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a vote was taken uh in favor of the payment was lando javi robinson uh against payment was griffin and kaiser so the motion passed and that that took place um if you would please join me we are going to stand for the flag salute i pledge allegiance [Music] and if everyone would please continue to stand this week we lost one of our dear teachers janiece kuhn the choral instructor at chico senior high school so i would appreciate if we could all just have a moment of silence [Music] thank you very much i'd like to begin this meeting then with announcements and i would specifically like to ask mr doug williams if he is on the zoom uh to please let us know how things have gone at chico senior high school we understand that some help and some assistance was put in place for students and teachers as well yes thank you school board and uh chico unified school district staff and people uh tuning in to the meeting um it's been a very rough week um obviously this event started uh on the weekend and at that point we didn't have much information but we sent out some information on sunday night the last three days have really involved around creating support mechanisms for students and for faculty alike so we have had three different levels of virtual therapy occurring in this coveted environment the first round in the morning we obviously called every student in mrs coon's class and talked to them and that was done by our counselors bcoe counselors and counselors shared who are professional therapists within the region and within our district i'd like to thank all those people who basically joined in a communal effort to come to our aid in addition i zoomed every one of her classes the first two days and basically um took control kind of of fielding questions from the kids and and tried to ask them in an appropriate way to the best of my ability um and in those meetings with me were also other licensed therapists every day we have had in the first day it was a one o'clock zoom therapy link that our assistant principals emailed out to every student in her classes to join and we had quite a few students join and some parents as well we also had former students that uh contacted me and and wanted to know if they could join those therapy sessions and of course i opened those up to those individuals as well miss kuhn was a a comet of an individual she walked in a room and and and everybody had their eyes on her she just spread sparkle and joy and and her influences across the globe really um after those virtual meetings now what we have going on is every morning at eight o'clock an ongoing zoo meeting um takes place for three and a half hours and different therapists come in at different times the reason we've done this is so students if they feel more comfortable could contact fellow students and say hey let's join today at nine together so they can feel some kind of companionship in those meetings um also in those meetings uh thank you mr tim karis mr brandon kessler we're able to provide breakout therapy so as the students join we ask them if they would like to to go to an even smaller zoom breakout one-on-one with a trauma counselor or with a group of three of their friends and that's been taking place and of course we're logging all this information and then we're going to respond back to the families to see how we can improve and and also if they need further follow-up from uh other support systems within our county um today we also did a moment of silence which is very difficult uh on our quad for our staff our staff has been unbelievable but our teachers are hurting as well uh and so that was at 11 45 today i said a few words and we had a moment of silence for miss kuhn in front of our school there's kind of a grassroots um goodbye to miss being chalked on our sidewalk with flowers and red lipstick that reminds us all of her um however i think the impact of walking by that daily by our staff is is going to be significant so we are going to set up a chalk wall uh next to our marquee with a message to ms kuhn and to the community and if people would like to go to the grass because it's outside of the closed campus and write on the wall something appropriate or a message they remember about miss um or set down something we're gonna have a standing uh area there for a week or so as i get information from their family because i'm trying to be very respectful of their families wishes because they're going through obviously a huge trauma as well and i know people want information but we also have to be respectful of the family and and their privacy um i will leave you with this um two things i heard in a meeting the first one is just what a joy it was to be around miss kuhn the second one was a teacher excuse me a student that said ms kuhn always used to say if you're struggling to find the right words in class or you don't have an ability to complete an assignment or your voice is shot and you can't participate you can at least try to be the nicest person in the room and i think that has such an impact that as we go through this trauma that i would just ask everybody to be kind to themselves and be kind to others because that's really a message that that she lived through so i appreciate this this opportunity to talk if anyone would like to talk to me in person or come by to school and find out exactly all the other levels of therapy and support we have i'd be happy to talk to anybody anytime and i'm going to put together an actual for lack of a better word an action item menu to post as well on our website so people can access resources but also see what's going on uh daily uh thank you very much and hopefully that your prayers and kind thoughts or whatever positive energies you choose to use will continue to come our way thank you very much thank you mr williams obviously our thoughts go out to the family and all of the friends and loved ones i also want to thank chico high for doing an absolutely fabulous job in the worst of circumstances the entire school is hurting our students are hurting the staff is hurting and yet they've rallied to be there for our kids so thank you doug and your counseling and administrative team and all of the teachers who uh have rallied to be there thank you um for another announcement uh dr kaiser yes so um the census has not yet been um changed in terms of its deadlines so the deadline is the end of this month everyone who was born and physically located in butte county on april the first counts and the estimates are it's worth ten thousand dollars a person over the ten years so if you haven't done the census yet please there's websites there's phone numbers we want to urge you to do that however right now we're facing local elections the league women voters of butte county is setting up the candidate interviews everything will be on zoom but we're setting them all up and you can submit questions for the candidates three days before their presentations so i wanted to make sure that you knew that the first set of interviews will be for the chico city council candidates now remember this is the first time that we've had district based elections so it's very different than before so you can send your questions in they are the interviews are going to be posted on monday evening september the 21st so uh we need you to send them to the league of women voters bc with your questions there are ten candidates for the four seats and the votes are in districts one three five and seven so the interviews are going to happen this thursday and friday and all interview questions will be given to all candidates and then like i said they'll be posted the second part of this is that we will be as a league arranging interviews for the paradise town council for all the school districts that are having elections and again these will be sequential and you can send in questions to the league that you would like to ask be asked of the candidates we are also doing a voter registration at the farmer's market so if you haven't registered yet that's a really critical thing the last part of this is as everyone knows we've had another dramatic crisis with huge areas of our county burning people being evacuated they may not be able to go back to their homes there may be no home and the post offices in a number of those areas have been closed so it's very very important that if you're going to have a mailing address different than the address that you were using to receive your ballot in the mail which are going to go out in october early october then you need to contact the hall of records butte county and get your mailing address corrected so that's the critical part of this so that your ballot will actually get to you so that's it thank you okay does anyone else have any other announcements i do yes so we are once again facing frustrations with our zoom so we had a call-in line set up for our speakers from items from the floor and speakers on agenda items the audio on the zoom is not coming through so we have posted new directions and we want to encourage everyone to go to the chico unified website chicousd.org we are going to call we will call the people who submitted speaker cards the phone number if you want to announce the phone number that will be coming to them so that they know what to be looking for thank you superintendent staley the phone number we'll i'll be calling from is 530-774-5429 again five three zero seven seven four five four two nine the speaker cards we have so far are mark owen ryan crosby and eric oberle for items from the floor we have from the elementary waiver matt tennis heidi dausman jody taylor and lcp thank you for lcp we have matt tennis kelly mcgregor and aaron isherwood so those folks do not need to do anything we have your numbers and i'll be calling you so if uh there is time and we certainly hope there will be after we hear from the uh speaker cards then we will go to those people that have submitted their name to staff and staff announced where they submitted it to to public comment i don't have my chico usd up in front of me submit your name the item number you would like to address and your phone number and we will call you in order as well so that's go to chicousd.org and submit your name phone number agenda item you would like to address thank you okay one announcement that i want to make is that um this week we've been hearing a lot of kind of disturbing news and and there seems to be a lot of swirl around social media and plus with students being home a lot um you know i i would think there's even more of an uptick in use of social media and i just wanted to make parents aware that there are some resources out there if you are concerned about your students social media use or the impact it might be having on them or their mental health there is an organization called humane tech and it's humanetech.com and they have resources to help you possibly impact or limit the social media or understand what the possible impacts might be on your teen or your adolescent and there is also an excellent video that can now be seen on netflix called the social dilemma and that explains a lot about what the impacts on children are and possible effects on mental health so i highly recommend that i think in this time when there's a lot of people indoors and not being able to see people there's more reliance on that and there are some dangers associated okay uh so we will move on now to our consent oh excuse me we will um have an update um did we want to do this uh do we want to take the items from the floor do you want to give some time for people to okay okay before while you're in the process of doing that let me just remind you of the rules that we have regarding this items from the floor are very specifically items that do not appear on our agenda tonight so if you are speaking to something that is on our agenda that it this is not the place to discuss it you will discuss that item at the time that we'll allocate for that particular item so the conversation under items from the floor needs to be something not on our agenda and and we are not able to respond in any way to items from the floor and that's three minutes each speaker we will have 10 minutes and then i will check in with the board to see if we're going to go further with this so anyhow okay we can begin okay mark owen you're you are unmuted go ahead all right my name is mark owen i'd like to thank the board members for their volunteered service i respect the time and energy you've put into our schools here in chico i know all of you are doing what you feel is best to bring a good education to our children with that said ingenuity is not the best we can and have to do better i have two daughters enrolled in chico unified schools a sophomore at chico high an 8th grader at bidwell for the past few weeks i've watched my daughter struggle with ingenuity the poor replacement of an education system has taken my honor roll students to failing students i've watched one of my daughters go from completely self-motivated engaged in her classwork to lackadaisical and not engaged at all another daughter who has always been a good confident student is now overwhelmed stressed and unsure of herself edge annuity is not working besides our children getting a subpar education is also messing with their self-confidence something needs to change face-to-face learning would be best i understand this may be out of your control but using technology like google classroom and zoom with teachers teaching our children and not using ingenuity is in your control i'm not i'm sure i'm not the only concerned parent i thank you for your time okay thank you mr owen we will move on to mr crosby brian hello hi ryan this is john shepard from chico unified school district and i'm going to unmute you and you'll be addressing the school board okay i needed uh my computer so perfect let me know if you can hear me yep we can hear you go ahead okay great well i appreciate uh you guys first off um obviously struggling with the zoom thing that seems to be a problem uh across the nation so i appreciate you guys being creative and still getting uh parents voices onto the board so really appreciate your effort there i want to start like man this the information around the teacher i mean uh how sad um obviously kind of a testament to the times we're in i mean i don't know the things around it but um i just want to say that i know everybody involved here at the board with our teachers i know that everybody's trying to make decisions uh they're for the best for our kids and we just we just all have different ways and different ideas how to get there so i guess i just want to start with that like i truly appreciate the efforts and the things that you guys have to go through um to try to make decisions for a vast majority of people um so i appreciate it and i truly truly appreciate our teachers um so i'm part of a group uh parent advocates for in uh for for school in person learning and uh you know obviously we were for the waivers for uh the elementary school kids um and and honestly we were looking for some solutions for six through 12 kids um kind of like the gentleman before me said ingenuity you know is definitely a struggle for kids i think the connection problems there's there's a lot of connection problems there's audio corruption um and i think really i feel like we're benching our best asset which is the teacher um you know and again we're trying to adapt to the times but unfortunately there's not a ton of instruction now that's coming from the teachers and so i feel like we're benching our best asset really the thing that we want to connect with our students um i think it's hard to control class in that environment the teachers are doing the best they can but it's a really difficult thing and so it's it's messing with the success of the students i think there's too many platforms uh and activities uh one of my sons at bidwell uh you know he does spend till about seven o'clock at night and i know uh mr mckay i think it was or one of the one of the principals said you know like just not to allow them to do it um but i think in the end it's we want to make sure that they get a good grade right we want to make sure they're getting the information their understanding material because frankly we don't get this year back um you know so there's body fatigue there's headaches they're sitting you know sitting and watching and staring at the screen for a long time i mean me a big one too is isolation from friends um and i do i kind of feel like there's uh some depression setting in and i think that's happening across the board and i think it's time for us to to really kind of look for some creative solutions um so to me i feel like they're two-pronged approach right we have to figure out how to creatively work with the systems we have in place today right how do we get better at that how do we get opinions from the teachers and how that can be improved but i think second is we have to begin to press the state right and that so thinking of creative ways that we can get in front of the state uh with with new ideas of how we could possibly open these schools okay mr mr crosby sorry to interrupt you but um your time is up mr crosby your time's up so i'm going to go ahead and hang up we do appreciate your feedback thank you okay i'm calling eric overly so should i try again we are currently trying to reach eric oberle hello is this eric yes is this eric eric if you are watching i think we do not have the correct number for you perhaps is okay we've tried twice if mr eric oberle we do have the phone number that you submitted which we tried calling that did not work we do have another opportunity for comments from the floor so if you could contact us with the correct phone number we'll be happy to put you on during that time because you did submit a speaker card okay so uh we still have a few moments are there any other we we do not have a way to do this now do we they can go to public comment at chicousd.org we've now listed that on our chico unified website right now we do not have any others that have submitted through that mechanism okay knowing that that is brand new that just started at six o'clock tonight right okay okay then that being the case we will we will move forward uh the next item of business is a negotiations update mr hanlon so um actually negotiations is a part of the presentation tonight so i'm going to defer until we get into the presentation and i so i won't be repeating myself okay that makes sense thank you very much um next will be our consent calendar uh do any board members want to pull items from the consent calendar yes kathy i want to pull uh under the um i think it's under contracts um yeah because it's it's notification of items i'm sorry it's one two the approval of items donated to chico unified school district 7.1.2 yeah okay okay did anyone else have any item they'd like to pull no if not may i have a motion i'll move the remainder of that calendar okay and kathy you seconded yeah okay um item was moved by tom lando and seconded by dr kaiser uh this will be for the remainder of the consent calendar and we'll take a roll call vote um linda how do you vote harvey i okay lando lando eye kaiser griffin okay that passage unanimously we will go back then to item 7.1.2 i wanted to pull this to recognize two particular donations mary j lauderdale five thousand dollars to fairview high school and then the soroptimus international avidwell rancho who donated one thousand one hundred twenty five dollars to fairview high school i think sometimes people see fairview as not the ideal school for their kid and yet it has been extremely successful with kids that need extra help and these donations are a validation of that and also a measure of hope so we want to thank them very much and with that i move uh the donations that would be okay that would be item 7.1.2 that was moved by dr kaiser seconded by eileen robinson all those in favor please say i i i don't know if i heard you linda hi thanks okay um that takes care of the consent calendar the next item is number eight under educational services it's going to be a discussion and possible action with regards to the parent and staff elementary covit 19 waiver survey results and that would be mr karis i believe actually i'll go ahead and start us off um the board has asked us to move forward with looking at what it would take to get elementary waivers onto our different elementary schools and so we have a little presentation to go over where we're at at this time so first on the agenda tonight we're going to be going over the background the safety conditions the parent and staff survey data and the process that we're looking forward to moving on next okay first a little background the california department of public health back in august 3rd of 2020 announced that a waiver of the state's school reopening criteria may be available for elementary schools however the waiver is not within the jurisdiction of the california department of education or the school board of education but will instead be considered by the local public health officers in consulting with the california department of public health therefore the california department of ed does not maintain a list of schools or districts that have been applied for reopening the school waivers additionally only the superintendent or the head of the school is allowed to submit the waiver request to a local public health officer also further the board direction chief unified surveyed the parents of staff to gauge the interest in applying for a waiver and the chico unified teachers association also administrated a staff survey and we'll be going over those tonight great the safety conditions in order to have the elementary waiver consider for approval by the butte county public health chico unified school schools would be required to follow all estate and healthy health and safety guidelines these include consistent small groups consists of small groups six foot social distancing facial coverings for completed we also have all the complete of the guidelines that you guys have proved before for the ampm model that would go for any of the different stages or colors that we would go into and those are on our website and it's also in a bit league on here people wanted to look at that at another time to accommodate these requirements elementary classes under the waiver cannot adhere to the traditional full-day schedule so if a waiver gets passed we cannot at this point have 30 kids or 24 or 30 or 34 go to a classroom all day the exact schedule must be negotiated with the bargaining units which we'll be talking a little bit more later and the elevated elementary waiver schedules may closely resemble the amt model that we had discussed earlier in another board meeting or an alternating deadly schedule so we could have only half of the amount of students on our campuses outside and remember this waivers are only for our our elementary schools these cannot be approved for our junior highs or or our high schools i'm going to pass over the survey data from tim carrots he's the one that's been working on all the data for us and he does a great job at that and before we go there i do want to again say that if we have people that would like to address this please go to the chico unified school district website and email your name phone number and the item you would want to address which in this case would be the waiver and that's public comment at chicousd.org put your name in and we will be calling you for public comment when we get to that part of the agenda in addition attached to our agenda are all of the written public comments that we have already received and that the board has read on this agenda also i want to be able to state that mr karis will be going over the survey data that we provided to our families and then we'll have kevin maretti the president of the chico unified teachers association go over their data after that great okay all right good evening per board direction we sent out three surveys on august 27th and left them open until september 4th one survey went out to parents of all of our elementary students the second survey went out to certificated staff at the elementary sites and the third survey went out to classified staff that work at any of our elementary sites so the first set of data set i'm going to go over is our parent survey data but before i go into the actual numbers um just wanted to give you a little uh kind of idea what the what those surveys looked like okay at the top of the survey was information regarding uh the offering by the by the california department of public health to authorize waivers as approved by the local uh health officers it also listed a lot of the information that was in mr marchant's portion of the presentation regarding safety protocols that needed to be in place so we wanted people to really know what they were voting for okay so we gave gave them a lot of information all the information we have available currently yeah if you need to it's really hard to start over no it's okay just if you could continue please okay thank you sorry about that so with that in mind we'll take a look at our parent survey data first and we got the title cut off but but this is our parent survey and i want to note for those in the in the audience that this is a little bit of a different look than was put out with the original agenda that that was put out on friday we added the number of responses and the number of total students to the data set per board direction and to give more context to the conversation and the and the meaning of these results so on that survey parents were asked a simple question given these uh circumstances for coming back to school in person in a limited manner would you [Music] send your student to school for in-person learning or would you like to keep them home for online learning okay so up here the green indicates the yeses and the yellow indicates the nose uh before we look at the greens and the yellows too much though i want to point out the number of responses 1930 out of total students 5055 for a response rate of 38.2 each student was was granted one uh survey entry so in cases where two parents entered survey data only one was taken we also validated the data that parents entered via asking for a student id so we could check to make sure that those students were enrolled in our elementary schools um so we're confident that we have valid data there were some data entry mistakes and entries for secondary students etcetera that were thrown out mr cares also if a family had four students they were allowed to have four survey results that that is correct one per student regardless of how many were in the family okay so overall we see that uh 68.9 of parents would like to send their child back to school for in-person learning in some way shape or form while 31.1 would prefer to keep them at home for online um at the site levels and we'll get more into what's going to happen at the site levels with this data and more data to come later in the presentation but we saw response rates that range from 16.3 all the way up to 51 and we saw you know rates as high as yes rates as high as 77.9 percent at some sites keep in mind the sample size is is fairly small and especially in that re that lower range of our schools with the lower participation rates it gets very very small do we have any questions about the parent survey data so just to clarify so at the so of the at okay so you've got 38 percent so uh of the 38 that participated sixty eight point nine percent correct okay that's that's what we're looking at that's a lot exactly i just want to clarify that okay yes i'm sorry elaine i'm i'm on the i'm on the clarification bandwagon as well so for example um at neil dow elementary the responses were 94. did you change the slide yep we're back okay 94 responses which is 29 of that school sites population responding yes okay so i'm reading it correctly thank you and of the respondents the percentages are given off to the side in the colors so let's just take the highest percentage which was shasta they had a 77.9 but they had 236 yeses out of 639 so that's really a 37 of the people in that campus of their students that have said yes that we know of that turned into survey i think there's another aspect to this though mathematically which is if we want to go to eileen's original question so kneel down we had 94 responses but they reflect 316 kids so when we look at the number kids they are answering for you know that is and i don't uh remember the total population to kneel down i don't know if tim the total population would be 316.
