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okay mr bauman here mrs dawn here mrs croner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan here mrs moyer mrs swanson here please rise for the pledge of under allegiance indivisible with liberty and justice for all good evening i'd like to welcome everyone who is personally in attendance at tonight's board meeting as was stated on the board agenda this meeting is open to the public in accordance with phase 4 guidance issued by the illinois department of public health and the illinois state board of education we are all social distancing per the guidance and all individuals are required to wear a face covering at all times while in the school building we will be accommodating those who can't wear a mask by live streaming this meeting at www.sd308.org so if anyone would like to make a public comment to the board but can't do so in person because of the mask requirement you may always submit a comment in writing ahead of the meeting and your comment will be read during the public comments section of the meeting the directions to submit a written public comment are listed at the top of the meeting agenda we certainly recognize that wearing a face mask for long periods of time is inconvenient and sometimes uncomfortable however it does not it does provide the best known protection against giving the virus to another person and it will be required of all individuals during this meeting if anyone needs a break from wearing a mask during the meeting please feel free to go outside for a break and take your mask off as you continue to remain six feet apart from others just put your mask back on before re-entering the building please understand that we will be monitoring the building and will be asking anyone without a mask to put one on or to leave the building we appreciate everyone's understanding and willingness to abide by these expectations for our collective safety and health thank you on behalf of the board of education i would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we receive from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system residents interested in speaking to the board this evening are asked to have completed a comment card and presented it to the secretary to the board when the secretary calls your name i ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback please note that comments are limited to five minutes per person and that no discussion of personnel matters or responses to questions are permitted the board does not participate in discussion during public comment follow-up to your questions or concerns will be addressed by administration through the contact information provided on the comment card thank you cheryl lontarati hi my name is cheryl lonzarotti i'm a recess supervisor at boulder hill i've been there for three years i understand the reasoning of your obvious decision i look forward to returning to work and being with all the kids when school starts in-person learning i have volunteered for any help you might need thank you tanya harris voting in a democracy is when a group of people have the right to choose who governs over them voting at oswego east is when the administration leads you to believe your voice is being heard for years the black students at oswego east have been asking for their voices to be heard they even wrote a book about it yet there are still some unfair and unjust practices in place and no one is willing to get to the root of the problem for the black student association to have an organization it has always been up to the students to find a sponsor but this year that changed the students were led to believe that their voices mattered they were led to believe that they had a say in their organization for a reason that no one has yet to explain the administration at oswego east went outside of the district and picked someone to be in front of our black students does the administration usually take it upon themselves to appoint a sponsor for clubs school district 308 has yet to put out a statement of unity solidarity and a zero tolerance for racism school district 308 has yet to set the tone for when the students return to the buildings school district 308 we are asking for you and your building administrators to be fair our black students are living and seeing racism at an all-time high as a parent i would to see the administration at oswego east be transparent and not have secret voting not take the voices of black students and stifle them and most importantly i would think that the administration at oswego east would want to make the clubs a comfortable and safe place for the black students especially during this time of high racial tension and not give someone they don't know access to them pamela hampton i think we can all agree that the percentage of black students in this district are suspended at an alarming rate i would like to speak with you today about reasons why the board and district leaders should do all you can to correct restorative justice practices for black students in this district benefit for this school district provides a layer of student support to correct behavior boost retention matriculation and graduation rates builds social emotional development eliminates the heightened sense of distrust between black students and white teachers there is restorative justice funding available to school districts if we look at the disproportionate number of black students being taken away from educational instruction we should look at the notion that all teachers are not equipped to be socially available to black students and families blank junior high school recently hired a restorative practices counselor dr kitchen i would like the board to consider hiring a restorative practices counselor at every junior high school under the leadership and guidance of dr kitchen for the purpose of all restorative justice counselors to be on one accord this district is lacking in black support staff and if you truly want to give the black students in this district a chance give the black students the support and guidance they need which in turn has the great potential to assist with closing the achievement gap in the racial climate of the world what a great statement sd-308 would make to be proactive in ensuring all students in this district have an opportunity to succeed our students should not go back into these buildings the same way they left please remember your silence speaks volumes key one of the louise my name is that's am i good now okay i'll restate my name my name is kiwana maurice i've been a resident of the school district for over 18 years i reside at 2529 lambert drive in aurora illinois i look around at this um school board our elected officials and i see many of you whom i elected and i'm here today to voice my concern as a parent as well as a civil rights activist you know equity is not a novel idea to district 308 we've been dealing with equality and equity putting in plans since 2008 plans were revamped 2018 and we have seen limited progress our nation our state our county we were rocked with the actions of george floyd not only with that we were also met with the pandemic but what was our response as a school district how can we lead i get a little bit teary eyed when i think about we have a statement that says we are a we provide world-class education i would hope that would be a district where all of our students would be would feel accepted so as these things occurred in this unprecedented time i waited to hear a response from school district 308 i waited as i saw district 203 roll out a statement june 25th of 2020 indicating their resolution reaffirming districts 203 commitment to equity for all students and overcoming systemic racism and ending racial justice i waited and i saw 204 made a statement then i waited i saw even joliet make a statement and had not heard a statement from district 308 where all of our children reside where all of our children want to feel respected want to feel valued want to feel cared for and i sent a letter to dr john starlin i sent a letter to many of you that's sitting here on our school board so what i am asking as our neighboring districts have made statements commitment to equity for all students making this a place where all students black students hispanic students students with disabilities students who have issues that we are yet is yet to be diagnosed that they feel good in this district what are we doing it's not hard or if it is hard it's good work why do we wait we shed our tears we know that it is a heart issue why do we wait to address policies and practices that make this district great whereas my neighbors they're not moving to district 204 they're not taking their tax dollars this is a good district this is a good community so what i'm asking our school board is to consider is writing a commitment statement writing a resolution the illinois school board it's not novel to them you all attend those meetings and they have conferences for the past two years in regards in looking at equity so it is my hope that you all will consider making a statement and a stand against racism and oppressive practices within this education institution our neighboring districts are doing it setting best practices surely we can set best practices but that's my hope as our i'm hoping as my children return to the an in-school environment that they're going to be perceived valued and know that this is a great place to be thank you katie hayden i'm just gonna be looking at my paper because my glasses are fogging with my mask so please don't feel disrespected in any way hi everyone my name is katie hyden i'm attending tonight's meeting because i'm a concerned parent of sure children with learning differences and i can i'm sorry one second i'm attending tonight's meeting because i'm a concerned parent of children with learning differences and a concerned ceo of rhk construction unfortunately unfortunately remote learning is not working for our family or our company it's affecting us and so many others from every unique situation as a local grad of ohs 05 and having been involved in helping build our community and surrounding areas i'm sorry i have to apologize again i'm always thinking of creatively ways to advocate for special education resources and the trades i'm voicing these concerns today not in anger but as guidance that the board should consider reviewing for their remote learning plan from the one-size-fits-all scenario to plans to protect our community families and to help build up our local and surrounding economy one of the questions i have for the board is why are the children expected to go to continued lives when their education cannot be completed during the live working families like us and so many others need to have the option for decreased lives and flexible schedules especially when we all have multiple children and those of younger ages it does not work with everything being at the same time my older teens must help with their younger siblings when we are working we all feel we are pinned to the wall with this attendance check and deadlines for work my family's mental health and i'm going to say that again my family's mental health is important to me and this this is too much for all of us and i won't begin to mention how it's impacted my business and having to ask my general contractors to have flexibility in our performed work schedule because the students are remote learning for sd 308.
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great i call this meeting to order kimberly can you do a roll call for me please karen anderson here tammy hines here john long here greg meyer here scott middleton here craig o'connor here lisa schumacher here we have a forum we're going to go ahead and get started first of all i want to say welcome to your visitors um it looks a little different than when we used to get together and be able to sit close together but hopefully this works out for everybody i also wanted to start off by saying tonight there is a plan and we're going to discuss plans and different options and things like that on a back to school for for our students all of our students in some form or another if if so desired so i know a lot of folks are here to talk about that and hopefully with with knowing that we welcome your comments and things like that but we just want to make sure that you understand that's what we're here for tonight a little bit of ground rules for the folks that are addressing the board each person is going to receive three minutes for public comments um in order to give the maximum number of people an opportunity to speak and i think we max out our chairs in here right pretty much um i think we have a few public comments that came in that dr costelli is going to address for us as well uh traditionally our public comments are limited to a total of 15 minutes per meeting but since we recognize this is a pretty hot topic we will we will discuss those things what i would like to do though is if you have the same comment as somebody else or if you have a sp or you have a spokesperson for a group that you're here for that you have that spoke spokesperson speak just in the interest of time and to hear everybody's opinions on this matter and um i don't believe we have anybody else waiting outside do we have one no i just think i think we have everybody we were thinking we might have more than our allotted number of folks we were able to have in here so we were going to ask folks to leave after they make their comments other folks come in but it sounds like there's nobody outside waiting at this point so let's go ahead and get started you want do you want to go ahead with yours yup i have a few people to call some to read and then we can move to the other public comments so i'll do the phone calls first hello mrs wheatley this is this is courtney costelli with columbia schools i have you down as wishing to address the board we have started our board meeting public comments and uh you have the board's attention if you would like to make a comment oh okay thank you and this is this is whiteley can you just ask them to say their names oh yeah can we just say your name for the record and then we do have a three-minute timeline okay perfect yeah and jessica wheatley and i just first i want to say that the teachers have done such a phenomenal job with this remote learning we're really impressed with it um obviously i think the goal for everyone is to get the kids back in school um i am also a teacher myself and i think one i would love to kids back and again i think we all know that but i just hope that you'll consider giving the teachers the time they need to teach remotely i know that was a big thing with our district and so they just really need that time it takes a lot of time and effort so that's my main comment okay all right thank you very much have a good night thank you you guys have a good night huh hello mr masik this is courtney costelli with columbia schools i have you down here wanting to address the board this evening that's correct okay and um what i need for you to do is just before you start your statement is just save your name for the record and that we do have a three minute time limit okay okay good you are free to start okay great my name is i'm the father of a mma sick who is in the third grade and her teacher is mrs boyles first of all a bottom line up front is we would like to be learning a continuity learning option for our daughter in the third grade one i am at high risk there's yet to be an example where any school or workplace has been capable of cycling coping who've been ahead of a vaccine or are taking measures to to ensure uh 100 safety from all from from people in the in those spaces two uh schools that have tried to return inevitably have uh have had to quarantine students that's making the environment inconsistent and confusing we are very happy with the experience material and recent increase in workload and i wanted to say a special thank you to mrs boyles and the other third grade teachers for doing such a fine job absent our typical in-school distractions my daughter is fully engaged focused and takes her learning to the next level by replicating her science experience at home and honestly it's a rare privilege to be so in tune with her learning as a parent and be a part of that experience in both science physical education reading etc my work i currently work for the department of defense and we have yet to return to business as usual because the science and the numbers do not suggest the mistakes to do so they're taking they're proceeding with caution as we would expect every workplace or school to do the same we know the teachers and the administration are doing the best they can with the information they have so we ask that you say consistently committed to your decision it makes sense to reevaluate every nine weeks but stick with the plan frankly we're appalled that the people within this community have campaigned to rally to bully the administration to return to school when a decision has already been made we ask that you do what is right what is safe and what is consistent we fully support you and we are very happy with the experience you you've gone the effort to bring at home the technology you know it's working well and the teachers are are expanding workload we couldn't honestly ask for anything more um yeah that's all i have to say again we just ask that you at least continue an option to have an e-learning environment thank you thank you have a good evening thank you hello mrs haven this is courtney costelli with columbia schools hi hi i'm calling because you expressed interest in addressing the board during the meeting in both public comments yes please okay and uh just for uh procedurals if you before you start state your name for the record and that we do have a three minute time uh period so whenever you're ready the board is listening okay my name is michelle haven i have a first grader in the district um and i'm just going to pose all of my questions and you guys can address them at will i am first wondering what has changed with since the hybrid option that we had as hybrid moved to remote when we were at four percent positivity we're currently at 11 and we're ready to thrust them all back into school it doesn't seem safe i'm also wondering what precautions what mandates will be in place to make sure the spread doesn't go any further than one classroom or one school will the whole class then be given their two weeks and what may be excused absences how did we get from we had nine weeks to have to go through this again to here we are at four where we're we're back to square one when the kids are finding their groove and the teachers are doing amazing and has everybody moving forward on a good trajectory and then now we're gonna go back to square one and then you're going to put the kids back in school and then have two weeks of learning the rules learning to walk in the line learning how the schedule works are the remote learners then going to be held back not learning because the kids in class then are having to do other things and my last question is how will remote learning work moving forward how long will it be offered how will the teachers be given time to do in class and remote learning how will the education be kept up on remote learning because we're obviously going to choose remote that feels famous for our family so all of those questions laid out there i'm happy to have more have feedback but i have three minutes so all right thank you very much okay thank you charles james jr and it says dear board of education first they want to express our family's appreciation for dr pistelli mr grody the administration and especially the teachers for having worked so hard to make remote learning work we feel they have done an amazing job under intense pressure and stress thank you very much for that effort i'm sure it was a grueling non-summer both of my parents were educators so i understand the vital with which you are being met i also have what i feel is a unique perspective on this my father charles james senior spent nine years on the lindbergh school district board he was president of the district for two of these years in the early 80s he presided as bussing middle and elementary school closures were being decided and implemented we were chased out of our house on three occasions due to bomb threats our driveway was spray painted with misspelled racial epithets we are not intimidated scared perhaps my dad voted for busing he and his fellow board members voted based on what they thought was right at the time they did not let the mob they did not let the mob win i implore you to take the same stand don't let the mob win in my view representative democracy is not intended for elected officials to quote do what we say we elect representatives to make decisions based on their experience and value set this whole argument that you have to do what people say is ridiculous the remedy for disapproval is the next election we cannot operate in an environment where those who yell most loudly are rewarded we are dismayed that an emergency board meeting has been called due to bullying and shrill parents we are angry that our teachers are being so mistreated there is no scientific or evidence-based reason to reopen schools right now indeed all public health measures are much worse than last brain all data and actual scientists not armchair epidemiologists who feel a certain way are predicting a bad fall in winter this reopening conversation is based on emotion not data or science the outcome is entirely predictable we made the right decision to close for nine weeks please do not alter that plan vacillation is a core modus operandi for any organization it is one thing to change course based upon new information none of which support reopening right now vacillation to appease the mob is unworkable thank you for your consideration we hope you do the right thing and don't let the mob win please uh feel free to share my comments openly that's all i have for people great um did we have a let's see who who would like to address the board next what i'd like to do is just uh something that i did not say at the beginning if you have specific instances for a child or a teacher please don't bring those to the board at this time this is a public meeting we don't we don't need any any uh children's names or anything like that so yes this is apoc you have to go first okay oh thank you i give a lot of thought before i'm here with your name thank you i'm jackie acock thank you i'm a lifelong colombian and my kids and grandkids went to the school system and i have a granddaughter who's a junior in high school and the reason i came to talk to you this evening is because i appreciate all that you've done but i'd like to give you a perspective that perhaps no one in this room has i was educated in love in the system in the school in columbia and i'm an rn in addition to being an rn i'm a nurse educator over the past 30 years i've taught on campus online and hybrid courses and i've i'd like to give you my opinion from my perspective as an educator who's done all three i recently resigned from central methodist university when they decided to go from hybrid to all virtual my observations now remember i'm dealing with adult learners supposedly high school kids are adult learners but we don't really know about that but what i've discovered is that online is not for everyone there's a breakdown many times of teacher-student relationship or in the case of a college professor sometimes it's very difficult to establish and in the first place good students will always do well no matter what system you utilize the students that have a problem are the c students are the students who are having difficulty many times these kids fall through the cracks and disengage and disengage forever students when given a choice would at least choose the hybrid as it gives them some of each i cannot imagine how these wonderful teachers are able to teach kindergarten first second third fourth grade it's amazing to me one of the things that spurred me on is i told you i'm an rn i haven't practiced clinically for eight years i've been teaching almost exclusively but i got from one of my nursing magazines they uh they questioned infection control nurses and members of the cdc who had children it was a very small study they only used 10 people but 50 percent of them said given the opportunity they would send their children to school and these are healthcare professionals who very well know the ins and outs of povid i'm asking you after this nine weeks to bring these kids back to school parents aren't nurses parents aren't teachers as much as we want to be we are not take precautions and go with of the hybrid model that you had planned on originally get the kids and families involved let them choose as healthcare workers they can make that decision you can protect yourself and protect your teachers we do it all the time i come from a family of health care workers okay lastly am i done thank you yes jessica okay good evening and thank you for the opportunity to provide public comments tonight my name is jessica ray and i'm a parent in the district i'd first like to express my appreciation to the board to district administration and to the staff for your leadership as we've embarked on this school year well the while last month may not have been a time to be a pioneer for a strategy for in-person learning we do have new information and i now have confidence in this board and our administration that we can be fast followers learning from the best practices of other schools in our region i'm sure you're sharing this we can talk a lot about how hard it is for all of us as adults whether it be parents staff administrators everybody is doing double duty it's hard and the kids are not here to give their voice so i'm as an advocate for my two children going to share their feelings since they couldn't be here this evening my nine-year-old is receiving asynchronous instruction uh the staff the administration has been fantastic and very responsive but she has struggled with the online platform and google classroom as have i somehow with the mba i still can't figure out how to tell what's due each week virtual learning is not compatible with her learning style and my normally happy go lucky kid is in tears at least two to three times per week her grades are poor this year and she routinely cries at night and tells me mom i am a failure i'm a failure at e-learning my eleven-year-old is receiving synchronous instruction the screens for remote learning are the size of an ipad she's an excellent worker but by the end of the day when we're viewing multiple students they're about the size of your thumb and she at the end of the day has a headache and has eye strain like i've heard from some others just from looking at that stream screen just sitting there isolated wearing earbuds for five hours straight before she starts to do homework and sits longer and looks at that screen even longer both kids are anxious about the technology challenges of remotely a leadership group to endorse a strategy that gets these kids in school for the maximum number of hours and days possible i believe in this administration and that the board will support this administration to offer that option for our children to support their their academic development and opportunity for success and i thank you for your time this evening amy boomer okay hi my name is amy goomersheimer and i think i have the exact same goal of everyone here in this room my goal is simply to have my children receive the best possible education this a synchronous learning is not conducive to providing the best education for our children studies show the disadvantages of this learning are it lacks and send feedback it lacks personal interaction there is no live collaboration and real-time activities it can cause a lack of motivation as we heard from another parent it also requires self-discipline something that a child underneath the age of 10 i find that personally very hard to instill that when they haven't been taught that and they're not at the level where they can have that self-discipline to do it entirely on their own as a parent i would like to support all of these teachers that are behind me and also help my children learn the three r's reading writing and arithmetic to the best of their abilities but what i'm finding is that with a lack of books advanced notice of any other curriculum and no one-stop location to find my children's homework is resulting in additional stress on my two children i'm doing my normal working job and trying to support these teachers along with my kids but we need a better system of delivering the homework provide us with one single list of links to do's and supporting materials the amount of people who showed up here tonight is indicated how supportive are columbia parents of their children's education we need to know in advance what the children are being taught so that we can help them i've asked the principal and the superintendent why our fifth grade students do not have textbooks and only reading novels and i'm told that they're only available or they're not available due to changes in common core math so my question for the board is if this is indeed the case why did they have an online math textbook last year in fourth grade and in closing i'm asking that us as parents are provided with advanced notice of the assignments and what the teachers are teaching our children along with all lists of links all on one page to make it easier on us as working parents to be able to help support our teachers and staff mark hanson good evening thank you uh for the opportunity i'm mark janssen i have uh two children in the school district and thanks again for this opportunity i'm here to advocate for in-person learning as quickly as the board and administration sees fit and as much as you guys see fit i'm also assistant superintendent in freeberg and we've been remote learning for over the past month and it's going very well yes there were some bumps in the road in the beginning but over the last few weeks knock on wood we've been going pretty well we're in a group and things are going very well it can be done and we're doing it right now and the second thing is that i would like to say is a should the board and the administration recommend going back in person my plea is to parents um we have to keep in mind as parents you know previously we would send our child to school if he had a or he or she had a runny nose a headache fever we can't do that anymore so as parents we have to be vigilant with our kids health and if they wake up in the morning and they're not feeling well we have to keep them home and we have to do the right thing with that we all know how valuable in-person learning is that's why we're here that's what we're going after but in order to keep that going parents have to do their part as well we're in this together so in closing thank you again for the opportunity thank you board for what you're going through right now it's not easy i know it's not and administration thank you all for what you've done for our kids over these past few months and what you continue to do every day thank you thank you board members for the opportunity to speak here tonight my name is margaret rudolph and i guess before i get to my comments um you know we've already heard parents and commenters talk about the negative emotional impacts and the technical difficulties of remote learning for the average students and i'm here to speak about iep students so students have who have additional challenges in their learning experience and and i have a great deal of insight into the needs of iep students i am the mother of two iep students here in the columbia district and i've worked and i've worked as a substitute teacher here at cusd4 for eight years and i've been involved in my children's education in columbia from the beginning i've been a partner with the special education team from the moment my children have entered the district sorry i do find it difficult to speak through this so in any case i i consider myself a key partner with the teachers and the administration and i believe i've developed some very productive and helpful relationships over the years through those means so i see how important it is for iep students to receive the the patient assistance in a structured environment to ensure their academic success and progress and from the beginning as a less than five day week has been contemplated i've had discussions with board members as well as leading administration officials to ensure that iep students have their needs met in this unusual time and iep students including teens need the guidance from the special education team to prioritize and manage their workload as well as to receive guidance and understanding the material so that they make complete assignments and perform well on tests it is difficult via the fully remote learning for iep students to understand and complete assignments especially according to teacher expectations they might miss some details and we've experienced that ourselves parents must work with their children each evening after we do our own jobs and over the weekends to meet expectations and we must consult group google classroom at several i guess seven classes a day for high school and we checked with tys with skyward to determine daily and missing assignments and under these situations iep students run a risk of amassing a growing list of missing assignments over time now the special education team at chs have made themselves available to iep students via google meets and i've been very appreciative of their efforts and there's only so much they can do okay under the situation so we are all very appreciative the problem is that what they're able to do is not enough for iep students and i favor a return to the classroom for iep students in particular where they can receive hopefully daily help and and columbia's children have only one shot at obtaining the foundations for productive adulthood and we shouldn't let this year go to waste especially for iep students who will have few opportunities after their k-12 education to receive the tools they need for adulthood thank you kelly hello my name is kelly antelek i have two children in the district one in fifth grade one a sophomore in high school and i'm here to give my vote if you will for in-person learning at the beginning of registration there was an option for in-person and remote learning and so if the options were given to the parents those who selected remote learning should be happy and and i don't understand um why in person was then taken away from the other parents especially at mass work kids at least my kids are completing assignments for completion versus comprehension as a parent i have i have my fifth grader who i have to hold his hand every step of the way or he would be failing parents are doing most of the work and i'm not a teacher i don't have a teaching degree i don't know what i'm doing it i'm just winging it with him but i can tell you that he he just he he has a lot of anxiety he feels like he's a failure we have meltdowns multiple times a day because he doesn't have the computer training or the knowledge to navigate the system most 10 year olds don't know what a hyperlink is they don't know how to create a slideshow they don't know about checking emails daily and emails should not replace direct teacher-student communication and we constantly have tech issues at our home um it's just causing a ton of anxiety in our home and i feel like it's debilitating to these kids this is the we're building this is their their building blocks for future learning and they're not getting that i have a document if i can submit it you're doing fine thank you so much thank you hey bailey hello my name is kate bailey i think i know most my i'm here to advocate for in-person learning i'm a normal parent i have a lot of people i've discussed this with we're in the trenches every single day i'm so glad the board meeting was held today after a day of e-learning it is it's brutal the teachers are doing a great job i don't have a problem with that i come from a teacher that's retired from the school district we're struggling as a district you want me to send these kids to college one day and we are behind it's been how many months now i need to get them in they got to see their teachers they don't have a social group that they talk to anymore they're in their rooms for