question to give just a little bit of insight ms winterstein has been working with our social workers on a series of topics for supporting our students one of those there's a group of social workers who are working together to develop some some information trainings for adults and students on racial tensions and that is something that's in the works it's not from not my kid but it's something that our social workers are aware of and are working on okay thank you very much i think one of the things that i would echo is you know when we had the vaping conference per se i don't know what the proper term for it was i think a that partnership that we had the the police officers that presented did an amazing job and i think the word got out and it was a very powerful experience and having their experience obviously first hand dealing with the situations and seeing what's happening with our youth and exposing some of those things that you know i as a parent i'm just oblivious to it you know i see vape i understand what it is um but i don't understand how prevalent it is and how simple um it is to get a hold of and just you know obviously make it make it simple to get available and something that kids are gonna experiment with um but i would say i definitely see some value in partnering with our police officers and our social workers and anybody else that has first-hand knowledge or understanding of some of these situations and although they are sensitive topics i think they are definitely ones that as a community we need to address and as a leader in the community i think we can definitely have a high impact and give people an understanding of what is available and then work maybe through some of our tools that we have to find out what people are interested in and then offer a variety of tools or options that we could explore and develop over time and create those i would love to understand the pricing model that not my kid has obviously if it's you know working and it's something that is affordable i think it's something that we could look into obviously being you know covid and budgets being what they are we need to be cost conscious and and make sure that it is something that we do get the value for the buck but i would definitely say um as we continue on let's continue to work it work with our our staff and the amazing resources like i said our police officers did a great job just putting together a simple presentation and i think it was a little bit more of the shock and awe that they brought just reality to some parents and myself included and i just really enjoyed kind of their no no nonsense hey here's here it is and uh and then being willing to answer the questions um that that were brought up i think was invaluable to to myself and those that i know that attended so thank you for looking into that any other questions [Applause] just kind of want to add regardless of whether we we look into my kid or not my kid in pricing and even if we do it in tandem with this i think that there wasn't anything i saw on that list that isn't something that a licensed social worker should know how to do and i will say dysart is very generous with their school social worker salaries i think i think we're probably pay the best of any other school district on this for sure on the west side so um i think we should tap into those experts i'm like again not saying let's not look into it but when it looks our finances are so thin as it is we have social workers here that can whether be on professional development mondays or you know they can um do presentations even if it's monthly because i think that list is very um very relevant for sure and you know as many students as we can reach or families we can reach and something they could put together even on a monthly basis or quarterly but then having those resources and maybe not my kid is one of the resources and networking people with that information is a big key thing what social workers should be doing too but um or lunch bunch groups i don't know if they still do those but but i do um just want to be cost conscious because we do we should have especially at the license level the expertise to be able to present on some of those topics without having to impact our budget but it doesn't hurt to see what the cost would be i'm not i'm not you know trying to squash that i just yeah and springboarding off of some of our successes you know the super in 60 i think is a is a huge hit you know maybe we do social and 70 i don't know give them an extra 10 seconds to hit their topic because it's a tougher topic but i think definitely using our media groups and the things that we're developing in some of the schools and some of those recent developments and positions that we've created i think we could really come up with some great assets so definitely love to love to have more information on on what we can do and just maybe a continued update on what we're looking at as far as the social workers and and what they can provide for us so thank you for that any other questions yeah go ahead um hypothetically if we were to have our own um in-house social workers do presentations whether this was on you know zoom or a pre-recorded webinar i do think it's important i guess not to maybe to either go into the classroom and do it for all students maybe in an assembly type format where everyone is there or pre-record it because i don't think that if we make this available for students they're not going to want to join and be visible that they're part of this if it's something of interest to them because they're going through something like that i think a pre-recorded or or or give it to all students at the same time i think we need to be very delicate about that mr president um miss densmore our social workers are currently providing instruction let me rephrase that they were working to provide instruction and we'll continue to to do so through zoom and those types of things two whole classes as well as small groups as well and i don't want to get too far off topic of the agenda item um but but that is something that is currently happening um we're more than happy to look into to provide the the information requested further and and to see what that is but yes to answer your question yes that is happening on both ends and for the reasons that you described thank you okay awesome thank you anything else thanks for that discussion i think it's uh very valuable to discuss those all right moving right along let's see if i can get here uh request for j1 request for any future agenda items anyone all right let's go ahead and move to k1 our favorite agenda item of the night i'll make a motion to adjourn the meeting second motion made by jay leonard seconded by tracey shorter sink belt voted on by jen tanner and we are you
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good evening i'm going to call this meeting to order dr thomas thomason roll call please president caleb members of the board let please let the record show that we have all five board members here tonight thank you so much we are going to have a moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance all right i move that we approve the agenda second any questions or concerns all those in favor i i motion carries five zero dr thomason superintendents report president caleb members of the board at this time i'm going to turn it over to dr foley who will update us on upcoming events good evening president kaler members of the board our upcoming events are are presented to you this evening as you will see we have several upcoming governing board meetings and the dates that support that as well as the labor day holiday as well thank you so much now we are going to go on to some board comments mr witovich you want to go oh mrs wilson go ahead mrs wilson ladies i just want to thank everyone for all the emails i have not been responding but we have gotten a few more emails probably around 40 or 50.
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i pledge allegiance [Laughter] okay we're going to move on down the agenda because we have uh first of all i'd just like to say thank you to everyone that has thought that it's a good idea to keep informing our parents we know that people need vacation time and other things and i just feel like as a elected official it's our duty to stay on top of things as a board things are changing um i've been on this board all these many years and this is the first time that we've ever did july and august meeting unless it was absolutely necessary oh we froze it's a good photo it's a good photo though goddess okay kate oh there she's back last week you cut out there a little bit you you're pros yeah why didn't i stop uh you were just saying that you were happy that uh you know parents are are given the opportunity to inform and that we don't normally meet in july and august right and i just think it's very important that uh we keep everybody informed and and let them know uh the current updates because things are changing uh day by day and minute by minute so we just want to be on board to let you know that we're not just elected officials just having a nameplate we're here to support you and to hope that when school reopens that it'll be safe uh before we move on to the agenda i have been pondering about this ever since our last meeting and how to sort of say this because i just heard some other bad news uh that's something that's racial that happened and it should not happen uh at our last meeting we we was interrupted we had a video that popped up but not so much that video and everyone didn't hear this there were the racial slurs that came out of uh the person's mouth and the words were we should send all the [ __ ] back to africa and i was very hurt and i was trying to deal with how do you address that i look at this as a a member of this community that is it that is inclusive to everyone i know that this and boy administration has a lot to do and with your help and board members and our administration uh we don't want to get our focus on something else we want to stay focused on what we were elected to do and that's to move forward and make sure that all our children and our teachers and everyone that uh within this this game not game but in this arena when school open is safe so i just want to uh uh say thank you and whoever these people are i hope that the police can identify them and prosecute them to the fullest because there's no reason to use that type of language to anyone and i just want to uh say that i'm going to if it's if it's my my thing to move this boy boy forward with your help that we can uh work on the things that we need to do right here in denver so without that without anything else because uh tears come down my eyes when i i hear people use the language that was used at our last meeting and we came to that meeting to inform our parents of what was happening in the school system and it was cut short so i just want to say we're here to move on and let's take care of our educational uh things that we need to do here in denver so uh kate would you um call the roll please of course uh joseph britton is absent this evening rachel toleski here kate canetta here gladys cooper yeah lauren daley here joe da silva yeah catherine hodgston i believe is absent this evening yes rich janelli kathy molinero here al russo here amy spelina yeah thank you kate thank you okay can you go down to the next item and just read our open statement please sure due to the unique nature of the covet 19 crisis and the limitations of technology members of the public who are danbury residents are invited to send brief comments and questions via email in advance to dps underscore public comment underscore boe at danbury.k12.ct.us okay thank you again kate uh sandy um you want to run through the questions that we have for tonight or i have quite a few here so i'll try and get through these as quickly as possible okay okay repeated questions um or the same thing just uh we'll put them together cindy okay is that it uh theresa chaber asked if we could clarify the need for the permanent early dismissal is this regardless of hybrid distance learning and in the event they ever go back to school in person i heard computers will be distributed for high school students is this still the plan when should we expect updates from special coordinators with regards to email slash requests regarding ppt's accommodations for plans chosen are there any updates on how many students will attend the high school for hybrid same for teachers next comment is from stacy smith brown can you tell us how snow days will work is there a way i can select the group my children will attend i really need to have them in the thursday friday hybrid group because of work um i need to monitor them for distance learning and i can't afford child care or a tutor alison benin casa i am not supportive of delaying the opening of school children have been absent of an educational environment since march and are lacking academic and social interaction they are isolated delaying till september 8th doesn't help the students frankly we should be starting september 1st taking one additional week to prepare only hurts the kids delaying a week due to a storm four weeks prior is not a viable excuse or reason i would like to see full-time options for families that desire to have them our children are suffering academically and socially elementary students should be afforded this option they are not like high school and middle school students that can independently use computers to complete assignments now more than ever this young age needs the amazing teachers that danbury has to offer i recommend altering plans based on age allowing for full-time options if hybrid is the only in-person option parents need to know core excuse me cohorts and groups asap it's not fair to delay and further impact plans and accommodations family needs to make many work full time and need to work we need to know well in advance to adequately plan for our children uh riley 723 can you please address which types of face coverings and masks are acceptable for when school opens i see a lot of local people with max masks that have a vent which defeats the purpose it should be made clear that those are not allowed are bandanas going to be allowed what about neck gators i think it needs to be clear what is and isn't allowed in time for people to be prepared amy and ron hutchins we appreciate all you're doing to ensure a safe and productive year of learning in a pandemic our son will be in the second grade at south street he requested to attend school in hybrid this year having the option was wonderful for our family during our introduction to the district in first grade we were told we could not see the classrooms it was a minor frustration not to be able to see the classroom in advance of our son's first day or have access to any class list to contact other parents to say hello we understand privacy and safety concerns yet this year with student private emails established and a heightened awareness of who we all come into contact with is it possible to provide families the ability to opt in and sign necessary waivers to access two things pictures of at a minimum the student's classroom and cafeteria to feel comfortable that our children are in a safe environment and class list of students and parents with phone numbers this can help provide transparency and accessibility that our family and likely others could benefit from and bring together the community in times where we need to stay at a distance terry sachs in accordance with the need for transparency i would like the results of the first survey in particular for k-5 students the percentages for full-time and percentages for hybrid and percentages that opted for total online learning or homeschooling for the most recent questionnaire he would also like those what percentage of students will be school-bused and what percentage will be walking or transported by their families for the proposed new calendar during the first nine weeks there are four weeks with no school on either a monday or tuesday during those weeks will the a group have in-school classes on wednesdays so that all students receive a minimum of two days in school each week children adhd or other learning disabilities are required by section 504 to receive special accommodations those students should be allowed to attend school four days per week to fulfill this requirement and meet the terms of their plan if not what accommodations will be made for them as required by law since online learning programs are difficult if not impossible for them to keep up with what percentages of k-5 students participated in the march through june online learning what is the rationale for sending k-5 students home 60 minutes early when they are only in school two days per week to begin with shouldn't we be maximizing their in-school opportunities while they are there do you really expect those students to be able to work on computers when they return from home to return home from school finally what preparations are being made for the transition from the hybrid to full-time classes and what would be the criteria for that transition to occur peter s for parents who work what accommodations will the district be providing for the three days a week the student is not physically in school will there be full day elp judy and draco why do you keep pushing the start bake start date back weekly what are the benefits in pushing back the start date for student staff and parents why have you not considered starting this year off with all distance learning so that you have more time to safely prepare the schools for the return of staff and students if it is true that the health and safety of staff and students comes first then why are you still pushing for in-person schooling with immune systems being compromised this fall with stomach bugs fever cases common cold seasonal allergies or allergies in general and flu cases this will cause more cases of covid19 as well there have already been instances in daycare with the current stomach bug for instance a child has been sent home with a stomachache and a fever they were also told they had to quarantine for 14 days even though covet 19 was eliminated as caused by the doctor how will this be handled in schools are the school-aged children going to be required to quarantine with their families for 14 days as well what about allergies that have fever symptoms or runny nose or nose there are many runny eyes or nose there are many illnesses within the community that mimic the symptoms of cloven 19.