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but that's if you're putting three in a seat and you're really cramming it in right right oh so that's very few students there's plenty of room okay yes right but remember too though on those days half the students are also coming to school so certainly a lot of parents are definitely driving their kids for sure um and like daryl said we encourage them to do that just to allow for the you know spreading out on the bus as well thank you thank you mr miss ellie sir oh can i ask you a question oh sorry no that's okay um i noticed that the it seemed like there were quite a few uh open choice students who were opting for distance learning do you know what percentage of them are joe uh mr missell if you go back one more slide that's actually a fairly small percentage of our students i would say it's proportional with with the rest of the school community and actually even up until today we're seeing an even number of students who are going from hybrid to remote and remote to hybrid so even every day it's a currently changing and shifting but i'd say it's pretty even of who's switching to go to what right now thank you okay seeing no other questions mr miceli here's a peek at the high school profile for remote learners so we had a pretty smooth opening there are 36 students um and exactly the same scenarios mr gr just pointed out we had two wins and two outs over the last two days so we're still at 36 but it's a different group so that's about 13 percent of our students and you can see the breakdown there the first two days of school we welcomed students in for those half days so all classes met for those eight day all eight periods even though they were half days so students were to get all their books and all their supplies and all their training the third day we had the opportunity for uh all students and staff to practice connecting from home and that included the very successful biggs and little event that you heard about earlier um and i just want to uh tip my hat to mrs title bomb and mr ginsanti the advisors for that group they did a really great job the leadership team debriefed the first few days during our weekly meeting and we had three major observations on those those first couple of days one is the teachers really enjoyed the energy of seeing students in person again the um the second was that students worked uh hard to applicate excuse me acclimate to the the new norm and that kids were even engaging with the peers learning from home and that was that was really nice to see this week we had the full days of school following our hybrid belt schedule we also conducted safety drills and the drills have been modified to support the student safety during the pandemic i had met with the president of the connecticut emergency management association to gather guidance on how to make appropriate modifications and i reviewed those with our emergency management director and fire marshal and he approved those and those are the procedures that both buildings followed this week our dean of students and i held some drop-in zoom meetings both the prior to the opening of school and then a a second one earlier this evening and although it wasn't uh huge groups we had some good questions and some good comments and if i can multi-task hang on a second sorry there we go um so earlier today actually not early late in the day like after one o'clock today i asked faculty just to shoot me some comments that about engagement i thought that might be nice to to have that in hand before i met with parents or with you and so i just leave it up in the screen for a minute those are just some comments some candid comments from some teachers that came out this afternoon so we are working hard and preparing to embrace the new norm at bolton high school any questions for me this is chris i had a just a quick question about the number of columbia students um how many columbia freshmen are there there are five would you put the other that graph back up please the one with the percentages of sure i can do that thank you it seems as though there's a large percentage of um hartford students that aren't coming in um uh well yes and no so yes by percentage but one child makes all the difference and one of the returns uh is actually a choice student we got that word today and they'll be back in monday so that percentage will drop pretty quickly when we go to four out of 15.
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second thank you joy okay any questions or edits on this all right so all in favor aye okay thank you that's unanimous okay the superintendents update i was on mute my apologies so this is the superintendent report here we go a mask a microphone a mute button holy mackerel um so i want to share uh briefly tonight with my report it was a very lengthy report two weeks ago and we had a lot from our principals tonight so i will be very brief bhs will have a school day sat scheduled for wednesday october 14th for our seniors you may recall that our seniors missed out on the school day sat because of the school closure this past spring we want to make sure they have that opportunity uh very soon with literally within a month and mr blanda will be sending out communication on that uh an enrollment update very briefly we are still at the 82 percent um uh in person eighteen percent remote in terms of our student population as a reminder uh october first it still has not been moved uh october first is when we submit our enrollment to the state of connecticut uh department of education and then later in the month in october usually the second meeting in october we share those enrollment numbers as uh especially as mrs diamond indicated but all the principles indicated there's a lot of movement there's still a lot of registrations happening there's still several withdrawals going on so there's a lot of moving parts with the beginning of the school year and then you add the pandemic and a hybrid model and the opportunity for students to be educated remotely there's a lot of flexibility excuse me a lot of volatility frankly um in the enrollment numbers right now so we'll continue to track that the next item on the superintendent report is the national school lunch program participation some people have questioned and wondered if we are going to be able to participate uh in the free lunch opportunity for all students in the brookfield public schools through december 31st mr post applied uh brookville has applied for that we're just waiting for communication back uh to um let us know if we um will be approved for that program in all likelihood we will and as soon as we know mr post will be sending out a communication of parents i imagine that will be in the next couple of days and then finally in terms of unified sports we have some great news bhs brookfield high school has been identified as a special olympics unified sports high school we have met national standards of excellence for inclusion advocacy and respect and so under mr baldwin's leadership and coach castellano and coach stevens we have been recognized for that prestigious uh honor and we're just really excited to thank them um and i know mr baldwin is here mr baldwin i want to just turn it over to you for a second is there anything you'd like to say share a little bit about the program for us uh it's our unified sports program obviously we put a lot of time and effort and we get a lot of support from everybody um we're recognized as a national banner school means we met all 10 standards um to accomplish that goal and i'm just proud of all of all of our coaches and our kids you know they they do all the work and they do such a good job we have great coaches and you know again if we don't get the support from the board ad superintendent and the assistant superintendent we wouldn't be able to get these nice awards for you know all of our hard work all right thank you mr baldwin is there um any questions for me from the board that's all i had for tonight any questions all right thanks thank you okay we have uh subcommittee reports and the first up is facilities okay so we continue to review and revise a 10-year capital improvement plan some of the project updates and ventilation so the majority of time and focus has been put into rehabilitating the building or building infrastructure and prioritizing health and wellness for the reopening of school a tremendous amount of work has been done with the hvac and the exhaust ventilation work is finalized and the hvac is under control and running sufficiently for reopening the custodian staffing update and reopening cleaning protocols we've hired nine new employees from green light llc for custodial work hilliard has been working hard to train them in our cleaning and sanitizing procedures and protocols and we still have one custodian out and two vacancies to fill how we clean isn't changing we are just increasing it in frequency and that's it anybody have any questions all right thank you okay uh and we have a verbal report from the finance committee and actually yep can you hear me online all right good uh so we met just this last monday as a finance committee and i wanted to give a verbal update because it's very timely on a couple of topics the first topic is how we ended this prior school year in terms of our spending and as you remember in the spring we had been uh having a lot i'm sorry i'm gonna do this a lot of discussions with the with the board of finance in terms of uh overruns and under runs of the budget um and this year was a very interesting year this last year because we had some very significant overruns in terms of special ed costs in particular but then we had significant savings and because we were shut down pretty much physically for covid as a result we actually ended the year at 638 thousand dollars under budget and uh mr post and uh uh the town controller mrs marion have just finished closing the books and uh that's a pretty solid number at this point that's i think the biggest under run as a whole that a um that our district has ever had if you actually look at that though the we underran i'm sorry we overran on special education costs by 786 000 so to put this all in perspective we're under under running overall six over six hundred thousand dollars while at the same time overrunning on special ed spending meant we saved um huge amounts of money well over a million dollars in on on other line items and those came in the flavors of 658 thousand dollars of savings on our transportation costs because we were not running buses and 342 000 on salaries which was overtime and substitutes and coaches and the like so there's an awful lot of things that we didn't do we underwrite books and supplies because we froze our spending by 240 000 and services by 172 000 and our fuel and utilities by over a hundred thousand dollars so um and then we were able to pull ahead some spending from this year uh as we had agreed with the board of finance so it's in your packet um the overall summary from uh from mr post but it was a very solid end of the year i will tell you we actually ended at about 152 000 better than we had told the board of finance back in uh back in june when we talked to them and that hundred and forty two thousand dollars was driven by by many of the same line items but we also had some things like we got a refund on some dental insurance we had we had more transportation savings than we expected and some of that was offset by by pulling heads so 2019-20 ended the year very solidly i wanted the board to hear about that we spent some time also talking about this current year budget the 20 uh 2020 2021 budget um and it's too early to actually start having reports on that we'll start seeing those uh in at the end of the first fiscal quarter but mr post was is tracking a couple of key indicators and if you all remember when we established the budget we actually put a very significant assumption in the budget for teacher savings and salaries due to teacher rotation and we are right on track to what we had put in the budget about 200 000 um of savings due to just turnover and so that's good news that's that's a risk that we had taken that uh is actually turned out to be about right and then the second he's they've been tracking uh mrs wagonic and mr post have been tracking the outplaced special ed costs and we're also right on track on that from what we put in our budget so both of the key items that we had talked about in the spring about our budget um have been proving to track right where we wanted them to be so i'm hopeful that that will help us with our budget notwithstanding that we have a lot of gives and takes in this budget as we go through this coming year um and the third i just wanted to give you an update on our kobit spending you know with all the school opening and the money we've spent on desks and uh and shields and extra staffing and maintenance we're actually running a little better than we had uh talked to the board of finance about uh we had the the the contract for the custodial services came in substantially less than we had estimated but we've had some overruns on things like desks where the we had to switch suppliers because there was not enough supply so mr post will be giving us an update on the school reopening and covet related costs at our next meeting and will keep us updated as we continue through the year so and around that time we will be needing to start go talk to the board of finance for our second tranche of release on uh on covet spent so so that's really what i wanted to tell it's very current and pertinent and i didn't want to wait for the next month in order to get a report to you all um and i'll pause to see if there's any questions okay seeing then i think we'll move on thank you um the consent agenda i move that the board approved the items on the consent agenda we have new hires resignations retirements and a leave of absence second thanks joy okay rosa could i just say something absolutely yeah so speaking of new hires uh something i should have done a little earlier in the meeting uh for any of the new staff that have joined us uh you did not need to stay any longer on the meeting we do appreciate your patience and your um responsibility and staying on but please know you uh we'd rather have you focusing on lesson planning for tomorrow in resting so please feel free to turn turn off thank you very much and again welcome great to have you here with us um the other thing i'd like to do is acknowledge two of our retirements uh mr art francisco uh a 10-year custodian with the districts especially at the high school has just done an incredible job for us was a was a bright light at the high school and has retired and we hope he's enjoying his time over the last month or so that he has been retired we wish him the best and uh olga weitzman a long time 23-year paraprofessional most recently at wisconsin middle school for years and we're just we couldn't believe she was gonna retire we never thought she would and uh we miss her dearly and just wish her all the best she's just such a wonderful person and another shining light at wisconier and uh wish all the all the best so thank you to both of them for all their services thank you okay any questions on these okay so all in favor aye thank you that's unanimous on to new business and up first we have the 21 22 budget planning calendar okay i moved that the board approved the 20 2021 2022 budget calendar as recommended by the finance committee and director of business and operations ken post second thanks joy okay so if you guys take a look um at exhibit d we we just reviewed this with the finance committee so i want you guys to sort of take a look through it it has all of the dates in terms of our budget process um so sorry were you getting feedback from me okay um so yeah so we can take a look through this and just see if there's anything that you flag as maybe needing to change or move and and rosa uh mr post is on if he uh he could um highlight a couple of key pieces for us if you would like that would be great sure so uh we begin with uh distributing materials and the principals don't want to hear this probably but on september 28th and they'll have about four weeks to get it back to me when we'll start our review process uh which culminates in the superintendent's presentation on december 2nd at the finance committee meeting monday night we discussed the the committee's work in reviewing the budget and decided to add a date onto the calendar being monday december 7th where the finance committee will do a detailed review of the budget with myself and dr braille before coming back to the the second board of ed meeting to discuss the budget on december 16th and then we go through all of the other regular public hearings and and budget meetings culminating in getting the budget to the first selectmen by january 31st and i don't know if the version in your packet has the december 7th date on it or not it does yeah okay but that's a significant edition and the only real aside from the specific uh dates from year to year that's the only significant change so the idea of adding that that sort of finance committee review so on the second which is when you know the first meeting in december we usually see the superintendent's budget that will sort of beat the idea is to sort of be more of a high level give you an idea of the budget details then the committee will review that and then we will start our dig in at that second meeting in december so as long as that sounds good for everybody i think all the other dates um line up and rosa if i may just as a reminder of for the public it's very important i know the board already knows this typically the superintendent in brookfield had given the initial budget overview proposal for the next year at the second meeting in december what we realize after my first year here which i can't even believe is now six years ago which is amazing that that much time has gone by we quickly realized that was not enough time for the board to deliberate especially inclusive of the holiday break so by starting it very early in december it gives us a lot of time to review in the month of december before the holiday break and then more time in the month of january it really is a quick turnaround when you think about it because we have to by charter have that to mr dunn by the end of january so the rest of the process could start so it's just a good reminder for everybody uh that we say it each each early fall when we start the school year we're starting one year and we're already planning the next year and any of the enhancements and the great things we do for kids can't happen without financial resources it's really important that we make sure we are fiscally prudent but we do invest in our school which is always the best in our community thank you okay so does anyone have any questions on this calendar or want to make any adjustments you're good i just wanted i just wanted to ask about the uh wednesday november 25th date the distribution of board budget packet is that a meeting or is that an email distribution that will be the yeah that'll be an email distribution probably okay just because it's the night before thanksgiving and i think it's a half day for students if i'm not mistaken okay yeah we only have one meeting in november anyways and i believe it's the uh first i'm sorry the fourth the fourth of november so that first week um okay so any other questions or comments okay so all in favor aye okay thanks that's unanimous okay [Music] um on to old business and we have an update on the new school project so um eric's gonna key up i think eric's gonna key up um the newest renderings of the building's exterior so last night um some board members got a chance to see the newest renderings we had given some comments back to tecton about the exterior um and i think they really took our comments to heart and they um they updated it made it a little softer it's still a very modern 20th century uh 21st century building um but it's they softened it with some materials that they're using it looks very playful almost like a tree house they were saying you know as if a kid would build this in their imagination and so i think it when i don't are you sharing it now yep okay perfect so as you can see you know it just looks very playful and it's such a it lends itself really well to the site with some really natural landscaping that's in there so i'm very pleased with this and i um you know i i like and i think i think the board members um you know really found that the uh the design team kind of took our comments seriously and sorry i'm getting some feedback on my headphones so okay thanks um yeah so um so you know there's there's a lot of habitat in the in the front and around the building for some wetland species and butterflies so it's the the entire building itself is going to be a great learning laboratory which i think is really exciting and one thing i wanted to point out um and debbie debbie sort of pointed this out last night was that what you're looking at in this photo on the um the right side of the building there's this huge glass wall and really you can in the actual building you'll be able to sort of see straight through so you're looking at that giant cafeteria and you'll be able to see straight through to the other side of the building so there's a lot of bringing the outdoors in and that's repeated in us in several areas of the building where you can see straight through the building and that was done intentionally to sort of bring in um you know the natural environment and the site so it's um it's really exciting to see this um um i do i do want to sorry i'm gonna okay you got it okay it's john's okay so uh i did want to update you guys on some more of the technical details of the process um i know a lot of you were at the mec meeting last night but for those that you that weren't the project right now has been cleared through all of the local town approvals except for wetlands nbc members and techton last night in no uncertain terms said that getting approvals from wetlands has been really beyond comprehension and at this point it's there it's not looking very good as a summary just to sort of highlight some of the issues the the building itself some wetlands are being disturbed by either the new building itself or the construction process tecton obviously knew about this and addressed every question and concern that the inland wetlands commission had had the inland wetlands commission also insisted on a few outside consultants to come in and weigh in on those findings which they did three firms were hired and all of their questions were addressed and none of them see an issue with the process moving forward uh with the mitigation strategies that were suggested actually the site is being improved um from where it actually is today so we're actually leaving the site better than where we found it um but the inland wetlands commission had extended the public hearing um a few times this this so over the summer and they have not yet voted to approve the project so that's sort of where that stands and that's some of the challenges that the nbc is facing currently at the moment so um that's that's pretty much it for the new school project um so some good news and some challenges as well rosa can you just um sort of clarify what this delay means for the next step of the project the delay in the approval from inland's wetlands uh i'm not entirely sure yet um i don't know how this affects state funding um i don't know you know how this you know affects construction timelines so it's definitely something that um the nbc is focusing on heavily at the moment [Music] uh were there next steps identified from inland wetlands that that they're looking for something else or waiting for anything else i think what they're what they current what their motivation is right now is to they would like it if the site um actually created more wetlands than it disturbed so you know if we're looking at if the nbc is looking at that as their next step then they need to look elsewhere on on another site potentially you know a site like um like the the open space that's adjacent to the huckleberry site because obviously there's no there's nowhere else to improve on the actual huckleberry site so that is something that i think they might start looking at yeah okay thanks yeah all right anything else okay so we're actually on to three main points already okay um i was thinking that we should uh [Music] summarize some of the opening day reports from the principals um i wondered if you wanted to mention should we mention uh the national school lunch program participation john i think that'd be a good idea mr post will be working on a communication soon but something on facebook the way we post three main points would work well okay and then your school project yeah that's what i was thinking new school update yeah we give you get post a new rendering and what i'll do is well debbie take this three main points and last two weeks ago three main points we'll merge them and put them in the spotlight for october for the town okay good everybody okay with that yeah great upcoming events okay all schools are closed on monday september 28th in an observance of yom kippur at center elementary school tomorrow thursday september 17th is the virtual open house the schedule for the evening as well as links to the virtual presentations were sent to families at huckleberry tomorrow and friday september 17th and 18th is additional 100 remote student material pickup from 10 am to 3 pm and september 24th next thursday is the virtual open house information will be forthcoming but that will begin at 6 00 pm at wisconia the virtual open house is tuesday september 22nd at 6 pm details will follow in an email from mr renna and picture day is being rescheduled details will be coming on that soon and at brookfield high school on september 22nd and 24th next tuesday and thursday is round two of in-person student photos september 23rd wednesday is the 100 remote student photos and material pickup and september 30th is the virtual open house at 6 pm and that's it okay thank you um any anybody else with any upcoming events they want to throw in there nothing at the library okay all right so what is that so uh okay so we have an executive session tonight so um amy do you want to read that motion i will move that the board enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing the superintendent's proposed goals second thanks joy all in favor aye aye okay that's unanimous all right so i think that will end our broadcast so um thanks everyone for listening foreign
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