about you know five to six hours the only one they talk to is me and i they don't want to talk to me my mom they don't want to listen to me either and i just need some direction from the school board you guys are doing a great job but i need in-person learning thanks heidi sanders hello i'm heidi sanders and i have a child that is a freshman at columbia high school and there's been many good points made and just a few things i would like to add to the thought process of this big decision as a freshman and sophomore in high school your classes and your grades or the foundation for your junior year to apply to high school or to apply to college to get the act and sat scores you need for scholarships there's so many things that are affected and i feel that the parents that don't want their children in school are having that option but us parents that want the kids present are not having that voice and i would love to see that opportunity given to my son and i can tell you i've been working throughout this whole pandemic and i've not once got sick and i meet with individuals constantly daily so i feel there is a legitimate concern but i do feel it as possible to have a healthy school thank you hi good evening my name is carrie goleener and i have a kindergartner in the school district i also have a fifth grader in the school district i'm a graduate of columbia high school k through graduated from columbia high school my parents were both teachers in the school district and my dad retired as a teacher in the district i'm also the director and owner of creative kids incorporated in columbia and we were mandated to close as well we are our school for young children and we have been reopened since june 8th and we have had absolutely zero issues we have about 70 students and we have had absolutely no issues at all i do understand that they are younger children their ages two through six so i understand that young children this doesn't affect usually as often but i did want to address that we have been open and been doing fine as a school my child my son is five in the same age as some of the kids he'll be six in october and he has been struggling kindergarten is hard the teachers have done an amazing job but kindergarten is just very it's very difficult to really bond with children and have them do fine motor lessons and learn and really be motivated to be excited to please the teacher kids that age they love their teachers right and they want they need that feedback you know in person so if we could have a hybrid option that would be amazing if we could go back more than two days a week i would be in favor of that as well since we are doing school across town five days a week i do understand that if remote is still happening that they would need time to plan as well so fridays if they need to plan i understand that as well so um anyway i have other um things i'd like to discuss with the school board at a later time but we will we can do that at the next school board meeting but i am in favor and my daughter who's in fifth grade she is a wonder she's a great student straight a student however i have also heard her say she's a failure at this so i and i have never heard those words come out of her mouth and it's very disturbing she misses her friends she misses the social aspects for sure and you just can't compete with in person so thank you for the opportunity to speak jeremy lane my name is jeremy lane we moved here about 12 years ago for the school district we wanted our kids to grow up in a public school the actions and the decisions that you guys have made have made me regret that decision i've called every private school they have waiting lists now if mcdonald's is open and every other business is open there's no reason why these kids can't be in school five days a week i work in steel i'm deemed essential i don't save lives i don't do anything i make stuff out of steel i've never got to stay home from work my kids are bounced between sitters and anybody i can find so that they can be taken care of while i'm at work open the schools up this is ridiculous that's all i got to say nicholas i'm nicholas salfridge and i have a daughter that's um in eighth grade here and i went through the columbia school system from kindergarten through eighth grade my dad went to school here and my grandpa lived here as well so i've been in columbia my whole life and my daughter is very self-motivated and is doing a really good job on the online and the teachers are great but she is certainly lacking the social aspect and really as far as going into the workforce the most important skill that i obtained from going through school was certainly the social interaction with people also finding your groups of friends finding finding like people with similar interests and she is really has become definitely there's been become a recluse in some in some sense um and i thought there was a problem before this all happened definitely interesting time this is but before that i was you know had to monitor you know phone time and t you know and video game time and wanting her to interact more but this is really like what you can't really tell what tell your kid to get rid of your phone or put down your phone because what else are they going to do they can't really meet or hang out with people so i'm thinking they're missing out on a very very important job skill that's going to carry really start carrying over um for the rest of their lives if if they don't start interacting even at this this age especially when you're talking about seniors and juniors and seniors in high school they really need that interaction and and i would say to the majority of people and at least the people i talked to were really just for the facts that we see um we're not afraid um if if some the worst case scenario that you did have a situation we would not blame the school board the majority of parents that have chosen to take let their kid go to school and if there was a situation that their kid got sick we would not blame you because we we fully accept responsibility um i just want you that's i believe that's all i have to say chris coulter got some notes for you all tonight so get your pins ready a little bit about myself my name is chris poultre my dad was a school board president here at columbia district back in the 80s or 90s i served on a school board in a fountain district night myself obviously we didn't have to deal with anything you guys are dealing with now and i understand the importance of health and safety and things like that but i want you all to take down this i want you to look at the cdc.gov website and look at article written in july importance of reopening schools what that discusses is basically kids don't get sick kids are asymptomatic they might bring it home not me but that's my fault if i'm not taking pps you know prescribed things at home or in a mask wash my hands which everybody advised to do anyway that's just good hygiene the school doesn't take me like i said like he said there's no reliability on you guys people have jobs they have to have your kids have to go to school so people know the work it's just ridiculously disruptive to child i mean the kids have to be there for social groups for emotional connections they don't get that at home i mean we obviously have an emotional question my daughter was a son but they missed their friends and then like somebody admitted they go out anyway they're going to mcdonald's going to walmart wherever these other essential businesses are and they're hanging out with them down there walking around town no mask on and still i have the stats the full drive of monterey county population estimated 2020 for columbia 10 550 individuals covet tested 1755 of our citizens right out of that 1755 235 tested positive for code that's a positivity rate for colombia itself of 2.23 so i don't know the gentleman on the phone is calling us a mob or whatever but i look at statistics and i pulled these off for the websites of the government so if i'm a mob spewing specifically i've got a problem if you look at influenza b which the death rate this is a positive death rate for m flu right every year children die at a rate of 6.9 percent do we shut down the schools or the business for that no why are we doing it now i prepare you guys to open up the schools send the kids to school five days a week normal hours and nobody will held account at least on my mark my name is chris poultre i will not hold you accountable for if my child gets sick but you need to help this community out you're part of the solution really it's not a problem you're part of the solution fix it you guys have the power to do it if you don't who's that for 2021 there's going to be people coming for your jobs you guys are here to help the community not to destroy it and what you're doing right now with the kids in school as kids and the schools is not productive in being a positive role model for this district i hope you guys really take a listen read that article it's actually real written and it's from the cdc and it actually provides a lot of insight about actually what goes on with kids and stuff and how they're affected by the negative impact of closing schools all right thank you guys very much have a good vote tonight 4-3 what about school what were those numbers 225 people tested positive for columbia 1755 people were tested or performed tests out of the population 10 550 if you do cross or positivity test that's 2.23 or plummet if you i didn't go into depth i wouldn't go into depth i can go to that no i just wanted nobody under 30 died of cobalt in modern county one time one person under 40 to 49 and four people 50 to 59 have died everybody else has been 60 years or older it's not a death threat or death sentence to our teachers or our students please open the schools up thank you alexa um ashley benz benzie ashley hi i don't have a whole lot to say other than i haven't i'm sorry um my fifth grader a lot of you know her mr dugan you probably remember her very outgoing great student everybody in all the schools she's been in has loved her all the administration teachers everybody um straight a student never had any problem loved school until now she's failing she's struggling very hard we went camping last weekend and people that she has met twice she wanted us to leave her with them so she didn't have to come back and do any more of this school it makes me very scared for her mental health and what the implications could all come from this um it's just a very unprecedented time none of us know what's going on you guys are doing as much as you possibly can and some kids thrive on computers and they love it she is a social butterfly she needs that immediate reinforcement a lot of kids do she needs to see your face she to know what you're actually thinking what you're meaning she's not getting that and it's very very detrimental to her at this point that's my biggest concern if it is five days a week it's five days a week if it's hybrid at least she's getting something i know you guys are gonna do whatever you can to make the best decisions that you possibly can for the whole um but it's just as a parent of a kid to see this big of a decline is very scary that's it thank you mrs kennedy 10 freely hi my name is jen briley i am a columbia graduate i have uh four children a ninth eighth seventh and fifth grader our experience with online i appreciate the board of education everything that you've done i appreciate all the teachers they've been fantastic with what they've had to work with but our experience with online has really been a struggle um as far as technical difficulty um as far as distractions we have four kids in the house and you know there's only so many places to go and we're trying to get them out of their bedrooms so that they are in more of a school environment but we're struggling with where to put the kids so they do have distractions all four of them are struggling grade wise from what they've done last year so i really just plead to get the kids in all school preferably every day but at least a hybrid schedule just for their mental health you know a lot of them have anxiety and it's just really been a struggle and i i just i hate to see that for my kids um the fifth grader they had sent i guess a worksheet for them to fill out and she filled in i am sheffield and okay about this school year she said i prefer she was asked i pretend she filled in that i'm enjoying online schooling and she's not and it's it's just been really hard so i just i really hope that for the kids mental health that they can get back in school and again i appreciate the opportunity to speak and thank you for all that we've done teachers and everyone thank you caitlyn brownberger hi i'm caitlin brownberger i'm the mother of a second grader and i just want to say that i do not envy your position as board members and as the administration right now the difficult task in which you have and i thank you for allowing us to speak and holding a special meeting tonight i want to say that i support our teachers and i am so incredibly proud i'm not an educator and i couldn't do i couldn't rework the wheel in six months and do what they have done it's been incredible and i'm grateful for them having said that um sorry my phone doesn't recognize my face with my mask on um i um also the gentleman mentioned numbers i also did some some numbers too with monroe county not specifically columbia but monroe county has 32 614 residents in monroe county 568 positive cases have been recorded as of september 11th now i'm uh i'm a former theater kid so math is not my strong suit i tried to do the math and what i came up with was less than two percent of residents are positive with kovid there's been 14 deaths that's so low to keep our students out of school and those deaths that that have occurred are in a population that doesn't affect our our students i am baffled at why the support and opening of daycares and restaurants is is being touted but the school itself which is a fundamental pillar of our community and cultivating the social and educational development development of our children is closed virtual if if people want to do virtual if liability is of concern people have had that opportunity to choose all virtual so that box has been checked my question is has there been enough time and reliable data to prove that a hybrid schedule is not a valid compromise when it comes to educating our children no matter our views regarding covid19 we all agree that we want what's best for our student population despite everyone's best efforts their education will suffer if we do not have at least some in-person learning what will it take to get kids back in school for in-person instruction what is the endgame the risks are not outweighing the benefits of the supreme importance of in-person instruction thank you so much and i pray and hope that you vote in favor letting these kids return to school hello um i have two children in the columbia school district a i have two children in columbia school district a first grader and a fourth grader both of them need extra help they're both in rti um i see my first grader come home in kindergarten she didn't even make it all the way through kindergarten because of coke she comes home and struggles every day to try and get homework done mommy i need help mommy i need this i work i'm an essential worker i work for the whole beginning my daughter my youngest one struggles my fourth grader my oldest one she just flies by i have maybe an hour a night to try and help them and on weekends my kids do not want to sit and do 10 hours for the homework they are struggling so bad please open the schools back up they need that one-on-one attention they need that help they need that extra help these videos aren't helping them the online learning is not helping at all like they need in-person attention so i'm begging you please open the schools that's everybody that signed in to um to talk to us this evening on to the next item on the agenda item 4 presentation by the columbia education association taylor you want to turn karen on or just my name is becky alexander i am a fifth grade teacher in the district and i'm also the union president this year my name is carla wanta i am a second grade teacher and i am union vice president my name is carly atwell i teach spanish at columbia middle school in columbia high school and i am the second vice president of columbia education association and i'm kerry clayton i teach high school anatomy biology and honors biology and i'm a high school representative so we wanted to start off by saying that speaking for the teachers we very much want kids back in the rooms i mean this is not anything that any of us wanted obviously our concerns are that we have a safe return and that we have enough time to prepare for that safe return so our presentation starts with time for kids um you know there are some kids that have been out and about more than others they might not feel as anxious as some of the kids who this change is going to affect more than others they need more than just a week to process that they are coming back to school and we want it to be as stress-free for them as possible in their return our next slide is also about time and time for the teachers and the staff to prepare for the return um you know in august we thought we were coming back and then we were told no you're going remote so preparations for having students in person came to a halt so that we could prepare for that remote learning so classrooms are not ready we don't feel that the teachers have we feel that the teachers need some time to prepare for what is essentially if we're going to have remote and in-person students we're going to have hybrid whether that's a b days or full days or whatever it is if we have remote and we have kids in the building we have a hybrid plan happening so we feel that the teachers need time and the schools need time to prepare so some of the things that we're still concerned about in regards to a safe return to school um i'm not going to read through everything on the slide but things like addressing scheduling concerns in order to maintain proper distance and protocols so that you know our children can stay safe substitute teachers um you know there's people are going to get sick teachers are going to get sick my kids might get sick and um you know we need people to be able to teach our classes if we have people there in person um so we need to have we need to have subs and currently we um like other districts it's not just columbia but we like other places are understaffed um in regards to substitute teachers and not just necessarily getting copenhagen correct you're gonna get those normal kind of correct illnesses that just happen correct um we do not have a full-time nurse in all of our buildings we have three nurses to staff four buildings um and so one of our concerns is that we have one one nurse um depending on you know what opens and how it opens if we had one nurse to staff two buildings um that's a concern of ours um and having a safe quarantine area for symptomatic students and then ppe um with masking and beyond um just there there are things that we feel could make it a safer return for both teachers and students in terms of barriers and other more specialized ppe that can ensure a safer return to school uh student screening and then we talked about uh possibly taking temperatures kind of screening kids prior to them coming in or even during the day i loved the comment that someone made about keeping their kids home if they're sick unfortunately that's not going to be the case all the time so we need to be able to kind of figure out if those kiddos are sick so that we can get them kind of into a quarantined kind of space and then home cleaning protocols when the kids are here it's going to need to be cleaned more often custodial health is going to be needed um how does that look you know what do we have in place for for that for cleaning i know the high school work kids and i guess six through eight where they've changed classrooms a great deal that's a lot of cleaning i mean i teach second grade so my kids are pretty much gonna be in their desk at their place and that might not need to be cleaned as much as a desk that's going to be used by seven different children throughout the day so cleaning protocols what does that look like what does it look like for teachers what's the cleaner how long does it need to sit is it you know is it feasible to have identified you know so there's just some things that we ready and prepared on before we would have children in the building uh students enrolling so uh we realized that the parents are going to be given a choice and that choice what they chose at in august or end of july might change they might love their situation and they might want to stay fully remote they might hate their situation they want to have their children come back to school but that could change so we're getting some time to have to have parents voice their what they want their children to do so i think it's going to take up a lot of time and i think with that in making sure that parents understand the safety protocol that's going into this too so they can make and like make an actual decision on what's what's happening so they can make an educated informed decision on do they feel safe with their child returning so something our students need over a third of our students have never set foot in the building kindergarten students um have never been inside this building they don't know their way around the school at all um second graders they've been in this building but they're new to carson i'm in the wrong building second graders have been in eagle view but they've never been here fifth graders are transitioning to middle school which is a lot different than it is at parkview and then these freshmen are being put into a building with all of these upperclassmen and they don't know their way around they don't know the one ways the ups and downs um and we're expecting them to do this without any open house no orientation um which talking to some of my freshmen they're very anxious about not knowing what to do when they come back um so none of our students have even been in the building in six months and normally they'd see friendly faces and now they're gonna see masked faces um which doesn't mean they won't be see friendly so we thought we'd give you kind of a snapshot of why we feel teachers need the time they need um if you look at this is for a k-5 teacher the hours that we are putting in as remote teachers at this time and i'm not going to read through that but you can see it just varies between group meets individual needs video creation collaborating and planning with our other team members getting and receiving and sending emails and just trying to be as helpful as we can to our students and video creation i know it seems like it shouldn't be a a huge like you know a 10-minute video seems like it should take 10 minutes to record when in reality a 10-minute video often takes two hours to record because you've misspoken or there's a phone ring or there's an echo or that you know there's something that came up and you have to you're on take nine and that's where you're at so and all of this doesn't go away when we bring kids we will still have remote people who choose to have their child be remote learners so all of this doesn't change we just now have added in we have in-person kits also you'll notice that there's not a lot of down time for coffee and chocolate which is which was my vote but not a lot of time in there we are busy and that's not having children in the classroom with us no i'm not saying i don't want my kids with me because i most certainly want them back in i just want the board to understand that when we bring these kids back in i have i have the same responsibilities for my remote kids and having in-person kids also so it's almost like i'm giving myself two jobs instead of just one job some of that's going to crisscross but i the teachers will have two jobs they will have to teach and get things ready for their remote learners and they will have to get things ready and teach their in-person learners so we gave you a little glimpse of a special ed teacher we don't have one here tonight to speak to this but they did create this slide for you you can see that their day is just as full if not even more so um than a regular teacher and this is currently because they are they are kind of in a i guess like a hybrid kind of situation where they do have children in person and and remote so they're they're busy they got a lot going on this is parkview then resource or the parking special insane situation some of this applies to eagle view too the two teachers who wrote this one is shared between buildings i think what's key in this one to notice is these 35 virtual lessons a week that they have to get ready it's a lot for two grade levels for two grade books it's just a lot so they had to continue on to another slide because they have a lot i have um i'm across the hall from the special ed teacher at the middle school and her door is closed all day long creating videos on live chats or meets with students and she is constant so that's her right there at cms so then for fifth grade um right now this is our day starting at 7 30 with our first meet at 7 55 and it is non-stop meets trying to do some live discussions and teaching collaborating with teammates getting back on for more meets in the afternoon and then trying to get materials ready for at least the next day we've been trying to get ahead but in all honesty we are keeping our heads above water by being a day or two ahead at this point wow i don't mean to breath um so this is the this is kind of how my schedule is the same as the six through eight teachers we are on a synchronous schedule which means we are on a google me for each class with the bell schedule um you know it it's and it's fast paced i mean that 30 minutes it flies and then you're on the next meet and the next meet and the next meet um and then from 1 15 to 3 p.m so you're we're on meets and then um from 1 15 to 3 p.m i'm running virtual office hours having appointments i mean it it takes every bit of that time and i'm usually their best for the spot now you know but that's neither here nor there but it takes every bit of that time just to get ready for the next day so i think what i've just noticed that is missing so far is the grading going back and looking at the work and commenting and you know i'm used to going through a stack of papers being able to write a comment kind of getting a rhythm this is click here click there click here and i'll put it here i mean it is so time consuming and i just realized i'm not sure that there's a whole lot of grading and just giving some kind of feedback to the kids i mean this is not the kind of feedback we want to be giving we want to be talking to them and discussing work with them but to give them something um so at the high school it looks similar to um at the middle school we arrived at 7 30.
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learn from your mistakes some of the grave errors he made resulted in rescue efforts taking a lot longer than they should however he did not mope or groan over the mistakes instead he just changed his course quickly and focused his energy on the new path needed this continual learning and adapting process kept the man and his crew alive in the most hostile environment i feel these lessons are i kind of felt like these lessons were specifically relevant today and sometimes i feel that we are kind of in a i don't know if hostile's the word but hostile environment and i think those seven lessons though to me are relevant not just anytime but especially now if you were the the one thing that stands out to me is shackleton was always thinking about his crew his team the people that ran the ship and i think i feel that and i hope that many of you feel that we're thinking of you and thinking of you're you're our team you're our crew and we want to be sure that you arrive safely whatever that means to you and um thank you for all that you do everybody that's in here tonight including school board members dr roberts and um i appreciate all the work that you do thank you thank you dr bills if you're able will you stand with me and join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all we have six of our board members present this evening um mr bryant is not with us this evening so that is a quorum i call this meeting to order uh our pcsc mission vision and high expectation objectives are are noted prominently around the room here and continue to be our guidelines for decision making and discussion as we move through the agenda this evening um let's jump right into the agenda uh dr roberts i think we have the mayor we do see us with the big check i hope mr caldwell so if we could invite mayor linda up to the podium we thank mayor lineup and the city of columbus for graciously working with us again with tiff dollars so mayor you know just like to take a few minutes to talk to you dr roberts and members of the school board and i brought with me a check it's um it's a rather ordinary piece of paper but there's a real big number on it so and i understand that you know you're doing your budget hearings this evening so perhaps this will help what we really do here is a check for 000 uh roughly 250 000 a piece for programs related to stem igrad and transition training and these are three programs that the redevelopment commission picked this is now our fifth year uh to come out and partner with you folks and uh it's what there are three programs that they found to be very compelling and we want to number one thank you you know for the continued partnership and let you know how how much we feel how strongly we feel that this is a very good use of tiff dollars i mean there's a is an address on the check we could just drop this in the mail but it's important to me and important to the city for me to come out here and express in person the appreciation that we have for the partnership that we've got with pathology consolidated schools so with that dr roberts do you want this or does it go straight to chad i'll take it [Laughter] it's always easier to relax maybe it's all about touch right nick all right thank you terrific thank you mayor thank you marilyn appreciate that greatly as mayor olynyk indicated it is five years now this partnership of working with the city of columbus the redevelopment commission uh to receive some dollars um from the tif uh fund and it does allow us to hit those three areas he he uh mentioned so thank you again three point seven five million yeah that's great thank you dr roberts chad you did get that check right okay good deal i want to make sure i thought maybe you might like that second item on our agenda is uh the reopening plan dr roberts you're going to give us an update on how well y'all take just a few minutes uh to run through things we are now into week six of our reopening it's it's kind of amazing the time has has went that quickly and so i'll jump into some things here very quickly from an enrollment standpoint at the last meeting i did a breakdown of the three areas i'm avoiding doing that tonight as we try to get through those three different options and make sure that we have a very accurate count so a reminder that this friday is an important day friday september 18th is the adm count date so we will have then updated enrollment numbers for you hopefully at the next school board meeting on monday september 28th for those listening paying attention either online or out in the audience the adm count day is extremely valuable because the number of students that we have enrolled on that day we get funding for each one of those children so the more students we have the additional dollars we have to provide resources for for our students and the instruction that they receive from a mass compliance standpoint a number that we've been working to provide to you over the last two weeks we have had our administrators working in their buildings with teachers and or getting into school classrooms and observing and from a report standpoint our elementary averaged across their 11 those 11 buildings 95.4 percent the secondary was at 95 percent and overall it was a 95.2 percent mass compliance most of the non-compliance observations are from seeing students with the mass simply below their nose it's it's one of those things if you're out in the community and you see somebody not wearing their mask appropriately assuming they have one on it's probably below their nose maybe below their chin or below their mouth but that's what we have seen mostly in some cases and we did record these as non-compliance but it was with some of our youngest children and the mass simply being too big so we maybe have an opportunity there to find some smaller masks somewhere somehow to address that if that need is indeed there so that's our mass compliance data over the last two weeks as we jump into physical distancing we have not taken a new measurement on physical distancing but since our last meeting our our task was to get into specific buildings that were having the most challenges with physical distancing either just because of certain classroom numbers large number of students a relatively large number of students in a classroom and or one of those buildings that maybe did not have very many remote options students a building like rock creek for example where 88 of their students had come back to in-person learning and so we got into those buildings had conversations with teachers and administrators i gave some suggestions for working through that but we acknowledge that that is our one of our toughest challenges from from the mitigation strategies we have in place and we do see that those challenges persisting as more students come back to in-person instruction so it is going to be interesting i think at the next meeting when we have the the new breakdown after our enrollment count on september 18th of how many students are in what option because we certainly are seeing uh an increase in students coming back a quick look that i had today it will take a little more uh a deeper day to dive but about 15 of our elementary students for example that were on bridge before are back in the classroom so 15 of the students that have started that way are back into the elementary classroom so i started to add to those numbers again and just continue to to add to the challenge that already exists of of physical distancing in regards to the metrics so i've already mentioned the mass compliance one these are the numbers as the most current ones we possibly can have i'm assuming it's also what went up on the covet 19 task force site tonight this this was updated as of 11 52 a.m today that's down on the bottom left and so right now our per capita rate as of yesterday the date september the 13th was at 5.1 that's after getting down to as low as 3.6 late last week or i guess wednesday of last week those numbers continue to decrease overall in terms of a seven day average the percent positive test rate now at 3.3 that's the lowest it's been for a long time uh also continuing to decrease uh from a seven-day average standpoint uh test turnaround time ticked up just a little bit back to 2.7 which had been out a couple of weeks ago and the covet hospitalizations is down to only two at this point in time so numbers looking good comparatively again uh to what they had been if you recall just a couple of weeks ago and you could see the red numbers 25th of august had both red with hospitalizations and per capita rate and and then lingered for another day in terms of per capita rate before dropping into the yellow and we've been continuing to to decrease since that time so i come in the community these are numbers that again represent all of bartholomew county not just our school corporation of course and the community doing a few things right to at least help those numbers to get down this is a new one a new measurement to put in front of you i think most of you are aware that the indiana state department of health did come up with two measurements the weekly cases per 100 thousand residents and a seven day all tests positivity rate and they combine those to get a score for every county in the state and so blue is is the best score so zero is between zero and point five a yellow is is either a one or one point five and i say between it's actually those are the only possibilities orange is 2 or 2.5 and and red is is a 3.
