Reader

and guys we are live yes thank and you recording it also just in case hi lucas can you hear us all right got monique on the phone and then james and stacey are here in person as well so we've got four for sure thank you for coming in [Music] we're live yes and lucas and monique we are live just so you know okay you've already got three viewers online watching you guys have become so popular we're gonna start a new series the real real important members of like real housewives follow you around you can close the door if you want i'll be fine it's not that you're trapped hi dr thorpe we're all right and you good we've got monique and lucas on the phone thanks for coming it's a jerk sure so good morning everyone welcome to the special meeting of september 3rd it's now 11 30 and calls me new york the median days about ratification of the negotiating agreement is there any questions from uh by the way we have three board members president with mike thorpe myself james higgins and stacy augustine and two on the phone i believe is monique hart and lucas allen is there any others out there okay so uh again is there any questions from any of the board members concerning the ratification with no questions asked i'll 2021 negotiating agreement with the burlington unified teacher's assistant [Music] all those in favor uh will have to vote by i on the phone and state your name or let me know this will be lucas all right [Music] i want to real quick uh just thank uh the buda group as well as our board negotiations group for their time energy and effort spent on negotiations i also want to say with the special meeting us doing the special meeting it's going to help us get our certified staff paid without having back pay so they will be able to get paid with their adjustments it'll also help our central office staff the adjustments will not occur for classified staff on their contract there will be back paid for them next month because they will be paid actually on friday so the timing wasn't going to work to get them taken care of so that was one of the reasons one of the big reasons that we were doing this meeting you know today at 11 30 so we can get payroll rolling for our certified staff members with a friday coming up and as well as a labor day monday coming up we felt like we wanted to get this meeting done as quick as possible so we can get moving forward with contracts so again i want to thank everybody for short notice and also again thank you to our negotiations team for their energy and time spent on negotiations thank you any other comments with no further actions on the board uh this meeting is a journey no wait a minute do you have all kinds of uh next item actually classified staff pay increase oh well i make sure you don't get it so annual wage uh salary review schedule is before you all for any questions about that no questions i'll accept the motion i'll make the motion to improve the annual weight salary review schedule adjustments for should it be 2020 2021 no it's actually yeah it's actually 1920 because they were 20.

so do so do i'd like to call this meeting of the ysham township board of education to order pursuant to the open public meetings act adequate public notice has been given by the secretary of the eastern township board of education in the following manner posted written notice on the official bulletin board at the board of education office emailing written notice to the burlington county times in the courier post and filing written notice with the municipal clerk of yvesham township you may have a roll call please here thank you now i'll need a motion to go into executive session whereas an njsa 104-12 allows for a public body to go into closed session during a public meeting and whereas the board of education of eastern township has deemed it necessary to go into closed session to discuss certain matters which are exempted from the public and whereas the special meeting of the board of education will reconvene following the end of the closed session at approximately 7 pm now therefore be it resolved that the board of education will go into closed session for the following reasons as outlined in njsa 104-12 matters arising under attorney clive and privilege lease purchase financing do i have a motion motion by miss barbara giovanni do i have a second second by miss fleming uh rule call any questions or comments regarding executive session go to roll call please yes mr all right we will see the public at 7pm approximately so do so do you so mmm we are resuming this meeting of the yesham township board of education can we all please rise for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all right good evening everyone um in our third meeting in a calendar month i welcome everybody back over uh over the uh the live stream uh today we have just a couple small items to go through uh but before we do that of course we are going to be going into public comment um in this public comment this is for agenda items only a couple things real quick just to remind you when you call in when you call in for uh to to state your your purpose or ask a question please be cognizant of the idea to lower and mute your live stream as if you are talking on the phone ask all your questions and we will we will answer them to the best of our abilities once you hang up uh hang up the phone as soon as you hang up please raise raise the volume also very importantly if you can clearly and and articulate uh your name and address that would be great for us too uh we are hoping uh in our new venue uh and and with better closed captioning uh that you will understand us uh we are in in no way shape or form trying to mess around uh nor are we trying to speak in any type of code uh we want you this is these meetings are to be valuable for its information and we want you to know as much as we can as we can give you so this meeting will now be open to the public referencing agenda items only however your questions or comments pertain to litigation student or personnel items or negotiations we'd ask that you discuss that with the superintendent after the meeting since we do not discuss these matters in public please limit your comments to three minutes per person and again it's crucial three minutes per person okay one more minute go ahead call you're all with the board hi my name is uh kevin thielmann at 14 lakeside drive good yeah um i just had a question about the ionizers and it was if i i understand that there's um multiple priorities with them on the one hand uh the the vote to approve the purchase of them um to keep the staff and students safe um for all the things that the ionizers supposed to do to help with the air um but and that we need to do that tonight we need to get them ordered we do those things but on the other side there's an eight to ten week lead time on getting them and getting them installed so i guess my question is how do those two priorities line up if if we need to vote on them and spend the money to get the ionizers but it's going to take 10 weeks to get them in how do the priorities match uh thank you mr pielman i'm gonna repeat your question just so um anybody listening at home who didn't hear it understands um you were asking essentially um if i heard correctly the um you know we're recommending the purchase of the ionizers but it's going to take uh 10 weeks to get them and um you know how does that fit in with our overall plan um i i would say um first to uh thank you for your question um certainly uh every factor of a decision we try to fare it out and take into account put it on the scale that the multi-armed scale that we're always trying to balance pros and cons um so the first thing about the ionizers is um this is um you know our so our plan our road back plan we have um full approval from the county to open in person on tuesday september 8th this is really about making safe schools safer about adding an extra layer of protection above and beyond what we already have the many other steps that we're already taking it's a conversation in that sense about eve sham we leave sham and you know how we feel about what we do and always trying to enhance and improve um you know anything we do especially something for that would improve health and safety the the time frame so there's high demand and ever increasing demand for the ionizers the delivery date is variable so you know there are two devices that we are uh looking at tonight for approval one is a rooftop unit which would serve our large spaces like cafeterias and gyms the arrival time for that could be as short as three to four weeks the portable classroom units uh could take long would take longer and uh when i say uh eight to ten weeks that um i have to put the asterisk of uh tentative because um you know it it's like everything in this pandemic it's um ever changing there are some districts uh that have ordered it and it didn't it's not arriving in the timeline that they envisioned and to think that you know as we think about the value of you know the safety features we already have putting down on the scale along with the value of and our commitment to in-person instruction on september 8th against the the the long delay if we were to wait until the ionizers got here especially considering that they're an extra layer on top also within the context of of where eve sham is at right now so over the last six days we have had we have averaged less than one uh new case of coronavirus in eve jam and that is a wonderful facet of where we're at right now what you know what our measures have done for us um and we don't know what the what the numbers are going to be like in november will we be able to reopen in november right now we are and so on the scale on that balance that multi-armed uh scale you know we are able to add this extra layer at the same time that we are um sustaining our commitment that we've made to so many families and the health of our children the social emotional academic and and even physical in the sense of um you know that a whole of the wholeness of a child the social emotional wholeness of a child certainly affects their physical health as well so to be able to balance and meet all those commitments is is why we're recommending the purchase of the ionizers and continuing with our plan to reopen on september 8th and thank you thank you again for your question all right we are going to close uh this public comment on agenda items only uh and we're gonna move to we're gonna move to uh number five superintendents discussion items which i'm now about to hand the microphone right back to mr smith uh to discuss uh here's some information he wants to go through you got it you're okay yeah yeah oh yeah thank you mr fizzicaro uh so i'm glad for the chance to provide a few superintendents comments first as we are bound to do each summer i just want to report on our student safety data system stats from the past half year so that would be the january to june 2020 time frame we had seven confirmed incidents of harassment intimidation and bullying which was down by uh 75 actually from that same period the year before we had six incidents of violence one incident of vandalism one incident of substance abuse and zero incidence of possession of a weapon over that time frame we also provided 36 trainings and 35 programs to address student behavior and just an opportunity to remind that the board of education prohibits acts of harassment intimidation or bullying of a student in accordance with our district policy 5512.

hi wildcats my name is ms sullivan some of you guys might recognize me from our transition program here one of the things that we prioritize in our transition program is how to make friends and how to be friends being a friend is a job that every single person in our community is qualified to do obviously remote learning is weird and it's different so now more than ever it's extra important that we are reaching out and getting creative with how we can support one another pay attention on your google meets classrooms and all your video chats see if there's anyone in your class who's not connecting or you think might be having a hard time and be that person to reach out to them and then if someone reaches out to you too take it as an opportunity to show support to someone who might need it we will definitely come out of this stronger than ever it's not a normal year but we can make it normal by still having our friends and our friendships to rely on