no that actually go to that school yes oh okay all right thank you any further questions here yeah okay we'll move on to the uh certificated staff survey uh we had a much higher participation rate uh 68.3 across the district uh 263 out of 385 certificated staff at sites uh classified is this classified this is certificated i'm sorry so the this data set well the survey was originally sent out to administrators as well we threw out those responses for the purposes of this data display and so it's classroom teachers it's title 1 teachers speech therapists all the support staff and one thing that uh i want to point out to you is at on the site column down the left hand side it says district itinerant those are our teachers that move from site to site so that would include our fine arts specialists our music teachers our pe teachers etc if i may um in designing these surveys was there room for comment as well there was thanks have access to those comments later on we will not see those later on at the board meeting i can easily make them available to you though thank you okay so overall 61 60.1 percent favored said they would like to come back and work should a waiver pass and 39.9 said no and you can see the variances down the list of sites any questions here on the certificated data okay classified staff was also surveyed on pretty much the exact same survey as certificated staff with a little slight change in wording and you can see there um quite a favorable response to coming back to work and bringing kids back to school in person so 73.1 percent uh favored coming back and 26.9 said no we see kind of generally by sight the rates are fairly high the exceptions there are chapman in sierra view interesting any questions no yes tim uh am i reading correctly that on for example chapman 45 is 11 staff members and 54 is 13 staff members okay thank you okay there's no more questions we'll move on to our uh chico unified teachers association survey data they gave us a similar survey but with more details and uh specific to to their needs so i'm going to ask kevin moretti to unmute and kevin i'll flip through the slides for you okay i'm still seeing the title page so the first three questions i asked one was i wanted everyone's name to make sure they were actually a teacher at that site at what site they i asked them all to pick a site and then um well and then what their position was because i wanted to divide this out by uh the classroom teachers tk through five and then all the others uh slps rsp scc because it occurred to me you could have you could make this work if the classroom teachers were doing it you could still have those other teachers doing by zoom in in the in the off session if we were in a am pm because might be a possibility so that's why i broke it out this way so um see the first question i had 251 responses and uh you can see the breakdown there i asked the question a little bit differently and you can see it up there if you go to the next sign mr moretti before you move on um what is the percentage of uh responses huh 251 answered this survey and there's about what 700 teachers no no because this is only elementary so yes it's about 3 35 we'll get to that slide that'll show up when i break it out yeah you bet so this so question four was just do you want your school to apply for a waiver right yes or no and let's know you're done okay so if we could go to question five so then i want to know because you might want to waiver but but question uh five was would you be willing to add and drop kids from your roster because not every kid in your class if you were teaching a person is going to show up so how do we account for that so the yes this went down from whatever they were before i think it was 117 down to 72 of those and then i and then the other questions were just like these are just what is you know would you still want to do it what if so if you'll go to question uh six please so would you be willing to move to a different grade level because it might work out that you know all the third grade teachers want to do it but none of the fourth grade teachers want to do it um and so what would we do in that case so that was this question and question seven is um what if everybody at one school wanted to do it but nobody the other would would you be willing to switch schools to make it happen and and so that's that was the purpose of that question so those aren't real popular popular ones and certainly not as popular as people wanting to get back into uh in the classroom with kids so then i went by hand and broke it all out by school site and then by position either a classroom teacher for lack of a meta word or a sec whatever so that's what this next slide is and this is the information that you're asking for so uh if you look at the total at the bottom we had a so this is just with question four so i had 117 yeses and 127 nos and 102 respond uh no responses so if you so 346 was the number you were looking for linda thank you that was the total so this is just breaking it out by side with those two groups broken out into yes and no and then you can um and then you can uh uh oh it's the percent yes over here the percent yes and then either no or no response when is it in the yes kevin when you are identifying chapman other you're talking about the teachers or the that provide a range of services they're not in a classroom right so so so the others on top you go to the bottom right there's chapman tk through five so that so other is everybody that's not that so that's the sec teacher rsp teacher the speech pathologist the nurse the um anybody else that's in my bargaining group that's not a tk through 5 teacher understood so that that was that is my part unless you have any questions well i'm a little concerned about the data kevin if you don't mind my saying so just because i'm looking at uh the seer of you other column where you've got yes three no response two but the yes rate came back as a hundred percent oh uh you know i didn't put those percents in i can look at my i can i sent you my original data this is a slide that that um yeah district put together yes kevin i'll take a look at that and and get an update to the board that was that was me putting in the percentages okay so uh tom i i sent you the i've got the original uh i'll recheck my email i can find the the other data see if it matches up or not thank you there was some oh just there was a question about how this data might have been different not tonight but i'll address it anyway uh how this data might be different from the districts and and when i sent out mine and people asked me why so many no responses and it could be people got confused they can already answer this um you also why am i doing a survey again might have might have been one one reason some people misinterpreted the district's question yes that was in the comments that i got where they thought um they misread the question and i sent out a clarification and kelly sent out a clarification but i sent my survey out after and people said that told me they misunderstood the districts was they were taking it as will you teach in person or or quit is how they interpreted it which is not what the district meant at all so if there was variations that might be um it was a misunderstanding on the teachers that took the district survey and um and then for mine also i sent it out as a blast email it made it have ended up in their clutter folders but mine closed tuesday after memorial day on memorial day i sent out an individual email to everyone who hadn't voted to remind him i was closing the next day so i'm pretty confident it didn't stay in there that that would have gone through but those are some things that might explain the difference i think tim can clarify the data yeah i was i'm sorry i was taking a little bit off guard earlier but i want to point out the sierra view other and 100 percent there there was three yeses and zero no's so the percentage is not out of the total staff it's out of the respondents ah right got it are there do you have any other questions for me anybody else have questions no i do not thank you you're welcome okay thank you very much kevin okay so we're just going to go back to the process that we kind of talked about at the last board meeting and what steps that we're going through and then so our first process was to help our school sites and our district to send out a survey to all of our parents and all of our classified and certificated which we have done and what you just saw the results also our step two we were going to bring back the results to you guys tonight which we are and then step three we wanted to give steps three and four are negotiation updates and i'm going to kind of let mr hanlon talk about um slides on steps three and four okay so um we have met with cuta we met on september 10th and we are planning on meeting every two weeks with that group specifically on coming back to school in some form either through the hybrid model when we move into i guess the red color or a waiver because those things as you'll see as i discussed this overlap um quite a bit and we also are meeting with csea we have a meeting scheduled for september 24th october 15th and the 29th those closely mirror the cuta meetings so that we can coordinate the two agreements we currently have a collective a bargaining agreement where under normal circumstances all the working conditions are laid out specifically for staff and then we also have an mou for online instruction and what we're negotiating now as something different some kind of a hybrid model whether it's in a waiver format or if we come back in some some conditions under under the level red just for some clarification under a waiver we're required to consult with our union our unions about their concerns and issues that they bring up with coming back under some kind of a hybrid model but the but the state requires that we negotiate with our unions anytime there's a change in working conditions so if we change the working conditions from the contract that we have agreed to then we have to come back to the table and negotiate there's really not a way to implement a waiver without changing the working conditions for example we're going to be talking about the instructional day the length of the day the starting and ending times possibly splitting up students into two groups or whether it's in a in a morning afternoon format or in every other day so those are all working conditions that by law we have to negotiate so yep of the things that i was curious about is uh my understanding is the elementary waivers are site by site they may be yes okay and we saw some very different survey results from parents from teachers and from staff at different school sites so when you're negotiating a union contract and yet there's only a couple of schools who are actually wanting to go for the waiver um how does that happen so we can even negotiate different waivers for different school sites so um with some minor minor changes depending on what um what comes out of that school site so we've had conversations with our principals depending on the survey results that go back to their staff and um and with their parent groups and try to come to get to some agreement because again we're changing working conditions so we we want to have some agreement on the front end so that when we go to the bargaining table it's much more effective um and and easier simpler to reach an agreement if we have buy-in from all the all the parties so we know from the data that there are groups of teachers that are interested in doing something at different grade levels maybe and how that will look at each site may be different and i would expect it to be different we currently have mou's waivers for parent conferencing and collaboration that are slightly different from from school site to school sites so this is something we've done before so we can be flexible eileen did you have a question yes yeah and there may be most of it probably will be common but there'll be some differences jim i just have a concern that if not all of the elementary school sites choose to participate in the waiver and you've got parents at a site that chooses not to participate can those parents elect to transfer to another school that would be a bigger decision um that that we'd have to have a conversation on because that may um impact some other areas of the students that are already there what do you do with them there's because there are case class size limits also that that's right we only have so many so many spots in in different schools we do have a form 10 process for inner district transfers but that is on space availability and that would apply here as well and uh that form 10 may be the governing tool because to assess a site that has the waiver as not having room because in order to add more students you skew the balance of the size of the cohorts and the size of the amp pm classes so that that may be something that the district would have to implement is a strict look at the um the form 10 and the impact of accepting movement can we see that now but this would add a lot of complexity to that for sure and parents would have to also take into account we don't know how long before we go into stage two or co or level red or or you know the next stage um it may be a month it may be the rest of the year we just don't know so they may be making a long-term decision here for for just a short amount of time and that may not be in their their interest or their child's interest also it's just there's a lot of unknowns and eileen the principles have started going back already and taking a look at the information they have if you think of it almost as a mathematical puzzle to see if the percentages can match up in some way shape or form that'll work for those that are interested and those that are interested to come back in person they've started looking at that and will start actually re-surveying and checking again to try to get a more refined uh accounting what their families want to do and what their staff wants to do also so um there's a lot of overlap there's a significant amount of overlap between coming back in a hybrid model that that you had voted on a couple meetings ago in a waiver so we are negotiating those in tandem because the the issues and conditions are very very similar we have a we do have a deadline our current mou for online instruction is only good through the end of this calendar year december 31st for both for both union groups so um we would obviously like to have an agreement well before that um um and that and that's what we're working to that end um i'm gonna take over that okay so where are we at now so we have like i said we had met with cuda we have made a lot of um cota which is the teachers union we have met with them once already um we've reached some some some tentative agreements on some very key issues already so just to give you an idea how quickly we're moving um now we can always hit a roadblock with with um anything but um we have we do have a very positive relationship with both groups and so it's been a very constructive and positive process we've reached some some tentative agreements on general areas such as personal protective equipment face coverings hand washing adherence to health department guidelines physical distancing we're really with physical distancing we're talking about class sizes there's no way to guarantee that kids are 100 percent of the time going to be six feet apart but if we have smaller groups it's much easier to to make sure that that happens so we're talking about class sizes supervision duties school ingress and egress points and then um not having things big big group meetings like open house in assemblies so we've we've talked about and reached some general agreements on those issues that we still have to negotiate on are instructional minutes health screening testing and notification sub coverage the the cuta members that work in the after school program their coordinators they're part of the the um the association medical leaves coven 19 exposure procedures and then the duration of the mou so we have some work to do but we've also made quite a bit of progress thank you any questions on any of that no thank you for your efforts you your team and and the unions as well thank you so this next slide i'm going to have uh mrs staley and myself kind of go through um our proposal i want to make sure i'm not talking out of turn sure so at our last board meeting we said uh laid out several steps that we would go through and at each step we said we would bring it back to the board for approval before moving on to the next step and we had approval from the board to do step one which was survey the school sites we have done the survey we have presented those to you so that is our step two step three is an update on the negotiations actually step three was we would negotiate with the unions uh we are doing that uh step four was the update back to the board on those negotiations step five is where we actually now need board action and approval to move forward and um i think i speak for all of us that we look forward and want to have our students back with their peers back with their teachers in a safe environment and certainly we want to find a way for those teachers that want to be back teaching to be able to be with the parents and the students that want to be back and that is the intent of the waiver is to try to match that up there are complexities which we've been sharing you know it is not a straightforward process but each school site has different data each school site has different grade levels where teachers are interested we could have a school site where let's say tkk and one all want to return to in-person learning great let's try to find a way to make that happen that may not be the case at another school site so with step five what we are asking is for the board to charge us to go back and work with individual school sites to find out for each school site how do we make this work we know that we cannot force teachers to come back to work when we are in a stage purple or down the color so we have to do this with people that are volunteering we also know we can't force students to come back when we're in a stage in the color purple so it's really going to uh require cooperation to find a way to make this work also i just want to add that we are our principals at our sites believe that they can get out of survey we've already given them that that they can get it out all by friday except for chapman's going to take their they would take out a new survey to their parents they believe that they could get a higher number working with their parent organizations and them coming out from their school to get a higher number percentage of parent participation as you saw that was pretty low so we really kind of want to get a true number for that also they believe now that they've been doing uh volunteer staff meetings to talk to the teachers with their union representatives about what this could mean with safety guidelines so they're more clear and we believe that we'll have a more clear number of how many teachers want to come back to work versus not to because we had a lot of the schools a third of their teachers didn't even vote either so we want to make sure we can get more of a sense so we think that we can get that done those surveys done by wednesday of this next week have haven't turned in so that's what we're kind of hoping also yes kathy um so i think uh getting deeper into the weeds as you're saying is really really critical and we've had a communications some of them personal about people misinterpreting or misunderstanding or thinking they were answering the question one way to get a certain result so i absolutely think we need to go back and really encourage them to consider what this means for them but a lot of the comments that were coming into us had nothing to do with the elementary waiver and so i just want to state two facts that people may not be aware of one is that orange county way way way way bigger than us tried to go against the state regs and it went all the way up to the state supreme court and the state supreme court said no one can go against the state's regulations for reopening schools i.e applying for a waiver so right now there is no question that there are no secondary waivers we are only talking about elementary which for us is tk to five the second is there was a private religious school that was k to 12 and i want to say folsom fresno thank you that tried to go against the health department and the judge literally shut them down so we really want to stay i believe laser focused on what we can do and try to do it as best as possible with our parents with our teachers with our staff so i say go good points kathy and if i could just jump in ms griffin in looking at this step slide five i'm seeing at the very bottom that the timeline uh would be the next meeting we would get results from both our union negotiations and the surveys would come back to us at the next meeting next month is that correct i want to be clear on the timeline here because so i i do believe that the timeline may be different for each individual school but the goal is to bring surveys back at our next regularly scheduled board meeting correct i see yeah yes we met with we met with the elementary rituals today for about two hours and kind of walked through all the possibilities here letting him know it's going to discuss tonight and just kind of to give them some forewarning about what they might need to be doing moving forward depending on what the board's will is with this so several they're very excited i have a staff that's very excited to kind of look at how they could take those next steps we told them possibly we might like to have them have a update ready not a final draft ready for the october 7th workshop but also that if they could have something in place by the 21st that we can move forward at that point with it also if that was the will of the board also very good thank you thank you okay one of the things that i want to stress and i have to say that this was an idea that i advocated for with the superintendent because i really do believe that when people design something they take ownership of it and they want to make it work and having this type of thing is not a top-down type of order you can give your staff that you need to put the word out there that we will do everything to help you and to encourage your cooperation and collaboration but you know it's just like with anything else if you're forced to do it you know you may not have the buy-in than if you designed it yourself and you're the one who helped create it so that was one of the main reasons that i thought this was going to be a good way to approach this plus seeing the results of these surveys you can look at the surveys uh in a couple of different ways and certainly there is support there's quite a bit of support for parents coming back however you do have to take into consideration the number of parents who did not respond um having a participation rate of 38 that's just barely over a third you know that participated in this and so we we have to find out what that group of people the additional people are thinking we would not be doing justice to all of our parents if we just ignored the other percentage that just didn't take part in this so another good reason to go about with this approach um so anyhow that's just really what i wanted to say and um at this point um you know this did you want to proceed with others or did you want to how did you want to do this miss daley well the remaining steps um you know are would still need to come back to the board so i think this would be a great time to hear from our public people that have submitted speaker cards we do have three speaker cards and i will check with erica behind me to see if we have anybody who has submitted into the website to see if there's other speakers okay then we'll go ahead and we'll proceed with the people who signed up to speak with regards to the elementary waiver and mr shepard i think you're okay i'm calling matt tennis hello matt okay matt you are live addressing the chico unified school district board hello uh good evening everyone let me mute my phone i'm not hearing anything on the phone matt so you should matt can you hear me you should just speak speak into your phone don't speak into your computer speak into your phone no computer's been muted terrific we can hear you go ahead on my phone okay um thank you good evening everyone matt tennis is my name i'm the organizer of chico parents for in-person learning which now has well over 300 members of parents and other concerned community members who have recognized the importance of in-person learning and we want to put children first and we want to get them into the environment that they critically need and that is a classroom environment where there is in-person school working with the teachers and staff that they know and love so we are committed to that um and you will continue to hear from us on that until that reality is restored for all the kids in the system um i think the reason why a lot of people did not respond to the survey is because we are completely frazzled out here and i hear from my constituents and you've heard from them i've read your comments not a single comment that you guys received in writing against the idea of pursuing a waiver every single one of the 12 comments that i see posted on the agenda it contains heart-wrenching stories about the need to get kids back in school okay as far as the survey results are concerned there is a very very broad majority consensus that both or all three parents teachers and staff majorities strong majorities of all those people want to go back to school and some of your guys's comments and interaction with each other there were a couple of members who mentioned how you know it seemed like there was only a couple of schools where people actually wanted a waiver that is actually opposite of the truth if you look at these survey data which i'm looking at right in front of me on paper neil dow and chapman are the only schools where certificated staff did not want to go back every other single school had strong majority or at least a simple basic majority of staff teachers that is who wanted to go back and then the classified staff results are even strong more compelling than that even more of those people want to go back and the parents i'll just reiterate again strongly want to go back i'd like to comment on the cuta data and i want to give a little shout out here to kevin maretti because i asked the district for questions one two and three of the survey data and because those were not initially released to the public and he informed me of what those questions were where those teachers they had to identify themselves for purposes of the cuta study that's a problem okay every single one of us knows that that's a problem and that that cuta data is tainted by the fact that it was not um anonymous okay so the district data is much stronger and objective more more objective than the cuta data um and as far as why some teachers didn't respond i i don't really have an answer for that but um mr tennis i'm sorry your time is up so mr tennis your time is up so i'm going to hang up thank you for your feedback yeah thank you thank you all right bye [Music] okay we have a heidi dausman i think we do hi hi hi this is john shepard are you are you you're now unmuted and you are addressing the school board okay thank you so much i first off i just want to say thank you for all of our teachers i know that they're working incredibly hard especially in the elementary school level to make sure that these kids are getting as much as they can give them unfortunately though i feel like in a lot of ways we've checked off a box for our kids and i don't really think that's fair for them no one deserves to go through life just checking a box and we definitely shouldn't be doing that for our kids they deserve the most that we can give them