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oh and it's live great thank you um all right so it's exactly five o'clock so i think we should just get started right away um hi everyone on the watching on our um arps youtube channel my name is ella stocker i am the high school librarian and i am the distance learning specialist for the high school and summit academy um and with meeting it today is lovely jay shree krishnan who is the pelham elementary school tech teacher and also a distance learning specialist for our elementary schools um jay she's going to be doing the presentation and i'll let her introduce her up a little bit in a minute i just want to let folks know who are on the call that you are welcome to um post a comment in the chat which could be right on your right-hand side of your screen if anything comes up as jason is presenting that raises a question for you or you're not sure if you understood what she said you're welcome to post a question i'm going to let jhj just give the whole presentation and then at the end we'll come back and do a q a to cover some of those questions so rest assured we will get to you all your questions um i also wanted to let you know that we are still in a battle with um with seesaw to get all of our seesaw accounts set up so they have all the information they need our incredible tech team has been working so hard to get students all the physical hardware they need like computers and ipads and all that stuff and now we're just waiting when cesaro to actually finish setting up the account so i apologize for this line i know that's really frustrating to hear if you're a parent or a guardian of an improvement who's going to be using foosa but we are doing everything we can to escalate the process um and we're just waiting on this point so um want to let you folks know that to begin with and then j street i'm going to pass it off to you thank you ella good evening everyone and welcome uh today i'm going to talk about the seesaw uh tool that we are using for pre-k to two um and uh it will be a just a basic introduction to what you can expect when your child or works on seesaw and to begin with i will start off with my presentation and i am going to share my screen with you guys okay and let me know if it works it's not showing just yet but now sometimes it's a little bit of a lag so yeah and i do not see it as as well so i might stop sharing and try it again great and if we need to i can also oh there we go yeah wonderful okay so i'm gonna switch my screen to the presentation and i'm going to present my slides okay so welcome again everyone uh today i'm going to talk about the basics of seesaw which is the primary way of sharing your child's work with the families and it will be also used as a tool for communicating with you uh you and other caregivers okay so before i actually talk about seesaw i would like to introduce my wonderful team who i've been working with uh for two past two three weeks um molly millay uh is the distance learning support specialist for krakow farm wildwood and fort river ella stalker who just introduced me is from the high school and she's also the high school librarian i am jai shree and i work for pelham and i will be the dlss uh for pelham school benjamin levi is for the m's arms school the middle school so we all are working hard for getting things in place for you um so before when i introdu uh i start talking about this uh presentation i want to let you know that it's okay if you do not know everything right now we will help you throughout the semester to um to get hold of the new tools that we are introducing for your children and so you can always reach out in uh in case things do not work out and we will always be there to help you okay so what is actually seesaw sisa is an interactive student driven digital portfolio for students where students can share their work and the district has opted seesaw for pre-k to second grade in most of the schools it will be used until first grade but then at pelham we will be using it for second grade as well now what happens when you use cesar what is the benefit so teachers can post their assignments and announcements and teach and teachers can also communicate to the families as to what is the progress or if there is something some lagging behind or or are all the all the wonderful work the students are sharing so watch out for that um now how can students respond so students can respond with pictures videos with their drawings and by recording their voices okay so um how do we get to see so always watch out for the seesaw symbol or the icon and this would help you take to the next step on logging into the seesaw and getting all the information that the teacher has sent now what are the ways to access seesaw now again we can either look for the icon seesaw icon that will be saved onto your child's chromebook that was given by the school or if it's your own computer you can always copy a shortcut on the screen if you're accessing using the browser you can always click on or you can type app.seesaw.me so those are the two ways so one is the seesaw icon and the second one would be the app.csa dot me on the address bar okay the next step once you get into the app you will be asked for logging login information now there there are as you click on the seesaw icon you will be taken to the small window that will show you three options one would say i'm a teacher second would be i'm a student and i'm a family would be the third option now you should always look out for the i'm a student um icon or or the clickable uh bar when you click on that it takes you to entering the login information now the login information is the arbs.org email address that needs to be filled in there would be this password that would be sent along from school you need to add in that and then click on the student sign in button now what basically is an arch.org address if you're if and for example i have given this first name and last name here and this is in the the in the rs.org address would be most of the times the last name of the child plus the first letter uh first letter of the first name at arps.org now it might change if there are more common first names and last names so please do watch out for it now uh many a times i find uh parents sending me emails that the arts.org address has not worked and the reason is the child would have typed the first name last name correctly at gmail.com which is incorrect so always uh try to watch out for this archdot org address okay now what is the other way of logging in would be to add a text code here which will be shared by your teacher but most of the times the email and the password would be the way to log into the classroom so when you click on this text code and click on the go button you will see the same uh same window okay now after you click in that um the computer verifies if you the if you are if you're logging into the right uh username so then the computer will ask to click on your name and it's always nice to sit with a child and make them identify their names if they are in pre-k or kindergarten so that they go into the right account and sometimes students do get into the uh get into wrong accounts and they can always come back by exiting out okay so if you are tom for instance you click on the name tom and then the computer verifies again if you have the right credentials and then it and then you can go ahead and click on this tick mark sign else if you think that you just accidentally or the child accidentally clicked on some of somebody else's name then they can always go back and click the x out sign okay so as soon as you log in and you you you have logged in the correct id and everything you get into the child's dashboard and this dashboard has all the details that you're looking for all the announcements all the activities that the child has done or will be doing in his or her or their classroom so there are some um some uh buttons that we have to look out for so first thing is the name of the child so to know that we have entered the correct uh child's classroom so this would be the one where it says the child's name and the second thing would be the right classroom so mostly the child will be enrolled into one classroom on seesaw but you can still verify that by uh remembering the classrooms the teacher's name and most probably it will be a combination of the class the grade and the teacher's name and then the next tab or button that we have to look out for is the activities button up here now activities button do tells us that which uh who um what all activities are uh has a child done for now or is pending or the child has to do so i might just stop there does ella have a question yes there's just one question in the chat and it's a very good one which is will the teacher send us the password or do we create it good question thank you ella so um yes uh so that's the the teacher would you would be sending you the password as well and it would be most of the times the arbs.org address which you use for signing into the google meet or google classroom okay so do not worry on that account the teacher would be giving you all the details okay so um so the activities button has all the activities that the child has to do or has done so uh for example um i'll just get into that detail but let me finish up with the other things that i've marked here so for example for instance uh so the other thing that to look out is the inbox and the inbox has all the notifications and the messages and the class announcements that the teacher does and you can also respond back to the teacher using this inbox button okay so the the last thing that we have to look out here on this dashboard is the add response button so for instance the teacher has given has has added an assignment which says which asks them to sort shapes by color now how do you respond to that assignment so you have to click on this add response button and moving on so um for example um okay so again this activities uh tab i have highlighted so that it has all the assignments and everything posted by the teacher um and let us see how we can respond to this assignment okay so as you see when i clicked on when i click on this add response button it would lead me to a drawing canvas so this this assignment lets me draw or drag and drop things onto a place or add or record voices uh draw something on it and so on and so forth so this small pointer lets me lets me drag and drop these shapes onto these mats um and what about these tools up here so i'm going to talk about it so what if i don't understand what needs to be done with this assignment so up here where it says view instructions we need to click on that button and this would give us the instructions to um to tell us what needs to be done with the assignment okay so moving on uh i have sorted all the shapes onto these mats so let us see what what more can i do on this drawing canvas and here comes the magic tools that lets the younger kids interact with the assignment because uh when they are just dragging or dropping or something they it's not as much fun as adding more interesting facts to your assignment so and then seesaw lets us do all that magic so for example um if the child wants to add some text to the assignment there is this t bar or the t icon which is which lets us label things then is the microphone button which lets us record our voices and the other thing is the camera so camera say for instance if you if the child wants to take some uh pictures of things that are that are red in color then the child can instantly take a picture and add it to his or her assignment so that isn't that fun so moving on now these are the three dots up here and i've highlighted them and these three dots let us add shapes to our assignments it lets us add backgrounds and it also lets us add links now links will not be used as much by little kids but yes they can have fun or add more variety to the assignment by adding backgrounds and adding shapes okay so moving on now what if the child wants to write something on the assignment yes they can do that using seesaw and let us let me show you how they can do it now there is this pencil um icon up here which lets us write something um and then there is this pen uh icon or feature that lets us write something with like a pen and then the highlighter and the marker and if something goes wrong what happens we have this magic eraser that can erase all the uh or we can undo our writing or drawing now what if the child wants to uh write in a different color or choose a different color so here is a wonderful color palette that the child can use and that will really enhance their work okay now some more wonder buttons are there and as you see there is this undo or redo button that that undoes your work and then if you think that you really need or the child thinks that the work wasn't uh done so good and if he or she wants it to be um or they want to just start over all over again so then delete and start over button would be the key they can click on this x uh x icon and then it leads it then the assignment just starts over all over again okay now if you think that everything is good i am ready to go um i'm ready to submit and everything then you need to click on this check mark symbol and when you click it saves your work okay okay now um as you as you see on this screen once your work is all done and saved now it shows up on the child's dashboard but it also says that it is waiting for teachers approval so once your child does the work um the teacher would respond to the work that the child has done and they will review the work and see if something more needs to be done but most of the times it will be good to go okay now as you see we came back to the very first dashboard that we were seeing a few minutes back and here as you see the in progress bar does not hold any activities because whatever word the child was given it's all done and there would be one assignment at the done bar or the uh done sub tab uh and plus to do will have the assignments that the child needs to do okay so moving on now what if the child is done with their homework or classwork or asynchronous learning and they want to post more assignments or or they want to share their experiences outside the school what if they want to show their broken uh what you call what if they they lost a tooth just in the evening time and they want to show that to you their teacher so they can do it in many many ways they could either take a picture of their broken tooth or their face or they can also record a video okay now what if the child wants to draw something and show it to their teacher yes they can click on this button and they can show it to them now upload lets us upload different uh files mainly photographs or videos or something that is saved onto their drive or computer now note can be used by students to write something and express their feelings to their teacher so that can be used now again the link button is is provided to us but i would always say that little kids cannot be using that feature much okay now i come to the last tab which is all about communications so as you saw before there was this inbox tab and it has this one in red circle now that shows that there is one notification or one message that is for that is due for you to see and there would be basically uh the class announcements that was sent by the teacher to all the kids or all the families it would also include student announcements as to what they can expect tomorrow or the week later or about some other events that will be happening in the near future so for example i have sent a notification to all the class members here and i have created this test note and this shows this is more like a welcome note that i have i have created and it went out to all class all uh students or all families but if the teacher wants to send private messages to families or the the family wants to send private message to the teacher that can as well be done so that will be this class announcements um button there is there's also one student announcements button beneath this so um always watch out for those and the notifications talk about what all assignments are there and all those kind of notifications that are sent through seesaw so that is all about the inbox that is all about the family and student communication and i think that brings me to the end of this session and i'm going to stop sharing and if someone has questions so there are no questions in the comments just yet but let's we spoke a minute or two to maybe think of some that they are now that you've given this presentation that they might still have um for anyone who missed the very beginning of this call i do want to reiterate that um we are still waiting on accounts for students this is at this point out of the district control we've given he saw everything they need to create the accounts and get them back to us and we're just waiting on that last step so just be aware that that is coming um and we apologize that it it's it's taken longer than we had hoped for to get to families but that information will be sent to families and guardians um in your emails so please keep an eye out for that we really will be coming very soon i know that our our tech folks have been really hard at work um getting that together and getting sort of haranguing them to make it happen so we hope to have it very soon yeah and we might just wait for a couple of more minutes if somebody has some comments or something we can um wait for them i i do also even if you're seesaw account your child has a csa account that isn't up and running yet um we are going to still have classes tomorrow for all but our i think are just our kindergartners and maybe first graders are starting a little later in the week um we are going to have class for them so they should be looking in their email for a google meet link um to join our virtual class meeting the first name school camaro all right hello ella yeah i was just seeing at the questions oh thank you um so uh i see that there's a question up here if the teacher sends a worksheet that we need to print is there a way of downloading or printing from seesaw so so seesaw as such is a digital portfolio and we are trying to lessen as many uh uh i mean uh prints on paper so we just want to work it out digitally so uh i i i feel that there will not be many instances where you need to download something and use from seesaw you can see everything on the computer or the ipad and you you can work right from there so it has the video recording ability it has the voice recording ability so i i do not worry on that point yes okay so there's one one more question does cso work okay on an ipad or are chromebooks preferable i think it can work on both so um but i think for ipad you need to download the seesaw app i believe it's actually downloaded for them it our kindergartners got ipads instead of chromebooks this year and the ipads should have them already on them so there's right they won't need to do any downloading it should just be right there that little icon that jay shree mentioned at the beginning that's what you'd want to click on yeah but i was and i was also wondering if they arrived if it is their own ipads they might have to download it yes you would need to download it if it is your personal device yes so yeah that should be all good yeah thank you all right if there's any other questions i also do a reference especially because we don't have the accounts yet um this video is being recorded right now this live chat and this will be um available to you on this arp's youtube channel anytime so when your child does have an account to log in to seesaw you can come back and review all the slides that jason just went through and i also would have a really great distance learning resources site that is constantly having new things added to it and this recording is also a group that will go up on the site should we download the people class or this family app oh i was just trying to get the answer for that i was just wondering if jerry could help us uh from his side i think you can just uh download the seesaw i think the csr class app is probably what you want yeah that's what your student would be using okay so our expert i.t director would help us uh through this question and we appreciate your patience i think it's it's an important lesson that none of us are experts of our time we're all learning and yeah new things yeah and and just as i said before uh please don't get overwhelmed uh we i mean i am a parent and i can understand when things do not work out at my end so please reach out to us and we will support each other so that's how i would split it yeah so don't worry on that account yeah it's a good partnership yeah absolutely and we look forward to it and we value it so i'm certainly proud that jury has responded that synthol class is the app that you should use so if you are using a personal device and you need to download the flaw you should be looking to download seesaw class thank you jerry for doing that for us yeah uh class would be for the student and parents can install the other one is what noah is saying in the comments i would say if you stick to class that's what your students will be seeing that's probably the easiest place to start um so that would be my recommendation just as a uh to keep things in mind for yourself you'll see exactly the same things they're seeing if you're using the class app so that's my recommendation yes and i feel that uh the seesaw class would have all the notifications and the family communications part as well in it so please do not worry you will be able to reach out to your teacher through the seesaw class app so that'll be one one-stop shop for everything i believe yeah all right well it's 5 30.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
hi everybody okay well welcome to this 12 45 afternoon session about seesaw which is a program that we are using this year for preschool through second grade students i'm mike morris i'm the superintendent and with me uh i'll let them introduce themselves in a second is allison j3 molly and ella uh who are going to lead you through this training uh one thing i want to mention just very briefly because we're still going back and forth with see saw the company to get all the accounts set up as you know this year was a little atypical with getting placements done quite late uh in the year with future assignments and so we've sent everything that's he saw we've been back and forth multiple times today with them to set up the accounts um so we're hoping to have them ready to go tomorrow if not they may be a couple days delayed but in terms of all the connections from google meets that are scheduled they would still occur as as they normally would tomorrow but um just appreciate all the work this team has done to provide resources both for staff and for families and with that i think i'll turn it over and let jay street molly allison and ella do introductions and get going hello everyone my name is jaishri and i am the pelham tech teacher i'm also working as the elementary distance learning support specialist for this year and i'll be presenting sisa today for you and over to you molly uh hi i'm molly malay and i am also a distance learning support specialist for the elementary schools and i am also a special education teacher at crocker farm hi i'm alison estes i'm the assistant principal at wildwood elementary school hi everyone i'm ella stocker i am the librarian at the high school and this fall i will be supporting both summit academy and air hs with distance learning support um and also still working as a librarian so i started wearing two hats this year okay so i would start presenting my slide and show you how to work around seesaw okay can you see my slides yet oh okay they're coming okay wonderful okay can you see the presentation okay wonderful okay so thank you and welcome everyone again um and today i'm going to talk about csa which is the primary mode of communication and which also works as a digital portfolio for our students which we'll be using from pre kindergarten to second grade um before i move on to seesaw i would like to introduce my team again molly malay from krakow farm who is also a distance learning support specialist along with ella stalker from high school me at pelham and benjamin levi at the middle school so here's the big thing you do not need to know everything now because i know as teachers we are also trying to uh learn seesaw and other tools and we are no experts and we would say the same thing if you feel frustrated about something that you're not able to achieve if you're not able to see or work around some tool please reach out to us and we will be we will be working out together so we really appreciate and value this partnership and along with this training we will also be providing you more trainings throughout the sylvester to help you through okay so what is actually seesaw it is an interactive student-driven digital portfolio for pre-k to two so seesaw will be used as showcasing students work on a daily basis uh it will include photographs it will include the video recordings what your child has done so it will be a fabulous way of interacting with students as well as the families teachers will also post assignments and they will share their announcements with students and families through csa and students can respond with pictures videos drawings and record their voices okay so how to access seesaw now you have to watch out for this icon that is up here on your screen which is the seesaw icon if you do not see it we can help you find it because sometimes we are not because this the uh app has yet not been installed on your computer or the chromebook given by the school so um as you see there are these are the ways to access seesaw we need to watch out for this icon sisa icon up here on the laptop or on your ipad and if you're accessing using the chromebook you can access it by typing at the address bar app.sisa.me okay now when you click on the icon what happens you get three options and on a small uh pop-up window and it'll give you three options those are i'm a teacher um icon or i'm a student option or i'm a family member so the best thing would be to enter your ask your child to click on the i'm a student button and that leads you to a login page now your the school has given you um your child an arts.org email address and a password associated with it so you the best way to go ahead um logging into your seesaw in your child's seesaw account would be to use the email address and the password and then you click on this button which says student sign in now i want to reiterate and talk more about what's an arts.org address because many a times i find parents and students complaining or i get a feedback that the arts.org or the email address is not working and let me tell you why now if the child's name is i've just taken a mock name and the last name is ddd for instance in most instances arfs.org address would be the last name plus the first letter of the first first name at arts.org many students do a big do a mistake that they type in at gmail.com and that is the reason they are not able to access their arps account so be mindful of that okay there is one more way to access the seesaw account um but i would i would i would ask you to wait until your teacher has given you that you the way either when most in most cases it will be your email address and the password the other way is to add a text code and this needs to be shared with by your teacher by your students by a child's teacher so that would be the place where the text code goes and you need to click on the go button okay so after uh logging into the child's arps account and um there's a question of the chat that is about even getting into their school um through the chromebook um and the question is whether or not the app will already be installed on the school chromebook or should they be installing it themselves who uh would be installing the app for them um but actually not on the chromebook that they will be installing it on the ipad on the chromebook you just go to the website that um app.seesaw.media website thank you thank you molly but uh okay sure sure sorry um yeah and i might find out more about it as well thank you so uh once you once you're logged in and you are uh into the child's account um the the computer asks you to verify the child's name again and it would be a good practice to tell your child to identify if they are very young they can identify their name and click on their work only so once you're done with that because there would be a list of names that will come up uh beneath your name or above your name so be watchful of that uh once you're done with that the computer verifies again for one more time and then it asks you are you tom for instance and if you are the right person you can click on this check mark symbol or if you want to go back you can always check my you can choose or select the x button in red okay so now once you are all set you come into your account you're logged in you'll be able to see the child's dashboard now chat on the child's dashboard there are these things that needs to be taken care of and the first thing is your child's name will be up here and this one in red is just a notification so and i will come to it how to respond to it but the second thing is the child's class name it would most probably your child's teacher's name along with the classroom uh but there could be a variant as well so please be uh watchful of that then the third button that you need to be um focusing on is the activities button this activities button shows you the the assignments that are in progress or the assignments that are all done so there are two sub sub tabs that are provided to you then the next uh tab that you need to focus is is on the inbox the inbox shows you all the notifications all the messages that the teacher has sent to you or your child and we will talk about it uh in detail a little later okay now that you know you've seen all these tabs now there is one important one that needs to be focused on and that is your add response button now when i when you click on this activities tab you will be seeing all the assignments that the teachers have given your child here on this dashboard so how to respond to these assignments so add response button or the plus sign along with the add response button would be the one that you need to be mindful of okay let us see what this assignment is all about so this says it's a sort by color assignment okay so as i said before the activities tab is the one that you need to be looking out for and then you when you click on the add response button you are able to access this assignment okay so when i click this assignment i see a screen something like this now this is called as the drawing camp canvas and this allows us to do magic and this allows us to interact with this assignment and let us see how we can do that so this particular assignment if you do not know what the instructions are you can very well click on this view instructions button and it shows you what needs to be done but even then even if you do not want to see or you even before that the teacher will go through each and every assignment that the child needs to to do so don't worry on that account okay so this basic this assignment is basically is to to drag all the shapes into the right mats and these are all color uh we need to drag the green triangles into the green maths right so once we are done with that let's see what are the other tools we see tools here we see some tools here at the bottom and then some here the color palette and some here on the top as well and let me go through one by one but these all are okay so my first step would be to learn what the instructions are and do the assignment just pull it uh drag and drop these shapes into this mat and then i can add i can be more interactive with it with the assignment and let me let me show you how so this are these are the set of tools that are provided to us and let me explain one by one what this means now this t icon is for labeling so once your child has done the assignment not fully though but then a bit of it they the child can add some labels onto it so when you click on this um t button it'll open up a text box and the child can type something on it okay the next uh button or icon that you see is the microphone one microphone button allows you or your child to talk about or record what he or she has done with the assignment and so the teacher gets to say get the sense of uh how or what uh the student liked about this assignment or how uh they went ahead and did this assignment so that's a pretty good tool then is the camera button now a camera button allows you to take pictures and when you click on it it shows up camera on three sides of uh the screen at least on an ipad and so uh young kids can interact with this uh seesaw app you know in a very fine manner they would love it okay moving on this is the shapes the backgrounds and the links buttons that are provided to you at the very end and students can draw or add some shapes add backgrounds to their drawing canvas okay moving on we can do some more magic and we can use a pointer button to drag and drop things if we use a pencil we can write on it so kids can always scribble or write something on you on their assignment or drawing canvas and this comes handy these all these tools comes very handy when they want to draw something and express their ideas okay so there's this pointer pencil pen a highlighter marker and eraser here now if suppose if they want to use different colors these color palettes come very handy so when you click on a tool like a highlighter you can drag the circle fro to any other color and that color gets selected and then the child can draw on the color palettes okay on their under drawing canvas i meant okay so so what happens uh when we do something wrong so there is this um cool um cool there are some cool buttons up here the undo and the redo ones which allows us to just go back to our previous uh drawing or whatever we did and we can when we are all done we can always save our work and it gets saved i'm going to show you in a little while if you think that you are you want to start all over again you can always click on this x symbol and it deletes and starts over so you can do that but right now i'm going to show you how to save your work and when you click on this check box you see your response has been select has been added to the to the assignment that the teacher gave and so it shows up something like this and how do you know that the response was submitted so as you see it says waiting for teachers approval so here's the child's name which is kind of hidden here in between um and and so this was the title of the assignment and this was the assignment done by the child so even though the child has finished his or her assignment it would be um it would be approved by the teacher and then it lands on there on their dashboard and so this becomes our seesaw becomes as an interactive uh digital portfolio for the child and so all the child's work will be saved at one place isn't that cool okay so moving on now um i think i explained this part when it says okay so it says activities when i click on the activities tab and when i click on the in in progress tab i see that there are no activities waiting uh for a response and if i if i click on done i'm sure it will show up the uh done work okay now uh some more tools now what if you if your child wants to um showcase or or express or share something exciting that they have been doing at home irrespective of the teacher's homework or or classwork they can always go again to the activities button and there you will be able to see this plus add button now when you click on this you will be able to see a a screen something like this which says post your work so a child can take uh their photograph showing that they have lost a tooth today or they can showcase their drawing skills to the teacher saying that i drew something today or they can also capture a video of what they have been doing after school time so it will be a fun interactive way in which child can communicate to the teacher and all of it is being saved in this digital portfolio now um when it comes to older kids or maybe a second grade kid um i would suggest that they can always upload their pictures although this also saves the pictures and this can be used by the preschoolers and the kindergartners in the first grades and by second graders as well but if you want to upload some picture from the internet or from somewhere else then upload button comes very very handy now this note functionality helps you write something write your thoughts onto it so a child can always express by writing and it's a fun way to interact as well now this link capability uh can be used but i feel that it is very very it would not be used as much with younger kids we can share some links with the teachers okay now that brings me to the last uh part of this presentation and i'm going to talk about the inbox tab how the teachers are going to communicate with students how the teachers are going to communicate with parents and vice versa now this is the inbox button that allows that allows you to communicate send notifications and receive notifications and this can also be used as a private communication tool if you want to send some message just to the teacher and not broadcast it uh to the whole class then it would be a private chat and say for example i have created a small note a welcome note uh for students uh at the very beginning of the school year and this comes under the class notifications or announcements because uh it is sent to everyone but in response i am sure you can send some private messages as well so that will be the communication part and notifications show what all assignments are pending or similar announcements so that kind of brings me to the very end of this presentation and if you have any questions i can take those so i there are a few that have come through in the chat well while you've been giving this great presentation thank you so much today um one that it looks like um has already been answered by mike who's manning the comments as well but um with a question from greg about how he saw accounts been enabled yet and uh he's currently unable to log in and i'll just repeat what mike said at the beginning of the meeting which is that um the district has been back and forth we saw on the sort of seesaw end of things um all day today yesterday as well the delays are now on we have done everything they've asked us to send them and we are just waiting for them to send us the information that we need to get them to families so um we apologize that that is happening but it's out of our control at this point we have given out all the information they need so we hope to have those two very very soon but we will still be meeting as classes we will meet um even if students are unable to log in to seesaw so please check your email from your classroom teacher for that information um and then one other question was yes the teacher will send and download uh info and links yes they will be sending that to you you should check your email for that uh if there's any other questions please feel free to post them in the comments and we'll um we'll stay on for a little bit longer to answer those so and as a reminder my presentation are in the chat here and also this as well as being this uh presentation is being recorded and will be available on the youtube channel free to come back and review it anytime if you'd like to watch it again i'll come back on at the end um and just thank jason and the team uh for going through that and we know it's a new program and we do as ella was just saying apologize even since the stream started we've been back and forth more with see saw and uh you know getting from a district account to school-based accounts so we are working on that you know for many of our students in grades k and one they'll have orientation the next couple days um so it's really or for pre-k and k excuse me um so it's really for first and second grade students where there may be this kind of instructional gap in terms of being accessed being able to access esau cs like many tech companies educational tech companies expressing extreme volume at this moment in time for instance google drive was down for a number of times google drive for edu was down a little bit this morning it's now back up so uh zoom you know didn't work and canvas didn't work the first day of classes for much of the country which was in late august so i think we are aware of some of these challenges we'll work through them but i think as ella said you know we'll just be able to communicate uh when this is up and running and that'll be communicated to you and again this youtube uh as it was noted will be active indefinitely so even if it's a day or two later or your child's in kindergarten preschool and they wouldn't have access to seesaw yet anyway because they wouldn't be in school until friday or the next week we'll make sure we're communicating all that information but i really want to thank all of you for tuning in and i want to thank you know all the team for putting this together i appreciate how committed this team is to family outreach and making sure that caregivers have what they need to support their children this year and hope everyone has a lovely afternoon thank you
