so good afternoon it's very nice to see all of you here we very much appreciate how much you care about our school corporation and the students in our community so this is the regular meeting of the bartholomew consolidated school corporation board of school trustees i'm here for a regular meeting here on monday july 19th so thank you all for being with us we do start our meetings each time with reflections to offer the opportunity for one of our board members to share their thoughts before the start of our meeting and this evening it is mr stenner so i will turn to him thank you dr shed i thought i'd i often share reflections on public education and the purpose behind public education and i'm leaning that direction tonight education technically if you want to define it is the process of facilitating learning or the acquisition of knowledge skills and experience and expertise education is different from training or learning and educational methods can include things like teaching demonstration storytelling discussion and directed research i think we use all those tools in bcsc education frequently takes place under the guidance of parents first educators and mentors however learners can also educate themselves education can take place in either formal or informal settings any experience that has a formative effect on the way that someone thinks or feels or acts may be considered educational most of the work that we do on our schools is considered formal education so there's different kinds of education and in the school buildings we do formal education formal education occurs in a structured environment where the explicit purpose is teaching students usually in a school building with classrooms with multiple students learning together with a trained licensed certified teacher of the subject most school systems are designed around a set of values or ideals that govern all the educational choices in their system our values and ideals are on the poster boards behind the superintendent and president tonight the choices that are guided by the values and ideals that we've chosen include curriculum organizational models design of the physical learning spaces we'll talk a lot tonight about buildings and classrooms it involves student teacher interactions methods of assessment like in indiana we've had istep and ilearn sorry i lost my place class sizes educational activities extracurricular activities and more formal education is also commonly divided into stages so that we have preschool kindergarten elementary school secondary school and then colleges universities and apprenticeships there have in the u.s almost always in our history been public movements for improving education and for making education reforms work to improve quality and efficiency of education [Music] or work making education more relevant for the students and their lives in many places around the world governments and courts have recognized that individuals have a right to a public education however there's no broad consensus or agreement on what education's chief aim should be different places and at different times people have used educational systems for different purposes it's a little dark but i'll share it anyway some governments in other places and times have seen education as a way to turn children into adults who will serve the state's political goals to me this seems very wrong the agreed upon purpose of education in any given time and place is important because it affects who will be taught what will be taught and how the education system will behave some stakeholders will stress the value of education to the individual emphasizing education's potential for positively influencing a student's personal development promoting their autonomy forming a cultural identity or establishing a career or occupation for the individual other stakeholders will emphasize the value of education's contributions to societal purposes like good citizenship public service shaping students into productive members of society and promoting society's general development i suspect that in most times and places the agreed upon purpose of public education has been a blend of these two positions somewhere in the middle with the majority of stakeholders hoping to benefit both the individual and our society in my day jobs over the years i've learned that it's very hard to move forward on a project or initiative without first getting everyone involved to agree to a common understanding of the purpose of the program it can be called the why for the program or project and it's at the center of what and how work will be done to the extent that we can have public input and conversations to increase our common understanding of why we all value education in bartholomew county i think we'll make better decisions at the school board i think the more we have a common understanding of what we perceive to be the purpose of our free and public education we'll all be better off and we'll be able to move forward together thank you thank you very much mr stenner for those who are able if you would please join us for the pledge of allegiance [Music] one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right all seven of us are here so certainly we have a quorum i'll call this meeting to order as mr stenner noted the mission and vision of our school corporation and that which guides the decisions that we make at each of our meetings are listed here on the screen as well as behind us and we can also share our high expectation objectives they are listed behind us as well and here on the screen again just to guide our decision making and our overall purpose and guidelines for the work that we do we get to start our meeting today with celebrations and we always love to celebrate our learners and i'm going to turn to mr lewis and mr sluter for to ref to make note of our stars for the columbus north track and field that thank you sir hello i just want to say thank you for the corporate reason for acknowledging our student athletes for their accomplishments i'm actually going to let them introduce themselves and give them the pleasure of doing this i'm tucker i can throw a ball very far i'm emily herndon and i throw ball far as well [Laughter] thank you guys so um our girls cross country team they're actually in their team camp they were supposed to come over they i don't see them yet so hopefully you know everything is okay for them coming over this way but um but coach flutter it won't be here because one of our coaches has sergey so he's not so he has to stay back and make sure like the kids are well taken care of so i tell coach lloyd i will come up here and speak on his behalf so one thing that i do notice about coach schluter is he's a very hard working man he always puts his our kids at the forefront what when when whatever he's trying to do or whatever he's trying to accomplish is always for the better of our student athletes and that's something that's super important to me to make sure like our coaches are putting our kids first before them before themselves i think one is important but i also think building character is more important than winning and i think a lot of our coaches are putting that that foot forward and making sure our kids are better when they leave than when they got here so i just want to say thank you guys for recognizing our kids and yeah thank you very good thank you thank you very much if we could have the kids stay up here just one more second uh thank you mr lewis for recognizing uh our students as mr lewis indicated mr sluter is with our cross country team and in brown county i believe or at least somewhere else doing some some training okay yes and at least four of the kids that also would have been recognized are a part of that camp uh and then of course we have these two fine individuals who performed extremely well and i love the way you described what you do you throw something really far and then you do congratulations to each of you on your success this year in the track and field season [Laughter] hmm thank you very much for coming out this afternoon so that we could meet and recognize your accomplishments all right as it's doing its magic before we jump to the next item yeah you want to go ahead yeah so so we had tucker up here who was the state champion uh in the shot put and and as he said he throws a shot really far and and uh actually she throws it about as far as anybody ever has in the state of indiana so congratulations to tucker and then reece kilburger stumpf uh reese not here this evening but finished second in the 600 meters we also had this team who these individuals these ladies are working with cross country and at the camp that's going on right now so mckenzie brianna lily and julie were third in the four by eight hundred meter relay race and then emily was up here and finished fourth in the shot put so an outstanding uh spring season for columbus north track and field team and congratulations to them great thank you very very much all right next on our agenda is an update of our plan of action for the start of the school year related to covid19 thank you dr i'll walk the board through what we have now as a reopening plan for this upcoming school year this plan was first put out in draft form i believe on thursday july 8th and then we updated that just slight revisions and sent out another draft for review by the community on friday july 16th and so here we are on your regular board meeting on the 19th to make some decisions and this uh what i'm presenting to you is my recommendation and as the representative for the school corporation and you have the opportunity after public comments and so forth to consider this item for approval a little bit later on in the school board meeting so in terms of our plan that is not correct okay nick might need some help here with yup just to grab that this plan is is available on our website and it is a a google document and so is available to anybody that is uh wishing to to view it and i've thrown a curve bullet next i apologize for i get that link to to fire up quickly so it is on our school corporation website and right now it's the one listed as july 16th reopening plan information so if you scroll down through a lot of information about the plan and yeah so if i was doing my job correctly we went straight to that link thanks nick so this is the document that we have um note at the top it does say effective july 20th which will be tomorrow if approved by the school board we listed some general information there at the top in terms of trying to cite as many sources of information as we can it also made a slight adjustment to that last sentence of the general information that bcsc will adjust the guidelines as needed based on the level of community spread so as we roll out this plan for you tonight to make the recommendation just based on where we currently are as a community and we'll cite some of those statistics here in just a little bit we have some information about wellness screenings so there is or are daily screening tools for parents to pay attention to a year ago during our reopening plan we recommended that we have temperature checks at the doors coming in for all students and staff members that is not the case we are not making that recommendation here but we are asking that people be vigilant in checking uh uh students students themselves parents working with their children to make sure that they have they are not symptomatic when they come into the school buildings from a face covering standpoint this is the one that we have received the most feedback on by far of all the mitigation strategies that we are attempting to deploy and here we are face coverings are optional for staff and students they are recommended for those at risk whatever those at risk factors may be whether it be individually or somebody at home and or not vaccinated but again it is optional for staff and students that is k through 12.
i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you all our mission statement here at center grove is we develop knowledgeable confident and responsible citizens through inspirational and innovative learning opportunities and with that i'd like to read a little note this morning first of all we'd like to welcome all of you here this evening uh be great if we had a lot of you had lots of board meetings but we would like to thank you for being here this evening we appreciate the opportunity to hear from our parents the partnerships center grove has with our parents is what makes this district a great district and a great community i would like to remind everyone here that our board meetings are meetings that are held in public we conduct our business and voters aboard with the public watching either in person or online our meetings are also recorded and posted on our district youtube channel we invite public comment on topic topics related to our agenda items at the appropriate times as outlined in our board policy we ask that you respect these policies tonight and in future meetings we will have an opportunity later in the agenda for public comments to be shared we will listen to those comments it will not be a question and answer session we will have other opportunities for questions from the public to be asked and answered in the coming weeks and you will hear those opportunities tonight during the presentations so again we do thank you we welcome you here this evening we hope to have a very productive evening tonight so on our next thing is to the adoption of the agenda do i hear a motion mr president i'd like to uh amend the agenda and add a report for the um back to school there it is the return to school plan the 21-22 return to school plan i'd like to move that up to reports thank you mr alexander just as a report and then we'll vote on as an action item exactly thank you any questions on that i do want to remind people you'll see that there's only four board members here present but we do have uh mrs counts is present on the phone she will be popping up on the screen hopefully once in a while because tonight when we do votes we will have to do it in a roll call situation so bear with us technology and it's raining so who knows so thank you mr alexander do i have a second on that thank you mr hubbard all those in favor or nope i gotta go down through it mr hubbard i or nick thank you mr alexander aye mr daniels aye aye mrs counts are you with us i i am i okay do we have to have her on the screen yes yes she's on screen okay i see her now and you look fine mrs counts and myself that makes the motion passes 5-0 thank you our next area is reports and our first area is critical race theory delineated nope sorry back up our next area is the covid report back to the school plan thank you for returning back to school plan thank you yes i've had five meetings today thank you so um thank you thank you mr russell as they come up to the podium we have uh today with us uh this is uh amy norman she is our uh director of health services and also our assistant superintendent of human resources and health services mr jason taylor so i will turn the podium over to them thank you very much um we're pleased to share the return to school plan for this school year last year it was all inclusive of academic changes and a number of other changes we had to make to start the year this year's really just going to be focused on health and safety changes some things that we're able to change from last year going into this school year i want to start by just sharing some of the recommendations that we received from the indiana department of health are listed here in front of you it was a recommendation for mask for all under vaccinated individuals social distancing of three feet and in classrooms and with the students facing forward assuming that they're masked if they're unvaccinated and then six feet in all other areas individuals should stay home for 10 days following the onset of symptoms if all students are are masked you see we have a difference in how we would contact face those students and eventually quarantine students if they were masked it would be contact racing quarantined at three feet if they were unmasked and not facing forward it would be at six feet and then um they did offer three options for students to return early um on day eight after exposure on day 11 and on day 12.
um it was 30 years of education for me forming lasting bonds and it was quite far the best job i ever had it's probably also the only job i've ever had but it was the best of the only jobs i ever had so i want to thank you for taking a chance on someone who had only taught in immaculata and uh you know you took a chance and i made bamboo my home and i appreciate that so when it came time for me to uh think about retirement i had a couple members of my department who said oh you can't do this you can't do this promise me that if you leave you'll come back somehow for example you have a great uh lesson on how to teach um uh the application essay for college could you come back and just like be a guest speaker for a day and nothing made me happier in fact we talked about maybe creating some kind of a zoom maybe making it into a podcast something and it has been my absolute intention to not retire completely from the district because you never really leave home even if you lock the door and somebody else is living there it's still your home so let's fast forward to i believe it was sometime at the end of march when i received or when i sent my letter of resignation for retirement purposes in and at the i believe it was the march 22nd um board of education meeting most of you accepted my resignation not all of you uh it says very clearly the end of the day on june 30th now if you're a teacher and i know some of you are you know that the last couple weeks of school are absolute pandemonium you've got kids especially at the senior high school level you've got kids who are in danger of not failing so you've got a pretty much an entire marking period of work that you're working with them on you've got kids who are stressed out because there are things in other classes that they they don't know how to do so you're sitting with them there was one day where i did 24 detentions three but 24 detentions i mean i was there until six o'clock at night i did zoom meetings at 10 o'clock at night when kids got finished with work you know uh it was a really hectic busy time graduation came on the 24th and on the 25th i opened up my computer fully prepared to say okay at this point in time all of those google docs that i created not for the last 30 years but i don't know when we when we were told we're no longer using paper in this district everything has to be online i created powerpoints that were turned into uh apple slide shows that were turned into the next iteration i had letters of recommendation that were glowing that i wanted to save i had all kinds of things i had professional correspondence with army recruiters marine recruiters junior colleges and i fully prepared to print out some of the creative writing that i had done with my class that year that was meaningful to me so imagine my surprise a full six days before my end date when i was locked out of my computer my genesis and my google platform no longer worked and it still doesn't work to this day i had no idea how many sick days i was left with to find out whether or not the payout for tonight was something that i should gently protest or at least ask for an explanation for i received a robo call from my uh principal that said hey you need to sign off on your end of the year evaluation i sent you a couple emails i can't get into my email therefore i was never allowed or never able to sign into my end of the year evaluation to sign it and yet once again my resignation for retirement purposes was accepted to end on the last day of june six days after graduation which is when i planned to do all of this clean up work that leaves me with such an incredibly sour taste in my throat that is in my mind my district's saying to me get the hell out and to today with my voice just slightly trembling i tell you that is exactly how i still feel and shame on my district for letting a 30 year employee feel that way when i have so much left to give this district and now i question whether or not i have it in me to give it to a district that says to me you're out of here now before i have finished what i need to do was i so heinous was i so dangerous as an employee that you were afraid i was going to send poisonous emails or somehow and believe me i'm 58 years old this is not within my means that somehow i was going to reconfigure the computers the night after i left with some kind of a sinister motive because that's exactly the message i got from my district now if i want to know something i have to trouble through a phone call my hr representative and taryn has to take time out of her day to prepare a report for me for how many sick days i have or to show me my last paycheck because i couldn't get in to do it myself and i wasn't able to what if i decided to take a second mortgage out of my house and they wanted the last two years of my taste pay stubs now i have to come down to bamboo or i have to trouble someone to do it for me because i can't get into my computer anymore what about the people that i had professional relationships with that i wanted to say hey i just wanted to let you know i've retired but guess what here is my replacement i want you to develop the same amazing relationship with this person that you did with me i have no access to my google email anymore so i can't do it i had to apologize when he walked into my principal because i couldn't even finish the last task as a teacher which was to sign off on my final evaluation some of you are teachers in here or some of you have positions that are similar imagine walking in and your entire life on that computer is locked away from you so that is the sayonara from bell brook and we you know i know i've been watching the board of education meetings i know that there is a huge movement towards all kinds of activity but this just stinks of something that is unprofessional absolutely and and i feel as though i have been accused of hatching something unprofessional and that's why i needed to be stopped immediately literally hours after graduation on the 24th done over goodbye you're done that's what you guys need to fight against because i can't come back to a district and offer even a little bit of service when i feel like you guys kicked me in the ass and told me to leave and i have to tell you paying a brand new person 35 an hour when you have professionals who have worked here and been underpaid for what they do wow that was like just a little bit of extra sriracha on the burrito of my goodbye come on you guys you take care of us first not the people that are coming in and by the way i've been watching this board of education meetings virtually for over a year is it possible that when you have something on the screen you turn the camera to the screen you guys are all sitting down here is there a reason why those of us at home who feel uncomfortable coming in because of lots of different health issues have to watch an empty podium an empty deus when there's someone who is perfectly capable of tilting the camera just my foot and then tilting it back not hard but it's a professional purpose okay thank you i have it's not a question i'm not even looking for a response it was a vent but i'll tell you what it shouldn't happen to anybody else this should be the last time something like that happens and at least the professional courtesy before you block me out of saying hey by the way we're giving you 24 hours to get your stuff before you go quick thank you have a good one hi again mr o'reilly um so i'm not sure if an i.t person will respond to miss del conte um i just know that with my job sometimes like if i go on medical leave like i had to turn in my cell phone and i had worked with this company for nine years i didn't realize it but they my company's cell phone was scrubbed they called scrub and and it does weird things and they didn't really give me explanation so like all these doctors and contacts that i had on my company's cell phone were gone so i'm just i'm not sure if the same thing happened with miss del conte um but with it it's a strange item world so it would be nice if it would uh respond to miss del conte though and even if they tell her that you know her emails and everything were scrubbed so they call it thanks well let me ask you is that is your account completely deleted or is that accessible at this point [Music] rate and the answer was denied for both of them so there's there's things on your google drive that you would want access to then absolutely temporarily all i want to do is print them out and have a paper copy um i don't necessarily need to hold them forever um if you saw my mason you wouldn't know paper is still my friend um to print them out before june 30th which was the day the district said this is your last day in the district i mean technically i got paid until the you know an employee who was on payroll is there any way that she could come in and sit with someone so that she could print those things out the things that she's i'm sure that yeah so why don't we thank you speak to because i mean to come in speak to tom come in and arrange a time to to be able to come in and print those things that you that you would like to have access to okay i think to our point also did not happen to somebody else that you know tech should have a protocol in place where they give you 24 hours at least to say hey i don't know exactly what their perfect goal is but they haven't well i mean i honestly can't believe that after we've been a technology rich district for how many years that there is no protocol that hasn't been thought of before i'm not the first person to retire a sampling of other recent retirees has found that this has not happened to them again michelle we have a protocol i don't know okay so so get in touch with the administrative office and we can just definitely arrange for you to have access so that you can get to the things that you need to take with you all right there's nothing online no all right so at this point i need a motion to go into executive motion seven since there's nothing else to uh to vote on so oh wait we may be coming [Music] back all in favor [Music] we've got eight dedicated viewers as i they just heard me say get out of here we have eight dedicated views welcome back at 9 15.
you're preparing students for the real world well i'm going to try this out in the real world i'm going to go to my employer and tell them that i'm going to work monday through thursday at eighty percent efficiency and not show up on friday and i expect to be paid for five days that comes that comes out to 72 percent that plays out to 72 for the week so you know i hope you're right i want to get paid for five days so i'm just gonna go back to my seat now and try to figure out how to pay my property taxes which pay for this awesome education that you're giving our students thank you nicole johnson is next followed by janice sleeter nicole johnson followed by janice leader again just to reiterate if you are here to speak about crt that time has expired so we ask did you give it to the next person change the subject hi yes i have nicole centro johnson i have a senior at north we are second generation downers grove north family i got a text to talk about this on my way in so i'm i'm winging it um thank you for having us um i think our kids are excited for the first time in a year and a half to go back to school you know i'm watching the football team you guys we're going in the right direction so thank you um dr thiel you used the word choice we need to use that word more often thank you for using it you need to know there's a lot of us parents that are just not choosing to vaccinate our kids i know many of us disagree guys but i'm not doing it to send him to a concert to travel and i'm not doing it for school as of today theirs everyone knows bears we can all get it 11 000 people have died from the vaccine that doesn't include the injuries okay so the benefit does not outweigh the risk for the age of our children i understand choice if you want to get it get it but no this could be an issue for a couple years guys and what we have dealt with is the quarantine we don't know yet i know you said we're waiting we think it's going to be 10 days but does everyone know this year when our kids have to quarantine which will be 10 days no remote learning did you know that they're just going home can you imagine a senior five courses teaching yourself you know it was bad enough when they were in their rooms last year for all those hours but now they have to teach themselves we need a plan we need a plan many of these kids will be healthy they they can't test and come back to school they just have to stay home they may be healthy kids our kids are already behind in illinois we all have cousins friends who have kids in other states our kids are behind we never went back full time we can't even say that for the rest of the state our kids are behind we have to have a plan if you're going to force these healthy kids to go home how are we going to teach them i'm assuming education is still the most important thing here right it should be educating these kids we got to get our kids to college and they are not at the same level as these other states we have to have a plan in our district for what we're going to do and i really i look to you to make that a good plan i don't want to send my healthy kid home in his bedroom for 10 days but if i do please tell me you can either remote educate him or the teachers are going to spend a couple hours you know getting with these kids so they have a plan and they don't fall anymore behind that's it thank you [Applause] i'm sorry i'm having a hard time reading this uh rithia bodley i'm sorry if i have that wrong followed by stephanie trussell oh i'm sorry yes i did janice you are next then rathaya badly followed by stephanie trussell thank you thank you i know there's a lot there my name is janice leader and i hope everybody can hear me in the back i am a long time resident of downers grove my great great grandfather homesteaded here in 1853 back in the day when the abolitionists were having downers grove as a stop on the underground railroad now i am one of 15 members of my family going from my father through my kids that have been in district 99 high schools i know this is a different a difficult situation and i'm trying to come up with some alternative information and positive ways to go forward everyone has to respect everybody else martin luther king and many of the original say 1950s and 60s civil rights leaders said no one should be judged by the color of their skin they should be judged by the content of their character so the color of anyone's skin should not be determining who gets preference over whom or anti-semitism uh you know there's a lot of this that's talking about black versus white well there's also hispanic native american um asian native you know lgbt everybody should have the right to free speech to give their opinion now on this i've done i've had a lot of personal experience through the 50s 60s 70s and whatever i'm 73 years old and i've seen a lot of progress there's a lot of way way to go yet but critical race theory as i have read it and the way it's been portrayed is preference based on skin color devices based on skin color there is a record number of rich minorities middle class minorities and a record number of mixed marriages i do not want my friends grandkids and my grandkids who are mixed race to have a conflict that they're half oppressed or half oppressor this makes no sense to me now some positive information and i'm passing on robert woodson with the project 1776.