and unfortunately i feel like we aren't giving that to them right now their mental health is definitely being impacted i have a 7 11 and thirteen-year-old boys who are very active luckily i have them in a couple other things that keep them going but um my seven-year-old melted down last week and he's not one to really do that i held him and asked him what was wrong and he said i just really really miss school and when is coronavirus going over the recommendations from the cdc the who and the pediatric association all recommend children going back to school so i see you guys are taking the steps i just want to ask you to continue fighting the fight because quite honestly i'm done with my kids in this program i'm done with them doing zooms i know many other parents are as well and have pulled their kids out i'm on here tonight because i care about my community and i care about the kids in the community and um i could have saved my energy but i know how important this is for our kids and i just want to ask you guys what happens when these students start leaving because i know that we aren't the only ones and that there are going to be many others who are following and looking for other solutions so where there's there's opportunity either we solve it for our customer or the competition will solve it so i just ask you guys to keep that in mind that other solutions are coming and people are looking for other ways to continue education for their kids and to give them the best that we can definitely i'm sorry but this this platform that we have the zooms where it's crashing the kids are being kicked out they're being told to email their teacher and they're not being let it back in it's it's just not working and the little ones they can't handle it we were just given information on how much they need to turn in per week for seven years old they have to be on the computer doing four i readys two reflex greens and also two ar quizzes a week on top of submitting their work daily through a system this is so much for them to do on a computer at seven years old personally i've been in many virtual trainings and within a couple hours as a grown woman it's pretty daunting but as a seven-year-old child by 10 am they're they're just done they're asking when can i be done so for my children they are and we're taking them out and we're looking forward thank you heidi your time is up thank you okay thank you heidi and we have one more jody taylor i'll be calling jody now hello this is jody hi jody you are now addressing the chico unified school district board okay i'm going to go ahead and mute the tv i apologize for that so um i my husband and i are parents to three elementary age students in the district and i like like the previous caller i can tell you that zoom based education distance learning it just does not even come close to replicating the classroom and it is it's not the same i can't really describe the struggles we're seeing in our kids all three of them i won't go into detail on that here but we're seeing social emotional behavioral changes in them that we have not seen before and this is taking an emotional toll on our kids that is very real so sorry i'm emotional about this but turning turning my thoughts to the waiver process so when it comes to the new step 5a in the application i have two points that i'd like to share the first is i know the board wants buy-in from families but let's be realistic if a huge portion of families didn't respond to the survey it isn't likely that they'll jump in and get involved in drafting their own school sites reopening plan it's just not realistically going to happen and also i wanted to note that many teachers teachers didn't also didn't respond to the survey so i know you want feedback from everybody and involvement from everybody but you didn't get it on the survey um i don't know that having them draft the plan is going to bring that about either the second point i want to make is that i really feel that the district is abdicating its responsibility here in placing the burden of coming up with this plan on individual school sites the district should be leading here with a plan from the district and outlining a path for students and teachers who want to stay with distance learning and a path for students and teachers who want to plan on returning to classrooms and then consulting with the school sites on specific items as needed you know to fill in the details of the plan i'm frustrated as a parent the district did not allow for any individuality from school site to school site when they were planning distance learning it was everybody on chromebooks everybody on the same curriculum everybody on zoom there was no personalization from school to school but now you're turning it over and giving each school site the chance to just completely customize their return to the classroom and that feels very scattered and haphazard to me um and and i have a problem with it i feel like you're putting your responsibility of the district on the shoulders of school staff and school families in closing i just want to give a shout out to our teachers though they are working their tails off for our kids and i know that many of them want to be back in classrooms i know our kids want to be back in classrooms and they need to be we just need to make this happen thank you jody your time thanks thank you jody so we do not have any others that have left uh phone numbers for us to call they have left comments which we will attach to the agenda as we have the other comments okay alrighty so i guess at this point what we're discussing is approval and determination of implementation of step number five i do want to address you know the comment that miss taylor our last caller said and by no means are we telling the schools go figure this out we met with them today to help with this we will help with all of these safety measures all of those pieces that we go through we will do this side by side with them but due to the drastic differences in the grade level responses the interest that are from site by site i don't see i could be very wrong i do not see how you can have a district-wide plan with such variances of at each individual school site yes kathy so i want to urge us to move forward with step five i believe that well for one thing i believe we have extremely qualified and engaged leadership at our elementary schools yes i think they will very much work with our teachers and our staff and those teachers can reach out to the parents and encourage them if they didn't respond the first time or if their opinions have changed people do change their opinions that they can give feedback but just in the context of people saying you know we're taking our kids elsewhere the rules that were given were for the entire county regardless of what kind of a school it was that's why i gave the the citation of the judge who just shut down a private religious school in another county because that school violated the county health rigs and that was the end of it so we have to follow those regs and those regs say site by site i'm really hoping that the our we have our district learning uh group that's been very effective and our principles working with our own administrators with ted that we will get strong leadership about what it is that a school site thinks that they can do with their parents and their staff i have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old grandchild i really want it to happen but you know i'm not in the driver's seat on how that school makes their decision the parent was so we live with that kathy or just to give a little more flavor to it part of the discussion today with the principals talked about if this was the will of the board to move forward we would schedule some joint planning sessions with all of them together so the updates you would see a lot of comparability with those kinds of things just to make sure we're addressing all of those elements like like superintendent staley shared you would see maybe some slight variation depending on staff interest as far as what they're able to do within the contractual limitations like mr hanlon was sharing also and that's why there needs to be a little bit of variance because we do need to match up to what we're able to negotiate with those different groups at those different places but there's definitely interest there's definitely desire there would be a lot of comparability to it and where we needed to have a little individualization i think that's where you would see that happening with it yes tim yeah i wanted to clear up our our first speaker um mentioned that the cuta survey was not anonymous ours was in fact not anonymous either that we sent out it was validated via google so they had to have a google chico usd google account that was used to double check their answers of where they taught what their what their exact position was so we did have validation that that our teachers were at the people answering the survey were our teachers it was behind a password also within that data that um that mr karas has sent out to them today is able to break down every parent's grade level that it came from so our principals now will be able to break it down from what grade level that those parents would say when they come back compared to what teachers that we say that we can have come back also and again the district office today was superintendents daily myself director sullivan and also assistant superintendent hanlon helping the principals we've also set up meetings again for next week for us to sit down with them and help them through this process we're not just leaving them hanging out there we will continue to support them in any way we can but they're going to have to be able to know their complexities of their differences from one school to the next or what grade levels for parents and teachers but they will get that information to us this next week so we can help them with the waiver process to bring back to you guys and as far as the parent participation question we do have mechanisms better mechanisms at each school site to communicate with parents is that not true i mean we have school site councils we have ptos we have targeted case managers who actually go out and visit families i think the principals are just kind of waiting to hear your guys decision tonight to start trying to put some of those mechanisms in place to get the word out so to speak and get get responses back yeah so it's it's uh there's a lot more participation um we have had our lcat meetings and we have had a good number of parents participating in those as well and um something that they are really wanting to be involved in if this is an issue that's dear to their hearts um and we set up the right circumstances and provide things like you know an opportunity then um i believe we will get the people we need several principles shared also with them sending home an email it comes directly from principal allen at chapman so to speak he is much more likely to get a response from his chapman community parents than me sending something to them because his parents don't know me but they do know him and he has a connection with them so if he's sending something out looking for information from them they're much more likely to be responding to him on that personal level with those things right and you know another another thing i just want to mention is you know we had a speaker who indicated that there were over 300 people who were supporting his efforts to get people back in school so this would really be a great opportunity for them to participate with their local school that their children attend to help with this effort because um you know they're very interested and and they should be voicing you know their what they what they would like to have happen so i would highly uh encourage them to do that oh sorry eileen no that's okay i was just wait waiting for my turn um i'm not surprised that everybody isn't in the same pattern for getting this implemented i mean that's why our schools are different that's why we have form tens is people pick and choose what fits best so i'm not bothered at all wanting to make everybody the same please no don't do exactly what you've done by going to the sites and the principals and saying you know let's let's do what this school and this staff and these parents want i i just fully support the anonymity of um our different school sites are our school site populations i don't see anything on the step 5 waiver process that that i feel a need to modify if it's appropriate and emotion is in order madam president i'd like to move that we direct staff to move forward with of step five with a report back at the next regularly scheduled cusd meeting if that timeline still is appropriate okay so we have a motion by eileen robinson a second by dr kaiser with the specification that um we have this come back to us at the october 7th meeting um any further discussion from people um uh linda anything else you'd like to say i have agreed with all your comments and i would just like to see this go forward so we'll get some some more data and make this process move along so i agree let's go okay so i will go ahead then and call for the vote all those in favor of moving forward with step number five with the report back on the seventh please say aye aye aye okay that's unanimous so we will move forward with that and um really looking forward to hearing what all the schools have to say and how they see themselves moving forward with this waiver if they decide to do so madam president may i uh approving step five leads into step six is what we will be facing on the seventh of october correct miss steely on october 7th we will come back with an update from each school as well as the survey data from each school site i think that you know that's two weeks away if there are school sites that have plans ready to bring forward we can certainly bring those forward at that point i think the school side for uh looking at their target date was the regular october board meeting okay but we will leave the door open absolutely and you know if you've got people who are highly motivated and they want to move forward with this we will definitely take that under consideration at that next meeting okay okay great thank you for clarifying that eileen all right so our next item is um the public hearing discussion action on the uh williams textbook sufficiency for the 2021 school year and this comes before us every year it does it does so education code section 60119 requires that each pupil within the chico unified schools should be provided sufficient textbooks and instructional materials aligned to the content standards and consistent with the cycles and content of the curriculum frameworks in the areas of history and social science mathematics reading language arts and science so the attached certification of provision of standards aligned instructional materials states that we are currently sufficient for the 2020-21 school year as such the ed services department requests approval of resolution number 1524-20 madam president yes i move approval we need to open a public hearing oh i'm sorry yes all right okay i open the hearing all right i this one we always kind of it's such a unusual little item um i'll open up the public hearing um for anyone to make any comments about this uh the williams act so in the textbook sufficiency no they they have to submit through the website and i i believe we did have a mechanism to do that earlier on and we and i at least there's no speaker request for this one okay so there's no speaker request so it would just be a matter of week we can talk about it and then close the public hearing and then we will take our vote so if you want to comment on it at all yeah kathy so i had just asked this question as a clarification and i i got an answer but i'd like to present it publicly um in the resolution uh in the second paragraph to the bottom it says whereas laboratory science equipment was available for science laboratory classes offered in grades 9 through 12.
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okay is there any uh but so if a parent has chosen to stay with the remote learning is there any attempt to ask them to consider changing that or are we just letting it no the direction has been from the commissioner of education that parents and from the governor that parents have every right to um select remote and we it's the parents decision oh yeah i understand that i'm just thinking about you know maybe contacting them to find out you know explain or like at least uh inform them about how it's going so that they have that information as well because they might not know you know many of those families anecdotally have shared with us that they're making those decisions based on um very serious health factors in the home um so it i would personally never bring that up to a family because i you know i don't know the reasons that they're you know not everybody's sharing reasons so we're we're just embracing the family decision and and supporting everybody the best we can okay that that sounds good and we've also talked react to all those families through parent meet and greets and then we also had every teacher call every single student in the school the week before uh school started and myself have gotten tons of emails and we're we're not instead of emailing back we're calling families so a lot of those are the remote ones as well so we're filling them in answering questions as well okay that valve that's great so they're getting as much information as they they need great thanks and it's good for you to know i think as well if you know what their concerns are oh absolutely thank you thank you any other questions okay hearing none concludes my report this evening my password um unfinished business is there any i don't think so uh new business and that will go over to policies and i will turn it over to either prison or chris or whoever would like to or sue or whoever is prepared to tell us about these i'll unmute myself um i'm happy to run through the list of policies and give brief explanations as to why we are recommending changes as you might imagine the vast majority of them have are just uh simple updates to make sure that we're in compliance with any new federal state laws or regulations um that relate to the covid pandemic uh so the very the very first one 1010 um i believe is a actually a brand new policy and it's uh it just explains the process uh for implementing and then repealing the temporary policies um and feel free uh superintendent heck to jump in if i'm missing anything uh policy 1470 concerning health and safety protocols uh the same sort of thing it's a new temporary policy that allows the administration to develop the necessary health and safety protocols so this is actually a revision i believe of an existing policy um to reflect that privately owned technological devices including desktop computers can be used during instructional time um if specifically permitted by the instructional staff it was also revised to reflect the improper use of such technology is prohibited when it is being used for school or at a school sponsored activity all right um policy 1240 so this is a temporary revision uh to allow the administration more flexibility in limiting or restricting non-essential volunteers into the school buildings and to require that they follow any of the district's health and safety protocols 1250 is similar it applies to visitors rather than volunteers 1330 again a similar policy but applying to other groups that might use school facilities in the period after hours and just to ensure that any groups are again following any health and safety provisions enacted by the administration uh 1455 the green cleaning programs it temporarily clarifies that any disinfectant or sanitizer approved by the department of administrative services um is okay to use sorry i'm sorry that's okay uh let's see it changes that one 35 41 uh transportation uh newly revised language uh due to changes in the law and also temporarily being revised to note that the district is going to be requesting that parents volunteer to transport their kids to school and also it notifies parents that they are responsible for the safety of their children while walking to and from the bus stop and that they are expected to follow social distancing and mask wearing and any other health and safety rules all right uh ones from the 4000 series 4112.5 employment checks uh this has been revised because the timelines for um or the ability to get uh state and national criminal record checks has it's not been as easy as it once was so the policy was revised to accommodate uh any delays four one one two dot nine oh actually we're not doing that one whole story 8.1.1 sex discrimination and sexual harassment that's a personnel policy uh it's been revised in accordance with new title ix federal regulations uh that became effective in august um this is actually a policy that um you would probably appreciate if we could approve it tonight since it needs to be approved as soon as possible honestly i'd appreciate it if you approved all of them tonight but i guess we'll see where we get to because the modifications um in particular and a couple of new policies that would be great if we could do that all right um 4118.4 use of district computer systems uh revised to clarify the board's responsibility uh relative to computer systems uh specifically that noting that you know we've installed computers and a computer network on our premises and that we may provide other devices that can access the network but that we don't necessarily provide computers and internet access in locations other than on on board premises regulations and notices regarding electronic monitoring are also revised to specify that employees are expected to exercise appropriate judgment and may be monitored electronically when engaging in remote teaching or use of a digital teaching platform five one one two attendance truancy and chronic absenteeism uh this is a completely revised policy it basically we hadn't been using the shipment policy so their policy will replace our existing one it does include some temporary provisions requiring schools to actively monitor absences and collect data concerning medical absences to help the district identify any trends that might suggest spread of illness such as covid and again that's you know something that the state is now requiring us to do 5131 this is again one where we are replacing our existing policy with the shipments policy it also includes some temporary revisions to clarify that students may be disciplined including up to suspensions or expulsions if they fail to comply with the school's health and safety protocols developed around covid19 and it also allows for any expulsion hearings to be held virtually if it's not possible for us to meet in person 5134 use of district computer systems uh these have been revised again declare i mean it's very similar to the 1 4118.4 so we're really just clarifying the board's responsibility relative to the systems acknowledging that we provide a network and devices here but not necessarily in other locations [Music] uh it also includes some updates to reflect current federal and state statutory definitions that are unrelated to covid then we have 5141r which is a administrative regulation for health assessments we're changing over to shipman's model regulation it's also temporarily revised to address recent department of public health guidance specifically it implements flexibilities in the timing for required health assessments upon initial entry to school so if students are having difficulty getting a doctor's appointment to get the checkup that they need to go into sixth or seventh grade or ninth or tenth grade this allows for some flexibility with those requirements uh 5141.1r is pretty much exactly the same thing but it applies to immunizations so again students who are having difficulty getting in for those immunizations it gives them some flexibility or gives us some flexibility to work with them 5145.5 prohibition of sex discrimination and sexual harassment this is a student version of the policy discussed earlier there's another one that has updates based on new title ix federal regulations that went into effect last month so it needs to be approved as soon as possible 6172.6 credit for online courses this is also changing over to shipman's model policy it was revised somewhat during the summer to address closure of schools and allow for students to earn credit through distance learning programs and then 9321 time place and notice of meetings again changing over to shipments model policy uh see it does it actually doesn't have any uh updates that are required by the state due to covid but seemed like a reasonable time to just put it in place 9322 public meetings and executive session this is a revised policy again the revisions came from shipment after they reviewed their policies over the spring and summer these revisions aren't due to any new guidance for for covid but uh just to bring things into line with what they think is best practice and then finally 9325 meeting conduct [Music] again we've revised to the shipment policy oh and actually this does have some it allows the board of education to convene virtually and to limit or restrict public comment during virtual board meetings so it does have some some covert related items thank you okay so 4118.1 is the one that we correct the one that needs to happen immediately four one one eight one and five one four five five are the two that are most urgent i would also offer that the student discipline one and the transportation ones are also urgent which was five one three one [Music] and three five four one so do you like to make a motion to adopt all of those numbers this evening uh when you say all of those numbers do you mean all 21 policies or just the four that christian singled out sure so i'll make a motion then that the board go ahead and adopt on first read policy 4118.1 sex discrimination and sexual harassment personnel policy 5131 student discipline policy 5145.5 prohibition of sex discrimination and sexual harassment students and policy 3541 transportation do you have a second for that second sue uh is there anyone who wants to ask any questions or any discussion on this uh these particular policies um i have more of a kind of a general question or comment about the naming convention of these the ones that are specifically related to the kovic 19 and have temporary provisions i in reading the the new policy the temporary you know the 10 10 policy it clearly states that the header of each policy has to say that it's a kobit 19 with a designation i would suggest it needs to be in the file name as well you know consistently when i downloaded all the the packet the the word document linked were all done differently some said you know at the end they had covered revisions some didn't that did have code i just think when they're when they're put into the policy section on the you know on the website or whatever we should be able to clearly identify which ones that are temporary that are going to expire and which one's not by the file title so i'm sorry scott go ahead well i just think so that you know i mean you know most of these you were describing did have provisions that were were related and those expire on june 30th 2021.