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hear me okay i will call the anaheim high school district board of trustees regular meeting of august 13 2020 called to order at uh 2 301. following members are present brian o'neill al-jabbar anna l piercy catherine h smith and anne-marie randall's president uh america staff has requested the following amendments to the agenda or did you all get these ahead of time yes i did okay i will read them uh page 10 of the agenda poll item 10 10 exhibit n replace page 1 to include the correct school site name of oxford academy exhibit r replace page 3 to include address for school service of california inc page 23 of the agenda correct data of the november board meeting to thursday november 19th do i have a motion to adopt the amended agenda second okay uh all in favor we'll call mr o'neal aye mr jabbar aye ms piercy aye this is hi and myself i uh is there anyone uh wishing to uh speak there are no public comments for closed session items today okay it is now 203 and we will move to closed session so well just to make sure
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it was announced this morning that the number of open 19 cases related to children has increased 90 in two weeks i cannot imagine the amount of guilt i would feel if i was responsible for infecting my mother or her husband i cannot fathom how the boe can expect me to put myself in that position i need to know what my options are for when the board insists we return to in-person learning before it is safe and what liability they are willing to accept if the virus is transmitted to me by a student or staff member in turn killing my mother or her husband sincerely for my debt bullying this is from arlene hill the present elementary school-aged children at home classroom schedule is just too harsh this has to change it's very stressful for my son at age six and for me it's too confining with too many breaks we've had no freedom for movement for four days monday through thursday 8 30 a.m to 3 50 p.m is not going to work for us very longer and for sure not until october giving the parent only one business a day giving the parent only one business day a week friday to do personal business again too harsh of a schedule you've turned my home into a full-time classroom and this is horrible class work during a day homework during the evening i'm considering homeschooling if kids do not open on a partial basis a six-year-old needs in-class schooling please put safety measures in place and get kids back into school four days of confinement is like punishment keeping us inside our home with your virtual online hello i forgot to add in my previous email that my six-year-old first grader is not progressing with virtual online schooling stated his virtual online schooling is better than no schooling he is not progressing with his education with virtual online schooling he's becoming stressed and crazy with a harsh schedule before not healthy for him and his mental health during the work packets at home he progressed greatly due to the one-on-one hands-on learning i gave him we had our own scheduled routine and education was an activity and quality time share together he can't get this online our lean health all right that brings it into our call to the publix we just did just for the other board members information we just got a message to online streaming our hard time hearing so we can try to speak into my phone a little bit louder moving on to item 1.6 adoption of agenda lead in motion i will accept the agenda or about the agenda with the exception of number two for discussion you want to remove number two or discussion okay so you want that to be a discussion item yes okay mr president there are all discussion items there are no there's no consent agenda all right so two is set for a discussion item currently are we okay with that so we're discussing all of the items yes here i'll do business okay but leading to a discussion item discussion of possible action on two yes okay so we will have number two be a discussion and so your motion is to approve the agenda because two is listed as an action and discussion yes okay i'll second that i all right moving on to uh item two two point one covered 19 resolution dr stewart mr president board members we've received lots of advice from the trumps as you know the trust is a co-op we're members of it they represent us and they try to keep our best interests of all the school districts who are members of the trust in mind so this resolution was one that was recommended by the trust to make sure that we've got covered all of the things that should be covered um particularly our board action relative to paying all of our employees throughout any time that we have closure as i indicated in some other information to you my primary concern relation to that is our bus starters we have all of our teachers and all of our paraprofessionals and our office staff working for the past nine days and for tomorrow our bus drivers are doing training that they don't ordinarily have time during the year to do and we do have impact plans for them regardless of what decision is made tonight so if we continue with virtual school there will be some work for them to do but it does not mean that they will all be working every day and the directions from executive order 2020-51 whether we figure out ways or that they recommend the governor recommends that boards figure out ways to help us maintain our employees you all know how difficult it is to get bus drivers and we can't afford to lose any of them to other jobs if we can't figure out a way to keep them deployed there are other issues in this i think that's probably the critical one but i would recommend that you pass the resolution and this is the uh this is the uh nine step uh resolution here yes it says resolution regarding code of 19 and it has nine uh supplements yeah yeah um on that one i thought we as a board for number seven um i thought we'd want to have an emergency meeting for the board members to close the school plan to close the school was that discussed previously where this said the superintendent will do it the by law only the governing board can closed schools or the governor excuse me and in certain circumstances the health department can close schools the idea of this particular item is um that if we have other policies that kind of violate the protocols that we've put in place in the plan that you all approved in june and any variations that you approve in the future um that if in any case those protocols might not be covered in current policy but they're for the benefit of the staff and students and visitors that that i could employ those protocols it doesn't i didn't read it as giving me permission to close the schools just to suspend some of the practices in light of okay thank safer i did read number seven the same way brandi did then i need to read it i think for the confusion i think by the confusion because i was wondering reading this long as you're going where it says the board authorized the superintendent to temporarily suspend compliance with or implementation of the same as needed to comply with applicable laws and regulations orders and guidelines and or promote health safety and welfare school community and to effectively and effectively operate district programs and serve security dakota 19 pandemic that's kind of broad so it could definitely be interpreted to be closing the school [Music] then i will move then we approve for resolution of 12 at 19.
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i looked this afternoon i haven't been responding but i just want to say thank you for reaching out i understand your concern and i appreciate you guys taking that time so thank you mr glover anything tonight okay mr watova you're up okay i just like to say a lot of things um first first of all i'm going to start with my negative and then i'll end it with the positive that we're on a good note here this evening i served in michigan for 12 years on a school board and also in higley for six i chose to live in the higley unified school district because of the great schools and the community i do not make decisions likely and i always will be in the best interests of our children as i served for all those years on the school district i've watched the different communities responses coming together during 9 11 such things like that the gulf war when the students all stopped what they're doing and we all saying god bless america those type of things nothing nothing has prepared me for what i have been experiencing as a board member in this community i have noticed a change in this community i have i have noticed you would not believe all of you who are watching out here you will have not a clue as to the cruel hateful emails that i received because i voted for online learning you know as somebody says well you know you're saying cruel and things like that let me clue you in what is happening in this community right now a media teacher yesterday a family was pulling up to a school the teacher heard that that student that family was not going to be attending that school so the teacher went outside to wish the family best of luck those type of things as the teacher was approaching the car the mother says to her who are you and why are you coming near me and she says well i've been with your teacher i've been with your children reading to them she says they don't know who you are and the teacher says to them yes they do i read to them every week and she says i just came to say goodbye to them i wish them well we have nothing further to say and i don't care what you're going to say and she drives off what type of rude behavior is that as those children are looking out the window watching as her teacher is standing there with that mother saying those type of things just in our community one of my neighbors is a waitress high school she goes to serve the family they had a big bill she gets a five cent tip family says to her next time if you serve me without a mask i'll give you some money you know it just goes on here and on i just can't tell you uh what's taking place um at times i was trying to even um examples of of my own here okay there was there were some emails that i've gotten and you know i try to be nice and i try to respond to them but you should see and hear the responses that i get in reference to that when i get such thing where they answer their statement it says the rewards far exceed the risks that take place and i think oh my gosh you are telling me that your reward for going to school and a risk to another child is worth it well not to even one child it's not worth it and you know i thought all that story about that starfish you know how they say what things matter worth is that one starfish and i thought about that starfish in in reference to those type of things so so those are the different things in fact probably probably the thing that just just the reason i'm even saying this today and going having this conversation with this community that needs to understand what's taking place here is i just told one uh this one person wrote me and i said you know i'm trying to do the best decision i can make with the information that i have and i told him i said uh one of my sons got the virus death store intensive care crying we thought he was going to die he thought he was going to die still has you know complications and this was a healthy athletic young person okay i told him i said perhaps my input's a little bit different know what that response was i don't care about your son i want the schools open i said oh my gosh where where has this community gone i mean i'm just sharing this to you because i want you to understand the career the cruelty in this community to what what has taken place and you know we don't have a i didn't ask for this job to open up the schools with a pandemic you know none of us did up here we don't have a clue how to get through this but we're trying to do the best that we can and we need to get through these type of things here and we need to show each other compassion we need to work through this as a caring and compassionate adults just think what great role models would we would be if we actually showed some kindness to each other let me just say enough with a negative behavior i believe what we have more good in this community with that you know i want to read to you one of one of the emails that i've got here okay um this is from a parent i got the other day and you know after i read the one that says often give a rip about my child and me myself and i those type of things it was really like wow where am i going to go where am i living at right now okay and let me just read you a note just from a from my parent it says how thankful i am that dude that the um uhusd has decided that we at least have a plan i would not consider myself in the middle i don't want to go back full force at this time i am but i am hoping we can get our kids back someday in school at some point when it's safe i want to reach out to you board members who voted for our kids for our families for our teachers for the safety of all children this boat is the most kind loving empathetic act that you have done that you could have done for your community at this time a huge weight of worry and anxiety has been lifted off to this mom and so many many others in this community when you made that vote to delay in person i know some of you probably are getting beat up for that decision you can't make everybody happy but i actually cried when that decision was made believe it or not my kids were happy no you know they've got online classes every day but they are smart they know what is going on in the world they see all the schools having to close again and again just in a few days they want to be safe you know that's that's just gives you an example of some of the things that that we have um taking place for us and then it's about showing compassion the governor can make the change people he pushes it to the community instead of making an executive decision a good political move here let the locals make the decision with the least amount of knowledge here okay let them be the comedy nominee who's going to take the abuse why i sit back and watch the fighting amongst the children look it up the maryland governor hogan made a directive and changed the opening dates so some schools could come back why can't that take place so don't ask us people ask the governor he can make the change if he wants to he's more happy watching the people fight here amongst ourselves neighbor to neighbor cruelty things like that let us fight amongst ourselves instead of looking over our shoulder and saying hey look at the guy up on the porch he can make the decision but he's letting the two children fight each other on the playground as i said earlier we all need to show respect and kindness towards each other as this cruelty will do nothing but destroy this community i have one other thing i want to share with you as well on this one here um i think it was important i was kind to looking around the country and seeing like what how are other people communicating and and how they getting how are the schools and trustees talking to other people and how they getting their communities to come together um i'm going to reach you i found this it's really a nice what this community did and i'm going to read to you what's on their homepage for their school and it's just really really nice okay it says last spring the school named three priorities that would guide our planning for the 2021 school year health safety learning and community for months our leadership team and faculty have worked tirelessly devoting the full resources of saint andrews to be ready to deliver exceptional education for each student in the midst of an ongoing pandemic given the ongoing shared risk that coveted 19 possesses to our school community and the larger society our reopening plans must be grounded first and foremost in the health and safety of our children we must acknowledge that local infection rates have risen and have remained elevated in recent months that there is not yet sufficient access to rapid covet testing results sounds familiar and that experts have therefore advised us that the virus continues to possess significant risk if we resume in-person instruction too quickly we have the duty and determination to care for everyone in our school each saint andrews student and family and every teacher and staff member who has dedicated their life to our school our community members come to our campus from across the greater washington area and with each return home to our families and loved ones every evening in this time more than ever we must care for the health and well-being of every student on our campus we belong and must be responsible to each other for these reasons our board of trustees and i have dedicated that st andrews will begin the year in our distant learning model for kindergarten through grade 12 through at least october 9th remember this october 9th people okay our medical staff and advisors will continue to monitor local health conditions and guidance and will inform families by the beginning of october whether we believe it is safe to to begin phasing in on campus instruction by our