thank you okay my clock shows five o'clock so i'm going to call to order this special meeting of the chico unified school district board of trustees if you would please rise and join me in the flag salute i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation one nation indivisible with liberty and justice okay thank you for joining us this afternoon before we begin our items on the agenda i wanted to explain a few things about how the meeting will be run all of the agenda items under the discussion calendar are information only this means that the board will not be taking any action on these items this evening i'd like to quickly review our public participation procedure for tonight's meeting per the governor's executive order our meetings are being conducted virtually to help reduce and minimize the risk of infection from covid i do not have my mask up because it fogs my glasses and i cannot read but rest assured we are at least 10 feet apart thank you since this is a special board of education workshop public input must be regarding an item that is currently on the posted agenda members of the public who wish to bring forward an item that is not on the posted agenda must do so at a regular meeting of the board full participation information can be found on the meeting agenda we we continue to encourage members of the public to participate during tonight's meeting comments on an agenda item will be taken when the agenda item is being discussed by the board there is an item on our agenda which requires a public hearing and so that the comments regarding that item will be taken when the public hearing has been opened up speaker priority will be given to those who have submitted a speaker's card and it appears to me right now that there are two that have done so if there is still time remaining within the designated 10-minute time allotment then the board will provide an opportunity for members attending the zoom meeting to raise their hand and speak and each speaker will be allowed to speak for three minutes speaker priority will be given to speakers who have not yet addressed the board and only a repetition of speakers will occur if time allows we also caution you that if there is redundancy and the same comment being made over and over and over again we will maybe ask to hear from other viewpoints if time remains we may ask that the time be extended for the public comment to continue speakers are asked to attend the board meeting virtually through the zoom invitation link at the top of the agenda when it is time for speakers to address the board their name will be called and the microphone on their zoom account will be activated speakers should rename their zoom profile names to match the name on their speakers card to expedite this process after the comment has been given the microphone for the speaker's zoom profile will be muted the board is unable to read written materials presented during the meeting members of the public may submit an email that will be sent to each board member by using the email address and public comments that are come via email will be attached to the meeting record okay i hope that is clear enough and if so we are going to continue with the first item on our agenda which is our consent calendar so are there any board members who wish to pull an item from the consent calendar yes dr kaiser i wish to pull the contract for comcast and that's under 1.1 correct okay any others uh linda any from your side no okay all righty so may i have a motion for the remaining items i'll second that okay we have a motion by dr kaiser a second by tom lando uh we will take a roll call vote for all those in favor of this remaining portion of the consent calendar linda how do you vote harvey i lando i griffin i robinson i okay that passes unanimously kathy what uh what about the comcast contract so i wanted to pull the comcast uh contract to give a shout out to comcast and to john vincent who arranged this contract this gives two months of free internet service to qualifying families an additional four months of free internet service that we at chico unified will pay for so with all the duress that many families are facing i thought this was a tremendous cooperation between comcast and chico unified and i just wanted to salute them so with that i moved the comcast communications contract i'll second that motion okay motion by dr kaiser second by eileen robinson any further discussion regarding this item all those in favor please say aye hi okay that passes unanimously i also understand that this period of time after that six months elapses that we will be renewing for those uh families that are not able to afford the comcast is that accurate mr baltimore that is accurate okay oh i'm sorry who was that really supposed to be to you missed okay i wasn't sure who was the one who was uh up to to speed on that okay john vincent blushing oh oh you're over there okay didn't see you over at that end you would for sure know okay so that takes care of our business services consent calendar uh we will move now to our discussion portion and this has to do with educational services the information about learning continuity and attendance plan and tina keane is going to start off with that thank you tina thank you very much tonight i'm coming to talk to you about the components of the learning continuity and attendance plan typically every year we come to the board and our community with our lcap which we do not have in place right now due to covid so john vincent if you can oh actually i have it i'm sorry right here we're going to start in with a little bit of the background of what this plan is senate bill 98 which was adopted in june i believe added a number of provisions to the education code regarding instruction during the 2021 school year one of these provisions is edcode43509 which among other things requires all districts and charter schools to draft and adopt a learning continuity plan this plan requires a detailed description of the ways the district will address many issues related to in-person and distance learning a little background on this it is a pretty comprehensive document of about 35 pages and it is all narrative except for some budgetary pieces so tonight i want to give an overview on the parts of the plan that that there are 10 of them that we were asked to complete and give you kind of an idea of the feedback that we're going to be getting in the next few weeks between our public hearing tonight and when i come back to you on september 16th for approval as you can see all of the districts and charters in in the state have had to do this the interesting thing with this is that there is not a whole lot of time as we heard about this in july after it went into statute and it has to be adopted by september 30th by the local board in the midst of that we get school up and going and we had changes as we know in between that time as well as far as our model of instruction so it is a pretty tight turnaround i do want you to know this public hearing is to gather input i've already started gathering input from site council meetings there was one at marigold today we'll take it to our dlac which is our district english learner advisory council on september 9th and virtually every other school will be having their site council between now and then to gather feedback from folks so it is narrative i apologize for a lot of the words i will show you the document after i go through the slides so you have an idea of what it looks like but bear with me if i read some of the slides so the learning continuity plan highlights a couple of things how the district will provide continuity of instruction during the school year to ensure pupils have access to a full curriculum of substantially similar quality regardless of the delivery method one thing i do want to comment on this jeanette spencer from butte county office of education who works with us on these plans set a big part of that providing continuity of instruction during the school year is also to keep in mind going from perhaps distance learning to in-person learning we hope it doesn't go back again to distance learning but to keep in mind as this is really a moving target for so many we have to to think in in those terms an important piece of this plan is to ensure access to devices and connectivity for our students professional development plays a big role as well and resources those things that will be provided to staff including technological support learning loss how the district will address pupil learning loss that resulted from kovat 19 during the 2019-20 and 20 21 school years a little note on this part right here throughout the plan does run the theme of what what was lost in education due to the march 13th date of having all of us go online there was significant time there that we know was lost with learning and that does that does present itself in this plan even though it's for the year 2021 and of course the end which is one one of the reasons we are here tonight the plan must be approved by the local board by september 30th after a public hearing has been held so digging in there are 10 sections of this plan it's important to note that within the ten sections there are sub sections as well so there are four to five subsections in each of the ten again i'm not going to go through all of it because it's it's a it's very wordy we will have the draft on the website so it will be totally transparent to the public and all pardon me here we go section one general information this section wanted us to write a brief description of the impact of covet 19 and how it has had an impact on chico unified in our community just a quick note to this as we all know our county and our community has gone through several things in the last two years that have impacted us and this this is right on the heels of that stakeholder engagement this is a big piece of this plan it includes to describe the efforts made to solicit stakeholder feedback those stakeholders are our students parents and families teachers and staff and also our stakeholders who speak languages other than english we have done this extensively and continue to do this in various ways there are zooms that we've had with students both elementary and high school parents and families lots of surveys there are facebook live communication ongoing communication with families and parents in that regard teachers and staff there were a large group of teachers and staff every monday through the summer that got together on zoom to help kind of flush out ideas about what what we can be doing as news was coming to us about the possibilities of instructional models and of course our stakeholders who speak languages other than english we ensured that surveys and information was always translated and again we'll take it to our district english language advisory council next week section 3 talks about in-person instructional offerings so this describes the actions the district will take to offer classroom-based instruction whenever possible particularly for students who have experienced significant learning loss due to school closures in the 1920 school year or are at a greater risk of experiencing learning loss due to future school closures there is also a funding part of this related to our in-person instructional offerings in the plan if you read it it really describes our plan that was adopted by the board in july the am pm that would be the piece the information that we know at the time of this plan writing that we would go forward for in-person instruction in that model and the funding is quite extensive chico unified has received a large amount of money through the cares act which is federal money and that money is all funneled into the pieces uh many of which are in this plan in terms of professional development technology um my goodness curriculum things like that that we've been able to use that cares act money for in the event of distance learning which is also included in the plan that we were asked to describe how the district will provide continuity of instruction during the school year to ensure pupils have access to a full curriculum of substantially similar quality regardless of the method of delivery we also had to address our access to devices and connectivity for our kids and families people participation and progress it also will address the grading and assessment which ted and john will give a brief description and update to you in a moment the distance learning professional development staff roles and responsibilities how we're supporting our pupils with unique needs and again more funding in terms of the distance learning piece so at this time i want ted and john to describe the grading and assessment piece good evening was that are we working okay perfect uh in the elementary world that's always a big question as far as for elementary teachers in particular where do we start instruction so trying to get a sense of what we do with that as far as how it relates to grading and some of those kinds of things our elementary dlc group met right away second week they were meeting and kind of going through our district assessments so they really looked at it through a lens of what what do teachers need to know about their students to start instruction at the appropriate place and then the follow-up question is what's doable right now in an online world as far as being able to assess students and get a sense of where to start with it so we went through and did a pretty significant modification of our assessments as far as what they're doing shared it out with staff and everybody is off and running as far as baseline assessments in elementary right now kind of following up with that uh our elementary dlc is meeting again tomorrow and we're going to start talking about assessments as it relates to the curriculum and also in kind of the scope and sequence and what we're looking for teachers to try to be doing as far as assessing and sharing that information with parents from there eileen uh thank you ted because i know there are uh guests listening in could you um explain the the dlc and and the other things that you're uh commenting on by sure so in uh for chicken unified we have a district leadership council hence dlc it is composed of a teacher leader and there's one from each school site and they are composed of kind of different areas we have primary teachers we have title 1 teachers we have special ed teachers that are on that group so they're charged with looking through kind of the things that are happening in the district and helping us work with putting things together related to what assessments are relevant to give how our report cards look what kind of professional development we want to put out for staff so that's the big charge of dlc so we meet a couple times two to four times a month depending on what's happening and that's really our teacher leadership group and we really lean on them pretty heavily to kind of look when we're making district-wide decisions that affect everybody that's the group that we lean on and kind of look for guidance on with those kinds of things so that group was incredibly helpful with this because i know they are at a school site level when teachers have questions or concerns that's who they go to also because they know that group meets consistently to talk about all those topics in the district so that group is going to keep meeting weekly for the time being to kind of talk about assessments professional development in particular what do we need to be working on and focusing on in those areas and that's where they're at right now we're going to meet tomorrow like i said and talk about more curriculum-based assessments and how they match up to the scope and sequence with things as well so ted has stolen most of my thunder about dlc and the the plans that people are developing those groups are still meeting they're meeting regularly uh we met last week for the first time with ela and and this week with math with edge annuity and the other online platforms that we're using grading and assessment is pretty consistent it's pretty clear how the students are going to be graded and assessed there's a significant amount of consistency which is something we came out of the spring desiring i think it's the main reason grading has been included in this board workshop that we revisit last spring and through a grading and assessment lens and ensuring that there's equitable and consistent grading and we know there are some challenges inherent in too much consistency to be sure that we are meeting the needs of various levels of students and so that's where the teachers come in and doing all they can to adapt and adjust to students needs while maintaining that consistency so i'm sure we'll be talking later about other aspects related to curriculum and grading but from a secondary perspective we're using the platforms mainly because of equitable consistency let me ask at this point it has already appeared twice the emphasis on how the district will provide of instruction in a curriculum that is substantially of similar quality regardless of the method of delivery so what steps were taken in order to reach that goal of getting a curriculum getting assuring that students would have access to to such a curriculum well i can speak for secondary and i think it will bleed into elementary as well that decision was made three and a half years ago when edgenuity was chosen that consistency of curriculum was chosen then and yes there's a it's a different game when we're talking 6 000 kids versus 200 kids but the decision to use the consistent curriculum edge annuity three years ago has has borne fruit here because we have the familiarity with that program so since we had a uh say a test group of people the people who were in the independent study program through oak bridge what was the response to edgenuity that led you to believe that that would be appropriate for this well i don't want to frame it going back three years but i can tell you since we started this school year i have yet to receive a single complaint from an oak ridge kid student or parent and so i that could imply that the population that's been using oak bridge in the past is really comfortable with the platform and the delivery um obviously we've been receiving significant amount of feedback recently about the current population using edge annuity and so there are some challenges there but based on the on the past and the feedback we'd been receiving it had been working okay and that that came also through vetting through teachers as well and their experience with it and making adjustments sorry interrupt making adjustments the the the oak bridge curriculum they're using now has been adjusted since the first year you know with modules being added adapted removed edited assessments being adjusted so those those changes have taken place over the past three years and those same kinds of changes will continue to be made yes yes uh eileen uh john something you just mentioned i have a question is what was being used at um oak ridge before because they have had time to work with it and make some tweaks and adjustments and things is that platform different than what we're using um with our other secondary students so just to click i'm sorry the second part of the question if teachers at the secondary level are given um flexibility to make modifications add and subtract and flip uh curriculum uh usage in their classrooms wouldn't that necessitate some kind of adjustment with the grading and stuff if it's not being delivered the same in every class so let me answer the first one and the platform is the same the courses and the modules because there there's such a wider scope of courses being offered versus what had been offered at oakbridge for a variety of reasons both lower level and higher level or higher achieve you know just different levels of of course work that there are there is a significant number of courses that have been added to the whole course list all of those courses have customization capability every one of the courses and that's that's actually what we're doing right in the middle of the customization and that's a that's a significant word customization customization can happen prior to the course being even open to the students one of the buttons to customize in edge annuity is actually called on the fly you know you can customize on the fly if we feel like we need to need to customize along the way so the customization is a critical piece of the flexibility of the program and we're learning hourly of things we may need to consider to be customized interject before you answer the question so one of the aspects of this is it does talk about substantially similar quality it does give access of the students to ap and to a to g courses that they need to qualify for college and my understanding is you can only modify about 20 percent in order to keep that recognition official so you can't just go in and take it apart correct just have you have a margin of correction or manipulation or innovation but in order to keep the validity of the courses standing you do need to stay there and i think that's the continuity and substantially similar they're not literally the same but they're parallel issues and if i can reinforce with the board too we do have a process for that customization it's not just willy-nilly people deciding they want to add and drop across you know the same course course alike within a department there's a process that the administration is involved in and because some folks don't know all the implications of customization so teachers and department chairs or department leads or or course likes meet with their admin team if they decide they're going to they're going to customize good good to know okay i don't want to keep interrupting you but thank you very much for the background on that all right section five addresses people learning loss uh and as i mentioned you'll see the theme running through this plan of 2019-20 and 2021 school years together because really we are starting backwards in march and working on describing how the district will address people learning loss that results from coven our actions and strategies that we will use to address learning loss and accelerate learning progress and a description of how these supports to address how learning loss is measured i i will address here too real quickly that pupil learning loss is of paramount concern and it is really one of the pieces of this plan that jumps out to us the most and with six months virtually six months of kids not being in school i think we all would agree that it is of um paramount concern and and how are we going about it and how can we adjust if it's not working and how do we find that data that shows us if kids are are learning or have lost some learning and you'll see that again in another section in a moment section 6 talks about the mental health and social and emotional well-being we are asked to address how our district will monitor and support mental health and social and emotional well-being of pupils and staff during the school year to circle back to the beginning of how our community has had some some life-changing things happen in it within the last couple of years we were lucky to have some things in place such as the at-risk counselors at the high school going into covid so we are fortunate in that regard but we still are able to use the cares act money to increase our support in this [Music] regard section seven people engagement and outreach this is another uh piece that is pretty meaty and of concern especially now in our early days of getting back into school our district's procedures for tiered re-engagement strategies for peoples who are absent from distance learning and how we will provide outreach to pupils and their parents or guardians including in languages other than english this actually came up today in the site council meeting i was attending to bring this plan for feedback and it is paramount especially in our teachers minds how are we going to make sure our kids are engaging we want to see them and make sure they're okay we want to see them and make sure they have access and they can learn and if and if not how can we help we need to to know so we can help it spurred on some great conversation of um how we can improve that so that's just an example of we can write things in a plan but when it takes on its own flavor at every school site and every every school within our district under the big umbrella of how are we going to do this it's just a great way to engage people with with this kind of venue and taking this for uh feedback we can engage people with their thoughts right now you know for example there was a second grade teacher that said i i just i'm worried about them how how do we know they're okay so again we want to make sure we're addressing that section 8 is school nutrition as we all know vincenzaro and his team at nutrition services does a bang-up job in this regard for our community and we have included a description of how the district provides nutritionally adequate meals for all pupils when participating in both in-person instruction and distance learning i will add through vince's program and nutrition services program that all all children under the age of 18 in our community will be fed i'd just like to add a personal observation i was going to pick up my grandkids lunches and i saw a family that included a toddler all the way up to probably a i don't know third grade uh kid and they had five kids and when i commented how great that was they said well we have families here that have seven kids you know all 18 and under that are that's how they're getting their meals so given the number of people in our community who have lost their jobs and for whom you know they're fighting the issue of how they're going to do rent and all those other things this has just been a phenomenal aspect and on friday you get double so i just really want to do a shout out to the teams at the schools and they always have a smile you know i appreciate that comment because to add on to that they always say sure no problem we can do whatever you need there's never a roadblock there's never a but it's what do you need so yeah section nine and we're almost done section nine is additional actions this is a supplementary section that districts can put information in to address the additional actions that they are taking to implement the plan we did include in this a description of our workday child supervision program currently our chico unified staff is able to participate in a workday child supervision program on many of our sites in very small cohorts of children being supervised it is not school but they are supervised and supervised by our classified staff who has been kind of reassigned because their job may or may not be be their their typical job may not be um gosh what's the word they may not have something like a bus driver for example a bus driver may not be driving a bus every day in in kovid so that person has been working in a different uh in a different capacity we are increasing on tuesday to include more of our students including offerings to foster and homeless students as well as uh some at risk students that that we would like to participate and then also have our essential workers moving into that piece we had some feedback from some people who in the community who are interested in that as well we do have space capacity parameters that we are working with as we have certain spaces on campus less than we would normally have because teachers are in the classrooms but students are in small socially distanced and pods following all safety safety protocols and the last part asks us about an explanation of how the needs of our foster youth english learners and low-income students were considered when making the plan and addressing the funding toward it so that is an overview of what the plan is in a moment i'll show you just kind of an eyeball view of what it looks like we can put the draft on the website as well for the next couple weeks until we we have it come back for approval but just again for you to know it is going to cite councils so we can have stakeholders from school sites give us input it is particularly interesting i think this you know this the way this plan was created in july the template was made on august 1st and it is due by september 30th and it is um it's great to make a plan and to have have an idea where we're going but as things as reality comes to us and uh you know the re-engagement strategies is a perfect example of that how are we ensuring as we go through this that we are able to connect with our students and make sure we know where they're at and if if they're not engaging for whatever reason we can we can work to find out why that is and how we can help so the next steps the plan will come back with all of the notes and additions edits deletions that we will have in the next couple of weeks so we'll come back to you on september 16th okay thank you miss keane and your assistants for all the information you provided uh okay so i believe at this time it would be good to go ahead and open up the public hearing we can hear from the public and then the board can talk about it if they wish knowing that we will be bringing this back for actual approval at our next meeting so if everybody's okay with that we'll go ahead and we will first listen to our two speakers that signed up to speak initially we have allocated 10 minutes towards this when that 10 minutes has elapsed we will ask the board if they wish to continue with more speakers if there are more speakers who wish to speak and we'll just handle it that way it's three minutes per speaker and so our first three speakers should probably take up most of our initial 10 minutes uh so in any case um whoever who is manning the um and thank you the fir we have two people who have submitted cards the first person is heidi dausman heidi i'm going to ask you to unmute hi thanks for taking my uh questions i just was first off i'm just kind of wondering where we are with the school waivers if um i know that the surveys have gone out and i think we have filled this friday um but i'm just kind of i've noticed i've checked the board several times that they're all been received but there hasn't been any any updates to that um and then the next part is of course just i understand the teachers are trying everyone's trying very hard but i'm just hoping that you guys are hearing that there are many of us who want our kids to get back into school we know that the best way for them to learn for according to the cbc a lot of pediatricians psychiatric society set kids in school is the best way for them to learn so i know from other friends that there are teachers who are out there who want to be in school and some of them are actually kind of afraid to speak up because of unions and just other things their jobs they're concerned with you know everyone's concerned about that right now but i really am just speaking for the parents of the kids that we many of us want our kids in school we just know that for them to learn this way is the best way and i'm just hoping that these waivers are moving forward so that's what i wanted to say okay um miss daley did you want to mention anything having to do with the waivers at this point sure uh we sent the waivers out for the board direction and they are in fact due this friday at that point we will disaggregate the information by grade level and by school and we will bring that information to the board at the september 16th meeting and then at that point the board will discuss and make decisions as to what the next steps would be we have laid out steps but the next step is at each way along the way is for the board to see the data and vote on that next step okay thank you can i just clarify i'm sorry that miss daley said you're setting the waiver out you meant you sent the surveys out right you are correct yes we sent the elementary waiver surveys out we sent those out to uh all elementary parents as well as classified staff and elementary teaching staff okay our next speaker is ready then yes our next speaker is brandon blizman brandon i'm going to ask you to unmute brandon your microphone is live all right hey thank you hey trusted board members my name is brandon blizman i'm a proud parent of a fourth grader and a seventh grader in chico unified i'd like to thank all of you for your commitment to the welfare and education of chico's youth i would also like to commend you for all the thankless hours that it's been taken to navigate the the chico unified ship through all these challenging and dynamic ever-changing times you know over the last three years butte county has been no stranger to adversity butte county and the chico unified school board have demonstrated an enormous amount of resiliency patience and really just love for our community through all these challenges you've been able to look uh to look to one thing to maintain that the use social emotional and educational well-being and that's school now those kids look forward to going to school unprecedented events over the last few months have put our children back into the distance learning environment you know you guys have done a fantastic job engaging the parents with surveys along the way soliciting feedback as a you know it's a good way to to make those kinds of important decisions regarding this upcoming school year after after reviewing some of the the lcp i couldn't help but notice that some of the higher ticket budget items were for zoom and edgenuity you know let me tell you about my son a little bit like most junior high schoolers he's he's a kind expressive loving kid who looks forward to going to school you know he's taking on the challenge of distance learning like a champion but over the last week i witnessed the crushing of a child's wonder and his desire to learn as his happiness turned to overwhelming frustration and tears on edgenuity our kids are already suffering from lack of emotional connection and social interactions ingenuity really this last week have just fueled that fire you know as as parents my wife and i you know wanted an educated if we wanted an education model similar to this we might have just opted for oak bridge you've you've sidelined the only good things left in some of these kids life which is their teachers edgenuity in my experience over the last few weeks has been nothing more than a sequence of videos that are very repetitive with minimal if any teacher interaction a quick internet search for that platform yields uh some interesting results one of them that i found of a recent school district who adopted it for a large population says that does not meet expectations now i understand that you had to maybe make a rush into this decision or maybe had some budget constraints now my hope is that there's been some misunderstanding when this was when this um i guess platform was selected for this large population of kids you know i'm i'm here this evening just to make a suggestion i strongly suggest that you allow the teachers to conduct live teaching via zoom which i know you're paying for track the progress through google classroom like they've done for many years now you could even keep the same one two three four five six um days in the in the middle school level there mr blitzman i i'm sorry but your time is up so okay thank you your your uh participation okay so now we will take if there is a person in the queue uh who was raising their hand we will take a person there for okay our next three minutes thank you michael kerwin michael kirwan i am asking you to unmute michael your microphone is available michael all we're hearing is music so i'm going to mute you would you like to take another speaker uh yes let's let's see who else has their hand raised okay we have drew collins is the next drew collins okay one more speaker yep okay our next speaker darren marshall darren marshall we're asking you to unmute okay we need to i think this something is happening here that is inappropriate so um since we have allocated this 10 minutes and we cannot continue with anything further since something is happening with interference with our ability to listen to speakers i'm not sure exactly what is going on but mr vincent do you have any idea what that could possibly be with all due respect to mr vincent we have students who are logging in under other people's names and they're just playing games they're just they're playing music they're taking time away from people who really have something to say so unfortunately they're impacting the community but they're just playing games and logging in under other people's names that's what's happening okay dr kaiser well i would like to suggest that the people who had and we've had some very very good student comments i mean impressive but i would really like to suggest that if there's a student or a parent out there who did have something they wanted to say and got unfortunately blocked by this kind of you know scamming or whatever that they please send us an email so that we can get their comments thoughtfully and they will be attached to the minutes correct erica and so then other people get to read them as well thank you okay yes christine griffin yes um linda yes i have a couple of questions for miss keane if i might okay let me uh well i guess we can keep the public hearing open still until we hear that is that how that generally is acceptable yes we can continue discussion under the public hearing or you can close the public hearing my hope is that we can get this situation fixed so that we can hear from some of the public i know we have people that want to talk and it's frustrating that they're not able to do so exactly um okay so i'll keep the public hearing open there's no harm in doing that um and i'll go to linda and then we'll go to you eileen great so um ms keane this plan i'm going to try and formulate my question here cohesively the learning continuity plan is it a living document and i ask this because it's really been a wild ride since the covid 19 hit you know there's been so many different regulations we have to move this way and that way and up and down and so if we put this plan in place what's to say something drastic isn't going to change which really has to make us do a total upheaval on our plan so i guess my question is do we have to update this and how often do we update this good question i asked the same question to our support jeanette spencer out at butte county office of education because i like you thought the same thing and she said and i totally agree with this that yes if things change this is what we know as of right now as of today and um to be due at the end of september but certainly if things change we can update and um move forward i don't know if the if the california department of education will continue on in some regard with a template down the way for that piece i don't know certainly but we would continue to have the most updated plan i think for our own knowledge and understanding and chronicling of what has happened yes excellent then my second question is you know you had mentioned all schools need to do this including charters do we have any oversight responsibility on the charter's learning continuity plan that are authorized through our district yes much like the uh spring time we had the covet 19 no was that that was last spring the kova 19 operations report that was due the charters also had an obligation to to complete that and their uh part of their obligation to to put it forward to the county was also to pass it forward to us as the authorizer the same remains for this one as well yes and i do happen to know they are working on it and going through the same processes right thank you thank you very much you're welcome okay miss robinson um yes madam president thank you i i did want to just let the first speaker whose name now i can't remember uh know that i did recognize his points in an email that he had forwarded to the board so just to let him know that i have read the completed uh the complete email that he did send to us and i appreciate his you know his input and being there tonight sorry to the rest of the folks that are having a problem with this i had tina i had the same question um about uh updating as uh miss heavy did but i also had