mass openings are hundreds of times larger than the kova 19 virus particles that's like throwing sand a chain-link fence and thinking the vents will stop the sand from going through it sweden-kept schools open from march through june 2020 with over a million kids in schools with no mass and there are no deaths from covid a german study of children between the age of 6 and 17 years old was published by the journal of american medical association showed that carbon dioxide levels were on average six times the reliable legal limit for indoor spaces while wearing a group of parents from florida sent their children mass into a lab for testing five of six were contaminated with bacteria parasites and fungi including three with dangerous pathogenic and pneumonia causing bacteria by forcing our kids to wear these petri dishes you are endangering their health and therefore liable for any illness or disease they contract with well at school you are wearing masks down not because you think you should but because there is a eo mandate or guideline that says you have to what type of message does that teach our kids even if you believe something is wrong or unnecessary just do what you're told top 23 education and cultural resources which provides standards for schools to follow says nothing about viruses or mass wearing that lawfully says you have to file guidance legislators create laws and administrative bodies like idph isbe certain rules and regulations are then given to them for legislative body if you go to illinois.gov legislation look up 105 ilcs five slash 2.3.25 you also see nothing pertaining to mass exists idph and isbe report to the governor and then he may issue excessive orders which are guidance they are not laws laws need to be passed by legislators but our governor has decided he does not need to file the law by bypassing the step over the past 16 months clay county judge ruled the governor pressure submission emergency powers lapsed 30 days after he declared kobe 19 the disaster and all of his orders april 8 2020 that relate to the coca-19 disaster where void when created all executive orders have been void and illegal since april 8 2020.
there is a mention there about due to a continuing federal mandate this does come from the centers for disease control the face coverings are required on school buses the initial draft of this plan had an expiration date of september 13th we found that date was erroneous and that the indiana department of transportation the department of transportation of the indiana department of education indicated that that was in effect for some other public transit opportunities airplanes for example i believe that was the case dr bozeman but september 13th is not one that would apply to schools so we simply removed it since we weren't sure about that information did not want to put something in there that would be in error or in be contradictory to something that was required or mandated so that that date was taken out for the for the time being from a physical distancing standpoint we did attempt to get six feet in classrooms last year by the end of the year we were down to three in terms of that physical distancing and we will still try to maintain that physical distancing of three feet uh contact tracing will be conducted for individuals within six feet that still is the recommendations or guidelines at the state and federal level um use of lockers will be allowed this is a change in that when we first put together this plan last year we uh did not use lockers it just cut down on a lot of um congregation i guess in the hallways and so we were looking at that possibility again this year but based upon some feedback we decided to adjust that so lockers will be allowed however within the buildings that are using lockers we will be managing those to limit the opportunities for people to gather in large groups for periods of time from a hand hygiene standpoint just keeping up the hand sanitizer will continue to be accessible throughout all of our facilities and frequent use is recommended the students and staff members will be encouraged to frequently wash their hands hopefully there are some lessons or or habits that were picked up during the course of last year and then students will be provided specific opportunities to hand wash for at least 20 seconds that being the recommendation with so before and after eating recess and after using the restroom and then from health services positive case and contracts tracing contact tracing standpoint this is another one that we did yours to get some feedback about or for but this still is a requirement for us is to um identify a person who has a cover 19 positive test case and then identify all close contacts too and so we will continue to do that any when we do contact tracing and we identify an individual there is a 10-day quarantine instead of 14 which was the amount of days before um and then in the the additional note there in parentheses is a quarantine is not necessary for those providing proof of being fully vaccinated and free of cover 19 symptoms uh and then just to note that isolation rooms will continue to be used for individuals displaying symptoms from a cleaning and ventilation standpoint we will continue with our senate sanitization and cleaning schedules for the cafeteria restrooms and other high-touch surfaces and areas as well as maintaining safety and sanitation procedures in locker rooms and restrooms that were employed last year and then the increased building ventilation strategies that we are working toward and will be a part of our plan tonight as we continue to renovate our buildings and find opportunities to improve ventilation we are doing that from a visitor standpoint we did not have really any visitors during the last school year book buddies for example a very popular program we cut that out during the course of last year that will be back as well as other opportunities for visitors parents caregivers to enter the building at this point in time we are still not permitting joining students for lunch both because of the additional number of people that that are in the cafeteria as well as as just additional opportunity for spread from a school bus standpoint i've already mentioned that these face coverings on buses will be required in compliance with the current federal mandates and note that the expiration date was removed from the school meals standpoint the cafeteria will be used during lunch and alternate spaces utilized that's in there because we did take away a lot of the opportunities from use of cafeteria last year or made sure to spread students out a little bit further i'm aware that in many of our buildings there are opportunities that were found and enjoyed by having students spread out through the building so i'm sure talking to columbus east columbus north there may be still continued uses of the various spaces they have in their building to do lunch but they are allowed to use the cafeteria similar to how they did in the past this upcoming year individually plated meals so that's just where our cafeteria our food service providers will be getting the plates ready for students just cutting down the number of touches that might occur and then other strategies also utilized to reduce the time waiting in line water fountains the use of personal water bottles recommended touchless water bottle filling stations will continue to be available and then those filling stations as well as water fountains sanitized regularly field trips overnight field trips will be analyzed uh reviewed on a case-by-case basis and then potentially approved the the cross-country event going on right now is an overnight uh camp that was approved um and then if traveling we will make sure that we follow all restrictions to the destination area whatever those restrictions might be from an athletics and extracurricular activities standpoint the ihsaa which is the indiana high school athletics association and isma which is the school music association have done a nice job putting together guidelines to follow we will follow those and then seating capacities at the fall events will be determined as we get closer to those dates uh those are going to be a few weeks away the first day of school is about three weeks away right now and so events will be starting around that time but as we work with the county we'll establish those specific guidelines for capacity athletics and extracurricular events could you get out of that naked go back to that second link then so as we um ponder this reopening plan as you do and end up making a decision here toward the end of the meeting uh data that we had available to us um comes from both the local and state levels specifically we're aware that there are increased cases happening across the country we're aware that the delta variant seems to be the majority of those cases and perhaps is more highly contagious and we'll continue to evaluate the the spread of covet 19 both in the state and in our community but i want to call your attention back to this website this was the one used a year ago first started with us putting out metrics and then the metrics being assigned to the site the communities coveted 19 task force's website the the pdf form that was sometimes available mondays and thursdays last year is not the same as we start this year but this is a site that you can go to on a daily basis and see what the updates are in terms of cases so whether it's new positive cases as of july 14th covet hospitalizations from that date or the test turnaround time those are three key measurements that are used here and were used by us a year ago when we set up metrics to determine how we would handle uh the reopening of school and then it does have uh data from the past so you can look at the last two months or at least beginning with june 1st that trend of of data from a hospitalization standpoint you see that number has remained low in our community if you scroll down next the positive cases has ticked up a little bit but to put that in perspective in terms of how tall that bar graph seems to be you are talking about a difference between three and five as those numbers go up so it's just ticking up a little bit that range from june 1st has basically been zero to five so the five we have right now is at the top of that range in terms of positive cases and the seven a week or seven day moving average has just ticked up to two i believe based upon those last last few numbers so i just i call that out for you in terms of another source or a source the source to go through your local go to here locally for information about copic cases and then if we can go back to the presentation the next page take it from here thank you for bailing me out with those links so here is just the state data so besides our local data and the information just shared we also have the covet 19 data from the state of indiana as we had set our red yellow green metrics up last year sometime i believe in october the state of indiana came out with this set of metrics which is listed or or defined on the left hand side and it goes blue yellow orange red in terms of severity blue being the best case scenario for any county at this point in time a week ago where 0.0 uh which is the best number you could have we're now at 0.5 but either one of those numbers 0.0 or 0.5 keep us in the blue and keep us at again the best color quote unquote that we could have we do have a county in yellow up to our north east and that would be shelby county the other counties i think are obviously blue around us i think the one to our east there is probably dearborn uh would be the other yellow county uh kind of close to us so that's that's how we are as a as a state right now that's the most recent data that came out uh last wednesday that we would have so that's what i'm proposing recommending in terms of uh us as a school corporation again we are aware of um the the spread of covenant 19 and where it is at at least i didn't cite the national statistics but we're aware of them as well as what's happening here state and locally we're also aware of the the guidelines that have been set forth by the centers for disease control by the american academy of pediatrics by our indiana department of health and those guidelines do recommend face coverings the cdc recommends face coverings for anyone unvaccinated as is i believe the wording the american academy of pediatrics released information just today so timing has been interesting but just today in regards to face coverage being required for all and i think the reason for that was was based upon just logic that if you try to require for unvaccinated individuals the challenge of of identifying unvaccinated individuals in our case in our public situation is is extremely difficult uh really no way to to do that for students and or staff members so that really leaves only the the known unvaccinated individuals being our our students who are from two to eleven ages two to eleven it's our recommendation that we don't just take that one group and have them wear mass that there are other health related things that we in talking with our internal people whether it be our school administrators having conversations with with our teachers association and others believe that there's there's value in starting the school year without masks and that we again make it optional that individuals who wish to wear mass certainly can and then i would add and it's not cited here but we we tried very hard last year to have options and though we were under specific requirements whether it be primarily from the state of indiana and governor's executive orders that we had options for our parents and students and so we provided two different virtual options a year ago and they were very popular we started the school year with 3 200 students enrolled in a virtual option and finished the year still with about 1700 and because of that and knowing how popular virtual options were given the circumstances we invested in in a full-time virtual option and so we have our columbus virtual pathway and i know there can be debates about that virtual option versus other virtual options that we provided example bridge last year but it is the the single pathway that we now have available we have a director for that program we have classroom teachers for that program we have special educators we have english language learner teachers we've invested in resources to make that virtual option work and so if if a person does choose to go that route it is available we have over a couple of hundred at this point in time that have chosen to go to go that route so that's where we are with our recommendation and certainly entertain any questions or comments from the board at this point before we go into public comments and then have other agenda items that will come up prior to the vote that you will have so colleagues are there questions that you have about the proposed plan i do have one dr bills thank you dr roberts and i wonder if you could go into the rationale just a little bit more about the not requiring masks for 12 and under just pulling up some information here dr bills thank you you're welcome i started to get into that a little bit so if we look at one the data that we have right now in the spread of covet 19.
and you'll see some of the day 15. thank you you'll see some of this play out as ms norman and i present through the slides tonight we also were very pleased to receive some some some recommendations from the johnson county health department that we really felt fell more in line with our community's expectations this was that schools would still continue to contact trace positive cases that they would be able to use the three foot distance for that tracing whether no matter if a mask was worn or if it was not and that three foot could also apply in the cafeterias they allow they will be willing to allow individuals to return on day 11 without a negative test if you'll remember at the state that was actually a day 15 return and without enhanced precautions which we'll cover again a little bit later in the presentation a positive test in prior school years would only allow students to avoid quarantine if they had been positive in the last 90 days our county was willing to expand that to six months and we talked a little bit there about home tests that should be independent for that qualification and that schools may also accept an antibody test which which ms norman has been excited to be able to accept that option looked at it last year and we just were not allowed to do that and then finally they do have a number of rapid tests available and no appointment necessary you walk right in at franklin it's near the masonic home and you can get that test very easily anything i've left out on the state and the county recommendations no no those are the main ones thank you we also know that the state legislature and the governor really transitioned some of the loca the decision decision making on on covet and the spread down to the local level and so after july 1st 2021 local school boards will be responsible for implementing whatever measures and restrictions are deemed necessary and prudent to address the impact and spread of covet 19 for their buildings facilities grounds and including transportation so we really took that to heart we spent some time gathering some input from the school board and other community members working with our our staff our teachers and our principals and our administrators to kind of look at what are things that would be right and a right fit for center grove schools that maybe weren't fully in line with what the state had mandated in pri in we also are extremely pleased with the vaccination rates in white river township you'll see our three major zip codes are represented here um and their percentages are all above 60 percent with bargersville and and some of the areas in the south being about 70 percent that's really amazing and awesome we feel like that allows us to make some decisions in our community when we know we have a high saturation of vaccinated individuals i'm going to turn over to ms norman she's going to cover then some of the recommendations we'd like to make tonight and some of the policies and procedures that really she lives in day to day um and this ultimately falls on her responsibility our school nurses and they work with our principals on it so this woman thank you face coverings uh what we are proposing is that face coverings will be optional under most circumstances this would include classrooms hallways cafeterias the athletic facilities um one thing to keep in mind i know previously it said you know that the school boards had some jurisdiction over the transportation but currently there is a federal mandate per the cdc order so regardless of vaccination status currently if kids are riding the bus they would still be required to wear a mask the center girl bus drivers though will not refuse transportation um to any student due to the lack of a face covering if a student requests the face covering we will do everything we can to make sure we have those available to them so that they have them when they get on the bus there may be situations though in our schools where face covering would be required for example the primary one is if you're a close contact and you've been quarantined and you opt to come back on day eight with a negative test in that situation on those days 8 through 11 you would still be required to wear a mask that's an enhanced precaution that would still need to be in place it's also possible that it would be required within our school clinics particularly for symptomatic people who come into our clinics um if somebody were to come in with um scraped knees i'm probably not going to mask them up for that we'll just take care of the scrape knee if they're coming in with complaints of cough sneezing fevers things of that sort we're going to ask them to put a mask on while they're in the clinic with us they may also probably be seeing their nurses and masks still this year in looking at kind of what our classrooms will look like kind of the goal is to get to business back as usual from what we had prior to the pandemic our classrooms are going to continue to try to use at the elementary level pod seating with the goal of three foot distance where possible if you get out a measuring tape and measure three feet generally speaking that's it it's not really that far it sounds far when you're trying to think of it in your head but when we would sit in the chairs last year when we were at six feet that was really really hard to manage in a crowded classroom i'm not saying that three feet won't still result in some close contact but we were doing three feet at the end of the school year last year and we were able to dramatically reduce what quarantine looked like for students our our cafeterias in the elementary standing setting are also going to be we're trying to still get to that three-foot goal [Music] and you know in situations where there's increased exhalation which is kind of a difficult thing to sort of determine you know we would probably look at trying doing our best to kind of increase that to six feet where we can um we're going to still do recess if the kids you know if students have you know families have chosen that they want their students to wear masks at school because they're not vaccinated which is still a recommendation but again we're going to have masks be optional so that's kind of a family choice of what you want to do when they go outside to play on recess they won't need to wear their mask but that's something for you to talk to your child about if you want them to do that instill that in your child you know but we won't be requiring that at recess and we're going to resume field trips i think the key and the field trip component is that wherever we are traveling to we will be required to follow whatever this you know whatever their requirements are if they're more stringent than what we do okay um and so that is you know we're going to be sending home information in regards to those field trips and and be mindful that stuff can change rather quickly so maybe have a few masks on hand just in case if you need to send them secondary school we're going to return you know again to normal seating hopefully with a goal of still three feet of distance to be honest when you're sitting about you know 12 inches from somebody it can be kind of uncomfortable so hopefully we can kind of still maintain a little bit of distance there cafeterias also will return to that normal seating again if we are noticing the exhalation issues and things like that we're going to ask that they try to space kids out a little bit more if it's possible our ecs are going to return to normal and again field trips are going to resume so through all of this we're still going to ask if you have a positive case if your kids are symptomatic you know we want them to stay home if kids are sick number one whether it's covet or not if kids are sick they don't learn well at school so please keep them home i would rather they're home for a couple days and get to feel better and then come back raring to go to learn please if they're having covid symptoms consider getting them tested it's not a requirement but consider doing that if there is a positive test result we will be looking at contact tracing so we're still going to be looking at seating charts checking out classrooms probably talking to teachers to see you know is there something that we've missed was there you know intense group work happening in a space those types of things that might not show up on a seating chart so then you as as parents we are going to utilize parent square and email to make those notifications there will also then be a hotline number that you can call so that you can get you know if you have additional questions please let us know i will probably be the person returning those calls so i i do try to make it my goal to get back to people very very quickly because i know that this this is a lot it's a lot to kind of deal with so i do try i take that very seriously um if the impact you know what what we're looking for is kind of that direct close contact that is going to be we're concerned about transmission of disease okay and and the likelihood that that your student maybe is going to be testing positive as well so um again you know if there is a situation and we contact you you know my request is just if you have questions please let me know i'm here to try to help and educate and and i know not everybody agrees with everything but we will do our best to try to keep everybody as safe as we can with things um i think the last thing there was parents may have the option to quarantine their kids oh yes yes so we're still awaiting guidance i know last year um you know obviously if you have cases in your home that's honestly where we're most concerned about spread so if if somebody in your home tests positive we're going to ask that you continue to quarantine your kids in your home and let us know about that the one big question that we have not been that's not been addressed for us is how those absences are going to be counted so looking ahead so i know there's been some obviously quarantine stinks and nobody likes it my goal is to keep it as much of a minimum as possible for our kids in 6th grade and younger this is something that they kind of have to deal with more than our 7th and above just because the 7th and above have a little more opportunity to to get vaccinated you know their ages warrant that if that's something their families choose the one thing is that covet is a communicable disease by indiana code communicable diseases have to be handled in a specific way to try to contain spread it's not much different it's not any different than if we had a chickenpox case i have dealt with that in our schools we usually don't quarantine for chickenpox primarily because it's a school required vaccination so when we find close contacts of somebody with chickenpox they've been vaccinated therefore they don't have to be quarantined so you don't hear about this as much this is kind of a little different one of the things that the county health department has changed for us is that going from the six foot to the three foot they've also changed that it's a 10 day quarantine regardless of you know you don't have to get tested to come back on 10 days if you come back on day 11 you don't have to have enhanced precautions which that was something we were not able to achieve last year so that was why we stuck at not you know you had to return on day 15 which if any of you had children who were quarantined as i did it was hard in the situation of extracurricular activities you know those are going to be handled on a case-by-case basis depending on what's going on particularly you know we're going to be looking at what type of conduct uh contact um last year at the beginning of all of this you know we had to quarantine the entire tennis team you know now under this new guidance we probably would have maybe quarantined one person if any because it's it doesn't now fall under the same parameters as what we were kind of dealing with last year so this is kind of what returning from quarantine looks like the key to this is the being asymptomatic which means you don't have any symptoms after you've been exposed okay and a symptom can be if you've been exposed and you didn't have any symptoms before and then you suddenly are having you know you have a kid who's never had a headache in their life and two days after the you've gotten a call that they're close contact they suddenly have a headache that's a symptom okay so that's something to kind of be thinking about um what we've looked at is on day eight if there's no symptoms we could do a net you know if you have a negative test it would have to be an independent test a rapid test that's through the health department would work for that and then you agree to follow the enhanced precautions until day 11 meaning you mask up the entire time you sit six feet away from people at lunch things like that then you could return like on that day eight um day eleven after exposure you would not require there's no test required um and you just come back there's no enhanced precautions needed you just come back to school like you normally would the other key to this that's changed is that previously you know we didn't have vaccine last year so this year if if we have proof of someone being fully vaccinated they will not have to quarantine if we have proof of an independent covid positive test which means an at-home test is not cannot be used for this purpose but if you have an independent positive covid test which are free at cvs and walgreens in the health department in those places it provides you with a piece of paper that verifies the proof that will last for six months this will go back to students who tested positive at the end of the school year last year if we have record of that or we can verify that through the health department then they will have six months kind of a free pass they won't have to quarantine i am leaning towards i still want to notify families if their students were in it were potentially exposed just because i think it's important for you to know because you could still become symptomatic and i want you to be aware of that and monitoring your kids but they are still able to come to school if they've had that positive test within the past six months the other key that the county has offered us is antibody testing and so if you have proof of an antibody test within the past six months that states that you have positive antibodies that will also work so that you do not have to quarantine or your student does not have to quarantine um down at the bottom there's kind of what that enhanced precaution thing looks like so that's that's again more for that day eight component of it which again is just there's no exceptions you gotta wear your mask all the time thank you and really want to thank miss norman for being willing to look at the day eight option for our students that's something i don't think you'll find in the other school school corporations nearby either we feel like we have a strong staff and we're able to offer some of those options and keep kids safe and get them back quickly so we're excited to do that we're going to allow the return to visitors in our schools we're kind of taking an approach thinking about when are our buildings when are students mandated when do they have to physically be in our building to get educated and we've got some rules for that and then when there's outside of the school day more voluntary opt-in activities taking place we've got a second kind of set of rules for that and that's where you'll see some of these breaks so currently we would allow volunteers and visitors into the building we would ask that they wear a mask again to protect all students within the building at the time if they are able to willing to provide we would provide an opportunity that they could provide their proof of vaccination and then we could um we could allow the mastering to not happen at that time but again that's to protect the students who do need to be in our buildings every day and have to be right now in the