hybrid model ladies and gentlemen this is st andrews elementary school outside of washington dc this is the school where president trump's son attends thank you mr glover i'm sorry thank you mr ratovich thank you mr glover well i wasn't going to say much but i i just i'm struck by i thank you for uh your passion mr wittobi and your many many years of service um you know we did get some emails that uh some people were like you guys shouldn't get a paycheck okay well we don't so um but uh you know i wish we could all just start from a place where we accept that we all want your kids our kids to grow up healthy productive citizens and i'm going to say that again i wish we could all start from a place where we could at least accept that we all want our kids and your kids to grow up to be healthy productive citizens if you start from there then you might be able to find some common ground you know i think i feel like our time and energy might be better spent educating others on the things that will help get us back where we want to be more quickly we should do those things and we should encourage other people to do those things and science tells us what those things are you know there's the metrics that the governor and dhs put in place so in case people were were confused about the decision we made you know the challenge is for us to meet those the sooner we meet them we are we were prepared as of last week to say in a week we can go back so the challenge really to the community is do the things that will help slow and and decrease those numbers to where we all feel comfortably safe so that your kids can grow up and and you know dance at their weddings and you know have give your grandchildren and all those things so anyway that's it for me thank you mr glover anything else all right we're going to go on to our request to speak dr thomason is going to be our reader again tonight he's got his water ready and i am going to read this first we value input from our constituents this time has been set aside for anyone from the audience who wishes to address the board please remember this is not an appropriate venue to evaluate discuss or criticize district personnel policy keb provides a process for complaints about personnel speakers should be aware that the false statements about individuals may result in civil liability members of the board may not discuss items that are not on specifically identified on the agenda therefore pursuant to ars 38-431-01h taken as a result of public comment will be limited to directing staff to study the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for further consideration and decision at a later date please limit your remarks to three minutes although we will not be doing that part but thank you dr thomason thank you madam president once again i'll be reading them directly as written as we received them the first one is from dana griggs with children at higley saseman and santan we want five days of in-person school we want to be listened to the survey said 90 percent wanted in person school including the teachers what was the point of the survey if you aren't going to listen open the schools next from miss jennifer larson children at williamsfield cooley in chaparral i have concerns over school closures next from lisa drake with children at higley traditional academy i have been an husd parent for over a decade i am so disappointed in how the board has completely turned their back on this community you were elected to this position to speak for your constituents but yet you have completely disregarded the majority you have made the decision based off this over exaggerated fear that the teachers are going to be in the classroom with 25 coveted plus kids i will continue to speak up on behalf of my children and every other child in this district please get the kids back on campus another eight weeks without these experiences and interactions are only going to deflate any desire for education that these young minds are typically so eager for next from rebecca shiver children at cortina saseman and higley last meeting the votes showed that you are not here for children you do not listen to children you do not represent children but shouldn't children be your number one priority all children please put your personal experiences your opinions and your fear aside to let children have a choice everything has been taken from them and only ten percent of children wanting the online program please don't ignore and neglect the eighty percent of children that need in-person school thank you next from kerry ware children at higley high saseman and centennial i would like to address i would like to address how all the survey were completely ignored also i would like to express how my family is personally being affected from christina klontz children at cortina and higley extremely disappointed in the vote against returning to school in person please tell me why or even why you even bothered to survey that were in favor of returning to campus in person or were you elected to further push your own agendas with your own personal opinions yes we all saw the email that was sent to a parent from mr k about his son contracting kovid and how he was bias basing his decision off of that ridiculous this is not what you were elected to do i am baffled that teachers at this point are the only profession refusing to go back to work everyone else has been back to work for months working with high risk people no profession is dropping like flies jump off the political bandwagon and do something for these kids how about you honor your original plan of offering choices that the parents and teachers who want to return go back that the online people stay online if you are following the data you would see the drastic decline of cases you would see the age group of our children that contract the spread covid is minuscule and the deaths are at zero percent i mean are you even actually looking at the website the cdc has said our children need to be back at school you can't cherry pick their recommendations to fit your very biased opinions and agenda we see you and what you are really about and it is not the children i urge you to reconsider your positions next from connie webb children at san tan elementary my husband has been working as a pediatric mental medical care provider for the past 12 years he has worked with the underserved community for all 12 of those years we have five sons four of our sons are hearing impaired three of our sons are adhd and one of our sons is autistic they range in age from 14 to 3 years and are in high school middle school elementary school and special needs preschool we deal with compromised children we do not fear coven and this is why my son has caught the common cold and been intubated in the icu for seven days hanging on to life but he recovered i have spent more nights in the hospital with my children struggling to breathe than i can count that being said in our family we live life like there is always a dangerous virus out there we have to be diligent about hand washing in an effort to keep our children out of the hospital i can tell you from experience that it can work do my children still get sick yes but when they do we deal with the problem at hand we would never limit their opportunity to learn and social growth by not sending them to school because there's a chance they could get sick and end up in the hospital it is not fair to our children to deprive them of the essential learning that they are missing and being by being in school germs are out there covet is not going away there is no cure but that does not mean that we should live our lives in fear and deprive anyone especially our children of their opportunities anyone who feels like keeping our children out of school is preventing them from getting this disease they are wrong this disease is here to stay if anything it is just postponing the inevitable because at some point we will get it the good news is the majority of us will weather it just fine this is the way communicable diseases work i also have concerns about my own children because as online learning is happening it is near impossible to have an adhd children engaged without a parent to sit with them all along the way and even then they are not picking up what is happening this isn't possible with all of the schedule overlap all the schedule overlapping that is happening my deaf children can't even understand what the teacher is saying over the computer so they are not learning anything i think my special needs children are suffering the most the screen time of any kind makes my child unable to keep himself focused and emotionally under control and now you're asking him to be on it all day their ieps are not being followed due to the assumption that children not being able to sit in front of the computer that long after all of their other classes they are getting 10 minutes of a week of their services instead of getting the amount of time allotted in their iep as pandemic medical providers we feel strongly that the american academy of pediatrics and the cdc should be some of the main sources that should be taken into consideration when it comes to the well-being of our children and by extension the community as a whole we feel very strong that with both the aap and the cdc having recommended that children go back to school as soon as possible that we as parents and those in charge of their educational need to work to make that happen immediately in my husband's job he has seen the strain that being at home has had not only honor the underserved community members but on our children in general as part of their well child visits all children over the age of 12 are given a depression screening to date every child he has screened since the school shutdown began has shown signs of depression as a medical provider this is extremely concerning to him about the well-being of all children should shut down should the shutdown continue in conclusion our children need to be back in school immediately for their good their learning and the emotional health of our community the surveys have been taken by parents and teachers and they showed that both parents and teachers feel that it is in their children's best interest to have in-person school resume immediately those who don't feel comfortable with that option have been given a choice please now allow the rest of us to have a choice that we feel is best about and allow our children to start back to in school in person i would ask that you please follow the recommendations of the experts and send our kids back to school molina rangel children at soseman junior high and centennial elementary please do not forfeit safety for loud voices demanding business as usual both my students schools have excellent virtual learning options my students feel safe and want to return when they know they will be not be at risk or put their loved ones at risk i worry these small groups of parents with loud voices will try to change the current course i've seen their social media and it appears their complaints are not validated and most of have not tried to learn technology to prepare their students for minor changes in the long run jennifer gibras children at williamsfield and higley traditional academy members of the board this is our first year with the school district as we switched from a charter school and we're excited to do so we are starting to second guess our decision for this first time ever my fifth grade daughter who is happy go lucky has hated school or what this is called the lack of direct instruction and actual interaction is detrimental to my child and her mental health she feels she is not truly learning as she cannot raise her hand and get a direct help during her assignment time while the teachers do their best to physically interact and speak is always better she is she was in tears yesterday due to frustration of not getting her needs met her words quote this is the worst year ever for school end quote discontinued remote learning is not helping my students how are high school students supposed to grow and meet the necessary hours for school with only two hours a day of direct interaction honors courses online is not enough time and when a teacher leaves 30 minutes into class what kind of message does that send to the students i'm not i'm done so goodbye and go do your work but i'm not available this is not okay i worry the future looks i'm worried the future looks like not only my children but all higley students we are failing them by not allowing them in-person interaction and direct instruction what is going to happen when students don't meet their benchmarks for passing are you prepared for summer school at no cost to parents to make sure the students get caught up or are all those students going to be held back how is husd going to make sure the third graders meet the state requirement for reading when there is only virtual learning and teachers cannot see what a child's real capability of if students get held back how is this district going to handle the mental health of these children who will think they are not capable of passing a grade that what will this do to our teenagers there is already a rise in suicides due to social isolation having students repeat a grade could possibly increase the numbers students need to be in school if proper ppe is supplied and used correctly why can't students and teachers be where they should be in school this is from george he has not listed a school just wanted to thank the board for considering educators students and staff safely while our community navigates through this covid19 pandemic thank you from donald donald anderson students at higley high thank you for recently choosing to remain in remote learning in husd since the county health department has issued the safe start guidelines i support using data metrics and facts to determine when it is safe for my student to return to on-campus learning at the school i do not understand the rushed return of the other schools given that outcomes of returning too early are potentially damaging to students the school staff and the community at large i urge the board to stand by their decision moving forward and to prioritize safety over speed the question is less about when school should resume and really more about how long schools can stay open when they do resume thank you for your many many many hours of dedication carrie matthew student higley high i would like to thank the school board and district administration for being diligent in circumspect and their decision to delay the reopening of school until heath experts agree that is safe for all who spend our days in the school buildings students and staff i have been impressed with the integrity and care you've taken and appreciate that your primary concern is the safety of students and staff matthew gray higley high i would like to thank members of the school board for making teachers and students feel safe by postponing the opening of our class in school it has made our community safer and will continue to do so thank you so much board members keep us safe final one andrew barcio no no school listed as a district teacher i would like to thank the board for all of their hard work also i would encourage the board that a rush to in-person classes is a bad idea both for the well-being of students and teachers thank you board that's all of the requests we had for today thank you again dr thomason for reading all those for us okay president yes dr thomason members of the board i just want to let you know we read these in order as we received them so it wasn't set up to be all positive or all negative yes i know mrs reach organizes those for us very well thank you for that okay we are going to move on to our consent agenda items i move that we approve consent agenda item 6.1 to 6.9 second questions comments concerns on the consent i just want to go over the uh 6.6 dr fowler could you just explain that to us in a nutshell president kaler members of the board cabinet dr thomason and cabinet i just want to talk briefly about this particular item when we originally put the purchase in for um the request for the flooring at williamsfield is that i'm sorry is that the number i'm sorry this is the gift donation i'm sorry i'm going to defer to dr thompson because he is sorry okay you're still coming president kaler members of the board this was a donation that was given to the district in in the form of a land donation uh many many years ago uh four superintendents go when mr larry likes was the the board the district superintendent at that time he made it the there was a donation of land made to the district by continental properties and there was also a point at that time when we had impact fees for builders that built within our school boundaries the impact fees could be 500 a rooftop a thousand dollars a rooftop or 1500 a rooftop depending on the cost of the homes that were being built in that area so in and return in return for the donation we we waived the impact fees or the rooftop fees at that time now there were more homes built in that area but of course with the recession things had stopped for a while and the building has continued to happen now as we're starting to grow and so the the donation of the the land was um