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this will kind of conclude a lot of the things that we've been preparing for as far as the budget is concerned so we'll look to have our budget hearing in september so this is kind of the last fund that we represent i guess as far as our budget is concerned so the education fund just breaking down gives you a comparison of the two columns on the far right the first one represents what we will advertise and then the second one represents what we adopted for past uh school year and then i just wrote a little bit of notes on some of the things off to the side just to kind of show some differences because we do have some differences this year the transfers we still do the transfers but we don't show it as part of our budget estimate we showed a different line in our form 4b when we submit that as part of our budget process transfer tuition you can see kind of has went up a little bit because that is part of our agreement with compass rose that we would pay for the transfer tuition that we collected on their behalf and so that that's expenses that we don't typically or didn't typically have before in the past and then um a lot of the other stuff that's mentioned there as far as changes were concerned is just a lot of things that we used to share with wabash city schools that we no longer share we used to have expenses that we would trade off on for billing purposes such as the preschool the shared preschool program and and the uh revised program for special education some of those programs that we're doing in house now and so some of those dollars are reflected in some other parts of the budget and so that's why you see some of the differences in that but overall pretty similar to uh comparable to what we had last year so that's just the estimate there for the education fund like i said we'll have our hearing in september so i'll start working on some of the advertisement stuff that we have to do from a legal standpoint and then it's a process that goes with that for the budget hearing feels good it does everything just hits the same time at this time of year with the budget and then you have all these fiscal reports that are due and it's a busy time all those three-year-olds do we have a teacher yeah so we have 200.
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um with that said the bus drop off at the school will be right at 8 10 and arrival will look about the same as last year um i know there's there might be parents out here that stayed fully remote last year and did not come back to the school students will be arriving to their classroom doors and please tamara if i get anything um if you know if i make a mistake anywhere in relating all of this information please immediately stop me i want the community to be fully aware and uh and have all the correct information so they will be coming in in their classroom doors um that's what what happened at fort rivers when they returned at the end of last year and we feel that um with the you know the spikes and numbers and things like that that to keep the students all extremely safe we're gonna continue that practice um the bus stops now i wanted to tell all the families that bus stops um have changed a little bit uh the schedule should be up in the um the district website so please take a moment and check that out if your child is a bus child please make sure that you look at those schedules and you know where uh the pickup times are um what the pickup times are what the pickup locations are and also the drop-off um and then this year as it happened last year there will not be any before school program um we are trying to work out some little glitches there to see if there's uh we we can't afford some staff to be um to kind of watch the students as they're being dropped off we want to keep in mind that there's many parents out there that are working have to drop off the kids you know 20 30 minutes before school opens and we want to make sure that the children are completely supervised outside and they're safe and so we're working on that and more information about that will be sent out now um the there also i wanted to also uh let everyone know there is a meet and greet so if you want to meet us in person next thursday august 26 from 4 to about 6 p.m we're gonna be outside of fort river right underneath that the big tent on the side and it's gonna be a meet and greet ice cream social so kids if you guys like ice cream come on down we're gonna have ice cream i am working closely with the pgo to um finalize those of those details but um we are uh the district has uh approved an ice cream truck um uh the ice cream truck and there's gonna be an ice cream chip providing ice cream to all the students so that's gonna be nice we're gonna have ice cream together we're gonna chit chat we're gonna talk if any parents have any concerns any questions about myself or tammy or what's going on in the school you'll be able to meet us in person that is a meet and greet ice cream social next thursday august 26 from 4 to six at the school right outside of the school underneath our tent okay and then also um students from grades school starts on um monday uh august 30th um and that will be from grades one through six and uh school starts again monday august 30th for grades one through six and that dismissal will be at 12 30 it's an early dismissal the very first day that monday and so students will be coming out of school at 12 30 so mark your calendars and make sure that that you kind of set up pick up and and and someone there at the bus to pick them up so we want to make sure that you have plenty of time to make those arrangements so that it works for your families um kindergarten starts uh september 2nd um we will welcome all our brand new little babies to the school our kindergartens uh students um it's gonna be all new and and and wonderful they'll they'll be a little bit nervous but um i would like for them to also be a part of that ice cream social on the 26th so they can see who i am and get to see tammy and their teachers um so it won't be so nerve um so they won't be so nervous and it won't be a scary um situation for them that very first day also um a letter i'm going to be sending out a letter soon to all the the families it's going to be all of this information again and probably even some more i think you know the district is is every day giving us more information and more guidance of how we're reopening and so as soon as i get more information and every all the information that i have shared today that will go out to all the families um by email uh a letter from me so look out for those of emails from the um from our administration um also placement letters so that the all the students know who their teacher is what classroom they're going to be in and those placement letters are going to be sent out by our fantastic school secretary maria torres she has been a wonderful help also um and she will be sending out those letters on monday so look out for those letters that are coming um out on monday so that all the students know exactly who their teacher is the parents are completely informed of the teacher and what location they will be in the school and what door they should be coming into the school okay also parents the parent drop-off um in car will look the same as last year um they will be coming into that side parking lot and kind of like looping around dropping off and then continuing don't worry we're going to have all all of that is going to be coned off for any family that has not done that and has not experienced that car drop off it will be all coned out there's going to be staff out there kind of directing traffic and so that don't feel nervous we're going to show you exactly that first day how that works um and pickup will look exactly the same the pickup will be in that same area you're going to drive in loop around and we're going to show you how you're going to exit um that parking lot so don't feel nervous this is to the parents that did not come back returned last year and stayed fully remote we'll show you how that system works and then all the the families that did come back the system's going to be the same there's not really much change when it comes to that i know tamara that she has uh shared with me that that system truly worked last year it was effective um and it was quick and so we're gonna continue that same practice this year and now moving forward to just kind of like sharing our vision and our goals for the year we're gonna be really focusing on closing that achievement gap like tammy had said and meeting those students and and meeting their needs where they're at we're kind of starting to kind of peel back those layers the teachers are going to get to know who the students are what their needs are any gaps that may have happened or may have grown or have were created because of remote learning and the challenges that that brought us last year with this whole pandemic that is our focus this year is truly uh making sure that those students get the um the instruction interventions if possible if needed that they need to close those gaps and make sure that they are completely and um prepared for the next grade to be successful um first and foremost in this grade and then be completely prepared for next grade for the next grade we want them to not only be successful here in school but in high school college and career this is their foundation of course in their education we wanted to make a make it to be a very positive foundation so that that we instill in them the love of school the love of learning the love of education are us as educators we are lifelong learners i don't stop learning i think i i learned something new every day constantly building my skill set as a leader tamara can can agree with me i think we're kind of on the same page with that and we want to instill that love of learning to the students and helping also a focus will be helping the teachers you know building their skill set making sure that they are uh aware of the uh the curriculum and making sure that they um know the standards and know where their their students should be um throughout the school year also we're going to continue promoting comenantes i myself as a am i i'm an english language learner um so i i have practiced to speak a little bit slower in english because when my spanish starts coming out it's super fast that was my very first language and then i learned english in um when i started kindergarten and i've mastered both um throughout my years of education i know uh firsthand the importance of being a dual language to being biliterate bilingual um and that is something that we truly wanna promote we wanna be the you know the the the face of that dual language program in in fort rivers and and instill that love in our families and in our students to know both languages and master both of them by the time they you know go off to middle school um they're going to be fluent in both and that is our goal also alongside the the current um services that we have and and that are being implemented at fort rivers we have our aims program which is going to continue it's very strong our building blocks and also our bright program that started last year right tamara started last year on bright program i have worked with my program in another district and i truly believe in the bright program um and um i i want to see it flourish i want all of these programs to flourish here at fort river so um with i want to uh kind of defer now to tamara and and you can add um anything that else that she would like to add that i might have forgotten i've gone through my notes i think i've gotten everything for the camera i think take it away a little bit um and kind of let us know that um i think um i think we covered everything i also want to say and and share with the um uh with with the community that um that uh um they can come and um call the office if they have any concerns um and set up a time to come see me come see tammy um and and kind of like you know if they have any uh suggestions any concerns any issues that might arise that they're not happy with um please come our doors is open and want all the all the uh the families to understand that that you are more than welcome to come to the school and and voice your your concerns with us we want to work together with the with the community and with the families and make sure that everyone is getting uh the get out they're getting the the services and the interventions that they need and deserve not only need i want to stress the word deserve all our students deserve a um a rigorous um academic experience and that is our goal here at fort river so i'm getting a message here and i think there's some questions um if i see sasha if if she could add some of the questions we're we unfortunately don't see the question so if you're adding any questions we don't see it we're kind of waiting to to have the questions kind of sent to us um and we have we would like to okay i see some of the questions now i missed what you said about the after school oh there is after-school care oh i'm so glad that a parent asked that there is after-school care um that's going to be provided um i believe it's 40 spots am i right tamara i think there's 40 spots those applications or to kind of apply for the the after school program will be in the front office i will have them we should probably have them for the meet and greet so that parents hold of those um as soon as possible um let me see some of their i'm just looking uh please forgive me because i have two screens open kind of looking at some of the messages um will you be making the recording on this session available in spanish um i can make this available in spanish once we're done here i can go back and make a a second video and make and give all that information in spanish also the the appearance that needed in spanish all this information will be in spanish [Applause] absolutely they can it's their first day this is their first experience in school of course i i'm a parent also when my students first started um school um i absolutely wanna perfect so yes um um anything that is that anything that can be translated so i think i think those were all the questions i see something for me i want to make sure that everybody is really close and again um please i apologize so okay so there's also link okay thank you sasha um so everything will be communicated thank you so much thank you so i think um tell me if you have nothing else to add i don't you are very thorough i think you covered everything well certainly sending out all the information in an email in both spanish and in english we'll also update families about covid protocols as it relates to face coverings and and all the other things just know that teachers and the custodial staff are working really really hard at making our school look beautiful and ready for your ready for your kids on when we see you on uh august 30th holy moly so i know it's coming up so quickly right i'm starting to lose will be sleep ready for the return of all the students that's right that's right so at this time tamara thank you so much for being part of this conversation i want to thank the community i want to thank the staff um for welcoming me and making me feel i feel a part of fort rivers already and i'm loving it and i'm really looking forward to this whole school year of just wonderful wonderful opportunities and growth not only for our students but us as educators also so i want to say goodbye thank you everyone and um please don't forget the ice cream social meeting group come out yes august 26 thursday from 4 to 6 right after school come down say hi we'll bump elbows because in october okay so thank you so much guys i truly appreciate um everyone that could not see and and um visit us a little bit you know you know my video but but i but i hope that everyone comes out next tuesday okay thank you guys i appreciate all of you
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so that's a huge increase football they're at 32 they were about the same in in 2019 and volleyball was at 28 and they were about the same um then we get to eighth grade cross country's a little bit down but steady they only have 10 kids total but we kind of see a little bit of uh a dip off but hopefully if we have 73 maybe we will see those numbers come through and one thing we've i've seen in the past 10 years i've been here our participation numbers is kind of like a roller coaster and we see sometimes we see that dip in eighth grade and we're not sure why but some of them come back when they get to high school they take a break they're tired you know there's a lot of different things that happen so that's not too alarming uh football they have 29 it's their largest group in eighth grade that they've had in a long time so we'd like to see these numbers increase especially being in the fox valley if we look you know three years ahead and through attrition if we stayed 20 to 25 we could have 50 on a frosh off level now we're talking about competing so those are some good things there volleyball is in the 20s as well and i really think volleyball stays a little low because it's it's a cut sport as well and it's hard to run big numbers there where we saw some boom is up at the high school we ended up with about just below 60 tryouts for volleyball we're we're right around in the mid 40s just based off of of cuts and you know not everybody can play it's it's one of those facts across country we're staying strong at 50.