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i think you're still unmuted i would just meet yourself until we're ready to get started i did unmute i can hear somebody's un muted sounds that's that's me i think i'm trying oh great so mike set us up but he can't stay on the call so we are technically live right now so i would just mute yourself and turn off your camera until noon i don't know okay i don't know what i'm teaching though yeah it's very stressful but we're gonna get through it i'm very confident um but we are live just so you know so hi folks if you're just joining us we're just all getting ourselves situated here um i'm going to introduce everyone my name is ella stocker i'm the high school librarian and i am the distance learning specialist for the high school and also for summit academy uh jay sri krishna i'm going to give a little way of jay shree is the tech teacher for pelham elementary and is the distance learning support person for pelham and then molly boy is our distance learning support specialist for the three amherst elementary schools and is also a special education teacher at crocker farm so um we are going to get started here we're hoping to have at least one other person join us so hopefully we'll we'll have another face to show you at some point in here um oh great and allison is here so we'll be able to uh get allison on in just a minute as well so let's see if we can do that right now as we're sort of getting ourselves situated i don't know if we can show out either jasher molly do you know how to do that um so i think mike can do it on his end and it's not here um so and i'm not sure how to get all right with some google me information then and then i wonder if maybe we can get him to let allison in covering for mike at the moment so all right i will get us started then in that case so i am going um to be going over google meet which is the main platform that we will be using for uh meeting with students this year this is sort of the video conferencing platform that we'll be using so i'm going to share my oh awesome there's allison meet right now and then we'll look at allison so let's do sorry my entire screen there we go all right so folks seen my screen [Music] set all right all right it's just taking a minute to go here sorry about that here we go so this is an introduction to google me for caregivers um i'm going to be walking you through what google me is how to join a google meet from google classroom from meet.google.com which is the website version of link um and then also sort of looking at what it looks like to join from a link this might be in a document as well um and then we'll be looking at navigating how to mute and unmute yourself um turning your video on and off presenting your screen and how to use the chat so if you have any questions that come up along the way please feel free to put them in the comments and we'll be sure to get those either at the end or uh molly or jay who might interrupt me and let me know um there's an important question so we'll be keeping an eye on the comments so first of all what is google me so google me the tool for group video calls it's very similar to zoom or skype if you move those um during distance learning google me is going to be the primary way that features in pre-k through 12 are we will be in class probably with their students while we are remote so it's a really important tool that we'll be using every day in our class um what do you need to do before you start using google me you need to make sure that your student or if you are a student watching that you can log into google using an arps account this is super important because you will not be able to get all the features of me that you need with a personal without a personal account you need to have that google account for school your arps account if you're not into your google arts account you need to let someone know whether it's a classroom teacher or one of us you need to let someone know right away so we can try to get that fixed before tomorrow if at all possible um ella some people can't see the screen i let's see [Music] you can see the screen i can't no i can i can see your you can presentation well good news we haven't looked at anything that super crucial yet we've just been looking at the text so far so let me try this again i'm going to share again if i can go forward thanks for bearing with us everyone uh let's see let's go let's go right to a chrome tower let's do this all right if we get confirmation from anybody that this is working in there because it's working better we still cannot see your screens and i'm sorry this is terrible it doesn't it's tearing it right with myself oh wait whoa now i see yay so this is the kind of a technical we're gonna have to give each other some grace in this distance learning process as we all learn how to do new things and this is a new platform for me today so thank you all for your patience um so this is all i've gone over so far is what's on this screen so we haven't missed that much um i'm also going to shoot now patrick join and google me from google classroom so it says create but it could save join so when you open google classroom you will see at the top of your google classroom banner that looks something like this it might not be this peel color it might be blue or purple or green or it might even have um of your teacher in there but it will always have at least one of these two things either this google meet nickname or a link to a google name and it'll always be in the banner that's where they live um some teachers will have one of those two things in fact most teachers will probably only have one they'll either have a nickname or they'll have a meat link so what i'm gonna show you right now is how to work through it through this link right here um and then i will go back and we'll show you how to do it through a google meet nickname so the first step is to do it through um this link right here this is a click of a link i obviously can't click it because it's an image so i can't actually click an image but um if we were in google classroom i could click that link and what it would do is open this next screen that would look like this there's me um and these are all the information that you would be seeing if you were logging into a google map for the first time you would see here um now button this is how you would actually join the google meet um right here you see the option to join and use a phone for audio that's a really great option if your internet connection isn't particularly strong you can actually use your phone um as the audio for your google me um which is just a really helpful tool if you are struggling with having not enough internet bandwidth at your house um and you can also make sure that your mic is on and your video is on um and that they should be clear and not read when you're starting a call unless you've been told to mute yourself starting a call in case you would want this to look red there's also some information about how to dial in if for some reason the webcam on your computer isn't working or you're having really really slow internet that day and you're unable to get on using the internet you could call in but we strongly strongly want students to call them a video call option available so that is sort of a last resort if you can't get in any other way we would have students call in from the phone so i'm going to move on to the next slide this is now how you would google meet with a nickname so you'll remember that in that google me banner at the top of your classroom you would see this link what we just did right now is click that link for the last section this is the google nickname option so um i'm not going to get into the details of what a nickname actually means but it's just a shorthand for a way for students to get to the same length that this is so just tell them the same information and you would want to copy this link right here so you will highlight it and copy it to get into uh google me and then you would actually want to open up a new tab somewhere in your your browser and type in meet.google.com or use the the waffle drop down your students will probably know what the waffle is um to find meat and get to it that way but you'll want to actually go to the meat regular meat page and you'll see this option join or start meeting and you want to click on that right there that's highlighted in green hello yeah can you enter can i interrupt you for a second i'm sorry i see many people have said that they are not able to see our presentation still i would suggest them they could please refresh their page so that yes they can see what is uh moving what is synchronously moving along we will make these slides available on the distance learning site so for some reason you're not able to see them right now um you will be able to go back and look at them later so i want to just assure people that if they can't see them currently they will be able to see them after this meet this is over so um that's the other just these will be available later to them um let's see here this next slide so once you get to that meet.google.com page you will see a uh and you click joiner start meeting you will see a text box will pop up where you can then paste that that nickname that you copied from google classroom so that's sort of the it adds an extra step whereas if you just can click that link in google classroom you won't have to do this this stuff in the middle but otherwise it's exactly the same because once you put that nickname in and click continue you will come back to the same page where the join page will look the the green join now button you'll always have the option to use your phone for audio you'll always be able to mute yourself or turn off your camera before you enter a call and you'll always have the option to call in from a phone if you need to and then the last one i want to quickly go over and then i'll stop sharing my screen and we hopefully everyone will get back to the same page um is that you can also join a google meet from google calendar you may have been sent a calendar invite to your student's classroom or you may have been sent a calendar invite from a teacher to go to a parent teacher conference or an iep meeting or something like that so in google calendar um you will be able to access google map really easily from a calendar you can actually go to calendar.google.com or you can get to it through your calendar um to the the waffle in google and so your students will have the same option um and from there you just want to find the event that you're looking for and you're going to just click the actual event itself and what will pop up in the event details is the option to join with google me and you would just click that right there and again you come to the same join thing site so it's very this last site where you get to this joining page is the same every time so regardless of how you get there you'll always land in the same place so i'm going to stop sharing right now so we can hopefully maybe resolve some of these sharing issues that we're having with sharing our screens i apologize that we're having this technical challenge at the moment i'm also wondering um we can hear you yes can you hear me okay okay i'm just wondering if this is an opportunity so tara acker is asking if students need to use their chromebooks or can they use great question um you can absolutely use any computer that has internet access to get to google me one of the reasons we recommend that students use their school computers is that your teachers will be giving them materials that we know are accessible using a chromebook that may not be accessible if you're on a mac or on a pc um most things are accessible everywhere it shouldn't really impact 99.9 percent of things but it does introduce the possibility that something would not be usable on a on the device that you're on so we recommend using the chromebook or the ipad if you're in pre-k in kindergarten um but that's that's the reason why we recommend that yeah another question is um what is the relationship between google me and google classroom because some people are wondering about if their child will be using the google meet versus google classroom so i thought maybe we could talk about that that's such a great question as well um they are very closely related but they are a little bit different so google classroom is used as like sort of you can almost imagine it like it is a bulletin board in the classroom it has the assignments that are upcoming it tells students what their homework is it tells them what readings they have to do when their next test is all that other things that would be on a blackboard or a whiteboard at the front of a classroom whereas the google move is more like the actual platform phase itself it's where you're meeting with students together it's how we come together as a group of students and a teacher in the same virtual place the way we would come together in a classroom so it's they're very closely related they sort of serve two sides of the same point and i think it's important to note that all students k through 12 will be participating in google meet this is our function for being able to allow for staff members to interact with our students children in grades third through 12 will be using google classroom as i i mean i don't work at the high school so i'm an elementary school vice principal but um that would be for third graders and above who will be using google classroom the younger students have an um a way to post work and get assignments in uh seesaw that will be the k through two version of how to get assignments in post work yeah thank you for explaining that i as a high school person i sometimes forget about that because it's not in my day-to-day world and i'm not getting any emails about it so i appreciate that reminder as well i was seeing one more question from molly jw as so how do we find the right classroom and i really find it as a very good question because there would be at least a few for your students if not many so um there are classroom codes that will be sent to your students and when they join in with their classroom codes it will just connect you to the right classroom and so i think you do not have to worry about on that account and teachers would lead you through those steps so yeah at least and i presume this is true for younger grades um that teachers have already started emailing their students and folks who are on their class rosters with the information for how to join their google classroom so that tomorrow they'll be ready to go um i would encourage your your students at home to check their schooling meals or to help them collect their school emails but they're they're still pretty young because that information is likely in their email already oh can i just add so the younger kids actually don't have emails um so it would be it would be in the parent it would be in the caregiver's emails thank yeah i'm sorry go ahead listen i just wanted to say i know at wildwood we're trying to make sure that wayfinding is easy i see molly jw a little worried about that tomorrow morning meeting and not sure if you're not sure please reach out to your school staff because we are working hard to try to make this an accessible space for children so that there are multiple ways to get into a session yeah i i totally agree with that such a many people working very hard so if you for some reason have not seen an email either from your classmate teacher or from an administrator in your building with that information please do reach out to your retirement class computer so we can make sure you have that information and kindergarten starts on friday we don't want to forget that if you're thinking that you should have had something by now the kindergarten classes won't be starting until september 18th good to know all right we have any other all right i think that's pretty good so i'm just going to pull one other quick thing i'm going to try to present my screen one more time and just show you what it looks like to actually be in a google meet um so you can actually see what it looks like when you're in the call itself so i'm just going to get that set up real quick um it's going to take me just a second and then we'll be able to share this and fingers crossed we'll work actually yes okay great okay so this google classroom or google i'm sorry yeah i confused them you know as well this is what google meat looks like when you were in google me now if i was in call with my whole class i would be able to see all of them in small little boxes together if for some reason your child will not see all their classmates at once or they're only seeing their teacher you can always change the layout so they can see a different layout and the way you can do that is in this bottom right hand corner where you see these three word of goodness anytime you're in any google product so google docs google slides google sheets google meet kabul you name it and you see those three little blocks what it means is there's more information here and i can look for some more settings information so go ahead and click on those three little dots and you'll see some options pop up um not your students may not have all of these options available to them because there are some that are for teachers only but they will have the option to change the layout so they can go ahead and look at that and they'll say there's a tile i'm actually in the tile option if i had other people on this call i'd be able to see all of them on my screen at once but you could also ask just to see the person who's speaking that's the spotlight version um so there are some other people as well so that's just good to know about the other thing that is really important for your students to know is that they can mute and unmute themselves and i can i'll do it right now i can mute myself or i can turn off my camera if i need to um i know there are some students who are very concerned about being on camera their whole class i really want to assure you that like you are not required to be on the whole class time there's going to be a lot of time for students to do you know independent work with small group work where they won't be on with their whole class but we also really want to get to know them so it's really really important for us to be able to see their faces if they feel like they can do that so i wanted to encourage you to reach out to your teachers again if your child is having a lot of camera anxiety for some of our older students um to reach our teachers and see if they can find a solution there's a way for them to come with a compromise work for the teacher and the student together um i also want to just really quickly point out where the chat feature is this is another really handy thing if the audio is not working very well on your computer or you'd prefer just to ask questions in the chat you can always post a chat right in this chat icon it just looks like a little speech bubble with some lines in it and you can just type anything right in here we want to remind everyone that the chat is um everyone can see it there's no private chat so if your students are typing in there and they are having a after having a side conversation your teacher can see that inside conversation too so it's a good reminder for students that everything is happening in the same space um teachers also may turn the chat off for part of class there may be times they want students not in the chat so just be aware there may be times there is a chat function available to students but it will be likely some of the time as well so the other thing i just want to quickly point out is how students would present their own screen if they wanted to i think this is mostly going to be for middle and high school students i don't know how much presenting of screens the younger students are going to be doing well they do have the option to present a screen i'm not going to do it right now screen presenting um like my computer might like spin into a spiral but you have the option to present your entire screen just one window of the internet browser you're on or just a specific tab most of the time you're going to probably want to just do the chrome tab so it's just just that one option um but again this is something your teachers will walk your students through when they have to do this so this is mostly just for you to know that something that your students might be doing so i'm gonna stop sharing my screen right now so feel free to ask some questions go ahead okay um i'm just wondering if you can show them how to turn on the caption oh yes great thank you so much for reminding me you can also turn on captions as molly just said some clothes with captioning so i'll do that right now and you'll see it'll just take it a minute to catch up with me oh and i can't my mic is off so um you will see as i as i see there are words appearing at the bottom of my screen so you can actually see and hear at the same time um what i'm what i'm saying or if you having trouble hearing you'd be able to see what i was saying um obviously it's not totally perfect i'm sure it's going to misspell some words at some point usually it misspells my last name so that's just something to be aware of but that's an option as well and and potentially a really helpful one for some of our students thank you for reminding me about that molly and ella do you want to uh walk through them using the nicknames you want to show them how to go about nicknames yeah i can show that that is um part of how you would get in through your google classroom if you are um actually don't want me to all exit this one so you can see what it looks like so here's that joiner started meeting link that you would get to that page on meet.google.com and if you have a classroom meeting or a nickname for your google me which some classes will be using this is where you'd want to put that google nickname they're usually going to be something really simple and easy to remember like your teacher's last name um and it may be the class period if you're a high or middle school teacher because they might have multiple mates for different classes and when you say continue you'll see it in just a second it's going to load it it's telling me that i'm joining the stalker a google me right here if you join through uh your google classroom through that link that i showed you in the slides that's at the banner at the top of the google classroom we would just have the last part about that banner link would be just however those letters are it's usually not um it's not like an english word it'll just be like random strings of letters but that would appear right here as well um and then you would just go ahead and click right now the same way you would for any um any google made you always come through this screen no matter how we get there any questions about nicknames or links i think that's a very complicated part of this puzzle i'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen as well all right if there is enough questions we do have a question um about uh kindergarten and participating in a google meet i would just um we understand that younger children might need to be supported through this um we also would ask that families respect the privacy of other families as well because you are being you are almost like a visitor into someone's home when we are in a google meet together so um you know yes we understand that you will be supporting your children at times but also respect their um confidentiality and privacy um another question came from asha they were wondering about a google meet for tomorrow morning from wildwood please look in your email principal nick just sent something out today just making sure that everybody had one of the options for how to get to wayfinding and i know that teachers are sending out emails today as well um and then christine lindstrom asked will children be on their google meet with their class while also logged into another program or will they mostly be just on google meet um you can do this in many different ways uh jay shree i mean you probably know of a million ways that people can combine these products uh sure thank you alison so i think uh you will be using two different tabs at the same time um and uh just as ella was presenting we will be we can listen to the voice of the teacher while we are working on seesaw or while we are working on google classroom and yes just like christine said we would be logging on to different programs at the same time but we would be uh we can listen to the voice and still follow the directions of what a teacher is asking a student to do so okay yeah i i just i wanna just think back on that really quickly and just say that it's really gonna depend on your classroom teacher and what they're doing in that class period and it might change from day to day what they're doing and how they're using google me but pretty much across the board everyone will be starting the day in google me every day so wherever you go from there will depend on what you're working on that day and what your kids are doing in their classes but that this is a the starting place is google classroom and google me that's where they should be every day they should start their day with google classroom open and google me open or google or seesaw if they're in pre-k for two all right i feel free to keep posting questions about google me as we go but i i do want to give alison a chance to walk us through some of the really helpful sort of some strategies to support your children i think this is actually a really logical transition like sort of how do you get your kids set up for success every day in remote learning so allison i'm gonna turn it over to you but if questions come up about me as we go please feel free to post them in the chat and we will get back to them great thank you so much ella um i i'm going to try to share my screen we'll see how that works um i am going to see if i can do this sharing screen um let's see share tell me if you see it that's not it is it this one yeah yes okay i don't see you so this is always the wonder of what i'm doing right now so i'm relying on my team allison you had it but now it's on to something else it's on a farm yeah do you see it now no google form a google form yeah okay uh okay i'm gonna try that one more time then because i think i messed it up let's try that one more time share screen application window share any luck yes okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna click view presentation what do you see now yes we did it oh boy see i've never done a a powerpoint in or a google slide presentation with stream yards so this is a learning opportunity for me thank you for your patience so this is going to speak more about some of the social aspects of of the remote learning environment and so i'm going to start off by encouraging all families to please um remember that this is a school day we are going to try to build in routines and try to create a pattern and a routine in our experience to help us you know have breakfast brush our team put on some clothes and so that we are preparing our bodies for learning i think that this is an important first step to trying to create that um shift there will be attendance taken um grades will be given um so i just want people to realize that this is school even though um it feels like we're still at home all the time but this is school as well you heard some discussion about the hardware and the software that you'll be using i just wanted to emphasize that the hardware tools that you'll be using with the internet that you can have access to if you have it at your home or you'll need to get a hotspot from the district chromebooks also we are trying to make sure everybody has those but you also kind of want to have those traditional tools pencils and paper to help support each other while we're trying to do our activities then on top of this hardware you have software we've been speaking a lot about the seesaw google classroom and google me older children might be able to use calendar and email efficiently and these are really solid programs to help us manage our day you know something that might be a good habit to get into is to have your gmail read in the morning while looking at your calendar before that first google me that might be a habit that middle schoolers and high schoolers get into just to prepare themselves for the day and these other programs are things that teachers will be using consistently every day i'm going to stop there for a moment and see if there are any questions i don't hear anything i'm not seeing anything in the comments so i will keep going and focusing if you have questions please post them we'll make sure alison um i wanted to make sure that everybody knows that the district has been purchasing software tools to help with support learning um you these are on the screen dream box lexia our dream box is a math program lexia is a reading based program along with some others these are all getting um purchased and in connected to our system so that children have options beyond just what the teacher is providing them so here's what our process of learning remotely looks like you will start your day checking in with your calendar in your gmail you will have a whole school google meet up this is how we will help children center what's going to be the important first beginning steps of the day then during the day they'll have reported lessons live lessons and independent work that they will be cycling through to be able to get access to the different learning opportunities then they at the end of the day will have an end of the day whole group meeting so that they can check out with their teachers students receive ell intervention or special education support that support will be coming during the middle part of the day they either will be getting that support during their language arts or math system time of day or they might have a separate session that's scheduled at uh independent choice time or at one of the what i need or when blocks that are in the schedule what are your expectations for your students and this is something that we are always developing whether in school in the school building or remote learning we really want to encourage our students to build a an honest interaction with all the adults in their life because so much of what they're doing is going to rely on them being able to tell us where they're going on the internet and also what they're understanding remember we don't want to have children using screens in private areas that is monitored you also want to pay attention to the number of tabs that are open sometimes somebody will have 20 tabs open and that can be very inefficient really you want to have a small number of tabs in order to participate in google me google classroom and maybe one other program and remember the number one goal is enjoying learning if we focus on having fun while learning regardless of the setting then we can all achieve what is necessary in this remote learning time that's the end of the presentation any questions i don't see any questions in the comments just left i'll give you a minute to come in if they have any more i'm not totally sure how middle school is doing that but there are some slightly nomenclatures or what we're calling those things depending on um what are uh what grade level you're at just be aware that they're completely different um but that will be communicated to your students all right still one question so um if you think of any more questions later on you can always email us at our email addresses and we will be ready to help you there uh and i think in a moment in another 10 more minutes we would be starting our seesaw presentation uh if um no more questions are there all right i see i give you two questions that have just come in so thank you we'll get those answered real quick and then i i wanna at least let jay street and molly go to get our next president who comes burden um but i so one question is if the chromebooks allow for web surfing outside of the arts work of software so the answer is yes do allow some some web access i'm not sure if there's additional restrictions on elementary school students i'm not my elementary school colleagues on the bottom at the end of that um but all all chromebooks and actually all school computers even the desktops are laws around child safety on the internet so there are a lot of sites that are blocked for our students um so they are not able to accomplish like the full internet while they're on there um they will have access to things that are not just the software tools that work that allison mentioned there will be some other things they'll be allowed to get to including library databases that are really great resources so um if you have a concern about the site that your child has navigated their way on please let us know so we can get that site blocked but hopefully most things should be blocked already that we'd be particularly concerned about um other thing where is the information for first grade so i think what that is probably referencing the information for getting into your file so again i would just suggest you check your email there should be email from either your school and or your classroom teacher with that information for tomorrow um so if you want to do that for some reason please reach out to your uh someone at the school so we can make sure you get that information right away and i wanted to piggybank on that um since uh it's the first grade uh i think you should be looking out for the uh meat link or the meat code and um the rest of the information about seesaw accounts will be coming in soon from your class teachers all right i i'm not seeing any other questions come in um i do just want to remind folks that you are welcome to reach out to us at any time we are getting a lot of meals at the moment so it might take us a little while to get back to you but we promise we will be returning them as quickly as we possibly can and making sure you get that information that your students need to have a great first period tomorrow we are all so excited to welcome them back or welcome for the first time if they're new to the district school um but we are we're just really excited to have them back i know we had a an all district-wide meeting this morning and left that meeting feeling so excited about seeing kids like welcoming them tomorrow so please reach out if you have any questions in the meantime um and it was wonderful thanks for joining us
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
great uh can we we will say the pledge um i pledge allegiance to this of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god okay um the first item on the agenda is public comment do we have any we do not have any public comment okay uh moving on to item number two review of the minutes of june 8th 2020 meeting um i assume we've all had a chance to review yep okay are there any objections changes amendments no they look good to me okay um all right um forgive me tony my robert's rules are failing me we don't need to make a vote on these no we uh yes we do actually i'm thinking of this meeting but yes committees we also improvements in the committee meetings okay thank you um do i hear a motion to accept the minutes of the june 8 2020 meeting anne do i hear a second next second and all in favor all right great minutes are approved um moving on to informational items and this will be the bulk of our meeting just going through the whole process of professional development in um covid times which has certainly thrown everybody for a loop so i am going to hand this over to um uh miss solano thank you so much so i i'm happy to have the opportunity to talk to you about the professional development that we planned over the summer um mostly because it took up a lot of time and we had a lot of days to hold professional development not only did we have our regular days but we also had three additional days that we were fortunate to have provided to us by the connecticut state department of education you know typically we have 180 days of school and they allowed us to use several of those days to limit our student contact days to 177 so that we were able to have some additional time to work with our teachers and we really appreciated that so our goal was that we wanted to make sure that teachers felt as prepared as they possibly could to welcome students to school we felt that by supporting our teachers that they could then turn around and best support our students so our goal was to prepare teachers and by proxy students for a return to school whatever that return would look like we knew that we needed to be flexible and we knew that we needed to prepare our organization to respond to the adjustments that we will undoubtedly need to make along the way this year so we began by sharing plans for all learning models including in-person hybrid and remote options as well as a combination of any and all of those choices which we are currently implementing we have part hybrid model we have k through in person we also have students across all level levels who have opted for the remote option we spent some time reintroducing tools such as google classroom and screencastify we also provided tools that met student and teacher needs that were brought forward in the spring one of those particular needs was i'm giving feedback and having a vehicle by which we could more effortlessly provide feedback to students by teachers especially for those students at the younger grades who might not be using google docs exclusively all the time which of course they're not when they're in kindergarten and in first and second grade we also thought it was very important that we provide collaboration time for teachers to really wrap their creative minds around these new plans these new learning models and decide on the best ways to onboard students early should we need to move to remote learning there was a lot of um a lot of bumps in the road in in in our plan in the spring because everyone including students weren't used to using all of these all these different tools and platforms so we knew that we wanted to make sure that students knew our in-person routines and structures but also our remote routines and structures that are tied to things like google classroom we also needed to talk to teachers and prepare them for improvements to synchronous and asynchronous learning that we've drastically increased the amount of time of synchronous learning of direct instruction that teachers are providing to their students and also some ways that we can improve upon our asynchronous learning after much researching over the summer a lot of training by our curriculum team which included our rams our division leaders at the middle school our department chairs and um and administrators from all levels we um solidified our plans for what learning strategies we would be be implementing to address that six-month absence of school and and not being a part of the in-person um experience since since early march so that's sort of the overall umbrella i'm going to turn it over to kevin who's going to walk you through some of the finer details and some of the context for that sure thank you marlon give me just a minute to set up with presenting looks good kevin i can see it on my end there we go okay so as uh first of all good evening everybody uh as marlene mentioned our professional development was really in some key areas to help teachers get ready to work with the unique nature of this year and this summer we drafted learning plans that were companion documents really to the cps reopening plans with really the focus on curriculum and instruction and the overall goal is to make sure that we're enacting our curriculum to the greatest degree that we possibly can given the unique nature of the year so these plans really serve as a foundation and a starting point for our teachers and the premise is that if if early on in the year we're starting from this foundation we will be able to move in and out of these different learning models um relying on some technology tools and relying on some key strategies so that the experiences for our students are as solid as the possibility can be in in this year and we know we know that things like learning time are going to be impacted on this year so that's that that's inclusive of some of the time that was affected last year it's also inclusive of um knowing that this year even for our in-person model some of our our time with students is um affected by longer arrival and dismissal times mass breaks and those kind of things so we've really tried to design up front a plan that can address some of those needs and for each part of those plans we provided some professional development time of those four days for teachers so you heard marlene describe you know good portion of that plan is based on various learning models are utilizing some technology tools to help support teachers and students and relying on a couple key instructional strategies so a good part of the plan that are helping teachers think through the particulars for at each grade level span k 6 7 8 9 12 what we need to pay attention to for on campus and in person what we need to pay attention to in a hybrid model and what we need to pay attention to with remote learning as an option for students and also any differences if we were to go full weight remote and a key part of of this is to be able to move back and forth with these as needed over the course course of the year some of the themes that emerge from feedback from parents and teachers last year from students as well some of the differences between being three quarters of the way through the school year when we needed to move to remote learning versus the starting of the school school year in a different model all impacted kind of our design and a lot of those scenes marlene mentioned already an increase in synchronous learning opportunities for any remote students providing some tools for teachers and students to increase interactions collaboration and feedback because some of what were were some of our parameters for this year don't naturally set us up to have student-to-student collaboration in the way they were used to even if we're in person in the classroom and certainly for across classrooms or across spaces in a remote environment so our plans really were grounded in some of those seams themes to help help us enable our or enact our curriculum as strongly as we can one foundation is every class in the school district is going to be relying and organizing their instruction based on a learning management system you're familiar with google classroom from last year and we'll continue use to use that in grades four through twelve seesaw we have added uh this year for our kindergarten through third grade students and some of the um you'll notice on the icon there you'll see things like video and drawing photo uh on that presentation screen and some of our struggles with having students be able to share their work if they're working offline [Music] give a demonstration of a reading to so a teacher can hear how a student's reading some of the tools like that um that we were searching for last year are naturally embedded in seesaw and it's tools like that that really helped lead us towards seesaw for the learning management system for kindergarten through third grade and some of those same concepts that brought us to some other universal technology tools that we're adding on to this year again the goal of these tools is really to increase our interaction between teachers and students our collaboration and our remote capabilities so for example some of the professional development on our days before school related to class well you might have heard a little bit about that towards the end of last year class flow allows um to do some of the same things that our smart board software would allow in a classroom that allows us to do that remotely but it also allows for some other tools like an interactive whiteboard so teachers and students can work on a shared space regardless of where they are things like quick calling to get a that teachers can make a quick poll for students to be able to respond to to get a quick check on on learning so leaning on some of those technology tools allows us to stay closer to the types of interactions we're used to in the classroom within person learning and it helps break down some of the the barriers of the fact that we're going to be in different spots for for this learning um a key part of some of the pd time was allowing teachers to think through how can we get students up to speed on the technology tools that we're using so each grade level band k 6 7 8 and 9 12 had a template of some of the approved tools that they use to plan well how are we going to get students a familiar with the tools that we're using and b set appropriate expectations for use effective uh effective uses for this and set some of the class norms on on how each of these tools might be used in the classroom as you can imagine at the younger grade levels more of the onboarding might have to do with how to utilize some of the tools and as you get to the upper grid levels more the onboarding might have to do with effective use of the tools and classroom norms around it but regardless the the mindset is really to help students become familiar with the tools that we might use in each of these uh learning model settings so that we're ready to move flexibly in and out of those as needed throughout the school year so so if i bring us back to kind of some of the pd early on it's being proactive about being ready to be on a few different learning models a few different learning environments leaning on some technology tools to help keep us as close to the kinds of interactions with students that were we're used to with our in-person learning and one of the last pieces of the puzzle really has to do with addressing the issue of some of the time the learning time loss that we experienced last year and that we know regardless of the learning model whether we're in person with some reduced time in class or whether we're remote and have to navigate some of the ends of them being remote learning we know learning time is going to be affected so several teachers and administrators attended a series of workshops sponsored by the connecticut center for school change around this notion of acceleration and after experiencing some of this professional development it really provided us a a way to frame our instructions so that we can continue to move forward with our curriculum without having to turn and look backward and try to fill in some potential gaps that might have been been there last year and these five areas really help provide a guide for us one is is really focusing on prioritized standards so we talked about this with teachers as having permission to just teach the most important stuff and this is not an easy concept because teachers are very conscientious and they understand that parts of our curriculum are there for a reason and they want to do their due diligence to make sure that they are teaching that thoroughly in the reality of the the situation though we really have to and we have spent some time we'll continue to spend some time prioritizing those things that are going to carry the most meaning and the most weight for the long term so those things that are enduring concepts from year to year to year within a certain curricular area those ideas that cut across each of the curricular areas so there's skills like analysis that are that are present in many areas of our curriculum to lead on on those uh areas and things that are going to be essential where learning is sequential you need to understand this concept or skill before i move on to that concept or skill knowing that our time is uh precious with students it also is incumbent upon us to make sure the tasks that the learning tasks that we're asking students to engage in are the most meaningful ones so really making sure we're grounding ourselves in meaningful academic tasks and then leaning on both responsive teaching which is not quite synonymous with formative assessment but but very closely connected to the idea that we can have a good read on where students are at any given time and find ways to have quick check-ins with students to understand where they are and then to provide the just-in-time support this is scaffolding to help bring students up to that meaningful academic task and not bring that academic test down to the students so what's the hurdle help they need what's the just what's the information you need right now to be able to gauge in that meaningful academic task our a lot of our special education teachers and reflections on this professional development you know said back to us yes this is what we do all the time we prioritize standards we um you know frame what's most important and we help students stage and and step up to whatever the grade level expectations are so these are this is not a new frame or approach for um for teaching but it it gives gave us good grounding to help navigate some of the unique nature of this year and the last thing i'll comment on is this comment of self-efficacy and this is just as important as any any strategy or approach but this is the notion and idea that students believing in their own ability to achieve and we heard this through and through in each part of our professional development with the connecticut center for school change that this belief um that you can achieve these tasks is critically important for success so we're spending time making sure that we're helping foster those messages and foster that that belief set within the students um okay that was a mouthful right there but but again the premise is that we know we're gonna have to move in and out of these different learning models we know we're gonna have to lean on some technology tools to help keep us as close to our natural the natural way that we teach and interact and give feedback for students and this whole idea of acceleration really focusing on the most important things and bringing students up to finding some good supports just in time supports to bring students up to those media academic tests is kind of our frame for this year and over the course of several days we chunked each of these pieces of the puzzle out and provided some direct professional development for example the acceleration led by the department chairs and division leaders of rams who attended intended attended the professional development by the connecticut center for school change they turn and give it to the staff and also some collaborative time for teachers to really wrestle with these concepts at their particular grade level their particular division or their particular department let's i'll stop there go ahead no thank you kevin thank you for um going a little deeper into into all of those aspects of the professional learning sessions mary didn't know if you wanted to add the piece that was really german into the high school which is those 80-minute blocks and moving an entire school which has really had the frame of much shorter sections to this 80-minute block and how your staff and the work that you all did to prepare teachers for what they're doing on the second day of school now yeah you said no it's um our time is different uh we have a little more um vertical time than than horizontal time so our classes are longer uh and and less frequent in terms of being in person uh just to talk a bit about the 80 minute our teacher spent their professional development sessions talking through the kinds of assignments and how they would adapt tools and assignments to the kinds of time chunks that we have in person and remote and as we went along we had a continuous conversation much like i had with all of you um at the full board meeting that students will be synchronous both in person and remote so on their opposite day students can and and do need to tune into their class sessions even though they're on their opposite day and what teachers are doing is they're giving instructions to the class basically well here's what we're going to do for the week here are the things i need you to work on now students who are at home for the for the remaining however much time i need you to work on these very specific items and bits of information so that you're prepared for our in-person day and i'm going to do some instruction with the students who are in front of me and then that flips so the students are able to remain in that class on their opposite day for clarification additionally if a student learned a concept and they need a little more time with it they can get that on that following day and so it will it will take us some time as we work through these new ways of instructing uh to get the rhythm down and exactly how will we use that time so we are starting out slowly um giving students the opportunity to to get in-person instruction and then follow-up instruction that second day and then on that third day or third third chunk of time it's everyone everyone is remote and on that day it's check-in and office hours uh students can always get support and office hour support right after school on any day remotely or in person depending on what they work out with their teachers uh but that's that's how we're utilizing that time um so that we're we're working through how we have to moderate the speed of that instruction and and we have a committee of teachers that will be taking a close look with representation from each department at those best practices that are working across the building and then we we certainly want to replicate that and then see how we're doing and and modify as we go along so that we're truly being responsive to student need thanks mary sure i also wanted to highlight that we were really very cohesive as a district in the plans that we laid out and that every teacher at every level knew what we were trying to do or got the same messages i should say so it was very coordinated um which i think helps when you're when you're talking about a district message and what all of our kids can expect to get from their instruction the other thing that we did was to have one day solely focused on social emotional learning and so we had restorative practices training and support for hall monitors and study hall monitors we had responsive classroom supports and