an offset of the rooftop fees we have but since that time he has surpassed the in-kind donation and so there was a an opportunity for him to pay for the rooftop seas that exceeded the amount of the donation that he gave the school district and the exceeding of that donation was 32 746 dollars that you see that continental property is a great partner with the higgle unified school district is donating to the district for those impact fees that the district utilizes to help run our district thank you i just wanted clear clarification on that on that gift any other questions comments or concerns and consent all right all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries five zero moving on to our action and information item 7.1 any questions although mr holland is not here tonight um if they have any i'm sure that we can email him nothing okay we're going to move to 7.2 um okay so i move in consideration of the recommendations of guidance issued by the centers for disease control the arizona department of health services and the executive order issued issued by the governor of the state of arizona it is requested that the governing board adopts the space covering policy for all students employees volunteers and visitors of the district second any comments yes i do have a comment i was looking around just at other schools in the valley just to see what's going on i just found this really nice one i want to read with you as we look forward to the fall and at this time proceed cautiously in planning for return for in-person classes we understand that our only hope is minimizing the spreader covid is to partner with our entire community in that effort in that in we introduce the amdg 2020 program and ask that our parents and students community join us both on and off campus in the following practices number one is a for awareness awareness of your own health symptoms hand hygiene and how these considerations can impact others m is for math it has been proven that maths are effective deterrence to spreading the disease thus we will require faculty staff and students to wear maths while on campus we ask our families to do the same when they go out in public places justicing distancing will be required on campus to the extent that campuses spaces will be allowed this is my favorite it's g for the greater good we ask that the men and women in our schools for others of our extended community focus on the greater good and work to protect one another and especially the medically fragile in our community at large and they have this whole program it was just really neat you know maybe you may not want to think of anything it's called am dg and they kind of like the awareness mass distance and greater good and and i just kind of thought this was really nice okay um i'd just like to give credit to uh brophy prep school and i believe oh this is where our governor's son just recently graduated he's quite familiar with brophy school and i just wanted to share with you that they're requiring maths at all time on their campus and how their the school is sharing it with the community and how important it is to for them to be role models in the community and to go out there and do what's right for everyone so i just wanted to share how nice this school is doing in reference to that thank you for sharing mr witovich and in education we all love a good acronym don't we yeah just add it to our list of all the other ones that we've yet to memorize mrs reese thank you president kaler i just have a question and concern under students for a that we have changed it from pre-kindergarten to preschool while they do say that no child under two should wear a mask but two to three to five can that's very difficult and very challenging so i do have some concerns that we've changed this from kindergarten to preschool i think that's for our teachers will be really difficult for keeping a mask on having their attention if this is my concern is if this is a policy then it's more than a recommendation it's a policy my my request would be that we go back to kindergarten with it within our policy and make a strong request in our preschools so our teachers can help them learn it's a learning process and we have three-year-olds on our preschool campuses um those four-year-old pre-cares that you know they may even turn five and i'm even good with putting an age group of five so in october they've turned five they've missed the kindergarten cutoff so they're doing pre-k things like that but i've seen three-year-olds try and wear masks and it is more work for a teacher to try and keep a mask on a three-year-old that that would be their focus until that can't be their focus any longer and they end up giving up and then we have a policy we're not following so that's just my concern of changing it from kinder to preschool is that it's a difficult age there are some safety issues with that obviously not nearly the safety issues of them under two but again my concern is when it becomes a policy the strong expectation that that's followed is very different than recommendation if a teacher can in preschool can spend the time working with kids on wearing a mask and and hopefully ultimately get them wearing masks properly for the amount of time they're there as a recommendation but that's just my concern as a policy president taylor vice president reese i hear your concern one of the things in talking about that change that recommendation for the change came to came from also our work with what do we do when someone gets sick what is the protocol for keeping safety and a lot of it has to do with the wearing of a mask you'll notice that in that policy the next two bullets are allow for when we're talking about students we're talking about the student again on a case-by-case basis medical reasons or determined by a staff member and in some cases the spacing where there can be the determination where there can be enough space that the policy allows for that being that this would be something that would be consistent with practice across the district again not ideal but it really does play into the what happens when someone gets sick the whether or not they're a primary secondary contact has to do with the wearing of a mask when that physical distancing was impossible and so again it is a challenge and preschool rooms meet unique needs of individual students in that room and some again can allow for more physical distancing than others again the points you have brought up are are ones that we've also had and have concerns about but felt that because of the process for consistency with the allowing in that policy for where physical distancing can occur and exceptions being made that they would be encouraged that when possible or when physical distancing is not possible that mask would be be worn and taught the importance of because it truly does have an influence on the next piece about what happens if or when someone gets sick and that mask determines whether you are a primary or secondary contact versus monitoring symptoms to or or being isolated for a quarantining kind of thing so i hear you well thank you i just like i said i just worry about the teachers having to spend more time with those kiddos putting masks back on them causing the teachers to be closer to the kids and having more physical contact with those kids putting these masks back you know on and off and you know some are made that there is a right way because it goes over your nose and the kids having them upside down and the teachers really having to put them on for these kids so it is causing the teachers to have a closer physical contact more often helping these kids get them back on so that's my concern i appreciate you guys have gone through that but i stick by that concern and think it's going to be a lot of work for those preschool teachers that if we can encourage it and continue to teach them how to wear it but that it's not their whole day putting masks back on three-year-olds do we have any views from a preschool teacher has anyone reached out to preschool teachers on this i would assume i think a lot of our preschool teachers have the same concerns as our general ed teachers and not just their safety but the safety of the kids while we do realize that it won't be a seamless thing it's just like teaching them to sit in a chair or wash your hands or get in line i totally respect that i think we view our preschool teachers just like all of our teachers up through 12th grade so while we understand that it wouldn't happen right away and it would take a lot of practice everything we do takes lots of repetition and practice so that's really kind of where it came from and we tend to think of our our district as a pre-k through 12 district so thank you mr glover did you want to say something i don't want to seem like an utter hypocrite i tend to agree with you so i just want to tell you i was wondering if it could be um if well we were going to have the mass policy back in the day was going to be strongly i love the words we use strongly recommended and encouraged strongly requested strongly requested and encouraged so if this is something the board wants to chew on president kayla are members of the board too we also have to ensure that our policy is not in conflict with some of the requirements from the maricopa county department of health services or if gilbert puts a policy in place through them too is that they kind of have to to align a little bit and i think this does a great job of aligning it we will definitely have exceptions for those individuals that are unable to keep the mask on and do the best we can but i think this aligns to what the current maricopa county board of regents or board of directors has put in place at this time if that changes then our policy should follow what their recommendations are well can i just follow one more thing so uh regardless of how you go if these kids are i mean if they're given the latitude to take it off i really hope for our i think that they would be more likely to have them off probably because of all the things that you said um so you know things like i know that taking a temperature is not a good indicator but maybe maybe that happens with a greater frequency at the nursery school you know with the digital digital things the spacing the teacher to student ratio and that we spread out as much as we can so some attention is paid to that because i do i mean geez i mean i've seen kids that you're three or you know two two year olds they don't want to be in a diaper and they're not gonna wear a diaper and this is a mask it's like so yeah anyway so i i i hear you we we do have time um this is the second read though so so if we were to vote tonight and pass this it would be policy mrs keller i'm i'm okay with it being policy i'm just concerned with it being policy what that will put on our teachers um and i hear the teacher and i agree our teachers are pre-k through 12.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
how will you be able to tell the difference how will you keep everyone safe there are many unknowns of how this is affecting children and how they are spreading this the health and safety of the school community is the most important if you can't open safely then you are not ready to open mini santosh now that the parents are part of the teaching team and have our students with us three days of the week is it possible to train parents to have the skill set will the teachers be doing live lessons live sessions class specific through the entire seven hours a day when they are distance learning please have a conversation about equity in education dana garland what will happen if a teacher is out for any reason and there is not a substitute will classroom teachers be provided with extra masks for children how many extra masks will teachers be provided what's the procedure when and if the teacher doesn't have a mask for a student who for any number of reasons can no longer use the mask they came to school with erica girardi i am a mother of two students at dhs who play football the boys have been happier and more motivated since they started practicing with their friends and teammates in june they were just given their false schedule and now you were telling them that this may not happen until the spring this should be the parents decision whether they want their child to play sports just like they have the option to send their child to school or distance learned from home if we can let all these kids and teachers back into classrooms and hallways together in very close proximity then i believe being outside on a football field with 21 other players is not going to affect anything if we do not allow this to happen then you can be absolutely sure that it will affect their emotional and social well-being just recently the football coach asked his players to put into words what football means to them this was my son's response all football players can agree with the statement that football is way more than just the game as much as we all want to play many of us need to play football keeps us on the right track and headed towards a bright future it forces us to stay out of trouble and maintain good grades i used football to relieve any stress or emotions from my day-to-day life and it has turned me into the man i am today i honestly can't imagine a fall without football we need football my son has many friends that he talks about that he talks about that would not even go to school or care about their grades if it wasn't for football these are the kids that we need to be thinking about when we want to take sports away from them it is so much more than just playing on the field wendy paulin my son will be attending king street intermediate school will there actually be six foot distancing in the classroom if not then the kids should not should be solely distance learning will the students be having lunch in the classrooms i do not feel that the cafeteria will be safe with too many kids cheryl radachowski chris murphy's proposed legislation to remove sros in our school would put our students teacher and staff in danger his agenda is to defund the police rather than to keep our students safe as a parent of two students at dhs i would have serious concerns if this is allowed to happen if you can bear with me i'm going to check the email real quick to make sure we don't have more which we do not that is the end of public participation thank you sandy for reading that so elaborate thank you so very much uh dr sam is he home yes um could you uh sort of go through the procedure as how are you going to go about answering uh those comments that were read well i think tonight during the conversation i will answer some of them and then um i guess we'll take a look at a q a and try to get them out some of them we don't know answers yet quite frankly we'll look i think the calendar we're going to talk about uh the good news about athletics we just got to last just just a little bit ago they are going through with false sports that's i think what the parent was alluding to as of right now so the question is going to be spectators but as far as the kids at least they're going to be able to participate that's for sure tonight we have kathy that's going to speak to some of the things that we talked about uh tonight that the parents asked about face coverage safety and courtney also will talk about spacing um so well i think we'll answer a lot of those and then we'll probably try some q a i plan to send out a letter as soon as i know uh what's going on with some of the things uh to parents um so i can kind of hit highlight some of the things that were talked about this this um this evening thank you dr sam i just want to change the agenda just a little bit because i know kathy is here and i know she's going to bring uh some information uh to us about you know uh the protection of our young people at school um i would like to bring the information item up nia madam chair i have to leave by now if we could get the vote on the calendar i this way i can go and the discussion can occur i i logged in in order to vote on that but i'm already running late for the obligation and coaching okay okay um okay let's uh just go to the action item okay you want to do a read the action item certainly uh i'll make a motion at the board of education approve the revised calendar for 2020-2021 in accordance with exhibit 20-77 made by kate seconded by joe are there any discussion at this time concerning calendar madam chairman may i make a comment yes okay i um i have care online and uh kevin um with the um with the storm that has presented uh some real obstacles um we've kept the forms open on our website um when we're sending home a um your robocall we have the ability to robocall just families that have not turned their materials in we're about i want to say three or four about four thousand we had many that are duplicates so um that has been a yeoman task to try to try to get through we ended it early simply to get to a bottom line um so principals would be able to make phone calls um so the time that we need uh as you're going to see with a presentation with carawanza the number of people that are asking for dl the changes that are going on i think it's a safety issue for planning structure-wise that we opened the eighth