elementary schools we're not ready for lunchtime visitors to come back we're still spreading kids out quite a bit it's hard to find those little nooks and crannies for parents to come in we need all that space for our students during the day and then building rentals again will resume visitors should be vaccinated or wear a mask while they're in the building that's something we're not going to really check at the door it's going to be a lot like going to kroger or one of the shopping centers where it's we expect folks to be open and honest about that and their current status we are going to continue all of our focus on hygiene and cleaning we will still have hand washing campaigns out and about the all the buildings and sanitizer available our custodians will continue their extra cleaning of high-touch surfaces in areas much like last year we are continually improving all of our air filtration systems um in all of our schools we're very fortunate that we were ahead of the game in a lot of our buildings there and we're catching up any building that may have not have been where we wanted it so that's that's been an awesome project that our operations team has really tackled and then we'll have bottle fillers available drinking fountains can come back we may bring some of those back too but the bottle fillers are really popular and it's working really well we're going to definitely keep those in place so a summary something that we'll talk about and again we'd ask the board to take action on later tonight are these recommendations that we've made again i'm just going to summarize this slide that it's mask optionals optional it's the continued use of pods trying to get kids spread out socially to avoid the quarantines as much as possible individuals shall stay home for 10 days following those symptoms or a positive test result regardless of masking we're going to stick with a three foot distance as we do contact trace and quarantine students and again that's for 15 minutes and then asymptomatic close contacts may return on that day eight with those that negative testing and precautions or all cases could return back and quarantine students could return back on day 11 that are asymptomatic i think is the key word there kind of continued on these recommendations we do want center grove we're going to continue to monitor our covert related absences we will publish that on a dashboard online much like we did last year so folks can be informed of how our buildings are performing and if there are if we are seeing spread within our buildings we'll work with the johnson county health department to offer the rapid testing option ms norman would like to try that on site we're going to work towards that we need to secure the test and and we'll work out those logistics so a student could pop in that morning get tested and the parent can take them on to school that's really where we'd like to get to and then finally this is going to change it change this morning on us it will probably change a little bit next week um it's hard to tell which direction it may change loose or tighter kind of thing so really would like to ask the board that well we do want your your support on these recommendations that you um we offer that we give dr arkanov some empowerment here and some authority to to plan some changes after consulting with you so we can make some quick changes if we need to throughout the school year however anytime we do make those changes we're going to bring those back to the board we're going to allow the public to have some public comment and input on those if necessary if it's some sweeping large change and we do want the community to be informed but we also know we may have to make some quick changes to keep our students safe and secure anything i left out there miss norman no i don't think so i i guess i would like to make the point that when we're talking about quarantine quarantine happens from the date of exposure um i know that last year i got a lot of questions in regard to that like well how come you know that it dates back five days well if somebody has symptoms and waits a couple days to see how they're doing and then they get sicker and then they go get a pcr test which takes two or three days it can be five days before we know um and so that's kind of why that sometimes happens and how that sometimes happens parents some parents run out the second their kid has a sniffle some parents will wait it out a week and a half and so again i think the key is is that if your child is not feeling well please have them stay home for a day or two and and see how that's going um if they're trending upward you know or if they're trending downward you know maybe get that checked out a little bit more so but i also think you know one of the things that we have i think with this plan that helps is the johnson county health department is monitoring kind of where spread is in the community so as of today we're at like 2.6 for the positivity rate so that helps us to be able to be a little more open you know and a little more business back to usual because that positive positivity rate is so low um and my hope is that's going to stay in that position so thank you one last note i know folks will have an opportunity for some public comment tonight but this doesn't have to be the end of that input miss conrad has already set up some great webinars we will speak with our staff next tuesday online in a coffee chat setting and then on wednesday we'll have some time available for parents so look forward to getting more back and forth comments and feedback that way as well thank you both before we get any questions from the board i also want to remind this evening later in the agenda will be a vote on on this so right now it's just really your opportunity to ask for some clarifying questions and so forth and as uh jason shared we will have more opportunities we have a coffee chat coming up and this will be one of the major topics during that process okay board any questions for mr taylor mrs norman i don't have any questions about the report i'll save my comments when we go to vote on it okay i have no questions at this time either okay amy do you have any questions mrs counts i do not okay thank you well at that time thank you so very much for your report i know it's thank you fluid report it's ongoing and as they said just this morning we got some changes on this and that can happen in another week when you're dealing with federal state county guidelines and those three don't always work together it can be changing but we would like to publicly thank both of you the work you have to put into this is something else thank you so very much okay our next order of business okay is uh under reports is community mental and behavioral health services not yet i was just going to skip over that is that important okay back it up our next order of business critical race theory delineated dr arkanov thank you thank you very much mr russell and i'd like to thank everyone for being here i appreciate it you may not have heard about this topic critical race theory or crt but i'm going to talk about that this evening i just also want to remind everyone that this is a live stream and we save it online so you can go back and watch it and particularly i share that tonight because of you know you probably have a lot of questions swirling through your head over what we just shared on our back to school plan so you should be able to get back in there and watch it later tonight or tomorrow so or if you enjoy this talk you can watch me again so so this is really a report to the board but i'm sharing it with all of you why am i here today i'm sharing this is that my leadership team and i and many of you board members have heard from parents that we do not want critical race theory taught in our schools others have reached out following a presentation made to fifth grade students at pleasant grove elementary that presentation was not approved by a teacher by the teaching and learning department of center grove nor would it have been based on some of the terms and concepts included in the slides some of the concepts in the slides or associate are associated with critical race theory or otherwise known as crt why is crt not appropriate crt is an academic concept that is studied at the post-secondary level it's not part of the indiana state standards for curriculum and we do not think it is appropriate for k-12 education in center grove we are doing what we are doing here at center grove well as you know center girl's vision is to provide exceptional educational experiences for all students and we are doing this by providing a guaranteed and viable curriculum in our schools we have a system in place for our traditional subjects and we have now extended that system to our counseling department to ensure oversight of the content and continuity in those lessons they provide across the district dr hoover and mrs burglar will be sharing more about the our counseling department in a few moments we want to earn your trust through transparency and by listening to you we will be posting social emotional learning lessons planned by counselors for our elementary students on our website for parents to view we are also planning an on an opportunity for all of you to learn more about these lessons later this month wednesday july 21st at 6 30 pm in the innovation center we'll be providing a parent information meeting where we'll have an opportunity for more feedback we value our partnership with parents and we will be looking for volunteers to be a part of our strategic planning committee as i kind of shared in our last meeting and i see familiar faces now so i'm hoping that you'll come to that as i shared in the past we we are finishing up and wrapping up strategic planning 2.0 that we were really fortunate we asked for at least 100 parents to get involved we pushed and we pushed and we got 300 parents involved and it was it was fantastic and it really helped and a lot of great things came out of that process through working with our parents so as we get ready to launch strategic planning process 3.0 we will be seeking more parent input and parent participation so i hope that you keep an eye out when we start sending out all the messages that we send out to get you involved and ask for you to be a part of that so that's my report as to the issue of crt and the fact that center grove does not use critical race theory and will not use it so any questions from the board i'll be glad to take on i got a couple yes sir turn your mic on so you're going to roll out a way for parents to be involved in the strategic planning committee later yes yeah yeah we're going to be doing that um we'll be doing that here in a couple of weeks we need to get a little get the start of school going and then we're going to organize out kind of a we do we do a big push through social media through our websites through our email and all of that and really try to get people from across the board to get out to participate why does that benefit the schools for parents to want to get involved in the strategic planning committee like why oh yeah that's great great question i mean you know there's so much that goes on in the schools as you know it's a k-12 process it's actually p pre-k we have pre-k sugar growth and there's a lot to be considered and the the last time we had our strategic plan um we heard from parents about the need to organize our crit our character education program for example we have six schools six elementary schools and they were all doing something a little bit different in character education and we found that it would be really beneficial to all of our parents and our students that that kind of thing was organized across the board so that it's guaranteed and viable no matter if you start at pleasant grove and you end up at maple grove for whatever reason particularly when we redistrict not saying we're going to but if we have to and you know that it's going to you know going to be the same did not hear that but it that also too um mr hubbard uh it's a great question because parents bring things to us sometimes that you know we're not thinking about that's important and so we need that input and a lot of times too we educate parents on what we do that they go wow i didn't know you'd do that i didn't know that was something that we needed to think about so it's really good to do that and a couple of years ago when we did it we had we had uh realized some issues with our extended learning program that's our enriched program we were able to revamp that and provide and grow that program a little bit more so those are just some examples of that in fact i believe too one of the process created the complete revamp of the the website we we launched a whole new website based on feedback and and so forth so yeah okay so uh obviously you were talking about crt so crt is something that we're not interested in doing at center grove but do you in your opinion do you see an overlap between crt overlapping into sel at all not not in center grove now i can see where people will make that connection in some cases when you look online and you can see where some organizations have tied some things to it i i get that but in center grove that's not the case and that's what you're going to see from dr hoover this evening and christy berger fair enough yeah anybody else i would like to reiterate on the strategic planning committee that hopefully we can get going this year health and safety stays good i've been on it twice and as he says you don't realize sometimes what you're seeing out there what we think you're seeing out there so that that combination of working back and forth and it really does help if there's at least a hundred people involved with that and the way the process works uh and new programs come out of that or a new direction uh as he also mentioned we work very hard to make sure our elementaries are all on the same avenue so to speak because we have become a more mobile school system of in and out but also within our elementaries because of just the way things work with where you people need to live sometimes so strongly urge you to to keep your ears open and we'll be reaching out to that for members for the strategic committee any other comments mr president i want to make sure mrs counts doesn't have any questions thank you mrs counts with us do you have any questions for dr arkanov i do not thank you thank you dr arkanov thank you now our next order of business is community mental behavioral and health services dr arkanov thank you uh this evening we have a report from let's see who's coming up i say okay dr dr hoover is going to share with you some information along with some members from community health so dr yes thank you i want to introduce becky mills she's the program manager for center grove school-based program through community health network we started our partnership with them last year in july and she wants to provide you an update of the work that they've been able to do this year to support students she oversees three six excuse me six therapists and five life skills clinicians she serves as the liaison between community health and center growth schools works very closely i'm with our director of school counseling and mental health i'm along with our principals and our counseling team and so that really inclusive work is is providing a lot of supports to our students and she's going to be sharing how they've supported in this last year along with some data and also the plans for the upcoming year how they're going to continue to enhance the programming that we're able to do for our students thank you very much yes i have been fortunate enough to be part of this transition from the previous mental health center provider to the current one i came on board again i'm becky mills program manager with community health network school-based programs but i came on board to this partnership last well it officially started july 1st of 2020 i was fortunate enough to be part of that partnership a little bit prior to that but when we started we we began with one there one clinically licensed therapist and one bachelor's prepared life skills clinician serving all of the buildings within center grove schools and um we quickly learned that the need is definitely here for those mental health support services in center grove schools and in november we hired on an additional clinically licensed therapist as well as an additional life skills clinician january february time frame we added a third clinically licensed therapist and life skills clinician the referrals kept coming in kept coming in unfortunately as in many professions right now there is a national workforce shortage in terms of mental health providers and it became very clear that our therapists and life skills clinicians were doing the best they could but did not feel great about the quality of services that they were providing because they were stretched so thin and so it became very clear that we needed to support our therapists in different ways because we wanted to provide that quality care that that the students here deserve in conjunction with the director of mental health and counseling services we made some decisions that we would need to put a pause on enrolling new clients so that we could provide that quality care we did not want to put the youth that we were serving at risk and so we did put a pause on that while we were looking to hire additional therapists and life skills clinicians and so and then in addition we made the decision to not limit ourselves to those therapists who are clinically licensed but also bring on mental health professionals who are masters prepared difference being the ability to serve the commercial insurance population clinically licensed therapists are able to serve private those with private insurance whereas mental health professionals without that clinical licensure status are not able to serve commercial insurance um just the medicaid population and so um we were we recognized that we were potentially limiting the service delivery in doing so but we wanted to make sure that we could still offer our services out beyond the scope of where we were at the time so we ended the school year with um four therapists and four life skills clinicians and at the end of the school year we were at um well presently at 233 active clients um we have enrolled a total of 276 some have successfully completed services some have transitioned out of services um or transferred to an outpatient office that sort of thing but we have been really excited about the services we have been able to provide and throughout the summer we have hired additional therapists we are now at six therapists we have three clinically licensed three um three licensed therapist but not clinically licensed and then um five life skills clinicians so that's where we are um right now and our goal in the very near future um is that we will bring on additional therapists whether it's clinically licensed or not clinically licensed so that there will be one therapist per building is our goal because we recognize what that does for the partnerships communication with the school to address the needs of the the individuals that we're serving as well as supporting the school as a whole in addition as the school year does begin we do we are at this time actually opening up enrollment again so that we are no longer putting a pause on those enrolling new clients so what are the trends what are we seeing historically in school-based services we are serving a wide array of diagnostic categories so we're looking at anything from anxiety depression trauma-related disorders impulse control what we're seeing here and this is the data in center grove so for our active clients matches what we have seen across the board in terms of our school-based services so what you see here is the majority of our clients in center rove are diagnosed with an anxiety some form of anxiety disorder we also ha at 30 um i'm sorry anxiety disorder is 31 34 adhd and 24 depressive disorders um so what i want to highlight there is um the mental health disorders that the youth we're serving experience um run on a continuum so you're going to see some who um experience them at a much greater level than others you're going to have some that are manifested in externalizing behaviors some more internalizing behaviors not one is more important than the other and that's what we want to recognize and just because someone has one payer for their services versus another not one child deserves more support than another and so we want to make sure that we're serving everyone the pandemic unfortunately has created more challenges in this area we're seeing more depression more anxiety and unfortunately for some people we haven't even seen the symptoms begin to manifest at all so while some individuals as i don't know if we call it life returning to normal someone normalcy um as things begin to open up as they previously had some people's symptoms will diminish and things will get back to some sense of safety and security and and normalcy for them however others it creates just as when the pandemic came on feelings of uncertainty fear worries um and so unfortunately for some some people it's only going to get worse from here on out and that's what we want to make sure that we're doing is providing the available supports for the youth no matter what the challenges are that they're facing so if you have not heard of ace scores you probably will at some point but adverse childhood experiences is what the ace stands for and that is a screening tool that is utilized linking trauma experiences to higher rates of depression um and other serious illnesses or diseases so what is important here is that 35 so um it's a 10 question screener and each question if they answer yes for some traumatic experience they get a point and so if you have individuals who scored a four or higher which here in center grove 35 of the enrolled clients that we have scored a four or higher what that means is that the likelihood of them experiencing a serious life event um illness or something of that sort is increasing significantly due to the fact that they simply have experienced four traumatic perceived traumatic experiences in their lifetime the reason i bring that up is because it is important to recognize that these the trauma is there people are experiencing it and we do need the supports i want to highlight our have hope pathway so the half hope pathway is an extra level of care for individuals who receive our services who also happen to rate as being at risk on the columbia suicide severity rating scale all of our clients receive the screener of the columbia at every visit so we're constantly assessing for suicide risk at each session with our clients when someone is identified as at risk on the have hope pathway we do identify a greater level of care more supports sort of like wrapping our arms around them they are assigned an intensive care coordinator that will be providing additional support checking in on them after hours in the evenings so it is an extra support and we've had 22 students here in center grove who have been identified to be on the pathway and receive that extra level of support so the need is here for sure this graph just highlights the insurance the payers in terms of the services that we have been providing for active clients 39 of the service of the clients that we are serving here in center grove schools have private insurance or commercial insurance and therefore what we have been able to do is expand the service delivery to those individuals who have private insurance solely we do have some that receive both or some that have um mental health i'm sorry have insurance uh support through both medicaid and commercial insurance but strictly 39 percent there are 39 of our clients who are receiving solely commercial insurance or have commercial insurance paying for their services so i do want to highlight a little bit of a difference between those who are receiving commercial insurance and medicaid because commercial insurance clients can only receive clinic option therapy services which means our schools are considered a clinic site so they can receive services here in the school building medicaid provides an array a menu of services for the students unfortunately is a huge difference when i talked about those life skills clinicians that the bachelor's prepared staff the bachelor's prepared staff can only work with that medicaid population what happens is someone who has medicaid receives a package of services that includes case management skills development which is coaching on any skill as well as home based and community-based therapy services so as you can see it does open up a lot more services for those individuals but we don't want to diminish the need for services for those with commercial insurance because it is just as important this last slide just highlights the services that have been delivered by our staff beginning january 1st through june 30th of this year so if you look at it between the six therapists and the actually not even the sixth therapist because it was four therapists and four life skills clinicians who have been providing those services they have provided over a hundred family therapy services and over a thousand individual therapy services you can see the array of services telehealth is still something that payers will support right now at this time we're not sure how long moving forward telehealth will be supported but we're going to continue to provide it as long as we can but you can see the different types of services including the individual family therapy as well as skills training and development which is that individual coaching which can include pushing into the classroom to provide that support or pulling out and coaching the students one-on-one so in summary i just want to state that the problems are not going away and we're happy to continue to provide those support we really just want to be able to provide them at a greater rate serving more individuals this coming year and we're excited to hopefully be i know we're already bringing on more than we had last year staff but the plan is to obviously like i said have one therapist per building as soon as possible thank you great presentation does the board have any questions on the diagnostic slide what's other so other could include any of those trauma related disorders we also we just i always say in school-based services we serve every diagnosis you can imagine but um some of the primary ones that you would see that fall under the other might be oppositional defiant disorder conduct disorder we do serve those on the autism spectrum disorder as well trauma-related disorders um adjustment disorder to name a few i absolutely had all the others pretty well defined couldn't figure out what else was left so this is more of a logistical uh situation from personal experience of having a son that had autism with asperger's uh and mom and i were pretty ill versed in how to get through medical things as she was a doctor it's a maze so i'm wondering are your people trained to help families get through that maze of paperwork and get to that source they need because it's so easy to throw your hands up and go i can't do it absolutely so it is amazed and as i'm bringing on more staff i am providing that training not myself i'm bringing in people to provide that training for those those staff because you're absolutely right the medicaid waivers bureau of developmental disabilities all of that is so critically important and getting them connected to those resources as soon as possible not when they turn 18 but well as you said understanding insurance also yes well why do you think coverage is covered yeah that has been definitely that is a huge help to families that otherwise would go my staff are happy to explain as much as they can and when they have questions they come to me to because we want the families to know we truly do we want them to have an understanding of what services are provided what services are available what services are we not getting right now that we could have access to okay thank you any other questions sport i i have a question on the last slide the individual skills training and the individual therapy piece are there limits to any of these therapies but and also too can you talk a little bit about what those the difference in those two areas absolutely so i'm going to answer the second question first the difference between individual therapy and individual skills individual therapy is provided by the master's prepared therapist or the clinically licensed therapist and that is anytime you are processing their the thoughts and the feelings linking the thoughts and behaviors um and emotions together for the client skills training is strictly coaching them it may be teaching them a skill and when we say teaching them a skill it could be communication skills anger management skills problem solving communication skills but it is teaching the skill and then ensuring that the skill is able to be replicated so there may be some modeling and some practicing of the skill and then praising for use of the skill in the appropriate ways so that would be the easiest way for me to describe the difference between individual therapy and individual skills i also want to add that individual therapy would be something that's done in a confidential one-on-one setting whereas skills can be done in any setting i mentioned earlier it can you can be pushing into the classroom and supporting them to stay focused and you know stay in their seat um stop tapping their their foot or their pencil um it may look like um them pulling out and teaching them the skill and then going into the classroom and ensuring that they're um exhibiting that skill appropriately or practicing that skill appropriately there could be in the hallway some opportunities for skills training if you see a student maybe not keeping their hands to themselves you know taking something from someone else grabbing something off the wall there's so many different opportunities for skills training and development that our staff have the opportunity to do um and then the other part of your question limit so when it comes to the skills training and development and i should say that any of those medicaid rehab option services that i mentioned there being a package of services that they have access to i could get into all sorts of nitty-gritty but if someone has medicaid as their payer cans is completed um every six months a cans is a child in adolescent needs and strength scale and from that cans an algorithm spits out a level of need that level of need identifies the amount of services that each client would receive for a six-month period of time so for example a client with a level of need three which the majority of school-based clients tend to be a level of need three a client with a level of need three would have would be eligible for 150 hours of skills training and development over a six-month period of time okay i guess the distinction you raised between the commercial and the medicaid we're talking about this kind of plethora of service that's out there for the for the medicaid what about the commercial