had a concern no i had a question do you have a concern that we're going to have enough time for the teachers to do the um evaluation of um the access plan and and stuff in order to put this together to submit i mean they're only going to have two and a half weeks of experience and so much of it right now is just getting kinks worked out what kind of an obligation do we have to upgrade our plan and who does the assessment is this going to the county uh to the state board of education to you know who's reviewing these plans to say oh chico unified looks great or i'm sorry chico unified that doesn't quite meet the standard we were looking for sure i can address both of those as far as the your first comment about the engagement of students and how we're we are literally just right into school the feedback i'm getting is in back going back to my roots as a teacher i can understand this teachers want to see their students they want to know that they are okay they want to know they're there and again if they're not those those teachers by and large are ready to say hey hey we need some help here we need to know where this student is so by by creating a flowchart for lack of a better word although each each school has its own flavor and their own supports we do have a lot of common supports so there was great feedback to help create kind of a flow chart to make sure that nothing gets lost along the way in terms of how we reach out to our families this the second piece you asked about was the assessment and who reads it this goes to the county to butte county office of education and they read it and it's not so much an approval as kind of a yes i see that they may ask us questions they're really looking for my understanding and trainings that we've been on they're really looking to see how more than anything we are able to adjust to in person and then distance in person that's that's p a part of that continuity that that the plan requires we hope we certainly do not go in and out of that but um they have offered trainings that i've been involved in and and um really i feel like as this is the first time this document has come out and it does have a very early date we're all in the same boat of of putting in the best ideas and plans and then adjusting along the way as we have to okay dr kaiser so i think the essential concept here and concern is fluid if we look at the universities around the country who have opened to in-person education it's been largely an absolute disaster even chico state who had every single possible health caution and had dramatically reduced their students and only had certain lab classes that were in person with very highly technical equipment they lasted one week university alabama a thousand cases and i think less than a week so nobody has an answer to this yet um i think this is just uh the effort to sort of appreciate how complex this might be that we don't forget to touch a part of education that we see as critical it doesn't mean that anybody's answer is going to hold up for [Music] the whole semester or school year i think those are all just reality checks okay yes tom all right um i'm looking at the section 7 on the lcp which is again the people engagement outreach portion um and it sounds like the major concern we're hearing from those families that are not thrilled with edge annuity is that missing relationship piece i was hoping uh twofold that one you could talk to us specifically about what we are doing to reach out to families who feel isolated and disengaged like what is does that plan look like what steps we're taking and secondly i'm not sure if this would have directed you or miss daily what can we do going forward to make sure that we don't lose more student engagement or that we continue to build on those relationships which are in many ways the most valuable part of our district that relation between teacher and student so sure for the for the families that we get that are not engaging that means that teachers are seeing that students are not they're not attending they uh again i go back and we i feel like we do this so much but they are so pivotal the the targeted case managers that we have on site are of tremendous assistance many times they they know the families on the site very well they are aware of things that might be happening within the family many of them have done home visits or have made phone calls they are reaching out as well um the wellness teams on the sites as well as school has started are are involved and i think we will just continue to see that grow within the within each school um the second piece of that relationship we all agree that relationships do matter and it is very hard in this in this online learning to do that our counselors are available as well to reach out and they are doing a tremendous job the best that they can do to get kids engaged in those time slots to um to meet with them mr orlando um one of the other things that mr shepard has been working with his principals and department heads as he talked earlier is about pulling out lessons of ingenuity and adding in more zoom lessons with our teachers so they'll be going back and forth of doing that and trying to see how they can get their children more or the students more engaged in their lessons so we can add some of their own lessons in there because we're clearly hearing it from our students that they're missing their teachers and we want to be able to do that we have to be very careful on how many lessons we do that because we have to give them a to g of compliant or we're allowing teachers in the future to come to us if they have a full course designed that we can look at to see if we want to improve it to replace so we we do hear their concerns and we will continue to work with that so we can get more teacher engagement with our students can i add just one more thing just moving forward uh we've been meeting regularly to decide to identify professional development plan that's ongoing to address our targeted student populations and while we're addressing those targeted student populations we also think we'll be addressing all our students so we are in the middle of planning a district-wide staff development day on september 15th that will what we think will provide some insight including inviting panel members who represent those those targeted student populations panel members who represent our english learners our students with disabilities our african-american students our foster and homeless so they'll be a part of panels to help us discover additional mechanisms to engage those students because these folks have lived that experience so rather than just assuming that we can keep doing what we're doing we're going to try to add to our toolkit okay i want to bring something up that relates to what is going on in this very meeting and that is this is a zoom meeting and there is manipulation that has occurred by students coming in and and doing things to interfere with the process and my understanding is that with zoom meetings that have occurred where teachers have been teaching the same sort of thing has happened so a lot of parents have been saying well just put the teachers back up there and have zoom meetings and have them teach in a regular classroom type of situation but if we're seeing this type of behavior where students who are out there come in and mess around with the system and prevent the teacher from teaching and prevent information from being disseminated to other students is there a great risk of that happening so i would like to bring that to people's attention that if people are looking to utilizing zoom and having teachers in front of their classrooms like they would be in their regular classroom setting where they're instructing and they're interacting it would be wonderful if they could do that but one of the things we're seeing is that unfortunately there are people out there that are subverting that process just like you had kids in the back of your classroom that were messing around and trying to you know disturb the class you've got the same thing going on in zoom so one of the questions i have is is the google meet um is that a safer type of process or is it the same uh threat that goes on with that and the additional thing that i think of too is if you do have all these uh type of things going on is the system going to be overloaded or have we taken you know care of that i know we've done things to boost our systems with the zoom but you know can that be overloaded if there's there's a lot more um happening on the system so if someone could address that yeah john vincent can i think he can address the google piece and i can talk about the overloading the system from a different perspective okay so in regards to your first question about zoom there are steps that we can take to help secure zoom so these these things don't happen there still are ways that kids can find around things but we can take steps to really mitigate these so we can talk about in private i really don't want to say what those are here in a public forum as far as google me goes one nice thing about google media it's tied to google classroom so all the kids are already logged in with their email addresses and with google classroom you see who is all in google meet you can see who's there so it really helps to mitigate this so not so easy to crash it so in google meet it's not easy to crash it because you have to log in with the chico unified email address or account our kids do and you can see exactly who it is whereas like with this zoom is what we're seeing here this has an anonymous link that people can click on and put in whatever name they want and that's what we're seeing here so it's difficult in this situation to manage this but in google me it is easier well i mean i i you know i guess it's we have very proficient students who are so good with computers that they can do this sort of thing i guess that's a positive to this but i sure wish they would use their talents in other ways yes i agree um so uh yeah we we definitely do not want to have the crashing we don't want to have the bombing we've had some some pretty uh horrible things that have happened and i'm not sure if all the the families out there the parents out there are aware that those type of things have happened and that has been something we've had to consider as well so one thing i'm sorry i'm just gonna add a family example so my niece is an ap art teacher down in san marcos and going crazy teaching because she has a nine-year-old a six-year-old and the three-year-old boy and he was driving her crazy and the last thing he did yesterday was while she's sitting in her lap he signed out every kid in her class and said have a good day so you know it's hard to stay ahead of them yeah definitely yes john did you have more to add yeah i just had one more thing so this week we migrated over to the education licenses for zoom for all of our staff so we can then look at those different things that we can do to help make those meetings more secure and push out those settings now to our staff to help them to know what settings they need to set to make their meetings more secure okay thank you thank you for all the hard work you've done trying to secure this okay any any further questions from i'm sorry well john shepard had a comment and then yes john oh just really quickly so we have some folks in the district that are directly affiliated with chico state's platforms and blackboard is the platform that chico state uses affects over 150 000 csu learners and it went down and it's been in it's been in effect for i think 12 years so we're going to face some of these some of these issues i'm not i'm not for a second you know implying that that's a good thing but these things are going to happen and we'll just need to adapt to them okay yes well i just wanted to say it's very frustrating because i received a lot of communication regarding edge annuity i know the board did as well and we certainly wanted to be able to hear from people and i know we have people that wanted to speak but this is an example of what our teachers are facing and the challenges that we're facing so i've been on some meetings with superintendents and other educational leaders up and down the state and even in our own county and they were very excited to hear from me how is ingenuity going um how is using a platform going because they were experiencing some very embarrassing and frightening incidents with zoom and you know even some in google classroom that had taken place and i had to say you know what we don't have the answer either because obviously we are disappointing a lot of students and families with the ingenuity rollout that has not been certainly what anybody had hoped um and we are now taking steps to rectify that we understand you know we heard last year from uh our parents loud and clear 4 000 surveys came back and we need a more more continuity to our program so when we looked we thought okay this will provide that continuity this will allow a platform that is the same for everyone moving forward so that we can get in that rhythm recognizing all along we would then need to be pulling teachers back in to provide instruction and connection but we need to do that faster because kids have been out of school now for six months and they are out of the routine but they really now more than ever need that connection with their teachers they need that connection with their peers um we all wish we could be back in person because so we wouldn't be having these kind of discussions and frustrations maybe other frustrations but not these um so there really isn't the perfect answer out there there are issues with zoom there are issues with uh google classroom both uh google meet and zoom crashed and we're down today we were actually meeting with a student regarding the edge annuity platform she was very articulate had wonderful suggestions but she kept freezing we kept losing her so those are the frustrations that other districts are facing we are facing the frustrations with edge annuity so i think our our approach needs to be how do we integrate as much interaction as possible provide that social emotional support for our kids so our families see that there are staff members there for their kids that we're not just throwing them you know into a setting here click on this and go um you know that that has not worked we've heard that loud and clear and we will make adjustments to that um and that you know we do appreciate the parents and the students that have reached out to us and said hey here's the here's the gaps this isn't working for me but just know that straight zoom isn't working for people either so it's finding that happy medium we're not going to get it right tomorrow but we will keep working towards that we need to keep hearing from you give us those suggestions when we get the it's just overwhelming that doesn't help but when you can be specific and we certainly had that from the young lady we spoke with today we've had it from several of the parents then we can address those issues so be patient with us be kind and patient with your your children as well and we will continue to slug through this and i am so apologetic that we cannot hear from people tonight because i i know there were many of you that wanted to speak well there was one more thing that i wanted to mention because we weren't able to hear more speakers that kept coming up with ingenuity in that conversation and something that i wanted to make sure all the parents understood is that we have arranged teacher time in the afternoons for teachers to address some of the concerns if students are having a difficult time and parents if they know their students are having a difficult time so whether it's the students or the parents please please contact the teacher directly and explain what you are experiencing so that they can help you individually we as a board can hear these things but they are right there on the front line and they are willing to help so please do that as well and i think one of the things that we can do here um you know we have received a lot of email communication regarding the concerns what we can do is post those so that people can see that they're there that we are hearing them that we are getting that input you know again it's just frustrating not to be able to have the input at this board meeting but we can provide those yes thank you okay with that being said um unless there's anything further i'm going to close the public hearing and was there anything anyone else wanted to say at this point i just don't think my niece will run out her little boy but you know we all have kids that are uh adaptable to internet and we have kids who need a different framework and we're just doing our very best and we all understand that that is what we want and we're trying to get there okay so i'm going to go ahead and close the public hearing and i believe since there is no action to be taken we are just going to move forward to our next item which is a human resources item that has to do with providing information about uh policy training and a complaints overview and that would be mr hanlon and i believe mr marchant maybe mr cole i'm going to have him make his way up here while i go get the clicker so give me a minute oh i see i see you're just you're switching chairs here okay so we have mr uh cole who is the executive director of human resources and we have mr jim hanlon who is the assistant superintendent of human resources okay so in light of recent events the board has made a request to review district policies on inappropriate and unprofessional behavior harassment mandated reporting staff training and the complaint procedures regardless if it's a student a parent or an employee so we're going to cover those we're not going to sit here and read a bunch of district policy for you but we're going to summarize it and go through it and if there's any questions then we're here to answer those and go through them but hopefully we'll answer many of your questions for you so with that david is going to start here uh good evening um sexual harassment uh policy 41 1911 really deals with our protected groups of different employees based on on the identities that are listed here gender and gender identity expression but it's not just limited those it's those and includes other groups as well when we look at the training requirements for all employees we actually have uh two hours of training that required for all supervisors where we require one hour of training for all um classified or all employees district across the board and we also supplement that training where we we've brought in kingsley bogart to provide further training regarding sexual harassment as well as gender identity training with lindsey moore so kim bogart and lindsey have both come out and helped present when we look at the public poly dissemination we have postings across the district for harassment and our policies posted we also during our orientations provide the training for sexual harassment and then we that annual training just spoke of where we do it every two years or every year for two hours for our supervisors and one hour for non-supervisors and then finally within that policy there are components of it that it's within the board policy it talks about if you violate that there's a there's a component that if you someone makes a complaint we make sure that there is no retaliation regarding that complaint but further if you violate it you can be disciplined up to including discharge so it's a very strong policy we use it quite a bit to support our employees but we make sure everyone is trained on that policy okay so this one is employee to employee harassment the next one is harassment targeting a child by anyone so it could be it could be another child it could be an employee of ours it could be a contractor but anyone that targets a child so all of those other things apply but it also specifically prohibits retaliatory behavior and a requirement to immediately report which is our mandated reporting requirements so that's it's embedded in this board policy and um and then also a requirement to ensure that all students receive age-appropriate information on sexual harassment and that's embedded in our health curriculums along the way so so students get knowledge and information in those areas as appropriate at a particular grade level okay so 41 19 21 professional standards goes into a lot more detail it really focuses on exercising good judgment uh when interacting with students staff or or members of the public it will go into if you look it's got a lot of great descriptions within it describing what inappropriate conduct is beyond those that are listed it also talks about uh when you single out a student for any personal attention or friendship it goes into discussions about being at a lo being alone with a student outside of the sight of others it talks about inappropriate contact as well within this there's also a component of requiring people to report any discrimination harassment intimidation or bullying so it goes into creating the standards of what we expect our employees it still holds the uh if someone does make a complaint there is the retaliation protection component to it and this board policy as well carries discipline with it so if someone does violate it they can be held accountable okay so the next one 4119.24 even goes beyond that as you can see has many of the same things but also um non-educational contact with the student and it used to be just phone letter that kind of thing but in the social media age electronic age we recently have added email text and then also participating inappropriately in social networks so we do permit social networks to be to be made for example like a banned facebook as long as it's public and parents are aware of it and have access to it and it's a good way to communicate to the whole band be at the homecoming game half an hour beforehand at such and such a place plan to meet and warm up and those types of things so there's some good things with social networks but we require staff to participate them in a very public way they may not go on to a student social page and then befriend them and those types of things that would be considered inappropriate we also require um for for the use of district equipment when they're communicating with students because that is our equipment and if there is any um suspected inappropriate behavior we have the right to inspect that equipment and um and see what's going on so if if a employee is contacting the student through their own private means that's a red big red flag for us and it's really for their safety yes it's for both there's an allegation they should use a district phone they could um so um we don't have many of those they they're not really handed out they're they're kind of administration so um so there might be in a in an emergency type of thing but at least then there's a record of it and we mean when you say half hour before the football game meet here um that could be a last minute change how would they communicate that if it's not on uh i don't know it could be but again this is a protection for the students and the employees so it might not work out for that particular game so i know that and that was an example but i know that teachers will sometimes use those very public social pages and instruct students be sure you check that you know an hour before the event or something like that so the next policy is really a focus on the importance of creating maintaining the positive school and climate and here it lists within it uh some of the attributes that go into supporting that but really the focus of this is enhancing an orderly and caring non-discriminatory teaching environment and so it's one of the shortest policies we have but probably one of the most important ones we have so the next one here are re regarding complaint procedures so with 13 12.1 it's a direct implication or a direction that specific formal complaints go through the uniform complaint procedure there's a lot of different items in the uniform complaint procedure that parents can complain make a complaint about or employees can make and complain about or even students but the one that is particular to harassment intimidation and bullying is the one i'm we're referring to here and we do have a uniform complaint procedure officer that's tina among all the other things she does and uh but typically it doesn't get to that level um it can be a supervisor but um sometimes that's not to the satisfaction of the the person that has made the complaint and so there's always a um a way to appeal it and eventually you can see down there at the very bottom the final appeal could come to the board of education if the person was not satisfied with the outcome anonymous complaints are permitted however we have to inform the individual that it may be difficult to thoroughly investigate the situation without giving their confidential information up of course we don't do that unless without their permission but we make make sure that they're clear that that may impede the investigation it may not be as thorough as we would like it to be if if we were not able if we were able to identify the person but we do accept those and we do follow up on those and then 4144 is a complaint for people that do not work for chico unified but have complaints about the interview process the selection process that type of thing that they feel like they have been discriminated against okay the next one is um just some some civil and legal rights it's kind of all of the other things so protection for religious and political activities as long as they're not done on the job they they cannot be brought into the classroom in any way but if it's in their private life they can an employee cannot be discriminated against it clearly states that district property that's under the employee's control particularly a computer in the classroom is district property and we have a right to search that if we have suspicions yes cody so i'm thinking of two distinct examples so if your religion requires you to have a certain physical presentation usually it's clothing sometimes that's how the hair is presented we can't prevent them from coming to school that way correct right i think it it particularly um refers to trying to communicate that to kids or influence them or using your your position of authority to influence or or or somehow impress on them your religion or your political activities and so in the second aspect of that outside of the religious one we had the example of a teacher who got harassed and threatened because she wore a black lives matter t-shirt in her class um we have a reaction to that because well there are some that could argue that's political um i would probably leave that to the board to make a final determination because that's going to be i don't know you can get you can get into particular that's a very good question i don't really have anything the teacher got threatened and they're at home yeah the threats and the threats and intimidation those are very clear that those would be investigated absolutely we do we do have some exceptions on political um the political piece of it so you might have a unit in government during an election but they have to present both sides you know so equally so that students are making up their mind given the information that they have but it would be a pertinent lesson for the particular curriculum but if somebody brought in a a yard sign and hung it in their classroom for one particular candidate or issue or proposition then that would not be okay and of course whistleblower project protections and then limited protections against liability so obviously if someone is uh in the commission of a crime um and not following board policy and the laws of the land then we are not the district is not um liable for their actions there on their own but if they're um if they are doing things that are in accordance with board policy and the law and they are sued then the district would take take liability in those situations to protect them so in the area of staff development um this is probably one of the areas that we've grown the most i'll give you this too jim this is an area in one of the the last handout you'll see that we have about 5 500 hours of training that occurred last year if you go back a couple years ago it was probably in the 1200s or less this is an area that we've focused quite a bit on in terms of internal training we provide uh office word excel things of that nature uh for employees understood moving up in the clerical areas uh we'll send our employees in the para educator about 44 or 43 of all our employees repair educators we'll send them down to a paraeducator conference we provide escape training for our staff and uh down in sacramento we've brought speakers in for pair educator training at the beginning of classes or at the beginning of the school year we also bring our nurses in for additional training one of the things that you'll see on the handout here we start talking about the new hire orientations there's kind of a breakdown of what that list and what happens so every single employee that gets hired in the classified side is required to go through a four-hour orientation and part of that is on that green sheet that jim has handed out is a breakdown of some of the classes and some of the things they have to watch videos they have to see trainings they have to go through and at the end of that there's a time when they come back in after they've seen those and will provide another hour of training and address any questions or concerns they have about anything they've read it's our chance to do the i-9s and things of that nature but it's a very extensive uh orientation and training that occurs so every single employee when they first get hired goes through that training and then we do the annualized mandated trainings followed up with some additional trainings to help support our classified employees that go forward all right so that's a brief overview of the board policies and the training um quite extensive training that we do with um all employees so any questions at this point questions i have a comment yes linda i would just like to remind the public that all of our board policies are online including the uniform complaint procedure so they don't have to feel uncomfortable about filing a complaint they can get the forms online am i correct yes thank you very much yes that's a good point good okay yes tom and along the same lines i would just love it if someone from administration would reiterate exactly what the process should be what's that first step if a student or a parent feels uncomfortable or is or unsafe with a with any of our staff well initially they're they would report that to the supervisor unless of course that supervisor was the one that was involved in the harassment or complaint then they would bypass that person go up so initially the complaint should go to the their first supervisor uh and then uh depending what the extent of the issue is of the problem whether it needs to be communicated directly blind it depends on what level of not all harassment's the same and not all you know comments are the same so we'd initially uh deal with those at the first step with the supervisor and if it was a student often they go to the person they're most comfortable with which might be a teacher a close teacher that they're comfortable with the counselor perhaps they they don't often go to administration with those kinds of things because that's not who they normally interact with on a day-to-day basis so we would encourage students to go to any adult and then those adults are required then to report it on to their supervisor but very simply tom if a parent or a student has a concern ideally they would first share that with the teacher and see if there's a misunderstanding but that doesn't happen sometimes because that's very uncomfortable and difficult to do and the order would be then go to their supervisor for for a parent with a concern over a teacher would be to the assistant principal or principal if there is still concern at that point they do not feel that that has been resolved then it would go um on up if it's an elementary issue it would go to ted if it's a secondary issue it would go to john uh to jay myself the board would be the sequence that that would go and the further it goes along you know the the easy answers have been resolved right so if there is really an issue and somebody is feeling uncomfortable and they are adamant about it by all means follow that complaint procedure we do do the mandated training each year that david was talking about earlier and so there is clear direction instruction for for staff at least to what they need to do in order to go through those steps most of the as kelly said most of the incidences that happen get handled at the site level at a much lower level i don't know how many formal complaints you had last year tina but it's like a pyramid um you know the tough ones and end up in her lap so i kind of you want to add anything to that yeah i think last year there were uh approximately five yeah so it's fairly rare that it gets to that that very formal process where you have an exceptionally tough case one i might add too with the mandated reported trading uh that also gives skills to the employees so they're actually knowing what to look for so a lot of times that whole process is not just about when it happens what do you do but be aware of these kinds of circumstances if you see these things if you're you know if you're aware of these things those are indications and that would be something that would go up the line as well okay um eileen did you have a question yes well uh just a clarification in the orientations and trainings that we do we do train every employee whether it's the campus supervisor or a cook they all get the same training because like you said that lots of times the trusted person on campus is is not um you know an uh an obvious person but uh you know there are kids that are aids with other staff members that do become trust the person enough to be able to disclose something that is problematic for them so i appreciate that the training goes to everyone and i also um was struck again i hadn't read those policies completely for a while but they they really are extremely um enlightening in in that they they spell out and describe exactly what's inappropriate what we're looking for what to look for i was pleased that we have them in there that that you know that cover basically just about anything you could imagine to protect everyone to protect our staff and our students so i appreciate the work you guys do to well and they're they're updated frequently um the social media one was something that that all of you adopted in recent years uh fairly recent because it had become an issue you know at some place in the state and um and you can see where the pitfalls are there so they are looked at every year and updated as needed so so maybe one last thing regarding eileen's comment we oh i'm sorry well it's a comment though in my professional expertise area i would have parents come up to me and they'll start the disclosure about their kid by saying my kid doesn't want anyone to know and that's one of the most difficult things because i'm having to provide legal advice to them but when your kid is going to refuse to testify i think that one of the most important things if we could encourage all of our staff that there is no recourse retribution effect but i think many times these um especially if it's a student they perceive that other students will exact some kind of sanctions so it's just a very difficult process that's probably our biggest barrier is the the fear of of retaliation um i mean we hear that at every level you know whether it's a parent or a student or or a staff member and so that trust piece and then that training piece is critical so that people feel that they can safely come forward david did you have more yeah yeah i think just one last comment regarding the training and ensuring that every employee gets the same training we're able to track that within our our process and so we'll actually follow up with people that have not had that training and then we annualize that training every year at the same time of the year so that we know that anyone that's hired through the new year goes through the orientation training that will capture that and all those people that have gone through it already are going to get it again next year at the same time and so we're coughed that we're reaching out here first of all i am very confident in the policies and the people who are writing them and even in 99.99999 of our staff given that this is not a time to pat ourselves on the back um something slipped up given to the situation that led us to talk about this and i really want to challenge everybody in this room to find a way to improve this process the trust that children will be safe when they are with us is the number one thing that makes the school work you're just talking about that in different context this can't happen again we have to do better so please over the next until we meet again i would love to hear some ways we can do that and we'd love to hear suggestions from you and the board as well i'm thinking on as hard as i can well i have to say one thing about that and that is that no matter how hard you try people will be doing things and if they are you know um savvy enough if they're deceptive enough if they're careful enough in what they do they will get away with things and i know tom you've been on the board for you know maybe close to two years now but we've seen a lot of different things come before us and you know it was not based on any person not seeing something not reporting something it was just that when people are engaged in something like that they're very deceptive very discreet in some ways and it's very hard to discern so i would just like to say that i don't personally blame anybody for that happening or say i think that we have what's in place and people are encouraged to come forward we have it embedded in our rules that if you see something if you know something if you hear something if you suspect something you are required to come forward so that's about as much as we can do to get to the root of things at times and we would hope that people wouldn't do this to kids but having a background in child protective services i know a lot of really bad things happen to kids and this is one of them so anyhow i don't want to belabor this but um yes we will be doing our very best to make sure that this sort of thing does not happen yes thank you liz um just to give some historical perspective on where we've been and where we are now i go back quite a ways with this school district and starting in 1973 i was a union representative for employees and incidents of sexual harassment in the first 10 years that i was involved with this district were were not handled well it just was a different time in our world and society and people were afraid to come forward and they were afraid to back up their fellow employees that you know witnesses were afraid to come forward what we have to now in the way of training and support and the the role of tina in the process that goes all the way through our complaint procedure is way ahead of what we dealt with in the 70s and i so appreciate that people have you know have just said this is not acceptable and we will not tolerate abuse of our kids number one but our fellow employees as well as you know anyone else this just is not okay and i appreciate the work that we've done as a district over the years to improve our policies and our attitude quite frankly our attitude has changed i i agree and one of the other things that i think is very important is that the whistle-blower protections are critical to making sure that people know they're going to be protected if they speak out they're going to be protected and and there will not be retaliation so anyhow with that unless there's anything further i believe this concludes our meeting and we will adjourn and we will go into our closed session so thank you all for being here and participating and um once again we are very sorry about the problem that happened with zoom