but in addition to that i have some grave concerns about particularly our primary kids being there all day with a mask on the hours that are spent we'll talk a minute about if the board would permit us to do it why we need the extra time in the afternoon based on the model that we want to utilize for planning they will meet the um the the minimum amount of hours per day at the end of the year and also the amount of days carrick could you speak to a little bit to the board to give more background on what we're doing to extra time uh sure just in terms of the calendar uh very briefly and i know that the board already has the calendar that's presented but for the sake of the public and those um watching the proposed calendars which is the start of school to september 8th originally staff were due back on the 20th they will now be due back on the 26th we will have new teacher orientation on the 24th and 25th and so mostly everything else in the calendar stays relatively the same the end of school date gets pushed out um so that the tentative school closing becomes the 18th of the school year and so that's just a short summary in terms of the other components i'll try to be brief with that as well because i know joe has to leave um you know the hybrid in the hybrid model um requires extensive planning planning and uh very intricate balancing of what's happening uh with the students in school versus at home distance learning and blended learning is still relatively new to our staff and we're still working on the craft of that teachers need some additional time and they also need to be able to reach out to students who are at home for particular reasons who may or may not be connecting in school um and so at the elementary level we did we did only short and by 60 minutes as opposed to secondary uh there are some additional reasons you know it's a very long day there's reduced movement um across the day the students who have masks on um and it also gives educators time to reset the classrooms a bit there are certain things that we have to do to modify our plans and programs um each day for example one quick example is that students will not be perusing the library and book stacks teachers will have to do some book shopping for students um and that requires a lot of time selecting based on their interests and their reading levels and curating that those types of texts for students so that there's not a lot of students touching the books um and that we have set up a process for that so i think this real quick the parents said we don't expect a day to be extended with dl um the purpose of the time too is to reach out to the other half of students and what is on any of the calendars that you see currently in terms of the timing that distance learning is that that time does is made up but it's not necessarily in real time students will be traveling home on the bus and but there's some expectation that they will have some equivalent independent practice at home that's um completed flexibly at the high school level i think um it was pretty well documented that serving lunch was extremely problematic and gathering that many students in such um tight spaces and so again um at the secondary level it was imperative that we have a grab-and-go lunch so they are on a 90-minute release that was as long as we can go that we felt was um enough time to give kids to uh get into school get their academics and um you know grab their lunch for for the ride home so you know there's a variety of reasons and a lot of thoughtful planning that went into that um all with the students in mind but also with the educators and our staff who need to plan a very con in a very complex way this year to meet the needs of students i have a question so the dismissal times under this calendar are an hour and 90 minutes these are not the same dismissal times in the presentation kevin had given us a few weeks ago the slide that kevin gave was a grab-and-go for elementary students we've decided to not go forward that plan this is just an hour earlier correct correct correct yes it was just too long of a day as we started to work through the details too long for elementary students and we did want to keep them in a little bit longer we didn't want to short change you know we pushed it to the to the greatest extent possible makes sense thank you any other question mccarran um i don't have a question but i just want to point out that the start time the new start time mirrors um other districts regionally and many are pushing them back as well thank you any other question from board members i've seen that was made by kate seconded by joe uh kate would you do the roll call for the motion please uh rachel chaleski hi kate canetta aye gladys cooper hi lauren daly is that nigh sorry okay thank you joe da silva hi uh rich chinelli hi kathy molinaro aye al russo aye amy spolina aye is unanimous all in favor okay thank you self-care thank you all so very much thank you thank you madam chair have a good night thank you thank you joe good night joe thank you okay we're gonna move uh the next item uh the information item up so we can um talk about that now and then we can bring um our final uh discussion up next uh yes um yes one kathy uh o'dowd is she here yes i'm here okay kathy um you you heard the questions in the beginning and cara prunty um i gotta say there's been a great team cara and uh kathy and it just been a comfort level to me to know that someone's watching out for the best interest of our kids so i want to publicly thank both of them who have been just diligent in checking the data and making sure our procedures are solid so you heard the questions of parents all legitimate concerns can you as you talk this evening the things that we're doing in those areas i know we received some things from the state that did some clarification so we'll start with kathy and carrie you can kind of uh talk targo in and out okay okay thank you dr sao uh good evening everyone um so in in addressing some of the questions um that that sandy brought forward this evening um in terms of the face masks we are expecting new guidance from the state next week on that um so the one thing that i will say about it this evening is that the masks with the um the valve they will not be permitted they have not been found to be effective and can actually spread so tonight i can tell you that um those definitely won't be allowed and then the state will be issuing us guidance next week in terms of um the the gators and the bandanas because up to this point they were considered to be acceptable um but now they're beginning to to look at some new data and question that so um that information um will go out as soon as as soon as we have it um and in terms of how are we going to determine whether a child has allergies whether they have coveted i understand that this is very concerning and very stressful for parents um again we've had some very specific guidance from the state um and if i'm going to try to share my screen i don't know if i'll be able to do that let's see okay just give me one and i i will i'll i'll just give me one minute please okay [ __ ] [Music] okay you should be all set now okay let me try to share that okay so can you see my screen no not yet no okay all right double click kathy kathy why don't you just send it to cara cara pompano she'll put it up for you if you want do you hear me yeah i did um actually hold on bye sorry well it's raining like crazy sorry for the delay no no words well we're waiting um i'm sorry sandy is she here i'm here dr south can you um just to help out on these answers put them right on uh type them in under the questions so then we can publish them like we just did about the masks they'll just keep a running thing for us and then we can get it to parents they deserve to see the answers to these okay cara i just sent that to you okay your screen is being shared right now i believe okay all right let me check this hold on okay is this going to work or should we just move on if not i can i'll just go through the document why don't you just go through it if we can get it up we'll get it okay um so in in terms of how we will be handling ill children at school um the state has given us very specific guidance um in three different scenarios um if we have an individual and this will apply to staff or a student or student if the individual has coveted 19 symptoms but has not had close contact to a person diagnosed with covin 19 we will have one protocol um and i am okay kathy it's up now okay so we just have to make this a little the type is kind of large yeah i know hold on there we go right amy can we enlarge that can you enlarge that kara kathy if you hit that plus button there and you're oh is that charis i'm trying it's not coming up here there we go there you go there we go that's better okay i'll move it along as you speak yeah okay you can go to the second page second page okay very good email sorry hold on oh my word what happened here you got my email up there oh my word okay hold on a second let me try it again um so we will have very specific guidance um for a child coming in and when we talk about covet symptoms they are many we are aware that they mimic other illnesses the main symptoms of kovid that the state has asked us to focus on would be fever above 100.4 shortness of breath any difficulty breathing chills and a loss of taste of sense of the sense of taste or smell so um we are going to be asking parents to uh you know screen their children at home in the morning for any symptoms of illness and if they are ill they should stay at home however if they do come to school and they present with the symptoms they will be evaluated by the school nurse and any illness will be sent home if they're having these coveted symptoms we will ask that they contact their healthcare provider and get a covid test based on the results we will determine whether they have to quarantine or isolate based on whether the results are negative or positive and then the other scenario that we have would be if the individual has covert 19 symptoms and they've had close contact with a person who's been diagnosed with covid um again there's always going to be referrals to the health care provider and for testing um but there would be more likelihood being that they've had close contact with a person with covet and then if we have an individual who does not have covid symptoms but they've had close contact with someone um again that that quarantine or isolation would determine on whether the results are negative or positive so if we do get a student or a staff member with a positive cova diagnosis um the procedure is the school nurse will be notified um but we'll be notifying the principal who and i will be notified um dr sal and kevin who is our co-liaison is notified along with our medical advisor dr fong i then consult with cara prunty at the health department and based on the addendum 5 criteria the amount of community spread that is present at that given time um we would collaborate and make a recommendation as to whether we have to close a classroom two classrooms or an entire building um and then all of the communication would come out through central office to parents and to staff in regard to that excuse many questions yes i have a question how is that how is this communicated to our parents this whole page this whole this whole the uh addendum we can post that on the website post it on the website and i think kathy when i send that letter i will also put a hyperlink for parents yeah so they could go right to it that's what i was just thinking too i think that would be helpful in addition to just putting it on our website those two things might be helpful okay i think so too i'm just trying to think how else we can do this but i guess that's really the only way yeah okay um i guess i'm just um kathy i just want to make sure i understand here um because i understand you guys are going to have to make those decisions as we go is there i'm trying to imagine a scenario where you're going to have a class where there's a kid who is you know suspected maybe they came in contact with somebody or they're exhibiting symptoms where you wouldn't close not only the entire classroom but potentially the entire school because i'm assuming that some of the kids are going to be riding the bus and if this kid is riding the bus or coming in contact with kids who are riding the bus correct so part of our collaboration with the health department um if there is a positive coveted case then contact tracing is initiated and it's initiated by the health department who will do contact tracing with the positive student and their family and then on our end in this school i would be looking at um the direct contact and the close contact that the child had so close contact is defined as um 15 minutes or more of contact with the person with in less than six feet of distance that's considered close contact so for example if we had an elementary class if there's a cohort and someone was positive for covid um and there was you know a class down the hall that those children never had contact we would not have to close the whole school we would have to just either close that classroom we would also have to look at if the child rode the bus versus if they um were driven to school by a parent so that would all be determined based on our end of the contact tracing whether we had to close a classroom or an entire building just so just go ahead sorry dr sal just one quick follow-up um in terms of that how that process works um do you guys have like a time like a deadline like a um a timeline for like how long you would expect that that contact tracing and that piece of it i mean obviously depends on the circumstance to some degree but if it's a situation of maybe having to make a decision about closing a classroom or closing two classrooms there's some urgency to that we could make that decision that day okay kathy i think what kate was going is where i was just going i thought as our conversation our plan talked about if we have some question about the time our first step could be three to two to three days while we make that determination is that still that's still about that would be that would be if we had a presumptive case so for example um if we get a call that from a parent and my child in this particular grade and classroom tested positive that automatically would initiate um you know a 14-day closure of at least that classroom and then we would have to look at who else the child had contact with if it was a bus but if we have a suspected we could possibly just close for two to five days until we had confirmed testing results so i mean we had those two options yes we had those two options and then the other uh the other thing too is that a child may be sent home and um one of the questions that a parent did raise was you know what if it's allergies or what if it's the stomach bug so if we have a doctor that will provide a note with an alternative diagnosis for example if we send a child home with a fever perhaps it's an ear infection perhaps it's strep so if they can provide that alternate diagnosis from us um that child does not have to stay home and we would not have to quarantine i just have one question um kathy will this addendum be in also in spanish and portuguese on the website um it comes from the state only in english but i i can ask to have that translated yeah it would be valuable to do that yeah it would be it would be valuable we can take care of that sure thank you thank you you mentioned you gave the temperature at what point rich it's hard to hear you sorry i can't hear the question you you mentioned 104 was a cold temperature but at what temperature should a parent uh not send their child home um if when and if taken no our our district six day guidelines say a temperature of a hundred or more is reason for exclusion from school and that's for any illness and that's always been our our practice then the other thing i i agree with kathy molinaro if this information and also with amy is important to parents so i think that's good the other issue is are parents aware of the procedure by which they'll be notified and and we make sure somehow i know we have a lot of work and you've got a lot of work of the contact emergency contact information so that you can make preparations to get in you know get in touch with whomever has to pick up this child [Music] uh so our district's six day guidelines which um will be going out to all of the parents and they are translated into spanish and portuguese as well it informs parents that they need to please keep their contact information up to date and that if they are working that they would need to provide an alternate person who would be able to come and pick up their child within 30 minutes if they were to become ill at school if if that is not possible then we have a place to at least hold the child and keep them safe as well as other people until he's picked up or he's picked up so if a child at school is identified to have coveted symptoms um they're gonna going to be put in an isolation room with adult supervision and that's where they will wait until the parent is um able to come pick them up but we will be emphasizing to parents the importance uh especially during this pandemic of being