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getting each of those questions yep how many students do you say uh i don't know what the exact enrollment is that was just the number on the top of my head when we went and looked well we have two four year olds and um north and then one three-year-olds north and then one and one at southwood and so our numbers we wanted to max at but we don't have 18 at the 3 year olds but i believe we have pretty there's different ratios between the four-year-olds that would be for two one to twelve well i just got a text that that the video keeps on going in and out what just checked it did you do this i think when you swipe really fast it takes a while to catch up oh okay because it really sets a little time to swipe slower yes so it's on a delay anyways but it looked great this time good sound everything yeah all right any other questions from the education club all right we'll move on to personnel under resignation we have warren daly baseball coach at southwood high school under employment we have andrea beaks cross country head coach at northfield trisha barton paraprofessional shark creek elementary liberty by your four-hour cook at mountainfield high school mary cole paraprofessional at northfield high school laura norman paraprofessional at metro north elementary stephanie selleck high school secretary at southwood high school hannah ely music teacher metro north elementary eric kirkland assistant cross country at northfield high school kelly beaver assistant cross country at northfield high school police a hall paraprofessional at south elementary ben lochman junior high football at southwood high school cindy french cook at southwood high school ashley harris cook at southwood high school and jordan boyer had girls cough at southport high school under resignation we have katie arwood an aide at southwood elementary under retirement we have deb mitchell paraprofessional at southwood elementary transfers jennifer merkel is transferring from special ed aid to credit recovery study hall aid at northville high school effective august 10th which is today sarah adaman transferring from paraprofessional to library aid at sharp creek elementary and amanda lyons transferring from sharp creek library aid to northfield library all right apartment career center report [Music] well like you said as far as recognitions obviously to get the school year started lots of work to be done and so just mentioning not everyone by name but our custodians maintenance mechanics in the office we have transportation human resource accounts payable payroll benefits treasures secretaries also we have all this technology of course administration teachers food service nurses hopefully don't need anybody out but there's a lot um people to make the first day uh run smoothly and also yesterday when we had the opening day for teachers and certified staff we had dr tony giaquinta who spoke to us and a lot of it was about early childhood education but also just about trauma that students have and how we can look at that and um it was interesting through some different situations some different images of of a newborn their brain and then how the connections are made at two-year-old and how they continue on it's just interesting that it's very very important to build those relationships and communicate with our our students and um being able to work on it one one thing that was very interesting he said that you know when a student came to you in a classroom or on a bus or wherever maybe on a football field or volleyball court or something like that but if there's a situation where they and they're very frustrated and very upset and maybe even throwing some kind of a temper tantrum if i can even say it that way but doing that you don't really necessarily supposed to ask what's wrong but what happened and so some of that making that switch a little bit to find out what happened because everybody's lives a little bit different and there might be some of those things that we don't know about in their life and we have to try to make those connections so i thought that was interesting there are a lot of different things that was mentioned but it was very very good i had some positive comments about that we tried to do it quickly yesterday we did the the teachers of the year staff of the year also made sure we recognized those that had like 10 20 30 and 40-year experiences uh here at msc wabash and then um yeah that was the main thing we talked about the new care portal program that we're looking at talked about we'll always promise so um very good the food service had a good breakfast um and it's interesting because we didn't do this last year we didn't do it last year but this year it's just really neat and actually um tony um actually mentioned how it was so neat to see all the people interact and come it's actually hard to start at 7 30 for breakfast and then to get everybody to get in the auditorium by 8 o'clock because we were not successful of starting at 8 o'clock because of relationships with all the staff and wanting to catch up from summer months so anyway that was very good and of course the first day today um it had to be a little bit different than last uh tuesday last tuesday probably like 58 degrees in the morning and this was like so humid and hot but uh a good first first day and speaking of first day really we have very very unofficial numbers but the numbers are looking good um as far as enrollment goes but of course you know that atm count won't be until september but the enrollment does look good um of course when i looked at it i said well i mentioned more they lost a lot of students the shark creek gained a lot obviously because we moved through the fourth grade and actually those two schools are only like 10 students apart as far as the number of students now of course the three and four-year-olds do not count on the adm um but as far as actual bodies in those buildings are almost identical and only ten students difference from one to the other um so anyway we'll i'll keep you informed about all the numbers but it's really looking good especially for the five traditional schools that we have it looks like we have an increase but of course we don't know that some students didn't show up today we don't know if they just forgot or if they went to another school that happens different things like that or maybe they just didn't want to come it was too hot they want to go to the pool so hopefully that wasn't the case so very excited about getting the school year started like every year but there's always lots of questions and so we are moving forward with what we're doing thank you excuse me curriculum and instruction report mr director we started testing yet it's right around the corner i'm sure i would just share that we've had some professional development and so last week worked with 15 science and social studies teachers to talk about literacy for two days and erica tyson led some project lead the way training and so we've probably had 20 teachers in the last two weeks doing professional development outside of the school year and so everybody's prepped community together and they were it was fun to be in the buildings today there was just a lot of energy right all those kids and it seemed like everybody was just happy to be back so we've got a good start then yeah all right moving on to new business we have before us a recommendation to approve the supplement to the re-entry plan for 2021 2022 and i will let you speak to that okay um obviously uh you voted on the green country plan for 2021 2022 on july 13th and then of course um there were different situations came up obviously like executive orders by the governor and so i wanted to make a few little details to add to to that plan first of all positive cases this would have put that in the plan but positive cases will be reported to the united states department of health if they're reported to us obviously we will report them and students and staff who are covert 19 positive will follow appropriate protocol and quarantine policies under contact tracing we're looking at doing that differently a little different than this than last year we will still do the contact tracing and parents will be notified and we have set it up now that we can do through the school messenger just like what i call i can have the principal's call we have to determine if this is approved tonight we'll work on this tomorrow with the admin or with the principles decide if it's going to be their voice or my voice but they would be notified that they are close contact and at that point then they would be they determined the parent would determine if they would would quarantine them uh based on the current guidance and policies and so basically it's the parent's decision on that part of it and going down the pre-pandemic standard operational practices basically just want to maybe identify those a little bit masks are optional we keep on saying that all rooms and buses will have a seating chart and enhanced cleaning and hand washing procedures will be encouraged and practiced with hand sanitizer stations available staff and students are expected to conduct at-home self-screening monitoring for related symptoms prior to leaving their residents on a daily basis students employees in a household with a confirmed causal case or to remain at home and students and staff will be required to fever-free less than 100 this isn't any different than before even before coven for 24 hours without use of fever reducing medication before returning school so really not a lot of changes maybe some just some details written in but the big thing is just the contact tracing parents would get that phone call and then through the school messenger it's kind of interesting you can do it by school you can do it by student so if they're close contact they will select through the software that we have there's google messenger or skyler it's called also and that will be just pushed out and then they can make that decision um it can be a parental decision on that so not any major change but any questions or discussions resolve my issues then i'll make the literature we accept this second done in a second to approve the recommendation for the uh supplement to our re-entry plan all in favor say hi okay we have no unfinished business we'll move on to board policy regarding our electronic participation in future board meetings so mr daisy and i talked about this um this is a new indiana code that we have to have as a policy and the nice thing about this policy is there were some choices that could be made um as far as reasons why you would do participate electronically and so it's all here i don't know if you would go over all of it a bit but i didn't check with um school board's attorney and school board association attorney to make sure i knew which one we selected so in other words this was the original plan from the i know you can't see that but the original plan from uh the state from union school boards association but then they had all these things where it would say you could do this or this or this or this you had to follow all the indiana code to go through that and so after i worked on that and shared it with mr daisy we felt like this is the one that we would want to be able to provide to you as a first reading and so of course you don't vote on it tonight but just ask any questions and see if we want to make any changes to it before you vote on that next meeting but it does allow us allow you to be able to do this virtually and there are stipulations though but we've got to follow stipulations you can't do it all the time though but one of the reasons that i added because it said that we could add that um now i cannot see it right away it's on the second page i'm sorry i didn't look at the second page yet one where i said the different reasons of course the military service illness or other medical condition death of a relative at a mercy involving um actual or threatened injury to persons or property or work related and so i realized in some of your situations work related might be something that uh if you have access via the internet wherever you're at then you can also participate that way but you can't do it all the time there's stipulations with all of this so any questions though it's in there someplace yeah isn't it if i'm correct that you can only do it two times correct yeah and that's one of them right and that's one of the stipulations in there you could have done it different ways you could have said it could only be 50 but i felt like keeping track of that all the time throughout the year the easier just to know you can only go two times in a row and then skip all the boss so anyway i felt like that would be better than trying to track a whole year saying okay what's that after meetings are not half the means we could have done that but i think this is a better way of doing it i don't think you want to miss a lot um and and we haven't and you haven't so that's good but it does allow for different things that happen to make it work but here again you have to be visual you have to be part of it i'd have to you know whether it's zoom or whether it's we do something with google meets uh you have to be you have to see you you have to participate that way with that right and you can vote because you can always participate or as far as you could comment you could just never vote we have to put it in writing 24 hours ahead right in an email yes and i think i put my name on there too just because then i would set up whatever we did with you and although we can vote there's about a half a dozen things here listed on the things that we cannot vote on electronically because they are major things like budget adoptions and referendums and raising or establishing taxes so there's it's kind of nice but there are a lot of stipulations with a lot of different things but it does give us an option yeah you're not necessarily what brought this about the nba school board association yeah i think part of it too is you know the whole thing with covet and then they um the indiana school boards association did bring it to legislators to see if that would be something because it's always been a situation and plus with technology now you can be a part of it's not the best way but it is a way especially when you have to be away and look at some of those i mean military service obviously an illness or other medical conditions and you might get sick sometimes you might want to participate but you just don't want to be here and without adopting the policy then that's not an option okay meaning electronically is not an option outside of the emergency situation yeah right yes that's exactly right right but that would be under executive order ordered that okay and as mr k paper said that's the first rating so there won't be any vote on that tonight so public comment for all items okay call me dance i just want some clarification because i can't read that and i can't think with my head crazed so so if close contact that asymptomatic it's parent choice vax or novak's is parent's choice correct thank you so you won't need to know who's been maxed or not correct we're not asking we're not asking that's the fairest choice so there's no difference in quarantine if because i i was reading the top part but then when i got to the bottom i got confused um that bottom where it says pre-pandemic is that that mean that's what it was before and that's not i don't even before we ever heard of code we would encourage you to wash your hands properly and not come to school when you're sick that's all kind of common sense so if a family member has a student home sick who tests positive and they have been like a cold for a couple days is there is there a quarantine time limit for those siblings yes yeah that would be yeah that's something that because some places i'm hearing it's different if you've been vaccinated or not and i don't get the point because your chances of getting it are the same really but whatever so so if a sibling has it the other siblings are whether they've had a vaccination or not they're going to be quarantined for three days or seven days or however many that's