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so maybe we just give a clarification to what we mean about that yes thank you i can do that so that the challenge lies in we are in an online learning uh delivery platform now knowing though that we could be shifting to in person so a resolution like this needs to cover all of that so the the system that we have set up right now does have the standards-based labs available to students if we are able to go back in person we also have those labs available so the language and the resolution covers both all right thank you so with that i would second the eileen's motion okay any further discussion around this if not i'm going to close the public hearing and we will take a vote this was a motion by eileen robinson a second by dr kaiser um all those in favor please say aye aye aye aye aye okay that's unanimous thank you and our next item is going to be a discussion action with regards to the learning continuity and attendance plan tina keene and before miss keene starts her presentation i do want to again remind our public that if you would like to comment make a public comment on this there's two ways to do that you may go to our website chicousd.org and under public comment at chicousd.org you can submit your name phone number and the item you want to address in this case the learning continuity plan if you leave your phone number we will call you back and allow you to address the board verbally or you can leave written comments and we will attach those to the agenda okay before you start i want to compliment tina because with this plan which was a new requirement by the state with an extremely short timeline she has included a translation into spanish and so i really appreciate that that was provided to our families so that they would be able to understand and participate fully so thank you tina good evening you're welcome my pleasure to do that that's important i do have a slide presentation that we'll go over here erica we'll pull this up i am back with the learning continuity plan i was here september 2nd for the public hearing part this is tied to compliance and i'll talk about that as we start out but the public hearing is part of that compliance and then coming around again for the final approval at the second board meeting actually the slides this is the plan uh looks like this that's not plain nice no it should look like should look like this one um thank you for your patience everybody no do want me to log in on you john you good job tina this better be really good after all that wait i apologize for that alrighty so again number two round here in the meantime between the second and the sixteenth today i've had the great fortune of sharing this with many of our site councils a large handful and have had more to go to that has been really fun because the the site councils this year have had a great turnout of people and it's been fantastic to provide this to them see their input talk and just generally talk with parents and staff so a little background on this plan back in june senate bill 98 was passed and that added a number of provisions to the ed code regarding instruction during the 2021 school year one of these provisions is edcode43509 which among other things requires all districts and charter schools to draft and adopt a learning continuity plan this plan requires a detailed description of the ways the district will address many issues related to in-person and distance learning now i don't want this to be confused with our lcap even though the the acronym is virtually the same typically every school year in the spring we involve a large group of folks from our site with including family members staff parents counselors you name it board members and we have quite a lengthy process to develop our lcap plan which contains our funding attached to the goals that we have for our district this year is a little bit different in that we do not have that typical lcap plan so senate bill 98 kicked off this piece of it and it is a very quick turnaround as i said it was approved to have this in june the template that we all have to follow all of the districts and charters as it is a compliance document that everybody must adhere to the template was released august 1st and everything has to be approved after a public hearing by september 30th so a very quick timeline to turn it around as we start school and and don't know how long we will be in this mode of covid so it's a little bit tricky that way and to share it with all of our stakeholders to see where we're at right now is it's great and it's it truly is a snapshot of what we have in place to go forward but where we are now and if we need to adjust and move how we do that so to highlight some of the pieces of the plan one of them is how the district will provide continuity of instruction during the school year to ensure pupils have access to a full curriculum of substantially similar quality regardless of delivery method a plan for ensuring access to devices and connectivity and that means for students and staff professional development is addressed and the resources that will be provided to staff including technological support how the district will address pupil learning loss that resulted from covid19 during the 2019-20 and 2021 school years i think i did mention at our previous board meeting but it's it's very important to mention it again that this plan actually does backtrack a little bit to march when we were ordered to go into online learning we had to very quickly turn around a um the way that we had instruction then and we know that pupil learning loss started truly back in that time frame and not exactly right as we started this school year and the plan must be approved by the local board by september 30th after a public hearing has been held so there were additions and corrections to the plan after talking and sharing with stakeholders and getting input we also worked with jeannette spencer from butte county office of education she is a great resource and support to all of our schools in our county and knows just a little bit more than than i do and and she would probably tell you she's just a little step ahead because again this is something that's come up very quickly upon everybody and we're all doing our best to put our heads together to do this correctly so i have these addressed for you i did provide board members and our superintendent assistant superintendent the updated copy of the plan but what i'm doing here and it's typical that we do this during our lcap when we make additions or corrections we come back after the public hearing and we have the changes listed and the pages you can find that so that's just a quick reminder back to last year's el cap when tim and i presented that at that point so in person learning i shifted some of the actions from contributing to not contributing and again these are based on recommendations from the county and our stakeholders what that means is uh in that section on pages 11 through 13 are our funding sources listed and contributing actions and not contributing mean exactly if it if the action the funding for the action contributes to the actual learning for the students or not now an example would be ppe protective personal equipment or personal protective equipment versus versus a curriculum so under jeannette's guidance that became very clear the online learning program there were some pieces that were added there we added specific language about aries attendance documentation on page 18.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so i just want i think we should know by looking at the file names which ones are that the ones that asked are listed right now you wouldn't know that it has covet specific information in it or not i i yeah i mean i guess as they're listed here um i don't know if you noticed when you open the files in the upper right hand corner you wouldn't you wouldn't know until you opened it it's my point true so when when we put them up on the website kristin can we have the c c19 yeah i'm gonna we're gonna ask um that can't do that they're the host of our policies and i also noted on the 1010 one i needed to note that as c19 as well um and i will change that in all of these that were a c19 for a second read as well um and i will ask dave to do that like yeah just it just thinks it'll be it'll be clear and then we'll know which ones have to be revisited when they expire but even though they might have edits that are permanent and some matters that are temporary but i think it'll be easier to know right up front which ones need to be looked at i agree that's a good point it's a great point and hopefully they will accommodate thank you for raising that uh do we have any other questions or discussion on these policies hearing nothing all those in favor of adopting the policies mentioned i opposed abstentions those ones pass we'll grab the rest next month and we'll move on to item f2 resignations thank you yes we have one requirement jamie ward his last day with us will be october 9th and we want to thank him for his dedicated service to bolton public schools and wish him health and happiness in his retirement and we have three resignations uh stacy bain leading paraprofessional at bolton center school aubry clark library media professional and polly book bliss pcs art teacher that is all i have there you ever popular future business do you have any no well i don't have anything under future business i would just like to offer a happy birthday to mrs malinowski his birthday this evening and i told her not to be honest meeting and i took her part of the super tennis report so i really should click off good night happy birthday sarah happy birthday happy birthday thank you good night well good night everybody soon because i will be learning motion to go into executive session for a discussion concerning the tentative agreement with teachers union and also for superintendent hecht to be invited into that discussion so moved uh do we have any discussion questions comments concerns all those in favor and thank you everybody
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again just to make it more specific and honing in on the details that that were not there before there was added language about professional development continuing based on staff needs previously we talked about the professional development we we have had in the last month six weeks but the importance of continuing forward with that professional development basing that on the needs of our staff as we go through the upcoming weeks and what all that entails there is added language about students with 504 plans receiving support on page 23.
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we wanted to make sure that was very clear as we talked about students and shifted again some actions from contributing to not contributing in-person learning is one section online learning is another section so that's why that shows up in there the funding shows up in both pieces we also are fortunate to have a good relationship with our el lead for butte county office of education and she happened to tune in to the public hearing and contacted me after with some feedback as well which was great so i added more specific language about continuing to partner with bcoe the el lead to share resources for our english learners and added details about faculty and staff meetings to review assessment to determine effective remediation or acceleration on the emotional health and social and emotional well-being section we added the importance of administration and i would i would probably add at this point everybody on a site checking in often with staff for continued support and open arms for our people and family engagement and outreach there was the addition of references to each site's re-engagement policy i've been in connection and talking with our principals to make sure that they have their steps laid out or their flow chart whatever it may be but making sure that all of the steps are sequential and an anchor to hold the site accountable to making sure that they follow all the steps to re-engage students if we see that they are not engaging under school nutrition there was an addition of heating instructions and weekly menus available to families those were specifically important those instructions we do know that some kiddos pick up the meals without families maybe with them and those instructions come in handy for them and the last part the increased or improved services for foster youth english learners and low-income students there were additional details put in there about how the percentage required will support foster youth english learners and low-income students so those were the additions that have made it into this revision for us tonight and uh i'll take any questions here our next steps would be upon approval the learning continuity plan will be shared with butte county office of education and then posted as approved lcp on our cusd website in english and spanish currently it is on there as a draft in english and spanish yes kathy yeah um i note that um the issue of attendance is if if a kid a student checks in then they're counted and we had several parents who were concerned that the student was checking in and then mentally checking out i mean okay i was here there was even a cartoon about it at one point where the zebra just had a a reproduction of its face and would just stick it up so the teacher would see it and then take it down so i know we're we're doing what the state told us but our teacher is able to sort of follow along and and see that the kid is actually disengaging i mean do we have you know a little better than just a check-in i think we do you know ted might want to join in as he talks to the principals or john a little more often than i do but from what i am hearing they are the teachers are really looking at students engaging and not and using the staff on their school site who know the kids and who know the families to reach out okay john do you want to add anything to that yeah so just in ted can address elementary for secondary there's there are also multiple other measures of engagement including the asynchronous time so the same day that students check in with their teachers if they need more follow-up they can do that during the asynchronous time and then the platforms that we're using it's not just edge annuity but the other platforms as well also gauge engagement to the data point that we can anyone any administrator excuse me any administrator can pull up uh screenshots of how long students have been um they've been logged in but then within that time how much idle time is is attributed to the student so there are multiple ways of measuring engagement good thank you elementary uses really it's teacher feedback and they have wellness teams right now that are kind of looking at how much students are actually interacting with teachers are they turning work in are they showing up for their zoom sessions and if they're feeling like this is a student that is a little bit awol right now they're not as connected not participatory that's part becomes part of the wellness team thing and everything from principal visits to home to check in tcm visits calls all those ways to make sure they're connected or to see what's getting in the way of helping them stay connected with those things i noticed i remember that one parent made a comment about i mean when they do the background and they can see all the kids in there then they get really you know they get a chance to at least say something or send something uh i know my kids uh his the teacher would let them share something you know a small group uh and then others were saying the kids were turning that off and i think she said then her daughter was the last one on and so then it was so i didn't know if that was showing up with other kids or actually i was just talking to the teacher from roseville today and she actually is built into her day a five-minute check-in with like five students a day where they just have a time to chat with each other for five minutes every day and it kind of rotates through and that's one of the ways that she helps them to kind of keep connected with each other keep connected with school and she just felt it was a great way for them to to be in touch with each other still i just think the more ways we can distribute and encourage that that kind of personal touch you know i see you i hear you i like your mask whatever okay was that yes tom i just because my comment kind of rolls uh out of kathy's um dr kaiser sorry um are we we've talked about uh making sure building into the secondary system more ways for direct instruction over zoom and some and flexibility for uh teachers to move away from engineer edge annuity and use some of their own content to engage with the students in the actual process of education where's can you tell us kind of where that's at i would love to i'm so glad you brought that up oh i always will thank you so last week we developed we finalized a process to to regain for teachers to regain some of the autonomy that they so cherish right now and we've heard it from parents we've heard it from teachers we've heard it from administrators and we've heard it from kids in zooms speaking with kids so and we heard it tonight as of this afternoon i've received 34 course course online adapted proposals and those have been approved um that was again it was finalized late last week people worked on them over the weekend so the process is for teachers to um to create and it's a systemic process we do not want to go back to where we were last spring where it was just all over the place even though teachers only had two days for the shift and then those proposals go to their department chair for high school and department lead for middle school then go to the um to the principals then to ed services and we have yet to not turn one back around within the same school day so the process has been expedited and implementation is is happening i want to add part part of that process is driven by sb98 and the the requirements that we have for accounting for instructional minutes as well as daily syllabi so that so that form is actually very detailed um and the reason for that is twofold number one to be compliant and number two to ensure that we are have course alike teachers on the same pathway moving forward and i do want to add while it is very detailed we do have many coaches that are coaching teachers through that process so as i said we have yet to not turn one right back around even though the form is detailed and we have some requirements we must meet we are turning those right back around i would like to add one last thing and i appreciate your comment and question tom because that's one of the this is one of the frustrating parts with this timeline is that we don't have a lot of time to get a plan see if it's working adjust if we need to based on feedback and and get it going so this is a perfect example of you know you put a plan in place and then you you make changes and shifts as needed to support folks so just a little piece to keep in mind with the september 30th deadline of a of a um an approval there are still obviously kinks that we're working out to better what we do ted will you step in between john and tim no don't go anywhere i want you all to give each other a high five right now that was amazing that you are got that together tina high five him hit him on the back if you have to because we've had so many parents and students have wanted some evidence that we were being innovative by this strength and the power of our own teachers and you just showed it and on that note um one of our pleasant valley teachers invited some of us to watch uh miss bainard's i believe ib english 12 i want to say and it was it was great um the kids were really engaged i stepped into a couple of the small rooms the small breakout rooms with them they were engaged they seemed happy to be there they were talking with her it was a really a much closer facsimile of what a classroom model looked like and it was really inspiring to see so shout out to her thank you very much for that okay thanks for that report um that was good to hear okay so before we take any action on this we do have some speakers who want to make comments yes i believe that we have four speakers uh mr oberlis and it's an updated phone number and we will we have mr tennis miss mcgregor miss isherwood and mr oberle okay so i just want to clarify and all these speakers are aware that they are speaking specifically about this item they're speaking to the learning continuity plan okay because i know mr oberli called about the other thing so superintendent stated my understanding with mr oberli was he would speak during item number nine items for the floor okay so that's okay that's important to know so we will wait until that but he's still speaking on something that wasn't on this agenda okay we'll go ahead with mr matt tennis i'll be calling him now hello mr tennis yes okay you are addressing the chico unified school district board thank you so much again matt tennis chico parents for in-person learning um i want to acknowledge the work of ms keane that you did in putting this together and i understand that we are in extraordinary circumstances uh right now and that's the whole reason that that you and staff are even in a situation where we're having to scramble to deal with um the kovid pandemic which is a serious thing but there is a gaping hole in this document regrettably that i think makes it almost totally worthless and that gaping hole is that there's no commitment on the part of the school district to report um publicly and you guys just in general in this lcp process or without this lcp process we are not getting any accurate or timely participation data on how many kids are actually participating in their zoom calls the standards for participation actually are are incredibly low by comparison to the old days when you know kids had to actually be attending school and not cutting class and stuff like that in order for you know for the school district to get get paid i'm not an expert on how that works but but it was important that people actually be there now if a child in my reading of this if a child simply calls in at any point in time during the day they are they qualify as having participated we need to at least know what the level of participation of kids is on an ongoing basis because i have a theory that a lot of families are steadily not participating at all and are increasingly dropping off the face of the earth secondly i think there needs to be a application process publicly available for the workday child supervision program that you speak about on page 24.
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so if that program is available there are the protected classes of kids who are in great need and we know that they're getting hit the hardest by this debacle so we need to make them available to them an application process and i think that you should also amend it to say that you will commit to making participation data available to the community as soon as possible we need transparency so thank you very much okay next is kelly mcgregor hello this is kelly hi kelly you are now addressing the chico unified school district board all right thank you so much mr shepherd thank you for the opportunity to speak today it was after conversations with many students fellow parents and respected teachers that i decided to share my thoughts with you my two sons a freshman and a junior at pv and i were thrilled when we heard that not only were teachers being allowed to adjust content and ingenuity they were being given the opportunity to fully teach their own courses then i learned of the requirements for the teachers to move out of vegemite a list so far reaching us to make it nearly impossible for many teachers to achieve if not impossible at least it has proven to be very discouraging the number of 34 submissions certainly illustrates this one teacher referred to it as being given a free trip to new york city the only caveat you have to walk there i fear these actions are an attempt at saving face with the parents at the expense of the teachers i hope you revise the requirements using an equity lens please do not require teachers to provide exhaustive evidence of their teaching plans to be allowed to move out of ingenuity when this wasn't required of teachers who never started in in the first place and it was not required of elementary teachers who in my opinion have been quite successful in their zoom classrooms as evidenced by the experience of my fourth grade daughter and marigold please use the purchases of a wide variety of new technology referenced on page 15 of the learning continuity plan to and i quote support teachers who are being asked to deliver high quality and engaging instruction entirely online use the future professional development trainings mentioned on pages 22 and 23 and budgeted on page 25 to bring teachers up to speed in online teaching pedagogy and techniques please make this process easier for teachers to teach their own courses support those that need it you have the resources our teachers are qualified not to mention award-winning professionals they are being paid to teach they want to teach if they think they can meet student needs better than edgenuity they can i would bet on them every time and i hope you will too thank you for your time okay thank you and we have aaron isherwood hello this is aaron hello this is this is uh the chico unified school district where you are now addressing the chico unified school district board thank you very much and thank you for your time everyone um i have two children in the chico unified school district my son is an 8th grader at marsh and my daughter is a junior at pleasant valley high school i understand completely that we're in a unique position with education right now we're all trying our best and have honorable intentions however the district's learning continuity plans usage of edge annuity should not be approved tonight your community is begging for a better solution i disagree with the most recent three minutes ago high fives on the success of customization of edgenuity even with those recent modifications and customizations my 4.0 8th grader and 4.2 gpa junior they're still struggling and experiencing learning loss i can't imagine what it would be like for a student who has a hard time with school in general ingenuity is isolating our students from their teachers and peers at a time when they crave and need personal connection the most ingenuity is causing my formerly motivated children anxiety depression discouragement and stress i know this is similar for a lot of children and not just my own i understand ingenuity was a response to the community's request for more continuity and rigor from the spring semester however using agenuity was an egregious over-correction unfortunately the comment in the previous board meeting on september 2nd was that there were no complaints with edge annuity with the oak bridge student population let me be clear comparing oakbridge students with pv and marsh and any of the secondary schools is a false analogy and a hasty generalization oakbridge students do not learn the same way as our students do the expenditure for this program is a gross misuse of state funding that can be better used to enhance google classroom and zoom learning experience where our kids can learn from their own teachers and not a stranger in a video as of right now the petition asking the district to get rid of edgenuity has close to 2000 signatures and it's growing still daily this petition is over two weeks old and you're still asking for help even with recent customizations those high fives were premature you're not done yet thank you for your time okay so that was uh the group of people who had signed up to talk did any staff want to respond to anything that was brought up okay because at this point then if not we will uh yeah i'm sorry you didn't ask if there was board response i'm sorry i yeah okay um one of the callers was talking about um the monitoring and verification of attendance and engagement as as being missing from being uh you know available to the public i do not feel that's a correct analysis of what ms keene presented in conjunction with what ted sullivan also presented that there is a tremendous amount of attention being paid by teachers that are monitoring those very issues and if there is a problem found there are supports in place at the school sites to involve other staff on the site the targeted case manager the principles at the elementary level especially and that the the ability of a parent to monitor this issue through the use of aries and going online to look at what the teacher is reporting about course completion and assignment completion and stuff that that ability to monitor by each family is there within the system so i don't feel that our um lc lc um ap er is in need of anything beyond what we're already doing i think we fully um well fully you can't fully in the circumstances we're in that that's not what i mean but to the extent possible we are making that effort knowing i mean for years our focus has been keeping a child in school and engaged because the loss otherwise of even a couple of absences a month can equate to you know missing a whole school year at the end of their education so that has been a focus it's a focus of our teachers it's a focus of our administrators and i believe our report represents that pretty fully thank you eileen tom thank you i share the concern of some of the callers about the use of ingenuity uh having taught both an independent study such uh context and in a regular classroom context they are very different groups of learners and we as one of the earlier callers said have a great resource in our uh teachers they're they're experts and i would like to add some kind of language to this that uh identifies our goal or a goal of moving as much as possible away from ingenuity and toward that i understand that we need to keep a baseline and then we need to keep uh a baseline of equal access for everybody and that ingenuity represents that in some ways but i do think it is important that we agree and make a statement that our teachers are the best educators we've got for our students not a genuity i have nothing against the use of ingenuity as a an umbrella or i say a floor perhaps um but i'd like to see some language that specifically directs us to move towards more uh customized and teacher-led instruction and and i don't think we disagree with that at all um you know when we when the board voted on july 15th our whole momentum was moving back to in-person learning combined with online instruction that was teacher driven and then when we had uh you know two weeks before the start of the school year we had to