able to come and pick their child up within 30 minutes thank you thank you very much thank you yeah can i just ask one more quick question i'm sorry to interrupt you again um i know that the the danbury public health um they send like an alert out you know with with like sort of like a a reminder for things that people should do to monitor um and i wonder if we have us if there's any way we have a similar setup that could be used sort of just to prompt parents as a reminder to screen their kids yes i actually will be developing a screening form that will go home to parents um and we will also have that on the website of the things that they should be checking uh for their child every morning before they either put them on the bus or drive them to school okay but uh i guess i'm thinking more is like a daily thing you mean a robocall every i day know if a robocall is the way to go but but you know um a text alert or something i don't know i think what you're referring to is um our we use it for our employee monitoring like a symptom that we do a text message out every day is that what you're referring to yes that we do use that for our city employees i don't know how that would work for an entire school district but um we could look i could look into that with kathy yeah karen and i can discuss that because right now i don't know how that would work um but we could certainly do that we'll talk about that kara thank you all right thanks for considering sure so so let me ask the question that kathy has and carrots i'm glad you're there um should we take this and send it out is are there any organizations like ark or things that that we could send this out to so we could make it kind of ubiquitous as well as we're thinking about this these protocols yeah we could definitely go to mute so let's work together with some organizations we can put this out too um go ahead i don't have any more questions of kathy gladys uh dr sal i just have a question if you want to uh make this available make sure that we don't miss anybody because some someone is going to say i didn't know and i didn't get the information i'm thinking about the contact uh that we did um a community uh contact that uh mr watson did and i can't think of her name i see her face did was uh contacting all the different organizations somehow to get this information to them to get out to get to the people that they come in contact with yeah we could those when they did the presentations we can use those groups yeah that would be a good idea we'll get them out i think the more we get this out the point i think everybody's saying the better it is that they're informed so yeah that's good work on that any more questions of kathy before i ask kara i'm sorry i have one more question um go ahead kathy i know that we talked about there's got to be an adult supervising um any kid who's in the isolation room is there is that a designated person is it going to be the nurse in that building or is it somebody else um it will vary building to building um depending on staffing and the location of the room yeah kathy we missed you didn't hear that depending on staffing and availability um in in the proximity of that room to the principal's office or the nurse's office right so it will vary from building to building kit okay thank you okay any any discussion about kathy about adults in terms of identification things of that nature you want to share in terms of our staff yeah anything there yes so the staff um and part of their return to school training from me will include a checklist of symptoms that they should check for every day and the procedure for notifying their immediate supervisor if they are ill and that they will need to remain at home um and the process in terms of uh testing and how long they have to stay home for is the same uh as for the students on this addendum five okay i think along those lines for everyone so that we're all on the same page you know substitute teachers have always been a challenge to us this is going to be a great challenge to us and we're we're trying to think through how we would do this um we do have our interns that we're hiring as many as we can it may be difficult to recruit subs based on the covic uh we will work on this um you know that was a question of a parent and the class will be covered um and uh you know we have to try to figure it out it'd be nice if we think we're gonna have enough subs but we're trying to plan for well if we don't have a sub what's an alternative that would would be helpful to us so we're working working that out as best we can uh cara i mean it could be more questions of kathy some things you want to bring to the board cara prunty uh the one thing that i just want to point out in this document when we go through the three different situations is um regardless of if a person tests negative if they were in close contact with the person diagnosed with cova-19 there's a required amount of time that they will have to be out so if they are asymptomatic it'll be 14 days if they are symptomatic it'll be 10 days so even if they test negative they're still going to be asked to quarantine for that amount of time kara we got some guidelines on the i called the red light green light stuff can you talk a little bit about that with the board about the community spread sure so there's um there's in addendum 4 there's metrics that they laid out whether it was for a low moderate and high spread community spread there's different metrics that we look at we're looking at on a weekly basis we're getting that information from the state from dph so we're monitoring that very closely every day making sure that the levels are still within the safety zone and we're reviewing that with kathy and dr sal and everyone within the school so that way we can make those decisions safely we're monitoring what's happening on the national level and we're also tracking it here uh within our own community and our surroundings [Music] anything else you want to bring to the board regarding some of the activities um i think kathy did a good job covering it unless anyone has any specific questions does any boy members have any questions you know some of the things i think kara and kathy that i hear even from from from board members and parents is you know um how do you make these decisions and i think you know as as we make it not quickly but we make it with the with the data that we need to make it with and the professionals and then um if there's a question about um you know an incident i think we have been conservative and um try to make it so that our climate is is safe for the kids um but as anything else until you have an event you know when something happens that's that's that's when you start putting these procedures and these procedures can change as kathy just mentioned depending on what you discover um i i started out by saying to this board we're lucky that kara and kathy are so proficient and capable and communicating constantly that um you know they will have the day to help us guide us through these things and i feel my own kids were there that i have a comfort level that what we're doing will keep our kids safe based on their help so um more to come i'm sure but i appreciate all that you guys have been doing thank you thank you and we'll make sure this gets out to uh parents kevin um as i think that suggestion from gladys those groups that we visited uh that you visited i think with morrissey that time or whatever or with ann we should get them out too so we'll get these things out and kathy you'll work on getting these this translated did i hear that okay great great so uh before we if i i know we don't want to spend all the times what happened to what two meetings ago talking when you had questions but i think it might be worthwhile for you to see this presentation that kara has because one of the parents asked what was the results of the survey how many people just learning i just mentioned that first survey was really just give us an idea uh this most recent one is the most valuable one of course there's actual commitment so carawanza can you kind of give the board a little background on what we what where the data that we're looking at sure um good evening everybody uh cara pompano do i have the ability to share my screen now yes yes you should be able to do that okay um it says the host is disabled okay let me try that again hold on please she disabled again it did disable you should be okay um so one of kara is still saying it's popping up oh hold on you should be okay it's still popping up playing host disabled participant screen sharing okay i do have you on um it it it is showing that you should be able to do that you want to try that again kara and if not you'll have to send it to me it's the same one i sent earlier too if you wanna all right let me see if i can pull that up before so one of the things that um we've all been working on in the day department is around the program selection survey that's went out to parents um the deadline was this sunday night at 59 we shortly thereafter started working on um cleaning all the data and the results um we did present to admin counsel um regarding all the results so they could see the breakouts that they're building um and then we're working on follow-up phone calls um it's still saying disabled care if you want to just try to working on it right now pdf version perfect thank you so principals are now aware of how we're breaking up the cohorts as well as what it looks like is overall um breakouts we did look at our demographics and and took that um strongly into consideration um and what it would look like where we cut it off at um the alphabet we're doing an um great so if you can i'm not sure if you can make that a little bit bigger so they can see it kind of like a slide okay yeah that's great and if you just um scroll down to the second slide for cohort breakout okay you're with me one second oh boy that's okay if you just scroll down that should be like press the down button perfect thank you okay all right perfect so cohorts will be determined by um the student's last name alphabetically cohort blue will be last names a through l and cohort orange will be last names m through z originally we started calling them something a and b but unfortunately um the high school uses that for their days so we had to keep it something that was um not going to be confusing to students or parents if you look at the graphic on the right it shows you the total number of students from the district that's elementary right nope this is the overall district so if you look at the total cohort blue yep and so right now we still have quite a few pre-registered students as well as um so not everybody has rolled up into power school these um cohorts were determined based on the overall power school enrollment and verified with pre-registered students so what i did was they took everybody currently enrolled for the 2021 school year then actually added the pre-registered students that i knew were coming but are pending approval for some reason mostly it's around kindergartners or our transfer students that are awaiting a couple documentations particularly because of the closure through the pandemic so um you'll see that our total numbers at the bottom if you were to add them together or a little bit low but that's because we're waiting on those pre-registered students i want to assure you that those pre-registered students have been included in the survey result data they are we are constantly reaching out to them they're receiving everything that our registered students do as well so when we're bringing out the cohorts to blue and orange with with um the breakout alphabetically like that you can see the balance our concern was around what does that look like for students receiving services within our district and it's a it's a fairly it's a it was the best way to balance on one letter so yes we could have gotten more specific in certain places but it was important to us to keep it district-wide and not just have different cutoffs at different schools particularly to avoid confusions within families of what day students were attending um so their cohorts are going to be identified in our student information system so powerschool will be visible to parents and teachers and administrators so that we can easily identify what day students should be expected um so if we move obviously this was presented i believe thank you into um the uh re-entry plan and so the way we called it group a and now that's that's being called group blue and then group b is group orange and so this is what it looks like in the re-entry plan so our our blue group would be attending on monday and tuesday just and then the um orange group would be uh distance learning on those two days everybody's home wednesday and then group orange would be attending live on thursday and friday with blue staying home if you want to go perfect um this is what it looks like with our breakout of the demographics we wanted to ensure that there wasn't a significant change in group a or b now just to to be clear that these numbers um and the percentages are not based on pulling out kids from distance learning as that's still a moving target within the survey results so we we are seeing a change as things come in uh but this is based on we want to always have a space for all children who are enrolled in our public school system that if all students were attending in person this is what the breakout would be so with our english learners our special education you can see the book within one percentage point um the uh the only um discrepancy we kind of see is between the hispanic latino um which we have a six percentage point change as well as our um our white students uh with a five percentage point between the cohorts um if we were to swing those it would it would really change the um amount of students attending by the hundreds um so this was this is just how the breakout looks again this is without distance learning can you go on the next slide thank you so is that our as i said before our results closed on sunday which was 8 9 as of monday morning at 8 8 on 8 10 these results were pulled we had over 9 300 responses um within those responses there were multiple responses for individual students so we had quite a few duplicates some were um changes and some were parents just submitting the same response or um i'm sure to see and make sure that they submitted i want to make sure they have an answer for their kids within the data so we had to clean through those once we once we identified all individual students our end was 8 387 unique students so at that point we started to break out the data um when students recorded multiple when parents recorded multiple responses for students we had said that they could edit their response so we always took the last recorded response from the parent initially if you're looking pre-k through 12 um 69 of those responses so that they would send their students in hybrid 31 overall would airplane art are keeping their students home for distance learning you can go to the next slide these answers some of the questions that were brought about in the um original opening statement um k5 the total responses were three thousand eight hundred and twenty two um thirty two percent um uh select the distance learning option keeping the sixty eight percent hybrid and i would say there were multiple responses um a lot for our um just from a anecdotal note uh multiple responses for a lot of our k5 that were changes with from the parents um grades six through eight we had our total response of 2050 um and 29 plan on distance learning 71 sending their students in the hybrid and then 9 12 31 plan on distance learning with 69 in the hybrid so we're really hovering around that 30 when we were taking numbers initially with the data um we were looking between depending on the breakouts we're looking between 24 and 29 so we've seen a little bit of an uptick with the um parents choosing the distance learning for the people who are choosing later um who are submitting their responses now so as a result of all of these um district and school outreach strategies that are being implemented our uh dr sales continues sending robocalls to families that haven't completed the form gina jasmine has been extremely helpful with identifying the families um that we need to specifically speak a response from also individual phone calls are being made to families by building so principals staff members teachers um we're all reaching out this week to to connect with families and and find out their intentions and to support them and really completing the program selection form since the numbers that we published as of when the survey was closed we are now cleaning 703 additional responses of the 703 uh 246 are planning on distance learning so of those responses 35 um are distance learning so again a lot of the later responses we're seeing are are really around the distance learning piece um and then communication is coming from the superintendent to inform families of the cohort breakout so just giving a generic presentation of like it's going to be a through l and m through z blue and orange and what that looks like as well as any students that um would need to attend school for other purposes