sessions for elementary teachers we had school counselors leading sessions to support teachers to support students on their return to school after a prolonged absence we had lots of collaboration across teams across departments on activities even getting to know you activities that needed to be both remote and in person i cannot stress to you enough the herculean challenge that our teachers are facing having to teach both the students in front of them and the students at home that just getting your mind wrapped around the preparation for that the management of that the things that would take x amount of time with your in-person students are now going to take be different for your remote learners so breaks and mass breaks getting that in the prolonged arrival and the prolonged dismissal that are impacting our instructional time because of the social distance that's needed the sheer amount of time to alleviate the traffic on route 10 and have that staggered just having to rethink absolutely everything for a principal for a teacher for everyone involved in our schools it it's truly um they've done a great job it's hard work this is only day two and i know that that this is cheshire and so they wanted to be perfect on the first day and and they don't want to make mistakes which i understand we're going to get better at this i think i think teachers need to give themselves a little grace and know that it it's going to take a little time before this feels comfortable is comfortable it's a lot and i i also wanted to also address with the technology tools it was not only the tools that kevin spoke of which are so important but under the auspices of a nationwide chromebook shortage and statewide and we believe national complications with google meet that we know are happening in so many districts across the state um so you know the late move of some remote learners that you know mary or any of our principals would get saying we you know we we need to make a change and so all of the many stop gaps in order to make sure that those kiddos got their device and that it was programmed for them to pick up i think we will continue to seek out our students who are not having wi-fi at home that will be something that we continue to work on we want to make sure that that students have access to wi-fi in their homes even if they're showing up to school we know that some kids will show up remotely you know because they're in a parking lot at starbucks and we want to make sure that we remove any barriers that they may have to access to internet that we have the capability to do so so we are currently actively seeking not only those who were absent but those who who need our support in that way we want to make sure that we can provide that so i i think that um after day two you know we're we're taking the temperature out there and and we know that people want to do better and i'm trying to tell them that you know it's it's going to take some time for them to feel really comfortable with this um i know ann you were in chapman school today and saw some of our remote learners in one of the classrooms and got to experience um what that looked like sounded like felt like in those buildings and i know the the rest of our board members will be doing visits to schools as well and um kevin mary and i hope to have our next meeting from one of those remote locations so that you all can experience what that is like to be both remote um and be a part of of the classroom setting i i think it will be good to get the feeling for that and to know what that's like so i'll pause there and uh stop for questions oh yeah well i just wanted to uh since you brought me up into the conversation uh marlene um yeah it was a really nice visit this morning at chapman school and um diana of course the ever cheerful diana um took me into some of those classrooms and it's it's really pretty amazing because on this the faces on the on the big screen are full size so it it it's much different than just a computer screen with the blocks of faces these big size faces and then with the microphones projecting so well there it's really a much better sense of being a a cohesive class with students remote and students in the physical classroom certainly it's a better it seemed like already a better experience than what we're doing at quinnipiac with with our combination of remote learners and in-class students at the same time because um mostly because of that big screen effect and and the way like diana could just put her head in the door and say hello hi students uh um at home and and they they all heard her they they were all they were able to get the classroom at home because visually we can see them from in the classroom and and and they it seemed to be working well already and it was you know the second day of school so i was impressed i'm glad thanks for sharing that and um i think too what's really important for for you all as board members to remember is that that experience that ann just described is the broadcast classroom so that is where we have put our resources into the video camera in the ceiling and the microphone that the teacher wears and that the speakers that are in the room so that's the the ideal and that is that is what we want to see more of and we will be seeing seeing more of that as all of them get installed and people get up to speed with those i know we visited jeff and myself and vin massiana and our town manager sean kimball visited all of the schools on friday so we were able to get us a peek into um we stopped in one of the was at the french classroom right mary up at the high school and so we were able to see them across all levels not all of our classrooms have this so it's important to know that that experience won't be for every student although we're trying to maximize the opportunities for students to be in those classrooms in other areas we have some more makeshift ones because we need to be flexible and and fluid and if a kiddo needs to be out we still want to make sure that they can they can access that information so um i'm glad anne that you got to check it out and that it was working so well and know that we have those across the district but we have a plan b in those other places where we where we don't have those in place yet one of the things i just want to add one more quick thing one of the things that was so important seeming to me was um those microphones that the teachers were wearing because they didn't have to be in us in a particular place because the microphones were attached to them but the sound quality was so good and when everybody's wearing masks when they're teaching it it enhances what you hear even for the kids in the physical classroom not just for the students who are remote so i i thought that was an important aspect to the whole technology that was happening and that's such a great point when we were up at the high school and we were in the french class that is exactly what one of one or two to three a couple of kids one one kiddo brought it up and the others all agreed he said it's difficult to hear the teachers with the masks on he said and that just makes it so easy you know you're not working as hard in the class when you can easily hear what folks are saying so good really great really great point thanks for pointing that out do any of the rest of you have questions on any of the content that we reviewed related to professional development or instructional time etc tony do you have anything no it's uh it's impressive the amount of work and moving parts that had to happen just to get to the reopening and here we acclimated it's uh marlene you emphasized that it was not an easy task i think it's an understatement i think a lot went into it so very thankful uh i actually have my walk through chs tomorrow morning so i'm looking forward to seeing all the smiling faces in the building again that's great that's great i think our teachers just did an incredible job oh absolutely i mean and feedback i've heard so far has been incredibly positive so that's always a good thing especially in treasure so um my only questions are dealing with time in some specifics um i know we're only on essentially day two but um how much is our arrival dismissal and mask breaks eating into instructional time have we been able to and do you foresee that shrinking so great questions and and i think it's important that we tackle that topic head on because there is no doubt that instructional time is impacted by all of this we there's no way to bring in that many students into a building socially distance and safe if we're letting them all in at once you know so it it is going to take longer same thing with dismissal we've got to now enter into these mask breaks which also eat up some time we're doing significantly more hand washing than we've ever done before you know especially before lunches and things like that um but on day two it's hard to tell exactly what impact that will have long term because we're still practicing the routines they're still new kids are still getting um acclimated to the lines and which way they can go in the hallway and where they go to wash their hands and you know where the mask breaks are i mean you know there's suddenly sinks where you never saw sinks before so things look different um i would imagine that as we or i i my my hope is my guess is that just like any year that once you tighten those things up and they become more of a routine you can do them more quickly so i think we'll be able to see that in the coming weeks okay all right um to tag on to that faith and then kevin i'm sorry to cut you off part of the reason we went with the strategy that we're going with is because we know and we need to plan for the fact that there is going to be less instructional time not just in cheshire i'm talking you know everywhere um so we've got to prioritize what's the most important things what are those things and that's what teachers did they began thinking about that and planning for that with their formative assessment with their lesson planning with what what we'll see um assessed on the report card etc go ahead kevin sorry yeah and just a few concrete examples of where we've been able to do some of that work at least at the elementary level um so for example in math uh you know we relied on a few different resources some from eureka some from a resource called achieve the core to really understand what some of those enduring things are that absolutely have to happen and then our district math code to listen elway at the elementary level took unit by unit and said focus on teach teach focus on this here's where you can let go of a little bit we don't want to let go of any of it but we had to prioritize a little bit so some of the summer work was kind of shaping that out a little bit knowing that we have reduced time at uh in reading we use junior great books to help expose kids to really rich texts to teach the standards we usually do one book per standard but these are really good pieces of literature so we're using one book to be able to teach into two standards at a time and therefore kind of that time that would otherwise be dedicated to interacting with another rich text gets focused on instruction so we're finding ways really concrete ways to help teachers prioritize a little bit and i know at the minimum high school level a big chunk of the work on those pd days was to start um start the conversations on what what is that that most important piece because we might not have the same we're probably not going to have the same amount of time to be able to do this i mean that's just the reality of this situation so that's and i don't see that stopping with those conversations stopping with august pd when we attended the acceleration workshop it was pretty clear the feedback from teachers was this is ongoing work we're going to have to collaborate with one another we're going to keep on checking in with one another on where we are relative to where we would typically be with our pacing and we're going to have to make some collective decisions on what rises to the top is most important so i see that work being the heart of the ongoing work throughout the year and then of course um you know some of the strategies that teachers may need to lean on to help students and get there knowing that we've got some this is reduced time so um even though it's the foundation it's that's not a oh we have that all settled that's that's going to be honestly great level department meetings professional development um to do that well and to keep some of the early things that we've laid out somewhat concretely going we're gonna we're gonna need to keep at this work throughout the year so future professional development days are going to be are you going to just kind of pick up the the same process the same theme or are you going in a different develop a different direction how how are they going to be shaped and when is your next one so we have five half day professional development days this year we also have a full day in november on election day and we have another day in march but we have committed to staying the course to make sure we get the job done so while we'll continue with our two marquee initiatives of complex thinking and social emotional learning underpinning those are this idea of acceleration this strategy that we're using and as kevin said we will use those professional development times for that we will use what you might often hear teachers refer to as the extra 30 minutes during one one extra 30 minute day per week for that type of work um as in it'll be infused through faculty meetings through grade level meetings through department time through division leader meetings this is something that that we are all in on in order to support the kids as we go through this tumultuous year okay all right and then um just kind of shifting gears you have with regard to learning of technology and adopting the technology on your chart kevin it looks like you have set i can't remember the heading but you um the way i read it was you're assuming they can pretty much pick the technology up in a looks like a two-day span the 14th through the 16th is that what you were saying and is that practical for especially for little kids and i don't mean to second-guess you i'm just curious so um what you saw there was a snippet of the template that template went on for probably about 10 more rows with with different things and and the idea was to get students up on tools in chunks over the first several weeks of school most of very few of the [Music] lessons will be standalone lessons so if if for example we're helping students get up on seesaw and learn how to uh post an assignment which is one of the skills how to take a quick video of themselves which we already had kids doing on the orientation days believe it or not kind of sharing they're all about me that we would typically do in you know a circle in conversation they take a quick video snapshot of it so even though that list looked long the teachers showed them how to post one of those videos and they did it on on kind of that first day so even though the list looks long the skills actually take short amounts amount of time to do we were just trying to be thoughtful of really identifying which of those skills that need to happen if you saw the remainder that was a snippet of the chart the remainder of that chart there's different layers of different universal tools that go on with the goal of the first few weeks to to be up on the essentials in case we need to flex in and out of of different learning environments so okay the work looks longer than it actually will take because most of it's embedded in what they're naturally doing okay and correct i'm wrong but i think that was also for teams to sit down and say this was a guideline and then teams would sit down and say we're going to introduce this during these couple of days in these couple of days so that they were covering everything and could you know sort of circle back to it sure and one so for one example that is in sixth grade they use an online big ideas math textbook they actually needed to put that up much sooner because if they're going to get into any of the math content students need to access that book so whatever draft times we had they said we're going to move that up here and we're going to take you know another skill and move it down a little bit lower because they can pick that up a little bit later so that was part of we gave them a template they actually applied it to their grade level their division their department okay all right thanks and then one last thing um the broadcast broadcast classroom that ann does such a good job explaining what's going on um with um class size fluctuations um are is that constant is it increasing decreasing um and what happens to learning time if you get a large group in the broadcast classroom i and maybe i'm just missing something but no you're not missing something faith because i saw this in practice this morning in a very short period of time diana took me to different classrooms and one of the classrooms did have more students in virtually and there were only five students sitting there in the classroom and there were about um maybe a dozen that were coming in virtually so i think the answer but i'm going to let the experts tell you um is this is an incredible balancing act that these people have put together that our our people in cheshire public schools have have put together it's it really it's it's pretty amazing with what they've done and how they've gotten kids certain kids into certain classrooms some classrooms are have no remote learners in them and those are the classrooms that don't have this broadcast uh capability some classrooms have one two or three kids coming in um remotely and the bulk of the class there physically but then there there was a classroom where more of the students were coming in remote than were and i i think it has to do with with the grade level where the families are who are choosing to have their students be remote and then the capabilities of the classrooms and i think it's why it's so important that we get as many classrooms outfitted um because it gives us more flexibility in how we put students into those classrooms but i'll let marlene and kevin well give you the real answer well said it fluctuates you know we we tried to the greatest extent possible after the surveys were administered to group the remote learners into those classrooms that would be set up with the broadcast equipment that didn't always stay stays it was static right especially when we have um you know students that we're hearing from who might need to be home and i think we're going to continue to need to be flexible as this this ebbs and flows are you seeing some kids some classes with um 25 28 kids in them we have very few classrooms that have that high numbers i do know that at dodd there may be a few classes for math that are on the higher side okay generally speaking our classes are not that high we would not want them that high on a regular in a regular year um and if they happen to be in that number it certainly would be as a result of the remote and in-person requests from families so it's going to fluctuate okay well that wraps mine up all right okay well thank you guys and thank you to the teachers and the parents and everyone for uh making this work so i guess now we're moving on to item b the state assessment calendar well that's interesting to see on the agenda you know faith um after you and i spoke the other day and we were talking about instructional time and you know we we still have to teach the things that are important and i i sort of wanted to put this in because this came out obviously on september 3rd and it articulates this the summative assessment calendar for this year which which comes to us from the state department of education so you can see that the typical state assessments we are still you know beholden to make sure that our students take these whether they are remote or in person and and how we do that will be um a particular challenge that won't be hitting us until about january so you see we have the lost links test for our english learners followed by the connecticut alternative assessment that we have to have our eligibility information in by which is for the ngss the science assessment you can see the dates also for that the alternative assessment is due a little further down the road in march um then followed by the smarter balanced assessment which has a date of march 29th through june 4th we usually start it later and the sat so i just wanted to emphasize um without causing any anxiety for anyone especially our teachers and students that yes we have less instructional time and yes we need to give our students and our teachers permission to just teach the most important information um because ultimately we'll still be measured by the same yardstick that we are every year that at this point in time um there there is no uh flexibility on that testing so the state looks like they're continuing to move ahead with plans and that's the only reason i put that and put that in there was to sort of show uh those two two extremes is there any chance uh so they're not modifying the test obviously to somehow recognize the most important concepts um they're going full bore with tests as if it's a normal year well we're hoping that what we see is the most important concepts are the most important concepts and we're assuming that will be the things that matter the most um but as far as if you're asking if they're giving us any flexibility going forward so far no oh okay um and do you have any advocates in the state department of education who might persuade the powers that be that this may not necessarily be the best course i think really good open dialogue with both our rests and um i know just being on a call the other day with the state department of education i think it's pretty open back and forth for example we were talking about attendance the other day and some concerns and questions came up and you know they really paused and took that information under advisement and are getting back to us and us meaning connecticut not just cheshire but i i think they've been really um open to hearing what districts are going through so this could very well change but i just wanted to make the point that you know we weren't we weren't um going to focus solely on hand washing and not worry about instructional important issues okay i'm sorry um ian or tony do you have any questions on on that i kind of took over didn't mean to no no not at this point okay all right um ann you're good okay all right well um that brings us to the end of our agenda um okay do i hear a motion to adjourn our meeting anne tony second all in favor aye all right thanks everybody thank you you guys for the very thorough and comprehensive overview thank you faith thanks tony and ann appreciate it everyone thank you mary
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we see you anne-marie we just don't hear you sorry about that all right i had the wrong link for some reason and i have to excuse myself so i need to get the pin number all righty hello everyone hi hello hello all right the anaheim high school district board of trustees are we ready to go sorry sorry john sorry about that i'm just going the anaheim union high school district board of trustees regular meeting of september 15 2020 is called to order at 206 p.m the following members are present brian o'neill al-jabbar anna ella piercy catherine ate smith and anne-marie randall trejo staff has requested the following amendments to the agenda did you guys all receive these early yes yeah okay so i'll just read them out so we're pulling closed session item 4.5 on page 2 of the agenda replacing page 7 of the agenda to correct the date to june 30th 2021 on item 11.1 only replace exhibit exhibit b replace page 1 to correct the date to june 30th 2021 [Music] exhibit cc page 9 section 14.8 8.7 or change the nurse's stipend dollar amount to 3614.
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you know and so things you know it that that helps a lot of stress for those cooks you know maybe not even just a high school little school spoiled elementary too but you know something i didn't even think about you know and i was like oh my gosh that would be pretty stressful for them so you know that those are um things that i think are important challenges pop up all the time every day there are challenges that are popping up we appreciate giving us the time and you know people tell us all the time don't do right or don't do what they would like for us to do and those challenges pop up and we'll listen and then we try to make some decisions that we think is best for the the whole you know so i have a couple things one in medicine if you want to have a big crowd we made breakfast free that's the way i always i went i use that because i i have faculty meetings and i always bring donuts people show up for free food every time the other thing is i appreciate you guys talking with the kids and communicate with them my daughter's the president of her class and she hasn't had any frustrations with all of it the whole process of the float building that they were they were all getting kind of she was getting a little frustrated they weren't going to get to there was some discussion but it was talked out and it came to something that she has she's totally happy with i mean there's the conversations you can tell are happening keeping the kids informed and treating them as adults i think is a good thing so that part i really like and the other thing is did you hear anything good bad or other about us serving hot dogs at the football game nothing uh from the hot dog side but i've heard a couple other little things that we pre-packaged all of them but i haven't heard anything on the food or concessions uh as far as any of that so i i i would never have not heard anything on that you know you guys get i mean it's funny but you to realize it's no different than your household dave and i argue about things constantly we disagree on things constantly and but we try to talk through those because i tell them i'm not always going to win you're not always going to win we're going to have to work this but we've got to keep those kids in the back of our minds and i think every time we come up with a final decision that's where we came from you know and some people won't think we're right but we're trying to keep the kids in the back of our minds when we do it but i think you're having conversations and that's important i think treating the kids as adults and respecting them i think you guys are accomplishing and that's making a difference with this school year yeah so i think if you guys keep that up it's you won't have i mean there's always going to be an issue but if you talk it through it's going to you're going to work it out pretty good what was the uh where was the money for drive one for your school your market to go we have that something go someplace every year yes there's specific things like middle school gets a certain amount uh this program gets a certain amount uh and i can't remember dave would tell you but each each program and out of that amount of money they give this program this this and this so but i know middle school and high school there's i don't know depending on whether they get the extra money during that year that goes somewhere else too so yeah that's that's that's a bad deal you know for the kids and for the community for not being able to do that but we'll move through we'll be fine good question though yeah yeah i don't know i think they got like 1500 out of the 6 000 and then there was different programs uh that get that and dave has that list because it's done that way each year there's no ffa many champions of character get some i can't remember which ones but they are there's [Music] well i think we talk every day about you know where we can get some things and you know just we're gonna lose money there so there's no doubt that athletics [Music] i'm not sure what my personal update was on that report um it was five okay five i think we have three currently um as far as hiring openings but i do have one building that was about six people today um for various reasons so um we're taking hits from lots of different directions but on a positive note so bridges program that we started last year our numbers are lower this year but we did just get on out at emp shield with paid positions for certain hours for our kids so we can work on budgeting and saving and taxes and all that stuff we started it today so we have two boys that are going to work um two different shifts out there to total four hours and another one that will work about an hour at a time and he's got a video today of him taran they're anything from building boxes a tearing um bubble wrap to sorting plaques so i'm pretty excited about that but today was day one that's awesome good job yes doug's not here tonight but if you have any questions on the technology report just share those with me and we'll get some answers for you a lot of information there from uh doug vanderlin in there i like that he put all the different options on social media superintendents report i just have a few things real quick uh again you have the action planning form uh for uh superintendent goals uh again uh just you can take a peek at that and look at that uh i i did add one thing to this i'm doing a weekly radio spot on 97 of the dog and it has information with events brian cunningham and i talked about this and something i felt like i wanted to to do and he was very very receptive to it he brought it to my attention we had a good discussion uh and so it gives some people some information about the district and what's happening and that led actually to another radio spot last week on kvoe out of emporia they asked me to do a radio spot on how things were going for the new school year and so it was uh it was a very good uh i guess uh a good couple of scenarios there for the radio waves to give some information about the district but if you have anything that you want to look to add to that you can do that in upcoming meetings you can uh review this you should have changed the date to 2021 they didn't do that with the actual planning thing but again if you have you can also share those so i say with me upcoming meetings um again superintendent's evaluation uh you have one evaluation for me before february so we kind of have to start to work on that i know time will go by quick here's the middle of september already so again if you guys can start to prepare and we'll get some information to you guys to start working on that tracy will do that and then look to do that i say january at the board meeting in january so i just today when i read that i had tracy send me the evaluation so i'm going to send it out to the board and then if we want to make any changes or honestly we could use that evaluation and then if you want to add things at the bottom we're happy to do that so i'd like to get that out soon i'm going to get that out because i'd like to have it done soon so we can work forward and then the community advisory committee met on august 31st that went really really well the meeting was about 45 to 50 minutes uh james and stacy were there at the meeting as well there was just one slight adjustment that we want to look at making and that's that kind of that aqua blue highlighted area there um that we want to do and this came from the administrators and directors so when again when we try it when we come up with a plan and it's a you know a plan that we're trying to put together kind of building the plane in mid-air so to speak you think it's a semester choice and you make a choice in the semester but there are so many different factors that can play in so again we just felt like administrators and directors felt like it would be best to allow kids and parents to to make adjustments to whether they're on-site or remote learners depending upon certain situations so again health situations can pop up different things can happen in a person's life right now so uh we all felt like that the administrators and directors could be involved in this decision making based on a case-by-case basis and what we want is the kids back in school as much as possible we really want that so having said that that's one change we'd like to make we did bring it up at the advisory committee no one seemed to be too concerned about that whatsoever again the people with the advisory committee they i think and james and stacey if you want to mention anything but they just i think you feel really good about what we're doing the things that we're doing to try to keep everybody as as health safe as possible so i don't know if you guys have any comments it was just really good i think what i heard is for the most part teachers really want the kids in the classroom if they can i mean it's actually they can do the remote learning but it's much easier if they can have the kids in the classroom so so they so we kind of allowed a little bit of that change and so but we don't want the flip-flop back and forth so i think that was agreed upon okay so with your approval we'll go ahead and we'll make that adjustment and administrators obviously they can the back and forth we're not going to allow that flip flop back and forth changes to be made like every week or every month or whatever that's where their discretion is going to come into play and that's all i have any questions and i i can't thank the administration directors and all of our staff enough i mean what we thought we worked harder we really thought we worked hard before this all happened um it has tested us and we've come out stronger than ever and so i can't thank all of our staff enough i mean for everybody what they're doing uh central office staff secretary office staff certified classified administrators directors everybody we just we're doing some really great things and some very challenging times i think i would echo that i would say all the administrators and all the staff across the district uh everybody has done a fantastic job and really adaptable this whole thing and i think we can actually gauge that a lot of time by unfortunately social media we don't have a lot of negative social media out there so until them over tonight but i mean realistically i mean you guys are handling it quite well i mean anything that props up it's double edged and it's over so outstanding job to everybody so well i feel like our district you guys are doing everything that you can to make sure that things still happen it's a lot easier just to cancel it and say we can't do it and you guys are finding ways to make things happen so i really do appreciate it and from an elementary standpoint i don't have a lot of experience in middle school or high school yet but my elementary student i know that you know some of those teachers are very stressed but it has not affected him at all he is not bringing he he is not feeling any of that stress from his teachers which i think is really important as well so great job pass it on board reports yes we can somewhere okay okay we have a sealed bed for the burglar alarm this was a very i'll tell you come to work some days and you're not sure exactly what you're going to you know encounter but james higgins mentioned to me that there was a person that he knew that it was had some interest he's a kind of a historian of sorts in burlington coffey county area on the east side of this building there sets a burglar alarm on the side of the wall it was from when the bank was here um he had some interest shared that with james and james connected him with me and so we decided we really have no use for a burglar alarm it's on the side of the building uh so really what we decided to do is put it up for sealed bids and we have one sealed bid the the person again that is interested in this we also talked about how he will have to pay for the removal there's an additional fee for the removal of that off the wall because it's going to take some removal time as well as some ceiling caulking to make sure that that is a solid spot on the wall now so that's that's the story in a nutshell so if you drive by out there look up high it's it's a the old time great big dome shape it says burger where i'm on it he just wanted it for history so on the side of the building when you leave go out and look at it because it's a beautiful night and we have no use we're not going to activate it so hopefully we're going to make somebody happy so we said we put it up for bid how do we do that because that's the first i've heard about it i think it's pretty cool too sealed sealed did it went sealed dead on well i mean how was the information put out there was it it went through the newspaper yeah i'll make a version accept sealed bid and the amount of 200 for my coat for the burglar any discussions [Music] okay does anybody have a reason to go and exit for a person no okay retirement i can't believe it [Music] well since i was the last one to have her in this room i think i'll say a motion to accept the retirement requests of sandy lives effective september 1st 2021 with regret second unfortunately what was it is it september the second question why [Music] oh but it doesn't require a new contract for them no no no she's working on her just the okay yeah [Music] salary schedule it looks like we left off one motion for the 25 cent to the base okay [Music] a discussion there's your past six zero degrees i appreciate the ministers still coming um we have some we did talk to them i'll say to the administration about if any of them or if they knew anyone that would be interested in bus driving car did we did reach out they also asked us to send out to staff a couple things they would help celebrate education week and then they wondered if there were some stuff that needed some things for their classroom if they did maybe they could reply to craig or tracy or whoever's in the top and then they would i mean they were very supportive then of course they talked about wednesday nights do you have to have a cdl to drive the vans no under 14.
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second all right are there any questions yes [Music] as outlined in the personnel resolutions of your district and high school 6.2 to 6.13 can i get a motion second second any questions hearing none can i get the whole call yes yes so yes yes yes foreign yes number seven uh personnel resolutions elementary superintendent recommends for approval the resolutions is outlined in personnel resolutions under middle and elementary schools 7.2 to 7.4 can i get a motion can i get a second second mr mom any questions hearing none can i get a vocal software yes mr ball yes yes yes yes [Music] board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in education resolutions under district in high school 8.2 8.4 and 8.5 can i get a motion question do the motion first yes um we have 37 students currently yes when will when we this will start next year yes and then kids that are currently in our program with our district will stay in our district until they finish school yeah okay yeah they they stay with us until they graduate or they voluntarily but they get to finish throughout all right and once we terminate then this is over there's no going back you can always apply to go back um but just knowing that um from the get go under a microscope with the state with this uh i would find it under a microscope financially no they've constantly because you know we've had some great additions to our schools and yeah i agree 100 i just think right now you're looking at 37 seats in high school and that was extremely tight and again you had the middle school in here which was probably 200 and 200 kids and they were kind of self-contained uh the four classrooms two top bathrooms here are the two side classes here on the first floor you know when it comes to high school there there's not gonna be any glasses you know here you know it's gonna be a little bit more difficult actually i think we have an eighth grader i think we do have one eighth grader where does it start um for us predominantly it was always high school but every once in a while when we had an extra scene for 8th grade we used it and so once like you know like always siblings but once but now they can't be yeah so if they're not in the like if you have a seventh grader somebody who's in ninth grade has a seventh grade situation so it's just over like whoever's here stays and then whoever are you and we feel confident to do it now and not like i i'm just i'm very nervous to like let's just see if it goes because we've we've touted it as a good thing [Music] it's been a good thing it really has um you know i'm not going to say it's not i was the principal when i first came in came in when did it start a long time ago 2012 yeah 2011 2004 so it's it's been here for nine years or so um i mean with this program we got well we've got an engineering class to be teaching here [Music] 000 is well listen i think i get that this you know but is it definitely next year or is it can we i don't know listen we can do it you guys you guys can do it at any time the only thing you have to think of is this if if space really becomes an issue you understand whatever you have when you terminate you have for four years so it's not like okay you need more not truly you lose a little bit each year yeah so if you decide you need 37 classes so they're 37 seats so therefore we're going to terminate this year well understand you don't gain anything that year then you lean off as you go along so again i don't have um can you get us numbers projection numbers like so that we can really see if our numbers are bigger then we may have a little bit more time till they get to high school with those numbers yeah i mean again our numbers are not going down we haven't been yet um so that's not really an issue at all um so again um yes but you know you want to make sure everybody's aware you know you don't have to keep saying you have from now until because if you decide to keep it you know we have to have a lot of room to set up right so that's the [Music] yes yes all right uh number nine resolve the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in policy resolutions under district of high school 9.2 can i give a motion motion second any questions here i am none can i get a roll call yes [Music] yes okay at this time number 10 resolved to the board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in special services resolution 10.2 to 10.5 can i get a motion any questions hearing none can i get a roll call yes yes board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in financial resolutions 11.2 to 11.5 can i get a motion motion miss mars can i get a second could you give us a little more information about the agreement with central jersey consortium for excellence and equity what they provide on 11.5 i'm sure so basically um it is a group of um school districts we were in the central jersey one last year that um meet we meet roughly every six weeks or so we talk about different initiatives in school districts that relate to equitable practices they also talk about including staff and students and surveys we have different presenters that come so it's a professional development thing for us as well you know any resources that they have available to us through the consortium we can bring back news in the school district so the two thousand dollars is to be part of it right and then it is that then we get last year we had a team of five um staff members uh this year we are taking a team of 10.
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so it's uh considered uh july 1st to september 9th yes yes yes it is okay thank you are you sure sir because i want to make sure i don't want to leave you with any further questions i'm okay if i have some i'll i'll just email you okay that's fine questions one one more question there's a substitute custodian and i understand the need for this but i'm also wondering at times would it be in a better interest to contract that outside without it being an employee i mean if we need if we need sodium services on an emergency basis because one of our existing custodians called in sick um so usually the contractors are a lot more expensive than if they are employees even are you all benefited employees no okay thank you good okay mr ayala it's unfinished business a second reading and as i went through the policies the staff personal security and safety is all about the face coverings and the maps and the executive order about that i wondered what the student dress one was about but it also is about the face mask and the coverings in terms of them being two years or less and the parent involvement education is just the parental rights that we have posted up in the front and that's in our handbook and on our website and visitors to the school was also about discussion i have one uh question and it's policy advisory 673 that has to do with senator dale connor day yeah that's a day that apparently is being set aside for the teaching of civics yes and it's it's supposed to be on september 25th yet september 25th on our schedule was we're going to close right so it says in the policy that if it is on the weekend that it should be receiving the following day that is observed on the weekend september 25th so we would do it we'd sell it also we can do it but that's going to be an early dismissal day also so are you questioning well i just i just wonder when are we going to do sandra day o'connor day and dedicate that day to civics instruction right so it would be that the 25th but we also do have um our civics club so we do a lot of civics things throughout the year but we could designate that friday and since it's a new policy we'll be letting our teachers know so that they can incorporate lessons on that date yes special pastor thank you for business so there were two things we do have the cool litigation plan and um redacted copy of our coupe that we need to present to the board and have it formally approved and we've made some changes along the way up until last friday and i have mr ferguson and mr nathan here in case there's some more specific questions i do know that we wanted to have the conversation about mass on the playground because it is in our group right now that students will wear a mask while they're on the playground so we've had a lot of discussions in terms of if they're outside six feet apart can the kids not have their mass on how do we monitor that what does it look like but we wanted to get a feel for what our world is thinking in terms of that and so mr nathan can also answer some questions among the mr ferguson when your thoughts well that was certainly my biggest question is have you it just seems to be very difficult to tell students to stay apart maybe maybe they'll be great and we do have um parents were concerned a lot of them were asking um they did not want their kids to wear masks while out on the playground um understood especially if they're running around and actually playing it would be hard to have the mask on so i have mixed feelings because i feel that if the student chooses to have a jump rope or a ball on their own and they're away from kids they should be able to take their mask off but again in terms of security and the playground monitors i just kind of wanted um mr nathan met with the playground monitors today so do you want to share some information so thank you for giving me the opportunity board to kind of speak to this um this is obviously a very concerning subject for a lot of parents is we've been back in school for the classroom one two and three for the past four weeks we have indeed had them wear masks while on the playground they have also engaged in pe-like structure in the gym and they have worn the mask there has been no issues the kids have not they're used to it they understand that this is just cover 19.