what happens to those kids are they thrown to their own insurance carriers to provide find that kind of coverage i mean what what happens to those kids so i wish i could tell you that commercial insurance coverage is fantastic and offers this array of services just as medicaid does unfortunately clinic option therapy is what commercial insurance providers are willing to to provide to support so clinic option therapy could include individual therapy family therapy and group therapy but it would have to be in a clinic setting again i mentioned those schools are considered a clinic setting but it would not allow us to go to the home for example and provide home-based therapy so those are still provided within our program it's just they don't have the broad array that the other side absolutely yes okay thank you and and that's what we ran into on that one i assume also you work very closely with our special needs department as far as ieps because that's a whole nother guidance absolutely and our staff are very well aware of the need to be maintaining regular communication with teachers of record and other individuals who are working with our clients so that we're aware of what goals are being worked on through their ieps how we can support them if there's a behavior plan in place etc mrs counts do you have any questions i do not um just curious so you've worked with other school districts and what can you say are we looking when we look at our numbers are we you know what does it look like what do we i hate to say but how do we compare can you clarify are you talking about the number of students leading services the need yeah i will say that if we were to compare the startup this past year in center grove to the startup in other districts the referral rate far exceeded here in center grove far exceeded the other districts that we have been in um recently starting up in and i don't know if that's because the i know that in some other districts that we've been in they did have a previous mental health school-based mental health provider some of them did not so that might be one difference but i will say the the number the rate of referral and right off the bat was extremely high it was consistent we were regularly getting them and we could not i what we ended up doing honestly because i had started out with one therapist and therapists are the ones required to do the intakes to enroll new clients the we had to identify therapists in other districts to assist with enrolling the clients into our services because my one therapist could not do all of the intakes and see the clients that then became enrolled in services so it it was definitely a higher rate of referral and like i said it was it broke my heart to say we had to put a pause on referrals back in in april but i just knew that we couldn't provide the quality care if we kept doing the intakes at the rate at which we had been thank you and i i don't want to blame it but i i could lean on pandemic for causing those high numbers at the beginning here let's hope that numbers go down so if there's not any other questions you have one more mr hubbard i got a few first of all i didn't get your name becky mills becky okay thanks for coming becky um in your one of your slides you said life skills clinician and then i saw someone said family skills clinician what are what are those two roles they're the same family skills um it's the service provided so there's a life skills clinician who can provide individual skills training and development or family skills training and development family skills training and development would look similar to individual skills training and development but it would be providing that coaching for the family often times what that looks like is coaching on behavior management plans in the home setting limits rules structures following through with things at the home that's what that might look like and these are things you work with with parents absolutely okay um you had a pie chart at the beginning too where was all that data collected from the was that data that the school collected or data that you guys dated that we've collected based on diagnoses um in our electronic medical record okay um and out of those 122 cases or whatever it was um did you give any feedback to the school on what caused some of those whether it be social media whether it be bullying or like what caused some of these issues that maybe we could address it at a school level to try to circumvent some of these things so that's a great question we are in constant communication with the schools and i will say that is something that we it is an area of improvement because we only had starting out the one two and then three therapists throughout the year moving forward i anticipate greater communication with the schools and that could be with the school counselor with the teacher of records special education department whoever is working with and collaborating um you know on behalf of that child because we do want to make sure that we're talking about these on an individual basis about what is what are the referral concerns why where are these um you know issues stemming from and it does take a little bit at intake you're you do gather a lot of information but you don't get all of the information that explains everything but with having a therapist moving forward like i said the goal of having one therapist in every building we're the plan is for that therapist to have at least a monthly if not weekly meeting with the school to talk about the referrals active clients so that we're maintaining that regular communication we were not there this year because we just frankly did not have the staff to be able to maintain that rate you know those regular communications okay so when you guys come in and talk to students or do you talk to the parents before you talk to the students so the intake process requires that the family is present family and client must be present for that intake assessment family engagement throughout services is something that we highly encourage and is critical to the to the success of our of our clients in our services we look at it as though we cannot create lasting change if we are only working with one member of the family one part of that system we need to be working with the entire system in order to be able to create that lasting and sustained change positive change for the youth that we're serving so can we force that no but that is something that we really do strive for it is part when we do that intake assessment at the intake assessment ideally that first family therapy session is scheduled so that we set that expectation right up front okay well thank you very much i would like that to see data on the whenever you do have like um like hey i see a social the reasons for like a social media issue going on in school there's a bullying issue so maybe we can try to address it here and kind of try to bring that number down be great thank you it would be nice for what are our directions we need to go thank you if i see no other thank you board uh thank you for the presentation very informative thank you thank you do you have anything else to do no becky's just doing a great job and i'm just waiting for the next one okay yeah shall we move on our next uh report is on social emotional learning you want to do an introduction yeah thank you very much so again uh dr hoover's uh up here uh today she is accompanied by christy berger who is our director of school counseling and mental health and she works closely with community as well as you just heard so with that i'm going to turn it over to the both of them to share with you uh an update on our school counseling mental health department thank you dr arkanov for the school board and i want to just start by talking about um just a little introduction um meeting our student social emotional needs it's just has been a critical component of helping students to reach their potential for well longer than since i've been in education the adage you know kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care and that really comes to those relationship pieces and how our teachers and our school staff really just get to know kids because it's those connections that often motivate and and help us to strive to really become who we can be as young people and i know we all had those teachers in our lives that really meant a lot to us and we know those connections are important and the affective needs and students academic success are linked in so many ways and the more needs a student has that aren't being met and and those run across all demographics the more needs they have the more that support they need so that we can help them get to the learning piece and so we've been doing this for a long time as individual teachers i'm in our counseling programs and we really pair that with our academics so our schools have worked to create the kinds of cultures and supports within them to meet the needs for all of our students so that we can meet our our academic goals um with with every student um so i just want to share a timeline and dr arkanov you did a great job of teeing this up um in our strategic plan 2.0 this really came from our parents that said we need some character education components to our schools and they saw that there were some things happening in different schools and it didn't have a centralized this is what we do and from that we had a committee that included parents and teachers and administrators and we landed where we have 10 um traits that we think are things that kids should have to to build good character um those are all on our website there's a information about all those and how we teach those in our our buildings and our counselors had worked on those um for since 2017 was the first year we implemented that starting in august um so we've had those for for five years in our district um also in 2017 um a group of counselors had formed a study group and there was a counseling grant available and the study group they were supposed to find what are we missing how what are where are we not serving students well enough to help them in their academic life and through that study we did not get the grant we didn't do any of those things but what we did learn is our students have of in our district overall have a very high level of anxiety and stress which makes complete sense we're a very high achieving school district our kids go on to do amazing things homes with very high expectations teachers with incredibly high expectations for those students and it's often good stress right good stress is motivating too much stress is debilitating and so we really wanted to work to help with students in those areas those students that needed it had that identified need i mean while we didn't get that grant we did know that was something our counselor started working on in support of kids especially as those kids came to those with them so they tried to build their toolbox of support um in 2019 uh three different things happened and one was the do ido the department of ed released um sel competencies and those were not mandated they were just said hey we know some schools are suffering and actually mrs misberger is going to give some more information on that um but and those are a reaction to some things happening around the state and in our nation and but they're not mandated they're not required that year though there was an indiana code a state mandated legislative action that was schools needed to teach employability skills and that was part of our move to college and career ready standards and so they understood the states not now these academic things need to leave things kids need to leave high school to be successful in what they know but there's also some um employability skills some ways we need to behave that make us good you know whether it's college students going into the military um getting a job whatever those are um these are things and that came from a big committee that included employers as well as educators saying this is what peop young people coming to us don't have so those are state mandated through through indiana law and she's also going to talk about those a little bit later in the presentation later that year we also had a referendum for safety and security in our district and while that did not pass there were some really important mental health things that we considered in that about 30 percent of that referendum had it passed was going to be dedicated to things we could do for students mental health and well-being we could not do all of those things but we've tried to do what we can with what we have and we've added some supports in the counseling department as well some things we've done in safety and security um throughout the district um in 2020 in that fall or in february right before we went on shutdown and couldn't be at school anymore we had hired our first director of counseling and mental health and she was instrumental in onboarding the community supports that mrs mills just went through and all the support we've been able to give to students this year and thank goodness because this year was needs unlike any we've ever had with the pandemic and that effect has had on students and adults so she spent a lot of her time and energy making sure that program was getting off the ground and we were identifying kids and doing the things we needed to do she also was instrumental in the administration of a survey called panorama and that was given to all students grades three through 12 in the fall and in the spring and it had been because no survey is given to students without school work and said i know you had voted on that last year and um we had communicated with families before those surveys so that they know what those were about and we use that to help support what what are those needs with our student is anxiety still high we knew it was high in 2017.
i'm passing on the president's commission report which gives treat racism and the problems we've had but how do we go forward in a positive way to improve things for everybody also the book red white and black which is essays of over 20 black civil rights leaders historians academics and pastors please use this as part of your information set on your decision thank you once again the time has expired for conversations on critical race theory diversity equity inclusion we invite people to come up for any other topics to address the board this is under board policy as to how much time we allocated each board meeting to allow people to talk on a variety of topics if that is the topic in which you wish to address the board we invite you to email the board at boardmembers at csd99.org please pass on your turn if that is your topic that you wish to discuss this evening thank you ruth ruth isla thank you if it's okay with you i'm just going to use my teacher voice because i think a lot of you can hear me in the background my teacher voice right but you couldn't hear anybody when they were just standing up here talking like i'm really sorry when you were mumbling quietly about the stuff that you never expect for anyone to pay attention to right but those of you that can hear me now right and you don't probably want to hear another word i'm going to say because i'm going to tell you that that is equity is about and hank you were going to tell me that i can't have any more time you are correct appreciate and respect that which is not what i've seen next up is stephanie tressel followed by annette mcneely stephanie trussell followed by annette mcneely stephanie trussell dupage county resident since 1994.
schools that state that if not file the gov and the state will not withhold funding if schools do not require mass so now we all know that there is no law that legally can require kids to wear mass in school but you are required legally by law to provide every child with a public education to deny student entering into school because they are not wearing a mask would be breaking the law we know kids are very very low risk of covet thankfully mass do not prevent the spread of viruses there are no adoptive rules regulations or standards in the illinois administrative code that states maps are required over 100 schools or school districts have already made matters optional for upcoming school year and more are doing so every day like wheaton warrenville as we go on lamont two more paragraphs 2019 pandemic is over and that is a great thing and we need to start acting like it give our kids their child childhoods back and let's get back to loving i'm asking you the school board should do the right thing make it easier on everyone and make max optionals this year for every grade level we the parents decide what is best for our kids period the maths are not made optional before the start of school year and our kids are not let into the building because they are not wearing masks the teachers staff and school board are in for a very busy year when lawyers get involved and unlawfully discriminate against those who choose not to wear mass that's not a threat that is a promise thank you [Applause] thanks cut next to brian kelly all right y'all doing good thank you i'm also just going to read something real quick be quick all right so clearly this is a very heated topic and people on both sides of this debate may have strong feelings one way or another obviously whether you turn on the media outlet or another everyone seems to know what's best for everyone else bottom line is that this is america and history has shown us time and time again that medical freedom and free will is extremely important and pretty much a must you cannot be forced to wear a medical device you cannot be forced to take a medication that you do not want and you cannot be subjected to medical testing that you do not want if you and your doctor feel that a medical device will protect you from sars flu colds whatever then by all means wear the device if you and your doctor feel that a certain vaccine or medication will protect you from harm then by all means take the medicine or vaccine if your favorite news channel tells you to do one thing or another and you feel that it is the correct course of action regarding your medical needs then i suggest that you all consult multiple doctors and then decide ultimately your health and the health of your family is a decision that cannot be made by any government or government entity i know that you only have opinions whether based on media personal morals or pressure from higher ups or friends or family which everyone in this room experiences but the point i'm making in the end is that everyone has a right to their freedoms and instilled as americans and freedoms instilled by god as human beings the only option here is to offer guidance that can help people prepare to make a decision that is right for them these final decisions must be left up to the individual and their families it is an extremely slippery slope when you try to force things on people not saying that you guys are but just the government in general and that often leads to fights that play out in courts which again will happen so again make masks vaccines and medical testing optional and this has been my first and last speaking event on this topic and then unfortunately the next one will have to be represented by my lawyer thank you thanks brian uh next we have vera kelly hi my name is vera kelly and i'm going into sixth grade at pkms my mom and dad made the hard decision to homeschool my brother and i last year because of illegal coveted rules i'm really sad i missed my last year at country trails because of your illegal rules as much as i loved home school with my mom i want to go to school with my friends no one should be forced to wear a mask or do anything to their body that they do not want as students we do not deserve to be treated this way we need to see our friends smiles teachers smiles hug each other and be normal kids i am so proud of my parents for fighting for my freedoms and making sure to keep me safe they are teaching me not to back down and fight for what is right that is why i am here even if i'm scared please stop hurting us and allow families to choose what is best for their kids it is my body my choice my family our choice if you want to wear your mask so be it that is your choice i choose no please make masks optional i beg you thank you for listening to me [Applause] all right next we have lord kelly my name is lori kelly i am a parent a taxpayer advocate and freedom fighter in the light of the continuing recommendations in regards to the covid response procedures for schools in illinois i'm going to present some facts based in law not in fear schools provide academic instruction they are not health care providers my children will be attending school without a mask and they will not be subjected to any covid response recommendations such as and not limited to masks covet tracing covid testing quarantine etc my children will not be denied a free and public education and they will not be discriminated against and my children will not be excluded from sports and any extracurricular activities the school district has been in violation of the law students have been scared into submission by those in charge the district instructed staff to lie to students all year 301 has demonstrated they care more about politics than students and staff and the students are being used as political pawns my children and i don't wear masks i will not let us be subjected to that tyranny they want to go to school they can go to a ball game or a concert with thousands of strangers but without a mask but they cannot go to school without a mask and still be around their friends who they play with all the time the school district is in violation also of the nuremberg codes which were enacted to protect people from unwanted medical experiments or procedures done to them god has given me dominion over my body and the right to make decisions for the safety of my child's body as well no person or entity can tell a person what to do to their body we are protected against this in the first amendment rights of the united states constitution under religious freedom and we are protected again under the 14th amendment under rights to personal autonomy if we as a society start discriminating and segregating others based on medical choice not too far along the path it becomes crimes against humanity so in conclusion school district 301 has been participating in a worldwide medical and psychological experiment as ones who make the decisions for the district you all have been implementators and co-conspirators of this wickedness and in turn making your staff participate in the unethical disgusting treatment of our most vulnerable and precious commodities our children so do the right thing do the lawful thing and make masks optional [Applause] all right thanks lauren next we have sherry green hall green handle great here hi guys um thank you dr stern and district 301 board for hearing our concerns this evening um my name is sheri greenhagel i stand before you not only as a parent of a high school child in this district but also as a second grade teacher in a nearby district who taught through the pandemic last year i'm going to share some firsthand experience with you regarding the masking of young children that i hope will open your eyes to the impractical and unsanitary tests that we have asked millions of young children across the country to do during a pandemic that has largely not affected them first every fall teachers are required to complete several health-related activities in order to ensure the safety of our students we watch a blood-borne pathogen video and take a test we watch powerpoints and how to handle seizures we deal with injuries of various kinds we have epipen training ead training suppository training and last year we had a nurse come in before school to give us proper use mass training during the mass training we were taught how to properly put on and take off a face mask in order for it to remain sanitary and uncontaminated first you are to wash or sanitize your hands before touching only the ear loops of the mask then you are to put your fingers only in the ear loops place it over both ears without touching the front of the mask and leave the mask untouched until removed when removing the mask you are to wash your hands again lean forward touch only your loops and promptly dispose of the mask or place it in a bin to be washed touching the mask at any time without washed hands resulted in contamination and possible spread of viruses and bacteria into the oral and nasal cavities not just covid19 viruses but all the other viruses that are still out there our nurse took this training very seriously with us i can tell you with all honesty that zero percent of my students wore a sanitary mask on any single day last year and i want to share with you just a few of my observations as a frontline teacher my students touched their masks all day long to the point that many were observably filthy before we even made it to lunchtime some had dirty spots on them from handling them and pulling them away from their faces so they could speak or breathe many masks were ill-fitting which caused students to tug at them constantly and you could always tell who had cheetos for lunch we had to learn phonics and reading behind masks i have been a teacher since 1994 and have never been more frustrating teaching students to read students need to see the formation of your mouth in the placement of your tongue in many of our english language sounds you can't successfully teach phonics behind a mask my incoming first graders i am told will be coming to me this year as non-readers and i will have to change my entire curriculum to meet their needs our district has actually hired a specialist to assist us in this effort many students probably my mouth breathers developed moisture circles on their mask throughout the day that would then catch particles as they breathed in and out they often would ask to go change their masks in the hallway and go to their backpack where a clean mask was shoved inside i guarantee you they did not properly handle the mask before putting it on most interestingly my students pencils developed a brownish film on them last year at first i couldn't figure this out then i concluded it was from overuse of hand sanitizer on top of already filthy hands you see the children were to sanitize their hands every time they came in and out of my classroom and before they ate because sending 18 kids to the sink at the same time is not time conducive many of my students used hand sanitizer over and over taking it on top of their already filthy hands this filmy dirt in turn made its way onto the surface of pencils and eventually turned their pencils into a sticky filmy brown this sticky filmy filth made it onto their hands because they touched them all day long and then it made it onto their masks i taught the last 42 days with all of my students face to face all day and ate lunch with all of them every single day in my 28 by 30 foot classroom so all 19 of us ate and socialized together for 25 minutes or more with our masks off lunch was their favorite time of the day because they could see each other's faces it was such a precious bonding time for us and became one of my favorite times of the day as well because i could see the faces behind the masks instead of their weary little eyes who were asked to make so many changes last year none of my students got covered either concerning my own daughter who will be a junior at chs this year she is a 4.1 gpa student in honors classes and went downstate for track to compete in two events she is a suite response responsible student and absolutely dreaded school all last year her attitude changed she became more introverted and missed out on many quality social interactions with her friends and teachers i do want to take the time to thank you for the decisions that you made toward the end of the year when you lifted restrictions and relax them a little bit so that our kids could play sports you try and wrap up your comments sherry okay thanks um just thank you for that um i implore that you make the right decision about mass wearing optional for the upcoming school year for all students regardless of vaccination status and there should be no discrimination in any way between mast and unmasked students thank you so much for your time next we have justin's end on i'm probably mispronouncing that too is justin here rendon i'm yielding my time for anyone else who might need it uh one one and nuna's um good evening members of the board my name is juan and tunis and i'm one of the parents that wants to speak against the option of making our kids wear masks whether it's temporary or the whole school year i want to make this clear i am 100 percent against forcing our children to wear masks now i do offer the compromise position that we make optional the usage of masks there's always going to be pros and cons against anything that we decide to take action against such as believing in research that wearing masks harm children believing that kids immune system is stronger than the average adults deciding whether getting the kobe best scene is the best action to combat the epidemic or in this event the usage of wire masks life is sometimes much easier than what we think and in this case is it normal for humans let alone a child to be covered with a mess throughout the whole time in school my answer for that question is no we are not meant to wear masks also this provides an opportunity for like a kidnapper to tape our kids mouth and to take them without letting our kids yell out for help because who because who would be able to tell what someone is wearing underneath their masks i want to take the next couple of seconds to talk about my experience to you guys in my case i trusted the government with their policies and their research to keep me safe during my time in service even though they have ex extensive knowledge and research they're highly inaccurate when it came to my health in the future in my life experience i was given the anthrax shot which is which is supposed to cause and prevent i mean excuse me prevent anthrax and instead of doing good it did more harm to my body and caused permanent damage i also was given the malaria pill to take obviously to prevent malaria and in recent research it has proven that it gives chronic brain effects i also wanted to i also uh provided the by the veterans health administration a cpem machine that of course would aid in correcting my oxygen intake during my sleep and learning two weeks ago i was thought to discontinue using the machine because it's causing cancer on patients i wanna i want you to take a second to think all these cases that happened to me was in a way to prevent a disease or an outcome instead it has given me a life of chronic issues i do not want this for my child or any child in general the decision that you all make right here now will decide if i let my child attend your school or start doing homeschool thank you for your time [Applause] thanks next was scott popovich good evening thank you for your time uh i'll be using justin's time so thank you justin uh my name is scott popovich i have two children in district 301.