yes okay is there a second second stage all those in favor uh mike clark hi hi james guy [Music] monique i lucas look at five look what's up motion carries five to zero class 5 staff pay increase questions leave no questions motion please motion to increase returning classified staff wages not including those in the annual wage review list by 25 cents per hour for the 20 20 21 school year per second [Music] zero next order administrating staff pay increase questions being none promotion increased return on the military contract for stacey reid dave watkins match bringing guard along and lindsey graf by 0.9 for the 2021 school year a second thank you mike thorpe seconds all those in favor monique hi lucas stacy higgins i died four five closure carries five zero next door um classified directors pay increase entertain a motion increase their returning classified director's salary for diver diana hess by 0.9 for the 2020-2021 school year second all those in favor monique honey i lucas look at life [Music] licensed nurse pay increase my nurses pay increase increase nurses [Music] by 0.9 for the 2021 school year [Music] 0.

investigations and reporting are completed by both the anti-bullying specialist and the building principle pursuant with all timelines and reporting requirements established in our district policy we use an integrated process to foster safe and positive learning conditions for all students by reinforcing and strengthening a school's climate and culture through prevention and intervention efforts along with targeted professional development for our students and staff our board receives monthly reports in board docs regarding the number of reports of hib that's hiv harassment termination bullying the status of the investigations and the type and nature of the discipline or other measured imposed all discipline is in accordance with our etsd student code of conduct and in the largest and most important sense we use both district-wide and school-wide programs to teach students about character education peer relationships diversity and social skills in order to enable them to make responsible and informed decisions within our society and interdependent world the other summer update i wanted to offer is it's been two weeks since our last board meeting and that is in covet time about two months in terms of the the different facets of reopening so the wanted to say a word about a bus information just because i know that's one of the next items that parents are wondering about so we are uh all hands on deck preparing that bus information that if i gave this the theme to the summer it would be doing more in less time than ever before and our bus transportation office has had to create not just one route per kid but two so you have cohort a cohort b and uh they will have this finalized by tomorrow and we'll be pushing them out through parent portal as soon as we can after that um i will be including information in my friday newsletter my friday email to parents um about the busing so just please know um you know it's coming soon and we thank you for your patience um the let's see here um also i want to announce something really positive we recently just um this week received a hundred and eighty four thousand dollar uh digital divide grant from the from the department of education so we're really excited about that um i want to thank mrs mcgulick for her work with that with putting that grant together it's going to enable us to purchase about 700 chromebooks for our students and just gets us that much closer to um you know a true one-to-one device to student ratio um so that's that's a great um update um other donations as well just want to give a shout out if you can see at home that we got um so the cooper health foundation and the norcross foundation put out the word that they had masks to donate to school districts so i reached out to them and they very quickly basically met what i asked for um just about which was a if we could have a mass for every staff member so these have been distributed to schools and um it's in our board agenda but i just wanted to say that word of thanks to them and also another thanks to uh life touch our yearbook company again if you could see at home i'm holding up mr dante and our personnel directors we they created for us at no cost um basically like face badges that our staff can wear um to just help show you know who we are um despite the masks and uh those are those are in we have them and they're being distributed to our schools so everybody will have those in time for tuesday and then on the in-service front we've we had a day two finished today we've got day three tomorrow i'm very thankful to our the work of our restart committee and our meetings with our teachers union to help coordinate the addition of that third day event service we took the june in service day and moved it to tomorrow to provide teachers with more time to prepare and it's just been a great energy in the buildings the last few days in addition to all the technical professional development as far as google medical classroom and other aspects just to uh to get practiced again at being together you know um is is uh can't be overestimated and um so it's just been it's been fantastic um a lot of energy and then lastly just um a few thank yous publicly um you know everyone who worked this summer our administration supervisor support staff to again like i said try to do more than they've ever done before in less time than ever before our teachers for all their work that they're doing um and i i definitely even just leaving here later in the afternoon there were still teachers here getting ready our facilities department for all they're doing transportation and lastly just thank you to our board of education um for having like as mr sakira said the third meeting in less than a 30-day period uh you know and and that's that's um that might be a new record i don't know but um it's certainly you know from from our standpoint in terms of uh recommending tonight it's um it's very appreciated to as it lets us have this discussion in the most timely manner that we could um instead of waiting for the end of september when our meeting was regularly scheduled so just so thank you to our board for that and that concludes my superintendent's comments okay thank you dr smith all right at this point we're going to move to item 6 new business i need a motion to approve items 6.1 through 6.5 do i have a motion motion by mr lanzalata do i have a second second it by miss barbara giovanni any questions or comments pertaining to items six one through six five all right seeing none let's go to a roll call please thank you okay at this point in time we will be moving to public comment for any item of interest again just to reiterate we are asking you that when you call in uh to to please state your name and address clearly uh we are also asking uh that you turn off uh or or comp mute your uh live stream and talk to us on the phone any questions you have we you will then hang up the phone turn the volume up we will reiterate the questions for the public and then we will answer those questions it is very important because of the potential for high volume of calls uh that you limit yourself to three minutes per person okay uh we will uh if you exceed that we will ask you to uh to to wrap it up uh when you get to that three-minute time mark uh so please please do so okay uh this meeting will now be open to the public referencing any items of interest however if your questions or comments pertain to litigation student or personnel items or negotiations we'd ask that you see the superintendent after the meeting or email them after the meeting since we do not discuss these matters in public please limit your comments to three minutes per person i'm going to give them mike over to you state your name good evening this is russ bowles vice president of etea and a teacher at the macy i come to you representing nearly 700 members of the eastern township education association i want to ask the board of education one last time to consider the better option of full remote learning or switching to a half-day schedule like other districts continue to do we have heard that we're going back because our plan was approved by the county superintendent and the state many other districts who have chosen all remote learning also had their plans approved just yesterday one of the largest districts in our area chose to change to all remote learning because it was the right thing to do in a statement released by cherry hill superintendent he stated and i quote our school buildings are prepared to welcome our staff and students for the year but we must honor the concerns our staff have raised we are asking you to recognize and honor our concerns we want to get back to school we want to see our students but we need to wait until it's safe we thank the board of education tonight for approving the ionizers with that said why would we not wait until they're installed i'm going to go through or i'm not going to go through all the other reasons the plan doesn't work because we've sent you all the facts we've sent you all the supporting documentation i'm asking one of you tonight to make a motion this evening to switch to remote learning or half-day in-person instruction with all that being said mr meagan i have to say that it's a little disappointing that the safety of students and staff is not your top priority you are elected to the board of education to do what is in the best interests of the community you have failed to uphold your oath and you should resign thank you all right we'll give it a minute go ahead call your own hold on caller um i just want to um make a um corollary remark to um what mr bulls just shared so it's it's it's it's really important i think for everyone to understand that our board of education members they do not get paid they do this out of their own goodwill out of the purity of heart of serving our community and these decisions are extremely complex anytime but during a complicated pandemic which is unprecedented they are unimaginably complicated everyone here one thing i truly appreciate about our board which makes it a joy for me to come to work every day is that no matter what our perspectives we all respect that our perspectives are well thought out they're well considered and they are genuine everyone needs to know that so we can disagree and that's okay we all care about what's best thank you good evening it's debbie van curan president of the eve shim township education association i'm calling again on behalf of the nearly 700 members of the etea and the students of our school district first i want to thank dr smith for listening to our concerns about the ventilation systems in our buildings the atmos air ionizers are a reputable product and will help our air quality beyond the pandemic i just wish that these ionizers would be installed before students and staff enter the buildings on tuesday september 8th board members i've sent you information from a buckeye chemist and a ryobi rep and both stated the products should not be used together i understand that we have used the buckeye product before but not in this way and we also understand that everyone has worked hard on this plan to get all of the pieces in place by tuesday september 8th kudos to our building principals for the amazing job they have done tackling this unbelievable task but to be honest we just aren't ready mr dante has tried his best to make accommodations to staff members but just this week there is a long list of names that have been denied 100 remote teaching even though their doctor's note clearly states that their health is in grave danger we do not have the necessary staff needed to begin school on september 8th what will happen when people are sick and we do not have enough coverage our staff has been in service yesterday and today on the cameras there are many problems like glitches lag time freezing and teachers not being able to see more than five students at home while teaching the cohort at school when i left school today all the cameras were not installed yet and all staff did not have a dependable computer more pd will not fix our current tech problems when the technology doesn't work kids are going to suffer and lose interest parents will be frustrated it will be impossible for our tech support staff to keep up with the ongoing issues you may feel that you have a good plan in place but this is not the plan for this moment in time it may be in a few weeks or in a few months our healthy staff wants to go back to school there just aren't enough of them we just aren't ready we need more time to iron out the kinks we are being asked to build a house with just a can of nails i'm asking board members tonight one of you please to make a motion this evening like mr bull said to consider starting all remote or in the very least have to until we have all of the building materials necessary to be successful thank you for your time hi this is kelly wilk 28 paddock road i'd like to know a little bit more about the substitute teacher's line item in the agenda i think what ms van curen had to say was very interesting i'm curious if you could shed some more life light on what our staffing situation is right now that we're approving substitutes and who they are thank you thank you for folks at home um the question was about line item 6.4 approved substitute teachers in additional roles uh so that's that's a essentially um a measure if we need it to be able to you have staff be available in different roles it's proactive and anticipatory of the many many many types of situations that can come up that we will need to be responsive to um in a quick moment um and so it's it's another safety measure in fact for our district thank you go ahead carl you're on with the board hi tom mitchell 26 washington drives thank you board education and dr smith i'm calling as a parent of a daughter who is a disabled she is in a disabled class very concerned of the year i'm aware that other self-contained classrooms in the district have a designated class in class and designate a remote teacher the learning disability disabled classrooms are the only ones in which the teacher is responsible for both the class learners and the remote teachers this is dealer specifically elementary even more concerning is the fact that the classroom is a fourth and fifth grade split which means one teacher is responsible for managing for different cohorts both remote and in person fourth and fifth grade learning disabled classes this is a learning population where the need is greatest however the teachers attention will be so divided that they will not be able to provide and receive education in the proper manner it is unfair expectation of the teacher and has the consequences that students will suffer my daughter is going into fifth grade and she was in the contained classes all last year as well additionally in the general ed population each grade has each grade level has a designated remote teacher students with a learning disability should be given the same opportunity to have a designated remote teacher as all other students dr smith i'd like to know what the answer is to that question thank you thank you i think um you know we can also i'll answer your question i'm very glad to do that and i also think because of the particulars of each scenario as we uh if you're um willing i'd be also glad to talk with you tomorrow in greater depth um so what i what i'd say first off is um there are many different situations across the district in all grades that have come about throughout our effort to create pairings and cohorts for each of the students so there are there most certainly are students who are all remote who are um in you know not paired with an all remote teacher um and and there are some students who are all remote who are paired with an all remote teacher we we tried to do that as much as we could and it was not possible in all cases there are um a number of different situations where uh we had to make choices about um trying to you know provide the best opportunities for every student for example there are some students there most of our all remote teachers are paired with all remote students from that same school in a few instances we have all remote teachers who are paired with schools from multiple schools and a few parents have reached out to me about that um which i really appreciate those those emails and because i again we understand how um how real this is for each of our families and we continue to try and we we will continue to try even throughout um each day of the year to improve each individual situation um so um again there are to your to your question there are children right now who are all remote who are not with an all-remote teacher they're they're with a teacher who is teaching hybrid in person um and uh you know as far as far as your daughter's particular situation we can why don't we talk more about that tomorrow as well thank you please turn down your computer in the background and all right you know as far as as far as you daughter's situation we can point out we talk more about that turn off your computer in the background please my name is erin mcglynn and i'm a teacher over at marlton middle school today we got an email from mr dante about how the covid the covet codes that we would have to use in elio for reporting an absence how does the board justify the use of employee paid sick and personal days when that employee is forced into quarantine after contact with infected students if you could clarify that scenario and explain what the thought process is behind using our paid sick days and personal days when we're not choosing when we're not sick we're not choosing to take personal days we have we're not choosing to be in the building to be teaching and we would prefer remote learning because it's safer thank you thank you yeah thank you for the question this is mr danteen is this thing in the scenario that you're describing there are actually several different options for teachers one is to use paid sick days another option is to use the expanded paid sick leave act which allows 10 days at regular pay which is capped at 511 a day and that does not require the use of any sick days another option would be to use unpaid fmla or an unpaid leave of absence and that is by code through the family's first coronavirus relief act good call you're on with the board oh hi uh this is joy boone i'm a teacher at bieler elementary and throughout this what i've been hearing i know i thank the board for all they've done i appreciate the ionizers i know you're doing a lot in a short amount of time but what's really clear is we're just not ready okay the technology is not working properly the cleaning supply situation isn't proper we don't have adequate staffing for all our needs that was just clear because uh some teachers are remote and some are not and and some children have remote teachers and some do not there's so many things that remain a huge uncertainty like lunch and the buses we're just not ready to open our doors on september the 8th i would ask you to please consider the safety of the children in the safety of the staff and consider a delay or a return to half days only thank you thank you donna rose nero transportation rep i'm at three houston road marlton i keep hearing dr smith talk about the many safety precautions that are already in place i'm wondering what safety precautions have been put in place for the children riding in a bus 14 inches apart head to head coming within six to eight inches of a driver's space every time they get on and off of the bus as the only thing that we have been told is to put your windows down two inches minimum in the rain in the snow and in the cold and open your hatches and that is the ventilation that we're supposed to have these children and the drivers ride in for sometimes 40 45 minutes these kids are on a bus i don't think that that is proper safety precautions and covered 19 times these buses are going to have the kids sneezing and coughing all over each other you're going to have drivers out and you're not going to be able to get the kids in because we don't have enough drivers as it is so i would really ask for you to consider what the national highway transportation safety association passed the first week of august to put plexiglas barriers around the drivers and have enough room to spread these kids out on the spot it's like riding in a tin can they're in heat they're in cold and they're going to be germ infested i again ask to think about this i appreciate what you're doing in the schools but you need to do something with these buses we are definitely not ready and it doesn't matter if we go a full day or a half a day the buses are not safe i don't know how else to say this but it is just not safe please consider some extra measures for these buses thank you um ms rose thank you so much for the call um i appreciate you know your your voice and questions and i appreciated the time we had on um saturday recently um to talk in front of the administration building um that was helpful for me also to hear your perspective um that day and and now i hope you got the we we responded um to your questions in writing recently i hope you received those through your um union leadership i know that they were important to us and we definitely gave you responses to those i also appreciate the opportunity to just talk through a little bit again the safety measures for our buses um and i hope you were able to participate in the training that we had today and yesterday for our drivers mr donahue who's our facilities manager trained our drivers in using the spray bottle and the mister which was great we also have a a wonderful detail which i put in my friday newsletter last friday that over that about 50 of our buses currently have less than 12 students so what that means is that each student there's one student per row and we're sitting them zigzag so you have a student we have a you know the the inside of the bus looks a little bit like an airplane because we've got row numbers and letters you know like one a one e two a two e so the kids can see where their seats are and we're seeing them one a two e three a four e so they go zigzag from window to window across all the way so it vastly increases the spacing for the students and again my gratitude to our transportation office as they know they knew and they were trying in their um routing their bus route creation to uh make them cdc guidance adhering plans and uh so that is again for parents who for whom from whom i've asked tonight for some patience in terms of us communicating those routes that's another reason why it takes some time because we really are trying to balance the routes toward the you know managing the number of kids on the bus there are other details as well but um but those are just a few and thank you again for your call good evening mindy coffee 25 south maple avenue good evening board of education i would like to comment on the request of the etea to start with all remote or half days i'm confused as to how a half day or an all remote day or going all remote will solve the problem of technology or staffing which they have cited i'm also unsure about how changing course two days prior to the start of school will provide teachers peace of mind or families in our community families which mr bulls noted are our duty to serve who have said and by and large more than 75 percent of them have said are ready to come back in a hybrid bottle how this will provide them equity for child care access to education and a free and appropriate education if you recall back in july when the board voted to move forward with the hybrid plan i made a plea to continue with a plan that would create equity for the most amount of families who have voiced their opinions via our survey for access to in-person education i urge the board tonight to stay the course and allow access to education that our students desperately need thank you thank you yes hi um this is sue wilder 11 granville court and i want to ask the board of education as well as the superintendent how many of their children are going to school come september and how many of them will be remote i also would like to ask why they feel the need when most of the districts in the neighboring towns are doing remote why the schools in our own town do not care about our teachers and our staff and are sending them to school when they should be remote cherry hill is one of the largest districts next town to us and they are remote it is time to put the teachers and the staff first and make the school begin remote and revisit this in november because kovid has killed 30 people that i know so how many of the board of ed and how many of the teachers and how many superintendents in town and out of town are sending their children thank you thank you uh comments and question at this moment as far as i know and again it's a pandemic and everything's tentative but um all lenape region school districts are still opening for in-person instruction next week and my daughter's really looking forward to going to school in person next week um i just want to say yes my voice will be in person for two full days each week and it's interesting because just this morning watching the news with my mother whom i'm visiting here north jersey went over the districts and two-thirds of all districts in the state are going back in a hybrid model one third are doing full remote so i i think that's important for me to know but yes my voice will be in lots of memory thank you um and they are all going back to the hybrid as our mind i have three children i have three children at jagger elementary and they will all be going back to school in the hybrid you might as well hear you want to uh i'll give the answer you know you know and i'll do it the best candid and honest honesty that i can um at the 11th hour my my wife and i had a discussion and we decided that my daughter was going to be all virtual but you have to understand the context of the situation uh before uh before you know the flies of hypocrisy crossed my face um one of the major reasons why that is is because we have three different family we're a family of of three people going into three different school districts and we were we were highly concerned about uh basically three different petri dishes uh in our household it was not an easy decision and and this is it's personal um you know and i i'm sharing this with you uh you know part of my personal life and and i don't think my my wife might appreciate this very much that i'm doing this um but you know i'm telling you this because uh it was it was a frank conversation that we had in our house all right and uh one in the end of the day that you know i i i went with with what what my wife wanted okay um now as you heard here i mean well over majority of school board members are um and but you also know where my stand was on some of these issues but i also believe miss nola is correct you know two-thirds of schools are going in hybrid uh and and dr smith is also correct that that's that includes everyone in the lenape regional school district all eight sending districts and and lenape regional i spent all day today in in cherokee high school i will spend all day tomorrow in cherokee high school i will spend all of next week after labor day there i will be in there with no air conditioning i will be in there instead of having 10 students a day i will see 15 students per period okay my wife will be doing the same thing in a middle school i'm not going to reveal what district she's in i think that's you know i think privacy should prevail a little bit there but she will be doing the same thing all right um i i you know i i understand it i i get it i i get the concerns and you know i i i you know i think about it quite a bit um but i your your situation in mind in terms of of being in educators we're going down the same path although with i believe different trials and tribulations but i wanted to be honest with you and i i didn't want to cower uh that my daughter was going all virtual i didn't think that would be right but i want you also to understand the situation that my family was in you may have a fact you might be in a situation similar to us uh you you may not so i just wanted to be honest about that um i just want to add that in terms of a board of education being representative of a community i think it's it's it's actually great that um that there is not a hundred percent uh in person within our board because our community is not 100 within our board you know and the percentage of in person on our board might be slightly larger than the percent in the larger community the 72.5 percent in our larger community but it's still important that you know that people in our community i appreciate mr visicare are you sharing um your family's choice because it just shows again how representative our board is of our community and um again we are fortunate for that so can i make one more statement i'm so sorry i'm gonna i want to just make one more statement upon this i got an email um and i i don't know if the rest of the board did uh from a gentleman it was right on the uh right after our august 20th meeting uh we got an email and one of the one of the complaints in the email was that we were talking about the students that were going into school but we weren't talking enough about the students that were going to be all virtual um and to that that gentleman and i i have a lot of respect for for his his letter and and for what he discussed um i if you are worried about your your child not getting an adequate education by being all virtual in a in a hybrid model i'm in the same boat as you uh and and trust me as i say this i will be monitoring it just like you will okay so for those of you who've chosen to put your students all virtual and you've heard us talk about hybrid and talk about in in classroom learning i i i got the sense that you feel forgotten and i don't want you to feel that and dr smith is right there is diversity on this board and it is allowing us to to make these difficult decisions um it's it's allowing us even even the decision on how we're voting on ionizers you know um and i didn't want to say this until later but we have serious budget issues we have serious budget issues no one's no one's going to dress that up no one's going to do that and we did not get a full you know 9-0 vote okay but you know what people who voted the way they did uh they voted because they were addressing other concerns all right i i have to be very clear about that i don't believe anyone tonight should be tendering any type of resignation for any of the vote that they did today all right uh myself and mr meegan we we we don't agree on on on everything uh we have very frank conversations about stuff but i would be remiss if i said i i you know i understand where he's going i know i know what he's he's worried about he's worried about march he's worried about the budget he's worried about about the the million dollars that we have to worry about all right and i get that all right so there what i'm trying to wrap up here and say is yes it might not be full here in one way shape or form but this is the board that i would hope that you would want one that has diversity one that has differing opinions uh one that that debates wholeheartedly and and one that is is you know trying its best to show you empathy even if you may not feel that uh we we are we are weighing your concerns away on us uh deeply uh and it the masks may cover that and um but i have to say that that it's there and and and you may come take my words back at me and and and punch me with it over and that's fine but this is this is kind of where we are at this moment go ahead yes hi my name is michelle vizia and i'm a teacher at demacy middle school i just wanted to ask the board if they could share whether or not the children that are in school are going full day or half day because everybody reported that their children were going to school one indicated remote but is it full day or half day that's my first question and then i have another question we won't have time tonight to go uh kind of have like an open forum discussion about all the questions just because um we know there are more questions to come but we'd like to hear all we definitely want to hear all your questions um so my question again was um members of the board shared whether or not their children were going to school um attending a hybrid uh form of schooling but i didn't hear whether or not that schooling was full day or half day so that's my first question i was saying uh we won't we don't have um time it was it was really uh wonderful of mr fiscaro and our board members to all respond to the prior question from the community member but um it seems um hard to do that for each caller moving forward we have no idea how many other callers there are for example and it's just um so if you could just name all of your questions for us and then we can figure out how best to respond good good keep going with your questions okay so um rather than a question i just wanted to share with the board uh on a personal note um because mr fisakara did reveal some personal information as well that many of us in on staff have personal situations i my medical note was denied because of staffing i have a husband who is twice widowed so i am his third wife we have eight children together um he is very apprehensive with me attending full day um and so we all have personal situations of our own that come into play here and that is why we as the staff are asking for the board to be more considerate of us in what we're asking and that is for either full remote or half day at this time thank you so that was all i wanted to say at this time but i would like to hear about these board members and the children who are attending school whether or not that is full day or half day thank you and this for everyone's will donio the solicitor for the board of education i i'm really uncomfortable with the board members and i appreciate the board members and i commend you for answering the question about what your own children are doing but i really don't think it's appropriate uh in this form and it's really not a matter of board business for you to share your own personal child uh educational uh elements i i applaud you for having done so but i really don't think i think we've exhausted that area of inquiry really and i'm uncomfortable with individual board members uh doing that um and in in in you know in in large measure also because of the um well let me just leave it at that i i just don't think it's appropriate i don't think it's appropriate level of inquiry in a public setting like this and it and clearly also this is not a cross-examination i mean it's not okay let me ask a follow-up let me ask a follow-up that kind of thing so that's all i wanted to interject in that regard hi uh i'm calling my name is gwen egan 49 lakeside drive marlton new jersey oh let me turn this down so sorry anyway i am a teacher at the macy middle school and um just want to comment on a few things first of all thank you for the ionizers i think it's the safe way to go i would like to see school waiting to start until those ionizers are actually installed in the buildings regarding technology hey we have great technology staff but i have to tell you we are struggling it's a lot to learn and we're kind of trying to cram it in in a short period of time and we could really use another week to get ready and i'm not exaggerating at all like my brain is totally fried i have some concerns about the um the buckeye eco-neutral solution looking at the sds sheet it has a lot of warnings about using it as a mist for severe burns and eye damage i hope that the staff is giving proper eye covering and that there's fresh water available should they get that in their eyes by mistake if anyone is confused why eta would prefer a half day and why it would prefer him remote i'll tell you because we are anxious and we don't feel safe um my husband is over age 65.