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that's again with the with the with the padding that we have in there i think that that's going to end up in the black unless we have and this could happen this year unless we have significant expenses uh that we weren't planning for but it could happen with some of the kovitz stuff we're dealing with on that line while i mention well i'm thinking of it we what i what i don't have in here because i don't know yet how much money it's going to be is we are going to get some cares act funding through the county i heard a month ago it was fifty thousand and now i heard last week that it could be over a hundred thousand so we'll use that money to purchase uh coveted related safety items for the buildings when we bring kids on so that's not figured in the budget as revenue or but it is triggered as expense i did i did put about 40 or 50 000 at an expense but i didn't know what kind of revenue we're getting and i didn't want to put it in here unless i know for sure i'm getting it so i figured play it worst case scenario um transportation line looks looks or let me go back to education fund sorry education fund if we if we spend in the if we can hold our expenses to around 90 we should be we should be okay in that fund as far as we shouldn't deficit spend but the the one thing that's a big uh question mark is we don't know for sure yet what's coming from the state right now they've they've projected that we are going to get the same thing we got last year and before covet hit we were set to get a couple hundred thousand dollars more than that but when covet hit the economy the state's economy just went to pot and so we we were told that that we will get basically their temporary budget are you hearing me okay okay the uh um where's that here oh that this the temporary budget is that they will give us exactly what we got last year so that's what they've told us at this point um but the carrot they're kind of holding over us is that if the graduated income tax that he's that they're trying to get past if that passes then they feel like the budget's gonna be what they said it would but if it doesn't pass then they anticipate some big cuts so this could look a lot differently at the end of the year if we don't get that so that's that's what i want to make sure you're aware of we just don't we don't know right now and that's why with the transportation fund you see that's a pretty big negative number um it's because i didn't want to budget for the revenue because i'm not confident we're going to get it from the state if we get it it's going to be a plus but if we don't it's it's going to look it's not going to look very good so we'll have to one thing i'm going to have to do i think for the tax levy i've been levying a little more in o m and and more than we actually need so we can shift some of that over to transportation so we can balance it out a little bit but and then we're capital projects is another one we did some projects this summer we did some construction projects and that comes out of this directly the uh i'll in the um later in the presentation in the board meeting i'll talk about the uh the development that's coming in uh over behind home depot that is gonna bring in some uh some revenue that i did not account for in here because i didn't find out until uh just recently well last week but then i also don't know when exactly it's going to come so they increased the uh impact fees for that development from 40 000 to 400 000 and they said that we're gonna get half of it up front i just don't know when that is so i don't know if that'll fall in this budget year or not so but if that comes in then that's but money that i didn't budget for here so that's all i have for the budget hearing later in the board meeting we will vote to approve the budget but does anybody have any questions on anything so your your budget for education fund is based off what we got and not what we're expecting to get you're saying they were saying they were going to give a couple hundred thousand more yeah that's not based on that okay it's based off based on what they're telling us now okay still could go down further if we don't he basically passed a half year budget and until it gets to the election and then so right now we are getting checks just like we did last year same amount every month and it's supposed to continue um where i think what i think could happen if that if the graduated income tax doesn't pass because that's what they're putting their cards in for if that doesn't pass i think it's possible that we'll still get our state payments they might skip the last one which would be a couple hundred thousand dollars and then i think i think that they would i'm just i'm speculating here but i think the other thing that we would not get is the what's called the mandated categoricals which is our transportation payments our special ed payments special ed payments go right into the 10 fund the transportation payments obviously go into 40.
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you know i i there's so many more classes offered things you know so i've heard from some people going you know thinking i mean i don't think i don't know that that everybody really understands you know the you know the the la you know how the breadth of of of what we're offering here and and that is making it more difficult um for us uh in terms of accommodating uh within these plans but i just thought it was important because we we've uh i know you've seen the same emails you know people saying well the schools are there's schools around us that are open why can't we do it we're fairly well off here and we've got smart people why can't we do it and these are these are the reasons why and i just the benefit of those watching um want them to understand we are working hard and the last point on here is uh we want to do this right this time now that we know what we know and about the fluidity of moving between these transmission levels we don't want to end up building a plan sending it out to the community and saying oh it changed so here we go again right we would like to now that we have this to try to future proof our plans and try to make something so that as long as we're in moderate that we can have students coming back on a regular basis but we want to make sure it's a good experience for students you know and that that's what we're trying to do right now we're trying to build that and hopefully um i mean we're spending the majority of our days on this and i i'm hoping to bring you a a pretty good plan next monday when we meet and then have some more timelines and details approach to it but we have a lot of chicken egg problems right now it's like we need to have transportation to bring students to school but we can't figure out transportation until we have a schedule yeah but i can't guarantee you a schedule until i know transportation works right so you move a little bit in one way and you say oh this is what i'm thinking and then you kind of throw it against the transportation wall and you're like oh wait that's not going to work so then you back up and now you got to move a little bit forward while the same time you're doing things with schedules you're doing it with classrooms you're doing it with curriculum you're doing it within the days of the week and how days off are falling and everything else so you move forward a little bit and you run into a roadblock and then you have to back off a little bit and push through it's a huge logic puzzle to work through so that's why it goes slower than we would like well the other thing is if if we aren't really ultra careful when we actually make a situation where we increase transmissibility that put this way back to square one and i don't think this would would people understand if you really want to get out of this yeah you gotta adhere to the rules you gotta wear your mess you gotta stay six feet away you gotta not be in congregate settings so we're going into whether where everybody's going to be inside transmissibility you know the numbers are going to rise so it's not it's it's not a oops made a mistake kind of thing right we will go immediately back well in the dupage county health department along with us we'll be looking at our own metrics within our own school walls and if we build a plan that helps increase the rate of spread in our own community we're going to be told by the health professionals you need to change something you know and i'd rather not have to keep doing this i'd rather build a plan that works that doesn't uh have community spread any greater than it is in the local community and we have a plan and we move forward for the rest of the year and we get off of this ride you know it would be interesting to know and it doesn't have to be for next week but at some point how are we going to track this we do we we have attendance codes and metrics and we have a report that we provide to the new page that's all set up yeah right yeah and that includes close contacts yeah there's a whole process for contact tracing and we work with the dupage county health department we have letters we have a whole process that's all been worked on over the last month i i have a little concern in terms of the you know us what you're going to bring to us in terms of us maybe bringing the students back um i would hate for us to be in in your looking at your continuum between phase three and phase five and if we're at the load of moderate uh band um but some of the metrics have us right at the edge of that and we've been trending up so i don't know what the break point is say for instance uh cases for that's where it becomes less cut and dry so far as what the metrics are saying and more talking with the health officials about our specific community our school that's why getting students back actually helps us with our metrics because if we get students back and they're following the guidelines and our rate of community spread while they're here at school is lower than the greater community we could demonstrate that kids are actually safer when they're here at school than when they're not right but until we are able to cross that threshold and demonstrate that we're we're stuck in this i don't think you're ever going to be able to demonstrate that because you're never going to be able to separate out if our community spread increases we can't tell this because kids came here or somebody came in from chicago or but we will know if it's greater than what the community is within our own walls we might not be able to demonstrate that it's less but we could definitely demonstrate that it's spreading faster within the same for the page yeah absolutely especially if we look at district 99 in comparison to the county numbers yeah [Music] and we've already talked through with the dupage county health department how some of those conversations will work they've made it very clear that it will be a collaborative conversation to determine what we should do with that that time so you know it'll be just like the conversations we're having now as to what we should do hey hank is the state or dupage county health department talked about uh recurring testing of students and like we're doing in most of our universities uh that's that conversation starting at the test level about some of the saliva tests and those kinds of things and the feasibility of widespread testing one of the i think i shared with the board last month one of the things that the dupage county health department is says one of our greatest limiting factors is is the lack of widespread testing that that would give the health professionals the data they need to know are these measures effective are we doing what we're supposed to do are we you know is this really somebody that has coveted and we need to respond and lock things down for their cohort of people or not um that if we had more rapid widespread testing they would be much more comfortable with moving us in the direction more towards minimal even if the metrics are are bad but you know it's it's the data they're doing it at our public universities now yeah so the funding is coming from somewhere for that well the funding like at u of i is coming from that is their own r d to be able to put a product to market both my daughter's colleges are are doing it too now i mean they tested coming in and now three and four weeks later they're they're testing all the kids again the other thing that universities have are like student health centers and you know they have people there on staff at a a level of medical expertise that a public high school doesn't have sure yeah but you said that what i heard you say to dan was that they're starting that they're working on that we're starting to have discussions about what that we're at the earliest level of discussions of what that would look like but it's something we're advocating for in dupage county with state officials to try to get more widespread testing at the student and staff level within high schools so we're asking for it we're asking for a pathway to that we're not but so far we are we aren't getting any um any sort of anything it's just believable that's coming or there's no way all right well remember testing is only a snapshot in time sure even just negative tomorrow today but more information is better than less no i don't disagree with you i'm as many tools as we can we can have uh to monitor and control the better so it's a shame we don't have this you know and the other before we move on here too um you mentioned uh about you know on this uh collaborating with our other districts and what's working for them what's their what's not in dupage county but aren't there aren't there examples uh elsewhere in the country where schools have have instituted some sort of hybrid type schedule already and you know are we seeing any data from from their experiences it's really challenging for yes we are we're looking at the stories and especially what is working instructionally in those settings uh is good to know but they're it's very rarely it's apple to apple when you go even outside of county lines let alone state lines you know the rules are different the expectations are different the communities are different so it it's really hard to say oh what you're doing is working let's just take that because they're not building with the same set of lego pieces that wasn't suggesting that at all but just you know to be able to know what is working no that applies or not actually a lot of the early conversations are about the frustrations that districts have because kids don't have access to technology resources so many of these district stories that are out there about districts that are trying to catch up to where we are now you know they're learning from us um you know so but the other ones that have kids going back or going back in wholesale are under a much different set of health guidelines and i mean those are things you could argue all day about but are are not within our purview to decide for all of the reasons i mentioned at the top all right so a couple of things in new schedule considerations just to review the hybrid schedule that we presented this summer so this is the baseline that we're starting from like we built a schedule this summer that works but it works only in minimal because what we built to was to follow the safety guidelines the six feet of social distancing that was the biggest thing that we were building around we had the uh we wanted every student to see every teacher every week but to do that you need to bring students back and they go through a four period rotation once and then a four period rotation the next time that doesn't work in moderate because you have too much mixing of students uh and then one of the things that we had was that we wanted to separate the time that in person was learning in person you know the in person was happening separate from remote because of the challenges for a teacher to manage all of the classroom environment of in person at the same time you're managing the outside and that was one of the key things that we built was that these were two distinct cohorts that were working in time and space and some of our same things exist as we try to build one for minimal and moderate safety guidelines six feet of social distancing now we add the limiting mixing of groups which drastically changes our schedule we still want the opportunity for every student to see every teacher regularly but it it's probably over a two week period not a one week period because of the limiting of the mixing of groups we still are working through the concept of in-person learning scheduled from separate from remote learning and determining whether or not we need to build a systematic schedule that puts those in separate buckets so that a teacher always has one group separated from the other or are we going to build a model that the teacher manages that time and space where they would be responsible for both groups and determining when they would learn at the same time and when they would work at separate times but we're working through with our instructional leaders of how that works this is the feedback that we're hearing from other school districts around the country is that that's really hard to do effectively really multitasking with two groups of students is a challenge so if we do that it's something we're going to have to talk about very carefully and provide a lot of examples for our staff as to how to do that effectively one of the other things one of the big key feedbacks that we did here between our hybrid schedule this summer and the remote schedule was how different they are from one another and that it's a complex change between one and the other right because we did build them from the ground up one to be totally developed to meet the needs of in-person learning one to meet the needs of remote they look very different but what we've heard from students and staff is can we get something that's more alike than different so it's easier to transition between the two because we know we're going to have to do that throughout the year so that's a variable we're introducing into this is to there might be some differences but to keep them closer than the original hybrid and remote schedule models looked so that's that's kind of what we're building from as we work right now oh i didn't change slides for you today there's those things i just said again all right we have some other considerations to solve for that sit on the calendar so as we look at our possible return dates in october october is a weird month at the beginning in the fact that the first week of october is a full week but then the next week of october we have a remote learning planning day that's the offset of the non-attendance day that is traditionally columbus day that occurs on monday then wednesday is sat testing for seniors we needed to find somewhere to put parent-teacher conferences so we're going to schedule them for that same week because that week is all messed up anyway but when we talk you heard from the kids today when they come back they want to come back to something consistent they don't want to come back and then go to something weird and then come back to something again right so the question is do we come back you know around october 5th that's a date many dupage schools are talking about and schools are debating the same thing we are do we come back on october 5th have a week of some kind of a hybrid model then we have a week of it's all messed up and then go back to the hybrid model or do we just work plan get every detail work through work with our teachers to get everything in place and come back on the week of the 19th after the the messed up week with testing and everything else there's pros and cons with both right if you come back for the week before you can come back you could do a run we can learn from it you can adjust during the week that's crazy and it's going to be remote and then come back to improved the week after or do we just say you know what let's not bounce kids and teachers between two different things and let's just target the 19.
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i'm going to continue off on another question i know i'm not going to read them all off because we still have other people to consider i mean consider so i'm going to go down to question number six why is it that only children with ot pt and speech are allowed for in-person services we need to bring back all the teachers to the schools and integrate them so school services for children with learning differences can come back in west aurora brought their kids back who have autism and severe learning disabilities kalan schools are doing a hybrid option and so is yorkville oswego we are going to bury our families if we keep hurting them like this families will begin to leave the area we are trying so hard to build up like our surrounding communities then all this new construction will be for nothing and how can we bring in more revenue which we're always talking about how can we bring in more revenue to support our schools and our communities when we don't support the hard-working families locally one other thing that i would like to bring to the attention being a parent of children with learning disabilities is why are these children ineligible for some of their in-person services and did you know that even though they're ineligible for those services they are eligible however through district 308 to test them for their iep services that are mandated through the state of illinois even though they are not eligible to come in the school for their services but they are eligible to come in for testing so even though they have been out of school for almost six months almost six months without their in-person services do you really feel those standardized testing scores would be a true reflection of those students capabilities without their services for almost six months so at this point that's all i have to say thank you for reviewing the document we are proud supporters of our community and giving back to the local area but i'm very concerned about the children in sd 308 especially those in the special education department those with learning disabilities or disadvantaged homes thank you so much tennis blue hello can you hear me yeah okay um i guess my first comment if anybody ever was wondering why we need capital reserves this is a primary example of where it would have come in handy it's like it's an emergency fund and it would have been very nice to have had that okay i want to talk a little bit about your last meeting on the bond restructuring and maybe a few other side comments on stuff like that i mean i've watched your meetings and i i have a little different take than you guys and i know i think you all have your set opinions sorry this thing keeps coming off and i i don't know i i didn't see the same things that you guys were talking about in the meeting i mean i looked at the different scenarios and over the years some the range is somewhere between 1100 and 1300 dollar tax liability um depending on which scenario scenario you do one two three well two three four okay the question becomes i know you all struggled with this the other day which one do you take actually i like a five i'd like to see it drawn out much further i think future generations should pay for some of the buildings that they're going to use okay i've been here a long time i paid for new generations coming in a lot of the people that have been here a long time have already paid for new generations coming in they don't use the facilities at all and i think anybody that's going to use it should be paying for it i know i know you're you're all talking about we save 600 here or we save a million here uh i kind of question that analysis only only from the only because you're talking about uh what's the word for it now a non-referendum bond well as soon as you do that you just added money you just added about a hundred dollars a taxpayer i assume you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of the 13 million dollars for a non-referendum bond that's what we did the last time and it's about to expire i mean if you look at this really what we're saying is every five years we're going to do this that's the trend you're setting so every five years this is going to come down the line because you need the money for something okay if you look if you look at the chart the bar charts the bar charts don't show the non-referendum bond at all it's coming off i know the bar charts do not show the non-referendum bond impact except for the existing non-referendum bond so you take that little piece and you add that on top to all the different charts that you look at if you're talking non-referendum bond so the scenario where you save 100 well you spend 100 as soon as you go to non-referendum bod net effect zero okay the 500 i don't know where the 500 is i looked at all of those i see differentials of a few hundred one way or another but i didn't see the 500 i mean they're all somewhere between 1100 and 13 until you get to the out years okay i didn't see this 500 likes unless you're talking uh you know around 20 28 or there's a period there where things go down and they go back up in the existing one maybe they're talking about that i don't know so the question and and obviously i mean your first your your choice is a roller coaster ride i don't think anybody wants to do that okay scenario one i i don't know what it buys you if you're talking this whole thing is like a holistic approach you don't look at this piece you don't look at that you got to look at the whole thing and what's your plan are you going to do non-referendum bonds if you are you put that together with what your bond structure is going to be okay as to which scenario you want to pick and see how that all plays out i'm guessing this the board is leaning towards non-referendum bond if that's the case then you should look at that in addition how that impacts the bond whichever scenario you choose for bonds okay you should see what impact that has i think i'll stop on that part right now okay i have a few other quick comments i've seen that there's ask a pleaser going to be there's going to be like a thousand there's a thousand fewer students i kind of sent a little email on that a little bit already there's an opportunity there to save a million and a half if you're willing to you know reduce staff by around 30 teachers and i know the board always has issues with that but sometimes we have to look at this as part of the grand scheme how we're going to save how we're going to put everything together you know we've got to look at this this is 80 percent of our our budget we've got to look at this stuff okay um i think a lot of times thank you um i have to go i got to get up four in the morning i mean no disrespect thank you jason mesenko hello board members my name is jason macenko i thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight i thank everybody in this room who came out to make a public comment it's important it's obviously important to you individuals i also would like to say hello to district 308 whoever's listening to online i thank you for the correspondence over this past weekend sometimes emails can get a little tricky i am passionate about this and what i'm passionate about is my son who needs to be in school he's in the stars program he's been placed at homestead he'll be in kindergarten this year he has autism when we found out that bear had autism it was a school that gave us the awareness of what was going on it was a tremendously scary time for us tremendously scary i can still i don't think i'll ever remember all right i'm sorry i don't think i'll ever forget the principle that helped us out early intervention came in it was a godsend my son had serious sensory issues early intervention was able to get him into a place where he was at least able to be evaluated down in joliet with easter seals when he was eligible to go to brokaw he still wasn't ready his sensory issues were still out of control was not ready to go into the classroom our family decided to use aba therapy every day somebody came to my house rang my doorbell multiple times a day for a year people in my home helping my son with me right alongside them because i stay home i stay home to help my son and to help my daughter aba ran its course for my son he was starting to show signs that he needed something more so he came back to brocaw he was assessed and placed into the stars classroom my wife sarah and i knew this was the right decision for bear he was done with aba and now it was time to get him into the classroom that we desperately wanted him to have bear exceeded to excel in that classroom he needed that pure interaction he's such a great kid he's a rule follower at school sits down when he's supposed to sit down gets in line he finds it so exciting he's motivated to learn motivated at school to learn with his peers the stars teachers in this district so far at brokaw and at homestead i would equate to the marines of our armed services the best of the best so this is our remote learning experience running away from the computer getting him back trying to turn the microphone on so he can answer a question but he already did and now he doesn't want to answer it again and there he is lost again these children cannot learn in front of the screen this is a public health crisis much like coronavirus i pulled up and i don't come to oswego east often because my children are so young i don't need to know about this place yet there's a bunch of kids filing in the back for something they're all in line coming in what are they doing here a bunch of kids coming in a district 308 building don't understand are there lives or health less at risk than the stars students and the special needs students that need in-person learning immediately this is a health emergency much like the coronavirus is we can't ignore one health emergency while we fight another the cure can't be worse than the virus please help our special needs students out with an immediate return to school we are desperate it's so important thank you wayne harshberger good evening my name is wayne hershberger i sent quite a few emails over the weekend i can count three responses exactly three responses coach whipple two athletic directors i can count one phone call i expect better leadership out of this board of education and this district administration professionalism is reading an email and hitting reply i got it we'll get back to you being unprofessional is not responding to email after email after email okay i talk to colleagues all the time friends family friends co-workers since june i've had many people bug me during work hours does the board always look like this all your meetings you need to go watch the videos okay my friends and colleagues are implying you look like a bunch of clowns up here okay when the district administration comes in with staff work it's not completed staff work i sent you a document on what completed staff work looks like if i came into a business meeting as unprepared as a dis administration i would be told stop leave we'll follow up with you on how to be prepared the next time you come in front of us okay this whole thing is difficult for everyone right i get it we need to take it seriously we need to show the stakeholders the citizens and taxpayers scenarios and cookie crumbs on how we got to the answers you can't say just trust us we're smarter than you are so i've sent emails and emails on how to approach things i don't get answers that's why i'm here tonight okay saturday morning i was out here out front okay ohs how many oe cross-country runners chose not to wear their masks i asked two of them where's your mask oh we're by ourselves we're good then one of them goes oh my mask is way over there what took a picture talked to head coach the head coach of oe cross country blew me off well they're supposed to wear the mask then he lectured me about taking pictures of underage athletes and wandered off and walked by his team it didn't say a word okay i think some of that's taken care of but here's my question the ads like oh we'll recommunicate the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result so what are you gonna do differently if you can't get the student athlete to wear the mask you're never gonna get anyone else to wear a mask does that make sense your senior upper class men will set the tone for the rest of the student body if you don't get them going in the right direction you are done what i'm asking you all to do is look in the mirror look asking the district administration to look in the mirror are you really prepared to lead this district and if you're not find the door and let somebody else you know uh all right item 5.1 board member comments start on your side i can go first um i just want to say to the community and the board members that i've been thinking a lot about all the options that we have in the future one of them is continuing remote learning and the good reasons why i think about that being a good option is because of safety a lot of people are either fragile themselves or they have fragile people in their families or they have considerations of how they're supposed to keep going if somebody gets sick and i know that some people think that coronavirus is just not a big deal i have people in my life who think it's not a big deal but the problem for me is that when i think of being off work for eight weeks with an illness or being off work for two weeks and then being just not feeling good for a while that's a pretty serious consideration for a lot of people so i think that we need to keep that in mind as we go forward the second thing is that the cost of remote learning is less than the cost of in-person learning and i know that that should not be the overriding factor but in a district like oswego where we're having some financial difficulties i think that's an issue for all of us as board members and another one is that i know that remote learning there's a continuity of education so in some cases where people feel dissatisfied with what their situation is that could be a continuity of a bad situation for some people that either choose really heavily to have remote or they like what they're getting that's a good thing that it goes through the year and it's continuous um i've been trying to learn more about our plans as a district to do the return to learn and i won't say anything specific because i don't know fully what the district's plan is yet but i want to say this there's a lot of people that say those teachers need to get back in the classroom and i just want to say this that teachers are not lacking courage they go into classrooms where there are ringworm runny noses lice coughs hand foot mouth disease and i can tell you a lot of other things that i personally have had students with right there with me we're not afraid to go to those things we're not afraid to get those things but this is something different and so i hope that everybody who's out there listening just give teachers credit for the fact that they do run right into the midst of a lot of difficulty to teach kids and this is one of the times where it's hard to do that and it's hard for a good good reason having said that i keep looking at the logistics of trying to come back and i think that we have some people in the district who can think this through and try to find a way to make it logistically possible for families who really need to have in-person learning or really desiring personality for that to happen but i have to say that i hope as a board member whatever those committees come up with those teachers and those people on the committees that they're really listen to and that people really hear how they feel and how they see it and how they know that certain things will work and others won't and i mean everybody teachers cafeteria office custodians you gotta listen to every stakeholder group and parents and kids because if you don't your plan is probably not going to go as well as you want it to so the logistics are a huge concern for me once that logistical piece and that is my biggest piece i am a very practical person i believe in in being realistic and being practical once that's addressed i think that the special ed kids are a major concern for all of us that we want them to get back into school because it is hard to learn on a screen because it is hard to feel as connected and as happy and excited about school as you do and i would hope that what we can ask from the other parents in the district is if you don't get the turn to go in person or if not everybody gets the turn to go in person that we can try to be reasonable and see why that's okay why maybe the special ed kids get to go back or the k through two kids get to go back or some group gets to go back but maybe not your group and that we would have some patience and understanding and and credit for having a plan that at least includes some of the folks that need that that situation and then the last thing that i'll say is just that i think there's some really exciting things coming up with diversity equity and inclusion i think that what i long for as a board member is that these kids come to school and no matter where they come from if you're poor if you're of color if you're different in any way that you meet a caring supportive environment where people are not making excuses of why they can't help you out because pretty much what i've seen 30 years if you really want to help somebody out you'll find a way and if you really want to be a problem you'll you'll find a reason why oh well i'd like to treat them equally but this is why i can't i think most of the people most of the parents in our district most of the staff really try for that and there are some bad experiences and we have to fix those and we have to have good conversations but i really want the action to take priority i want it to be where we come up with some action where the kids see it the staff sees it and it really is meaningful and it's not just us saying oh we believe in that of course we could say that let's do something that shows that we actually do care about that that's what i think so that's my comment for tonight well not now i'm phil compelled um i'll be brief um you know i we heard we've heard a few impassioned comments this evening and we're all well aware of the impact of remote learning not just on kids with special needs but all kids and it was interesting i think we all kind of individually got an email from from someone over the weekend but it was sent directly to each one and and my response back to that individual was i don't think there's a single board member that doesn't want to be back in person and and i think sometimes that's lost on on some members of the of the public um we want to get there and we will get there um there's but there's a process to it we are looking at and considering all sorts of different things i'm encouraged every day when i read a different article about a different school district that is either started online and is now returning in person or started with some sort of a hybrid approach and the sky is not falling i'm not discounting the severity of covid or the risks but what i am saying is is that other districts have found ways to make it work we will find a way to make it work and i'm excited for the next board meeting when we're going to talk about this more detail i think i share their comments i think we need to get back to work but i think the first step is getting teachers back in the building and i think i don't i like i can appreciate tony's logistical i more of a throw the kid in the water and see if he can swim instead of dipping my toe in but i understand that doesn't work for everybody that's why we're all different but i honestly believe that we have to get teachers back in the building because we have to figure out how to make that work and once we can figure out teachers and buildings then we can start bringing in sets of kids into buildings and we can't wait until october or november or december we have to do that now so while i realize that we don't have a meeting until the 30th to hear the plan that's where i'm at we've had um another successful week of remote learning in our house i said it at our last meeting i'll say it again tonight that it's gone better than i thought it would the teachers the the experience we haven't had any uh connectivity issues it's it's working however the concern that i've had from the very beginning i've stressed it over and over again the students that we're gonna lose the students that this is not going to work for how many bears are out there he's not the only one and i thought about this as i was taking a break between our meetings the size of this building is immense and our guidelines are social distancing and masks and if out of our 23 buildings we don't have a way yet to help the bears that are out there that are identified in the space that we have with the staff that we have i can't wrap my mind around why we can't have a handful of kids as tony said if it's not your group yet be patient but we have to start somewhere and if we can't have we haven't figured out a way to have 20 bears in a classroom yet or in a building in this district to get them the help we need years students like that have been worked with repeatedly over and over again and how long is it going to take to get these kids back into the door or back up to that that performance level that they were at after months and months of of not having that pushing that guidance that's out there so yes it's going great it's at least for our personal experience it's going great i know that there are families out there that this is working well that we could survive to january do we want to go the whole year no absolutely not but it is working for some people that's working out well but we have to figure out a way to help the kids that it's not working for and get them the help they need whether it's not in the building whether it's it's a homemade it's somebody we have to do better we have to do better so kudos and thank you to the staff that are pushing it 100 percent i know you i know they're out there i know they're doing a great job thank you thank you thank you but we have to be able to help more people out there i i will also be brief and just thank those of you who came to speak tonight and those who submitted comments online we always appreciate community feedback um i guess i will kind of echo matt's comments a little and one thing that he was saying kind of struck me as what is equal in this type of situation is not necessarily always what is fair and i'm just thinking about my my kids are i wouldn't say things are going great i don't know if they would say it's great but they're fine they can deal i'm not concerned that they're going to fall way behind but i definitely