have something because we heard from over 4 000 parents that the zoom and the instruction where they might hear from a teacher one day a week and that was it read the chapter answer the questions they might hear from a teacher five or six times a day getting emails and instructions really that wanting to connect that there needed to be some continuity and that was the attempt here i will tell you i don't think any of us thought we would be here this long we really had hoped we would already be back and able to do am pm at best be back in that stage two um so that we could be seeing our kids providing those emotional supports providing the academic support the things that our teachers are trained to do but not all of our teachers are trained to do to deliver instruction via technology and it's and it is very frustrating for our kids for our parents it's frustrating for all of us when you listen earlier zoom is failing us they're crashing um you know my kid can't access it so you know i think the idea behind ingenuity was certainly to give something that was accessible a steady platform and now that we are going to be in it longer absolutely that's the work that mr shepard has been doing let's make sure that we still have continuity of education which is exactly what this plan is requiring us to do but yes we want our teachers that feel comfortable and want to do that presenting and sharing and working with their kids absolutely so the one uh comment that was made about uh all of these steps excuse me you have to take in order to be able to adapt your lesson plans and so you know to get away from using ingenuity 40 steps or some amount what validity is is there in that so there are some steps that teachers who are going to completely shift from an edgenuity based course to a google classroom based course for example we still need to ensure that the standards that were embedded in the course when it was originally board approved would still be in in that course moving through the rest of this semester and next year so when the form when you when people look at the form they see that requirement but what's explained to them when they start meeting with their administrators is it's not very difficult for them to identify the standards which we provide links to they really just need to provide a link to the standards and then describe in their form how those standards are going to be delivered so it can visually i could understand how it can be it can be daunting but once those conversations start i received one today that had a link to the standards for ap calculus and then they just described how they're going to deliver those standards so so it sounds to me like maybe a little bit more information should be put out there in the way of communication from the principles or however that you know this is it it may look really onerous but there can be you know there there are ways to tackle this which are not so burdensome because you you have gotten a number of people who have mastered this and have turned these in and it's it's certainly progressing you know along um but to get more people on board you know i i would say anything we yeah just to reinforce too that our speakers um wouldn't know that there's a frequently asked question supporting doc that goes out with it um there's there are links on that document that go out and so people wouldn't know that and i don't know when the speaker talked with the teacher but we've been responding to those needs as well for example originally we said we need a year-long plan because we want to be sure that two teachers teaching the same course who had addressed standards differently regardless of how they addressed them differently that all the standards would be included within a year-long course but in the last three days we realized that we can actually step that process in we can ask teachers first to individual we can talk with them about getting that first semester in and then working through that second semester not knowing where we're going to be second semester not only that but isn't a lot of this mandated by sb98 absolutely i mean this isn't something we invented and that's what i wanted tim to address that a part of this is we do have to account for the amount of time spent both asynchronous and synchronous um time so do you want to just briefly give some of the d yeah sb 98 came out over the summer and about i think about three weeks ago now cde came out with their suggested way of meeting the the requirements brought about by sb98 regarding accounting for instructional minutes accounting for course content taking attendance measuring uh engagement etc etc and we as a as a group i think we all agree that that cd guidance the the original guidance was would be we're trying to light it would be a horrendous load on on teachers and so what we're trying to do in our systems is uh meet the requirements of the law but put as little as we can on our teachers and as an example that the cde document that came out a few weeks ago had teachers doing this all on paper writing their class roster documenting their lesson plans every day of the week etc etc every week that we're we're engaged in in distance learning we think that um it's better better product if we get if we get that planning up front and we have that documentation um from the get-go so teachers aren't you know we want teachers teaching and thinking about teaching and not recording things as much as as we possibly can as they work yes kevin well just a clarification as a reminder uh funding is not driven by attendance this year our funding is based on our prior year so this is really a compliance issue and certainly is a challenge related to compliance because we'll still go through an audit and there's still potential for penalties if it's not done correctly but i just want to clarify to the board to the public it's not onerous for the point of trying to generate revenue that's been established in a different manner okay thank you but that's correct we don't know what penalties may be applied if we are not in compliance i would like to add one more thing sure real quickly if i could and it kind of expands a little bit on what superintendent staley had mentioned about the the word continuity and one of the things i've learned in this process is through our county lead is that this plan should really for everybody it should reflect the movement from in-person learning to online learning and perhaps back to in-person learning because we don't know which way things are going to go and we certainly don't know how long we will be in each of these kinds of learning pieces so so with the spirit and flavor of in-person learning what that looks like as we had thought in our hybrid model would be to online if we then go back and forth hopefully we do not go back and forth hopefully we're on the the positive way out of this but that piece of the continuity word is what this the cde meant okay gosh there was such a long discussion i sort of forgot where we were in this but i guess we're okay so tom your your main concern was having i would like some acknowledgement of and i'm looking at uh top of page 11 here in the plan where it seems we could add some language uh to just say something like uh you know teachers will be encouraged and assisted to transition to direct instruction over zoom with the understanding that is the preferred method of building community and maintaining emotional and social health within our with our students some language of that effect that indicates that we are aware of that and that is how we're moving uh i would support that would that be a very difficult thing to to add in at this point tina no not at all okay i think that's very appropriate um it's just really acknowledging that we all what's something we all are you know behind and we do want that to happen and it's just we want to make sure that we are doing everything that we need to do i i just think we need to be very clear that not all teachers will feel comfortable um or pursue that we do have some teachers that are very comfortable with ingenuity and like that flip classroom approach we have other people that have had very bad experiences um you know even some verbal abuse on zoom and so that is not where they want to be we're trying to provide other resources but i do think you know the goal we we want teachers teaching kids absolutely and that's why the preferred language would say something like encouraged so i'm certainly not going to lay down a fiat that says you have to because again teachers have different levels of familiarity with the company process okay so tina do you have an idea of of sentence that you could possibly add that would reflect what what tom is suggesting so i think i captured it but please add more teachers will be encouraged page 11. yeah teachers will be encouraged and supported in moving toward more involvement or i would say encouraged and supported in developing a teacher teacher driven teacher teacher facilitated instruction i'm just trying to get them is that capturing what you're thinking that every single one developed in curriculum and instructional methods i think we need to include not just the the delivery but also the development of the of the curriculum because that's really what drives that teacher okay so let me see if i capture this teachers will be encouraged and supported in developing teacher developed curriculum and delivery methods okay does that work for me does that work kelly do you think that meets the okay all right how how does everyone else feel about that because um i think we're at the point where we should be voting on this and if and if and if that's the only um change then we could approve it um on the basis of with stipulating that we would like that inserted at that point so i would need a motion okay do we have a second i'll second that thank you okay so we have a motion by dr kaiser is second by tom lando and unless anybody has something else to say or contribute we'll take a vote um all yes kelly so i i was worried about this so uh mr oberle did reach out and say what we're talking about right now is what he wanted to address and since we did try to contact him earlier i do think we need to give him that opportunity okay let's do that okay i'm calling him right now erica is linda still i'm here she's here hello hello mr oberle thank you for your patience uh you are now addressing the chico unified school district board okay go ahead okay thank you very much i wanted to um i wanted to address the edge annuity thing i know you guys are i've already sound like you made up your minds and stuff and yeah it's a difficult situation for everybody but my experience is i have two kids both in chico high school i'm going through a lot with the loss of one of my daughter's teachers as you heard earlier in the thing and just it's a difficult situation for everyone and i completely understand that um i've been a teacher for 27 years now i teach at butte college i used to teach at the high school level down in southern california and just my observations on edge annuity are nothing that hasn't been said before it's just i have two honors students who've never gotten anything less than an a they're really hard workers they're really good students in class and they thrive of course in the face to face as as we all know i know that's not a possibility right now so that's not what i'm saying um but the quizzes in there are tedious they're too specific uh the ideas do not flow from one idea to another there's no connection made and i understand completely from the teacher's point of view why they would not want to go through the process that was outlined by you and i understand you guys have you know some t's across and and eyes to god as well um but i think you know the online format you know was not ideal in the spring i get that i get the concern that parents had in the spring but you know we did you know the teachers didn't have any training and stuff and that's probably what summer would have been good for us kind of train on google classroom google me or whatever and hopefully um with you know this kind of an out that some of some of my kids teachers are not going to do just because of the stress of the paperwork involved um is not acceptable so i i just i want our teachers to teach and edge annuity is just it's sucking the life out of my kids love for learning and that's just as an educator i'm very upset about that and just i just want to leave you with the quote um education is not the feeling of appeal it is the lighting of a fire and that's what our teachers provide edgenuity does not thank you very much thank you okay thank you for participating uh okay so we're ready now i believe to take a vote um so this is once again approval of this plan with the addition of the sentence that tom suggested so all those in favor please say aye aye okay that is approved um all right so the next item we have is i believe because mr oberle was the only one who called in for items from the floor that that takes care of that any other announcements that people might have okay i'm not seeing anyone so it appears that we are able to adjourn we are adjourned thank you
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hello chris cooper superintendent clearwater schools here to give you a brief update about how things have been going in our district actually they've been going quite well considering everything um i would say they've been going amazing but they have not been going easy it is a difficult challenge before us and not just for staff but for students parents and everyone and we recognize that first of all i did want to start off by just saying thank you thank you to our parents for having kids prepared and ready to go to school this year with all the changes and for just rolling with the flow of how we've had to do things differently i appreciate the staff greatly the effort that they have put in before and during these three weeks has been tremendous and some other stress levels are are getting really high one of the things i would ask our community if you know a teacher live by a teacher have kids in class if you could just reach out to our staff not just our teachers you know it's been difficult for custodians bus drivers food service everyone in our organization so if you could just reach out to them and tell them you appreciate them doing the things that have to be done so we can have school in our community i think that would mean a lot it won't make their jobs easier but we'll let them if you could just let them know you appreciate the work that they have been doing to just make school happen this year i think that would go a long ways and would be greatly appreciated i do want to thank our community our community's been very supportive i talk a lot with other superintendents and every time i do i'm thankful to be in clearwater where i'm new but have been quickly accepted into this community and i'm so excited to be here and definitely not least of all i want to thank our students because from pre-k to seniors they have done anything we have asked they are doing what it takes to have school under a certain certain situat current situation and current orders from sedgwick county and from the state and everything that we have to do they've been great above and beyond expectations and we should have had those high expectations for them but there's always that fear of well how are students going to handle this they've handled it great very well i did want to let you know we have no changes planned for next week or having school as not normal but as coveted normal as we continue to move forward we finished the full week of school this week and things have been going as well as could be expected with that i wanted to give you also a brief covet update of our county and also our district so currently our county's been trending well zip code's been trending well but we are not there yet we still have to do all the things in school and not in school that will continue to let us have school so i encourage everyone in our community to continue doing the things that will keep these numbers down that will allow us to have school for school i'd also ask again for parents to check for symptoms and report those symptoms anything that doesn't seem right let our school nurses know yes it might cause a brief quarantine but it's better than the alternative of what might happen so we'd encourage you to continue doing those things we'll continue our temp and health screenings as well but we really need parents to be involved in assessing their child's health and letting us know so uh i want to give an update on our current numbers for our district so we have had numerous students and staff in quarantine for various reasons whether that's uh some symptoms that may or may not be covered related whether that's a close contact outside of school at this point or we have had some in side of school county health will notify those people if that has happened and that's that system has worked fine for us we have some people that have been in quarantine because of a positive case in the home and our current numbers overall since we've started school we've had 19 students and three staff members that have been in some sort of quarantine for some length of time currently we have eight students and two staff members we do expect uh some of those to return on monday unless something changes that we're not aware of yet so again various reasons that we've had people quarantined and we know this is just going to be an ongoing thing as we go through this year i appreciate the teachers doing the best we can to get a solid education to those students while they're in quarantine and the their work i just want to know notice that the work that they've done has made a difference for those kids so overall thanks for the efforts again i really appreciate the staff reach out to them if you get a chance and tell them you appreciate them we've had various activities several days of school now three weeks and overall as i said when i started things have been going as well or better than can be expected and just want to let everybody know we appreciate our community and we're excited to be having school and hope to just be able to continue to have school on site and do the best we can to deliver an amazing education for every child so have a great weekend go indians and come by and see me sometime i look forward to meeting more and more of our community take care
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but right now i'm just trying to set myself so i was wondering how it was because on my laptop in front here yeah i have my uh chromebook with the agenda we're streaming live now so i know so i hope my voice is good or whatever you sound clear all clear houston bueller there's a new documentary on netflix about the challenger shuttle has anybody seen that yet you know what my friend's watching it it's amazing i think it's really good yeah she was saying so many things i learned that i didn't know about because that was yeah now that was a moment in my life i was watching that live in fifth grade sitting in class i remember that moment was that the 1986 one the 1986 show yeah i was one our our congressman shared the congressional hearing on that bro who was that jim bob rowe he's passed on but he was our uh congressman and he's chairman of that committee he chaired the hearing on that in the house clearing yep just confirming we're we're live now so we're ready to go okay fahim tried to connect it looked like he dropped yeah it still says joining for him okay well i guess i'll start so it you know he'll because we have enough so we have a quorum so call to order the september 17th 2020 regular board meeting please stand for the pledge of allegiance and a moment of silence i pledge allegiance to rope mr avadrabo here miss bassford here miss beltran here mr canova here mr daley here mr casper here mr pacenti mr smith here miss danny here the mission of the clifton school district in an open and reciprocal community partnership is to provide all students with a quality education to develop the skills necessary to become literate lifelong learners who are responsible productive citizens contributing to democratic society in an ever-changing world the next order of business is the reading of the open public meeting statement the new jersey open public meeting law was enacted to ensure the right to the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meetings of public bodies at which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon in accordance with the provisions of this act the clifton board of education has caused notice of this meeting to be publicized by having the date time in place there are posted the city clerk's office clifton public library administration building senior citizen nutrition center on cable tv in the local press on the district's website and mailed the presence of current teacher organizations this meeting will be tape recorded in accordance with policy next order of business there is no recognition and awards presentation the next order of business is the adoption of the august 20th 2020 minutes regular an executive meeting can i have a motion removed from mr smith second by mr casper any revisions editions yes mr yes mr daley yes mr casper yes mr smith yes miss danny yes motion carries can i have a motion to accept the minutes of the regular meeting of august 27th motion by mr daley any questions or visions scene none roll call mr abadraba yes miss bassford yes miss beltran yes mr canova yes mr daley yes mr casper yes mr smith yes miss danny yes motion carries we have no communication and announcements so next order of business is first reading of policy we have one policy 1648 restart and recovery plan mandatory we do not have any presentation of reports from an administration advisory committee and special committee next order business is board committee reports i know that usually we would let the student representative go but i you know uh don't see him here so i know that probably public recognition will speak so the first one will be policy followed by facilitation policy thank you uh madam chair uh the policy committee met on september 15th at 6 00 pm uh attendees were myself board members joe konova frank casper from the administration dr danny robituzzi mark teigen luis ross mark gingaro also president president was mike doctor and rachel harrington which is an intern um the agenda included discussions of the following policy number one se1648.03 full-time remote instruction this is a mandated policy and the committee recommends the adoption of this policy number two sc 1648 restart a recovery plan this is a mandate amendment to the policy previously adopted it amends the policy to include the use of masks by students as well as a certain exception to this mandate the committee recommends mandate um the committee recommends adoption of the revisions to this policy um policy number three board policy 7510 use of school facilities preliminary discussion was held on this policy specific discussion focused around the procedure paperwork and the board approval process and applications for the use of school facilities the committee agreed to review this policy at a future committee meeting um there is uh some information that was sent to facilities yesterday so we're gonna uh use that information that was sent to facility committee and further dig into this policy and uh get some clarification on some language um number four the committee discussed the possibility of developing a policy regarding onboarding of new board members uh this will be reviewed at a later meeting after recommendations by a special subcommittee this recommendation that this subcommittee be headed by the board secretary number five the committee further discussed existing policies on distribution of flyers and other materials within the school the specific policies will be reviewed at the next committee meeting with the possible recommendation book to the full board thereafter the meeting adjourned at 6 41 and mr ross wrote the minutes any questions um mr daley do you want to read the facilities sure um as mr vicente isn't here sure okay um facilities athletics committee meeting it was held september 16th uh president board members president was mr cynthia miss beltran mr kanova and myself administration's president with is dr robert tosi the strategic mr yusi mr thomasevich mr marcion and mr malayhi time of the meeting was 4 45 p.m to 6 45 p.m items of discussion was number one athletic update by the athletic director mr malayhi gave an overview of the status of athletics throughout the district he started by he started by stating that all coaches and students athletics handled safety protocols throughout the summer and up until now extremely well athletics in new jersey went through three phases to be able to return to sports this october all coaches and students student athletics athletes required to fill out a google form medical questionnaire daily before practices also there was a mandated temperature screening when they arrived at the field there was a discussion relating to how football games were will run starting in october for governor murphy's executive order each district receives 500 tickets per game of which 200 will be given to the away team tickets will be distributed as fairly as possible there have been meetings about the ticket distribution within all schools and community stakeholders of the past couple of months if the away team has unused tickets mr mullahy will coordinate distributing extra tickets to the district mr daley suggested appealing the governor's to the governor's office about allowing additional tickets uh the stadium has a capacity of five thousand uh approximately five thousand the stadium would be able to hold more than 500 people safely if the district was allowed to administration concurred and mr leahy mentioned that the njsia is appealing to the state on all districts behalf for uh less strict restrictions regarding the attendance number two pseg uh eastman proposal there was initial discussion with pscng about the possibility of surveying the area in front of chs for an underground easement with a representative from pscng legal counsel will review a right of entry agreement which would allow pseng to survey and investigate the area to see if the project would be feasible even if the board were to do the uh or to do the survey there was is absolutely no obligation to move forward with the project if the agreement is reviewed by legal counsel be brought to the executive session during the future meeting for a contract discussion with the full board number three uh locker room um mr marcion gave an update of the locker room project at the stadium unfortunately the project was delayed two weeks because the contractor did not install the correct flooring the correct epoxy floor was recently installed and the ventilation will be replaced soon the projects consisted of painting uh locker renovations purification water fountains and sanitizing stations dr robertosi mr lazy mr malayhi will give an update to the football booster club number four northern regional aid services commission transportation bills march through june 20th the business office verified the invoices relating to transportation routes uh through the commission during the pandemic there will be a thirty percent reduction in the agreed cost prior to the pandemic per governor murphy's executive order school districts are required to pay transportation bills even though the buses were not running so the companies could meet payroll number five policy at seven five one zero use of school facilities there was a discussion regarding policy seven five one zero and use the facilities during school closure by virtual learning it was decided to send the policy to the policy committee for some clarification on language number six capital projects school 15 roof replacement the project has been completed the city will come out to inspect the project to close out all permits b school 17 building management systems upgrade the project is moving along smoothly the air violence engineering report will be coming out shortly the contractors are closely working with i.t department to ensure the security on the district's network for remote access uh see number seven per capita potential capital projects 2122.
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you due to the coven 19 health emergency and in order for the board of education to conduct its business this board meeting is being held via video conference and streamed live on youtube on the district website at www.ebnet.org in addition members of the public may provide comment at this meeting through zoom by entering the url into the web browser of your computer or mobile device and entering the meeting id and password upon joining the meeting your participation will be muted to ensure there is no disruption to the business being conducted by the board of education will the secretary please call the role mrs chu here mr sismar here mrs guass here mr hong here mrs lax here mrs reese yes mr simmons here mr winston here president becker here we have a quorum please rise to salute the i pledge plaid 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 the new jersey open public meeting law was enacted to ensure the right of the public to have advanced notices of and to attend the meetings of public bodies in accordance with the provisions of this act the east brunswick board of education has caused notice of this meeting to be published at the board of education offices and written notice was also provided to the sentinel the newark star ledger the home news tribune and the municipal clerk of east brunswick all board of education meetings with the exception of executive session discussions or video tape related broadcast individuals who speak at the board's public meetings should be aware of these videotaping rules good evening and welcome this is the first time this board has been in this room since march and it feels good to be back welcome home without any further ado we're all anxious to hear the superintendent's report and hear how things have been going in our district dr leski thank you president becker and good evening everyone and and again it is almost seven months to the day since we closed schools in march so it is good to be back together again i want to thank the entire east brunswick community for collaborating with us to ensure we have rapid notifications of close contacts as i've stated previously my messaging our ability to keep our schools safe our ability to keep our schools open is depending on keeping our greater school population safe this is especially important if children in your family unit attend non-public schools public schools like ours have different reporting requirements for positive cases of covert 19.