correct is that what you're saying yes doesn't matter okay and then sporting events there's no not going to be any limits or a mask at this point right okay those are just things that people ask all the time and i wasn't perfectly clear so i have a question i came here not to speak tonight so this is very very impromptu i'm learning i'm uh i'm concerned about her same concerns i do want to say that i respect all of you guys i know pretty much every one of you on a personal level um not all but my question is what what concerns me the most with executive orders i know that july the 1st you were able to make your own decisions on re-entry or going back to school mass no mass quarantine whatever you wanted to do my concern tonight after listening to you and i know this is uh 90 of my friends which are also parents um why do you educate me a little bit why do you have to vote on an executive order why do you have to vote to approve an executive order just like you voted to accept the contact tracing correct that's what you just voted on maybe i don't know if you want to respond to that but okay because that that's where i'm that's why i'm here tonight and i hope to make a lot of other meetings to educate myself the executive orders is what concerns me personally the most why do we have to vote to accept them if they're forced and you and you vote against it what's gonna happen yeah i i believe and there's different executive orders obviously so i believe it was 2115 as the one you were talking about i talked about um july one where school boards can make those decisions yes but then there were other things in there specifically um that were a little bit different and then i believe and don't quote me because i look it up again but i believe it's 2119 was the new one that talked about close contacts and so so since it gets those different wording of different things then we at least want to make sure that we recognize as a board as a school corporation that we're following those and we're doing um you know we're following those and doing the best to make kids safe and doing all those different things so that's a very very good question but i think it's just allows us to to look at it to talk about it and to make those decisions too because it's like the very first one i'm sorry to interrupt but the very first one though um that executive order was allowing the school boards to make those decisions and of course you needed to have school boards built on that because everybody would be different i mean there's schools all around to do everything differently right and so i think you you can see that everywhere and so that was something that we need to do so when when it came back and talked about the close contact we need to look at a supplement to add that to that just to our old plan and part of it is too we are required to post these on our website and through some of our esr grants that we get it ties to some of the grants that we give because the esser grants are federal funded or federally funded and so they want to see that we're following some of those some of those guidelines executive orders and different things like that and i will just say there's so many different people in the in the decision making of that because of course you hear about the cdc you hear about the indiana department of education i'm sorry the indiana state department of health of course the indian department of education and then of course you have the local school boards you have local health departments and so not everybody always speaks the same language and all that so it sometimes makes it very complicated because of all the different uh information that is given to us so but ultimately this is the governing body and so the governing body would go ahead and uh make those decisions i was gonna say from my perspective the reason that we vote on these even though there's an executive order that says what we have to do is partly because of the confusion of 2115 that gave boards the authority to do what they thought was in the best interest of their school district you see some schools like falling community schools giving a mass mandate some schools closer to home saying we're not going to have a mask unless you're on a bus so this is an opportunity for the msd school board to go on record and we have an electronic record of it to say this is precisely our policy even though you may hear things from cdc saying that this is what you're supposed to do this is the approved policy from the school board of the metropolitan school district of wabash county and i i think that's important because you know even though we've been given that choice we still do it with the knowledge that we i've received a couple emails within the last week or so if people are not happy with our choice to make mass optional so i think it's just a matter of us going on record and saying this is our preference and this is how we would like to to to run things at msd or have things done at ms as far as those particular policies we know that because of the nature of it we're not going to make everybody happy but we just have to do what we think is in the best interest of the school school is it fair to say we're interpreting the governor's executive order for our school yes yeah i would say from the legal standpoint you ask the question why why do we have to approve the governor's executive order that's that government in this authorized statute to issue executive orders to address a specifically statutory health so i was on vacation when the executive order came out came out but this is the policy adopted by msd and white so to push a little bit further if the cdc cannot set law and the governor mandates executive orders based on the cdc then further as we go on week by week why do we have to follow what the cdc is saying for new york because the governor is interpreting the cdc's information as however he sees fit and makes executive orders based on what he believes to be the scientific evidence is prevented presented to him by the cdc so technically if i could say it this way and maybe you know i should refer to our legal counsel we're not necessarily following the advice of the cdc we're following the mandates of the governor in the state of indiana is that a fair way of saying that yeah i think so i mean he gets his information from the cdc we take our lead from his executive orders yeah if we don't follow his lead no funding i've heard this has there ever been a school board push that historically i would imagine you could find an example of a school board who chose to in some way either violate state law or not uphold the statement and and dealing with some pretty serious ramifications um we're doing so yeah i can't cite specific examples but we don't have to prove that our government would withhold funding well i will say this though so this is a comparison has nothing to do with this but for food service for example that's a federal federal program okay and so we get audited with that and so if we don't follow those things yes we will get charged for that so we might we may get written up we may get different things like that but if we do something that's incorrectly then we could be there could be financial implications because of that because it is a federal program so for example um i was going to get into the weeds too much here but uh you know we have it's a little bit different now because everything's free but pre-plan to make pre-code if you would um not follow the guidance of free and reduced launch applications making sure you're checking those and doing different things like that and you were giving them free and we were getting federal dollars for that and we were audited and we were incorrect then we're gonna we're gonna get charged for that and so it can't happen that way so i'm not saying it will with this necessarily but but they we do get audited we get audited our teacher contract gets audited our food service gets honored the regular books get audited our transportation gets audited we get audited by almost everyone so um said all of them dr king and i think about all of our yeah everything gets audited and so it has to be done correctly so this is new so we don't know if it's going to come back and say okay let's see your policy and are we going to withhold esther dollars are we going to get that one that would be tight which ones are enrollment everything gets on if i can say something you know that's kind of why obviously you know what our policy is and we're basing our policy up what the governor for the states say so you know it is also important for you to voice your opinion to your state congressman to your to to the senators because they're obviously helping you know regulate some of those things are coming down so if you have a preference of one thing or the other which i know they they're getting bombarded with phone calls because of this so don't just i guess don't stop here you know if you have you know things that you want to talk about because it does come from you know if we could raise our money just in our community it'd be different but that's not where we get it and so and obviously we want to protect the kids we want to do what's best for kids not only for their health but for their education and sanity and everything else but ultimately it comes down to you know what we're asked to do and then what's the very limit that we can push it if i can read between what you're saying because i can relate to the concern of the reaching the far reaching of a dictate from a governor as far as an executive order versus legislative law and in my mind there should be a difference that seems so quickly anymore to have executive orders for everything that we've lost a lot of the legislation um benefits of representation can you see that personal from governor even up to presidents i mean they've signed these executive orders even though it hasn't went through the legislation you know they just you know even though it's not law they they make the order and so everybody holds it like this law back to your question about what if we chose to violate the executive order i think you're going to see that play out right now in texas governor abbott in texas has said there will be no mass mandates in the state of texas but then the school board for the dallas independent school district has said mass will be required in the dallas school system so they are in direct violation of an order from their governor so it might be interesting to watch what happens there and what happens to dallas on whether or not they're fined or because that's instead of precedent too even though it's flip-flopped it the the concept is still the same you have a school district in violation of a mandate from their governor same thing one one thing i brought to ask and you kind of mentioned that um was the bus the buses included the bus i didn't see anything separating the bus out so the bus is not required we addressed that in uh our last in july about the original um which was not running or not that they're also optional on the buses and drivers the executive order requiring that said uh if i can remember exactly how that was worded and i don't know if i can quote it verbatim but was that the policy would be set by the school districts as they saw fit regarding grounds buildings and transportation like most things with this with what i'm learning from various resources is to continue to stay tuned to see what the challenges are going to be and are inevitable um without getting into the federal and state differences i do think in defense of the indiana state legislature they did pass the environmental emergency law which allows the governor here to act from that policy so this what goes on okay anything else the items from board members all right we're done
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we see the fluctuation between boys girls one year boys or more one year it's girls but you know 50 in that program is pretty good considering we have not had a huge incoming freshman class so we could see a big spike in two years uh boys soccer is up from about low 50s up to the mid 60s so that that's a nice increase there boys golf is the same just due to being a cut sport we're in the 20s girls golf is down from 13 to 8. we graduate a lot of seniors and you know golf is one of those niche sports and it's i've been flow there uh cheers about the same we're back up from the coveteer because it's a little bit more normal and you know the girls are back they didn't have to choose between all-star and you know football season uh dance is way up uh that we're in about 32 last year we're in the teens so there's a huge spike there a very successful program and uh i think that's where the interest is coming and the biggest one is uh football taking taking covet out where we were below 50 we're in the low 50s last year with covid we're in the low 60s a few years prior to that we're at 92 today so that's a huge increase there a lot a lot of excitement you know for the sports i think kids are are just excited to be back playing you know trying to get some normalcy there i met with all the sponsors today so this week at the high school we got all the logistical stuff done you know all of the activities and groups and clubs are going to be kicking off in the next week or so i know we're meeting with student government on wednesday because homecoming's in a month so be here before we know it and uh you know we talked about hey let's have our in-person meetings you know have the virtual option as a backup or run both because you know kids can't you know they have to be somewhere else but they could turn it on so we learned a lot last year with having to do things that way and we're not throwing that to the wayside we're still trying to incorporate both to meet the needs of of everybody and we really stress this year that we don't want a lot of overlap with our our clubs you know we have a google calendar don't overlap with someone else don't make our kids pick give them the options that they need it's been a year you know since i haven't had these things and i said we're all in it together so i think it's going to be great um i know this week we kind of start with our sports a lot of our scrimmages are going off this week and then next week it's you know hit the ground running with opening up against hampshire so with the clubs and other activities are we encouraging them to do like somebody right after school and somebody's starting an hour later and with as many as we have i'm assuming we can't have just one no but the like the minimum requirement for a majority of our clubs is to meet once a month okay so if if they're in that once a month it's we can if you want to go on that wednesday okay this one's taken go on this this time slot you know the ones that meet two times a month or three times a month just based off of what they're they're trying to do you know try you know that's where the calendar comes in kind of pick the days and once it's gone kind of it's gone okay another questions all right thank you thank you all right next is um foia do a smart procurement request we know that this is a quarterly for that we receive so our business manager has developed a spreadsheet to make the response easy we're able to respond to that then we also received a form from mr james horn regarding the enrollment totals of black hispanic white students as well as other students on free and reduced lunch and students not on free to reduce lunch who are enrolled in our advanced placement courses and we're able to provide our our data for that point as well all right excellent that wraps up today's video uh into executive session for the emotional second to do so so much
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of america and to the republic thank you would you please call the role certainly frost voice for oh here that's me no yeah shane not here today oh we're six tonight okay thank you do we have any correspondence none okay uh do we have any visitor statements tonight um uh nicholas i think it's your turn scrabble are you protecting or do you want me to you can go ahead and do it i can get on the airplane for learn lab 2.