if if we if we continue to require mass now when is it that we don't um or stop uh and again i say that very aware of of where cases are and there's always a potential for those numbers to take out but at least as a recommendation today for the numbers we have and to start school that's the information we have in front of us we also recognize that although we have recommendations coming to us at all levels really whether it be the federal level the state level or the local level that that they are recommendations and we've tried to adhere to those uh to the degree that is possible but no longer any requirements the governor's mass quarter expired on on july 1st with his most recent executive order that applied to schools the cdc has recommended that but they've required it on public transit so there are situations or circumstances where requirements have been put forth but they have not for schools at this point and and it's been left to local control that that at the end of the day that's where our even our state if we would listen to our governors or state legislators um it is local control and so with that and no requirements additionally we have shared our plan with the bartholomew county health department and received support uh from the health department for the the plan as presented initially for the first time on july 8th um and then i started to go to the logic that as we look at masks we really were at is it all or none because the the all piece is is excuse me the unvaccinated piece which is a recommendation again by some entities including the indiana department of health really isn't enforceable that that we would be enforcing it for our two-year ages 2 to 11 because we know they're not vaccinated but we couldn't enforce it it would be very much the honor system for every other child from age 12 to whatever age as well as all of our adults and so if we push that aside then and review the all versus non-circumstances uh and when i say none again we are recommending use for those who are unvaccinated or at risk we follow that side um it seems odd to me that that we would indicate that or even that the spread of covet 19 in this community is going to fall on the shoulders of our ages 2 to 11.
were students still struggling with that and then we wanted to help support that in the ways that we could for those students that did have those needs we had also in last year started talking about what we could do for they're called tier one supports what can we do to help every kid proactively to learn those employability skills to learn those things that help us get along in the world um and we were able to to adjust some things in our elementaries and we're going to offer some of those tier 1 supports um next year which we'll explain later and then the last just june 1st of this year we had a director change and miss burger came to us and just started just last month and she's been helping to get particularly that elementary thing off the ground connecting with our community health partner to make sure we're ready to start the year and have those things in place we need so that's kind of been our journey this isn't we've been traveling this we knew the need um which was a great um part of feeling like we needed that that referendum to um fast forward things more than we could have otherwise so i wanted to just give that background and um let christie talk about our our plans in the future sure thing okay thank you all for coming tonight i'm chrissy berger and i am the director of school counseling and mental health here for center grove a little bit of background about me i am born and raised in indianapolis i went to anderson university for college got my bachelor's in social work there took a year kind of tried to figure out what i wanted to do did some case management down in nashville tennessee and decided to come back my passion was really working with students in schools and so when i was in nashville i got to see how school counselors and school social workers work with students and so i decided to come back to iupui to get my master's in social work and then i started my career here in center grove schools i was at north grove elementary for about six years serving there as their school social worker and then was asked to come over to the middle school to be the middle school counselor and i at that time went back to get my school counseling degree so i actually had my masters in both social work and school counseling which is helpful because that's the team i lead here in center grove they have both of those backgrounds and then about three and a half years ago i went to the indiana department of education to work on what's called title iv funding which is federal funding that helps support whole child learning and teaching and i was there for about six months and within those six months we had two school shootings in indiana and the superintendent at that time felt like we needed to hire somebody who had a mental health background who could really help schools as they come around and support the whole child so that we don't continue to have these crises in our schools and so i was promoted at that time to director of social emotional and behavior wellness and then as dr hoover said i came back to center grove excited to see a lot of familiar faces and families i worked with over the years but i have been back since june 1st and have been working with my team and a team of administrators and teachers so why whole child wellness so why do schools have to do things around whole child wellness that don't include our academics and so here are some national stats at age 13 20 of our students are diagnosed with a mental health disorder and 5 of our students are diagnosed with a substance abuse disorder a lot of times we know that those can go hand in hand a student may be coping with a mental health concern by substance or maybe using substance which may create a mental health concern students who struggle with their mental health tend to be absent a lot from school and they are in that definition of chronic absenteeism which means they're missing 10 percent of their academic day youth are six times more likely to receive school-based treatment such as community which is why it's been such an important path for center grove to take to partner and to provide that school-based services because our families are more likely to attend those services because they're at school it helps to eliminate the barrier of transportation also with parents schedules it tends to be a bit more flexible so that they can do that at school so in indiana so let's talk about some indiana specific stats so this data was taken by the indiana youth institute and this was done pre-pandemic and there are two stats here that i'll get to that are actually from 2015 because we have as a state have not had any current data since then and so students claim about 36 and a half percent of our students have claimed that they have been cyber bullied and this is one of the stats that i believe will increase um due to being online 24 7 with a pandemic i only could assume that this would be higher and in johnson county specifically for every 1149 youth and children that live here we have one mental health professional for them so that's when becky was talking about our staff and the national shortage and so that's why we're doing this work we're doing is because we want to be proactive and preventative so that our students may not need that mental health support about 26 percent of our high school students don't feel safe and that doesn't mean just physically safe that doesn't mean that they are afraid to come to school it might mean once they're at school they don't feel like they have a place to go if something was to happen they might not feel emotionally safe they may not feel mentally safe and so 26 and prior to covid 33 of our students 6th through 12th grade reported feeling sad or hopeless for two weeks in a row and being a middle school counselor for the years that i was this is something that i saw on a daily basis here in center grove and the last two stats are the ones that i set are from 2015 and truly is where mrs hoover was sharing about the counseling grant and the funding that came from that was because of these stats so indiana the second leading cause for our students dying that are 15 to 24 is suicide the first being automobile accidents and then indiana ranks second in the nation for students who have made suicide plans and that data to me alone honestly is what keeps me up at night and is what i would say is our students are asking for our help and they're crying out for some supports and some needs day in and day out so let's look at center grove's specific data so prior to last year there was not necessarily a formalized way that all schools were submitting their suicide assessment data so this data is if a student comes to the school counselor possibly a dean assistant principal and says that they're having thoughts of suicide a parent could have called it could have been a friend coming to report that we go through the columbia screener and so you'll see last year alone for elementary students we did 106 of these and for secondary schools we did 137 two things to note our kids weren't in school every day at the secondary so would this have been higher if they had been or was school their safe place and it maybe wouldn't have been as high something to think about and again i spent six years at the elementary and i can tell you that this number is extremely high from when i was there not too long ago dr hoover also shared that we did some panorama data last year and so this is the spring results for grades three through five and again these are the students report this and so it's electronic and some of the questions that are asked on this we focused on classroom effort emotional regulation and grit and the type of questions that are asked is how hard you work in class do you try to be a part of classroom discussions what do you do when you're upset are you able to calm down and then for grit questions like if you're working towards a goal and you fail at that goal do you try again or do you stop trying and so when i first look at this and i look at the percentage i'm like that's not terrible right 76 tile 40th percentile but that is then we take it to our national norms and you'll see so 52 of our students say that they do well in grit but compared nationally to their peers we're in the zero to 19 percentile the same for emotional regulation and then classroom effort we are up higher above the norm and that space for our students three through fifth grade and then if we look at our secondary students you'll see a little bit of shift their classroom effort actually went down so that's them saying they aren't trying as hard at school and then emotion regulation went up a little bit for them and grit is still down in that zero to 19th percentile so what is social emotional learning at center grove so here's the definition that we use what i really want to point out about this i'm not going to read everything to you is that this is a process not only for children but also adults this is something that we have to continue to practice day in and day out i have to practice conflict resolution day in and day out i have to practice public speaking right and my stress around that so those are things that i have to practice day in and day out and those are skills that we're teaching our students and the employability standards that i'm going to get to here in a moment tie to all of the definition here that you'll see in the black boxes so we're teaching the skills for our students to be able to understand and manage their emotions which ties to the regulation piece of the panorama survey set and achieve positive goals establish and maintain positive relationships feel and show empathy for others and to make those responsible decisions what is the benefit of this work well i kind of laid the why the foundation of why we do this but again as dr hoover and dr arkanov shared this is something we've been doing for a long time it may have been under a different name it may have been called soft skills character education but there's been a ton of research about this and the research shows us that our students who receive daily social emotional learning skills practice and instruction we will see an 11 gain on their academic scores we will see an 11 dollar return on investment to the community which means what we're doing is we're seeing less of our juvenile students being arrested we're seeing less medical bills we're seeing less of public assistance and substance abuse and so this really invests money back into the community we know that social emotional learning has its greatest impact when we start with students in kindergarten and even really preschool we're so fortunate to have that here and we are really supporting those students right away and then social emotional learning also has a positive impact on our teachers they're teaching their students how to handle a tough situation maybe they're coming in that morning and they just got into an argument with their children or their husband and they're feeling frustrated right they can explain that how they're working through that because they're here to teach and to do their job just so we can get our students brains ready to learn so again social emotional learning at center grove we're focusing on skills that support college and career and life success we're really helping to develop productive responsible community members as our community businesses and stakeholders have said they need to see this from our students when they come to their space and again really just being intentional to align to the vision of this district which is to provide an exceptional educational experience for all the students that we serve here at center grove dr hoover talked a little bit about this the tiered supports and so tier one is something that all of our students receive so in center grove we talk about the conditions for learning we know that if students come and they are hungry or their pet passed away or a grandparent is sick and they come to school they're not focused on learning right they're focused on what they came to us with and so we want to have an opportunity to talk them through that and get them ready to learn we want them to have access to their school counselor their school social worker a lot of our students participate in health and pe classes to really focus on that wellness aspect and we have school-wide expectations for our students and that is again a tier one support and if we look at tier two and tier three some and few you'll note that if your student is receiving any of those supports it is parent permission we just like becky was sharing she would not do an intake unless the parent was there and as a counselor sending her a referral i have to have parent permission before i even send that contact information to community so some of that tier two support might be a small group with the student service personnel some one-on-one skill skill building a mentorment tea program and then for about five percent of our students they need some additional support so that might be referring them to an outside agency like community providing them a 504 plan or a special education plan to support their needs so the new thing that is coming in august is the elementary special rotation a lot of this has been highlighted but i want to show that these are the three skills that we will be working on and those are the employability skills and that was shared several times that um that was through indiana code and i want to say it's senate enrolled act hold on i wrote it down 297 so that was in 2019 that that came about so senate enroll acts 297 required that all schools k12 provide employability skills to our students what was also shared was that we will be posting all of those lessons on our website and nine weeks excuse me nine week increments and so you will know what day your student will be receiving that what will be taught we will also provide a teacher extension so if teachers want to support the lesson or if parents want to support the lesson we'll also have a parent resource there as well and then as was shared earlier something new starting june 1st going forward is that all school social worker and school counseling lessons will be reviewed by the teaching and learning team i'm not going to go into depth of all of these but i just wanted you to be able to see here are the actual skills and standards that are required and when we put up our lesson plans we will tell you which skill we're teaching to so that you know what that student is receiving and how we're tying it into that specific employability skill so you'll see the ones for regulation again this is just k5 special rotation so i obviously didn't put up all k12 but those are on the department of education's website and then connection and collaboration think of collaboration just really working well in teams working well with one another what happens if we have conflict how do i work through that so that i can get my project done and then ways to get involved a lot of this has been said already but the strategic planning that's coming again we'll provide that home to school connection and then next wednesday we will be hosting a parent information session and i believe yesterday we've already started to see some responses come in we sent a form for you to fill out for your questions so that we can make sure that every question is answered at that meeting next week any questions from the board board movers one of you go first i have a few all right okay um so when you said the lesson plan is gonna be posted online would is that the last plan that specifically is gonna be used or you use are you posting more of a curriculum online no we are creating that we are creating our own curriculum we did not buy a national curriculum we wanted to make sure it was center growth specific to the students we serve so the actual lesson plan will be posted the resources we use if we read a book if we show a movie clip all of that will be posted in addition to the standards it matches okay um i got a few questions i do appreciate you being here and being transparent i think that's real important to the community so um especially with all the things around sel right now you know you kind of i try to you know we talked earlier in the week and i did a lot of diving in online and i can find a lot of stuff that says how horrible it is i can find a lot of stuff that says how good it is so i kind of create i kind of made a list of questions here to kind of separate facts from fiction for me so anyway i'm gonna go ahead and get started um are you using uh school counselors to talk about scl um are you gonna do that yourself if you are gonna use school counselors to work with you because you referred to them as your team earlier yeah um will parents be notified on what school counselor will be where and talking to which their students yeah it's actually already posted on the website um which sel counselor will be there are there's three of them and they will be sharing two buildings and they will be on every other week so one week they're at north grove one week they're at sugar grove and they go back and forth those three counselors have been in the district i have been working with them this summer to create those lesson plans i will be in there evaluating and hearing how they present the information to students and again those are the lesson plans that will be on the website but in addition for years our school counselors and social workers have provided in classroom lessons so one of the reasons for that is if something happens with a student they have a death of a family their parents are going through divorce they have somebody at school they can talk to if they want to right and so how students know who a safe adult is is by that person coming into their classroom and teaching lessons so every school every elementary school will have that full-time person that they've had and they will provide like a intro who i am they're required to provide a bullying presentation to make sure that our policies and procedures are up to date with that and those things will post as well so the same counselor will stay at the same school so there's so the addition is there will be one person always at that same building but then a half person will be or a full person will be there every other week so they have one and a half but students will get sel instruction in the special rotation twice a month by the sel counselor that floats okay um i know i asked dr archanak this earlier about the crt when he was talking about that but do you see the overlap in between crt and scl do you do you personally see an overlap on those two things sure i would honestly agree with what dr arkanov said in center grove no i do see if you look at national organizations that are doing sel work they're using it in certain spaces i could see how people could connect those two i see how they could connect the words that are being used to support that but really the social emotional learning that we are teaching here is what i shared on the screen and really those skills that our students need to leave to be successful to deal with real life to deal with conflict to deal with stress to deal with day-to-day things that come up so in center grove no i do not see the connection i do see how other people see it as a connection in other spaces and especially in some national spaces okay um how are you going to measure sel here at center grove and it being successful how are you going to measure that great question the panorama survey um that we shared that data and again that is an opt-in opt-out that survey last year there was a form that went home you had to turn it uh the bottom part in if you did not want your child to participate same same thing will happen again it'll be fall and spring again this year and you can always opt your child out but that is the data that we will look at to see if those seo lessons are making a difference which is why we tied them to classroom effort emotional regulation and grit okay um i think you mentioned this earlier but well parents have full access to all media videos pamphlets anything that's presented to the child they'll have access to that prior to that and nine week increments yes okay so um before the first lesson will be august 9th our goal is to have that up two weeks before so it'll come to yeah be on the website so what if a parent sees something that you want you're going to present to their child that they don't they don't feel appropriate to you know to be given to their child is there a contact person for them to to reach out to yes we will actually have on the same page where those resources are an input form that they can provide input that will come to me and we'll discuss that if their child is at school that day they will receive that instruction we don't allow our students to opt out of special areas so but that's why we're putting it on the website so they'll know which day and what time their students will be receiving that okay and what would you consider it like an appropriate time frame like if a parent reaches out to to a point person oh sure would you try to have your team get back within like within a day oh yes okay 24 hours okay at the latest um is is is this only going to be implemented twice a week or is this going to be something that you would like to see implemented like into other courses like english maybe or things like that to of course it just specifically to wherever i guess what i'm asking is if a parent is concerned about scl um is this what they need to focus on because you know or is this something that that you see kind of being an english class or maybe specific books they're asked to read or things like that so this is where they will receive explicit instruction um i believe that good teachers day in and day out talk with their students they model things with their students if there's a situation they walk them through that they share how to deal with conflict that ties into social emotional learning but explicit instruction that two times a month at the elementary level k5 yes okay so in your opinion i think i asked you this when we talked last time but in your opinion do you think the parents should be asked for permission before anything is discussed with their kid in mental health counseling direct counseling in general in the schools so those are two separate things so if you're talking mental health and counseling yes we need parent permission for that in the school when a student comes down and they're in a crisis i don't always have the time to call the parent it is best practice to always call the parent after i have had that interaction or a lot of times honestly i would just do it while i was with that student if i was a school counselor the sel instruction that we are teaching that our employability skills that our academic instruction no i don't believe that we need parent permission for that because it's in line with all the other academic standards that we teach okay last question yeah uh our indiana attorney general todd rokita he wrote a thing called parents rights i think it was called um have you read that have you ever read that in your opinion from what you interpret from that do you do you interpret that parents have the option to opt their children out of anything to do with seo based on what his rec with his what he recommended his parents rights or not so i think it goes back um to what i just said about it being the what we are teaching in center grove it is employability skills it ties to regulation connection and collaboration so no i think in that document when he spoke to scl i believe he even used castle's sel that's not what we're doing in center grove that is different and so i think the way that he spoke to it was more general and the way that i'm speaking to it is specific to our students in our community okay all right i lied i got one more question so uh would you be in favor you know if there's let's say we've been forward with this and there's a lot of questions and concerns from the community would you be opposed to having any kind of audio visual equipment in the room so parents could kind of hear what's being told to their children or would you not be opposed would you be opposed to that or not so we can't do that due to student rights if you would like one of our team members to record a presentation that doesn't have interaction with students yeah we can post that so you're saying the parents can't see they can't like live stream in or watch what's going on in the classroom no because of student rights of those in the class right so this is a presentation let's listen i mean is that you mean like video wise and audio or or both i'm just trying to escape myself no that's fine and i'm not gonna call this one uh jason taylor but i think for hr i think you don't have to you don't have the answer that's fine i think for parent right or for student rights if a parent says they don't want their child to be photographed or a part of live stream we cannot do that okay okay it's fine um any other questions yeah so anyway i appreciate you doing that and i i really truly believe that every teacher at center grove wants what's best for the kids here i mean i don't think they'd be teachers that they but the concern i have is what a teacher feels what's best might not be what a parent feels what's best and i really think that line [Applause] i just really want that line to find because i would hate for a teacher to ever infringe on what um somebody's family standards might be you know what i mean i agree um and i hope you agree with that and you know i'm a firm believer in it it's a it's a school's job to educate a child and it's a parent's job to raise the child right and i also make sure mr alexander did you have questions yes so in in terms of the opt out and obviously listen please in terms of the opt out and opt in um do so the do they do it before each nine weeks presentation so like if the first nine weeks the parents are like yep i'm good with that and then the next nine weeks they're like i'm not so sure i like that so is it all or nothing the curriculum is not opt-in and opt-out like our art classes or our music classes which are also state standards and those are actually recommended classes these are supposed to be they're mandated for us to teach so um the um the panorama survey is what we families do not have to have their students take and we did have some families last year that that did not want their child to do that and so that that they can opt out um i think what she was talking about before families would know when the lessons would be for their child's class and families always have the option of not having their child in class during that time mr daniels i have no questions at this time thank you this counts do you have any questions i do not have any questions thank you mrs counts dr enough thanks for that question uh oh wait we still have thanks we still have some questions don't be sneaking away dr arkanov has a couple questions all right more just some clarifying things too i know because uh i've been asked this i'll make sure i said the right thing but that panorama survey that we do that's anonymous correct no that is not anonymous however that data is not shared widely okay that data is um currently i have access to that a parent could call and ask for the access of their child's response okay uh-huh okay good good to know so okay and then senate enrollment act uh was it senator enrollment act 297 correct that's what i believe yeah yeah it's okay so um in in that um act there we we talked about the employability skills and i liked your slide number 13 slide 13 where you talked about connection regulation and collaboration and i know in talking with a lot of employers um is part of my responsibility out there is that these are three of the major areas of concern um in employing you know a lot of people hire folks that are really good at their job but they can't collaborate or they can't self-regulate and they have trouble connecting and so hence the need for this work to be done within schools and hence the law set forth by our legislators um i i just wanted to kind of just touch base on that and see if you had any other thoughts around that as you you've had the experience of working around the state and um you know districts trying to work towards this in particularly these these three areas is this what are you seeing around what did you see around the state as districts were working to implement this type of of work sure um i would say majority of the districts i saw teachers i spoke with students i talked to regulation is the number one concern our young people are really struggling with managing their emotions that might be outburst that might be internal self-harm those types of things and so i would say for the majority of the districts they're really leaning into the regulation they're really leaning into that support and especially after coming off of a pandemic providing that not even just for our students but also for the educators and the staff and then collaboration always working together in teams i think we've all been in school we did group projects and some people love that and some people hate that but that's life we have to do group projects and we have to know what to do if one person isn't pulling their weight or one person's being a little too bossy and so that's a skill that we have to teach our kids and so i would say that that that to me is just teaching that's interacting with kids that's them being in a classroom that's them going to school and then connection i think is again goes back to the fact that you and i might not agree you and i might not have the same belief but we're in the same space and so we need to work to get along while we're in that same space and so i think that these three skills honestly from kindergarten to seniors we are seeing the need for these skills for our students to be successful day in and day out at school but also when they leave our space that's our responsibility yeah absolutely i appreciate that and i know as you've been working through this we've talked about this before that these three issues we see that in just our own employment and we have conversations about how do we get people to work together obvi you know a lot of times people are not dismissed because they're not good at their job it's a lot of times because they can't get along with one another and so we we definitely um need these skills work done so thank you so much i appreciate you guys i actually have a follow-up question with that if you would because because i see the connection regulation collaboration up there and i don't think there's anybody that would say that those are not three important skills for not only as dr arkanov said children but for adults correct so with teaching connection regulation and collaboration how do we measure success how do we how do we then say this is having a positive impact or or how do we measure failure how do we say it's not working i mean what do we look at what metrics i think in the moment again we'll look at that panorama data we'll look at office referrals discipline and referrals we'll look at attendance if kids don't feel connected at school they're not coming to school so can we see that can we see how that works out and then our ultimate goal would be right in five to ten years that our business owners in center grove are saying we're seeing a difference in your kids who are coming out ready to either work go to college or to be in the service and so i think that's the long-term goal but in the in the right now we're going to look at attendance discipline and the panorama data and i know we've at least since i've been on the board it's my second term we've talked about educating the entire child yep about how you learn in the classroom you learn at show choir you learn at band you learn robotics you learn in the athletic field you learn all these different places so do you see connection regulation and collaboration as part of that whole package yes yeah i believe that again that these skills are good teaching what we're doing is because we've been seeing a deficit we're doing explicit instruction to make sure that all students are receiving that twice a month to make sure that we are building those skills but i believe all the great teachers i know do this day in and day out when kids walk in a building appreciate that thanks anything else great questions great presentation as always thank you our next order of business is public comments we do have four people speaking before we do get to that process i would ask you to listen intently to what i need to read here persons desiring to address the board concerning a scheduled public agenda item must register before the start of the meeting registration will close five minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting each person's statement may not exceed three minutes if several people have indicated their desire to speak the time limit may be reduced in order to allow more people the opportunity to speak no more than 15 minutes will be allotted for public participation this evening i also need to add to this that during your speaking time it is not acceptable to have a derogatory remark of any participant of report this evening or towards a board member or another community member let's have respect for one another this evening we are only have four speakers so we will be able to lot three minutes to each one when you come up you'll give your name and your full address please our first speaker this evening are there any questions our first speaker yes are you going to allow people to like we talked about earlier speak on behalf of a group like what persons can speak for four or five we only have four speakers so we have plenty of time that's what the doctor they can do yeah explain that again yeah yeah we only have four speakers we only have four speakers we don't have to worry about that yeah they each are going to get there full time this is a public speaking situation where you're allowed to come up in a board meeting that is being held in public you are allowed to give your your information and your ideas and your thoughts if we as a board want to ask you a question and there may be some go back and forth we may have that it is not for the community to start questioning during that time frame i think mr russell do we do we know what topics the four people have signed up to speak on is that all three are uh crt and seo all three of them are four i'm sorry all four okay so no one's here to speak on the covet issue everybody no one is here on covet no okay just checking we all know we can speak on covert tonight and it will be different tomorrow and just a point of clarification on it just a point of clarification for the board's policy per the board's policy you had to have signed up here you were supposed to put your address down no one did um and we need you to state your address because of that that's really important as that's part of showing that you're part of the community here so that's why mr russell's asked that you state your address since you since it's not there we have four individuals that have signed up and um if they're so that that would consume 12 minutes of time of the 15.