special educational related services staff pay increase mostly allows step of movement will relate to service personnel for the 2021 school year thank you stacy aye higgins eye mike mike thorpe motion carriage 5-0 now we can do it now that we finished the business uh we can move we are adjourned thank you thanks everyone have a good day thank you good bye guys thank you

i am the primary caregiver for my mother who's over age she's 92. i'm concerned about giving them to them i understand it was very uh nice for mr festa cara to share his concerns but please believe that we have concerns well on their valid concerns as a science teacher i'll be interacting with over 100 students per week okay some other staff will be they teach six classes 130 people per week and these are these are good concerns and finally um i know some of you have children that are in the lenape district they're going remote hey i'm glad for them i'm glad for you we would like the same consideration excuse me not remote half day half day and taking that lunch component out would really give us ease of mind all right thank you for listening thank you go ahead call you're on with the board now we have people just calling you hanging up now i'm sorry before we go um usually at the bottom here we have an announcement section so if there's any board member who needs to state any like final pieces uh this is the time to do it any any board member wish to miss fleming um can we pass the mic to her i'm sorry i've been struggling since we took our first vote um unfortunately i did not bring it up in a timely manner to mr fizzicaro to have it on the agenda in listening and reading the emails that we've gotten in the past final days um i certainly love the fact that we're getting the ionizer ionizers i think that's above and beyond and i really do appreciate that from hearing statements the past couple board meetings we've had from getting emails i have major concerns still so i i i again would request perhaps that we do consider half day i know we're late in the game it bothers me the most that we're having lunch um involved and again with some of the bus considerations i'm struggling to understand why they can't get the barrier and so perhaps uh dr smith can help me with that and i was not aware that even with the doctor's notes that some of the teaching staff would still be denied it just didn't occur to me so again i just wanted on record that i am i would prefer that we were not full day hybrid at this point i know we cannot change it at this time but and i do want the public to know that these decisions have been grueling these are no decisions that any of us are making lightly and so i think it's important that they understand that as well um so that's what i wanted to say thank you very much yes no go ahead yes i just wanted to say a few things the first thing is um i i i'd like to know as well about the bus drivers and protecting them do we have we looked into that and not necessarily plexiglass but if you've taken an uber recently people have some kind of you know thinner plastic film between themselves have we considered this to better protect the bus drivers i know we'll be wearing that then the children will be wearing that um so you know i'd love to hear more about that if you can discuss that i know very very late but that has been on my mind as well the other thing the only other thing i wanted to say is to address the concerns about spending money on the ionizers i know at this time it is a lot and i can understand mr mcdigan's concern we will serve on the finance committee and yes i am very concerned about spending this money but looking further into the ionizers moving forward not covered pandemic it really will greatly improve indoor air quality they will be they can reduce the amount of dust and molds in classrooms along with bacteria and viruses so i think in the long term reducing the absence of our children and of our staff if you could help with that then yeah for um once mr me again we will have our work cutting up for us in finance committee moving forward and i do appreciate you always keeping that on your mind so that was it thank you just uh to respond to miss fleming and ms noel's uh comments and thoughts thank you both um and specifically with regard to the bus driver and the bus uh so we can definitely look into uh adding you know what it would what it would be i mean there's certainly uh um i think it's an emerging area i'm not sure that the um it's conclusive you know adding a hard plexiglas uh piece around the driver could i think i'm picturing that scale again that invisible scale that's always in front of us um the uh but perhaps something uh that is um more like shower curtain-like that's softer uh could uh have the same barrier effect without um being impeding movement if if the driver needed to move quickly um so we will look into that so thank you both all right i i will close out uh by saying one last thing uh on my end uh and that is we we just um obviously approved these ionizers today and and i believe strongly in these and any added extra protection i think is incredibly important for our students and staff but i got to look towards the future for a moment too all right we and this is administratively and for this board we now from here on in need to think very clearly about what we're doing with with everything that we spend we have to look at everything all right um i i appreciate the words of dr smith he he is he is uh put in a sentiment on a sentiment on on being careful about spending uh but we really need to address that now all right um this was important i i i believe that these ionizers were important and uh and i understand the cost of it and there are going to be some more covered costs that you know in response to covet that we're going to have to endure a few more of those and i i would imagine that's going to happen but we also need to take a look at the bigger picture uh because right now this this feels bad i mean you know in terms of there's been a lot of back and forth and and and you know people are upset or they're their their people are arguing over over over facebook or whatever it is and this issue's hot all right but i think everyone has seriously forgotten the blazing sun of an issue that is about to cross the horizon in in just a few months and things things are are not going to be good and and you might be listening to me and there's about a little about 230 people listening right now and you're like what is he talking about i'm talking about the thing i've been talking about for now two years all right you know we we have over four million dollars you know we lost in state aid funding and and that hurts in a 77 million dollar budget that's that's not like i had seventy seven dollars and i lost four dollars i'm okay it's a little different here all right so we really need we really need to focus on that uh as as as a as a board uh as as a administrative team and as a as a community all right we have to keep an eye on that so with that being said i will ask for a motion to adjourn motion by miss ryan do i have a second second by miss fleming all in favor thank you have a wonderful night so do foreign

good afternoon chris cooper superintendent of clearwater school here to give you another brief update the best news that i have today is that we've been having school there were days that we wondered if this moment would ever come but we've we started on tuesday we've completed four days of school and it's been outstanding i just want to take a minute to thank everybody that's worked so hard to make that happen i want to thank our staff and all the time that each of them has put in to get ready for this week i want to thank our students for the amazing attitude that they've had this week from preschool to seniors the kids have been outstanding with all the procedures and protocols and different methods that we had to put in place they have just rolled with it from the masks to temperature scans we have had very few issues and everybody's doing their best to do what we have to do to have school this year and that's greatly appreciated i want to thank our parents many of you did a lot of great work with your students to get them prepared for this week and what it might look like and i want to thank our from community for really just rallying around our school and encouraging our educators to to do the best we can and to provide the an outstanding education for each student this year so many of our students are on site we do have around 60 students that are getting their education through clearwater school district remotely this year and that has went as well as could be expected this week i think for the most part we've had a few exceptions a glitch here or there but i do know by our second day we had every one of those students engaged in someone in our learning activities and so many of those glitches were fixed quit quickly it is a challenge to provide six hours of educational opportunities and activities at home is a challenge for students staff and parents we appreciate the partnerships that we have with those parents and the work that you're doing also if you're a remote student a parent of a remote student know that we are continuing to work with the kansas state department of education to try to streamline the logs that we're required to keep to ensure that we're giving a good education so we're looking at lots of things to try to ease that burden on parents but it is we also want those students to have a great education so if something changes and we can have everybody back on site that they can make a smooth transition when that does happen we have formed a new committee this week called our learning options committee and that team has some administrators board members and some members our community who are in the health profession and their role is going to be to provide advice to our school board as community cove data changes as to what we should be doing in our schools just want to shout out to them and say i greatly appreciate them volunteering to take on that role because we are going to have many challenging discussions ahead i i presume um but we seek their advice and appreciate their expertise one of the things that i wanted to mention is our activity attendance if you're not aware uh our activities like volleyball football will be limited attendance and the way our school district's doing it is each participant for home games is getting four bracelets that you can wear on your wrist and that bracelet allows you to buy your way into the game by a ticket into the game and unfortunately if you don't have one of those we can't allow you to attend because under the county guidance and our abctl league rules that were just recently adopted we need to limit attendance at those activities to keep everybody safe so like tonight we have a football game at wellington and each of our participants got two bracelets so if you do not have a bracelet that has the clearwater logo on it for tonight unfortunately you won't be able to attend that game our games will be live streamed and i want to thank heath elliott our assistant principal at the high school for making that happen if you need that information reach out to our high school or to me and we will get you that information about how to view our activities remotely this year one thing that you may have heard of the usda announced this week that they're going to continue the summer lunch feeding program which we are still working through to try to figure out exactly what that does mean and our director of food service brenda hastings has been in many meetings and many phone calls this week to try to get that all figured out what it looks like is that sometime soon maybe as soon as september 14th we'll be able to provide our meals to all students free this year and that has been extended through december until or until the money runs out which i can't predict when that would be but i want to let everybody know that that is very likely coming but i also want to emphasize that it is important that we still get the applications for free and reduced lunch because those applications affect other parts of our budget so if you're considering applying for a free lunch if you've had an economic change because of covet or not because of cobit if you could fill that out and go ahead and get that to the school it is important for us and we'd appreciate it if you would do that lastly i want to say be safe out there this labor day weekend enjoy family the outdoors it's going to be hot and windy which is not unusual for kansas the first of september so a typical labor day weekend i'm hoping to get down to the home place where i grew up not far from here over in cedarvale this weekend and enjoy some of the outdoors would would hope that we can all enjoy some things and not cause any more spread of kova that would put us in jeopardy of not being able to have school sometime soon so i've appreciated this week getting to see all the kids has brought new life to our district in many ways and we hope to be able to continue that's all i have for today i look forward to meeting those of you that i haven't and getting to know more and more about this wonderful community of clearwater have a great safe labor day weekend you

hi west chicago i'm mrs wojcikowski i'm the orchestra teacher here and i've got a special tune for you all right guys so you can probably guess that did not sound good and that is because i didn't know the notes and i didn't prepare my part in order to come back to school and be successful you really got to make sure that you've done your legwork beforehand and you're prepared for your day so what i should have done is i should have practiced so that i can be present for everybody else that's also in the classroom then we can focus on communication discussion expression all the actual real fun stuff really making music when you're well prepared and you're well practiced and you come to school even online with the right mindset you can engage and discuss and get the most out of your [Music] classes

i'd like to call the meaning to order roll call roll call dennis bender donna davis here maria oppara rick rawley wilson cell here [Music] 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 public comments kaylee do we have any public comments today we do um we have a few um that came in they did not indicate the section that they belong to but based on the content and personnel i believe it should be appropriately read prior to closed session the first one regarding officer carl willis school please carl and i first met at a star hearing over 20 years ago at that time i was employed with the apple valley fire protection district and the fire chiefs bart lewis allowed me the privilege of being a panel member while on duty over these years i have had the opportunity to see how carl interacts with family members and their true children many of them are angry frightened about the star process or even homeless in many cases carl has had to locate these families to deliver the subpoena during that time he would reassure them of the help available and the benefits of the tsar hearing because of his kind respectful manner these parents appeared before the panel and were helped by all the resources available having carl at the hearings was also reassuring to all the panel members because he had a way of calming and diffusing situations also the families were reassured seeing carl there because they had already interacted with him and he had made them feel at ease at my last star hearing in 2019 the panel was informed that carl would no longer be the school police officer delivering the subpoenas issuing citations and attending the hearings he is such a benefit to the tsar process taking him from this position just seems so very wrong i believe that carl is a man of character who wears his school police uniform with pride he gives all respect therefore gaining respect in turn respectfully submitted rita gay star panel member thank you let's see next i have oh i'm sorry i thought you were done yeah my name is emmett tucker i have been a resident of apple valley my entire life i have coached for many years for hcysl and storm i am writing on behalf of my good friend carl willis my daughter was going to be 14 years old as you may know he has always given me tips on school safety for her and advice on what i can do and what she can do this man has been a huge help to our kids at every school taking away someone who cares about kids more than most would be a mistake i wish there were more people like him in this world i am against willis being moved out of the school patrol 100 we need him right where he is thank you the next comment is from jasmine gonzalez to whom this made concern carl willis is a pillar in the apple valley community mr willis has always brought a sense of security to all those around him i have personally known mr willis for over 20 years he is not only one of the most professional men that i have ever known but also one who forced nothing but compassion and love into his job and community community is defined as a feeling of fellowship with others as a result of sharing common attitudes interests and goals this definition is exactly what mr willis brings to the people of apple valley he is a person who is not only well liked but also very much respected in the apple valley community having someone that is so respected does nothing but help the people of apple valley feel as if they are safer safer with someone who is familiar more comfortable with someone they have grown up with and happier knowing that my daughter along with my nieces and nephews are growing up in a community that is loved and protected by officers such as mr willis he has helped me and my family on many occasions when he is called on he comes with no hesitation he goes out of his way for his community and it shows through the amount of people that he is admired by throughout apple valley it is rare to find any person that has worked in a field for as long as mr willis has and still shows up every day happy and willing to work this only comes when you find your true calling it only happens when you love the work that you do mr willis loves the work that he does and it shows it shows to every person that has had the pleasure of crossing paths while he wears that uniform growing up i have always admired the man mr willis is he is a man of integrity his character speaks for itself i am thankful for mr willis and all of his services he has given to apple valley jasmine the next comment is from lisa gonzalez i have known mr willis for nearly 30 years in this time i have known him as a father coach to my children an officer and is as a dear friend as a father he has brought up too respectful and well-rounded young men as a coach to my children he has demonstrated patience and encouraged the boys to always give their best on and off the playing field he has passed down to my children and many others less than in sports and in life that i hope they will carry with them for the rest of their lives i see mr willis all over apple valley in his uniform exuding professionalism and the utmost respect for each person that he encounters he is a positive role model for many children for my children and grandchildren who light up when they see mr willis wearing that uniform proudly as a friend mr willis is so genuine and always willing to lend a hand when is needed there has never been a time that i have personally reached out to mr willis and he has not gone above and beyond for myself or my family i have never come across a person who had anything negative to say about mr willis i have never heard him use any kind of foul language i have never heard him speak ill of anyone he is the epitome of a man with integrity lisa gonzalez the next comment is from alex gonzalez senior to whom it may concern carl is one of the most respectable persons i've met i have personally known carl for 23 years he has remained the same nice and kind man through and through from what i have seen throughout the years carl takes great pride in his job and family carl's son played sports with my son growing up and sometimes was their coach i can assure everyone that carl is the kind of man you want around and protecting the children of the school district carl's respectfulness character and integrity is unmatched he never raises his voice or reacts off of anger and that is an important characteristic to have in an officer whenever carl sees me and my family he never fails to properly greet us and make my wife and kids feel welcomed i truly feel from the bottom of my heart that carl is everything the public should look for in a police officer and role model sincerely alex gonzalez senior the next comment is from linda gibson hello board members i am writing this letter on behalf of carl willis transportation safety and reflecting on the past 13 years of working with carl i know one thing that stands out in my mind and that is that he is always a gentleman we worked very closely at the district police department i feel strongly that he is a fine example of an excellent employee one who is at work every day and greets everyone he comes in contact with in a positive manner he is always pleasant in his speech and never fails to have an encouraging word or something positive to say carl's work ethics are always above the norm whether it's he is handling his bus routes or working with families who are struggling getting children to school he has dealt with some of the angriest parents at these stops and also those who were angry in regards to being served subpoenas for the tsar program at their front doors in both instances carl was such a light for the district keeping a firm but empathetic attitude to solve almost every situation if the solution wasn't easy carl found a way by calling on other district resources that the district offers he didn't just drop the ball he went the extra mile and gave his all to lend a helping hand in whatever the task was the reason i am writing this is to help the board decide on whether or not to reinstate carl's job title his pay increases and equipment necessary to perform his duties i am convinced that in the future when school does reopen that the district will want and need his expertise especially in sar matters to keep the program running smoothly and to help families who have special needs that carl has experience with he has become a well-known district employee in his community and families do appreciate his expertise and caring personality thank you for your time linda gibson retired school police coordinator the next comment is from virginia iran dear abusd board of education i first met carl willis while i was the family center director at phoenix academy mojave mesa in 2007.