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hello mike davenport here christopher espinoza here thank you denny hagstrom here terry pavisage here joanna vazquez drexler present nancy kupka here with carla o'hara here thank you we have a forum [Music] 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 okay good evening we have um the first uh order of business is we need approval of minutes for the july 19 2021 business meeting the july 19 2021 closed meeting the august 2nd 2021 workshop meeting with action item and the august 2nd 2021 close meeting i couldn't with me joanna and terry thank you joanna vazquez drexler yes terry pavisic aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza thank you jenny heggstrom aye and nancy kupko aye the minute security thank you we're gonna move on to the first reception of visitors the guidelines are here we did have a request so i'm going to go through the what i need to read for the reception of visitors and then we're going to talk a little bit about how we're going to approach this so the meeting agenda includes two opportunities for comments from the audience the first reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board about any agenda item on which the board will vote and those agenda items are the approval of the addendum to the student parent handbook which will include masking and personal protective methods approval of the strategic plan consultant and approval of the 2021-2022 budget so the first reception of visitors will only focus on those things the second reception of visitors uh comments excuse me i lost my place the second reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99 comments are limited to three minutes to provide all visitors an equal opportunity to address the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary visitors addressing the board need to submit a comment slipped to the board secretary mrs nadiak and will be invited to the microphone prior to addressing the board audience members should state their full name these proceedings are being tape recorded for the purposes of producing accurate meeting minutes and they are being streamed i reserve the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warrant audience observation of these protocols is appreciated now we have had a request from mrs hoyce because we're going to we limit the amount of time that we have for open comment and she informs me that she has two areas of concern one is um restrictions which i think you're talking about masks social distancing etc and uh the other diverse diversity inclusion so we're going to limit the first reception of visitors to discussion of restrictions is there anybody in the audience who has something yeah we have the people who've submitted slips for the first reception for the first but is there anybody that is is there anything other than um restrictions oh rest uh than the the addendum yeah i i don't know that but we only have for the first reception of visitors five slips i'm assuming five times three that's 15 15 minutes fits definitely within the time that's allocated but did anybody else have something else they wanted to say during the first reception visitors related to anything we're voting on hearing none uh who's the first speaker the first slip that was submitted was kylie spahn the microphone's right over uh there evening board members uh kylie spun district 99 parrot i have the timer up here i would like to sincerely express my gratitude to every school board member the administrators and the entire district 99 team for doing everything possible to safely get our kids back to in-person learning i would also like to thank you for trusting the science and data and for following both cdc guidelines and governor pritzker's mask mandate like most families in our district last year was a very difficult year for us remote learning had many challenges in our house from wi-fi issues to depression due to isolation and lack of socialization i do not want my child to do remote learning ever again that is why i support the mask mandate and all mitigation actions that the district undertakes to ensure that our kids are in the classroom that they are growing socially and emotionally and that they are able to participate in extracurricular activities such as sport band and clubs if it means wearing a mask then we will wear a mask if it means being vaccinated we'll do it my whole entire family is fully vaccinated please please let us hear the speaker please let's show some respect for the speaker thank you it is that important to me as a parent for my child to be in person it is that important to the mental health of our family every parent who has spoken to the board over the last year about remote learning and mental health have all wanted their children back in the classroom full time with sports and activities here we have it this school year our kids are back to full-time in-person learning with all the added fun activities all we have to do to keep the kids in person is to wear a mask and if able get vaccinated it is that simple it is that easy what's more important to parents fighting the mask mandate keeping your kids safe and in person full time at school or going back to full remote learning which has had a major impact on the mental health and academic outcomes of students i choose wearing a mask and vaccinations i choose in-person person learning and extracurricular activities i choose mental health i choose physical health mask up thank you thank you speaker you know we're asking everybody we're we're allotting time for to listen to people's perspectives we are allowing time to listen to people's perspectives please show respect whether you agree with the person who's speaking or not okay our next speaker is i believe it's paul drabick oh you'd like to be in the other one okay well that's fine jim devitt rich benema ridge bennema downer south alum and parent merely 14 days ago this board approved a return to person instruction plan that quote recommends everyone including fully vaccinated individuals wear a mask in public indoor settings in areas with substantial and high transmission end quote today the proposed student parent handbook addendum says quote students must wear personal productive equipment unquote and outlines disciplinary actions should the students fail to comply i have three objections to this addendum that i'd like that i ask the board to address first quote students must wear personal protective equipment and ppe includes but is not limited to face masks per osha quote personal protective equipment may include items such as gloves safety glasses and shoes earplugs and muffs hard hats respirators or coveralls vests and full body suits the unproven virtual signaling of masks as an effective mitigation against covet is difficult enough to accept however i will neither accept nor give consent to any of the rest separate specific evidence or mandate if this is about masks then please say masks prior to approval i asked the board to replace protect personal protective equipment and the word ppe with the word mask and strike the phrase ppe includes but is not limited to face masks two students must wear this while in the building and on school transportation and in any other areas determined by district administration the phrase any other areas is too broad as it universally encompasses places unconnected to the school i will neither accept nor give consent to such and precise language if this is about school-sponsored events and activities then say that prior to approval i asked the board to strike the phrase and in any other areas determined by district administration or replace it with a comprehensive list of areas within the direct jurisdiction of the school three the phrase during a pandemic or other health emergency appears several times throughout the proposed addendum however it is notably absent in the masking requirement in fact this change to the handbook is open-ended without limits in terms of either time or criteria as written this addendum could be interpreted to require mask wearing even in moderate transmission level which directly contradicts the plan approved only 14 days ago i will neither accept nor give consent to an unrestricted permanent masking requirement given the recent threats meted out by the governor and the isbe to private and downstate schools i can understand the desire to ensure compliance while waiting to see if they indeed have the legal authority to enact their coercion and extortion if this is about mandates of that kind and not intended to derail the approved plan once the hysteria subsides then please make that clear prior to approval i asked the board to add specific clarifying language stating that students must wear masks only during times required by states expired state or local mandate or guidance thank you thank you [Applause] read hoist this needs to be shorter um hello again my name is reid hoyce i don't want to focus on covet itself but masks immunity and what makes sense in schools i think the districts i think the mass mendix district 99 and the state enforcement students like myself is ridiculous and unfair um the board to my knowledge has not quoted any facts numbers cases or common sense about corona and facemaked effectiveness with younger people any student is now eligible for the vaccine which means that any student that should or wants one should have one which also means that students who don't want it who could care less about jb pritzker and district 99 mandates does not feel the need for a vaccine does not have to wear a face covering because it is the student's decision i think these board meetings should be mentioned to all students because if majority of students saw what happened here i bet they'd want firstly max mastoff then they'd want some mass statistics then wonder why we don't have a governor like ron desantis in florida which is a model that illinois should be following mass should be optional or whatever madam president madame prentiss president excuse me um please gavel when uh sorry stop the clock thank you you can get back five ten seconds all right but let's let's again let's be respectful please with an underwhelming 349 deaths ages 0-16 nationwide and 0 0-18 in dupage it would make sense to not require mass what is obvious with this is the decision that should be ours but is not is based on fear there will never be a day our leaders say covet will be over or covet is over but there can be a day where we look at statistics have common sense and take the masks off thank you for your time [Applause] is that it that's the end of the slips for the first reception of visitors okay so we will move on to the recommendations and reports of the superintendent i'd like to speak to the return to person return to in-person intervention plan all right um so to share with the board um this this came out i think late last week from illinois state board of education many of us had questions similar to what those in the audience have raised this evening about is this truly a mass mandate how enforceable is it do school districts have the ability to move forward with the plans that they've outlined with their communities and shortly after many of us asked those questions of isbee we received a memo that included this information first of all the executive order that went into effect puts universal masking in place in all k-12 schools in illinois secondly that the order has the force of law that we do not have the option to not comply with that order that isbe will use all of its regulatory authority to ensure that every school in illinois has a universal masking policy and enforces it and non-compliance is not an option and then what they outlined what that means what that means is that a district would have multiple opportunities to remedy the deficiencies the deficiencies is not complying with the mass quarter if we don't comply with that a school district would become unrecognized many school districts except well more than a dozen have received in the last week notice from illinois state board of education that they either must immediately or have 30 days to comply with this order and if they don't they will then lose their state recognition as a school what that means is that we would no longer be considered a school our students grades and transcripts would no longer transfer to post-secondary locations we would lose all state funding and we would lose the ability to participate in ihsa sports we also heard today that if we aren't an official school in illinois none of our certified staff members or non-certified staff members service this year would count towards retirement so there are several regular regulatory pieces here that isbe has authority over us to force us to comply with what we have to directly answer some of the questions there comments that were made in the reception of visitors we don't know how long this order is for and that's one of my criticisms of it is that the cdc has come out with guidelines that that indicate which is what we followed as to when it would be safe to remove the masks and move back to a mask optional setting the executive order does not contain any of that the executive order is in place for 30 days and then the governor either has to reissue it or modify it or or just it isn't reissued right the executive orders as far as i've been told from attorneys have been upheld in the courts 69 times so until this one falls in the courts we have no recourse other than to comply with the executive order that we've been given by the governor there's it's very clear that isbe has the authority to force us to comply with this executive order and schools have been given clear directive as to what's going to happen if we don't therefore it is my recommendation that we continue as we must to comply with the executive order this is the rationale for the student handbook language the only time we would enforce students to wear mask is when we when we have to either under the current executive order or because the safety measures that we're following according to the idph indicate that we should it is my clear intention that i outlined with the board this summer is to be as close to a pre-pandemic state whenever we can be that way which would be including giving students the option to wear masks encouraging people to be vaccinated as we move forward but until i have that authority as a superintendent i have no options to offer the board other than a universal mask requirement so the the policy that sits in place is exactly the policy that was in place last year around following ppe uh it's written that way because we don't know what guidelines will come our way the remainder of the year we will only be enforcing the expectations that we clearly communicate to students and to parents our authority is the school district only extends to these grounds and places where students are at school related activities we have no authority for students once they're off campus or anywhere else so that's why it's written the way it's written to in order to capture all of the possibilities that we would face as a school district it has been vetted by the board of education's attorneys and it is why it is the recommendation this evening later on tonight that it be approved if for some reason we should see a need to modify it under last month's resolution that the board placed if there's a need to we'll we'll modify it and then we'll take it back to the board for approval moving forward but i don't think it's overreaching i think the community has seen that we're trying to keep people safe you've seen a commitment to us trying to get back to as close to normal as possible this school year and the administration is dedicated to continuing to do that as much as we're able to so that's any board member questions on universal masking any board member questions on universal masking all right so the key pieces uh oh one more thing i want to make the board aware of i've received questions from this from community members i've spent a lot of time discussing this with our elementary partners partner superintendents and a lot of time with the health department discussing this this this showed up in the quarantine isolation rules that were released from idph originally and then updated guidance as it came out and faqs pointed back to this protocol idph allows for a modified quarantine approach for certain close contacts under this test to stay protocol before i go into it i don't want to bury the lead which is the last bullet which is at this time the dupage county health department is not in favor and does not support test to stay the idph documentation and the isb documentation clearly say that when it comes to close contacts isolation and quarantine that the dupage county health department has the final say over those protocols we are really looking at this strongly for us our students have the ability to be vaccinated which would exempt them from close contacts quarantine and isolation unless they test positive or have symptoms but our elementary partners are very interested in this because many of their students aren't able to be vaccinated so elementary schools across the county are very interested in this and we had a lot of questions for the health department on our bi-weekly call today but the way that this would work is that it would be voluntarily and optional we're looking at if if we were to go this way and be allowed to go this way that we would work with a third party company to do the testing and parents of course would have to opt into that and sign off on a medical authorization to have their children tested and they would test on that first day that they're identified as a close contact and then they would come back and be tested on days three five and seven if they came back negative on day one they can continue at school they can continue with activities they continue with sports then they they only have to they have to wear a mask just as everybody does then they continue at school and then on day three do likely a rapid test again if that comes up negative they stay in school and continue going about school on a normal basis then again on day five and day seven and then from after that they're released from the testing protocol they still have to remain masked through day 14.