we want to talk about systemic racism well i fled systemic racism when i chose to move to dupage county so my children could be educated like everyone is i didn't we're not covering the topic of equity i can't talk about it oh no we're out of time for that topic if you would like to address the board on another topic i can reset your timer and you can start over i don't want to break any rules thank you okay thank you next up is annette mcneely okay i want the group to quiet down so we can hear what speakers have to say and if you cannot for the safety of those in this room we will move into closed session and i will close the second reception of visitors so take a moment take a moment ma'am are you here to speak about crt no thank you i'm actually going to say that um when you bring up people of color you're referring that white people don't have color so we come in vanilla ma'am i'm working that is i can say that it's not we're not here to talk about equity but i really would like to talk about something i'm going on i will reset your timers okay so there is a career that is scientifically and physician based and it is called an ecological consultant they are fit testers and what we do what they do is they go around to hospitals teach doctors nurses transporters police stations rangers on how to wear a mask properly and what mask to wear i will tell you that i have never ever told anyone the way to stop a communicable disease is by putting a surgeon's mask or a piece of cloth over your face so if you want to prevent the communicable disease it's an n95 mask meant to wear for a short period of time thrown out wash your face and hands don't be lulled into a false sense of security and also i did want to touch on i know critical race has beaten a dead horse but it is a historical thing it was um thought up at harvard we're no longer taking students from your time do not let asians into harvard anymore ma'am we're not taking that topic any longer thank you jeffrey mack followed by robin bollinger jeffrey mack followed by robin ballinger [Music] my name is jeffrey mack i'm a district 99 alumni as are my three sons and i'm here to talk about senate bill 818 which will mandate national sex education standards in illinois public schools which some believe are based on pornographic and age inappropriate national education standards what is wrong with the any the n-s-e-s or the national standards k-12 are k-2 would have to define gender gender identity and gender role stereotypes three through five would have to learn the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity six through eight would know all about vaginal oral and anal sex and methods of contraception 9 through 12 would see videos depicting vaginal oral and anal sex and study reproductive justice why would anybody push that kind of a education program in our children [Applause] on june 18th on june 18th wakeup99 asked you to stand up for illinois the the community by asking governor pritzker to veto senate bill 818 and uh superintendent thiel you mentioned that you're not opposing the bill not opposing the bill basically is a passive support of the bill in our estimation and we strongly urge you to oppose this bill or district 99 to oppose this bill that is an abuse and an assault on our children [Applause] you have a duty to prevent the inappropriate national standards material from being shown in 9th through 12th grades this is not about keeping you safe and healthy and promotes the early excuse me it's about grooming innocent and precious children in early age to have sex forcing them to agree there are more than two genders and that there are no boundaries or norms when it comes to sexual behavior this will destroy the traditional family trample on religious beliefs corrupt the culture and harm vulnerable children who are struggling through the normal and difficult years of puberty the job of the school is to teach basic fundamental subjects such as the science math literature social studies that's the core mission when we go off into teaching these inappropriate subjects how are children going to learn when all they can think about after being in sex ed is to go home and have sex kids have a hard enough time concentrating without them having these things forced on them we asked district 99 to actively oppose senate bill 818 and if it becomes law not to teach such a sex education at all and declare district 99 to be a sanctuary for innocent children thank you thank you next up is robin bollinger followed by janet's i think it says nortney i'm sorry robin hi my name is robin bollinger and i wanted to say thank you to the board for listening to all of the various opinions and for clearing up the misinformation when the board meeting started my topic was on equity and i'll take a pass out of the respect of your request thank you thank you [Applause] next is janet i think it says nortney followed by gerald stapleton i'm sorry all right me again i'm not a public speaker where should i be looking at all you guys it's the board the board okay sorry guys so this is the second okay i'm sorry my name is janet novotny i've had three children come through the school this is my last one i'm trying to get through and i am very concerned as a parent that i just hope that you guys can listen to us as parents that we just want the kids to be taught the normal stuff math science social studies and let us be deciding of what we want to do for them whether it be medically as far as like the vaccinations it's a choice and i feel like everyone has a reason why they're going to get it there's a reason why they can't and there's people who don't want it there's so many reasons and everyone should have the right to have that power to do what's right with their body instead of being forced and pushed and i respect the fact that you guys are trying to give so much information but i think we're kind of sometimes beating a dead horse whoever wants to get it is probably gotten it and who hasn't probably is not or can't there's so many reasons why and that's a whole other story so i feel very pressured right now for the kids to have to get vaccinated or the parents or there's like we're bad because we do or we don't and and that really has to be kind of i feel left out of the school we have a parents should have the right to do what's right medically with our children and with the doctors and with our children so it really shouldn't be pushed upon the school and same with the mask you know if you want to wear a mask great and if you don't whatever i i feel like the cdc and the who and all these other three-letter thing organizations are guidelines it's not the law i mean and like people have done their research have have their opinions and i think again parents should have the right to decide what we feel is right for the child and my daughter didn't get to go to school at all last week last year and she did um she got basically bad grades and so she went to math and she got straight a but she came home with the headaches and she couldn't breathe and she had the worst acne like poor thing and that's really bad for a 15 year old she's gained a lot of weight from not going to school there's a lot of psychological and like emotional things that are happening and i want her to go back to school but with the conditions that i don't know what's going on i don't know i feel like you guys really hopefully can listen to the parents that's all i ask is just please listen to the parents and then back to the guidelines as the child is not vaccinated my child or whoever child who's not vaccinated should have the right to have education if they have to be quarantined because quote unquote they're going to give someone a disease that they don't even have let them have some education and not be stuck at home twiddling their thumbs for 10 days playing with the cat or with computers or whatever like let them teach they need to or learn let them learn and let them you know still be allowed to have education when they're not allowed to come back to school because they weren't vaccinated so i hope all that made sense i have a bad headache and thank you for listening thank you [Applause] gerald stapleton followed by russ novotny good evening my name is gerald stapleton i have been a resident of district 99 for over 40 years i have two children and three grandchildren who have had the privilege of attending downers growth south i've also been a teacher a principal and a college instructor and i wanted to speak up in support of the education of education that promotes our ideals as a nation is culture culturally responsive and recognizes both our successes and our shortcomings in out of respect for the board's decision i will yield my time thank you thank you russ novotny followed by marcella boy my eyes are getting worse as the night goes on uh chore trey thank you so russ is up next hey can everybody hear me yeah okay um hi my name is ross novotny i've been a resident of woodridge for 23 years my daughter sofia spent her entire freshman year taking classes at south via online learning she was deeply affected by this as my wife had just mentioned she was the second to the last speaker um about weight gain and um you know really feeling isolated and depressed and just wanting things to go back to normal um and you know i do appreciate the board's push to make as many things as possible go back to normal um just because of the fact that i see exactly the way that it affected my daughter and i don't want to see her go through that again so i was encouraged when i read the proposal released last thursday for the return of the school the fact that mask wearing would be optional for all students whether they're vaccinated or not i sent all the board members an email about that and i thank you all for the proposal dr thiele you and i had a couple of exchanges through email and i appreciate your responses as well what i quite didn't understand and i know this isn't a forum to ask questions but why does it take so long to vote on i guess i was under the impression at first that this was a proposal that was all put together and then it was going to be voted on tonight i don't know if anybody else was under that impression but um i just i guess kind of rhetorically want to know kind of ask the question of what happens between now and the next board meeting in order to decide whether or not to vote on this or to a vote in favor of it i don't know if any of you can answer that or give me a short answer or what but it's just kind of something that i would like to know typically we don't but this is a very simple answer is that the guidance just came out we're expecting new updates from illinois state board of education illinois department of public health plus before the board takes action as the superintendent i always try to provide them time to digest the information i've given them before they have to vote on it as you saw with the board goals tonight they came at multiple meetings before action was taken so right that's our our practice okay i mean but i guess is it the view of the entire board that you guys all want to have the kids go back to school and be able to choose whether or not they want to wear a mask and choose whether or not they want to be able to be vaccinated or anything else i mean there's got to be some general consensus already right i presented what the administration is going to recommend this evening and then at the future board meeting the board will have the opportunity to take action okay well i appreciate you in answering my questions so um thanks for your time thanks everybody [Applause] marcella uh linda uh bodum will follow good evening my name is martella durdik cheray and i've been a resident of downers grove for the past 25 years both my children graduated from downer south i'm a member of awake illinois and a member of the illinois chapter of children's health defense i'm a first generation american daughter of european immigrants my father fled a communist regime at the age of 17.
i first want to throw out two big things about kovid that the concerns of talking about kovid kovat is very political let's be honest it's very political the other problem with kova talking about it is that's very emotional it brings out a lot of emotions in people and the point is what i think is the true pandemic is cognitive i can't we don't say it now because i'm more nervous cognitive dis thank you dissonance edit that part out um when we held the belief and a fact comes to supersede that belief we still hold on to that belief because it offers us a false sense of security a false sense of control and so i want to challenge you check that in your heart right now and to really put aside your political side put aside your emotional side and use the logical rational mind that god gave you so i say all this for a reason i have been a registered nurse for over 21 years which has always been in the pediatric intensive care unit at a very large chicago suburban hospital in my picu i have worked with children with covid as well as some adults when we had to float i work with children from newborns only a few days old to teenagers i have worked with virtually every kind of surgery disease and or condition a child may experience during my time as a pqrn i have literally seen more children die from every age right in front of me then i've lost count sadly i have also had children literally die in my own hands more times than i want to remember along with this one of my own children had covid whom they caught from an adult family member so with all due respect to everyone in this room who has experienced laws i have seen the death of children far more than anyone in this room so if anyone would be susceptible to allowing personal experience to overrule their logic or reasoning i want to wrap my kids up in bubble wrap it should be me let's talk pediatric deaths from the flu for the cdc 2018 to 2019 there were 480 flu deaths now this is key the majority of those were baseline healthy kids let me tell you a kid dying from the flu it's ugly a lot of times they get put on ecmo a heart a heart and lung machine they become so bloated and swollen the family can't even recognize them it's a horrible gruesome death they're bleeding from every part of their body because of the heparin for the machine so let's contrast that to covet pediatric covet dust since it's its inception it's about a year and a half there have been 238 deaths now this is key nearly half of those deaths had two or more underlying conditions predominantly obesity and asthma which are largely self-inflicted with asthma at least it's very highly controllable if the person is compliant with their diet and their medication now anecdotally how many children have i have seen die from those infected with covid zero anecdotally about half of those who have been admitted with covet were not admitted for covet they came in for something else but the er tested them and they tested positive for covet so it skews the numbers they were never in for covet but with covet big difference the foundation for research on equal opportunity we estimate that americans between ages 1 through 4 are 3.4 times more likely to die from the flu than covet 19.
and and um it is the although certainly cover 19 is contracted by all individuals and certainly there are serious health issues sometimes for for all ages it is the population that has the less uh spread uh and it also has the less severity again recognizing all the cases that have happened across the nation and in the world and so it did and then our conversations internally with with staff about starting the school year in the best way possible educationally socially emotionally psychologically relationships all the other things that seem so important to get school started it was a similar conversation dr bill says we had last year with starting school period right in that we believed it was very important to at least get kids in the building even for us for a couple of days because of those relationships that were formed so similarly um but different because i think everybody sees a starting school i don't i don't know of any school corporation in indiana maybe there are some across the country i'm sure there are that that are thinking about doing something different than having five days of in-person learning to start but i'm not sure i know vinnie um and so that's perhaps a given now so it came down to one of those mitigation strategies to deploy and we believe that we deployed them effectively last year we managed and that that we we can begin the school year with with mass optional for all individuals whether it be staff or or students thank you other questions of the plan yes mr stenner thank you dr shed uh the last sentence in the first box uh on the revised opening plan about flexibility and adjusting the guidelines based on the progress of the disease in our community talk a little bit about your experience over the past year you've kind of turned on a dime several times readjusted plans as things are unfolding what do you think that'll look like we're four weeks away from the start of school now yeah so thanks for that question mr stinner um i think the most important quality that we can show at this point in time is agility the ability to change direction quickly and and i think as a school corporation we also always have to be actual and and hopefully we demonstrated that last year and need to be prepared to demonstrate that again um and so we start with a plan we we continue to review uh regularly this is a weekly situation for us every week as a cabinet we are digging into the data the circumstances reviewing with whether it be our our principals teachers associations all our internal stakeholders as well as then reaching out and having conversation be at the coba 19 task force city and county government other business leaders um the hospital of course columbus regional health and then dr nabalski at the bartholomew county health department those are our routine conversations that at a minimum are held weekly and we will continue to do that and as if circumstances dictate uh we will we will pivot and change now i've not given you specific metrics that we did a year ago that would say on this day at this moment if this happens we're changing um but but i think conversation is necessary to understand at least what those parameters might be and and we'll continue to have those with with the individuals entities that we work with to see if something more concrete needs to be set forth but at this moment of time i do not have any metrics for you to indicate that's how that would how that would work thank you you're welcome other questions i just had a question regarding social distancing abilities in some of our elementary schools knowing that you know that is the population we've already talked about is potentially being at more risk and can you speak to the possibilities of that yeah um ms wilton thanks for that question i i think that we probably have better opportunities this year and starting with three feet versus six than we did a year ago and for a few reasons but a primary one is the the dollars that we've invested through uh grants to increase numbers of teachers in our classroom and therefore decrease student-to-teacher ratios and so with the the with the primary focus or at least one focus being on elementary grade levels and then primarily um grade levels k one two three with uh reading and so forth um we we have numbers that classroom numbers that are as best way to describe it as as good as possible or at least as good as we've had in a very very long time that lesser numbers in a classroom obviously provides more square feet per child and that allows us to physical distance uh the the most difficult physical distancing experiences we had last year were actually the secondary level and um they will continue to be for a variety of reasons whether it's the size of the bodies or number of kids in just some classrooms it is not likely or at least i'm going to cite this and please correct me one of my categories i'm wrong it's not likely for us to have 30 in an elementary school classroom that happens a little more frequently in the secondary classroom tries but still even with with increasing student teacher ratios or student excuse me teacher numbers at the secondary level that should help there as well it remains a challenge it's just regarding the screening i'm sorry i cut you off mr gramps i'm sorry have we ever screened a student out based on temperature screening and all in the whole year and all the i'm just curious i'm sure there was one somebody was somewhere miswell the the temperature screenings um became i credit our schools on doing a great job of efficiently getting individuals in and through it to wherever they needed to go it was rare extremely rare for it to screen somebody else now there could be a couple things with that right that one maybe this screening tool was was not not working as well as it could have been but the other is that parents did a nice job of screening at home and all and there should be less circumstances there but but it was it was rare for us to catch someone i just had a couple questions not really specific to the reopening plan but part of maybe something to consider in terms of mitigation strategies could you refresh my memory on how many kids were vaccinated at north and east last year during the clinics at schools clinics stop someone the number of the total number of students that end up being vaccinated at east to north was it about 200 total yeah okay 100 and some at north and then 60 or so so around 200 okay well and i was just you know thinking i mean in an effort to get as many kids vaccinated as possible if if that might be worthy of consideration again sometime soon after the opening of school and and i don't know about the possibility of either he at north side or central as well [Music] yeah mr grabs we uh so last spring we worked with the bartholomew county health department columbus regional and others to to have those clinics available for parents to choose and and we've continued to use our buildings so tatersville elementary school was used uh this this summer at least sailors who have not if not another one so if there are opportunities i will continue to work with local entities to make sure opportunities are available for people who want to be vaccinated there are other questions that you had no that's it okay thank you any others all right thank you you're welcome i think you described it as well as we can all right next on our agenda is the opportunity for public comments and i do have eight individuals listed i will ask that those who are choosing to speak will welcome your thoughts please note that we have listed a three-minute time limit and this lovely little thing to my right will be counting for you and i've understood it will not make me jump out of my seat when it goes to zero please be respectful of everyone and i might encourage you if you've if most of the major points that you have made that you are hoping to make have already been made please just let us know that so that we know it was a concern of you but we have all we have basically heard the intent or the the majority of your concern so with those guidelines i'll turn to megan johnson if you'd step forward please please and if you'll use the microphone hello uh first and foremost uh we believe the board needs to be representing our district a bit better um there's still no clear line of communication no community two-way communication we're here you're there and that's about all we get uh we parents have expectations we want to be notified if there will be any discussion about equity sexuality or gender identity while at school we don't want our children to be asked which pronouns they prefer if you don't know their name we simply you just if if you are unaware of their pronouns we simply just ask that you call them by their name we want our classrooms to be free of any flags symbols or political advocacy we are here because we want our children to have an unbiased education and that is our right we demand to know your position on crt and any other discriminatory teachings and how you would be preventing these things from entering our classrooms we have some very vocal bcsc staff who give us reasons to question their intentions for example and i quote just because you are a parent doesn't mean you know everything or necessarily know what is best for your child i disagree we absolutely disagree as parents we most definitely know what is best for our children another quote if you truly knew history you would support curriculum reform and the tearing down of statues and lastly and i quote trust me if there was a crt club here i would be the president of it i'd just like to know some how we can find transparency with all these things okay uh we are here because we are standing up for our children and teachers that also believe children should have an unbiased education and we are not going away we look forward to reviewing the curriculum with you in the days to come thank you thank you very much next on the list is angie grimes if you come forward hi i'm a mom of five two have graduated from columbus north high school i have one that's in high school now and i have one that's getting ready to go into middle school and one that's in elementary school and i debated on whether to talk about this tonight because it wasn't exactly on the agenda but you just brought up a great topic and that's the topic that i would like to speak about tonight in the last few weeks the nea has been pushing for required and mandatory covid19 vaccines for all of our children to return back to the classroom this fall i want to tell a story so back in april we were sent a survey asking about whether we agreed with having coveted vaccines given on school property during school time it happened so quickly that most of us didn't have time to do much about it we responded i responded but nothing was done at that point other than they pushed forward with it and i wrote a letter in april to our principal and to our superintendent asking those questions and i did receive a message back today saying that those were sent to the indiana department of health i did not receive any response back from the department of health at any point um we chose to keep our daughter home that day that those were given and here's the reason why my daughter was in class speaking to a friend they were talking about the vaccine and she stated that she was not going to get the vaccine because she had coveted she had a very mild mild case of covid and she said that for her it was not worse than the flu for her well a teacher overheard her and reprimanded her told her she needed to get the vaccine proceeded to embarrass her in front of her classrooms in front of her classmates and then proceeded to show them a video the video was something called vox which is an american entertainment company and that video was shown called coronavirus is not the flu it is worse what gave her the authority to give my daughter medical advice that's my job she doesn't know her medical history she doesn't know her religious beliefs what authority did this website give it's an entertainment company how do they know what's best for our children there's so many things that i want to ask and i see i'm already running out of time i've i've got pages of information i wanted to share because there's so much to say but our children have been exposed to a lot of things in the last year and a half fear instability and shaming so i asked the school board what are you going to do in the future from preventing that from happening and are you going to be held responsible if a student is harmed during school hours on your property with the coveted vaccines because it's fact that children are suffering from coping vaccines not all but there are some in their permanent damage thank you very much justin stott thank you for allowing me to speak i told my kids before i came here tonight that i thought it was real important for us as americans to be able to speak and to hope that the people that we elected would listen so that's why i'm here not only because i feel like i've got something to say but also because i hope that us as parents can show that to our kids that we need to be courageous be more involved with what's going on in our communities and speed to not be afraid to speak out i'm empathetic towards your guys's situation what a weird time to be a parent and a weird time to be a kid or also what a weird time to be in charge of a program that is educational to kids i run a baseball program here in columbus very active in it we have about 600 kids this year and we didn't have any masks we didn't contact trace and every weekend in columbus we have thousands of kids that come here and have fun and we're not having major outbreaks we're not telling kids that they can't play for 14 days and nobody is reporting that to anybody last year there were four thousand forty-two kids that were contact traced within bcsc i would like to know if it's possible how many of those kids did end up getting code 19.