during my tenure at phoenix academy carl always was a constant and helpful safety officer he would sometimes drop by the family center and say hello to the families or he would come by during release time after school and greet the families and students he was a friendly face that parents and students could talk to in the phoenix academy community during my tenure at abusd i was also a member of sarp carl was always professional and courteous to everyone including star members and families he would always keep us updated on what he might have discovered out about a family or student when he delivered the subpoena he has a genuine concern for students and families and will help whenever it's possible carl is always professional courteous and helpful in whatever capacity his job directs him i am very grateful that i had the opportunity to work with somebody like carl it made my job so much easier working with families that carl could represent the best of atusd sincerely virginia the next comment is from michael barrow to the abusd board my name is michael alvaro i have had the privilege of knowing and having frequent interactions with officer carl willis on a professional basis for the past 18 years i am currently a special education high school teacher for the san bernardino county superintendent of schools i have served as a special educator with sbcss the past 19 years during that tenure i also spent five years as an interim special education principal supervising and working at a variety of special education classroom sites located within seven school districts including nave usd located throughout the high desert region i have observed and directly interacted with officer willis during his law enforcement assignments with awsd as a safety officer truant officer and police officer he has assisted me and other scc-ss educational staff including administration staff during countless problems and crisis situations involving the students that we serve throughout the past 18 years his extensive knowledge of best practices for diffusing crisis situations providing law enforcement support and continually continually developing positive relationships with students and families throughout the high desert region has been invaluable he has always displayed a high professional courteous and most of all relatable friendly pattern of interactions with school professionals students families and the general population of citizens in our region everyone seems to know officer willis holding him in high esteem i have personally only heard very positive comments and statements about his personality character generosity and personalized service to our community officer willis is an individual who presents an excellent example and image of what law enforcement support and dedicated service should be in the high desert or anywhere else in our country sincerely michael el parro the next comment is from martin gonzalez to whom it may concern growing up mr willis was a coach a family friend but more importantly he was a perfect example of what a man should be he was patient and kind he always greeted me with a smile his hand always stretched out to give me a handshake when i got to go in for a big hug he always treated me with respect and humility he is the kind of person that genuinely cares about every person that he encounters i had the pleasure of having him as a football and basketball coach he wasn't a coach that yelled and cursed he was the kind that encouraged every kid no matter who it was he never tore you down and always built you up he was the kind of coach that every parent wants for their pit i don't have a single negative memory of mr willis i have known this man for 21 years and he has always been a man of integrity it's hard to come by people that are as genuinely good as mr willis has been in all these years i am happy to say that he is someone that i looked up to and have had the pleasure of knowing throughout these years martine gonzalez the next comment is from alice wright carl willis has been excellent in servicing the needs of apple valley for many years in his role as safety officer truman officer and police officer and has been instrumental in getting to know his community he has always presented himself in a professional calm soft-spoken yet stern manner in my observance of handling kids and incidents throughout apple valley i truly would like to see him continue in the police capacity as a positive role model figure that is definitely needed in this day and time through his relationship building he has been able to establish trust in our community dealing with kids is a specialized area and the apple valley police department is essential protecting our future is a must in handling matters for kids who are the next generation continuing to provide safety and security to students and staff at our district and schools is important as a parent and former worker with the school district i know what it was like to be on campuses in classes and working with kids carl has been a pleasure working with over these years and is an asset to the police department today more than ever we need to feel secure when we are working on campus or just visiting a campus that officers responding to a need provide good sound advice guidance and calm leadership alice wright the next comment is from william a kirkpatrick i am making a public comment in regards to carl willis being transferred from awsd police department to the transportation department i have known officer willis for over 11 years my kids have attended adusd schools i have observed officer willis as a very professional police officer who exhibits the type of community policing skills that all police officers should exhibit officer carl willis is always helpful and giving of his time to listen to abusd parents and their concerns he always has a smile on his face and many of the parents know him and greet him officer willis has acquired an abundance of tech knowledge and explicit knowledge while working as a police officer for awsd for almost two decades there are many examples of his knowledge that i have seen officer willis display while applying his skills and all his experience that he has acquired over the course of his career for example ensuring the order and safety on school grounds and traffic control in addition he exceeds the community's expectations by engaging with students teachers staff and the community to foster strong school police partnerships i am hopeful that the awsd board gives consideration to the information i am sharing pertaining to officer carl willis as i have mentioned he has developed a number of professional and personal traits which make him an outstanding asset his experience needs to be utilized in the abusd police department to protect serve mentor train and improve avusd police department policies and continue to serve the community thank you william kirkpatrick the next two comments are from mario manu they're very similar but there's a change in verbiage so i want to make sure that i read both because it seems as they were both submitted my name is mario manu i have lived and grown up in the town of apple valley for 30 years i attended desert knowles elementary vista companion middle school and granite hills high school through the early 90s and 2000s i have known mr willis for over 25 years not only through his professionalism as a exemplary campus police officer but also through his service to the community as a youth sports coach his presence in uniform not only helped comfort me when i was attending awsd schools but relaxed me and reassured me of my safety and security while on or at an abusd event i cannot express how much of a staple to the community this man is a man of principle great character strong morals and work ethic mr willis is a great inspiration to all those lucky enough to meet and have had conversation with him his service to our community i believe is greatly undervalued and not completely understood as a campus police officer he not only kept the peace in schools but served as a teacher being a great example of civility and professionalism to our community's youth i truly believe that you would be doing the town of apple valley and high denver community a disservice if you reassign mr willis somewhere other than his previous post in the av avusd police force i know that myself and many more who were brought up through adusd would feel much more safer and relieved sending our children to abusd knowing mr willis is helping watch our kids and keeping them safe this is also from mario manu my name is mario manu i have lived and grown up in the town of apple valley for over 30 years i attended desert hills elementary vista company middle school and granite hills high school through the 90s and 2000s i have known mr willis for over 25 years not only through his profession as an exemplary transportation safety officer but also through his service to the community as a youth sports coach his presence in uniform not only helped comfort me when i was attending 8 usd schools but relaxed me and reassured me of the safety and security while i was attending an abusd event i cannot express how much of a staple to the community this man is a man of principle great character strong morals and work ethic mr willis is a great inspiration to those lucky enough to have met and have had conversation with him his service to our community i believe is greatly undervalued and not completely understood as a transportation safety officer he not only kept the peace in and around schools but served as a teacher being a great example of civility and professionalism to our community's youth i truly believe that you would be doing the town of apple valley the high desert community a disservice if you reassign mr willis somewhere other than his previous post as a transportation safety officer i know that myself and many more who were brought up through adusd would feel much more safer and relieved sending our children to the absd schools knowing mr willis is helping watch our kids and keep them safe that's it yes that's it um we're going to close session yes you can use close to your we need to go into closed session oh we need to pull it down yeah put it down okay we need to go into closed session can you hear me now okay i'll check on it all those in favor aye okay calling the meeting to order and then if we can do the pledge of allegiance [Music] ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all we have student reports [Music] it'll be the one called board streaming [Music] uh good evening board members superintendent nelson and attendees i hope you all an excellent and safe summer my name is erin fouget and i am the governing council president for the 2020 2021 school year i'm very excited to update all of you on what grant this is aaron it is aaron okay yes i'll try it again [Music] she's not playing it yet so board members superintendent nelson and attendees i hope you all had an excellent and safe summer my name is erin fouget and i am the governing council president for the 2020 2021 school year i'm very excited to update all of you on what granite does this year whether that be in person or from afar granite has already introduced many online activities to keep up school spirits from afar while also providing students with any resources they may need to be successful in distance learning as these uncertain times continue we hope to provide a consistent environment for students to look forward to the first three days of school consisted of getting to know our staff learning how online classes were going to work and completing short activities which entered us into drawings to win t-shirts after this we began normal classes and have been doing so since due to the hard work of everyone at granite our first few weeks of school have been very successful while our student body adjusted to online learning asb decided to host a virtual spirit week so students could show off their cougar pride from home this spirit week was an immense success and we had a lot of participation this outcome has led us to plan many more for the coming weeks which you will hear more about as we release them to our student body not only do we want our students to show their school spirit but we want our staff to as well so today we hosted a spirit day exclusively for our staff this too was met with a lot of participation and is being considered another success while everyone has been working hard to keep up school spirit there is certainly a hole left while where our phenomenal sports teams would normally be at due to this our athletics department has been sure to put out multiple messages encouraging our student athletes to keep their spirits up because we look forward to having all of our usual sporting events in the spring these messages have provided our students with something to look forward to and keep working towards overall everyone at granite has been working very cohesively to ensure that our students continue to be successful and spirited as they have in years past and we will continue to do so for as long as it takes thank you all for your time this evening and always remember maroon and gray lead the way that's cool greetings esteemed board members my name is maisel sia and i am apple valley high school's asb align president for the 2020-2021 school year i would like to start off by thanking you for giving me the opportunity to share how our school is working together to create a sense of normalcy for our students though it is off to an unusual start our staff and students have been hard at work to get ready for the school year our staff has been busy organizing a distance learning system that will keep students engaged and motivated since this type of schooling is new to all of us i am proud to see how well our sun double staff is handling this unexpected situation we started off our school year with informational zoom meetings held by our principal miss howell vice principals and counselors we then had meetings to get to know our teachers and meet our fellow classmates last week we had a textbook pick up where different grade levels went on their assigned date to pick up textbooks and school supplies the camp and mass academies provided their students with bags filled with supplies the math students received stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs to assist their learning experience last week we also had our first virtual spirit week we received many pictures of students dressing up and posted them on our various social media accounts our asb class officers have also been working on virtual fundraisers clubs that are working on getting recharted have meanwhile been preparing for the year the cheer and palm team have been holding virtual practices and are working on a dance compilation video the cheerleaders are filming their dances and they will compile them into a collective video the camp program has been planning for video announcements and the host program just created their officer team sensations and vocal motion choirs are practicing and preparing for a virtual back-to-school recital national honor society and mock trial are now accepting applications other school clubs are planning on how they can adapt to a virtual setting our athletes are still practicing individually to stay in shape for a hopeful return of sports for the spring semester as you can see the beginning of our year has been filled with planning and adapting to these unprecedented times but i believe that our school is adjusting to completely converting to a virtual setting very well i'm excited to see how the rest of our year will turn out i take much pride in my school and i thank you for letting me share it with you thank you and remember sun devil pride is contagious [Applause] and then kylie you have um there we go thank you jason um i have a report from csea good afternoon board members superintendent and assistant superintendents i hope you and your families are in good health i apologize for not having a report last month the start of the new school year puts a lot of demands on us all being the first time with these kids of with these kinds of conditions for almost all of us i thought it was best to not yet make preconceived notions i would be telling you a story if i told you this was a perfect start for the school year many of our classified employees have worked hard to make this hopefully new temporary type of learning successful we do have a mou the school board approved in the last month with very little demands on the district one of our one of our intentions was expecting to have some latitude to address the needs of the classified staff more on an individual basis thus keeping costs down this mou was last minute with no fault to the district i realized we had less than five days to come up with an agreement if we had drug out negotiations to address more particular concerns it would have been a lot more hectic at the startup the main positive goal of the mou was to save jobs and collaboratively it looks like this has been successful the introduction of student care personally helped and i consider it a milestone for our district i think it could use fine-tuning as we progress but is it but it is a great thing for staff many of our classified employees have benefited from this great idea and i thank you many of the single guardians of children would hate for this to disappear i want you to know that csea is committed to working cooperatively and all we ask is to be treated equally and fair i soon hope to see you all again in real life thank you for this opportunity to share our viewpoints csea chapter 828 mike kaufman president no report from abta i did not receive a report from a buddha c5 closed session reports the clerk of the board will report out on any action taken and closed in those sessions the board of trustees in first session the board of trustees took action in support of the following recommendation from the superintendent b2 public employee appointment resignation refinement reduction an emotion by maria akara seconded by wilson vote of 5-0 the board of trustees approved the following appoint marcus bruce as the assistant principal granite fields high school winning a couple months on the certificated management salary schedule two things basically days effective to be determined we're going to have is it turned off teach you more can you hear me no can you hear me there it is there is a delay so thank you for that now you'll see it again sorry in closed session the board of trustees took action in support of the following recommendation from the superintendent b-2 public employee appointment resignation retirement reduction on a motion by maria oppara seconded by wilson cell vote of 5-0 the board of trustees approved the following appoint marcus bruce as assistant principal granite hills high school range 8 column 1 on the certificated management salary schedule 210 base duty days effective to be determined employment is contingent upon successfully meeting the pre-employment requirement b2 public employee appointment resignation retirement reduction on a motion by maria ocara seconded by donna davies vote of 5-0 the board of trustees approved the following i point janette martinez as assistant principal vanguard preparatory range 7 column 1 under certificated management salary schedule 205 base duty days effective to be determined employment is contingent upon successfully meeting the pre-employment requirement b3 conference on litigation elizabeth cardenas at all versus av avusd government code section 54954.5 d amended government tort claim or in the alternative application for permission to present a late claim in closed session on motion of mr sill seconded by mr bender the board voted unanimously to deny the amended government court claim and to deny the alternative application for permission to present a late claim by elizabeth cardenas at all b7 conference with labor negotiator agency negotiator trine nelson employee organization or unrepresented on a motion by mr raleigh seconded by mr so the board of trustees approved the following effective july 1 2019 two percent shall be added to the exempt classified management salary schedule the non-exempt classified supervisory and confidential salary schedule and a certificated management salary schedule not to include assistant superintendent deputy superintendent nor superintendent that's it c6 adoption of the agenda the port may approve the agenda as is or add and or pull items from the consent agenda for discussion and or action you need to adopt the agenda as is we have a motion second all those in favor aye aye all the supposed okay and then we have um nothing under d under e we have um five presentations the first one is the presentation of the school intercom systems which was based on a comment public comment at our last board meeting about a safety issue thank you and i'll just make reference to um some printed materials that i provided to each board member and that will be part of the items that are provided in the minutes and i've got mr shulenberg's copy here i'm going to hand back to him because i'm going to read through them but i'm going to summarize them but i wanted you to have a claim-by-claim answer to what was presented in a public comment at our last board meeting if you'll remember we had a public comment regarding the intercom systems and so um essentially if i can summarize just several of the items there you'll notice that one that the claim the initial claim that the intercom systems are being removed is not true um we did have some intercom systems that experienced some trouble you'll remember board comments about a year ago where some folks came from um school sites and said they were having trouble they either couldn't hear didn't have a system and that was true we had a system that failed we brought in our local vendor asked them for support they were unable to make the necessary repairs and recommended that we replaced the entire system at the same time however we had in-house through our one of our employees actually a low voltage specialist in the i.t department was testing for another purpose something that turned out to be a solution so we installed essentially a new controller at that school site and have since used that at several others what this has done is not only made that intercom system functional but it's actually upgraded the feature set so it's been a wonderful solution for us it was a low-cost in-house solution but it allowed us to do things that as a principal i could never do um dustin and matt and i have always joked about how we when we were principals we changed the bell schedule by operating it through a phone interface and dialed the sequences of numbers and key turns in order to tell the bell schedule to ring at a certain time now an assistant principal can go to a computer interface and program a new schedule put that schedule to ring and sure enough it's it's so much simpler so it is functioning much better so that's uh that's the upgrade actually that we've accomplished some of the other claims included things like um that the feature set is not in keeping with what is recommended and i'll just tell you this that our our entire um sort of system includes the intercoms our phone system and a set of mobile apps that work as well and so this system of all those parts works in concert to to affect our safety plan we do have the ability to call out of the room of course we have different ways of doing that we don't have a call button like you used to having a long time ago so instead what we have is we have the phones or a mobile app but that allows for a high level of functionality as is recommended through the app no and the but the what the phone does is allows them to do several things one it tells them where's the call coming from exactly where and what the situation is they can do it from a phone right and it also allows them to instigate for example a series of more instead of just an alert it can say lock down the whole campus from from the phone they can institute a active shooter alert for any phone on campus these are approved by our risk management department our insurer and it's also part of our plan that's in partnership with other local agencies including the sheriff's department is our tactical plan which is not publicly available but it is approved using these systems the nema sb40 standard that's referenced in the complaint or in the public comment is indeed an industry trade group representative um document that does suggest feature sets they are not building code and they are not required they are simply recommendations and most of those recommendations are in our system but that particular feature set at the moment is not in ours but it is also not part of our safety plan we go through a process of determining what are the needs and how can we meet those needs our current system is effective operational and meets the needs so that's that's the the that's the essence of what you'll see here what is this is a claim-by-client answer from last time thank you any questions about that specifically i'm glad you talked to us about it because i thought we were taking the intercom system right out right because we had faults we have both and i love this part thank you then any other questions on that presentation okay then mr schulenberg is going to take over the screen and do a presentation on the budget committee structure and function thank you one second here as i get this go [Music] yes well um thank you and i would like to move on with a little presentation on the budget advisory committee based on a question uh from the board a couple meetings ago in our board policy and your board policy 3100 budget budget advisory committee is something that states the superintendent or designee may appoint a budget advisory committee if the decision is to structure and appoint a budget advisory committee the membership shall include representatives of the board as long as it is not a majority of the board representatives from staff and also community members it dictates that the duties assigned are going to be based on the district needs at the time so that committee will be convened with specific duties and that any recommendations from that committee shall be advisory only and non-binding on the board of trustees the administrative regulation 3100 goes on to describe the membership in a little more detail again governing board members less than a majority district and school site administration bargaining unit representatives additional certificated and or classified staff parents guardians local business leaders community members and students will make up any budget advisory committee samples of duties that may be assigned to the committee this is not an exhaustive list nor is it an exclusive list however duties can include recommendations regarding budget priorities recommendations for cost reduction strategies including reductions to programs efficiencies to operations or cessations of certain programs reviewing clarity and the effectiveness of budget documents any public communication or board communication and of course the responsibility to present reports to the superintendent and board either a progress report or a final report based on the specific duties that were assigned to the committee a requirement in administrative regulation 31 is that the committee understands their duties and they're defined and communicated in writing to all committee members one of the biggest requirements is to provide all necessary background information to complete the duties that's one of the biggest educational pieces of any budget committee is to make sure the members of that committee understand the revenue stream of the district the expenses and the structure of those expenses and how we deal with that on an annual basis throughout our budget cycle identifying the tasks and the timelines for completion of these tasks and also identifying a timeline for reporting the committee's progress so the next steps would be of course for us to define any specific duties based on current district needs that that budget committee would take invite an establish committee membership and establish timelines to provide that necessary background information completion of those tasks and when in fact a report would be given to the superintendent and to the board that's the structure and the function of the budget advisory committee per board policy 3100 and administrative regulation 3100 and that concludes my presentation on the budget committee so having said that when do we set up one i would refer to the superintendent to establish that based on board direction as the board policy says the superintendent may establish a budget committee and so you have requested information regarding a budget committee and that's what mr schulenburg is bringing you back and we are more than open to starting a budget committee based on the um policy we already have in place okay okay okay so how the question again is how soon can you set that up we can um fairly soon we just need to know which of the board members is going to be the ones participating because we can only have two we can't have three or more um so as soon as we have whoever the board members are we will start establishing who is um my question would be is there really a need for a budget committee it's the um assistance of business has been presenting this information this weekend i think there's a need is that his phone saying it does and i think when you look at the sorry i'm sorry i think when you look at the very specific why i have a budget committee um part of that is educating people about the budget inside and out so um we i can send an email out to board members under a blind cc so it's not a surreal meeting you can let me know who you recommend to participate or you can agree right now who that is you can recommend and then we can start moving forward with putting one together well can i nominate somebody to go right volunteers how about you i will okay we have two so we only made two so we got two you got two okay so now i know who to communicate from the board and then we will get back with you about a timeline for that okay so when you get that get to go to do that when you're looking for certificated are you working through the the different two associations we would have to absolutely okay the association through the associations we can include others as well but but um always have somebody from both associations and parents if they would like to they're welcome to participate well if we have we i think we need to allow the association to to make that determination and after that we feel whatever other extra spots need to be in place we'll bring back a report on when it's ready to be established and and who is comprising of that committee okay give us a few board meetings thank you okay and then um matt it's you again yes it is um i took over the screen with another presentation you should have a copy of this it's the presentation the overview of a proposed certificates of participation it looks like this it's a fairly brief presentation if you recall earlier several meetings ago the board approved a contract with public economics and public economics incorporated to take a look at our redevelopment revenue stream that is a property tax increment stream that we receive based on redevelopment agencies and the successor agencies that we have been utilizing for small capital facilities improvement projects currently the project at sycamore rocks and the bakery at granite hills are being funded through that but we have some other projects and the the purpose of hiring public economics was to analyze that stream to determine amount that we may be able to borrow against that revenue stream to speed up the completion of some of our improvement projects throughout the district yes i will get i will get to that uh that's gonna that's gonna be determined later in this particular situation this presentation was put together by mr tim carty of piper sandler mr carty has been the district's financial advisor for many years and has worked with us on different financing and refundings uh previously so he helped me put this together so just a general overview of what a cops is it's a certificate of participation which is basically a type of loan taken out by the school district and it's publicly offered so it's selling a debt instrument out on the public market it does not require voter approval so there's a whole process we have to go through adopting a resolution notifying the county auditor controller notifying the county superintendent of schools of our intent to issue non-voter approved debt now what that means is the debt service for this does not fall on the taxpayers of apple valley unified like a voter approved general obligation bond the debt service is the sole responsibility of the school district and it's our intent to utilize that rda revenue stream the restricted revenue stream to pay the debt service however as that third bullet point on the slide says a copies is repaid by all legally available of funds if the redevelopment revenue stream for some reason does not materialize as projected by public economics then the general fund would be responsible however i'll a slide later on talk i'll talk about specific of what we're what we're looking at for the rda and how we're borrowing against that the certificates of participation will carry a fixed interest rate with a typical repayment term of 30 years our interest rate that we're looking at is right around three percent right now they are fairly low uh borrowing money so it this is the time to do it if we are going to borrow money in this instrument so the structure this there's a lot of arrows going back and forth but our five board members are also board members of the apple valley public facilities corporation and that is a non-profit organization that we will essentially lease a school site to in this example up here we have identified granite hills as a possible school site we could use whose appraised value or value of that campus covers the amount of debt we're looking to issue so we lease it to the public facilities corporation they lease it back to us and we pay the lease payments through the corporation to the investors who buy the investment document out on the open market and they basically front the money to the district which will be held at a trust through a bank and as we complete our projects or have payment applications we apply for those payment applications to be paid from those funds held by the trustee i've identified some projects uh currently we are working on finishing up the cte bakery and the ada upgrades at granite hills also if you've driven by sycamore rocks you've seen some progress on the parking lot and the ada upgrades to that and the parent drop off at sycamore rocks the phase one we are proposing to include phase two which some is some additional ada and playground upgrades on the campus at sycamore rocks we have our district-wide security camera project which is already in process mariana academy ada parking and playground upgrades and what that will do is will align our campus to some improvements the town of apple valley have recently completed on manhasset in front of the school uh some street parking is no longer available and we have to upgrade our parking area and our bus circle to kind of match what the town has done and better serve the community of mariana did you take away some of the par the park the town yeah in their project did not take away any of the park no and we will not be taking we will not be taking any of we will not be taking any of the park adjacent because that is not our property at mariana that property belongs to the town of apple valley at sycamore rocks we did take some of the park because that is our property and we've been in communication with the town in fact i met i've met mr david coleman he's the park and rex director up there yesterday to discuss the future of sycamore ox park and we were entering a partnership and doing some things up there to serve that particular community thank you we are proposing to do some ada parking upgrades here at this facility to better serve the public when we're able to open to the public post-pandemic we are proposing to include some ada parking and drop-off upgrades adjacent to sandia if the board recalls many years ago we purchased the property directly east of sandia from san bernardino county superintendent of schools the town is also interested in a joint project there to create a small community park in that area mr coleman and i did talk about that concept nothing official at this point and then a little contingency for increased cost but i would like to point out that green box on the bottom we currently have a solar cops that we took out in 2012 to pay for the solar generation facilities at three of our campuses that currently is a an impact to our general fund our unrestricted general fund and using the proceeds from this certificate of participation to pay that off would relieve that debt service from the unrestricted general fund and make that funding available to serve the students of apple valley unified school district this slide and i apologize it's very small it's tough to see but this goes out to the year 2053 the next 33 years of projected rda revenue and the redevelopment revenues are projected in that blue column and you'll see for this year we're projecting about a little under 1.3 million in redevelopment revenues that will flow to apple valley unified specifically restricted for facilities use we are proposing to only use approximately 60 or approximately 750 000 towards debt service so we're not taking it to the limit we're trying to be very conservative and the estimates in the blue column that public economics prepared for us are actually very conservative and lowered due to the current covid pandemic in terms of property tax increases a quick question yes when you say rda is that the rda from the georgia air force space culture uh we are in several rds yes that is one of them along with the apple valley rda and as you know all the rdas were dissolved so now we're dealing with the successor agencies and the successor agreements from those rdas but that's why we paid public economics to do this for us because that's all they do is analyze and project redevelopment pass-throughs for school districts there are several parties involved in this transaction first off piper sandler mr carty as our financial advisor straddling attorneys at law has been our council on past certificates of participation and bond refinancing we had to loop in the san bernardino county superintendent of schools and the san bernardino county last week we did send them a letter notifying them that we were proposing this and we had to do that because of a 30-day deadline when we're going to be bringing some further information for your consideration and action at the october 1st meeting that gives the county superintendent of schools and the county auditor controller a chance to comment they do not have to approve this but they have the chance to make comments based on our proposed debt financing when it's non-voter approved debt u.s bank we're proposing to use them as our trustee they're our current trustee with our other cops and have done a good job processing that for us and taking care of those payments and standard of poors of course will be a credit rating agency for us that if the board chooses to go through with this as we bring those resolutions for your consideration at the october 1st meeting we'll have to get a credit rating agency from standard and poor's and then the underwriter is actually the organization who who buys the instruments and sells those instruments on the public public market we have yet to identify an underwriter for this particular project so as i mentioned some of the next steps we are working with straddling to draft the legal documents and the preliminary official statement which kind of summarizes the entire transaction uh those legal documents and that preliminary official statement will be in front of you as a board at the october first meeting for your consideration and then if you choose to approve uh moving forward with this debt issuance we will have a credit rating meeting my my staff mr cardy will take care of that that's nothing any of you are involved in then we'll work with standard and poor's we'll select an underwriter we'll sell the certificates of participation and we're looking at projecting we'll have the proceeds sometime the middle of november does anybody have any questions i just want to share that i have worked with the law firm australia yoga on this meet several major assessment districts around riverside and then of course tim carty i know him for 35 40 years and again you will see some resolutions at the october 1st meeting for your consideration and then not your next presentation yes i'm going to go ahead and start this one but before i move to the unaudited actuals report i would like to just discuss i do not have any slides but at the last meeting when i was not present i know mr wilson posed a question about our custodial and maintenance response to our classrooms and cleaning one of the things i would like to point out and make sure the board and the public understand when we're dealing with our classrooms and school sites right now we're we're dealing with basically a two-step process as we go in we have cleaning number one which has not changed from our previous process that's the soap and water the vacuuming the the cleaning all the surfaces getting the dirt and grime and detritus out of the carpet make sure classrooms are clean the second step which we've done which we're enhancing now is the disinfecting stuff we have products through waxy that's they're called a 700 and a 710 which are both hospital grade disinfectants with a very broad and i'm going to use a term kill claims because they are considered pesticides as they kill bacterias and viruses sars cov2 and sars coronaviruses are listed as viruses that the waxy 707 10 kill with a certain dwell time and it differs per product but those are the products that we have in place yes it does take time to spray and apply those products they have dwell time on those surfaces and then we have to wipe them off we also have a sanitizing product it's a waxy 910 it's a sanitizing solution solution which is a no wipe that's a sanitizing solution it doesn't have as broad a kill claim as the disinfectants but it's similar to the hand sanitizer on the table in front of you that's something we can spray on a surface and there's and there's dwell time and you leave it you do not have to wipe it up so that's another product that our custodians have mr so did mention hydrogen peroxide and waxy has a waxy 730 hydrogen peroxide product but it does not have as broad a kill claim or as a broad spectrum kill as those disinfectants and it does not list a sars coronavirus as one of the viruses that the hydrogen peroxide kills so we're currently not using that in lieu of the disinfectant products we have but that is a product out there that we could utilize as an application similar to the sanitizer where you apply it and you leave it no no sir we do not utilize agent orange so you do provide training for the people who will do the cleaning absolutely yes our custodial supervisor provides training and updates to our all of our custodial staff regarding proper mixing and application of all the chemicals that our custodians use on a regular basis one other item mr mr so mentioned he mentioned looking at new and innovative things to clean in classrooms and we are looking at a few things the the product and the process we've really focused on now is what would be called an electrostatic sprayer this it takes a liquid and a tablet and then creates a solution which is electronically charged and sprayed in a room so it sticks to surfaces both hard non-porous surfaces and porous surfaces such as cloth carpets all the surfaces and it is something that our custodians can go through with a backpack type sprayer in all of our classrooms spray it and then leave no wiping necessary it's a effective cost effective time effective way to disinfect classrooms we are also looking at some larger disinfecting machines that would be able to do cafeterias gymnasiums on a regular basis we do have some of those on hand that we have utilized already and we have more on order to to deploy throughout the district we have looked into uv light germ killers those are less efficient than the electrostatic sprayers and also when those uv lights are on you don't want to be in the room it's it's a it's a very it's not a light that you want to have in contact with mri yes and and we were looking at uh hepa filtration for our hvac systems along with a higher merv rating on our filters but we have to be very cautious there because if we increase the merv rating of our air filtration too high it over stresses the equipment and it can actually damage the equipment so we have to find a good balance with our hvac equipment so if anybody has any questions that's i apologize no slides i just wanted to verbalize the response to mr wilson's questions the question i have is if you use any one of those um in the classroom let's say teacher goes in to do their presentation if how long does it uh do you have to put have it before a human being can walk into this space um well with with our current cleaning processes when we apply a waxy 710 and a 730 i believe their dwell time is 10 minutes and then the custodians do wipe it up and once it's wiped up and cleaned up after the disinfection process you can go in right away okay with the electrostatic sprayer and you spray it again there's a slight dwell time but then it's safe to enter that room after a matter of minutes okay thank you any other questions thank you thank you so one final presentation i'm sorry i'll talk a lot and i apologize this particular presentation has a few slides and there's some detail in it so i want to go through some parts so i can get to some of that detail this is the update on our 2019-20 unaudited actuals now just a quick visit to the 2019-20 budget cycle if you can recall all the way back to january of 2019 we were in a great place economically in california in this country it's governor newsom's first budget 10th year of economic recovery we get to the may revise in 2019 we were still strong tax revenues at the state level statutory cola last year was 3.26 we move into the on-time budget in june of 2019 again this is all this is a year ago over a year ago they ended up funding prop 98 at the minimum guarantee with no manipulations which is what the legislature has done a lot of the previous years governor newsom did dedicate some non-prop 98 funding to assist local educational agencies with the increased retirement pers and stirs contributions but an impending recession of course will have any impact on the state and of course local local districts so here we are in august and september of 2020 19 months after we started the budget process closing the books in what i would call a completely different world as we go through that budget year just to remind the board we do have several reporting intervals we have our first interim second interim estimated actuals in may of 220 2020 which established the baseline for our current year budget now when we close the books that's kind of like the reset button or it's the the end-all so now we are not estimating what happened last year we actually have the actual financial activity from 1920 which of course affects our starting point for the current year so we go back and make those adjustments to our beginning fund balance so in a look back at last year we brought in just under 163 million dollars in revenue to apple valley unified school district the lion's share from our local control funding formula and you'll see five percent federal revenue some other state and two percent local revenue of that we spent 165.1 including expenditures and transfers out so you'll see employee certificated salaries classified salaries and employee benefits makes up the vast majority of our expenses we are a people organization that's the 39 on certificated 16 unclassified and 28 across the employee benefits for both groups or all groups including management books and supplies services capital outlay other outgoing a transfer out here's the detail so you'll see on the unrestricted and restricted side unrestricted that first column there you'll see we overspent our unrestricted revenue by just under 2 million dollars 1.9 we overspent our restricted revenue by about 340 000 and you look in the combined column we did end up overspending our combined budget by about 2.2 million now that's less than what we had estimated when we were in the end of april and beginning of may but we had estimates and we were in such an interesting time with the coveted pandemic there were some questions that were unanswered when we were at the estimated actuals that are now answered when we close the books when we look at the ending fund balance on the unrestricted side we have to reserve 40 000 for revolving cash based on our store's inventory we have to set that aside and of course we have a three percent required reserve and we do meet that on the unrestricted side for last year while we close the books on the restricted side we had an ending fund balance of about 1.8 the vast majority sits in our routine restricted maintenance account 1.4 million for some of our larger projects that met that budget is managed by our director of maintenance and operations in conjunction with myself in determining and prioritizing projects as we move through the year and this is a chart i've had in my actual presentation the last couple years kind of looks at the evolution of our ending fund balance if i could bring your attention to that first column there when we closed the books in june of 2012 we had a 36 million dollar combined ending fund balance and you see we spent that down significantly back down to 22.3 down to 19.8 then back up to 30.2 and that jump was really due to some uncertainty when the lcap came into play with our local control funding formula we had budgeted a whole lot of new positions in the district and were unable to fill some of those unable to come unable to uh work through some of the things we had planned to do so we did have some money um fall to the bottom line that year 17 fairly balanced and bring you to this slide you'll see in 2017 we ended that year with 30.9 million just about 31 million dollars now that's combined both unrestricted and restricted and you see we've been on a steady downward trend since 2017.