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five three one five awesome that's about um oops when you're done with this i want you to come home with me and show me how to get into my knees here you can do it just there if you go to the top right hand corner with the arrow that's pointing up if you see present put in the first row oh yeah there we go okay school board meeting monday august 16th 2021 let's get started so i know i had two meetings with you guys last year with a little bit of an introduction but you know it's been the summer so i just wanted to introduce myself again so i'm nick stuck i'm your steven siffer on your student council school board rep for this year um this is me in wyoming on my family vacation this year that's in yellowstone so that was really cool we actually biked through two of the national parks so that's just something i did this summer um and then starting with what i'm involved in so student council obviously my whole soul i love that club with all of my heart and then fmp this is my second year being an ffp i'm an advisory leader so shout out to kim's 4a advisory part of national honor society i started cross country this year after running a little bit through the pandemic so i picked up that sport and then obviously tennis so this year's focus transparency and integration so these two words were something that really stuck to me when i was making this presentation so as we're coming out of the pandemic hopefully um these two principles will be crucial to this year i think with covet last year there was a lot of uncertainty within our school community so being transparent about what was going on and our next steps as a community was super important and integration but more so reintegration for freshman orientation day sophomores and freshmen weren't invited since a lot of the sophomores hadn't even stepped in the building yet so that was something that really stuck with me and i think everyone needs to be as involved this year as possible so that we can have the most positive outcome so student council so i have three things to go over today which have just happened over the summer and are happening in the next couple of weeks so for the first day of school actually after freshman orientation day i went straight to decorations for the school so we decorated the forum so we hung streamers from both the catwalks and then we also did a balloon arch in the sports center lobby and then also on the first day of school myself along with some of our e-board came early and handed out lollipops cookies so straight out of the ppas book we had class banners which you'll see right here so kids sign that during all periods of the day and then that's also handing out lollipops and then we also did boards which you'll see throughout the school just giving students notice about certain happenings from student activities and then tinkle times which have always just been a fun part of student council so we put those in the bathroom and you can read them they're just some jokes teacher of the week student of the week and just some events that are happening um and then the second thing is actually happening right now um in the west building we're having our first meeting of the school year um so i saw students um signing with their ids getting on our official roster so our meeting is running from 6 30 to 8 p.m last year when we adapted to an online environment we ran from 6 30 p.m to 7 30 p.m so we have an extra half hour um back so that's super exciting and we're meeting every monday and then the third thing is homecoming and assemblies so this is our super bowl um these are our super bowl events of the year so these are happening on october 1st and 2nd and we have our roaring 20s theme for the dance and then the assembly is something that i'm in charge of with my um e-board members as well as our general members so we'll be start to we'll start to plan that but it's always tradition um it's always a traditional um assembly so we have some of the same events throughout the um that we've had in years past during the assembly and then next up is freshman mentor program so the pictures on the slide tell you a lot more than the text actually does but i'll just run through the text really quickly and then relate it back to the pictures so first is the new e-board so last meeting in may the fmpe board actually wasn't decided because miss stitman was having her baby girl um but they have been um appointed so this is a picture of um all of eboard so you have iu sticks it abby tenor dia shaw and then you have uh ashwini narayan raghav khosla lily madavian udit meda um nandu and yusuf so i'm in class with a lot of them they're all amazing kids and i think ms denton and the olympia definitely did an amazing job selecting our new fmp board it's definitely in good hands this year and then also fmp's super bowl event of the year freshman orientation day happened last week on thursday so fmps arrived um around 6 a.m that day and then some of them went back on the bus to pick up freshmen who arrived around 7 45 a.m and then throughout the day freshmen went to their advisory so they were able to meet their peers the fmps as well as their counselor during that advisory period and then they went to their first shs assembly in the pac which a few of the fmps put together and then we took them on hour-long tours i know for some of the kids who participated in the hybrid program in the spring semester last school year they got some tours early in january but we took everyone back through the school so that was super important for them to refresh and even learn the landmarks of the school as well as see some of their classes which they would go on later they would go to later that day um so after tours they had dean presentations which just went over safety protocols and other important things that you need to know as a stevenson student and then like i said before they participated in many schedules so they went through their schedule and spent 10 minutes in each of their classes with 10-minute passing periods and fmps were in the hallways guiding freshmen i do have to say the construction with the field house did mislead some of them so we had to bring them through the multi-purpose area and into the field house and then the third thing is starting tomorrow since we had um an activity period today we didn't have advisory but that's starting tomorrow and going through thursday so some activities we're doing this week are two truths little eye which is pretty self-explanatory um and then 50 questions which is just a get to know you game we'll do a lot of those throughout the first weeks just so that everyone can learn each other's names um and then they'll also have a quick counselor visit on wednesday um so that's about it um but to go through the pictures um all the fmps go on an fm playdate they like to call it there are a lot of puns with the fmp acronym so we went to chipotle that's all of us and then on freshman orientation day the fmp's um usually dressed up together so this group was um cowboys and then this is me um this is actually a kid i play tennis with we have the same tennis coach so i saw him in the hallway walked into two of his classes um his name's haroki so he's really nice um and then this is our a lunch so while the freshmen um and other fmps were having lunch the al's met which are advisory leaders um in the multi-purpose room just to talk about certain things that we can improve on fod for next year and just things coming up in the school year next up we have nhs so general meetings those are actually happening this week they run monday through thursday there are a couple of options for you when you can attend there's a 4 to 4 30 option on monday and tuesday and then i believe a 7 to 7 30 p.m option on wednesday and thursday so i'm going to the wednesday one but these meetings are monthly and mandatory in the first couple of meetings go over general requirements for membership upcoming events and just ways to get integrated into the school community since that was that's what nhs is all about like one of the four pillars of service so that's super important for nhs and then also their super bowl i know i said that like four times already but um their event this week or their event coming up later this month is street fest so this family from the event will have food trucks games entertainment music and so much more i know some of the band is playing they're bringing in kona ice so those are some of the specifics as to what street fest is going on but it's a super way it's a super great way to raise money for certain charities i don't have the specifics on that but that's um all over um like the d125 website um and that's happening on august 28th and that kind of segues into my last slide which are student highlights so there's a wellness week august 23rd to august 28th and street fest is the culminating event for that so that's all about mental health and nhs is collaborating with other clubs such as peer helpers and fire to really just get everyone on into the school year on the right foot um so peer helpers is hosting their own event which is the annual mental health and wellness forum on august 23rd so that'll just have live discussions and immersive activities for participants to participate in so that'll be super important for students who um want to work on their mental health um and then also athletics are back in full force um like i said before i'm doing cross-country so we've had some 6 a.m practices which i was not aware of before sunnyvale but i've seen football and girls cross country and a bunch of other sports um back on the track that's super exciting to see since bless you since a lot of sports weren't at full force last year um and then also relating back to fmp the freshman mixer is this friday august 20th so fm senior fmps will report to stu act at 6 pm in their fmp shirts and it's just a super fun night for freshmen i still remember my freshman mixer like it was yesterday and then also one thing i didn't add on here but i just talked to my friend dt she's the debate captain she said that debate just had a 200 member meeting so they had their first meeting the school year they meet monday and thursday so that's obviously another big club so that's just super exciting to see everyone getting involved since that's what student activities is all about that's all i have for you tonight any questions yes what is your take on how the students are weathering the storm here um i think everyone i think most people are excited to be back in school um i think summer reading and like getting ready for the first day of school kind of is dreadful for some students but i think a lot of people are excited to be back especially because last year was kind of optional to come but now that we everyone has the full experience um it's much more um appealing to students and then also like one thing that happened literally my first period um mr kanine my comparative gov teacher um some students were having like a small funny discussion um before class started and that was he said like that's something we missed with uh we missed with online learning so i think everyone's feeling a little bit more connected and everything's a little bit more positive so i i have to jump in and say you're hitting the ground running and you i really appreciate the slides and and the way you structure them with the with the description and the photos were really helpful they gave us a really good sense of what's going on um and i appreciate that i look forward to your reports um coming in the upcoming months well done thank you so much thank you thank you very much and see everyone next month next month so do we have cook i'm supposed to have ppa tomorrow but i got postponed cancelled for heading over to student council now thank you take care okay uh dr trudeau you want to take us through the business yes okay well thank you everybody for being here tonight um with our curriculum instruction and assessment um agenda items we have uh two the first is a first reading which is an approval to uh revision of our board policy uh two colon two six five uh we'll give you the opportunity to read this over the course of the next few weeks we'll bring it back for approval in september and carol this is something that was recommended by kim our attorneys um as an update to um our current board policy you will see a more significant update um with the most recent press edition maybe next month as well so in this hurricane we're talking it isn't redline to show any changes because the whole policy is is correct so people understand what they're writing um what was updated here um that was discussed with the attorneys is title nine coordinator for student related or employee related issues and also to include an investigator a decision maker an appeal decision maker as well it's an entire rewrite yeah we're just replacing okay okay um so again we'll bring that back uh for you to approve uh in september if you have any questions in the meantime feel free to let me know or carol know we also have included for your review a summer school report for the summer of if you had a chance to look at that there's a lot of really good information in there thank you so much mark um i was glad to see that um we had our third highest summer school enrollment um i'm reading that correctly which is pretty good coming out of actually i know we're not out of it yet but in the midst of a pandemic it was great to have kids here on campus and taking classes mostly for enrichment so that was really good um so again all of that information is there for your review all the data as it relates to classes that students took the grades that they received and the work that was that happened so okay um moving on we have um a typical um smorgasbord of personnel uh information um there for you in the human resources report and all of which will be part of consent so you can take a look at that there's been a lot of kind of last minute over the summer hiring and changes since we last saw each other in june so you can see all of that information there and that takes us to item c which is a follow-up to the conversation we had in closed session not available [Music] thank you questions uh would you please pull the board weisberg all right arguable hi courson hi wounds i know hi frost carries six to nothing okay and we will not end up needing an executive session following the board of education meeting and that takes us to the business section and we have um a few items for you beginning with um a recommendation to update our accounting methodology so sean take it away thank you um currently the board or currently the district operates on a cash basis but we would like to switch to a modified accrual basis for two reasons actually three reasons one um the uh gasby which is the governing board government accounting standards board recommends that we operate on a modified cash or modified accrual basis secondly moody's which is one of the bond rating services has begun to downgrade school districts who operate on a cash basis as opposed to a modified accrual basis and then lastly we believe that a modified accrual basis will better reflect what our actual cash balance is at the end of any given year because we receive taxes early i.e in june that are really earmarked for the following school year so tonight we are recommending that the board of education approve our recommendation to change our accounting method as presented uh can you have a motion please vote um okay um two questions sure so go ahead if you've got questions how far do you crew out um we so what we would do is our accrual basis um is really at the end of the year um statements um so we accrued back uh i believe 30 days and then we have to reset though our entire starting point which would be um so but you're not accruing up for one two or three numbers how do we get to that it's modified we can't and it's this is the same policy actually that all of the schools i think it was just many other schools are i've already have already converted to it so right so i recall there's only one other school possibly that it's not in lake county correct high school so we'd just be consistent with it with our peers correct can you be restating the previous years yeah we will have that correct we have to restate the fiscal year 21 that just finished so as we move to accrual we'll have to go our auditors will go back and restate our beginning balance for this fiscal year correct any other questions would you please pull the board certainly arguable um corson all right moon's eye no hi frost all right voice verb all right carries six to nothing okay the next item is approval of a a contract a renewal with pediatrist and i'll let sean give you the details but i just want to offer that pediatrist was a um just a fantastic partner uh with us throughout the course of the last year as we uh worked really hard to implement mitigation strategies in the building um and you know we we really do believe that you know although this year hopefully is going to be less interesting and less challenging than last year we do think um that they'll make a great partner for us throughout the course of this year as well because the reality is you know the pandemic isn't over and we have already found that we have a number of students and adults with confirmed cases of covid so having them as a partner to advise us but then also to work with our nursing team complete testing work with students and families we think is really important so as far as the details of the agreement sean i won't worry with too much of the specifics but it'll basically mimic what we well the same services that they provided for us last year uh just on a little bit more of a shortened schedule we do have the ability to uh increase their the doctor's time on uh on site uh if need be um but right now we shorten their hours down just a little bit the cost of renewal is 175 000 um but we plan on using on the esser funds that are provided by the federal government for covid um basically covet type programs if you will um this is one of those uh instances where we definitely can use that money to spend on uh to do this but i will also recommend that we do have a termination clause so that hopefully when things settle down and everything goes um goes away we can in fact uh give them notice and terminate our contract early um savings for them the district so we are recommending uh tonight that the board of education approved the contract renewal with pedia trust at a cost not to exceed 175 thousand dollars even can we have a motion please so second any other questions for sean do we still have the coveted clinic like this trey got his office back [Laughter] um one of the things that we uh learned through last year um is that we we can we kind of set up these colvin clinics in each of the nurses office so they know how to isolate our students we have some separate rooms um but the doctors will still be located uh near troy's office just off to the side it used to be our old prep office and they'll still do all of the testing through the circle drive like they did in the past and is this for nine months or a whole year this is for the full year um you know it doesn't include summer i'm sorry it does not include the summer nor did our contract last year include summer as well sorry every month correct just through just through the nine months that they are growing so if in january or february we decided to terminate that to be just prorated right we would just