um my guess is that if you can't like get it done within the first in the three minutes he's going to probably give you a little bit of lead way since we have a total of 15 minute time limit um and um we we don't know everyone's viewpoint that signed up they may be the same they may be different so um that's that's why the process is like that if you were hoping to speak but didn't sign up that's unfortunate because it per the policy we we have that ahead of time and and that was out there um again if you're hoping to speak more we will have the uh parent information meeting next week so um but with that i'll just turn it back over thank you dr agnel so this evening rich did ask this group specifically it would be best if you guys talked together as one person for the you know he explained it in the 15-minute time he told him that instead of having five or six of you guys get up here and talk and say maybe the same things maybe it's best if you all collaborate with one person designate one spoke person and they could eat at that the whole amount of time that they i mean we've already talked enough that they could already said what they have to say well yeah i agree with you on that yeah yeah so i mean i guess what i'm saying is i'm assuming whoever the spokesperson is i don't know who it is they probably put their name down as one person assuming that that's what was being told to them but nothing has come to us have been explained to us ahead of time that they themselves have worked that out amongst themselves well the directions are part of the policy that is public knowledge so who who is the speaker these two women and parents want to speak in response to specifically the crt and fdl but there i'm sure there are others right this has been board policy and practice for years that you sign up when you come to the meeting here that is on our website and it's what we have followed then you will be able to speak yeah if you're signed up if you're signed up you will have time to speak tonight because we allow 15 minutes there are only four of you making it 12 give or take minutes so all four of you will get a chance to speak tonight [Music] i'm being transparent from the standpoint this is the practice we have done i'm not changing it from any past practice i was not at that meeting so no i do not know what transpired at that particular meeting [Music] this also let's also your your meeting next wednesday is really going to be a good time for you too yes it is it's okay no it's not it's a free screen sending your questions they'll get some contrived answer for it and you know have that answer and four weeks ago at this board meeting we were told that we could come ask every question we had and to change appropriately four weeks ago we'll go ahead and start with the people on the list we're going to start with people on the list and follow the procedure we normally follow let's see where we go our first speaker is angela elliott please right after if if you would state your name again an address sure so my name is angela elliott and my address is 421 governor's lane greenwood indiana 46142 i'm a parent and a community member i came tonight because of the topics that were on the agenda and the concerns i have about a lot of the misinformation i've heard going around and so i really appreciate so i didn't know exactly what i would say when i came up here because i came to hear what was being said on the agenda and i want to use my time to say that i really appreciate the detail that was given that the position of center grove on critical race theory and that dr arkanov gave was very helpful to have just have it out there to say this is what we believe it is and this is how it is or is not being implemented in our school district so i really appreciate that and then the sel was the other thing that i've heard a lot of misinformation going on about and how it is being applied within our schools and so i came to hear that as well and again i was not disappointed i thought that the explanations that were provided were very helpful and my request in my time up here would be that we continue to provide more opportunities for parents and community members to have the information and specific examples of how this these theories and concepts are being implied at our schools with our kids and giving us real examples so i think there's lots of generalities that are thrown around out in in hyperspace and it would be really helpful i think to calm some of the concern if we had real teachers sharing real examples from real curriculum that happens in our classrooms and so that is my i will leave this with that is my request to the board is that as you mentioned you're having one coming up that answers my question as a start but i would say it's just a start this is a big topic nationally and we need to focus locally to combat any misinformation and make sure we're all staying on the same page for our kids so that would be my request if you have any questions for me i'm happy to answer them okay i'll go one angela um thank you very much for taking the time to come up and talk to us i'd like you what you said about the real teachers kind of giving real stories is that something you'd like to hear like in a board meeting or or like how would you like to hear like maybe a you talk about like a success story from a teacher is that what you're talking about not necessarily success stories i'm just talking about like real examples of how um sel is provided in the classroom and how it not only in the explicit instruction but when we do uh you know group projects how does that connect and how is that an example of sel being implemented in our classrooms whether it be good or bad i think that would be i think we'd have to hear the examples yeah so i'm saying you want your example whether it's good or bad it doesn't matter yeah not just success to hear the glossed over sure you know i want to hear the truth and i want us to focus on real life and what's really happening with our kids and not generalities and um you know inflammatory life butterflies you want the nuts and bolts yeah i want i want real life i want to hear i'm you know i'm concerned about my kids thank you thanks any other questions for angela thank you thank you thank you [Applause] and our next speaker is amanda ennis you state your name and address amanda ennis 1209 millstone drive greenwood and i'm a parent and community member i'm going to make this easy on myself and just read i want to say i strongly support addressing the unequipping students in reference to social and emotional health i'm saddened that the state sel curriculum which has embedded links to castle which has been brought up so many times tonight and does little to meaningfully address social and emotional health which is needed now more than ever i know dr arkanov says the school teachings will not be influenced by organizations like castle but the state's lessons are in its current form this castle teaching has hijacked true social and emotional learning and aims to divide students and promote causes such as systemic racism equity and social justice a quick search on this castle website just one search led me to articles and teacher trainings on topics such as how to be an anti-racist teacher and student how to be a social justice warrior and how to teach that black lives matter and while black lives certainly do matter if we're teaching our students anything other than the truth that all lives matter we are failing them this website has articles from the author robin d'angelo the district is familiar with her she's contributed to books that i know the leadership staff has read and her works are featured on the district website or at least they were it teaches that all white people are basically white supremacists that would mean that we're all here white supremacists and we know that this is not true this is racism in reverse teaching these ideas will cause social and emotional damage not healing transformative sel and crt go hand in hand and they teach that racism is everywhere and everyone is guilty these ideas hold contrary to the real civil civil rights heroes of our time like martin luther king jr and frederick douglass these brave individuals never promoted hate and division so i ask the administration to address sel independent of the state curriculum you say this is what center grove is doing and i look forward to being able to see this in a transparent way i've been told that as long as the state standards are addressed any curriculum would suffice i'm glad you welcome parent involvement in this area and so i'm not just going to gripe i would love to help i would also like to know if there's a plan if a teacher or counselor goes rogue and decides to inject race or division um into their teaching if they decide to teach crt or transformative sel instead of board approved curriculum um i think the district i know i was at a meeting where one of the board members um said you know what that's going on let me know well i think that there probably needs a better way to be a better way than just emailing one board member and lastly just related to what i saw tonight when i read under connection cultural sensitivity and social awareness these are big broad terms and i expect as a parent that individual educator beliefs won't try to make kids believe that unless you think believe and act a certain way you are not socially aware or you're not culturally sensitive and that's a big concern of mine with this thank you real quick dude you have any questions for amanda board i'm sorry i didn't give her a dress 1209 millstone drive what was the drug millstone thank you and your name is already on the list for strategic planning thank you amanda i appreciate it thank you and our next speaker is theresa west all the way up if you would state your name and your address please hello everybody my name is theresa west and i live between arnie's and target basically so 1075 south state road 135 and i'm not exaggerating um easy to find um i'm going to speak from my own experiences because i have retired now 39 years of teaching 36 and a half thank you 36 and a half of it at center grove i'm a center girl graduate um gosh it's the whole gamut i bleed red and blue or red and white i think right now but i've gotten the chance to see it evolve and you know and some changes have been good some not so good some great some wonderful and all along the way and a lot of these people sitting here and in the back i've never been shy about what i didn't like or what i totally approved of but i always gave reasons why and one of the things um for sel for me and i think the misunderstanding perhaps and i liked i think what angela said of talking or listening to actual teachers that that work with it it's not a moment where we just say okay everybody we're going to have an sel moment for instance when you develop a classroom and you develop your rules you come up with what you want your classroom atmosphere to be and most times i learned with my age a little wisdom came along i let the kids and it was mostly fifth graders that i had they came up with the rules with me they had ownership and so with the kids they would come up with things that they thought we should stick with and you'd be surprised at some of the kids that were maybe the biggest talkers don't talk when somebody else is talking and it's like bonus package because they got the connection and their part in it that's an sel thing you know when we worked on a project for reading i forget who said this now but anyway um the one of the ways that i would bring the kids and let them have involvement is a group project they all have their parts and you know how group projects are sometimes everybody doesn't do their equal share adults are the same way but what they were able to do then is evaluate their own involvement privately with me but then they were able to fill out a sheet and tell what they they thought how the group did together now the rule was they could not be rude they could not just say oh i don't like him he didn't you know couldn't be any of that they had to give a reason what they didn't like or how they thought it could have gone better that's an sel moment you know we had kids somebody's christy did such a wonderful job i just totally threw out my nose because i don't have to use them anymore but um i had a little boy walk in when we were doing istep testing okay he literally came up to me and said he was crying he says i watched my puppy get hit as i was waiting for the bus his classmates got involved that's an sel moment so all these things are things i think if you're parents i'm a parent that's what you want your kids to do you want them to be a productive citizen you want them to see how they fit into the whole thing you want them to have ownership on what their part in it is you want them to grow academically socially responsibility-wise accountability-wise it's all enveloping so just my two cents thank you teresa okay we're gonna work with a little bit oh thank you you may be seated did you see the teacher look you just got i know not your first time we grew up she just give me that look many years okay we're going to have an sel moment here of collaboration since there seems to be some confusion we we have discussed that with one more speaker with your three minutes i'll put that into who would you like that to be what is the fourth name that signed up tonight oh i'm sorry but so i wanted to tell you that our fourth person coming up is john jacob if you'll come on up to the podium at the moment but i did want to work have you have time to talk talks amongst yourselves and figure out who you would like to come up and have another three minutes if you'll state your name and address please uh i will state my name my name is john jacob i'm state representative for house district 93.
as a child during world war ii ma'am i'm sorry to interrupt you but is this about crt no it's not world okay ii my father-in-law spent time in a concentration camp he eventually made his way to the u.s attended the united states naval academy and proudly served in the military for 27 years i'm a private person but i share these things because you need to understand that i do not take our freedoms particularly our medical freedoms for granted i'm here tonight because i have watched educational institutions over the past 16 months implement ill-conceived policies with egregious overreach and a total disregard for law and constitutional rights under the guise of public health when questioning these policies i'm always met with the same rote response we are following cdc guidelines law supersedes guidance and mandates are not law the cdc is not the fourth branch of government this never-ending parody is insulting dismissive and a complete deflection of responsibility in my opinion i've spent over 20 years personally researching psychopharmaceutical threats to children and by extension vaccine injury it has always been my personal belief that the subject of health should remain outside the realm of education parents should be the ones making health decisions for their children the vaccine the mass the testing are under eua only any product with this designation must be voluntary under us code 21 section 360 bbb3 there must be informed consent the individual has the ultimate right to accept or refuse administration of any eua product that is the law these mandates being imposed represent a loss of god-given freedom over our own children and their bodies this is beyond unacceptable they violate the us constitution the nuremberg code and the helsinki declaration and schools implementing these protocols as a condition of enrollment are complicit in atrocities toward our children regardless of where you stand relative to the mainstream narrative that is this pandemic and regardless of where you stand on the vaccine debate one thing is perfectly clear there is no legal justification for these mandates it bears repeating there must be informed consent and the individual has the ultimate right to accept or refuse vaccination testing and maxing choices for all students in district 99 must be optional parental rights over our children will be restored thank you for your time thank you let me end it up i think we're past going back to 30 and now are we in total time yeah when do we start we're passing now um let me check um no we still have time okay thank you um i will invite up lindell mines followed by eric windishman and we have eight minutes oh i'm sorry i did it again i did it again linda you're up next then lynn followed by eric and we have eight minutes remaining in the reception of visitors hi my name is linda bodum i've written to dr thiele in the board numerous times and that now i figured it was time for to put for you to put a face to my letters i'm here to because i have asked some questions and although dr thiele wrote me back he didn't actually answer my questions i followed up with another email requesting the information but again it went unanswered i wonder if the board even reads the email sent by stakeholders in this community i will make sure to keep my comments to three minutes to avoid the board calling a recess and walking out and ending public comment like last month i've requested the specific directives given to teachers in this district regarding personal political opinions given in class where does the district stand on this issue are the teachers allowed to give their political views i've also requested a link to curriculum resources used in language arts classes i would like to know what the approved curriculum topics are and approve resources to be used this is a public school so we have taxpayers have the right to see what's being taught to our children especially when it comes to controversial topics such as police brutality race and sexuality i believe the curriculum needs to be transparent sending me a generic link to a course description is not sufficient the superintendent has a responsibility to know what is going on in the schools as well as be aware of the controversial topics being proposed in the state when people spoke last month he was unaware of everything which was very surprising to me i'm also here as i've been watching the meetings month after month and i see that the board states to visitors that they do not answer questions i would like to call your attention to your own district 99 board protocols protocol does not allow the board to discuss their debate topics raised however if there is a simple answer to the question and may be provided during the meeting and complex questions will be answered in writing from the superintendent if contact information is provided or sent after the meeting it appears that you can answer simple questions in a meeting yet i haven't seen it done i did see it once tonight and i sure hope that the superintendent is following up as answers as i will be leaving my email for answers to my questions the best way to get parents and community members to be supportive is to be transparent and provide answers when questions are raised thank you dr kupko we have six slips remaining i recommend that we just invite all six before we end the reception visitors i'm fine with that does anybody object fine all right again we're going to go ask that if you're here to speak about critical race since we've theory since we've spent a good portion of time on that tonight that you allow that time eric windishman is next followed by susan we're still restricting the the topic of critical race theory diversity equity inclusion as we've expanded our time on that uh eric windishman is up next followed by susan hi thank you for having me i'm eric windishman uh members of school board and attendees i'm not going to talk about what is happiest i'm going to talk about liberty a little bit but member school board i would like to express my appreciation to the dedicated staff and teachers of our school community for the work they do my children attended downers grove south and it helped prepare them for the future pursuits however as a citizen and tax paper payer taxpayer i just had some issues and and one of the main things now that we're not talking about that other thing is this is this is a community school district community donors grove right it's not the district of illinois school district it's not the district of the united states of america even though we're all americans we're men we're we're citizens of the state of illinois but it's the community and and we're all here sharing uh what we believe to be important issues in this community so given that i think we return to the core principles of our nation's founding once understood to be self-evident that all humans are created equal says men but we mean humans are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the truth that there is only one race the human race made in the image and likeness of god and the truth that we were created to love god with all our hearts and love our neighbors as ourselves this is not political but moral and spiritual but the positive socio-political outcomes of returning to our creator and living out this truth i hope is evident to all and as citizens i believe we all should should take a step back and think about where where our responsibilities lie both with our children my children came to the school they're doing all right and and where our obligations to our community lie we are all here together to to speak about what we believe is the right thing to do in our community and as you see a lot of people are really concerned about some stuff going on so god bless you all and thank you for letting me babble thank you thank you [Applause] uh susan carroll is followed by rich benema susan carroll all right i don't see susan but i'll hold her space if she does come forward i know we're getting later in the evening rich come on up rich benema dgs alumni and parent i came ready with statistics and research to support the in-person plan but i'll take your lack of discussion as as agreement and acceptance of that plan so i just want to take some time to thank dr thiele i know you and i have gone back and forth for a long time over this last year and although we never agree i do understand your commitment to student safety that that you were willing to shut down the schools in order to protect any student from long-term side effects and so i thank you tonight for your consistency and understanding the potential for long-term side effects from vaccination i think that that i what was good last year is good for this year so i just want to thank you for doing that um really quickly to say i know not a forum but to save me from sending you an email one thing in the morning one thing i saw in the presentation was talking about with the commons that there might be a full lunch period am i understand that there will be students that will actually be eating for 50 minutes instead of having a half lunch and half resource correct that was always the plan when we introduced the master facility plan to the community to extend the amount of time that students would have in that new common space is that assigned to them or is it a choice on whether they want a resource or a full lunch period i don't understand how that works we'll be con we'll communicate that all out from the principal soon yeah anyway i just i know it's uh last year and the year before was a total mess and so i just here's to a successful 22 may we make it all the way through thank you um next up is carolyn oh no i'm sorry next up is anthony chang followed by carolyn googly ammo i tried i told you'd be bad hello my name is anthony chang i'm uh obviously a president of downers grove um i want to thank you for the time at the microphone here um i want to echo a comment earlier about sample 818 i think the responsibility of sexual education gender identity all that education belongs firmly with the parents and should not be taught by the schools uh i think the the family unit is the best source of information for that and that it's the responsibility um i also want to say thank you for giving the opportunity for full lunches i cannot tell you how often i've been hearing complaints with my kids when they were like i don't even have enough time to eat my food i have to shove it in the garbage or just walk down the hallway and eat it so um i don't well i don't have any kids now at this point but i just want to say thank you for future students that will be coming through they will greatly appreciate it um and my kids are going to limit that they didn't get that opportunity um i also do want to say that uh i am a little concerned about something that was taught to my daughter um in freshman english she was told to check her white privilege i mean obviously i'm you know i don't know but to be fair my wife my wife is jewish so she is half nap so there is that split and it causes a lot of consternation and i think that this obviously is a very divisive and very sensitive issue and i want to be i'm i appreciate the fact that you made the opening statement that critical race theory is not going to be taught here and i i really hope that we can follow through and you know like i said during a freshman english class in a 2016-2017 year being told to check your white privilege you may say that critical race theory is not being taught but if your teachers are saying that we know otherwise so i just want to thank you for your time and thank you for your service thank you thank you carolyn [Applause] you can help me with your last name now the g silent so it's guillermo who yelled i've had that name my whole life imagine all the teachers who messed it up we're good at messing up names yeah we try our best to get them right so my name is caroline golialmo i'm a nationally recognized safety and health practitioner for workplace safety my mother was instructional aide in fairfax county public schools outside of washington d.c i had my education there my father was an assistant principal at the science and tech school in fairfax county so i'm very well aware of how school systems and the government works i'm a former lobbyist that represented three major industries to congress and military and federal and state agencies on safety and health and i have worked for the cdc investigating firefighter fatality i have developed videos for the construction industry on respiratory protection i have worked with agency heads on protecting workers and people for 25 years guidelines which i know and i know the cdc very well there's a reason i don't work there okay i know the government very well and i know the press very well and when you push paper masks there is no science on paper masks i am an expert i have 20 publications that were peer reviewed and published by the cdc prior to 2019 the cdc in the national chemical society published studies on hand sanitizer which lessens the immune system they did studies on doctors and you can find this online and health care professionals what the government did to this nation is despicable what they did to the school systems is despicable they told everybody to spray lysol and all these cleaning chemicals that cause cancer that cause all kinds of adverse health effects in the workplace in a lysol manufacturing facility or clorox workers are fit tested under the occupational safety and health respiratory protection standard which far outweighs cdc guidelines and in fact i fought the government at osha during the clinton administration who try to push guidelines on the construction industry they are not peer-reviewed they are made up by a bunch of government bureaucrats a lot of people who work in the cdc are academics and have never practiced medicine this is one of the reasons i left now these poor children you're out of time okay thank you [Applause] all right the last slip i have is for susan carroll is susan still in the house all right this concludes the reception of visitors thank you all and thank you again for pretty much sticking with the plan i very much appreciate it we let us get through all the speakers tonight moving on to community that will conclude our reception of visitors second reception visitors report on legislative education dupage jenny anything we haven't had a meeting since okay no and they they've really worked behind the scenes to try to get illinois to work quickly to release release the guidance once cdc released theirs so it was a very pleasant surprise to have a quick decision from idph this time if i could just ask the audience we are still meeting and need to hear each other so if you could just keep it down as you exit i appreciate it thank you i'm sorry i didn't mean your approval it's all right uh sas uh joanna's not here for a report on sassid did you have anything on the 99 uh foundation okay uh my uh iasb chris is there anything this year so far yeah okay we have two upcoming board meetings we will have on august 2 excuse me we are still meeting so i'd appreciate it if you keep it down on august 2nd we're going to have a workshop meeting at 6 30 a place to be determined and august 16th a regular business meeting at 6 30.