including their services and and things like that so um though that will all be forthcoming with a general communication and then next week we will be in uh sending individualized letters to families so that's going to identify each individual student what school they're in what the program selected was and then what cohort they will be in if applicable that way we're pulling directly from our student information system how everybody is registered so that parents are clear on okay this is your student's last name this is the cohort that they will be attending in and then any follow-up that needs to happen from that in addition we'll be identifying that you voluntarily chose distance learning this is what you can expect as far as the communication moving forward so um again we're continuing to um look at the data clean the data um in all of those pieces there was also a question at the beginning that i can answer around um the buffing and the survey results of students that are um planning to attend um in a hybrid um 67 of them plan on using breast transportation from dave ray public schools so it's not that all students are just electing not to use the box that are not within that 67 some of them are already identified as within walking distance to the school so they might be considered um under that or that the parents are electing not to have them use transportation eric can i interfere um um okay i mean the the the the the um the unbelievable work that's going on behind the scenes the parent had asked that question for our special needs has been um a human effort by kelly and her staff so i think kelly would you speak somewhat how you're you're personalizing this and working with uh the kids you're in charge of please sure um thank you dr sal so for the students with special education needs um they will be informed along with the other um district notifications on whether they're in the blue or orange cohort um we do have a group of high needs special education students in which we will be speaking with families and should they wish to send them in for both cohorts my team will be reaching out to them over the next couple of days and into the early part of next week and we will make sure that they are invited to come in on monday tuesday and on thursday friday and again those are for our um students with pretty significant disabilities primarily in our self-contained population so those families we've already reached out to many of them and will continue to do so over the next few days regarding the special education services and accommodations and modifications the state department of ed just released some guidance actually this evening i got it about an hour before this meeting so my team and i are meeting tomorrow morning to work through the details of that um but we will make sure that students receive their services both when they're in their cohort model um as well as through the distance learning so regardless of what model students are selecting um they will receive their direct services as well as their accommodations and modifications and the accommodations and modifications also apply to the 504 students i know that was a question that was posed so it will look a little bit different than it has in previous years but certainly our priority is to make sure that all the needs are met and students continue to make progress on their individual programs dr cell did you have any other specific questions well i think that's i think that's did you um i think it's good for parents to know that those youngsters will be coming on a different schedule it's good for them to know that the personal outreach from you and from your staff so that we're taking care of that i think that's very important cara anything else for the board before they ask questions i don't think so i i think that was the majority of it but i'm happy to answer anything okay yes rachel no it's quicker i'll go after you okay okay i can't hear rich at all overall it looks like out of a total school population we've got about 82 responses uh roughly speaking overall when you can you go back to the statistics on a high school it seems like that in terms of the actual responses of about 3500 children um oh i'm sorry so you got 2 400 out of the 35.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
can we have a second a second all in favor aye corey burgess randy i some notes item 2.2 regulation gbg car personal security and safety dr stewart thank you mr president and board members these three regulations uh came also from the not from the trust but from asda and we're advised that we make these changes um this is a change for this policy for the next two is their new policies to correspond with executive order 2020-51 so that the changes that we're making is the addition of the clock based coverage exactly and under the executive order schools are required to have face coverage yes and for public just for your information children under the age of two uh those should not be worn by children under the age of two and you want to just have a chartered breathing or anyone who's unconscious and incapacitated or otherwise without assistance so if you're over the age or two it does say that but it also in the other description says that there are some other exceptions and we have made accommodation for those in our district when we have employees who have health conditions existing health conditions that make wearing a mask not safe or inappropriate we are making accommodation with shields for them and so every case then is considered by human resources department and the reason we do that is because we are truly trying to respect people's privacy and um particularly for any medical conditions but we are making those accommodations and those are on our case-by-case he said case-by-case situations any questions yes is there a time limit as to how long that this will be in effect there doesn't seem to be and as i was reviewing those this morning again because i've read them several times but the same thing thought i heard the same thought friendly about a timeline on these um and i don't these are regulations so you all can make some changes to these as we go if you want um it struck me that it might be appropriate to have a statement saying that this section would be in effect only as long as is required by health and safety conditions otherwise it would be a permanent thing and i'm not sure that that's advisable right in our original plan that you all approved in june at the time just for employees but now it would affect others as well but we had that wearing a mask would extend for four weeks following the first day that we opened in person school that was not particularly arbitrary the leadership team spent some time talking about that and talking about the 14-day lag time from the time might be exposed to the time that you know that there would be symptoms so at whatever point and of course in june we had no idea about other benchmarks than the ones we were working with from the cbc but we had also said in there unless there were other circumstances that would change it but i think you would be safe if you wanted to add a clause or add a sentence to this that said um and i think it would be appropriate to add a sentence that says this section would only be in effect until health and safety conditions allowed it to change and that that doesn't set a date it doesn't have a deadline but you can you know you could put some uh you could use a benchmark as a point where you would make that no longer or it could be possible we could set it for this calendar year um and if we see a time before that we can this is all front of mind awareness we can add it to an agenda later to have it removed exactly i think that'd be easiest just make it and that's my recommendation just make it for the calendar year the school year my county here sorry the school year uh 2020 2021 school year um and we can remove it anytime this is our policy and it's a regulation so it only takes one reading it's not like you have to read it at two different wardens so if circumstances change you know when you have a board meeting fairly quickly or fairly soon after that or you have a special meeting you can then change it thoughts ideas i i would like to see the sentence added in there just so they know this isn't permanent you guys okay with the school year 2020 2021 and then of course if we see in a month two months three months whatever that may be we can always revisit that and remove it or do you want it health and guidelines i'm just trying to make it as simple as possible because it's ultimately our decisions you could make it for the semester too and that would be the calendar year and you know i think we all would be hopeful that we would have some other things to consider by december 31st i would be happy with calendar year while following with the cdc guidelines in there okay yeah so is that calendar year semester all right so we need a motion i will move that we approve regulation gbgr personal security and safety with the addition of the calendar year comment added for the space mask following cdc guidelines ten seconds all in favor aye corey burgess brandywine [Music] all right item 2.3 regulation j i c r d student dress clock face coverage dr stewart uh mr president this reads virtually the same as the other it's just that it's a new regulation and you could add the same sentence to the end of that if you want i'm fine with the audition on that yes dave and i will move to the approved regulation jica rb student dress code cloth page please covering with the addition of a similar edition as we had in the gbgbr regulation you have a second second all in favor aye corey burgess brandon i jamie borland i item 2.4 regulation k-i-r-d visitors to school clock takes parents and once again i think we're in the same position adding the same so i would like to uh make a motion that we approve regulation kirby visitor to school with the similar edition as the previous regulations the mou boys and girls club dr short mr president and board members uh one of the stipulations in i'm sorry right now i don't remember exactly which one these are 44 or 51 of the executive orders indicated that schools should provide a free safe space for students if we're in virtual school for students whose parents are working or who otherwise have an unsafe situation prior to that executive order we were also already aware that we have employees who have children in our schools and we knew that it would be a good idea for us to find a safe space for those kids before we made that term a safe space for those students to attend school so their parents could continue to teach and do what we needed done so i've already started a conversation with boys and girls club with autumn uh well uh richardson and um yeah and um so we had started talking about that for employees and then the executive order came out the good news about this situation is that we can recoup the funding for paying for the free for kids service through either the stabilization enrollment stabilization act and there is now another grant that is intended specifically for this and arizona boys and girls club is one of the recognized organizations for which that applies to make it formal we set up this memorandum of understanding of what each side was going to do and how we were going to operate to their credit boys and girls club got right on it i've been over to watch what's going on they've done a nice job with social distancing students training their people where people are not supposed to be teaching they're just making sure their kids are doing what they're supposed to be doing we have the meals and we do all of those things so this is just the formal document of agreement between baltimore city elementary school district and boys and girls club of the colorado river to continue to provide a safe space for our students questions well i don't disagree with the agreement for the boys and girls club but what happens when you have more than 100 students that need this we have um i'm kim was reaching out to the local daycares when we were back at that point where we were just trying to find safe spaces for our employees to learn and scooters has a similar program that um that we can that we use and we have some students there um it's set up a little differently so we haven't established an mmu with them but we have the same kind of agreement in terms of paying for the students to be there to be safe if it becomes more than 100 students at the meeting center or the 20 at the teen center then obviously we would be looking for some other arrangement we can do this with outside agencies during the closure up through tomorrow um because they don't have the same restrictions although we imposed our restrictions on them for social distancing and masking and those things that schools do but starting on monday if we need additional safe space then we might then we would provide it at our sites and you know there have there have to be it can't just be the things that came uh you know the governor does his executive orders and he works with the ide and then they lay out all the okay here's how you do this he says you're going to do it and he says this is how you do it and so there's some some restrictions on that and whatever but we're also starting on monday if we do not if we continue virtual schools starting on monday we will have also services targeted services for special ed students el students and we also need to make sure that we are addressing the needs of our homeless kids so we've addressed all of those concerns and those issues that are required and those will those students will be coming to our campuses in very small groups for very limited time if we need the safe space we will find a space we will make sure we have social distancing and we will take care of that once again it would not be direct instruction it would be folks supervising the kids being doing what they're supposed to do with those is the funds from those grants able to pay salaries for those individuals what we're doing is emailing our site we're not paying your salary directly we're bringing the kids here oh if we have to play well because the people that we would have supervising that would be some of our current employees so for instance that might be something that some bus drivers are doing to help supervise since they're not instructing they all have to pass fingerprints they all have to have the same kind of clearance as our aides do a classroom age and we could be in that kind of a situation is it ideal no but at least it provides safe spaces for our kids we use them to be with them too so that they know what to do yeah i mean this kind of random bottom of the first page it says the boys could be responsible for chromebooks checkout are we providing those chromebooks are they theirs no we have um our students who are there many of them most of them already have the chromebooks and actually we have provided a few extras for if students happen to forget theirs or their other issues so we have some extras over there that boys and girls club use to check out where and it's not in you this recall if it's in the agreement or not but i will tell you that one of the things we are doing we did assign them initially three of our hot spots when they finally arrived and uh that and they're having really spotty issues with their internet service which should probably not be a surprise to you if you're using internet at home so we they now have six however we are awarded the equipment to set up a direct link to our website to our network and that's supposed to be installed if the equipment comes tomorrow that will be installed on friday and that way the student our students and in fact any students who are at the boys and girls club as well as the employees of boys and girls club will have the same kind of access to our network as our teachers and students do safely our restrictions are safeguards and our filters but it should give them excellent service and then we would have those six hot spots to deploy to other families this is very minimal cost and a very big benefit in fact james and i were talking about it today we were both going window and we think of this before because this is the only room for our students even if we return to school this is a win-win for our kids when they go there after school or anytime for that matter so you know kind of falls into one of those community service things or a partnership that benefits everybody if you have any other questions all right i'd like to allude that we approve item 2.5 the mou with the boys and girls club all in favor aye corey burgess item 2.6 pull it to the covered endorsement this one this is going to take a little uh explaining partly for the audience but also perhaps to help you all understand as i mentioned earlier the trust the arizona school risk retention trust is the co-op to which we belong that essentially makes sure that we are covered for liability property insurance and the alliance which is their other way for in the spring um so it is our co-op and so for them to cover us with insurance they have to work with reinsurance reinsurers in the spring they were notified that the reinsurers were not going to cover any uh any incidents related to code 19.