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[Music] so [Music] um [Music] i called to order this regular meeting the bullhead city elementary school board on thursday september 17th at 5 30 pm 2020. roll call corey burgess here brandi dubois here jeanne borland here citizens president can you please sign the agenda or do you please sign him back and if you join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of america okay call to the public this is the time that the public may speak to the governing board regarding issues in the jurisdiction of the governing board and subject to reasonable time space and amount of restrictions as the governing board may establish comments will be limited to three minutes per individual unless specifically waived by the governing board at the conclusion of the call of the public individual members of the governing board may respond to criticism made by those who address the board may ask staff to review a matter or may ask that a matter be placed on a future agenda however the governing board cannot take action on matters that have not been noticed in advance as part of the agenda and no calls to the public today so we'll move on to 1.6 can we get a motion to adopt the agenda i move we adopt the agenda i will second all in favor aye corey burgess randy dubois aye jeannie borland aye aye so moved uh item 1.7 superintendent's report dr stewart thank you mr president members of the board i sent you quite a bit of things this time for background information and reports and answer any questions you might have about any of those items do we have any questions for dr stewart thank you i have quite a few updates for you it's been a busy month of course it's been a busy six months but some other things have been going on first of all an update from the part of the report i gave you last month about the subpoena from the attorney general's office those documents were all prepared and sent on tuesday and we'll await whatever rulings that they give us i've been asked to represent bullhead city elementary school district on the chamber of commerce business and government affairs committee and i think that's a good opportunity to reach out and inform some connections with people in the community and also stay on top of relevant legal issues that affect us locally was the weekly mojave county superintendents meeting and we had the pleasure of meeting with kathy hoffman today and sharing with her concerns from rural schools in arizona they have she has a new task force starting next week to review first of all where we've been in the last six months and then listen to concerns and ideas to establish the next steps for the state and there will be a representative from mohave county don't know who that will be but we know there will be one i attended the asba law conference on thursday and friday and some key points that i thought i would share with you the first one i had mentioned last month is the change in the open meeting laws they added two new uh allowable reasons for having i'm sorry for for executive session they've added two new legal reasons for that both have to do with school safety organization planning and programs someone finally recognized that if we're going to plan for emergencies in our schools it's probably not a good idea for just everybody to know what those plans are and to allow us have to have those conversations some districts have already tried to use that to have conversations about covid19 plans and those don't really fall within the law secondly the sexual harassment policy changes that you have that you are going to be looking at this evening are new policies because of changes in title ix at the federal level you will notice if you've read through them that they significantly narrow the definition for sexual harassment they give new rights to the accused and it narrows the type of complaints that can be made that districts would have to investigate there is according to the presenter at the law conference that will probably be challenged in court but in the meantime it is the law one of the things that personally interests me is the brophy mcgee mental health omnibus bill that was passed by our legislature in the spring because it gives us the ability to work with behavioral health agencies in the county and in the community to bring behavioral health particularly trauma support into our schools and there was money put to do that to help pay for those services so it'll be a good thing especially under the circumstances where we know that we have students coming back with lots of stresses from this whole experience and then one of the other sessions had to do with proposition 208 you're probably aware of that that proposition that's going to the voters that has to do with increasing taxes on individuals who make more than 250 000 a year or couples who make more than 500 000 a year and it was just information to to let us know how those monies would be dispersed if that proposition passes 50 percent of the money raised from those taxes would be for base compensation increases for teachers and direct classroom services so that would be teachers and paraprofessionals 25 percent of the funds would be for increases for student support staff so that could be the folks who help run the school it could be transportation if we'd had our own food service it could be for folks like that so anyone who provides support for our students 10 percent would be for teacher mentoring and induction programs 12 percent for cte programs 3 percent for the arizona teachers academy which is one of the mechanisms that ade is using to try to recruit and retain teachers in arizona and if you looked at the report i sent to you today you can see that we really need some help recruiting and retaining teachers in arizona and uh if that proposition passes uh it prohibits supplanting so we could not use it to supplant other funding so we couldn't say oh we've got this money to give people raises so we don't have to spend this money out of mno you can't supplant there are reporting requirements and it cannot be used for administrative salaries so it's very much directed at the folks who provide services for students i then attended the aasbo which is the arizona school business administrators conference not a conference it's a bi-monthly meeting on tuesday and lots of information from that a couple of key points to share one is that they gave us a much more detailed spreadsheet for determining how much money we might be qualified for for under the enrollment stabilization grant the good news is that it's nice to have something that's a little more specific the bad news is that when i calculated uh it was considerably less than the original formula indicated so we'll be working on trying to make sure that that's close we won't really know what those numbers are until after the 40th day which is not for another couple weeks some other information that's related to that aspro report that i sent to you today and that is regarding bullhead city we have 10 teacher classroom teacher positions vacant we have one special ed teacher vacancy one counselor and one psychologist probably the lowest we've had in a number of years but still too many for for us to be doing well in our schools and because of kobit we think partly because of covid we don't have a lot of subs on the list from our substitute company we think frankly because many of our subs were a little older they have some legitimate fear about being subs in our schools and there are probably some other reasons as well but we we know that that's part of what's going on um and so we're we're having to be creative so for instance at bullhead middle school teachers will be covering classes for some of those vacant teachers so that we can keep the class sizes small enough to be effective i have a question sure did we um the subs that we had in the district where they sent a letter letting them know we were transition okay absolutely and in fact we encouraged all of them to do so okay and what about at the elementary level if they're short a teacher how are they covering in those classrooms if there's no subs the good news is that pretty much we've got it covered right jen jen's been working on that she's been coordinating that with all the principals that's part of the process of us making sure that we have the in-person classrooms uh a reasonable size and the virtual classroom is a reasonable size because if you noticed from the enrollment information we're down about 200 students and it looks like more and the one on the enrollment report that you have in front of you in this meeting but by adm which is how our budget is based we're down about 230 students we think some of those students will show up we think some of those families will say okay we're going back to school so they intentionally built the classes with a little wiggle room both in the in-person classes and the virtual classes so that parents would have a choice when they brought their kids back but we've managed to absorb that and one way we did that genie is so for instance if we if we had 90 kids yeah 75 kids at a grade level that wanted to be virtual we made sure then that we had at least three teachers but but it didn't necessarily break down to be 25 from each of our sites so it might have been more from one site and fewer from another site so the students are still enrolled in their home school but they might be working with a virtu a teacher in virtual class from one of the other school sites so that we could keep those balanced right and i think i saw that too one of one of these i highlighted um one of the schools had zero virtual teachers so do you have i think it was sunrise has no virtual teacher in a grade level so who's going to one of the teachers from one of the other sites and we filled those positions we filled those positions initially starting with the folks who had health reasons and had legitimate reasons you know for not being in person and then we still had a few virtual classes that we needed to fill or needed to have a teacher for and so we had volunteers for those and the classrooms are going to be balanced for the in-person ones because which school which school is taking the extra virtual position i'd have to defer to jen on that because she's been coordinating all of that um okay so desert valley second grades teaching the sunrise second grade yes and then what happens with all the desert valley extra students that are in person does that increase the class sizes then yeah are they going to have enough room um you can see how gina you can see how this is uh you know this was real complicated to try to get all of these things worked out and yeah all those numbers worked out so we've done the best we can to keep those classes in a reasonable size i guess my concern is if you've got i'm if i'm reading this right i don't know in person at does this mean there's going to be 27 or 28 kids at diamondback in a second grade class i mean that's a lot of kids to try to yes it is and it's because we're short a teacher at that grade level and was sunrise not willing to to have any of their teachers go virtual in second grade so it looks which second grade diamondback has two virtual teachers sunrise has none so both the diamondback teachers had issues where they needed to remain virtual or were they give all given the choice everyone all of the teachers had a survey that they answered and that they responded to so anyone who had their own health issues documented with our hr department or they lived with someone who has is at high risk also documented we're given we're put were given the opportunity to be the virtual teachers first and then where we had where we needed virtual teachers we had some other teachers who had volunteered or volunteered after the fact i'm just a little concerned with 25 26 in a classroom i mean diamondback has it in third grade and second grade these are high numbers they're not they're not our most desirable numbers you're right about that and we would prefer that there were fewer on the other hand we've got to make sure we're accommodating all of our kids um i mean i guess i was under the impression there would just be at least one virtual teacher per site we we you know we could have said that but then we would have had really strange sizes we would have had some classes that were very small and some classes that were huge we just needed to balance it across you know across the three elementary schools so what happens so so these kids at sunrise are going to go to a virtual teacher now at diamondback and they're going to switch teachers and then what if they in january go back in person they're going to switch again so they'll go through three teachers it's possible and how is that working at at fox creek too i've i've had quite a few parent emails stating that teachers are being switched and taken out in we're doing some things to balance some things at fox creek that have not been balanced in the past so when we used to do block scheduling language arts and math classes were three blocks and science and social studies were two blocks so we had more teachers we had one more teacher at in math at each grade level and in language arts at each grade level then we had science and social studies when we returned to a regular schedule that left a real imbalance and so our science and social studies classes were the ones that ended up with 32 35 students because we only had two teachers at that grade level and three teachers in the in language arts and math so what we've done is instead of have six having six math teachers for two grades and four social studies teachers for example for two grades we've moved that changed that around so that we have five of each so one teacher one teacher will be teaching some classes seventh and some classes eight but it makes the scheduling so much more fluid and keeps our class sizes much more the same equal so we don't have classes of 35 at the same time we have classes of 20.
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september 17th 2020 cheshire board of education opening a school's meeting uh mr netscape we have a role for quorum mr granville here was helen here ms harrigan here mr martelly here mr garagini here mr white here mr chairman you have a quorum thank you carol ask the board uh please rise good evening everyone before we get started uh do we have a motion to amend the agenda this evening sure i would like to move to adequate session to discuss union negotiations to agenda item number 10. thank you man is there a second the second the motion is we move to add executive session to discuss negotiations to agenda item number 10.
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there was a brief discussion regarding potential project projects for the next year such as additional electrical upgrades window replacements in the next couple of months if the board decides to move forward with the capital project the district would need to bid the project out around january to meet budget deadlines uh that concludes our minutes if anybody has any questions i'll be happy to answer them anybody have any questions yeah so for me not necessarily a question just some clarification um uh please standing to dr robertosi uh and in the meeting we did discuss the option for uh going back and talking to someone about getting clarification on what it means to have outdoor events and proceeding because in my eyes you have the visitor section that's on the other side of the field to me personally i think that's a whole separate outdoor area so i know the restriction is 500 but 500 i would assume within the stands and then another 500 or whatever they fit on the other side and not how many fits on the other side because right now our tickets are set up 300 and 200 for 500.
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so information sharing may not happen immediately or in some cases it may not happen at all if your family is impacted by a close contact or a positive case of coven 19 in an educational setting outside of east brunswick and you have children attending east brunswick schools please let us know immediately obviously there are multiple phases scheduled in our complete recovery process and every week we demonstrate that maintenance of safe teaching and learning environments that means that our next scheduled opportunity to introduce more students to our face-to-face population is achievable our district's esl department welcome families of our english language learners k-7 in a google meet online the first week of school our goal is to ensure that all are knowledgeable about how to help their child access google classroom in addition parents and guardians learned how to access interactive ebooks to strengthen our students reading literacy and mr aaron prickett from the our prickett from the east brunswick public library shared how to get a library card and to access library resources the child nutrition team has worked hard to transition the district's traditional school meal service program to the new and improved grab and go meal service all east brunswick school-aged children are eligible to participate all meals are being dispersed at no cost to students families until december 31st students and parents must pre-order their meals and pick them up on tuesdays and fridays at select schools throughout the district please visit the child nutrition website for additional details the child nutrition team distributed 5786 meals the first week of school and that number increased to 20 980 meals by week two and is expected to increase going forward thank you to the entire child nutrition team for making a positive impact currently there are 44 students attending our remote learning centers which are operating at three schools before and after school care options are available the early morning program and after school kids programs are operating for those students participating in the hybrid program and there is still space available in both those programs i want to offer congratulations to our finance department on receiving the certificate of achievement for excellence and financial reporting from the governor government finance officers association for the fifth year in a row so special thanks to mr juliana to mr crotchfeld mrs roseming for all their hard work and just a few reminders friday september 25th will be a single session for students and staff there will be no afternoon sessions i'll make that clear we are operating on single session days but there is an afternoon component once students get home so on the 25th no afternoon session and on monday september 28th schools will be closed thank you thank you dr valeski now we're up to the good of the cause of the public members of the public may provide comment at this meeting through zoom by entering the following url into your browser your computer or mobile device and entering the meeting id and password in order to be recognized use the chat feature select the zoom meeting host then enter and send your name to the host you will be recognized to speak when your name is called and individuals will be invited to speak in the order in which we have received your request the board of education recognizes the value of public comment on educational issues and the importance of allowing members of the public to express themselves on school matters community interest participants will be limited to three minutes duration is there anyone wishing to speak to the board we have no one that has requested to speak no one seeing none i close the public portion moving on to our board of ed agenda as a reminder the minutes were pulled from this evening's agenda so can i please have a motion for item one on the community programs agenda move by susanna second second by leewoo is there any discussion all those in favor opposed abstain motion carries moving on to curriculum instruction can i please have a motion for item one moved by todd second by jeff is there any discussion susannah um an associate's degree i'm just wondering if anyone has achieved that or has kind of stated plans to achieve that they actually we actually have students who have stated they have plans to try to achieve that issue but we don't have anybody who has actually achieved it yet but one of the factors that along with more course offerings is the fact that the middlesex county college reduced the cost per uh college credit down this year so it gives a lot more opportunity to families to for their students or their children to uh crew credits under this program so we're really excited about this even in this pandemic environment yeah i think it's especially important now with the price being down and making college affordable so i mean thank you i remember being very excited about seeing this um you know created and uh just seeing the number of courses is just really amazing work right yeah i had i had asked dr valesky i did not recall how middlesex county was conducting its classes if they were in person or virtual or hybrid but i wanted to make sure that our kids wouldn't be at any kind of a disadvantage at all and he assured me they wouldn't be um mr becker actually i had a conversation with president mccormick from middlesex county college about five percent of their classes are being offered in person and their critical classes uh but most of their their classes are in a remote fashion right now so they're they're dealing with the same situation that we are okay that's good any other discussion all those in favor posed stain motion carries can i please have a motion for items one and two on this evening's facility agenda moved by leewoo second by todd is there any discussion okay see none all those in favor aye opposed abstain motion carries moving on to financial services can i please have a motion for items one through nine todd jeff todd moved by todd second by jeff is there any discussion okay this is roll call the secretary please call the role mrs chu yes mr sismar yes mrs gloss yes mr hong yes mrs lacks yes mrs reese yes mr simmons yes mr winston yes president becker yes motion carries moving on to our human resources agenda and there is an addendum that bernie had uh alerted us to can i please have a motion for item number one and the agenda move by todd second second by susanna is there any discussion for the secretary please call the roll this mrs chu yes mr sismar yes mrs gloss yes mr hong yes mrs lacks yes mrs reese yeah mr simmons yes mr winston yes president becker yes motion carries moving on to the staff development can i please have a motion for item one so moved moved by my hearing is deteriorating by the second um is there any discussion actually i had had a question about this that i had again asked in advance but um i thought you guys might be interested in the answer i wanted to know if these uh workshops are going to be conducted fully virtually so that any staff can can take part and the answer i received was that they are fully virtual for the year all those in favor aye aye aye opposed staying motion carries on our student services agenda can i please have a motion for items one through three move by leewoo second second by todd is there any discussion okay i have a question actually lou maybe you can answer or dr boleski could you please talk for a minute about the heat acclimation for field hockey and football practices um policy that that came into effect i've been reading a lot about it and i i see the explanation on our agenda but if you could absolutely tell us what it it is which is another way to protect our athletes uh so they don't uh go right out and play with their helmets and their shoulder pads on right away the intense heat in the summer this gives them extra time two days to wear just the helmets three days to wear the pads and then after that fifth day allows them to wear everything and their body should have acclimated a little bit better to the heat and into the stress of the helmet and the shoulder pads please remind me it's been a few years since i had a child playing sports in the district isn't there a certain temperature where if the the day hits a certain temperature that a practice and or game would be cancelled so for instance if we have one of those free late summer heat waves in september we we actually monitor each practice and each game to make sure i believe it's 96 or 90 it's up there i think it's 96 degrees but uh it's in that range and anything close to that we'll make sure even if it's not above that range we still make sure the athletes are well hydrated they're in shade we check them you know regularly to make sure that they're they're feeling okay we'll also sometimes even shorten the practices to make sure that they're you know well taken care of okay great thank you any other discussion all those in favor oh sorry this is a roll call will the secretary please call the roll mrs chu yes mr sismar yes mrs gloss yes mr hong yes mrs lex yes mrs reese yes mr simmons yes mr winston yes president becker yes motion carries moving on to transportation services can i please have a motion for item one move by job second by todd is there any discussion all those in favor opposed same motion carries moving on to committee reports information items and the good of the cause board members just fyi we will be starting up with our regular committees trying to get things back to some kind of a schedule they may not meet with the frequency that they had been and a lot of them may still be done through zoom depending upon the size we have some with like student services or curriculum which can be 30 or 40 people we have others which finance which is could be five or six so but those will be starting again your administrative chairs will be reaching out to each of you to set dates for um committee meetings so i don't think we have any committee reports but are there any information items of the good of the cause for the board lori so last friday uh dr cowan had or mayor cohen had um the annual 9 11 tribute um both mrs goss and myself were there and what they did this year that was different was this is the first full class of high school students that have not been that were not born before 9 11.
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so it was a move that we needed to make anyway and this has made that happen for us the real issue with both middle school and fox creek is because they're departmentalized is having that figuring out a schedule that allowed us to have virtual teachers for those schools because especially at the junior high you can if somebody's not certified to teach language arts they can't teach language arts they can't teach math virtually just because we need a math teacher virtually so to work that schedule that's really been a more complicated process for the middle school and the junior high than it was for the elementaries yes sir it's kind of breaking up now it's very well i'm trying to listen that i i wonder if james can work some of the magic and think we're breaking up stuff out we'll ask him we we can definitely try now we were having some long pauses between the discussions so that might was that what you were hearing is is no sound at all all right yeah because we did have some pretty long pauses between discussions um but there we'll try to do the best we can with that for you i tend to be kind of loud so yeah i need that was she able to answer your questions if you want more detail jeannie please please give us a call tomorrow jen jen can work with you on some of those details since she's been working so closely with the teams to set those up yeah i guess my biggest concern is a classroom size of 28 kids sure we get that well another one has well sunrise has 16.