children under the age of 15 have a 1 in 155 000 chance of dying of the flu but a 1 in 1.2 million chance of dying of covet 19. so what's the bottom line healthy children are more at risk from dying from the flu than covet so if the concern is about the health and safety of our children then why weren't mass required during flu season before going forward same covet magically disappears tomorrow going with your reasoning mask to be enforced every flu season then should it not conditions required to catch covert without a mask it's all about exposure time and viral load on average it takes five to 15 minutes of direct face-to-face exposure such as sitting at a table to catch covet but the other side as i mentioned is about the viral load how much virus we're exposed to so in theory a person with covet could sneeze and a person behind them walk right through that and not catch covet because they walked right through it and they weren't exposed to much of the virus masks the only mass that actually stops the covert virus itself is n95 and those have to be sealed perfectly to avoid any gaps now to be fair if a person calls or sneezes covey could be suspended in droplets which could be stopped by a mask but there's more to the story professor yvonne kosart of department of infectious diseases at the university of sydney those surgical masks are only effective so long as they are dry as soon as they become saturated with the moisture in your breath they stop doing their job and pass on the droplets which is about 20 minutes so if we're really concerned that much about our children we should make them change their mask every 20 minutes in school right now what about teachers catching cover from the students and spreading it big concern sure the evidence also wouldn't support that children rarely spread it to each other or to teachers or to parents if anything is the opposite adults transmit to kids a research study from binay brock israel it is estimated that kids carry a viral load 63 percent lower than what adults carry which thus affects the chance of them spreading from child to adult psychological effects 2019 the suicide rate ages 10 through 14 534 ages 15 through 24 5954.
if we don't know that number we probably should is it doing anything if you had that up if each one of those kids had 10 let's actually let's say 75 of those kids were 75 of that number were students and each one of them lost 10 learning days that's 30 000 learning days that's 168 school years cumulative that were lost you want to know why our test scores were so bad i think you spoke on it we're lacking and facilitating formal learning we need to have our kids in school you guys were elected to make choices that were based on what's best for our kids education and i understand that the indiana state health department the federal level is saying that we have to contact trace so i'm asking you as somebody who has a little bit more pull than what i do to please write these people call these people let them know that our kids need to be in school that we can't send somebody home for 10 days or 20 days from school because they were they looked at a kid wrong and a teacher thought that maybe they might have been close and in some cases it's 10 days they've already it was six days that they were last next to that kid and then they get sent home for another 10 days my experience was that my son he did fine in school honestly but i was concerned because he never had homework at the latin the second semester why don't you have homework in seventh grade because it was to keep to let the other kids catch up there were so many kids missing school last year that we had to stop really challenging kids to learn so that we could catch other kids up all i'm asking is that we do what's best as far as keeping the kids in school fight for our kids at the state and federal level to help keep them in school thank you autumn retrieval hi i'm adam strieval and i'm here as a parent i have two children they are ages six and ten so they are unvaccinated they are not eligible for vaccination i'm here to speak about the face covering part of the reopening plan so i appreciate your efforts and time i know that it's hard to come up with a reopening plan and and i do appreciate that energy that you put forth a couple points that i want to share with you though the cdc and the american academy of pediatricians have announced a recommendation that all unvaccinated children under the age of 12 or other unvaccinated children should require wearing a mask this is really important in reducing the spread and keeping covet at bay all elementary children under the age of 12 would benefit from having a mask requirement my children will wear a mask if they return to in-person learning but that doesn't mitigate all of the potential transmission risk it's much better and much safer when all children are wearing a mask because you keep the transmission risk very low i would also say that the online option my children did complete the bridge option last year and they want to return to in-person learning i want them to return to in-person learning but i want them to do that in a safe manner i believe as a community we want to protect our children and we want to keep them as safe as we possibly can this is one small measure that would allow children to return to school in a much safer environment i would also recommend that with the virtual academy a pathway that's being offered it's not necessarily a viable alternative for in-person learning they're not the same thing so for a parent who wants a child to return to in-person learning it really kind of puts a it makes me a little nervous to return children to an in-person classroom without a mask requirement simply because they are not eligible for the vaccine yet and the all or none statement that was made before all elementary students under the age of 12 are unvaccinated i don't have the choice to vaccinate them yet and that's a concern the children who are over the age of 12 if their parents decide to vaccinate them they have that choice and so they can send their schools to send their children to school without a mask knowing that their children have some immunity and if they choose not to vaccinate that's their choice as well but that choice is not one that's been given to me yet so i'm asking that you consider having a mask mandate for the elementary students until at least a vaccine is available once a vaccine is available for that age group then i think the mask requirement could be optional at that point so i hope that you consider that i hope that you also consider the center for disease control i also hope that you consider the recommendations from the american academy of pediatricians these recommendations are made by health experts not politicians they are looking for the well-being and the health of our students and our children as a community please let's make sure that we keep our young children as safe as we possibly can thank you thank you very much deborah stapler all right thank you very much tamia oreo evening i just wanted to speak to you briefly as a pediatrician to advocate for my patients particularly those who are under 12 and are not old enough for them or their parents to make that choice as to whether or not they would be vaccinated if you ask any pediatrician what last year was like you'll get a couple different answers first of all you might get a smile at the fact that um something called rsv and influenza that usually plague us every single winter for months on end was basically non-existent last year that is a great testament to the fact that masks do work to decrease viruses whether or not you like them i understand that there are many other emotional aspects to the topic but of course while that was one good thing there was much about last year that was awful for all of our kids and our teenagers we saw kids suffering from anxiety and depression we saw new eating disorders we saw excessive weight gain we saw kids struggling with food insecurity and struggling with their schoolwork for these reasons we all in my practice five of us agree with the american academy of pediatrics guidelines that excuse me that came out today that we want kids in school that is the primary number one goal um and and so i think we're all on the same page about that that aap does recommend masking for the reasons that have been pretty um well i think elucidated here um i think one comment i would make dr roberts mentioned um we don't anticipate and i would agree with him that the spread of covet in our community would be based on two to eleven-year-olds we've all heard that they tend to get sick less often perhaps even transmitted less often but the part that would concern me as a pediatrician who has patients in elementary schools would be the unvaccinated adults whether that's the teachers the staff and the visitors i know that we're going to allow visitors back in the schools i think that's great i think book buddies as an example is a fabulous program my kids are all out of elementary school but i used to spend all of my days off volunteering at parkside when they were there and i hope for other parents that they get the chance to do that but the more adults that are in the building who are unvaccinated the more that you can have spread in an elementary school that maybe isn't pinned on on the students who are there i understand that there are challenges i understand that there are many families who feel like they want to make that choice whether their children are vaccinated if they're over 12 and whether their children can wear masks but i do feel like we have a responsibility to protect the younger children as the previous speaker mentioned whose families don't have that choice um the delta variant as dr roberts indicated is here um our luckily our numbers are still pretty good here and as the gentleman who is has run a baseball program and commented the numbers this summer have been great lots of experts felt like it would get worse when school started and it's already started to get worse the last thing i would comment based on mr grimes mentioning an incentive for children or students to get vaccinated and as many people said there may be some reasons not to do that within the schools i hope we can highlight the change to the quarantine policy that fully vaccinated people do not have to quarantine for 10 days whereas it was 14 days last year i think that is something important that will motivate many people to choose to be vaccinated if they're old enough thank you thank you excuse me so we have to be respectful of everyone who've signed up um you're welcome to speak to the rest of us after our meeting but let's be respectful so we can hear everyone next on the list is amy is it hail hi everyone first of all i just wanted to thank all of you for what you've done for our kids especially over the last year as others have said i know it's it's been really difficult and so know that we do appreciate it much of what i was going to say tonight has already been said by dr iorio and autumn in particular i'm also a local physician and of course you know i would urge you to consider listening to the guidelines that have been laid out by public health experts and we talked about the cdc and aap guidance in particular you know for me this is really a discussion about public health and i know we all care about our kids and the health of our kids that's that's something all of us here have in common um i also did want to highlight what autumn said um i'm also a parent and right now i feel like i don't have a lot of choices once i have the choice to vaccinate my kids i'll feel a lot more comfortable you know sending them to school but as i don't have that choice right now i really would ask that you consider especially in the elementary schools a universal masking policy so thank you very much thank you and anna tennis all right thank you all right that is the end of the list of those who have signed up thank you very much for all of your comments i'll turn next to what um the next item on our agenda is our what and board commendations so i'll turn to colleagues mr grimes yeah i have a few here most in regards to c4 teachers and students who have been working very hard this summer for anybody who went out to the county fair this year each evening c4 was represented and distributing information about the program and just spreading a public awareness of what the program is all about miss circe c4 ag teacher as we speak is holding an ffa student officer retreat at the ffa future farmers of america indiana headquarters in franklin mr johnson the c4 construction and architectural teacher has worked with students each week this summer working on their build for exhibit columbus and is coming together very well also this summer the international hosa which is future health professionals held a leadership conference virtually june 23rd to 26 29 students from c4 participated largely under the leadership of c4 teachers stacy horn and jennifer stein weddle who sponsor the future health professionals club and to mention just a few specific students who did exceptionally well and again mind you this is a international leadership conference matthew liu who placed seventh in general chemistry first in biochemistry and first in organic chemistry aisha eris who placed third in leadership sripada moon jaleuri and hillary yang who together were first place in forensic medicine and then sripada also placed eighth in biology so congratulations to c4 students teachers and all the great work they've completed since school ended last school year excellent thank you very much for sharing that are there other commendations yes dr i know lots of organizations and people do their best to help students get ready for school with school supplies that's always a busy time in the summer and i want to commend the residents at four seasons that helped stuff 50 backpacks for bcsc students all right nice thank you there are other commendations i will offer one we need to offer a wonderful shout out to david miller who wears at least three hats he's our dean of students at east along with being the assistant athletic director and assistant football coach he will be honored and named to the 2020 indiana high school football hall of fame class as a player and his induction will be in malt in may of 2022 so our commendations to mr miller doctor said i have one more that i felt to get to any of you and also i did not mention when tucker was here tucker smith who we recognized earlier has been named the gatorade indiana boys track and field player of the year so it's a very prestigious award so congratulations for one more recognition for tucker thank you very much school board member reports our colleagues had the opportunity to be in any committees yes mr grimes one quick one here dr shedd so the the school foundation annual campaign uh letters have just been recently sent out and the school foundation also just recently since the end of school has awarded seventeen student scholarships totaling nearly ten thousand dollars as well so fingers crossed for another good school foundation campaign again this year great thanks for sharing that others i don't ever want to forget you on my left side over here [Laughter] our cabinets reports i'll turn to mr phillips for our financial report you have a clicker up there mr phillips a good evening um my name is chad and i don't throw a ball as far as tucker smith does not even close nor even its weight um so uh we're all ready for something boring after last year and 2021 from a financial standpoint is shaping up exactly like we expect it to be so nice boring report for you for the second quarter financials this is our revenue report again about where we would expect it to be education funds a little bit behind where we were last year but all of those are mainly cash flow issues just money coming in a different six-month period than they did during the uh the prior year operations is up over last year but if you remember we didn't collect property taxes until the third quarter of 2020 as they delayed those being due last year this is the revenues with taxi anticipation warrants and transfers and the discrepancies between the prior year and the current year are simply because we borrowed less money this year on our tax anticipation warrants than what we had in prior years and again you can see the the discrepancy in the operations fund is the other direction but again that's just because of the timing of property tax collections um on an expenditures from an expenditure standpoint this is the education fund we are running a little hotter than what we normally would in the salaries category but that is entirely expected we do pay out all retirees in may and so we have a large expenditure there but we also paid out coveted stipends to all employees during that second semester and so at the end of this third quarter we will be coming to you with a request for an additional appropriation not only to cover the additional salaries and benefit salary related benefits due to those but also the nine percent increase that we gave to support staff starting on july 1 and when we negotiated contract with the teachers association this fall because of the increase in state support that they passed during the last budget session we do expect to spend more than what we had planned last fall when you approved these appropriations for teacher salaries and so we do expect mainly to come to you with an additional appropriation request entirely related to salaries and salary related benefits and for the new board members that's simply last fall you approved a specific dollar amount to be spent from the education fund and we expect to spend more than that during the course of this year so we're required to have a public hearing and to have your approval to spend that additional money we imagine that it's money that we have it's just in a different pocket at the moment that's correct not only do we have um about we started the year with about a three million dollar cash balance in the education fund and during the second half of this year because of the increase in state support from the legislature the legislature's actions we will collect more than what we anticipated so our revenues will be higher than what we anticipated as well so yes there's money available to pay for you're welcome on the operations side very similar story where you would expect us to be but again we do expect because we have so many support staff that are paid from the operations fund also we'll come to you with an additional appropriation probably in september or october for the operations fund just related to salaries and salary related benefits on the operating referendum side exactly where we would expect to be at this time of this time of year and we do expect you can see we're not quite to 50 percent which is where you guess we might be around this time on the salary side but we do have a large number of teachers that are with us that are going to qualify for the referendum increase this fall who didn't the first semester of this calendar year and so we do expect to get up to that full appropriation for 2021.
if you don't mind i will not i as i i'm because of my address i have a lot of threats i've been getting at me so i would rather not make my address public okay well i again uh mr jacob why don't you give us your uh office address i'm sorry your office address not your it is the state house indiana state house 300 300 west 300 west washington okay we got an address all right okay so i thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak i had a lot of notes actually to talk about sel and crt however given that it was discussed as crt was not going to be implemented in center grove and also it's been discussed at sel as it's going to be implemented in center grove is not going to be traditional sel as it as it has been taught across the country however i am grossly concerned that scl and crt are just inextricably tied there is a lot of ambiguous and subjective information and ideology that is in both that is that weaves back and forth so i am a little bit concerned about the information that was given tonight because i feel like it was very vague and it was very ambiguous i do believe that sel and crt as it presently stands in its present form being taught across the nation i believe it definitively pushes a marxist ideology that definitely undermines the very fabric of our nation and that is greatly concerning to me and i believe it's very concerning to the people here [Applause] in addition it's been talked about i noticed over and over the state mandated employability skills and you reference i believe it was senate bill 297 i believe from 2019 so i am more concerned about the what exactly are the details of those state mandated employability skills i would be very interested in the in the explicit detail that's being plumbed out with that in addition i am i worked for state board of accounts for almost 30 years as an officer of the court everything i did as an auditor for the state board of accounts with the issue of government was the issue of transparency everything that government does should be transparent and i understand that there's issues of concern with children and their privacy however i think there's always a way to do things and i think that the issue of video in the classroom and keeping our teachers accountable i think is an incredibly important issue i think teachers need to be accountable as to what they are speaking and teaching in the classroom not what they're going to say say that they said that they taught but that people can go back and look at the video footage and also that that if if necessary to make sure that that students are not in those videos you don't have to video the the students but discussion okay so again i think that the bottom line is is i took an oath to uphold the indiana constitution of the state constitution and also this the laws of the state of indiana you also took that oath and what i'm asking is that you respectfully uphold your constitutional oath and anything that undermines or conflicts with that as it relates to anything within sel or crt that you make sure that that information that that is not implemented thank you mr jacob we have some questions please my apologies any questions any questions sorry please well one thing i was going to share with you uh mr jacob thank you so much for being here by the way thank you you know it's and thank you for serving the state and and our constituents um you know one of the things you you asked about the employability skills um if you reach out to the the department of education and it's um jason callahan you can see that guide that was put together so i would i know that's one of your questions that you had asked and i know some of the board members might have some some questions for you but would it be okay if i asked you some questions since i have you here and i don't you know i don't always get i love to get the chance to talk to uh representatives so i will try to do my best okay um i guess my my first thing is um and i'm gonna get on my soapbox because i did i've done it my entire career but i'd like to know where you stand on state assessment standardized assessments and the millions of dollars that are being put into them i am greatly concerned over the issue of state assessments i am a big believer in the control of the local school boards and i believe that our schools have have greatly deviated from education in other words reading writing arithmetic and we have [Applause] i'm greatly concerned that we have overlapped in it and and i'm just using that as an example here tonight sel mental behave mental mental behavior uh the the physical well-being of our children i i'm all for we i have my wife and i have six children i'm very concerned about our children and i believe that many of the parents here i can tell but just because they're here that they're concerned about that but i think there's so much the school teaches that is outside of the scope of what i think education really should be teaching okay and so so in regards to that um you know so like the state assessment piece and you know i i can't remember what the crazy number was spent um on you know just standardized testing right like istep or ilearn or all those things i that's the really my question is so as we work as a school district and we put so much resources into that because that's how we're judged that's how we receive our funding and so forth i'm just curious as to has there been talk at the legislative level about just really that large waste of money that continues year after year of all these different assessments and quite frankly creates a lot of stress not just for our our students and you know but our teachers and i just i wonder you know if there's been some conversation that's my that's been my biggest soapbox as a superintendent i've personally watched the this never really work um and every couple of years you know the legislators say okay we're going to throw that test out and we're going to spend millions and more dollars again and you know what we could have done with all those millions of dollars how many teachers we could put in classrooms how much more we could pay our teachers and i just wonder if anyone's really having that conversation there you know in all honesty again i'm a freshman legislator but uh there was no as far as i know there was no discussion of that this past legislative session okay well i i appreciate if you i hope i'm not i i feel i don't want to put you on the spot somewhere okay and if you have further questions i would be i would be open to a meeting and if you would like to further discuss things i am i'm open to this yeah absolutely i would i would because i i think and i've been telling this to people i'm not afraid to say it but standardized testing is just wasting our taxpayer dollars i agree thank you thank you thank you dr arkanov board members hey john um so i take it you're on the fence with crt and scl i know there's some other people at the state house that are as well and i i'm rumored and well it's not remember i've talked to michelle davis and i know that she's kind of writing a bill um do you know where that stands like last i heard it was kind of in the attorney's hands like do you think that'll go through um do you think that'll get passed where we ban seo as far as legislation yes your talk on it joe i think i think you know where i stand with i'm going to be actually very polite i think and i will be limited on my comments regarding the gop in the state of indiana we have a republican super majority and primarily they typically fail in standing for the republican platform fair enough i think in as it relates to crt specifically i think it it's an issue that we need to protect our children our nation and i don't see the republican party doing those things and it's really angering to me okay mr alexander actually mr hubbard covers my question oh well thank you mr daniels i i just have a question you know we talk about the state funding formula for schools you're familiar with the algorithm that goes in and determines i have reviewed it when i work for the state board of accounts but honestly it was years ago that i did can you tell us what the algorithm actually is and and the reason i ask is because center grove is almost always at the bottom per pupil you know how much money we get for each kid in order to educate is there any discussion all at the state house to take another look at that algorithm for some more fairness and clarity among the schools as to what each gets with respect to the state funding formula i'm sorry is your question has there been a discussion or would there be a discussion or either one pick one i can i number one i mean i i do not know if there has been a discussion i did not hear of any again in this last legislative session i know there was much discussion about education i'll be honest uh the gop was was pretty infuriated i think by a lot of the teachers unions um they felt like they gave them the world and i'm not directing that at center grove and they felt like they just kept on asking and asking and asking and they kept on giving and giving giving but as it relates to your question specifically going forward i would entertain discussion and and and i'd be willing to take in information and take back to the gop things that you want to discuss with me and just so you're clear on what i'm going for i'm not talking about increasing the amount in the pot i'm talking about how that pots divided right right you're talking about the distribution the actual distribution the distribution among schools right now there's there's the other issue too of you know increasing the pot and then everybody has more so i think it's for further discussion i was just curious as to what your position was on both of those and i'm not trying to put you on the spot i'm just trying to understand again i i would be open to a discussion about that further discussion outside here if you'd like and i can give you my my contact information thank you you're welcome and just for reference for everybody um there's 289 school districts in the state roughly 200 in high school i'm looking at dr gabriel back 97.