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i i don't disagree with that um and i've seen three-year-olds and we have since the town of gilbert they put theirs in and theirs was five that they recommended five and over um for us our requirement requirement is five and over we give the option of three to five but with that option is that if they're going to wear it they need to wear it because the more they put it on and take it off the higher risk of spreading it to other people and things like that and then seeing my staff having to you know no no i want to wear my mask well then they're they're in close proximity of that child somewhat face to face and they're they're putting them on so i'm okay with it being policy i wanted to state it's i'm concerned with it being policy i don't have a problem with it being greatly requested and that we try and do it i also worry about our teachers being so focused on individuals and again it depends on the teachers comfortability but if they're so focused on consistently having to put masks on because this is what we have to do then they could spend a better part of their day for several weeks helping three-year-olds put their mask on correctly keep their mask on not saying it can't be done i agree just like washing their hands i mean we have one-year-olds who wash their hands the proper way but that doesn't happen overnight it takes a lot of time and repetition and i again if it's if that's what the teachers are very insistent and and want i can support that i just worry about them having to be consistently in close proximity almost face to face three-year-olds may not they may drool a little bit more or you know things like that and i know our teachers can wear gloves and they can wash their hair i get they can take all those precautions it just does it's just one more thing though that does put them a little closer in proximity of kids than then we would need to worry about but if you're you're comfortable with with that and that's the the recommendation that they they really want to go with in in preschool i can support that i just don't want the teachers to be like my whole some of these kids we only have in our care for four hours and if we're constantly putting masks on then that's that can be challenging so vice president reece i think either way we go with it i know patty gleason and stacey utley will be kind and loving and thoughtful and it's not a discipline issue my goodness when i can't keep my mask on so either way we go with it there's not there's not a perfect answer here and i respect it and i know all about snotty noses and drool and just wiggle so either way we go i know they'll work hard to keep our kids safe and by any means am i saying that even if it's not in policy that we should not be doing it it doesn't give the green light of well it's not in policy so we don't need to that from a preschool standpoint they can say this is what we're going to do we just know it's going to take us the time to to get through it and if a teacher feels like i can't not today then i want to give them that that ability to do that instead of perhaps another parent coming in and saying well that's the higley policy and they're not following it that's my like i said by no means am i saying if this is not in our policy that we should not really encourage it it's not means that we shouldn't even say that they're you know highly requested or even required within it but that was just my only concern there so thank you mrs reece i think we're just going to go on this go ahead and vote tonight on this mask policy based covering policy and i do agree with you mrs richards that mrs gleason will be very kind in this area and the teachers as well and we know like you said the beginning of preschool and maybe this is a chance too that we can talk for just a second that if we are thinking about coming to our preschools when they do open that practicing mask wearing on your little three and four-year-old here and there would never be a bad idea and i know i've seen you know the kiddos out in target with mom and practicing so um you know that can be something that we can kind of just talk about and practicing with all of our kiddos the five-year-olds are going to be going 16 year olds and i feel like they maybe need a reminder like if you're watching this hey it might be a good time to start practicing that mask with your five-year-old because i have thought long and hard about this mass policy and what that means for our kindred friends and all those teachers all the way up um so it might be a good time to start thinking about that even with your 16 year old mrs kaler it's one thing to go into a store for a minute with a mask on it's another thing to sit and do school for a few hours with the mask on so um just i think everybody's gonna have to when schools do reopen that we're all gonna have to kind of go through that process of adjusting okay so all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero okay now it's 27.3 and let me okay let me get there this is the floors dr fowler so i move that the governing of governing board approves the price increase of forty one thousand three hundred and seventy six dollars to upgrade the flooring for the high school meet higley high school and williamsfield high school media centers second thank you [Laughter] dr fowler can you please give us an update on this thank you president kaler members of the board dr thomason and members of cabinet i was going to start earlier but no the the the item that you have before tonight this action item related to the floors let this be evidence of our continued efforts to always be as frugal with our funds as possible when we selected the floor for both the media centers we were looking at an alternative that was the least expensive um the challenge though that we had was once we looked at a mock-up of that flooring uh with getting input from from ben um with extensive experience in the field and then the principles we realized that although it was a less expensive option it wasn't going to be sufficient to to to meet the needs in that larger space so we had to look at an alternative and that alternative included instead of just having the epoxy um to adding a color chip as they call it to the floor to uh to make it um not not slick and also add to the just the feel and especially in that larger those larger spaces in the media center so the the price that you saw the original price that was already built into the cost and so it's only the additional piece that we're paying and that's the cost of of adding making those chips and mixing that into the and adding it to the epoxy flooring and really this is a safety issue because without those chips it's very slick that is correct yes okay go ahead mrs wilson what's the durability like on this floor sorry to put you on the spot i mean it's i mean it's a quality epoxy with those chips and so it i mean we're feeling that it'll it'll you know stand the test of time yeah i just have a little concern um being that it is at our high school i'm just thinking about it now like those kids kind of can be rough sometimes so just a thought on the durability of it and making sure that it's a good durability to make sure that you know they're not going to chip it away or do something like that does that well we have a we are using wholesale floors which is a vendor that has done a lot of our floor installs and and one of the benefits of working with a partner like wholesale floors is they stand behind their product and so i'm confident if there's any issues that that may arise with that they'll stand behind their product thank you that was kind of my question too was um what is the warranty how long do they give us on a warranty you know what i'm not sure on that answer president kaler but i do know and board member wilson that as i've said in the past they they stand by they stand behind their product and so i'm confident that if we have any issues with wholesale i'll confirm the warranty but this company has been with us for many many years and i'm confident that they'll stand behind this product for us okay any other comments questions all those in favor aye aye those opposed nay motion carries 4-1 onto buses i move that the governing board approves the purchase of six buses from canyon state bus sales for the tune of and forty two thousand three hundred dollars and forty cents questions or comments for i know even mr crosby is here tonight is that correct yes i did ask a question beforehand i want the community to know that what my question was um it was about air conditioning to make sure all of our buses were up to snuff on air conditioning so mr crosby's here if he wants to come in and maybe just answer that these will put all of our buses at having air conditioning which i was excited about because i knew there was one or two out there that may have we may have loaned to charter schools at time to time that did not have air conditioning so this puts us right on par to have all of our buses air conditioned right mr crosby correct yes our lead is 100 air-conditioned and we're not retiring any buses at this time correct my recommendation would be to hold on to all the vehicles we have because we're unsure of future growth and future bond money so at this point i would recommend we hold on to all of our buses and uh just again a thank you to our community so that this is bond money that is being used for the purchase of these buses so i appreciate that mrs reese president kaler um i was just gonna state that this has been in the works for some time you just don't order buses overnight so um i get the timing seems strange at the moment especially um that we're physically not in school but this has been some time you've done a lot of research to make sure we're getting what we need for our district and our community so um thank you i appreciate that and i also appreciate your forethought on let's not retire anything yet and see where we are and what we need to do and how we grow and then we'll have availability there before we let anything go so thank you for that thought mr crosby one one more thing how many buses do we have i have no idea i think it might have been in here at one point it is okay um so we have 78 buses um it does say 77 on the paperwork but there is one white special needs bus that didn't get included in the yellow bus count so 34 of them are special needs and the remaining 44 are full size thank you uh yes again and i'm not trying to be negative nelly but um these buses um is coming to us again a little bit later than i would have preferred i would have preferred to get this on the front end and not the back end this dollar mount i know the buses are already ready to go have our name on them so and again i know it's been in the works and in the talk just coming to us maybe not first and foremost but with that said any other questions all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries five zero thank you mr crosby for coming tonight okay we're going to move on to 7.5 i move that the governing board approves the purchase of laptops for students participating in graphic information technology programs second and i believe this is we are using cte funds to purchase these specific computers for the students if i am not mistaken any questions comments all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero and now we are going to have an update on reopening of our schools i think president kaler members of the board tonight we have some updates for you on a few timely topics that we wanted to share with you the first thing we're going to talk about tonight in our agenda is we're going to talk about what is scheduled and what will be happening starting august 17th for the required on-site support services that are required per executive order 20 2051 and we will share with you some updates about that so that we can clarify um for our community that information as well as provide additional updates we also have information tonight for athletics that is also continuing to evolve so we have an update and then conversation about more updates that will be forthcoming we have a human resources update and then we'll do a metrics benchmark update as well so we're going to start by talking about tonight those targeted support services president kaler members of the board dr thomas and members of cabinet so beginning on august 17 2020 the school districts must provide free on-site support services for students who need a place to go during any time of distance learning that's the first start of a quote from denise lobritt talking about what our executive order 2020-51 meant for the arizona school districts and so while it required us to ask us to look at metrics it also said on the 17th we need a place to go so we've been working on this plan very very diligently throughout the last week and i need to give a lot of credit to um as we go through this plan to miss richards as she's been helping spearhead this especially at the elementary level and our site principals our academic coaches and the rest of the district we're kind of taking this as an all hands on deck approach to supporting our kids when they're coming on our campuses and so what this is asking us to do is that to make sure that we had our mitigation plan social distancing and have a service available for those kids who need and so tonight what we're going to try to do is explain to you what our plan is going forth on the 17th more specific language came out that said free on-site learning and support services include but are not limited to student supervision nutrition health services strategic support or teacher-led paraprofessional support for students participating in distance learning on-site support services will be available to a limited number of students with specific needs and does not require traditional teacher-led in-person classroom instruction these services allow students who need a safe place to engage in distance learning away from home schools may develop procedures to meet recommendations for physical distancing and other mitigation strategies outlined by the center for disease control and prevention and so i think a lot of times when people hear this idea of the free on-site support services really there was more specific instruction given to us about who and tried to clarify who it was for and then what we're going to do for them president taylor members of the board dr thomason and cabinet we've tried to outline our plans specifically so that families know what they're signing up for if they do sign up or register to attend so these are free opportunities however it's not teacher-led instruction because our teachers are currently teaching and they're very involved in that all day so principals have been calling families to clarify what this means because we don't want kids showing up and saying where's my teacher what is this where are my specials my electives because that's not what's happening here so this is somewhat repetitive of what um mr lotzenhower has or just uh shared with you so we're gonna provide student supervision and strategic support for kids that are on their canvas learning platform engaged in remote learning so if they have questions accessing content questions about assignments and believe it or not this next week we start dibbles or acadiance testing and we have our seabest testing so kids may have questions and they will need support also we have an amazing team of people here is our classified paraprofessionals we even have bus drivers signed up to help directors assistant directors from the district instructional coaches and of course every time i talk to you i highlight our lovely preschool teachers and everybody's working together we have them tentatively assigned to sites at this point and we'll double check registration for numbers maintenance and cleaning is a very very important part of this whole process boxes the boxes you saw on saturday are ready to go they're getting sent to the sites and training's going to happen with individuals that will be in these locations for kids so we're looking forward to being very organized because this is a different model than anything we've ever done before oh next slide yeah so this outlines some of the kids that will benefit potentially from this opportunity it includes our special education students our students that are learning english at risk students homeless students or we refer to mckinney vento students of course our employees kids if they need this and children of essential workers so everything's been strategically lined out transportation is available for our self-contained sped students which we call level c and d a lot of those teachers have volunteered to come in and support those kids because march was a long time ago and we're excited that maybe we can provide that individualized support in a very careful thoughtful manner with keeping those medication strategies in place our el students and our title students will also have specific support i'm sorry miss richards you said you you said that um we've already been in touch with the families yes okay i'm sorry if you said that i'm sure you did well initially we sent out the survey where they said do you want online do you want in person and then we described this so they replied but i'm sorry yeah i i think i started i was talking about the uh the special ed specific ones the level c and d okay miss miller has personally called every family and i don't want to add up the hours but that personal touch and her ability to work closely with our staff and ensure that we're safe when we do this she's been outstanding okay next slide when we talk about hours of support really the the goal originally was to model the exact hours from the previous school year i know we've all read those executive orders that said hey you have to give it for the same amount of time as the previous school year and so you'll look at the elementary and that completely mirrors what they did last year and so those are the hours of support you will notice originally with our middle schools we were doing nine to four we were doing 94 because that's what we used to do however we know that instruction starts at eight and not nine and so therefore we have adjusted that and our principles and the sites have reached out to people's requesting it that we're moving it to mirror that so that we can help support them when classes start at eight in the morning and so instead of going from nine to four it's now going to go from eight to three and then our high school is consistent once again with the high school schedule of 7 25 to 2 15.
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all right i i didn't recall getting those figures so that's okay all right thank you yeah but i think overall the representation you know statistically of the responses is pretty good i think so too just for the board certification it seems that the districts around us what i've been seeing they're running about 19 20 on dl people are going back and forth but that we're about 10 percent more um than our surrounding district which will impact um for the board certification uh staffing that and um and putting this together at staffing is is incredible so that's why we need to get to a bottom line so that we can start the assignments the secondary is particularly challenging because it's by certification the elementary the certificate is much more general so there are a lot of things going on with that but with 31 30 percent of our our our kids families asking for dl will reduce the numbers and spacing in the schools that will happen you will have more spaces on the buses um and then we'll be providing this you know um and i could have if you would like cara speak to how that will be organized somewhat in terms of the dl if you would like to do it after this questions this evening so i just want to put that out there follow-up question also on dr sally this is to your hypothetical question currently with all of the media publicity relative to the opening of schools and the statistics on children having the viruses and the pros and cons etc etc you anticipate changes from your surveys to people that were hybrid now changing their mind to uh district learning i mean we've seen them i think that it's a it's a challenging time for parents to to discern information coming from the media from the you know all the different sources their their pediatricians um i think everybody's trying to make the best and most informed decision for their families and we've seen the changes both ways i mean the later survey results tend to be more the distance learning but in general we've seen people switch to hybrid as well so you know i think it's really unique to family circumstance and and their perspective around kind of the data they're seeing in the public yeah but but for the most part it was as we got later the distance learning choice thank you very much i think there's some other questions gladys yes raise your hand up thank you um originally when we were talking about um the cohorts and how we were they were going to be divided um there was so going to be um some research into um neighborhoods possibly and um i know that there are some families with um different names so siblings have different last names so will that be a consideration yeah so dr sal is going to send some information with the with the parent um communication uh or letter that goes out individualized when when their cohort is um determined and sent to the families we've already informed principles of the procedure around that to be prepared um also uh kelly churches and um our ell program director will be involved in analyzing the the services that need to be delivered for that student as well so um there that's already been discussed and shared with the principals there will be an opportunity for for family circumstances to be addressed and and we'll do that at the building level because they tend to know more specifically and uniquely have a relationship with the family and the number of kids in the school and the number of kids in the school sure and look what the classroom sizes look like thank you are there any other questions from board members that you i don't know i i have a question teaching for the teachers are they expected to teach in class and then they're expected to teach distance learning at the same time i i couldn't yeah that was part of it that was part of the time but cara can you talk about our about our uh strategy and and how are we preparing the teachers to be able go ahead kazzy to teach many of them many of them have not ever taught that way and i find it impossible but anyway go ahead kara sure thank you dr sal um certainly challenging uh there's no no secret about that this is this is challenging for everyone uh not just the teachers those but those uh folks who are also supporting teachers as well this is new so um in terms of i'll explain a little bit about the structure and the the differences between k5 and 612.
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