be prorated through those months correct i'm sorry if i missed this you mentioned we're going to use that yeah we got message all us for funds think correct is there a problem with that if we don't use the full 175 no if we get some back that's not going to be an issue no we have plenty of things that we can spend our funds because the ask for funds actually spanned three years including last year which we've spent way more than we've heard right right okay yeah any other questions would you please pull the board gerson hi wounds i know hi frost whitesburg all right well i carries six to nothing okay before we get to the next item quick bit of trivia does um anybody on the board know what the number one college for um stevenson graduates is when they leave us harvard clc uic university of illinois which brings us to sean data sharing agreement correct um so in a better uh basically in an effort to gain you know how truly our students are performing at the next level when we need to gather information uh from and share our make information with the college of lake county um one of the things specifically is um we look at our math students and our math students often get credit at the college of lake county for the things that happen here and i know mark and his team are um you know behind kind of creating the structure so that we can constantly improve if you will upon the services or the instruction that we're providing um so tonight we are recommending that the board of education approve the data sharing agreement with the college of lake county or between college of lake county and stevenson high school is presented can you have a motion second i'm the any other questions for sean do students is this just an automatic thing or do students have to be attending there or give some i don't believe they need to be attending there but i'll i'll defer to my colleague therefore students that actually do attend the data sharing piece and it's mainly meant for a transitional math program so essentially we're just looking to capture information about how our students are doing beyond their experience here at stevenson and better understand their pathway and then likewise clc is interested in how they've done here so that they're you know working to articulate regular instructional practices that support the students so what is an example of what's the data shared levels particular student what's the example of what data is shared is it transcript transcriptable it can be transcript data but never anything that's personalized so it wouldn't be like by student it's just aggregate data you know about student performance within the course then the this may be too much information for everyone but mainly um each high school in the area is really interested in the transitional map experience of students at clc so most all high schools have some sort of articulated agreement with community colleges to support students in that particular subject area and that's really what we're concentrating in the goal to kind of create some benchmarks for them like say you know if a student gets a c at stevenson and precalculus they're still okay to go on to calculus at you know that kind of thing okay that makes sense yeah thank you mark any other questions thank you would you please pull the board certainly please i no i frost honey iceberg all right i'm going hi where's them six to nothing and i'm sure clc will be thrilled okay moving on um the next item that i have uh for the board tonight is approval um to purchase the properties located at 2 334 indian creek road and 23362 indian creek road if you recall back in june the board authorized me to engage in negotiations with the owners of these two properties um many years ago the this was one property and the owner at that point in time decided to subdivide or subdivide the lot into two lots um which is why we are or why i'm bringing uh fourth the ability to purchase both of those lots um the um one of the properties did come for sale and i engaged in conversation with the owners um and the other owners of the property the ones that uh 3362 um also approached me uh with an interest into purchasing their prop uh property as well um so tonight um and we are recommending that the board of education approve uh the resolution for the purchase of properties um with a purchase price of four hundred and forty thousand dollars for two three three four four indian creek road and three hundred thousand four two three three six two indian creek road for a total of two uh seven hundred forty thousand dollars for the full two acre um full two acres of course pending um not only our board approval tonight and our site expection um i will just if i may one other thing before we make a motion we currently have um no plans to utilize the property for anything other than administrative purposes at this time so no students no parking lot right now this is an ability for us to hold on to it if at some point in time the board feels like we don't want to develop this property into something we can in turn uh turn around and resell it so we are not bound to hold on to it and lose any money on that particularly so so moved well i just need a second second thanks um so can i ask questions please so sean um can you just share with the board you know that um as you said we're we're not planning to develop this at any point when you say administrative purposes correct um what that can mean though is using it for um storage or office space um for adults not kids basically anything but students anything but students if need be so the the key is um for us the not have students on this property yeah so it's um unlike you know the far transition exactly and the other thing i would add too is you know it might seem odd you know the purchase of this property allows us the flexibility in the future if we do need to do something you know when homes come on the market you have to react at that point in time um so we might need to do something later and if we didn't have this property that was already owned by the district we wouldn't be able to do anything with it at that time so another quick question sean is this um is this in lincolnshire or is it it's currently um in prairie view um okay so it's it's it would fall under the jurisdiction of the uh township and the county okay um so if we did want to do more we would go before the lincolnshire board and asked for annexation if we were going to use it for student purposes if we were going to use it for student purposes any other redevelopment though we could go through the account correct correct what's the price of these two in relation to the one we already purchased um so the house that we purchased uh last spring was oh my goodness i'm going to draw a blank 595 000 which was a one acre lot so we're getting a better deal on this price for the two acres when you look at it a per acre price and it's um pretty much directly east uh of the lot d extension it could expand into quite a parking lot in the future it could but i at this point in time um we're not going i don't we're not going to recommend that at this point we want to start we want to get that parking lot built and then see see what the need is which do we have plans yet uh the survey came through the engineers are designing it getting through going through the storm water all that so we should hopefully have something by uh the end of september and gildane sands we can price it out okay yep they are both these lots contiguous yes they are connected there's a picture right i did include some pictures for you guys yes sir do you how did you get to the uh purchase is there appraisals um so the uh i did look at uh purchase uh prices for similar properties uh i talked to one of the attorneys that i used before and had some comps run as well um and we are at market actually we're a little bit below market but um the gentleman that was selling the property that had the house on it was asking 460 for it i guess it would have been about a month and a half to two months ago um and so uh i can tell you that parts of the market right now are flying and to keep one on the property is you know to keep something on line it's surprising that it didn't go that fast did you see it i hadn't thought about the fact so the house is we're going to have it and hold it for these administrators do we just it falls under all of our insurances we would add it to our insurance which is no additional cost um and then we have our ground guys will maintain the property on the exterior our maintenance guys will um you know obviously we'll change all the locks and then we'll put the settings um assuming that we don't have any uh we didn't move any um administrative offices or something like that over there um we would keep the temperatures very low at a very low operating cost so do we have to pay the property taxes uh we do not have to pay the property taxes on this correct [Music] at this point in time we're just going to hold it as eric mentioned we could put storage in there we could move some offices over there um but for now it'll probably just be storage um at this point in time the real issue is when something comes right you want that so you have the option the big thing is that when they come available to your point exactly we are landlocked everybody knows that so you know when these come available they don't come available very often and when they do i do think it's in our best interest to act at that time according okay and the people who have houses around they don't have any objections um so i've reached out to them yes um i've reached out to the neighbor uh immediately north um and we've i've been on the phone with her many times when we started the construction project i obviously talked to them frequently to make sure that we're not disturbing them or being good neighbors um and then when if we ever were to develop it we would certainly include them in our conversations about what we're going to do and how we'll be neighborly at that point in time and we don't plan to rent those houses out to anybody no okay any other questions uh would you please pull the board no hi frost iceberg all right it carries reluctantly six to nothing and then the uh last action item that i have for the board tonight um is a change order to our east um building addition phase two um you know sometimes we do the best planning um once things get up we deserve to determine that there's a need um for additional things this one is an additional need for some security cameras um we you know after the field house was completed um in a review of some of the fitness area and of course the updating of our landscaping we basically determined that there is a need for additional security cameras and areas that currently aren't being monitored by our cameras or the areas have been disrupted by some of the landscaping that's been put in or more of the construction that's going um on so we um did come up with uh so we did uh look at this change order it is uh includes the trenching for the conduit on the pulling of all necessary cables the purchase and then also installation of the cameras and so tonight we are recommending that the board of education approved the change order at a cost not to exceed 176 223 even can we have a motion so moved second uh questions for sean i would like to add that we are also still projected to be under budget even with this change order so the reason you are asking is just because of the different scope correct and the law and the dollar amount yeah and the dollar amount of the change order i do think this is important to bring to the board's attention from a total standpoint the project is still on track correct on track and under budget on time on time july 2022 it just seems as interesting that this is changing this and maybe it's just because the number seems large yeah that this wouldn't be something that would be foreseen and included in the original project so the big thing is the um uh trenching of the parking lot um to bring the power out to the lights that are already existing those didn't have power out to them or enough power to um run the camera they also didn't have the data to talk back to our camera system um and so a large chunk of this is the in fact the excavation of that parking lot and then the repaving of the parking lot and laying of all that underground conduit that's the expensive part 1994 technology right like that was a total when we built that and ran all that initial cable and wiring and all that well some of them didn't even have it 25 years ago but we want to put all of our you know modern cameras out there modern technology out there you know our security cameras are you know they're significant yeah the difference between the old ones yeah but i mean my point is like this is really just you know it's an updating yeah you know just for the benefit of our newer board members sure um there there have been instances in the last let's just say there have been instances where those cameras have helped our security identify folks on campus who who should not have been here and that allowed them to respond quickly so this um after hearing some of those experiences this kind of thing i think is it's really important we've also saved a man's life on one of our neighbors whose house was on fire um and we happened to catch it on our cameras and our security got there before they didn't even know their house was on fire so so there's no wireless technology and stuff that you have to dig all these things there there are some but it uh it's not to the scope that we use the cameras not that technology hasn't gotten there to make it wireless for our uses of it so and they need both power as well as the data when is this gonna happen you're tearing up this parking lot again is that no no no no no no this is this is this will this will get um taken care of um when um through uh we call it burrowing okay thank you the next time they come here okay uh any other questions would you pull the board please certainly frost iceberg all right agua hi gerson moons i know i it carries six to nine okay and then you see um a usual buffet of lawyer requests and i take this to the consent agenda i have a motion any questions about the fully request uh can i have a motion uh for the consent agenda please still move second okay we have a first and second any questions for erica on the consent items would you please pull the board frost hi vice versa all right well hi garson moon's eye no hi carries six to nothing okay and then finally um just a couple items to finish up tonight um i know uh nicholas mentioned it but uh we're pretty excited about the wellness week uh coming up here um beginning 23rd troy do you want to give us like a little a little run down on that i think now more than ever it's important that we provide these opportunities for our kiddos yeah i think over um cobit from the last year we really learned our lesson about how we can take lots of clubs and bring them together and build these weeks and started a year ago sort of with the homecoming week that we built and then with that we had success with the anti-racism week last spring and so as we come into this year we know that you know and it's really been the talk of this of all of our professional development for the first week and a half is the well-being of our students and um a really and you know we we really like the shocking number is that many of our students haven't been in a school building in school in over 500 days uh when they started here last week and so what's the impact of that and how are we taking care of our kids and how they feel so um as you can see well you can't say that it's presented but there are going to be events all week long from multiple clubs and activities a couple of highlights alex stoller has been working with us and he's going to spend the evening talking about mental health and your mental health and your physical wellness and he's he's been an amazing all last year all over the summer he worked with all of our athletes and it was fantastic and they're going to have a presentation at the football game which i think is awesome and then a big webinar for parents families everyone strategies for students to maintain their mental health throughout the school year i think that'll be really really well received and then closing up of the celebration a real celebration bringing this all together for street fest so um it's a really fantastic opportunity for us to rethink how we take care of people it's going to be good and you know hopefully it'll be the theme of the year also that's good all right thank you troy and um troy feel free to kind of jump in and speak up here but we just wanted to give you a little bit of an update as um we've come back to school i would say we're three days in and knock on wood um things are going fairly well um we are once again launching into a unprecedented year again hopefully less unprecedented less challenging less interesting last year but it'll still be unprecedented we have been in school for three days the most significant mitigation strategy i believe for us this year for students is continued mask wearing that was something that we had made as our own requirement in early july but then the governor issued a mass mandate for the state of illinois a few days later and for the most part and i think you heard nicola nicholas say this kids have been really really good um i think there was a lot of folks who were worried about whether or not kids would wear masks but we have no cases of students just outright refusing to wear a mask there's been some cases where kids have them kind of below their nose or you know on their chin and most of our adults including myself and troy are pretty good about just saying hey you know can you pick your mask up and our kids are so good they do it immediately so um i don't want to suggest that you know there was much to do about nothing but i think any anxiety that we had around you know hundreds of kids not wearing masks was you know relieved by the fact that in the first couple days our kids are really good and they were following directions and so i think a lot of kids have realized bring two or three masks like they're hard to wear all day switch them out after second hour switch it out after fifth hour you know like to get kind of in a cycle because it's it's it's more comfortable if you're changing them around right you know and um you know we're especially with the weather being so nice we can get outside for pe that gives them a break they can take their masks off in that outside space we still have them available correct absolutely somebody gets here and forgets every classroom yeah and uh we've got extras in every classroom at all the doors um speaking of outside we have uh set up on the principal's patio and outside seating for lunch and we see out there kids every day um so there's an opportunity for kids to get outside during the lunch periods we've also cutting into my suntan time on the patio close down the hot tub but um better for the students to be out there we also set up the sports center um with individual seating for students if they felt like you know during the lunch periods they just were uncomfortable sitting close to other students on mass [Music] that has not been as popular as we thought it might be um only four students during the lunch periods are using that space but you know what we'll keep it open as long as you think kids are still getting it settled in still finding their way around and figuring out where they're going to