you'll notice we 18 was 26 2019 was 22 million 2020 we are now at 20 million dollar ending fund balance now as i mentioned earlier we did have some uncertainty between estimated and closing the books so you'll see at estimated actuals we had actual we had estimated our ending fund balance at about 12.6 million well it came in at 20.1 and that's a 7.5 million dollar variance now that's not our intent to have a variance that size but i do have some detail to explain some of that because the last three years you'll see from estimated actuals to unaudited actuals we had a very small variance in each year and that is our goal in the finance in the finance office to estimate as best we can so some of that detail when we look at our revenue side we had a 46 000 unrestricted adjustment to the lcff between may and closing the books that's on a that's on a hundred and third million dollars so a 46 000 adjustment on that is is pretty small when we look at the federal revenue we had a we had a net 2 million dollar reduction in our federal revenue that's because that's that's because of the the mechanism of how the federal revenue flows to us as i've mentioned before the majority of our federal revenue flows to us as what's called unearned revenue we don't earn the revenue unless we spend it so when we close the books we have to reconcile our revenue with our actual expenditures in each one of those federal restricted programs for instance i'll pick title one our allocation from the california department of education for title one i'm gonna round it to about five million dollars that means we have the authority to spend up to five million dollars in this particular fiscal year and as we allocate those funds both to school site operations and specific activities at school sites and also district operations we only spent about 4.5 million of those dollars keeping in mind we did not have students in any of our schools on our campuses most of march april and may so that's about 10 percent of our allocation now that doesn't mean we lose that money it doesn't mean we send it back that 500 000 of revenue that we reduced in the 1920 school year we're able to book that revenue in the 2021 school year as carryover revenue and of course we will also book carryover expenses when we post that revenue same with all those programs listed there under restricted in the federal side in the other state we had a positive adjustment in revenue about 1.9 million you're going to see we've got a little more lottery now that's unrestricted money that flows to us that flows out to the school sites for principals discretionary spending at school sites for supplies materials for our kids most of it on the restricted the lion's share we had an increase from estimated to closing the books of 2.4 million in what's called the stirs on behalf the state requires us to put on our books what they pay to stirs on behalf of our certificated employees it's not actual revenue we ever receive but we have to book the revenue on our books and a corresponding expenditure and we never know what that amount is until we close our books it's an accounting entry but it does affect our revenue and expenses to a net zero but this does affect that other state revenue because on that summary slide all these numbers are aggregated together and you'll see we had some restricted programs again these are grant programs that we do not earn the money unless we spend it so as we close the books we have to reduce the revenue accordingly to match our expenditures now again this revenue is available in the next fiscal year much like that federal restricted revenue so we had some other local revenue adjustments mainly we had increased revenue on the ab602 that's to support special education and we had some increased revenue from estimated to actuals in our rda pass-through so overall from estimated actuals to closing the books on the revenue side of the budget we increased our aggregate revenue by close to seven hundred thousand dollars uh on a 150 million plus budget the expenditure side we had a net adjustment between estimated actuals to unaudited actuals and certificated salaries of an increase of 35 000 so uh we were pretty close at estimated again that's on all certificated salaries which includes teachers and certificated managers a very small adjustment on the unrich unrestricted side of the budget the 38 000 on the restricted side we had a net adjustment of 116 000 in increased expenditures and classified salaries mainly on the unrestricted side you'll see that there and then moving to employee benefits we had a positive we had a adjustment 2.8 million dollar increased expenditures primarily resulting from that stirs on behalf accounting entry uh for what the state pays to stirs on our behalf you'll see that was 2.4 million of that 2.8 million the rest is is balancing based on actual payroll and what needs to be paid to stirs and pers on behalf of our employees by us as we close the books in books and supplies uh this is one of our biggest adjustments and this is where we strive to have some of the smallest adjustments but we reduced our expenditures from estimated to actuals by almost 6.2 million 3.3 of that on the unrestricted side those top three line items there textbook adoption site lottery budget and site discretionary fundings were the lion's share that's 2.9 million of 3.3 million dollars that 2.9 million that textbook adoption is a 1.9 million expense that was originally booked in last year but we didn't get the books by june 30th so we have to remove that expense but that's an expense we're going to book in the current year so that merely delayed the expense from 1920 to 2021 the site lottery budget that's unrestricted funding that is allocated to principals for their discretionary spending to support student programs at their schools again students were not on campus march april may so that will be that is spending authority that will be passed to the schools as carryover in this fiscal year same with site discretionary that's lcff funding unrestricted that is passed to schools to support student program that's about a million dollars across all 13 school sites the bottom three tires fuel and oil general maintenance and other miscellaneous side adjustments i think that tires fuel and oil was some budgeted expenditures that did not occur because our buses were not out on the road as much we did not spend money on gas that we had originally budgeted same with some of that general maintenance as we closed in the spring we did uh we did not have all of our maintenance crew working at certain times so there were some things that were budgeted to happen that did not happen um again those projects and maintenance that did not occur last year will be moved into this year now this is still in books and supplies this is the restricted side of books and supplies now that 6.2 number is the same net adjustment you saw on the previous slide the restricted share of that 6.2 million dollars is 2.9 now you see all those restricted programs that i talked about where we had to reduce the revenue we always we also had to reduce the budgeted expenditures based on actual activity now again these programs that revenue will be booked in the 2021 year along with these expenses as we move it forward so out of that 6.2 million about 2.9 was restricted and that 3.3 on the previous slide 2.9 of 2.9 of that 3.3 were were expenditures that will move into the current year services and operating expenditures we had a net adjustment of a reduction of about 4.6 million on the unrestricted side about 2.6 million a big piece of that was a cabling project that did not complete last year so that 1.2 million is an expense that did not occur that will occur this year the rest of those lines are some budgeted expenditures that did not happen partly because of the corona the pandemic partly because some activities slowed down or ceased for instance utilities that utilities line represents water trash sewer and electricity so we did not spend about 236 000 of what we had budgeted for utilities as we did not have as many people on our campuses for about two and a half months we had some rentals and leases repairs legal audit and election costs that we did not spend a budget telephone and internet was reorganized last year with our move over to move to voice over internet protocol with our phone system and we had some other miscellaneous savings across many object codes that were small amounts but aggregated to about 600 000 so we did have some savings across services and operating expenditures on the unrestricted side of the budget and also some on the restricted side of the budget again rrma is our routine restricted maintenance account some projects that we were not able to complete and the restricted side will move over to this year we had reduced special education expenses expenses with students not on campus and we had some other miscellaneous in our six thousands capital outlay we had a net adjustment of increase of 437 thousand dollars mainly due to some projects we had a a sewer issue at yucca loma school which was the lion's share of that that some work we had to have done and then our other outgo that net adjustment is primarily due to the rda the increase in rda we also had an increased expense to the balance with that increased revenue on the rda so a total net expenditure adjustment of 6.8 million dollars so what that does is with that 700 000 increased revenue and a 6.8 decrease to expenditures that's that 7.5 million variants the majority which are expenses that will move into the current year but there was some savings or some costs that we did some budgeted costs that were not realized due to the pandemic and the closing of our schools so here's a quick summary slide that kind of takes a look at the unrestricted and the restricted on the revenue side you'll see the the lines share the adjustment falls on the restricted on the revenue side of the budget that summarizes that 700 000 and then here the unrestricted and restricted but again a lot of those unrestricted expenses that did not occur this year mainly in the books and supplies line will move to the current year 2021.