have those concerned about certain populations of our student body and i hope that we will not be so concerned with the fairness of everybody getting to go back at the same time in at the expense of really what is doing the right thing and there are going to be people who are not happy because we all just want our kids to be in the building i mean i want my kids to be there because i know that that's where they want to be as much as they complain about going to school they can't wait to get back to school i'll just i'll end my comments here i kind of like being able to go last but i kind of hate it because like everyone says the things i already wanted to say so then i have to sit here and think of some other ones that i want to say in a different way about the same things but i think what what i saw most represented tonight in our community coming to speak or via email is that what they're feeling is a need for a more which on the one hand we all we all know this this is the basic if we wanted to do school remote we would already do it if that was what was best for kids learning environment we kind of get real concerned about kids that need early intervention that don't get early intervention we get concerned about kids that don't get preschool who need preschool because those ages those years of brain development can't get got back and i think i can pretty safely say that the people that are responsible for those areas in our district are lying awake at night worrying about that i having met these people um but that doesn't change that this is something that that i also feel we we really need to be working toward as quickly as we possibly can for for the kids that we don't want to lose because we could lose them either because of situations that they're not able to connect or because of different educational challenges or or just availability of devices um i hope that when we see this plan at our next meeting we are able to to see that we have already been able to take steps toward getting kids more than what they're able to get this week that each week we'll see a little bit more progress but one of the other things that this this situation really really really highlights in a district our size is the disparity in the educational experience and that disparity is for a variety of reasons um be it race be it socio-economic income uh be it school boundary be it attendance capacity of the building you're in we have a lot of our community that falls into a specific need that still needs to get addressed even though it's not a majority need so one of the things that i was very excited to see that the board and i we were all in agreement that we wanted to do and that i do want to make sure that i mention is our addition of our board advisory committee we have our finance and facilities advisory committee we have our legislative and policy advisory committee we have our teaching and learning committee and we've added a fourth committee where currently applications are available for any citizen who would like to apply for our diversity equity inclusion board advisory committee so that we can start to add our board level in each of our opportunities take some time to think about how how will the experts how will the subject matter experts just like in our other areas how will they remind us to think about some of these areas and i think that especially given the times that we're in we're looking at how do we keep kids in front of a screen and yet we want to give star tests because we kind of have to know how far behind they are but at the same time we know that they're still getting behind sometimes it's there's there's not a real good answer this week but hopefully as we progress through the weeks and we get through the processes that just take time with this big place we are able to include as we hope we will our new board advisory committee in all of our subject areas and i know that tony morgan and ruth croner will be the chairs of that committee and that we will be taking a look at approving those advisory committee members in october um besides that i had an opportunity to observe from a safe place but yet very close up some elementary learning even though that's not in my own household and it's it's it's a tiring thing and it's not just one kid when you have this sometimes in houses you're doing multiple kids when you're with special education students i've seen you know households where yeah you really can't work you have to sit with your child and it is disruptive and it is not what's best for kids and and there is fear that goes along that we can't get that back so hopefully we can just kind of move forward as safely and fast as we can which i know everyone shares these same feelings so that's what i got item 5.2 superintendents report well good evening board i'd like to start off with a couple congratulations to staff and students i'm proud to announce that we have seven students who were named semifinalists in the 66th annual 2021 national merit scholarship program over 1.5 million juniors and about 21 000 high schools entered the 2021 national merit school program uh the nationwide pool of semi-finalists represent less than one percent of high school seniors so congratulations to ohs students liam fitzpatrick kyle twodowsky and ohs students nicholas alonso autumn bartle kayla fichtel porter lee and paul ricken so congratulations to those students i'd also like to say congratulations to sd 308 first grade teacher pam click pam teaches at churchill and she was nominated and selected as one of the american girl pandemic heroes pam was nominated by two of her students by uh by going above and beyond during this pandemic and there are over 1 000 people nominated uh for this and pam was one of five who were selected for this award so congratulations to pam uh this week is also national arts and education week during this week the fields of edu arts education joined together in communities to across the country to talk about the story and the impact that arts education has and the empowerment of arts education so i'd like to thank all of our sd 308 arts teachers for everything they do for our kids on a regular basis as president doyle just mentioned we've posted and are seeking committee members for the board of education diversity equity and inclusion committee and that application process is open until september 23rd and we will approve the board will approve those uh those members on october 13th and lastly i'd like to share that our return to in-person planning meetings are going well and our next meeting has has been mentioned on september 28th we'll be presenting with that to the board what that plan looks like along with some potential dates to implement the plan to start bringing our kids back to in-person learning in our schools that is my report for this evening thank you thank you i do think that when we're able to have people back in person i would love to see mrs click bring herself and her new friend in yes it's pretty cool the the the dial that looks like her the american girl they made a custom american girl doll complete with a churchill club lanyard and tote bag i saw that i saw the picture in the paper it was very very neat yeah yeah that's pretty cool i just wanted to say dr sparlin when you say return to learning in person you mean that there will still be a choice for remote learning and that there will also be yes there will be correct i just want to make sure that we're clear on that to people because i think for people that are afraid that's a very important part of the thing yeah no i appreciate the clarification tony but yes there will be there will be a choice item six approval of the consent agenda can i have a motion to approve i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 6.1 minutes from the august 31st 2020 board of education meeting open and closed session and 6.2 to acknowledge the foia requests received by the district second mr lightfoot aye mrs croner aye mr bauman aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye motion passes six zero item seven item seven point one tonight we're going to present the climate for learning framework that we've been working on and faith is going to guide us through the presentation thank you for the opportunity uh as the slide deck is being pulled up i did want to make sure that the board knows that this is work that was completed last school year before the pandemic we had a group of administrators and teachers that gathered together to really create a vision for where we wanted to be with our learning environment and while we built this with obviously in-person instruction in mind when we talk about social emotional learning uh and how that fits in it is ever so more important as we also do remote learning so i'll talk a little bit each slide after this is one of the components so you don't have to worry that you have to read that from there but again this is a common vocabulary for us to use from early childhood all the way through high school it exemplifies some of our best practices and there are a lot of great things already happening in sd 308 there are also some big opportunities for improvement and some of our schools really excel in some areas other schools need assistance and by having a common vocabulary and a common vision of what we want our learning environments to look like we will be better able to create professional development and support and monitoring them so there are seven components uh the very first one is explicit social emotional learning instruction and for those of you that might be viewing it from your living rooms those are the things when you're talking about mood management where you're talking about how to take a break when you're talking about those types of things in the social emotional competencies they have to be explicitly taught and that's early childhood all the way through transition component two is explicit instruction on behavior what are the expectations that we all want from our students and how are they shared and re-taught component three is this integration best practices are for learning instruction to not only have that academic learning target of what we wanted to accomplish in this math lesson but also the social emotional learning component that we're looking at what does teamwork look like what does that how are all those social emotional competencies interwoven into perseverance with our academic program component four is critical student voice and being able to listen not only to the aggregate of our student voices but to individual student voices to address things around equity to know our own impact on how we are doing for all of our students and then involving them in helping us solve those problems and teaching students to be civically minded to be able to not only respectfully talk about their experiences but problem solve together to make all of our school better i could give a week long on component five having that supportive school climate and that's culturally responsive instructions that's building relationships we talk a lot about it at the beginning of the year but it's crucial to revisit that and continue to go on of what does our learning environment whether it's remote or in person look like to be supportive a key component of that is engagement and we created this document and you'll see a column it's not only for what student engagement looks like but what is it for teachers what is it for building administrators what do we as district administrators create for our learning environments to make sure that our learners whether they're principals teachers or students how are they engaged how are they in a sense of inquiry where are they with a sense of inclusion six is staff social emotional learning if staff are not taking care of themselves and also have a good stance on where they are at socially emotionally it crumbles so we have to make sure that we have trusting relationships within our adults as well component seven is supportive discipline we have to talk about restorative practices yes consequences and those types of things are important but just as important as how do we learn from those how do we work together to solve those conflicts and resolutions so they don't reoccur so we did the initial training on this from my porch in april with all of our administrators but we revisited that in the last week and then all of our principals and our instructional coaches and assistant principals have been given a lot of tech tools and we modeled that and they will be using this over the next few wednesdays to talk about with this with their staff as well and part of that is having staff identify the things that they already do well but also the areas that they would like to have continued work in and that will help map out our future for what type of professional development we will continue with for this school year are there any questions i just wanted to ask you to explain a little bit more about restorative justice because i think when people hear the term they think it sounds like a soft approach to kids who are misbehaving and i just want you to clarify what that does mean as far as the end goal so restorative justice and practices you still have the consequences in place of a regular system that if the behavior warranted a suspension or the behavior warranted you know whatever that is that still happens but it is talking about and getting the group together if it was a conflict between students or if it was a conflict from student to teacher getting them in the same room making sure that they've heard each other out that there are apologies or next steps what is going to be done how do they respectfully listen and understand both perspectives to move forward and to restore that relationship piece uh as you move forward and the end goal is target behavior that they learn to behave in the way that is expected at school and expected in a civil environment right correct okay i just want to make that for sure clear that came in along with senate bill 100 correct that was part of that there had been things prior to senate bill 100 around peer mediation and conflict resolution but yes so um one of the things that i was curious about is how having to now add in students who needed these things more how is this adding into this framework where are you looking to roll this out what kind of um additional mentoring professional development are you looking for for our principals for assistant principals so that they're able to adequately help our staff as they prepare to deal with these increased needs in these ways so one of the things that we added for this school year was a director of social emotional learning and a critical component to the beginning of the school year was a presentation just on that and then we walked through and built a online collaborative presentation to go through our principles and assistant principles with so they could use that same presentation to then provide it to their staff then we're providing some ongoing pieces of what that looks like but the next critical step is for our own staff to identify what they see some of their needs as and then creating more professional development that as i talked about our engagement practices that is they decide their choice they decide where they want to go because some some of our staff are fabulous at differ of these areas we wouldn't want everybody to sit through the exact same presentation so there would be those different choices but we also have to take care of our teachers social emotional learning and not put as much change on them right now as we would have done in february and march of last year when i mapped out how far we would be because we've had a few other things to do is there a thought to integrating i i know that i do this because i don't have time i integrate some of the social emotional learning into a regular lesson so if we're talking about something i give them a chance to share something that maybe is on their mind or whatever is that what we're trying to do in the current climate so that yes and we've actually established some things especially at the elementary level where there's a time into this day even during during remote learning to do social emotional learning pieces and to your point president doyle the what our staff is really hungry for is some instructional technology pieces so we taught a lot of instructional technology through using the climate for learning as the content so that we would be able to do both of those things and how are we going to be monitoring growth and achievement just like we differentiate for our students and we're differentiating for staff how are we going to be monitoring so some of that is right now by teacher reflection but also our administrators are joining google classrooms and looking at what that looks like and then my main push for how we will be monitoring this is to listening to students and to creating whether it's through the work of the equity advisory committee but having different ways for our student voice to be amplified so that our students and our system are getting the feedback from how we are doing uh to our most important clients our students and i just think that all of us can do a check-in by randomly talking to kids in our community when we run across them and say do you feel like people in the district care about your well-being any other questions thank you very much under item 8.1 we have financial statements are there any questions from the board regarding item 8.1 nope okay item 8.2 tonight is a first reading of the policies that have been provided policy 2 colon 265 is a new board policy which is a title ix sexual harassment grievance procedure i've asked maureen to present to the board this evening because there are some changes to existing policies due to this new one added regarding title ix and i found the best covered by the board's attorney so maureen thank you dr sparlin good evening uh as dr sparling just said title ix there was a final rule that just became final in august and one of the obligations of all school districts across the country based on that is to identify an individual designated as the title ix coordinator who oversees title ix title ix is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in all educational activities and programs and we had a conversation uh last week and recom the recommendation is that val patterson be the title ix coordinator and um and so one of the requirements under the law is to get that in writing as quickly as possible so it's in all your handbooks on your website disseminated to staff students parents unions applicants employ it covers both employment and students and so rather than bring these to the through the policy committee it was my recommendation that title uh title ix grievance procedure 2265 and then all these others that have some reference to it be brought to the board for first reading so they can be adopted as quickly as possible i was on the state committee that put these together for press and so there's really not much for your policy committee to do it's really it's it's all legal these updates any changes to uh human resources procedures things like that for accountability for um disciplinary changes beyond what are in here uh these are all things that we've already been procedurally following these are the policies to catch up to that is that my understanding i'm sorry i'm not understanding the question lori that's really more for dr sparling though we already do all of these things the simple the simple question is we already do all of this these are just following up to create the wording on the actual policies themselves okay correct yes yes there's a quite a bit of professional development that'll go on here that maureen will lead the district administration through and then we will take the rest of the school district through as well i do want to mention your current policy 7 colon 180 which is called closed campuses my suggestion is that can be deleted because if you look at your current policy 7 colon 90 released during school hours covers that topic and then we can make what your current policy 7 colon 192 the bullying intimidation and harassment policy for students make that 7 colon 180 and then it's in alignment with what iasb recommends and they're through their press service policy and procedure committees thoughts you do these more i think the only problem we had the last time was who was going to be the coordinators well and that was my only question on on this piece how often do these grievances come forward how much time does it take up because there's a very qualified person moving forward to to do this but what i what i fear is is it something that's going to add even more on to the director's plate it definitely will or is it it definitely will there is under this law effective august 14th there are certainly new obligations whenever there's any allegations of sexual harassment before even if no formal complaint is um ever filed and it can be it can be an allegation about a high school student it can be about a second grader it doesn't it can be employee etc and there are obligations on the title ix coordinator to meet with that person and ensure that they're supportive measures offered by the district in every single situation so in a district of your size that could be significant i mean i i agree it's a needed it's a needed spot uh the the focus and the attention is necessary again i just want to make sure that we're not piling too much work on the director's plate that that's all or if it has to be so i mean as long as everyone's on agreement in it and that's great you you got my support for that spot but i just want to make sure that we're not that's what we were trying to avoid the last i think when we were looking at some of these policies earlier we were trying to avoid adding more to what i think the answer to man is time will tell on on the uh workload and uh because it it this could be a full-time job it's just you just don't know this there it's become there's a lot more work with this new policy and that's like i said that's why maureen is going to be walking uh the administration through all the professional development we had a meeting last week and we'll continue with that and roll it out for the rest of the district i'd like to pause real quick heather moyer who is absent this evening due to a work function so she has the ability to call into the meeting um is now participating in the meeting via phone with mrs groener did you have something heather i'm going to have you on speaker i'm going to have you state your name heather moyer thank you so from a legal tense standpoint if this gets to be too much for miss patterson at what point is the district gonna say you know we need her and safety and students and i'm sorry what's the last part of that we need to what at what point are we gonna say we really need to give this job to somebody else and then how quickly do we have to adjust the policy if that happens we can adjust the name within the policy at any time correctly yes once the name doesn't have to come to the board once the policies are in place you can change who yours title 9 coordinator nondiscrimination coordinator complaint managers etc that can be done administratively okay i guess also the thought i would have about that is that my hope is that much like when we included the satellite food pantry that the need for this position will not be great as always i would hate to see this need to become a full-time position any other questions under item 8.2 thank you maureen and thank you for your work on the state committee for this as well okey-dokey action items item 9.1 approval of bills for payment can i have a motion i make a motion to authorize the payment of bills in the amount of three million four hundred and twenty five thousand five hundred and forty two dollars and 83 cents as presented second mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan mrs croner aye mr bowman aye mrs moyer aye mr leighford hi motion passes 6 0 item 9.2 i make a motion to approve the ppe supply and equipment bid in the amount of two hundred and fifty seven thousand two hundred and seventy dollars as presented second mrs croner aye mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye ms morgan aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye mr bowman aye motion passes seven zero item 9.3 i make a motion to adopt a resolution authorizing a reduction in force and honorable dismissal of educational support personnel second miss morgan hi mr lightfoot aye mrs doyle aye mrs swanson aye mr bauman aye mrs moyer aye mrs croner hi motion passes 7-0 i'd just like to add that hopefully we will need these positions again sooner rather than later and that i thank the individuals involved for the support that they continue to give our district 9-4 i make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented second mr bauman aye ms morgan aye mr lightfoot no mrs moyer aye mrs croner aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle i motion passes six one can have a motion to adjourn i make a motion to adjourn all in favor i we are adjourned
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
many of us arrived before 7 20. we start our first google meet at 7 45 we sync or we synchrously meet um for all of our class periods for 35 minutes each and then we have a 30 minute lunch some teachers are even working through their lunches meeting with students because that's when it works for the students to get help especially in some of our college-level courses from one to three students are running virtual office hours where they're virtually available to help students so at that time they are helping out students i know i usually have two to three a day that i'm helping if not more and then we're also using that time to assess work provide feedback create more engaging and interactive lessons um for the next day and most of the chs teachers are creating their own videos their own lessons their own activities um different from the elementary schools we don't have teams necessarily we don't have a whole third grade team you know teaching picking a different subject we are having to create them all and prepare and assess for around 150 students each um and for some teachers we're continuing working into the evenings um at home and on the weekends and that's across the board yeah yeah well i think what's and it's a little different i'm going to not necessarily jump back to the slide that was k4 but you know your k4 teachers aren't used to that your k4 teachers don't departmentalize i teach every subject to my kids i know exactly where they are i know when i just speed up i know when i need to slow down i know when i need to pull these kids back into a small group now i really kind of only know what they're doing in math because that's my that's my subject so i need that time to talk with my team to figure out okay how are your kids doing the math do i need to slow down with my math lessons or my full speed ahead okay my kids aren't getting this reading lesson what can we do to to make sure you teach something remotely for my kids to understand so the team kind of plc time is becoming ever so precious to us k4 teachers probably not everybody truthful so going back with a hybrid model where we're going to have students in the classroom and remote this is going to then take all of the things we've been doing with remote and adding a whole nother layer to it we're still going to be teaching those live classes for those 35-minute periods but then we're gonna have five-minute passing periods in between that we're not only switching meets to get our remote learners still into where they are we are now answering student questions that are in person attempting to answer student questions that are online if we can see them we are monitoring the hallway welcoming students into a room checking emails to make sure we're not missing something if we have time going to the restroom and we're not sure what we're doing with desks or we can have time to wipe down these desks are we having students wipe down these desks what where's the safety of the cleaning um and then again lunch and then our time to run virtual office hours which will be helping our students like like you've said before in our normal remote time and um i i'm going to speak for myself as a science teacher and for vocational planning lab days for these a and b kids who are going to be coming on different days this is making prepping for multiple preps it's not so to try to explain this i teach three different science classes so therefore in the hybrid model i am now going to be planning for nine different lessons each day because i'll have my full remote learners my hybrid a and my hybrid b so if i have a lab that i'm doing the lab a group the a group shouldn't have the shouldn't be shouldn't be allowed to not do the lab because they're in a group while then the b group gets to do the lab and vice versa so we're talking about now nine different things for each day so i guess what we're asking for is support um we see all the different things that have to happen for a safe return um i guess my i have a small question for all of you which is what have you done to maybe educate yourself into what teachers are doing and what this looks like for us in our buildings and so forth you're about to make a very important decision well i've talked to a teacher and asked a lot of questions and i've gone back to mr grody and dr castelli to ask them questions based on what question or what concerns the teacher had excellent have they heard some of the same concerns yeah yeah thank you thank you for getting that i've actually talked to several teachers and uh gotten a lot of good feedback i've been read i've read every email from every parent every teacher i read your old summary word for word i didn't miss one email one word i gave everybody the attention they deserve i've done a lot of research i've been on the cbc side i've been i've been doing a lot of homework on probably far more than i ever intended thank you and i got some ideas you got some ideas right so do we okay so um you know we feel our teachers once are safe um you know they while kids are asymptomatic in this there are some teachers who are concerned about their own families and family members that they take care of or you know just feeling that they are safe and protected if we have students back in the building we are asking for asynchronous fridays just to give us the time to create these lessons for this hybrid model that we are possibly going to you've seen the hours it takes to create these lessons and to you know provide that for the remote learners um you know we still need to make connections with those remote learners we can't let them fall by the wayside because we have kids in person you know we we're used to having them in person we are going to make those connections we are going to um have that with them but um for the remote learners it's still going to require that time to give them the quality education that they need as remote learners and more than just like really what we're asking for is just time to time to prepare i mean going back to school with kids would be like the first day of school all over again and usually we have two or three days to get ready for that and um correct and i mean when we like i said when we did an about face on august 10th we were really trying to go all in to make sure that this started out successfully so that kids could have strong remote lessons and that we could we could do the best job possible because we know it's not i mean we know it's not an ideal situation we listen we get it um and we just want to make sure it's safe you know we we anticipate that students will still remain in a remote setting and we want to make sure those kids get a quality education too and it's it's just not going to change when when kids come to school and i just want to i just want to be confident you know you i've had all of all the people on this board most of you have i have had your children in my class and more than anything i want your kids to be safe no matter what what we're thinking about the virus and what it does to kids or whatever more than anything i just want your children to be safe i want to welcome them with open arms and i want i want them to feel safe and i want us to be able to make the connections we can to these kids because if you know me and you know my teaching and you've been in my classroom you know there's nothing i love more than having those kids with me but i would feel unfor i would feel it would feel unforgivable to me if something happened to one of those kids um they're they are like my own and i just want to make sure that when they're back in this building it's it's a safe place for them to be so there's a lot of things that go into that the time realm parents are going to need time to make their decisions once those decisions are made teachers are going to need to get those lists so that they can arrange desks make decisions for the classroom principals are going to need those numbers to possibly have lunch ready or have scheduling concerns so there's it's not something we can just start tomorrow it's just not so i think we are asking for a possible start date well i mean we just not tomorrow for sure not tomorrow but we are going to need parents and parents are going to need time to maybe they have you know are we going remote or am i not going to vote some parents might make that decision like that other parents might need you know i talk to grandma i got proper daycare i got to talk to a lot of people before i can make that decision so fine before we do this um also you know just because we make a decision today excuse me you make a decision today doesn't mean that you are stuck with that decision for the rest of your lives obviously you made the decision to stay fully remote for nine weeks and we're back here discussing it now so this decision that is made today doesn't necessarily have to be one that is forever so if we take a baby step or a couple baby steps and then in some time we figure out hey we can take some bigger steps it's re-visible or you might need to say when we need a backup card that might interrupt you we didn't vote it says remote that was a decision i'm not trying to throw the administration on the bus but it was not a school board no administration decision that they were fine to make but it's not that this quality voted to go all remote we voted for the highway and the situation changes where the administration felt it was investing with that and and again but it can change it can change okay questions for us i have a question i'm sure you have a time period of what you would want the start to happen what is that date you've got to have something i can see your smile i think the teachers could have this ready and ready to go by the 20th of the year september by the 28th of october but that's halloween but yes i that's what we are suggesting i guess we have all the union representatives here probably going to be healed after asking this question a little bit we have all the union members here you guys are the leadership um i know you guys mentioned school nurses being an issue which i hardly agree with i think we need not just uh i think our current requirement is just an emt or there's really not there's no maps this is the cea though they're not there they're they're not yeah on one teacher that's underneath their contract yes we have certified school nurse that's under the contract and then the other school nurses are under the assessment contract okay but i think what we're trying to find is we don't have a medical professional in each building which whether as a parent is terrifying yes whether they're an argument or the assessment union especially in this environment with kobit i i personally think we need an rn in every building but i guess there's some logistical problems well i mean we don't have any applicants any other questions for us um i also agree the feedback that i had from the teachers that i spoke to that was exactly what you guys understand it's the double duty and i agree wholeheartedly we're asking you guys to do two full-time jobs with in-person and remote do you have any idea how many students you you feel the union feels that it's going to participate all remote versus the all-in no idea no i wish we knew um if we go by the data that we had for registration that was 293 total in the district um obviously that may change we are going to whatever we decide and however this moves forward i have created a form that will be published in skyward and the parent would just go underneath their students profile and select just so that we can have an updated count because some of the people that i saw who were selected remote have also now decided that they are just homeschooling so that might be different so i just think we need a better picture of where we're at but there was 293 at that time um we are no it's more than that we have uh yeah there's a long time no we have like uh we have 1800 kids that is what you said was having two full-time jobs with why we would like to have the asynchronous fridays so the students wouldn't come in the building obviously the teachers would and we would still push that lesson similar to what it is now so we would push out remote lessons on friday i guess my train of thought is we if we have let's reverse that number so we're having 87 of our two in person and i understand the ieps they need special attention and that's great we want to make sure they get that but for the people that just are scared don't want to have other issues at home that they don't want to expose them to i have no problem with that but i guess my concern is we're spending half of our resources on 13 of the kids and half of 87 percent and i think we're kind of short changing those kids i would rather and i don't know how the union feels about it but i'd rather see a couple teachers depending on if if we take out 13 of our teachers and have them do all the remote we'll let you guys concentrate on all in person and not do that that will do well it like it doesn't it wouldn't work like well i teach spanish and we have three spanish teachers in the whole district and we can't pull a spanish teacher to be just doing remote it would it would never it would be impossible yeah like everything is k through 12.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