be the outside space has gotten more and more full every day they do expect more people to go to the sports center as they just learn where it is i mean the freshmen at this point are still you can just see it like oh my gosh where's everything at so they're even the sophomores even something the sophomores who went back last year so yeah there's a lot of people still figuring out where where everything is been great so the kids who are going outside to get the distance you may want to go into the current center when it rains and it's possible that you know at some point in time we might have to consider you know bringing the tents back um you know as the weather turns but you know we'll we'll kind of make that you know decision on a week by week or months month by month basis so so far um things have been going well um it is you know definitely um nice um though different to see the building crowded again it's been 16 months since we've had kids in the building um so that's something that's nice and yet at the same time there's a little bit of okay we're back and things again are going fairly well um i was asked a question earlier um how many cases have we had on campus um thus far we do know that we have had um one case uh if not two um investigating of um unvaccinated adults on campus and then the number of student cases that we have confirmed are two or three one case and other kids that are kind of important right so one student case and then two or three other students who may be involved in contact tracing and quarantine so that just happened uh over the weekend so we do it we do expect that there's going to be student cases um we have uh our because we don't necessarily have access to all the student vaccination records vaccines are not yet required of students we do think at some point in illinois they will be just not yet we have asked our students to provide vaccination information to us in order to facilitate quicker contact racing and so our best guess educated guest sean in terms of the numbers of our students who are vaccinated is around 70 percent um it could be a little bit higher could be a little bit lower but if you're gonna ask us to make a best guess we're thinking right around seventy percent right um as the delta variant continues to spread lake county in illinois is seeing really high numbers of vaccinations i don't know if you're following the news on that so that's a good thing um and our hope is that over the course of the next couple of months more and more of our students are vaccinated and the nurses continue to receive vaccine on a daily basis you know so if so for the students who are vaccinated when you're doing your contact racing they don't have to clean outside of the building correct as long as they're asymptomatic and and not as long as they don't go cry is what that's correct and so that's a great benefit right to being vaccinated you would yeah you won't be corn you won't be corn unless you get sick unless you get sick and if you're not vaccinated the quarantine is how many days so well there's there's four options now so you can be quarantined if if you are close contact within three feet because we're mandating masks on everyone so the rule is if you're masked it's three feet or closer for 15 minutes in a 24 hour period that's the whole spiel and then if you're the person who has covet it's 14 days if you're the person if you you can test out after 10 days of quarantine or after seven days there are two different ways you can get a test and get your quarantine cut short then the fourth possibility for in building closed contacts is the test to stay program where you can test every other day you can come in in the morning and get a test and if you are negative for covid you can continue to come to school so there's four options before once you're quarantined how you can handle that and the nurses will walk everyone through there they're a little more complicated there's paragraphs for each of them but the nurses will explain each of the options to families they'll get to make a choice about how they want to handle that quarantine going forward and they get to choose how are the other area schools doing the surrounding schools the high schools around us how are they doing quarantine no how are they doing in terms of cases oh i i don't know some schools aren't even in session yet so um and then i'm trying to call anybody yeah that date is not publicly available so and you know it's also really hard to tell you know because a lot of kids you know are asymptomatic and they don't know and so it's right now it's it's just a challenge to track all that data so we don't we don't know yet and i don't have any anecdotal information either um so in addition uh to the masking i would say um troy we are also trying working really hard to maintain the three feet of social distancing in the classrooms um which is admittedly you know a challenge but um our teachers are doing a great job of making sure that kids are spread out as much as possible we've rearranged kind of the standard seating chart for the classrooms to to try to keep kids uh three feet apart because by doing that you know we're able to keep kids you know out of that contact tracing protocol so that's important to us as well anything else i'm missing troy on our mitigations and then all the other things hand washing and all the other things we continue to do so for the hvac system yeah okay any other questions about back to school all right that's all we got uh can you have a motion to return second uh all in favor aye all right any opposed oh we merger thank you
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so if they're negative they remain at school there's these masking and universal masking is required for the entire school for this to be an option so there's some definite decisions to make down the road because if masking does get turned back over and becomes optional if we made masking optional test to stay is no longer an option right so there are these different levers that get pulled on that determine what what options we have to offer our students in our community so currently we're walking through the legal and medical processes that might put this in place should the dupage county health department authorize us to use it right now it's just trying to make sure that if it does become an opportunity for us we know how we would execute it how we might go about it and you know if we if we think this is a good option for our families or not and then we would come back to the board with a recommendation as to what we're going to do moving forward so this is just to let the board and the community know we're looking we understand that something idph lists it isn't something that's possible within our county right now but um we're we're staying and working towards understanding how we might do this if we choose to questions from board members can you elaborate as to why they're not in favor of it um [Music] the question is why the dupage county health department isn't in favor of it they shared with us today that they still have questions about processes and some of the rationale behind why this is an option so since they have the full authority over it i you know that's i can only report to you what they've shared with me any other questions from board members all right yeah my clicker doesn't want to work from here all right so the proposed addendum i mentioned it a little bit but i just want to call out the kind of key points that are inside of this so section one there's four bullets mr benama was nice enough to highlight a few of them which require students and families to observe all the safety measures that are required and we clearly communicate what those are and post them on the website we also ensure that educational opportunities are available to all students so making sure that when students are on quarantine that we're making sure that they're provided educational opportunities i it encourage it it spells out everybody who's sick needs to stay home right that's the first part about keeping all of this in place and keeping everybody safe and as we know procedures may and likely will change as we move forward so those are kind of the key takeaways there's a lot of language in there as the board has seen but this is kind of the big overarching takeaways of the first section the next section is the discipline code which yes students must wear personal perspective equipment is directed by the administration so we've directed what that is and how that works it's posted on the website it's been shared with all of our families students must visibly display their student id this has been the policy for the past year continuing into this year and students must comply with the procedures related to the pandemic so it just spells out those expectations that are there it's highly likely without even the board passing this addendum that the school district has the full authority to expect these practices to carry them out and to ensure that the students are doing what we expect of them but this just lays it out very clearly because we are in a pandemic so uh questions from the board on on either on the the addendum or either of these two sections all right this is an action item later on this evening all right concussion oversight team part of our board policy is that every year we inform the board that we have a concussion oversight team and who they are the board approves this every year but this is really us just making sure that we've gone through the process the board's aware that we've identified them the board has had a chance to review that team and that we've put into the record that we've done our our duty in making sure that that team is present questions about the concussion oversight team all right strategic plan consultant the board we've talked about this for several years that once we wrapped up the master facility plan it would be time for some long-range planning because the last big check box in the strategic plan was our finishing our facilities which you're in those spaces right now so the board has asked the administration to go through a strategic planning process jill has been working diligently with the rest of the administration to get out requests for proposals or qualifications to review those and then to make a recommendation to the board which we're bringing you this evening at the end of that process well that's what i just said that jill went out and it's the administrative team that reviewed all of the proposals and went through them and then ultimately worked with cso get used to that acronym at ceso that's the company that we're recommending tonight the team that was reviewing the proposals unanimously gave a vote of confidence for cso so the way that the process would work over this year is that will is would already has already started talking to us about this but we'd really begin working in earnest about putting together the details long logic logistics and planning for the year as we do the strategic planning process then there's a first round of community engagement activities where we gather feedback from all over the community about what we should be doing in district 99 then then cso will analyze that feedback synthesize it present it back to us then we'll workshop that information with the administrative team then there'll be a oh i have a typo there a second round of community engagement it's hard to do a first round twice so a second round of community engagement and then they'll go through all of that analyze it synthesize it provide feedback and then from that whole process they start laying out the new strategic plan and then prepare for the rollout of the plan in our initial meeting with them we did walk through kind of our planning process from year to year that we have in place where we you know summarize uh an entire year in a narrative that's presented to the board and the public that from that we develop our goals for the next year those goals are approved by the board as they were last month that the administration reports out to the board on progress on those goals for the entirety of the year and then at the end of the year we repeat it all over again and they felt that their strategic plan would fit directly into that process that we already have established so it was a good just initial meeting with them so based on all of that tonight we recommend that under action tonight that the board approves cso as the third party company there's a scope of work that's outlined in there that the board authorizes us to exec to execute all of the documents that we need to and approve an expenditure of 32 000 plus expenses to carry out all of this work so expenses would be things like travel to get their consultants here so questions from the board i have one question the 32 000 plus is that competitive to other companies that we've looked at yeah it was very much in the range of the other proposals we were seeing i assume that we talked to them about our master facility planning process and that because so much of i think this is going to parallel a lot of what we went through with that they they actually told us that they respected our master facility plan process and that felt like there was a lot of good work done there that they could replicate well it's good because i think the community then will find this a familiar process as well and maybe engage agreed i think there's a lot of interest in schools right now i think so yeah all right so this is up as an action item later on this evening all right i'd like to recognize mark and jury for a pretty good streak here it's the 22nd year in a row that they have been recognized with a certificate of excellence in financial reporting so congratulations mark [Applause] so they get to put another little sticker on the plaque that hangs in the district office all right i'm going to turn this over to mark do you want to advance you want to tell me when to click oh good i'll be your clicker signal okay so uh we we've done the budget for this year or at least a tentative budget for the 21 22 year needs to be completed and and filed by the end of september and also needs to be displayed for 30 days prior to having a hearing where it can be approved for that release so we we make it by having it this presentation that i moved to and that will hopefully allow you to approve the tentative budget that we put on display for those 30 days so if we start with the revenues this is a comparative uh of the fiscal year tentative budget and for 21 22 and the last year's actual amounts um comparisons are very difficult with last year covet you know we had no rentals we had no athletics and we had no a lot of things were just not there and so there's some some costs that are gone some other costs we had were exorbitant last year like you know supplies and things like that and the o m fund so the percentage change column doesn't mean too much this this year because of the what hit us last year overall our our budget for the fiscal 2122 is 97 million 781 thousand dollars compared to last year of 105 million 643 thousand dollars but that second one had a 10 million dollar issuance of a working cash bond it kind of throws things off if you took that piece out of that which is a one-time event you'll see that the increase in our budget this year is actually up instead of down by 6.6 million dollars it's actually up about 3.5 million dollars and i'll get to the key things here are that personal property replacement well property tax is first off our biggest revenue item or 3.1 percent um 2.9 of that is for i'm sorry 2.3 of that percent of that is just for cost of living the cpi factor and the remaining part is for new property added to our our roles it's a new development that's getting taxed new taxpayers on the rules replacement taxes surprisingly is supposed to go up this year the state department of revenue provides an estimate at the beginning of august every year for what the replacement taxes will be for the following year um they were up unexpectedly last year and it was because of a if taxpayers had a net operating loss or had a net income no taxable income business owners in particular companies they did not have to file taxes they were given like a relief of having to file taxes and so if many of them might have had replacement taxes that they paid and would have generated well generated new dollars but for those that did not file and had net operating losses they could have used that loss against the replacement tax and offset it and they would have paid less in replacement taxes because of the net operating loss and we would have received less but it went up just because they all i mean we were just expecting it to drop because of that reason and it um because they the net operating losses weren't part of the formula therefore we ended up getting more money than we expected last year now i thought that we're going to file this year and that the state would say okay now they're going to bring all those net operating losses forward and we're going to get hit again i was really ready to reduce this line item but the department of revenue has come back and said no they and they're very accurate with their projection they pretty much know what it's going to be for the next year because they've already collected the funds so um it's it's uh we're happy to see 216 000 going up instead of about the same amount going down um interest income has been just just ridiculous you know it's less than one percent it's been less than one percent but if we go back to 2019 we were making over 850 000 and that was a pretty low average year so when we get to talking about a five-year plan we're going to see probably hopeful that some interest rates will come back a little bit over fight in the next five years because that there's been years we've collected two million dollars in interest when some of the rates were higher um now we're looking at you know three thirty five thousand dollars you know because it's just no banks don't want our money they're getting it freer and cheaper from the cheaper from the fed so we have things like food services which we didn't really have cafeteria operations for most of last year um and we had registration fees i think those are they still won't go up this year because we have as you know we've got approval to leave the national school lunch program which means we can actually have a food that we believe the students will like better than what we're limited to under the national school lunch program uh so we won't be collecting from the kids and we're turning this over to uh chartwells and they they have experience with an open open kind of cafeteria operation like that they'll collect the dollars we still deposit it and track it and have checks and balances on it but um they'll collect it and at the end there'll be some a bit of some amounts based on how much they collect some money giving back to the district for for the program other local revenues are look you know kind of the same we have 2.1 down they're actually going to go up in the building fund because we all have rentals again and so we are already arranging to have rentals in the district but we had none virtually none for the last year so things like that are tough to compare the general and other state aid um is going to be up this year i'm sorry it's like we've got it down in the general that's right it's general and state aid it's going to go down but federal aid is going to go up significantly because of esser which is elementary and