moving on to our other funds and just a quick summary as we move through we have fund 11 that's our adult education you'll see there she did finish the year with about a 26 000 surplus so she does have an ending fund balance on the positive side fund 12 is our child development our preschool she operated with a surplus of about a little under a hundred thousand dollars and she had a positive audit adjustment last year so that positively affects her ending fund balance nutrition services did run at a deficit last year and that's a plan deficit 250 000 we did purchase some equipment and i believe we'll be faced with another deficit in our food services fund this year as we as we work through this pandemic and serving meals to our families our fund 14 deferred maintenance ran at a deficit mainly because it was determined not to make a transfer last year from the unrestricted general fund into deferred maintenance uh because we we already had overspent uh on the fund 01 side to the tune of about uh million but we do have a positive ending fund balance in our deferred maintenance we have fund 25 capital facilities that's our developer fees we get from both commercial and residential development in the town we had a positive increase there 1.1 million of revenues over half a million of expenditures so we do have 3.6 million there that's some money we have in developers fees if we see some growth that right there will help us place some portable classrooms on campuses for any student growth that may occur in the immediate future fund 40 our special reserve for capital outlay that's the fund that has been supporting our improvement capital facilities improvement projects around the district again that is restricted funding that we transfer in there on an annual basis that rda pass-through money you see we did spend it down quite a bit but we do have an ending fund balance but as of my earlier presentation i talked about that certificate of participation that will help support this fund in supporting those several million dollars worth of projects site improvement projects throughout the district and fund51 i put that up there just for your information that is not a fund that we control that is a fund that the county auditor county treasurer controls and the auditor controller tax collector controls because they collect the tax increment for our general obligation bond measure s from 2003 they collect that tax increment and they disperse that tax increment to pay the bond investors when those bonds become due but it is a fund that's on our books but we don't control it so next up we have our first interim reporting that's going to be our financials as the end of october we update our assumptions we bring all everything in line and continue to make those budget adjustments as we move through the year based on our needs and we are auditors will be in district next week again this is the unaudited actuals they become the audited actuals once the auditor visits and finishes their process and uh and we typically get our audit report around the middle of december and i typically present that to you in january for the previous fiscal year anybody have any questions thank you for your patience i know that was a lot of information i do have a question yes uh when you present the first interim report in october right that's when we're looking to get it the first dinner report is our financials as of october 31st and i will present that to you at our first board meeting of december okay uh will it be possible to then be sure that you include the ending balance and the starting balance so that we will see how it how we are playing with the numbers absolutely as part of that first interim reporting one thing that we are required to do is a multi-year projection and that multi-year projection will have this year updated to to uh our updated beginning fund balance based on these unaudited actuals i just presented with our projected ending fund balance for june of 21 and also our financial projections for the next two fiscal years all the way out to june of 23.

yes that will be a part of the first interview so um i know that we've been we asked this question in a few board meetings ago how much savings did we or how much expenditure did we as a district have because the students were not in school from march did we save on on the water and electricity that particular slide there shows utilities missile par to about 236 thousand that is 236. that is utilities um i would imagine the majority of that savings is directly related to the last two and a half months of school that covers water trash sewer and electricity fall into that line and again um some other line items that didn't occur because the students were not here it's hard to say what exactly we saved but we did have some savings uh also in the four thousands in the unrestricted side tires fuel and oil i believe that's uh the majority of that is a direct result that our buses were not out on the road those two and a half months um again in some general maintenance items that were not able to be accomplished in the spring as we did not have our maintenance crews staffed up so we did have i would say a minimum i'd say about 500 000 but it's hard to put an actual figure um but we did say but i would like to point out um as this summary if i can go back to this slide real quick right here even with the pandemic and closing our schools and having some savings based on our curtailed operations those last two and a half months we overspent our revenue by about 2.2 million dollars so we still spent more than we received we just didn't spend as much more because we were able to curtail operations is that we still overspent and we still did reduce our ending fund balance thank you you're welcome thank you any other questions thank you okay excellent job matt um told all the principals be sure to tune in i'm i'm the presentations today um kylie do we have any public comments we do we have one um this comment was submitted by melissa wetzel my name is melissa wetzel and i would like to address the unjustifiable closures of schools and the potential mass requirements upon reopening schools as it pertains to covet 19.

i would like to bring up just a few issues with distance learning although there are many it is a complete disservice to both children and parents first there are so many issues with regards to technology people are speaking over each other i have heard profanities in the background when children are not muted it is intrusive to the household it is impersonal children are not getting the one-on-one assistance that some of them need not to mention the complete disservice for children with special needs secondly as a parent the amount of time and work required by me as a teacher's aide should result in compensation granted i love spending time with my children and doing various activities at my discretion as a mother however if i'm going to be a teacher's aide i should be compensated accordingly school is school and home is home if schools are going to remain in this distance learning format or reopen with mask requirements etc perhaps parents should start to consider homeschooling unfortunately teachers could potentially be out of work if such a trend were to begin third these children are not getting any real social interaction and believe it or not many of them miss school as much as we appreciate our teachers we need to get schools reopened immediately under the same conditions prior to cobit 19.

this is not about blaming the school district however the school district and school board of trustees are representatives who do speak on these matters regularly and can request waivers and other things this is not about accusing the school district and the school board of trustees of not doing these things this is about being heard by you all so you our representatives can in turn speak for us in meetings with your superiors etc this brings me to my final point currently you do not allow allow public comment at your board meetings in person by phone or by video you only allow an email submission to be read i already addressed this with trenay nelson and emailed all of the board of trustees on this matter so far trene has been the only one who has given me the common courtesy of a response i emailed the following in part i know that currently the school district is exercising the executive order in 2920 which allows you to hold these meetings virtually assuming that you meet certain criteria are you aware that this is optional not mandatory are you aware that the town of apple valley allows public comment where the clerk calls the speakers to make their comment live by phone for their town council meetings are you aware that san bernardino county allows video and in-person public comment at their board of supervisors meetings one of the conditions that should be met to hold these meetings virtually is as follows four gives notice of means by which members of the public may observe the meeting and offer public comment in each instance where notice or agendas are posted i would argue that the latter portion of this is not being met as i am not afforded the opportunity to make my public comment someone else will speak for me they will not represent me as i would represent myself they will not represent my children in the way that i would i am without a voice i am pleading with you to allow public comment in person as the county does i am no longer a free person and matters pertaining to my own children i am not even free to speak for them i will leave you with this as my final thought and hope that you will consider all of this heavily i have much more to offer and suggest and question including teachers strikes lawsuits against the governor and more but my time is limited in this meeting i look forward to your response thank you melissa wetzel is that the only one we're under f2 right now which is superintendent comments and i will um just tell you publicly that our county data for apple valley unified school district has um continued to decline um which was the trend we were hoping for the two week 14 day rolling data showed that we were just below the threshold two weeks ago we are now sitting at a place where it is appropriate for us to move forward with a waiver our county just last friday the governor released the new guidelines on how they were going to color code counties our county is purple which is the the most at risk county however that said the waiver process can happen for apple valley there are some requirements that take place in order for us to do that um we have to include stakeholders um which includes both bargaining units and parents and then we have to also include people like the transportation department so that they're involved in the discussion as well as nutrition services and all of those things because as we move forward with the waiver the potential is one that we start bringing kids back to in-person instruction under a waiver process tk through sixth grade only this does not address high school or seventh and eighth grade well um the cabinet sat in on a presentation um from the state several weeks back and the um person that was speaking talked about the no moving forward with a waiver based on the ages of the students because the younger children are not ones that have been typically affected by the virus nor are they typically the ones that are moving the virus it is the kids that what they had statistically at that time was 12 and above now i know we're going to have some sixth graders that are 12 years old um but they had to make a decision and so that's that is what they gave us as an answer because we asked the same question there is no torque um protection potentially that would be true of any situation so um there is currently no torque protection um however moving forward this would take us um the timeline for any waiver so just so you understand that this is not a sign a piece of paper and turn it in tomorrow and have a waiver um once we have consulted with the bargaining units and the stakeholders meaning the parents and and typically we would include some students in that conversation probably high school even though they're not the waiver ones um it would take the the county then department of public health 14 days to review the current data what the waiver process looks like and all of the pieces that we have to submit under the application then it goes to the state it takes an additional up to three days for the state to either respond that they support the waiver or they can say that they don't or they can actually not respond at all and at that point then the department of public health in san bernardino county can approve the waiver okay so we're talking at least three weeks by the time it gets processed and there has to be some work time so dustin has work groups coming together that includes all of the stakeholders that will be necessary we have survey data from parents that we will actually move forward with and ask for more and we continue to keep our survey open with parents and um if we come off the off of the purple so in the middle of this waiver we have to do a parallel process if our county becomes red no longer purple then it is approximately an additional 14 days before we can ever start looking at returning students to seats so we're going to explore both pathways we certainly have some concerns about safety of staff and safety of students and how we're going to sanitize and make sure that all of the systems are in place we don't get to ignore the requirement of masks that is a requirement for any student fourth grade and above um and teachers and the teachers have to maintain a six foot distance so the work groups will come together and then dustin will bring the negotiating teams together to negotiate the effects of whatever the plan is finalized for the waiver okay so i wanted you to be aware of that um if at any time data indicates that it starts going the opposite direction we certainly will have to adjust and do whatever the state tells us we have to do we are working in unison with um the lewis center because at aae we want to make sure that we are discussing our reopening with them as well because they serve similar demographics and bringing kids back so i know that that's a collaborative process as well um we currently have about and i understand distance learning is not ideal nobody loves it it is work it is different and people miss having kids on campus there is no doubt about that but right now in the process with parents we have some data back 70 of our parents feel like they're it's just right what we're serving them with is just right um on either end of that are the rest and we will continue to push for satisfaction and support of students um we did have a two percent decline in our current enrollment and that is um pretty much trending across districts um throughout the state in fact superintendents have been texting me where are you guys at how many have you lost that type of thing two percent about 200 kids um and they are out actively talking with those students we have reopened um and actually transitioned a few teachers to independent study so that at school sites um where we did not have independent study before they could offer independent study um instead of sending them to hdpa because they are maxed out with their staffing and that's it for me right now and then mr so yes because we are based on our demographics of our district boundaries so at the time two weeks ago actually when lucerne valley had applied for their waiver they had very few cases of community cases within their town boundary and so that data alone put them below the threshold of 200 cases per hundred thousand we were at um the last time i looked for them when we were at 192.4 they were at 52.

so quite a difference in the the total community case number and that's what approves us for a waiver so when you're at the threshold of right at 200 applying is is risky because if it goes up they won't approve it and we don't want to put it in and have it denied we wanted to see the trend return and go down um the county is our district boundary is different than the town boundary so there is data on the county website having to do with covid19 that addresses approximately 72 000 people that's the town county community cases ours is based on over 80 000 because of our boundaries that are in the county area so that's why they were allowed um likewise um apple valley christian has to utilize the community cases but they also are very small so they could separate students and and that's part of the waiver process and they were denied yeah they were denied they applied esperia christian did yes so the zone was denied and i will tell you that that it's a little bit of a um there's a little bit of a contradiction in the data conversation because we have been told that the um private schools are having to go by their community data and hisperia's community data has not gone below the threshold so that that the the fact that they wavered them um they must have had other things that that factored in as well including you know being able to space kids um at i don't know where they could put them but just from that perspective but they've told us that that's their goal is not to approve any waivers if the community data is over 200 per okay um mr cell board comment i i don't have any uh i i just wanted the rest of the board no we are working together as a board you know what i i marie and i share and we talked to other board members in san bernardino we're doing we're doing all we can and so just don't be influenced by comments you know mr bender i have no comment mr ollie mr para um i do have a comment um i'm interested in knowing where we are on ethnic studies uh i'm also interested in uh when i saw the police report i was a little bit um not sure why we had on a police report um traffic stops uh so i'm not clear why we're still having traffic stops when school school wasn't in session in july um so um i just want to know why where they're out doing traffic stops during our vacation time when school's not in session the other thing that i am interested in in knowing is what are the possibilities if this continues what are the possibilities of having this room with a speakerphone so that the parents who want to speak to us directly using a phone um can be given a number and a queue and they can speak to us directly through that speakerphone this this was a classroom so i know it was wired for a phone it had a phone when it was a classroom i'm just wondering if we can just set a speakerphone here turn it on and let us hear them through their queue and just let them know that they have two minutes to speak or however minutes the board approves um and they speak to us directly that will bypass the comment that we just heard i do know that having them on a video will be a little bit more tricky but the phone might be an easier route to go so that we can bypass this um otherwise i have um absolutely nothing i'm so impressed with what the teachers uh able to do in this time i have actually spoken to parents who were who were glad about the um the virtual instruction because they said for the first time they get to know what their kids are doing it's no longer it's no longer good how does school go and they say good parents actually know what that really means of course you will always have people who are not too thrilled about it but the most important thing is that we need to keep the safety of our staff and our students um as our number one priority that's about it well thank you maria i was thinking very similar thoughts as you i will tell you this has got to be the hardest time for parents and students and our district trying to continue on their educations through such difficult times i was a teacher for many many years nothing has ever been as detrimental to education as this long time away from their teachers has been i'm sure the teachers feel just the same way okay public hearing we have a public hearing 2020 2021 learning continuity and attendance plan mr schlosser are there any questions or comments from members of the board regarding the 2020 2021 learning continuity and attendance plan or questions or comments no no no um we will now open the public hearing regarding the 2021 learning continuity and attendance plan for public comment at 429.

4 29 pm and due to the streaming process we will pause for five minutes to allow the public to comment anyone wishing to address the board are invited to email their comments to awsd underscore board at awsd.org and then while we're pausing for the the five minutes mr schlosser is going to talk to you a little bit about the plan first i'll pause and see if there are any public comments that have come in regarding the learning the lcap we'll check again at the end of the five minute period okay so just a brief outline i know you've seen the document i just wanted to make sure we highlight a couple of things that are important for this plan one the first section of the plan is stakeholder engagement i just want you to know this plan comes about through a process of gathering information from a variety of stakeholders in the following ways one the the aforementioned survey trene talked about the fact that we have incredible information from our parents in fact the most recent survey she referenced had a really quick response of almost a thousand parents again uh not everyone is um there's outliers and and we feel that's important to hear from but we did get good data back and that's in addition of course to the 13 000 responses we had to the previous two surveys then we had on august 17th the district advisory committee made up of our members of our normal district advisory from every school site made reference to that last time we talked and then on august 19th we met with our district english language advisory committee we took questions from those groups they had outstanding questions we are required by law to answer and post the answers to those questions on our website which we will do we're in the final stages of getting translations to those the questions were these there were questions about for example um they noticed that the in our lcap there's no mention of our police department we've talked about that in here that is not a one of the items in our lcap at this point however they were they wanted to make sure that was still a priority in the district and we were able to answer that question there are questions about how parents can get information about how to use a chromebook there are questions about how to get lists of class assignments excellent questions that help us to know what parents need to make this work second section of the plan has to do with in-person learning well of course for us hard question to answer because we're not doing it right now so we had to have a contingent response so it says here's based on the cdc guidelines what we would do but we made clear to say that whatever we do will be negotiated as is mentioned with bargaining units and consultation with bargaining units and bring in stakeholders and so that's critical to know everything okay yeah okay got it and then um then of course a section on distance learning where we highlight all the training that's happened all the devices distributed and what's going on to make it happen um to make this distance learning process work including people who have changed how to change roles and responsibilities there's a pupil learning loss section which talks about how we will be addressing what you so rightly notice is a you know the impact to students and how we'll be measuring that so that's addressed in the plan and then finally mental health and social emotional learning and you'll see even in this board meeting on one of the consent items is about care solace this is a attempt by us to contract with an agency that will help connect families to mental health services as one of the one of the measures we are putting into place so that they can have expanded services so that's just a quick highlight of what's in the plan also all the other lcap items are kind of tucked in there and and summarized because that's the only space they gave us to work so you can tell the state had to build this quickly and then um it you know they built it we drafted drafted it we posted it to the website then they sent out guidance for how to write it and so it's in draft format now we await public comment and input we will make adjustments and bring it back to you on the 24th for any other um feedback or or you know for a final adoption rather on the 24th of september then by the 30th of september must be turned into the county and submitted to them okay um do we have any public comments kylie not at this time okay hearing no further public comment we now close the public hearing for the 2020 2021 learning continuity and attendance plan um it was opened at 4 25 and closed down 429 oh thank you and it's closing at 4 34.

um we have a second public hearing and during that five-minute break um we're gonna let the board take a quick five-minute break while that we're waiting for that to come in so we're gonna start the public hearing people textbook and instructional materials pause for just a minute let me get it done and instructional material compliance ka 12 2020 2021 school year uh mr schlosser under the ed code 60 119 and ccr title 5 section 9531c requires the governing board of any local agency receiving instructional materials funds from any state source to hold a public hearing on the sufficiency of textbooks or instructional materials by the end of the eighth week of school are there any questions or comments from board member members or um of the board regarding the pupil textbook in instructional materials compliance k-12 2020-2021 school year any board questions yes well that include ethnic books for this school year are we waiting for next school year they i can answer that that will include um at this time anything that is adopted as the core adoption which was already approved so at this time no new adoptions are a part of it only anything that was adopted and turned into williams for sufficiency okay okay williams lawsuit that's what we're talking about that's one component okay okay yeah no questions we're going to open the public hearing regarding the people textbook and instructional materials compliance k12 2020 school year for public comment at 4 35 4 35 and we'll do a streaming process we will pause for five minutes to allow the public comment to come in those wishing to address the board are invited to email their comments to awsd underscore board absd.org so we're going to pause for five minutes and you may take a break while we do that kylie do we have any public comments we do not at this time okay hearing no further public comment i now close the public hearing for pupil textbook and instructional materials compliance k12 2020 2021 school year and it will it the time opened at 4 35 and will close at 4 42.