those reds aren't showing up maybe we don't have a red today this is the most accurate or most recent data that we have so a handful of counties across the state that have darker colors but you might see a little rectangular yield sign on those counties and that that would indicate a disclaimer alert so i sometimes get get mocked i think for the information behind the information comments but oftentimes that is indeed the case so if there's a prison for example in a county and there's a high percent positivity rate in that prison that's going to drive up the per capita rate in that county but doesn't necessarily mean that there's high community spread in the county so there are just different pieces of information behind uh those and and there's there's an uh again a symbol indicating that so bartholomew county is is a 0.5 so we're in the blue at this point in time which would make sense if we're in the green with the metrics that we've put in place uh it would make sense that the corresponding measurement which we also include positivity rate and per capita rate in our measurements that a 0.5 would be there so that is the case at this point in time unless you tell me differently the metrics that we've approved as a school board is continuing will continue to be what we look at and that we'll look at the state as one more piece of information and data and certainly track that and follow that and use it to to either support or or go against maybe what we have and lead to different conversations this uh our data here just a reminder to you comes out by five o'clock every monday and thursday on the covet 19 task force website and thanks to kelsey de clue and others who are making sure that gets posted and indicates our current school status and then this comes out every wednesday and kelly i don't remember the time on that but every wednesday toward the end of the day maybe the governor's typically had a press conference around 2 30 on wednesdays if if the need is called for that but around that time or later we'll have this this next round of information um just a reminder in terms of those colors this is uh the flow chart we approved back on july 20th and we have the red which is substantial spread the yellow which is moderate spread and the green minimal nose spread so actually with all numbers being in the green right now we would say minimal no spread but we know that you can't just flip a switch and move from one of these to the others otherwise we would immediately drop in the green to a traditional environment with one remote option and not be doing everything that we're doing and although we'd be implementing preventive preventative practices we'd be resuming all of our standard operating procedures as a school corporation so started starting to to minimize some of those mitigation strategies that are in place in our schools and that's not what we're going to do uh we have gotten to a certain place as a community trying to mitigate the spread of coven 19 as best as we can and so we'll stay in that moderate spread area and continue to work toward that but those are the three areas that we have i'd also just clarify um and maybe should have brought this up last meeting with a lot of the conversation we were having that again this was approved on july 20th that very top part says level of community spread is determined by local health officials so those are individuals we are working with and helping us track that data that data for the community is not coming from bcsc it is coming from the county as a whole and then the instructional model where we go is determined by bcsc and then the response in terms of those various pieces let's say there's a targeted closure or a short-term closure an extended closure because of spread protect perhaps in a classroom or a wing of a building or a building overall then those responses might be jointly determined so just a little bit of additional information pulling this page from our uh our reopening plan in terms of bcsc so it gave the the county numbers bcsc's rolling seven day per capita rate is zero because we have not had a positive test case since august 31st you might have noticed uh in the republic that we would have had two additional cases um posted last week but those positive tests actually go back to august 31st sometimes we are playing behind in terms of the information the actual date things lag a little bit so we have actually not had a positive test knock on wood um of a student or staff member in in over seven days august 31st being the last date that calculation 0.0 is easy to calculate but if there was a number there it would be based upon 13 000 students and staff members running up whether in person or remote and positive cases would include both in-person remote students and staff members so since monday august 10th if we would just compare to uh take bartholomew county and compared to bcsc the average daily per capita rate for bartholomew county was 11.8 for bcs it had been 5.2 and again this is since august 10th and we had some some cases early and we do have 22 cases overall but then if we drop and i just added this number because we'll be asked about this sometime if we would actually subtract our remote students and staff members take that thirteen thousand down to around um eleven thousand remove uh actually it would get closer to ten thousand yes so that number is wrong three point four was assuming eleven thousand it would be ten thousand so it dropped that number a little bit lower um then the per capita rate of the people in our buildings would be even smaller than the 5.2 reported there but we but because those students are enrolled for us or those staff members are working for us it is possible that a student might come into building for a class in a remote student um so we are including that that all the students and staff members in our calculation in terms of our total 22 positive test cases since august the 10th that is 14 students and eight staff members uh only four of the 14 positive student cases were actually in in the school building where we had to identify close contacts and then we have had 341 total close contacts and that is due to both internal and external positive cases so the number of internal cases that we have had has not resulted in a large number of total close contacts the external ones has has made up um a sizable portion of that 341 and by external uh the the definition of that would be a case outside of our school corporation but still impacts people who come to our school and they have to be quarantined so for example if i had a family member who had coveted 19 what was not in our school system it would keep me at home i'd have to quarantine so i would be a close contact of somebody not or somebody external to our school system so that that has that happens and again we have to treat that situation identify those close contacts and and then keep them home for a while uh the last time this slide was up it just said keeping the doors open for in-person instruction was hard i did add and providing quality remote options is really hard because that's what we're seeing as we get into week five and and try to navigate everything that we have going on or get into week six i guess the majority of our teachers are having to contribute instruction to at least two options that was not by design our hope as we got into the school year was to be able to have enough staff members participating remotely for a variety of reasons that i could balance that out but our need changed for a variety of reasons including just the the um attractiveness i guess uh of of the remote options and the number of people choosing to take advantage of that physical distancing does remain our biggest challenge of the five mitigation strategies we have temperature screenings has become a pretty i don't know seamless process is the right way to to describe that but we are getting the students into the school buildings uh quickly efficiently face covering is going pretty well again we'd like to get higher than at 95 percent but that's that's where we are right now physical distancing being the biggest challenge hand washing and cleaning and disinfecting being uh the other mitigation strategies we are working collaboratively with our teachers association uh to address challenges specifically we had a series of meetings last week that focused on three topics one was to try to recognize those individuals that are having to contribute instruction to at least two options uh with with some form of a stipend so that that conversation continues we're also looking to reduce the flexibility for transitioning between options what that means it means is is that from the beginning of the school year to now we have been pretty open with if you want to go from in classroom to remote option let's try to make that work today if you want to come from a remote option back into the classroom let's try to make that work today we need to limit that flexibility we're now into week six uh we've been at it for a little bit and so how can we do that appropriately and and get perhaps a survey out to parents as to what their plans are from now to the end of or into fall break and then also for the second quarter so working on surveys for elementary and secondary students and then also a timeline for reducing the number of remote options we created two to start this school year we already had the columbus virtual pathway in place we created the bridge to to provide for flexibility to to make sure that parents who maybe didn't feel comfortable sending their students back to us yet had an option to start remotely but knew that they could get their student back into the classroom quickly and so with those options being out there is there a timeline for starting to reduce that and if we did reduce it we don't believe the answer has to be the same for elementary and secondary so for example the bridge option may remain the best remote option we have for elementary students but a different option maybe the columbus virtual pathway is a better option in the long term for for secondary students so we're looking at both short term they're reducing flexibility and long term at timeline producing the number of options as we move forward so that's a part of that dialogue and then are there creative instructional models that we continue to take a look at whether b4 and in particular be for this situation where if we are looking at uh spread of covet 19 and we get to a point where we're thinking about an e-learning environment is there an in-between place to go we did not build that into our reopening plan on july 20th mini school corporations around the state around the country are doing hybrid models most people are familiar with what that looks like or what that might might mean sometimes we'll use the word hybrid for some of our students right now scratch that from the way that we use that because that might mean that we have a bridge student who's taking a an ap class at columbus north or a c4 class at columbus east but the rest of the time they're abridged and they might refer to themselves or their parents might as hybrid students that hybrid model in its in its true sense in terms of what it looks like for other schools in indiana or across the country would be maybe half the students in the school one day and the other half in this in the schools the next day and looking at it from that standpoint so looking at a variety of ways to try to address just needs whether it's both in person or even relieving that that stress uh that time constraint of having teachers contribute instruction to at least two options and i say at least because we do have instructors special education probably an ell in particular english language learner teachers who are working in all three environments in person columbus virtual pathway and and the bridge bridge model so that is a quick update in terms of the variety of things that we've tried to tackle since uh i guess three weeks ago now but five weeks into the school year take any questions that was the quick update did you have a did you have a more i was worried we might have to administer oxygen there for a little bit doctor well i i it was quick it was quick for me yes yes thank you for the very thorough and extensive board members do you have questions or or comments on anything that dr roberts shared mr stenner uh dr roberts the this last slide with uh the challenges would you say you talked a little bit about the folks that are involved in english language instruction is it one part of our school district versus another is it one building versus another is it secondary versus elementary where are we having the the friction really good question question rich and so one it is the majority of our staff members who are participating you know as indicated however there is a smaller percentage at the elementary level uh having to be involved in both remote and in-person instruction a higher percentage of their secondary maybe almost all of our secondary teachers to one degree or another at least has a a pool of students that they are trying to balance out time with from an instruction and remote standpoint so secondary would be one place the the special education and ell mentioned specifically because as they try to meet the needs of students the students let's say a student with an iep that that parent that child may have chosen any one of those three options that student remain on that teacher's caseload so now has to whether it's in the classroom or in the building or try to reach out remotely in one of two ways work with the teachers that are that are working with those students they they're having to go through that so a quick summary would probably be that that area but by doing that i'm leaving out maybe a building somewhere who who is you know running into some attention or struggling too that that wasn't captured there but that's a quick summary i think we've talked at past meetings about professional development opportunities that that helped to address some of the concerns and relieve some of the friction how are those efforts going yeah so we have the the professional development we've offered so far has only been after school so that in itself adds a challenge right so if it's not able to be done during the school day somebody participating in that is having to commit time uh but we do have a great team nick and his team brittany i think it was last thursday between 3 30 and 4 30 uh put together an outstanding professional development opportunity i say it has to be commitment after school they did i think record all of those nicks so maybe six options it's off the top my head that were available that uh that have been recorded and teachers can go back to that that do give additional strategies to addressing this need that we're talking about of trying to balance in-person instruction and still meet the needs of kids who are trying to learn remotely if i may um we were having a sidebar uh dr bills and i about if you take out labor day and how many how many days have we completed as of 3 30 or 4 o'clock today is it well it would be 25 i think today yes yeah yeah good good question i had to do some mental aerobics there but uh yes you were more sure than either one of them thank you because of labor day yeah other questions or comments dr roberts um uh first with i i assume that 341 individuals who have stayed at home because of contact many of them that that was self acknowledged they they called and said i won't be in i ran into a person with a positive coping yes most of those from an external standpoint thankfully people are are acknowledging that letting us know and we're tracking it that way so i i just want to start by applauding them thanks because that's that's unbelievably uh valuable to us that's where our biggest exposure is and then staying home for that entire time yeah exactly you talked about distancing is still probably for our teachers and other staff the single biggest challenge i mean are we still looking for any additional ppe or other mitigation i mean is there any any any source of creative or new ideas things other school systems are trying that uh we can we can come up with there yeah i i think the two things you have mr caldwell to get physical distancing is is one the best use of space possible so whatever square footage you have in your building is maximizing that space of the degree that you can given the people you have in it the only other way to do that is reduce the number of people in the building so what other school corporations are tending to do if faced with that big of a challenge saying we just can't get it accomplished is is a hybrid model so as as the one team that we have continues to look at that we want to make sure we have something in place that if we need to make that decision uh we're not all of a sudden saying hey can somebody come up with a model that we can use we have something to turn to and you guys have had a chance to review that would move us in that in that direction okay so different line of thought uh in your discussions with the health county board health board and health department that i'm concerned about this test time trickling back up because i everything i had heard and was promised in the in the news media was that it would only get better as we got better and more practiced and and more um facilities doing this is there anything we can do as a board or as individuals to i mean is anything is it a is it a money factor is it people is it volunteers um i don't know that i can respond to that kelly would you have a a better answer than my none at this point the health department is getting some more sites so by the end of this month the actual our health department will be a testing site there will be a testing site at windrose in edinburgh and there will be a mobile testing site in hope on mondays so those are in the works right now so we will have five testing sites in the county but that just is more tests i'm thinking about faster turnaround kelly i mean do they all still go to the same really slow inefficient night that's wrong to say it's inefficient but but really slow and seemingly getting slower um that our health department site will still be optum but i'm not sure which companies those other sites will be using but i can find out that information yeah that's just what it just that does seem to be the key for us to be able to be responsive is getting that quickly and you know i mean i know it's a problem everyone shares but as a school corporation it seems like it's really key to us okay the quicker we get that turnaround time yeah more quickly we're able to identify close contact get them home and yeah agility is helpful it's kind of interesting what um you know for some people it seems to be taking less time and for others it seems to be taking more time i mean in some people it can be almost a 24-hour turnaround i've heard and then in others it takes three or four days so i'm not sure i'm not sure what that's what's happening but all right like i don't know are they all going to the same place did you say they were they're not all going to the same lab a few sites all right i'm scanning the board members i see no up mr persinger is there any chance or opportunity that the health department could set set up like temporary testing sites at the school buildings i mean and they do it for school pictures there's been a little conversation about that so i think the possibility could exist if and if nothing else we would we have asked them from a student staff standpoint how possible is it to use facilities to send somebody immediately there to try to get results back but i don't think it's out of the possibility james okay well one one more question just because we seem to be successful i think all the major employers in bartholomew county probably all across the nation sent out reminders to employees about labor day coming up be sure to the 3ws or whatever mnemonic device they tried to remind their employees not to put themselves in dangerous positions are we doing something unusual there that got us these results i i don't know that it's unusual i i think there's a lot of awareness in this community i i mentioned the covet 19 community task force earlier and they're posting the data that group has been very active since february 28th i think i see jana here they made sure to get something out uh via the media so i think our media has been on top of it and helping to shape uh ideas and and behaviors um i think it's just a community awareness and and and perhaps it was another article i was reading this morning but it wasn't it was it was speaking to things nationally that from july 4th hopefully we learned some things that you know a few weeks after that we had numbers going up and we saw here locally and and that seemed to get people's attention in terms of okay this was the behavior july 4th this was the result of that behavior i need to be more aware of of how i'm behaving now out in the public and maybe if i wasn't wearing a mask before i'm now choosing to do that um so and i think i think the state of indiana overall has has been uh paying close attention and and managing things overall again uh well so maybe a variety of factors rich but i'm not sure of anything specifically unique i'm going to say just like when dr roberts put the zero up there because we've had seven days like that i said and you don't talk about a no-hitter while you're in the middle of the game and i mean just think no kidding it was the week before august 10th and the week of august 10th that we saw the local bc the bartholomew county spike that i still think was attributable to the july 4th weekend and the time it took to really mature so i think it's going to be another three weeks before we know what how well we all behaved collectively on labor day i mean i can't believe it'll be any sooner than that yes and i'm holding my breath with that in mind if july 4th weekend yeah we started to see numbers get into the red here around august uh 9th 10th something like that as we were coming back to school actually if that is the case then you look at september 7th would it be october yeah 10th 11th 12th somewhere in that time what about fall break that's about fall break time unfortunately which is august maybe four years maybe maybe october 5th monday is the first yeah october 5th is fall break okay we've about worn that out haven't we i think okay let's move on to the next agenda item is public comments there was no there were no ones signed up to speak this evening so we'll move on to uh the what section of our agenda dr roberts we've got a new title ix policy to review tonight dude it's about 20 pages long so i hope that it was uh exciting reading for you um as as many of you are aware the the federal government has put down new title ix regulations so this is actually a new policy for us and that in the past uh title ix discrimination claim uh would likely have fallen under policy 5517 uh student or there's also a staff anti-harassment uh policy uh so that's that's it would have fallen under a policy like that but because of the detailed requirements listed here concerning very specifically title ix protections also the detailed provisions in the regulations for identifying reporting investigating and making determinations of responsibility for acts of sexual discrimination harassment and the detailed listing of supportive measures remedies and sanctions to respondents in the event of violations found have occurred because of that detail we have been advised to create a new policy and it is indeed about 20 pages long and was provided to you i think i just have one slide on that so hopefully you didn't again have a chance to review that the the the copy you have is the one that we utilize with neola that gives us various options language based upon the way our operations run who's assigned specific roles for example who is the person that would be assigned uh to to address any title ix complaints and then what's the process for that and how many days do you to take to turn around paperwork or what's the process for actually interviewing the claimant versus the respondent how do you handle an appeals process uh do you have a hearing does the board approve hearings to be hailed and then do you do you allow attorneys to be in those hearings so just a lot of detail in there in terms of how something will play out uh 90 days is listed as the potential time for all that to be done and and and reading through my knee old notes and and beginning to work on this policy they are worried that that's not enough time that actually because of the detail included in here to thoroughly uh navigate through um a claim of title ix then it may it may need to be longer than that but that's the requirement under the title ix regulations promulgated thus far by the u.s department of education so that policy is there before maybe taking any questions i would ask chris we did have mr monroe also review that as school board attorney and and he had a variety of recommendations that need to be adapted or adopted in my opinion recommended for adoption that gets into some definitions and make sure that the definitions align well with indiana code so chris i'll turn over to you the suggestions you had what i wanted to do is to expand some of the definitions federal law is cited throughout this wherever you see usc that's the united states code the definitions for some of the criminal acts are not the same as they are in indiana for instance indiana doesn't have a specific uh statutory rape crime it's covered it is criminal but it's defined as child molesting in indiana indiana also has a slightly different definition of stalking and there's some other issues with consent so the proposals for changes i am making is to expand some of the definitions so we include some other criminal behavior as defined by indiana law thanks for that big chris to remind the school board is school board members is that what you have in front of you is a first reading and so we would take look to take chris's suggestions and build those into the definitions that we have cite indiana code add that to it so that we are aligned both with u.s code u.s guidelines and and the state of india where necessary chris is there anywhere where um aligning with state legal requirements and state code is actually in conflict or can they always be with with federal code or can they always be either or it can be an either or okay okay so we can be yeah federal law defines some of them slightly differently than indiana does so if someone were to be convicted of a crime in indiana that didn't specifically line up with a federal law yeah there's going to be some legal wiggling that can be done in that and i'd like to try to reduce that likelihood by putting in some specific language with regard to indiana indiana has about i think 14 different crimes that are included as sex offenses and some of those have to do with child solicitation um trafficking and some of those things that are not specifically set up with the federal crimes okay thank you could i ask for a reminder so our title nine person is our hr assistant superintendent theresa yes and and then when it kept referencing decision maker is that to be determined by each case or is there going to be a standard okay yeah it's case by case case-by-case space based depending on whether the staff supervisor others that would be involved in that situation so the 90 days is starts when it's reported to hr to teresa and then in 90 days there has to be what what happens i mean is all the information is supposed to be gathered all the i'm here that doesn't sound like it's very in everything and i believe it doesn't sound like it's very it feels completed yeah yeah three months of time to get through a very detailed yeah peace with who knows how many people being involved in okay all right any other questions board members uh just a response to dr biltz uh according to neola with the 90 day time frame those requirements may prove time-consuming onerous and unwieldy so it's recognizing the challenges of the time but it has to build those in uh they include them because that is the requirement at this at this point in time and they do specify it's 90 business days yeah okay all right all right thank you so first reading and we will make the adjustments as per mr monroe and bring that back yeah so just to clarify i think the the version we had to look at in the board packet had none of uh chris's that's correct right yes that is correct yeah that those those bullet points and recommendations came as we were putting the packet together last week so okay yeah thank you you're welcome um second item under the this section of our agenda our board commendations board members do you bring any commendations to this evening based on dr robert's report and again knock on wood don't want to jinx anything but commendations to everyone that's making efforts to keep the students and staff and teachers safe thanks there school board member reports to share in the sequel let's hesitate for just a moment but a moment before you move to that conversation yeah we just mentioned one that just recognizing this week is the council for youth development's youth empowerment summit that's a really big week for them a lot of a lot of effort goes into that and it does make a difference in our community involved with so many in so many ways with different youth organizations and with bettering our kids probably the marquee event of it is wednesday night there is a documentary that you can virtually uh participate in called live uh like like yeah like and it is in regards to uh social media use i'm looking forward to that i believe it starts the laura seven o'clock i think seven o'clock still an opportunity to go to the council for you development's website and log in or register for that and uh then it'll be a panel discussion after that involves a couple of students and individuals involved with that documentary but just goes through a lot of data a lot of information about what social media is like these days so it might be interesting for you to tune into that but thanks to heather carson and her team for doing so many things there are activities happening in our school there's an activity guide if parents would like to go to the site there's an activity guide to download that you might want to we'll be doing some things in schools but also work with your kids that just helps develop some appropriate social emotional wellness habits now i'll check with board members are there any school board member reports i know many of our offline subcommittees are not meeting now on uh because of uh just distancing i do have a report thank you dr bills i attended the iupuc board of trustees meeting last week and thought i'd just give you an update iupuc purdue university and ivy tech are continuing to collaborate on several topics such as career guidance space for student clubs and organizations mental health guidance and diversity inclusivity the community education coalition has changed developed a new website kathy oren discussed the partnerships among the campuses and the new website it's just much easier if any of you ever been on the community education coalition website the new website is so much better she also talked about partnership among the campuses and community members and then there's some updates from academic affairs and right now iupuc is offering virtual hybrid online courses and advising and they have had their three-year academic master plan released which includes diversity work and outreach a diversity council a national equity project book reads anti-racism task force and several other diversity-ish kind of initiatives and they also have a new mba program that they are starting at iupuc and some dual credit opportunities that's my report thank you dr bills there are no other school board member reports let's move to the cabinet reports um we had dr bozeman first as dr bozeman is walking up there for school board member reports mr callaway as you mentioned uh maybe not many meetings being held recently with those will start to gear up i know mr jensen has a couple of this week diversity council is wednesday and perhaps business advisory friday so things things will be firing up here yeah good evening i'm just going to take 30 seconds or less and give a quick update on the usda meal waiver you may have seen my note my email last week and thanks to the republic for covering and to josh for the social media our families who normally are paid families who would not qualify for free or reduced received good news on friday the usda had implemented the summer seamless option for meals which basically means if you recall in starting in april into may then throughout the summer we supplied meals to the community during the pandemic and that was set to expire in august and did expire in august the usda has gone back to that option and the uh we are waiting for a couple weeks for the state to provide guidance on that which they have now so um basically we've we had a few options from the state to choose from we chose to maintain the same meal option that we have provided to the community in the spring and the summer which enables our all children in the community that are under 18 years of age can eat for free and we are reimbursed as the at the school nutrition program rate which is four dollars and fifteen cents per meal compared to forty cents per meal which i only mentioned because um the food service department is funded uh completely federally and separately from from most other entities that we that we have so we i would not say we were anywhere near dire straits but we were we were starting to get a little bit concerned financially as fewer students were not having meals uh throughout the spring and summer and then we had a fairly low number of students eating in our cafeterias to start the school year which is gradually increased any fees that we've incurred from september 1st will be returned to families again these are paid mail students and also this would allow us to continue that program if we were to close anything covered related or during breaks fall breaks christmas break etc we're working on plans for that to implement meal opportunities for our families as we had over the summer so again thanks to the republic for publicizing this and our social media we had 27 percent increase in lunch today actually we had nearly a thousand more meals served today and about 23 increase in breakfast so hopefully hopefully those numbers will continue but just want to give you an update on that a little more detail as to how the head come about thank you thank you dr bozeman let's if we could change real quick here mr cola dr hack maybe give the seo connection piece first just because of the presentation that mr phillipston has come in sergio thank you i wanted the opportunity to talk to you about social and emotional learning connection that we have with indiana university so we will have dr sandy washburn and mrs deanna nyberger come to us from indiana university to work with our leaders in our schools and the presentation will be on september 30th from 7 45 to 2 we'll practice social distancing right here in this room but really the meat of that work will be around our advisory time how that's handled in our buildings our morning meetings and how that connection is so critical to our students how to talk about adolescent adversity making sure that we have a developmental asset connection in all that we do we're going to talk about stress response understanding behaviors and understanding how adult adult brains work as well as student brains so just making sure that again it's on the forefront that when we take care of our students and we take care of those relationships learning comes quickly after if we don't take care of those things we will struggle so our stu our teachers know that our principals know that our leaders know that we want to give them the chance to dig into that work and become better themselves so we are calling it taking care of you to take care of others and it's it's going to be a dynamic day we welcome you to come if you would like we'll have a lunch if you would like to come please rsvp and we'll make sure we have that for you so it's going to be a good good opportunity for us dr hack who's going to participate from from our different individual schools we've offered it to building leaders first and if they can't be there for various reasons then we're asking them to send a representative maybe it's their school counselor maybe it's a maybe it's a leader inside their pbis team maybe it's their udl facilitator somebody that again is connecting with students and connecting all this work together so you're looking for at least one from each absolute each building okay right gotcha and again thanks to counseling counts and our cares dollars that's what's providing this funding thank you thank you thanks come on chad let's talk budget it's good it's good to see you back here as well mr phillips it's good to be back i'm also just going to take about 30 seconds or less yeah yeah be brief yeah okay no honestly we're going to get into ernest shackleton's manage the vital details and freely share information with the team so tonight's budget work session is just that no action required on the part of the board this evening just informational an opportunity for questions first first glance at the 2021 calendar year budget looks um nothing looks like nothing incredibly unusual about a 3.5 increase over the prior year we'll get into uh each of these level uh some deep level of detail here on each of these but with the education budget with revenues really uncertain for 2021 that budget is essentially unchanged the increase is really in the debt service and operating funds and we'll get into that but there's a new line at the bottom this year the operating referendum this will be an annual just like the budget adoption for all of the other tax supported funds same same deal with the operating referendum fund so it'll be part of the annual budget adoption in the future and so if you include that budget in there the overall increase in the budget from 2020 to 2021 is closer to the range of 10 important information for us as has been for a number of years more important in recent years the health trust is doing relatively well and this really kind of sets the tone for how all the other budgets are affected this is our second largest expense by a long shot after salaries and so knowing that of course due to due to covid we have had some decrease in usage of the plan basically but i'll also remind you that you know that those reserves and the expenses being down 19 percent our revenue is up because we did have two premium increases uh one in september and one again in january one and then also there's more out-of-pocket expense so our plan design changed um as a result of the the increase in um you know in claims costs as you can see for for several consecutive years the prices were our expenditures were continuing to to increase so while we are happy that the reserves are sitting at over two million dollars at the end of at the end of july you know some of that did come on the on the backs of our of our folks chad do you you recall what is the annual annualized impact of the increased premiums i i couldn't tell you off the top of my head right now mr caldwell because in if it was a static number i could um but as we make plan design changes people people uh reacted differently yeah so we actually did experience and uh get into this in just a little bit we did experience a decrease in the number of people on our plan as families decided if both spouses were covered in their workplace they moved in some cases the children over to their spouse's plan and paid for a single plan here additionally one of the things we hope to achieve and we did is a migration of folks from the ppo to the high deductible plan and so a large number of people made that change which again affected how much revenue you collect from that good question and i'll get the answer for you so the education fund obviously the largest part of our our budget and there's some some concerns here lots of red on the screen as a result of that some of the things that we're concerned about is is the fact that the state support that we get again over 70 75 million dollars a year now from the the state legislature and the state's budget comes entirely from the general fund of the state of indiana and that is reliant upon tax collections so sales tax income tax corporate tax and gambling taxes basically are the four thing in all four of those as you can imagine way down so we do have some concerns about what the legislature is going to do in the spring as we look forward to the second half of the calendar year which is the first half of the budget that they will pass in in the spring also worried about adm implications so most districts that i'm aware of are expecting to lose adm this fall we are in a better place than what many of our colleagues i've heard from many of my colleagues we expect our decline to be relatively small next budget session we'll have that number for you i'm sorry next board meeting when we do our budget hearing also we don't know how many students are going to return to a chat i don't understand that if every school corporation in the state is thinking i mean are they all going to kentucky or what no um really there are a couple of factors there some some students um and this is a small number but some students not returning from the from the shutdown last spring some of the older students who have mad juniors the seniors not coming back if they disengaged but really the thing that i think is most consistent across all school corporations i almost say all some of the smaller corporations obviously have some anomalies kindergarten enrollment so people just decided if you had a five-year-old well he just turned five let's just wait a year pull them out of here and so you just you're either going to wait a year and enroll them in kindergarten the following fall or just skip kindergarten enrollment first grade the following fall and so i i think if you look at all the corporations our size it'll be a consistent um you know drop in their kindergarten enrollment and we experience that as well um and so we're we don't know how many students will return from online learning and when as the pandemic continues to uh to move on without a without a vaccine and then so um there's other legislative decisions of course other than just the per pupil amount that i cited at the beginning what are they going to do with complexity they've talked about it now for a number of years and they've changed it several times from a factor that nobody understood to free and reduced lunch and then now to what it is today with a snap tanf and foster children and so we think they're going to address that probably in this biennium and then what is their long-term solution for the virtual question we don't even know what the the answer to that is for the spring semester after adm so what they're going to do with that in the next biennium is still up in the air so you're familiar with this if you've seen these these sessions before basically we only know this right here on this whole chart is the only thing that is known as we go into building the 2021 budget is we know what the state funding formula amount is for this this school year we do not know well we do we know this one as well the whole per pupil amount which i'll get into the next slide is right here we do not know the september adm now the february adm or next september is adm or what the funding formula will be for the next calendar year so it does make make us have to make some assumptions as we look towards the 2021 budget so those education fund revenue assumptions are on the screen in front of you again basically the revenues that are budgeted are basically flat compared to calendar year 2020.
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i know we were only scheduled to be on this call for half an hour um i do want to just encourage folks if you have questions that come up later please do reach out to um you know myself to jay shree to molly who's not on this call but is the other elementary school um distance learning specialist who's supporting our elementary school's parents and families and students and teachers so we're all really happy to help you or point you in the right direction if it's not us you need we'll get you to the right person um i also just want to remind you to check your emails and make sure that you have the link for tomorrow's google meets or for kindergarteners and first graders for friday's google meets um because that information will be coming to you very shortly if it's not there already from their classroom feature so please keep an eye out for that because that's going to be helpful for them so i think that's everything unless there's anything you want to add at the very end here i think that's pretty much it and uh we look forward to uh your participation yeah have a great year everyone absolutely thank you thank you everyone for being here
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on exhibit triple e replace page one to include reshell chavez and diane durbin ryan under section 2b as well as remove christian garcia lopez under item h so may i have a motion to adopt the agenda second moved in seconded a roll call vote mr o'neal hi mr gabar hi miss piercy hi and miss smith hi and i vote i uh is there anyone that wishes to speak on a closed item session item good afternoon everybody there are no public comments on closed session items this afternoon thank you so much carl it is now 208 and we will move to closed session and actually i think we're staying here
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it's 14 passengers don't quote me on that 100 but i think 14 is the number so somebody asked me that and i said todd i don't know and even our 14 passenger bus somebody can drive it but we want them to practice driving because that's boxy it's different okay we need hey
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i think this year will be virtual yes thank you okay can i get a roll call dollar tree yes yes yes yes yes uh yes accepted from check 36736 yes all right other matters to come before the board that should have been changed before um today's sports started so i'm excited hopefully that they can did the njsia come out with their recommendations to if you want to call it recommendation all right i'll never mind i take that i withdraw that question strike from the minutes just happy they're sports craziness blanket assessments start tomorrow yes maybe just let the parents [Music] right so there was an announcement uh put out on facebook and teachers are sending out invitations to students [Music] yeah you know um is there going to be a time when the principals will be here again yeah we don't have i would just like to hear from them about how things are going and the principles here um it knocks a few more now how is that because i was i went back to see if there was a change and there wasn't and it says for indoor gatherings 25 or 25 whichever is less you know so it's really limited to 25 but yet you can have a wedding with up to 150.
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