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all those in favor aye is unanimous it passes thank you and for those for those watching if anybody hopefully there's quite a few tonight we like the uh the 200 numbers that we've been seeing these meetings lately on online so we had we added that because the agenda was posted earlier this week did not have uh executive session danny agenda but we do have an updated discuss with the board so we had to add it this evening thank you for bearing with us on that having said that welcome and uh jeff marlene we're going to turn over to you for the presentation of opening a school thank you very much mr perez i'm just going to step to the microphone here if you don't mind um first of all i just want to thank everybody for tuning in this evening and for all of your incredible flexibility uh during this really challenging time uh there is a it's a pretty lengthy powerpoint tonight given the very unique nature of the situation in spite of editorializing over there i will try my best to go through this as quickly as possible uh starting with the fact that you know this has been a summer like no other uh we had to absolutely redefine everything that we do within the school system and you know you don't necessarily think about a lot of these things when you think about coming back to school but they're all elements of our school day that had to be absolutely um redressed given the coven 19 situation so we will get into some detail on many of these items tonight but as i said in the interest of time we'll just kind of move along with that i want to pass this off to our chief operating officer mr maciana who will cover much of what we did during the summer and how that impacts our daily school life now that we've started up mr maciana hold our applause please thank you good evening everyone and welcome in the interest of time i will i will move this along as quickly as i possibly can which by a lot of people's definition is kind of slow but this summer i was no different in that we did have summer projects that were funded through a capital budget and you'll see here there's a picture of the 10 000 gallon underground oil storage tank that was removed at darcy this summer um whenever we remove an oil storage tank there's quite a bit of environmental testing that has to be done and i'm happy to report that there was no contamination from this tank we only have one remaining tank that needs to be removed next year and that's over too little so we've knocked off this project over the last three summers darcy will be heated by propane going forward so we will not have an underground oil storage tank to have to worry about in in 30 years from now at the high school we um if you've been by the high school you'll see that the front lot the driveway have been repaved we also re-carpeted 7 000 square feet of of carpeting in the library at this is a picture of the high school window replacement project that project is uh just about complete you know due to covid there was a delay in the awning windows actually you could see there those plywood sections those will be replaced and the blinds will be installed by early october so that that is a project that you know we were looking forward to getting started on those windows are low e and they're double panes so you know that will improve the comfort in those rooms both when it's hot and when it's cold this is a it's not a great picture i suppose other than this is the inside inside of the new highland government freezer that was completed over the summer and you could see that there's some shelving cheese fruit chicken turkey so the highland government freezer serves as the central storehouse for the items that we receive primarily from the usda we get about a hundred thousand dollars worth of product every year and our food service director madeleine dyker decides what product that um we're gonna basically get and and use in our schools over the of the course of the year so this was an important project for us um this summer we also completed the new office trailer that was installed at the bus depot that was actually funded by daco under their contract so we're happy that that that work has been done the old trailer has been removed we also finished the video surveillance system camera installations and that was about a three year project so those are done we've um exhausted all the funds that we had available for that we may ask for more to do additional camera installations um and then the last thing i put on the list there was um funded through the capital budget is the cheshire high school stadium lighting which we're converting to led the you know everything is in place except some of the components due to covid were delayed so that project will probably be completed in the late fall um since football is being you know canceled for the fall i i don't think it presents a huge problem and there is still lighting at the field it's just the old lighting beyond the summer capital funded projects these are the typical you know maintenance and repair projects that we do i'm not you could read it but i will highlight that the first item on the list the detail cleaning of all schools normally that is a job that is done by our cleaning contractor but because of of the school being shut down we were able to use our internal building maintainer staff to do all that summer cleaning and they started doing it during the period that students were not in school which was from march through june so that saved us a little over a hundred thousand dollars um that was um planned for when we prepared our you know our final budget and then you could see that there's a laundry list of things that we typically do we paint we do playground inspections you know we you know we'll do the annual maintenance on the emergency generator at the high school we inspect the cheshire high school utility tunnels to make sure that you know we have no no water coming into those tunnels to stay ahead of that um tree pruning and removal fence repairs those types of things then also across the district we did some um district-wide projects like catch basin rebuilds and cover replacements we did h duct cleaning you know primarily at cheshire high school we replaced exterior doors in sight and side lights over at the high school loading dock and we did some asphalt patching and we did line striping things like that and then this is a list of school specific items that we completed over the summer chapman we replaced the handicapped stair lift that's over by the main entrance bunch of door lighting and other projects we did a lot of work this summer obviously as we do every summer what i really wanted to spend the next couple of minutes on because this was new for this summer and i'm calling it the covert 19 preparedness so to get ready for this school year as as dr solon explained this was a summer like no other so there were tasks that we we added that we normally wouldn't do the first couple of items i want to mention one in order to create additional space in our classrooms and in our buildings in general we were able to take furniture and equipment and move it into storage and so that created additional classroom space so that we could maximize the social distancing between the desks that are in our classrooms we also installed tents at all our buildings except cheshire high school in humiston we didn't need to do it at cheshire high school because remember cheshire high school is in hybrid mode so only 50 of the students are in the building on any given day so there's enough room to spread out when we use the gyms in particular but we have about 30 000 square feet of tents installed those are being used very successfully at the elementary schools and at dodd's tent is 7 200 square feet so we're able to spread out um primarily to do lunch you know but it's also being used for mass breaks underneath those tents the you know tents i'll just caveat you know come november it's gonna probably be too cold to use those tents so you know we'll have to move those um students back into the building and figure some other strategies but you know that was certainly a good solution to get us through the first two months of school the other thing i want to highlight is you know there's a lot of guidance that has been issued by the state by cdc by our local health department you know things that you know you have to familiarize yourself you know with the guidance and then you have to implement the guidance so these are just some of the highlights it's not an exhaustive list there's a lot more than than this that you know has been done and that we're continuing to deal with but some examples at transportation even though our buses can accommodate 71 students or more we have some larger buses that'll accommodate 80. all our routes were mapped to 50 students or less per bus so that we could at least not have more than two students you know per seat the state guidance did say that you you could run your buses at full capacity but we were able to not do that and plan the route successfully and by the way we didn't add additional buses to do that one of the ways we were able to accomplish that is that we did have several hundred parents who signed an opt-out form so we were able to remove those students from the routes the mass police have been hired and basically these are bus monitors that get on the bus in the morning at 6 30 and then you know in the afternoon for the for the runs in the afternoon the goal there was to make sure that um students are compliant with the mask wearing that's why i call them the mass police um but i will say that the students have been terrific you know not only on the buses but you know generally speaking you know in in the classrooms and at school so the plan was to have the bus monitors ride those buses for the first two to three weeks of school we did have some difficulty getting those bus monitors so we don't have one bus you know one monitor per bus per day so they're being rotated very successfully the bus drivers are very grateful they feel that um you know they're able to continue their focus on the road while the bus monitors are focusing on the students but that's worked out very very well um and then we are disinfecting after the morning runs are done and after the afternoons are run uh afternoon runs are completed you know all the seats and the high touch surfaces on the buses are being disinfected again part of the state's guidance we hired day porters in all of our buildings to basically go through the building during the course of the day you know sanitize or disinfect all the high touch surfaces including the bathrooms so there's one in each of our buildings and that started as of august 31st their only job is to do sanitizing and disinfecting you know they're not there as an added resource for building maintenance they're solely focused on trying to stay on top of this disinfecting that has to be done and although the state wasn't very specific on what needed to be done we gave very specific instructions to the dayporters they are hired through performance environmental which does our building cleaning and then we added to the nightly cleaning that was always done additional disinfecting duties so we're disinfecting all the high-touch surfaces including student tests every night in our schools that is an add-on that was done once a week but with covid we're doing it nightly by the cleaning contractor and beyond that and i think you'll see that maybe in the next slide you know we also provided product inside our schools so that the teachers and in the case of the high school the students can can wipe down with products to either sanitize or disinfect we've added across the district signage um floor decals you know to try and and encourage people to keep their six foot distance at all time you know we stamped some of our sidewalks with with markings six feet apart you know some of them are kind of clever you know maintain your six that kind of a thing we've added acrylic shields in all the high traffic areas like the offices and the nurses um areas uh the library circulation desk you know hvac was a there was quite a bit of guidance that came from the state so we did have all our mechanical systems and not every building in fact only three buildings have true air conditioning systems um most of the rest of the buildings you know have you know at a minimum ventilation systems but not all buildings do you know and even our windows they've been inspected and repaired to the extent we can some of the windows are so old you can't get repair parts um you know as part of the state's guidance you're supposed to start up your air circulating air circulating systems two hours before occupancy we're doing that you know we've upgraded the filters where there are filters to be upgraded to merv 13 so it it will remove finer particles out of the air and the last thing that i wanted to mention is that we did hire collios facility engineering to detect to conduct further reviews you know of of all our um mechanical heating and cooling systems uh in line with the state's guidance we've provided hepa filtration units for the nurses offices and the isolation rooms isolation rooms have been set up in all the buildings in accordance with the state's guidance so that if the student is reporting some type of symptoms they have to go into an isolation room and we also had a higher isolation monitors for each of those rooms so that's been done hepa filters are recommended just for those rooms they're not recommended for classrooms in line with the state's guidance so you know again we we've done everything that we possibly could could to um you know meet the guidance and exceed the guidance to the extent that we could some other things school meals uh are being served but they everything is streamlined and pre-packaged so it's not the traditional lunch line where you go and you you select your food we're pre-packaging the meals we converted to a scan to purchase instead of having students punching their id into a pin pad we've also on the technology side we've increased the bandwidth that we have available because we know we're doing more video streaming um that's been an area that we've been struggling with a little bit with google me it's it's more of a google issue than a a network issue but you know we're we're trying to to you know deal with these problems as they come up and and so far we're doing okay you know some days are better than others so we are making some further upgrades to the google licensing we have in an effort to get higher priority when when items aren't working as well as they can and we do have quite a few students that are remote so this is an important task for us and the broadcast classrooms are up and running across the school district which we've talked about providing ppe and cleaning products for our staff this was a huge focus and it it still is a huge focus for us the um what we had to do and i'm just going to know because i think this is important but we've appointed a district ppe coordinator and each school has its own ppe coordinator so that if there's a product that's needed the the ppe's coordinator's job is to you know look at the inventory as we get a couple of weeks into school we'll be able to better predict what the needs are so you know we my my operations assistant is the district ppe coordinator and pretty much that's all she's been doing for the last four weeks and you see a picture there of some of the items that we have stocked you know in our undisclosed location where we keep our ppe some of the ppe is very difficult to get you know sanitizing and disinfecting wipes in particular are hard to get hand sanitizer is a little bit easier to get right now masks we have plenty of face shields we've got enough of right now disposable gowns those were able to get pretty easily um the other thing that i wanted to mention is cleaning sanitizing and disinfecting you'll see that you know this is highlighted um this is a great it's not going to work so we're going to skip that but you know part of what we've done is not only have we trained our building maintainers but we've had to educate our staff as well on you know the difference between cleaning sanitizing and disinfecting you know cleaning is what you typically would do with soap and water it does uh reduce the number of germs sanitizing you can do with soap and water some there are some diluted products that will sanitize you know sanitizing generally reduces the number of germs and which is okay so if you just sanitize a surface it reduces the number of germs on that surface and at times that's all you should be doing um you know on things like gym equipment you don't want to disinfect you can't disinfect constantly disinfecting is typically harsh chemicals um so there's a big difference between sanitizing and disinfecting disinfecting kills germs there's no doubt that's that's the best thing you could do but there's an appropriate time to do it and then we have also spent a lot of time not only educating you know ourselves but trying to educate you know our staff on you know what type of products should we be using i did bring you know some of my favorite items i didn't bring them you know to the podium right now i'll spay you the details but we did find some excellent wipes and a very limited supply we're able to get through our cleaning contract are called oxavir tb um used in hospitals the great thing about it is it's hydrogen peroxide based you'd need no pe no ppe when you use it so no gloves no mass no respiratory it's got a one minute contact kill time for covet just very difficult to get so we've taken whatever inventory we had and we sent it to the high school because at the high school students are moving between classes you know and using the same desks so the students are wiping down right now using the ox of your wipes if we can continue to get those we will great product absent that this week we received another product called enviro cleanse a very safe product to use it'll sanitize you wipe it down from a spray bottle so it's not a wipe the only difference is it's got a 10 minute contact time to kill covet so you have to use the application appropriate with with the contact time and so we've been sending out procedures we have posted to all our employees a product list of the products that are used and can be used safely by students staff and then there's the products that are used by our building maintainers and then our professional cleaners so we've spent a lot of time we're trying to do this right we don't want to put any kind of a disinfectant into somebody's hands that's going to hurt them and so you know where it's appropriate we've opted to just provide some basic sanitizing wipes that are alcohol-based or some other mild product based and that concludes my my remarks thank you uh mr massiana um you know as i say thank you to mr manciana i just want to again take a moment the buses right now do you have any expectations whether the bus ridership would change have you gotten any feedback from parents or anything like that uh it's kind of early i do expect the bus ridership will go up assuming that the infection rate stays low and and i think there'll be a sense of comfort this is my speculation there'll be a sense of comfort and students will get back on the bus and any parent that wants to add a child to the bus all they have to do is contact our transportation department and we're going to do that as quickly as we possibly can usually today sure i uh again just want to thank all of our parents and students who've been so flexible this is a different world than they're used to and i appreciate the trust they put in us to keep their children safe and that we are going to you know work as diligently as we can to make an education that's as normal as we possibly can i more importantly though as it relates to preparations for the opening of school there are so many people who had to just do incredibly different things than they ever have that of course continues but the preparation uh dating back to june july when we had um you know our team together to try and create the reopening of schools but ias food service uh teachers of course uh maintenance professionals nurses secretaries technology specialists i mean we have technology specialists working over the weekend bringing their spouse in to help you know clone computers and i mean people have just gone so far out of their way and our administrative team you know they all of these folks have engaged in a herculean effort and without them we could not have reopened schools the way that we have and the three-day orientation process all the preparation that they put into that really i think helped ease our students and staff into this it hasn't made it quote easier but um we're trying to normalize it as much as possible and you know i just want to thank all of these groups again our administrative team all summer long our entire group and thank you all all of our staff members for what you've done for our students and community and of course each other so school opening convocation we as you know have uh at least our board members realize we have a generally very invigorating um you know edutainment we call it we try and make it really engaging for uh folks to come and enjoy the day uh vin gave his own qvc uh episode with ppe and you guys missed that this evening but a couple of the key events are really the naming of the instructional assistant of the year that's something that we started uh last year and esther harvey is a beloved instructional assistant and we were proud to honor her as well as our teacher of the year deb menke i really encourage anybody who's watching to visit our website and look for teacher of the year you can hear her speech there it's really powerful and i think it'll help you understand why she was our teacher of the year really great stuff um so typically what we do is go through the school by school reports and kind of give an overview of the opening of school and how it went um every time you go to darcy it's it's just like this honey i shrunk the kids moment for me and and it's really a lot of fun uh to see that the kids arriving at school and all the wonder and excitement that they have to show up for their first days of preschool or kindergarten it's really great stuff but you can see that you know even for our youngest students things look much different with masks and taped off areas and so we had projected through the new england school development council nasdaq last year to have 64 students in kindergarten at darcy we have 62 so pretty close to projected at chapman you know you'll see that tape on desks in a lot of places kids spaced out differently and a teacher teaching remotely to students there with no mask on but here's the arrival we've all become much better i'm sure socially reading eyes and a lot of smiling eyes through those masks it was a lot of fun on the first day of school and so we were projected for 330 total students at chapman and uh have 323 enrolled doolittle so in our do little enrollment we had a projection of 469 students with 437 students enrolled at highland we had uh really kind of an anomaly here 300 or 713 students projected in 760 students enrolled so you know we're not quite sure what happened i know that you know across connecticut there's been a real demand for real estate um there were no new developments built or anything but apparently there was a little bit more turnover in the highland uh residential area and it really shows in our enrollment at that elementary school it's pretty yeah yeah but uh has explained that the turnover housing stock treasurer so i'm not surprised by that yeah and i you know i i love to tongue-in-cheek kind of say people don't move here for the night life and you know you can see it in our school enrollment norton school you know another exciting opening i i think everybody was so enthusiastic about returning to school even if we weren't doing a lot of our traditional pomp and circumstance uh like with countdowns and things like that and kazoos and the usual stuff that we do but it was still really it was it was just special this year to see each other and that was that was really great part of our opening day uh 430 students projected it norton with 405 arriving you can see what it typically does there to the class size even 25 students across seven grades it really doesn't move the class size average all that much the middle school level at dodd [Music] see folks outside under the tent so our enrollment it dodd the 631 projected 629 actual so pretty much right on treasure hi giving out senior shirts right of passage very exciting our link crew team helping freshmen and find their way and uh 1392 projected in 1395 enrolled so pretty good size still building our overall enrollment summary uh a total k-12 enrollment of 4030 was projected 4011.
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so as long as we section that off we open up the other side by the visitors side where they would walk into the other entrance and keep them totally separate in my eyes that would be another outdoor area so we can get clarification on that yeah um mr canova you and i we had discussed this briefly last night and and i don't disagree with um you know your common sense opinion but your your common sense doesn't mean much sometimes when it comes to government regulations um i think the understanding is despite how large the outdoor area is it's based on the venue meaning there's there's one event there's one venue and if it's outside only 500 people could could be there now um that's my understanding of it where that is in writing i'm not sure um but we can certainly look for that um we could ask perhaps board council if uh if if if maybe miss gutierrez could get us some clarification on that because that would solve the uh the ticket issue for sure and our stadium is certainly big enough to have more than 500 people and socially distance do you know how many people we can hold in the stands versus in the visitor stance i i don't know that um does anyone else know that it it's approximately joe yeah it's approximately 5 000 in in the concrete grandstand and and to coincide with joe's comments part of the discussion was that one of the reasons why we ask that we as an individual district send something down there because every school district has a different their venue is situated differently so we can present our case based on our specific venue and you know uh i i don't think they'll do anything but i think we're obligated to follow that and and try to see if we get any bites on it at least we need to present our case because we do have a unique venue of a school district in the state madam chair yes i think there would be a better sell if you um if you guarantee that the visitors will come in a different direction in a different entrance so this way you could separate the two groups out you could put the visit there's a back gate and there's a there's a we would have to have a couple more personnel on staff but if we could guarantee the visitors would go through a different entrance to get into the stadium and they'll be sectioned off from our our visitors i think that would be a better sell as well yeah judy what uh in in line with your comments we we did discussed that in fact we also discussed having uh porter john something on so they wouldn't have to come all the way across the field and and and use the same facilities that the people in the grandstands were were doing so uh it's in line with with your thinking and your concept thank you jim so we can look and uh happy to take a look and see if i can get some clarification understand though that the rec the uh the guidance that's out there the executive order that's out there is uh it's not a certain number of people per square feet it's just outside in a certain number whether you have you know and the public don't think that they these things are not done looking at well how big is clifton stadium and how big is west new york stadium and how big is some other stadium but we'll take a look i mean i understand the logic yeah and uh uh we we um i'll think about but it did we we did discuss all that in terms of uh of our unique situation and i know the um mr malay he told us that the state organization is trying to push for some flexibility in that so but we want to send something in parallel to that but uh yeah the state thinks in one way and unfortunately see if we can get a little headway on that you know i miss miss basford's idea about a different you know path and a different flow of people you know adds to safety so okay we're on it okay any other questions oh just want to clarify for the public and the board members if they um the count does not count the participants so the cheerleaders and the football players and and hopefully the band will not be included in that 500.
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