secondary educational yeah relief so we will um get 1.7 million dollars or 1.27 million dollars for programs this year that help us get recovery into education recovery but also more um items that are helpful to in the against the fight against decoding um so that's that's really the key keys for the the revenue of expenditures if you look at our total about 97.8 97.7 82 million dollars um very very close to what they are for the revenues and that's going to be important in a couple of minutes and i'll explain why uh salaries are up 4.8 percent but it's actually because some of the salaries last year didn't occur because of the covet so the comparison number is off a little bit but there's 2.9 percent was for ongoing employees we are going to have to expand our custodial ranks we are actually custodial maintenance and ground so we're going to be adding some staff because of all the new floor space that we have we also have some other certified staff increases because of the learning recovery that we're going to try and push hard on this year um if we get to things like purchase services again that's messed up because of the cafeteria operations we're not paying for the food we're not doing that so there's a lot of these pieces there that are hard to compare capital outlay is down primarily because of massive facility plan we've done so much and we actually moved some things into last year as well just to try and get them coordinated with the master facility plan so that's down a little bit tuition is the biggest item here that we're not 100 percent confident of this number because it's a big drop 4.2 million dollars but we've identified kids the same way we have done every year and we just do have a lot of kids exiting or just graduating out of this role and being for those that don't know tuition payments are paid to other facilities for first usually special needs students where programming in the district isn't isn't in district or in schools our schools is inappropriate um so that's a quick rundown on expenditures when we get to the fund balance if you look at the the two columns overall we are lost about three point three point six million dollars so or i'm sorry eight two six seven eight two point six million dollars and that that number just about matches if you mo the debt service transfers okay but the revenues and expenditures are pretty well balanced and that's what we had projected um for this year from last year we knew we would have a negative year this year and for 22 also but the biggest part of that is the debt transfers that we've we've we've got a number of debt certificates in fact i think we're down to this one last one where we issued bonds but we didn't hit the taxpayers with it we took it out of their operating costs and we're paying it out of the operating fund of the district well this is the last payment on those debt certificates and and the biggest part of the 2 million 0.52 from the building fund that's the last payment so we will have 2 million dollars above what where we'll be next year hopefully if we can continue the same way we have for so long every year trying just keeping up with inflation so we'll have um two two million dollars of expenditure in that transfer account that we won't have to deal with next year so um that's the biggest thing we can point out on the fun balance piece so that it's there is going to be a way to get ourselves balanced again the the reduction of that payment for debt certificates and interest income hopefully over time going up we'll talk about these items in the five-year projection which i'll bring to the board at the september 20th meeting and it's when we'll also be asking for approval of the the the the budget at that meeting and i'll have a five-year projection so you can see whether we end up over time with with this track i think we're on track um and i think it's it's uh we do we knew we were going to take a hit for a couple years because of the dead certificates coming up um so really there's there's a couple just a couple things this is just a quick summary by function and objects because it to look at the state form it's 40 pages and it's it's quite an opportunity to be able to share and look at one of those but there's a couple things that in our formal legal budget that i don't present here but it'll be in our you know is be presented budget that one is on behalf payments on behalf payments are made by the supposed to be made by the state of illinois because they control the teachers retirement system and they should be making payments for for certified staff pensions um but they don't and they haven't and so they've allowed this liability to to just get bigger and bigger and we are required under generally accepted principles to disclose how much the this state should pay or should have paid each year and and it's it's broiled up to a number of 44 million dollars it's ridiculous and um in the history of this of this state of illinois there's only been two times my understanding is two times that they actually paid the actuary amount that they were supposed to pay and one goes back into the 30s or 40s when they first started the plan so i mean they just have never they've always just concentrated on what the outgo outgoing retirements are and paid that year's cost but they didn't pay for all the accruing costs behind it anyways we we're going to disclose that in that in that document that we put free for them um and that's really about the presentation i don't think if you have any questions i'd be happy to respond okay so we're going to have it hopefully in the libraries there's three libraries and we're going to have it at our office it'll be online um the state forum and we'll have this as well the short short form so people can see see that i have it on display for a month i just had a quick question it wasn't really uh related to the budget but in terms of rentals have we had any interest in renting this space have we thought about that oh we know we're going to have we had a smaller stage here that was very small this is a this is a professional 20 times right and i mean i think you know the story everybody in case people here don't that the original south high we were told was built to be a freshman feeder to north high and so the theater at that time was just a smaller group not really the same size as what you would have in the north and this is the kind of the level where everybody's at for comprehensive high schools it's beautiful yeah well i think we'll have plenty of you know opportunities and you know when we're not using it we've always been trying to open it up to the community the fields as much as we can there's a lot of a lot of demand for a lot of our property and we're happy to to work at a reasonable level doing that all right so this is up as an action item tonight to put it on display for the next 30 days all right master facility plan as mentioned earlier we're wrapping it up um actually from this point forward only if i have something new to report will be an action an agenda item um so we'll have like budget close-outs and probably follow-ups on the groundbreaking ceremonies and a few things down the road here as we right you know when we get the third party inspection done you know i'll report back to the the board we've passed all the roe inspections and obviously have a permit of you know permission to occupy all of the spaces right now but the board has a third party that then comes back through and looks at everything and makes sure that everything is that is as expected last friday and today we're absolutely energetic in both schools uh exciting to see all of our kids back nothing better than watching kids walk into those common spaces and just soak them in i mean just incredible space and you could immediately see as i was helping students i started here at south in the morning on friday and then i went over to north as students arrived there for the afternoon sessions being able to stand in the commons where kids are flowing into and then you can kind of see the picture here of or if you walk out the doors you'll you'll see kind of the storefronts of attendance college and career counseling student support i was standing kind of back here for most of the morning and in every other school year i've been here kids come up they don't have their schedule they have questions about their they need to talk to their counselor and you take that one student you walk them around to the counselor's office and you get them in line so that they know where they're at and especially incoming ninth graders and the the first two days of school i'm just stationed out there and i'm like you see where it says college and career services that's where you want to head you know do you want me to take you over there and no no i got it but you know we told everybody forever that one of the keys of the commons was all of the resources the kids needed were available right there from that space and it was really cool on day one to just see that pay off you know kids immediately knew where to go and the cool part was or the even cooler part as the morning went on i saw other kids like oh you want to go over like go there that's where you need to go you know and it was just uh so easy we're in the past that was resources to you know maneuver kids through the hallways and get them to the right spot and make sure that they didn't get lost so really exciting here everybody can step out and see those that beautiful commons out there there you can see those storefronts there and just students coming in and just loving the space there's a lot of excitement in the room here over at north the same thing you know just talking to kids and them telling me how excited they are to be back and how they excited they are to have these spaces and you know over and over again saying like i feel like i'm in college or you know that that type of a feel as you see them there which is you know part of the goal is to set them up a lot of workplaces you know have similar kind of feels to them many colleges do this is a spot as we intended all along for students to experience that kind of space be trusted in that kind of space but also be protected in that kind of space right and have the supports that a high school offers them as they learn to navigate and have some freedom in there the 50-minute lunch period students are really excited about i've talked to many a student that that's the highlight well that and the new lunch menu right the the fact that we have an expanded lunch offering just a couple more pictures there you know you can see that original 1928 brick in the background there it is just stunning when you're you know we really did at north high put the original high school on a pedestal inside of the commons and it's it's very cool to see all right uh last report out for me we received foia requests and we filled them they're all available up on the district website for the public to review okay we're going to move on to the consent agenda before we do two things i'm going to ask everybody to please put your mask on and please leave it on for the duration of the time you're in the building thank you uh before we go to the consent agenda i would just like to once again recognize one item specifically on it which is the um the bonfield express foundation has once again as they have many years before made a financial donation to both north and south high to our multi-needs program through the special services department the total amount of the donation is ten thousand dollars which results in five thousand going to north and five thousand going to south respectively this will support community experiences that students in the multi-need programs attend during the school year we're very excited about this donation we appreciate the continued support that the bonfield express foundation provides to us and to our students with disabilities and we would be remiss if we did not give them special recognition is there any other item any other board member would like to remove from the consent agenda no okay hearing none i need a motion for the board of education to approve the consent agenda as presented which includes the personnel report appointment certified appointment exempt appointments classified transfer position classified the personnel report resignation certified leave of absence certified retirements classified resignations classified the financial pages the out-of-state credit authorization for imrf employee the 2021-2022 concussion oversight team and the acceptance of the donation of the bonfield express foundation second i think that was terry and joanne thank you terry pavicich aye joanna vazquez drexler aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza hi jenny hegstrom hi and nancy kupka aye the consent agenda is approved now we're going to move on to recommendations for action the first is we need a motion for the board of education to approve the student parent handbook addendum as presented second terry and joanna thank you terry aye joanna vazquez drexler aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza ryan jenny hagstrom aye and nancy kupka aye motion is approved next we're going to have the motion for the board of education to approve entering into an agreement with ceso communications as outlined in the contract and scope of work documents provided authorized administration to execute all necessary documents to enter into this agreement and approve the amount of 32 000 plus expenses to proceed with strategic planning so moved second mike and was it joanna yeah joanna thank you very much mike davenport aye christopher espinosa jenny hagstrom aye terry pavich aye joanna vazquez drexler aye nancy kupka aye the motion is approved next we need a motion for the board of education to accept the tentative budget for the 2021-2022 for display purposes and establish 6 45 pm september 20th 2021 for the public hearing to be held at the administrative service center at springsite avenue downers grove illinois tell moved second mike and joanna thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye christopher espinoza jenny heggstrom aye terry pavasic aye and nancy kupka aye the motion is approved moving on to new business the first reading of board policy 2.230 public participation at school board meetings so this is a topic that has been raised by several community members and by several board members uh and it's just how the policy that has been in place we re we look tonight since 2019 that came from press is worded in a challenging format in how they present the 30 and 20 minute time slots so part of this was working with the board's attorneys to write that in more clear language so that it's more easily understandable just codifying the procedures that we've put in around the sign-in sheets another request that came from many of our parents was to prioritize uh folks that live in our community uh when uh when we have speakers just you know they feel like you know they're the tax paying residents that the board serves so they would like an opportunity to be heard first and we have many students in the past that have been here that you know especially when we have nights that are longer receptions i'd like to be able to get our students through and get them home to do homework or their activities we already have this language that's in 830 but it points to it so what our attorneys did was pull out the the conduct that's prohibited during any anywhere on campus and just codifies it again in 2.230 so that people don't have to go from one policy to another policy to see those it just makes it read cleaner and then it outlines the board president's authority uh and once again puts it in more clear language as to what the board president is authorized to do in making these rules in a specific board meeting really the only big change in here um is the prioritizing the district 99 residents the rest is either procedural like the sign-in sheet which we we have the authority to do that within a regular board meeting or it just clarifies and puts in more readable or understandable rather than what sometimes presented as kind of legalese language we asked the attorneys to just make it a more readable policy so that was easier to follow so otherwise there's no real significant change in the policy itself so this is there for for a month for the board to review and say ask questions we have questions let nancy and i know since this i was requested by several board members to make this more clear we didn't go through the policy committee as we normally would we just went directly to the the board's attorneys and then made those recommendations for changes uh so if you have anything please reach out to nancy or i will go back to the board's attorneys and uh and ask your questions for you so this is second reading and then action taken at the next one to make this an official new policy questions from board members okay all right okay we're going to move on to the second reception of visitors this is the second reception of visitors which is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99 comments are limited to three minutes to provide all visitors an equal opportunity to address the board if you need more individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs nydak visitors addressing the board need to submit a comment slip to the board secretary and will be invited to the microphone prior to addressing the board audience members should state their full name these proceedings are being tape recorded for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes the boards and i reserve the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warns audience observation of these protocols is appreciated now we have had how many slips do we have we i think we have 12.
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so i would think that within the time that the board typically allots in an evening we could hear all 12 speakers okay because we also have like 10 minutes left over from before yeah yeah okay um we did have a request today for um to make sure that everybody had an opportunity to speak related to diversity and inclusion well i think we'll be fine you know as long as everybody's following the rules we'll be able to hear from everybody but i'm going to request that people show respect as people are speaking shouting out calling people names whatever will result in me repeatedly result me closing the session so let's be respectful and then i would also remind everyone that after the reception of visitors is over the board still has work to do so a couple weeks ago we had a lot of discussion in the room after the discussion visitor was very hard for us to hear in this venue so we would ask that you would either sit quietly and listen to the rest of the board meeting or have a discussion out in the parking lot or wherever you'd like to go thank you okay all right uh first the microphone is noel manley um good evening my name is noel manley before i begin my comment i'd want to extend my condolences to the family of slain chicago police officer and downers grove north graduate ella french officer french served her community did her duty and tragically paid the ultimate price may her life serve as an example for others and how on how to do the right thing and may her life serve as an example to end this dangerous defund the police nonsense the united states is not a racist country and district 99 is not a racist school district and there is no systematic racism in our community madam president in your july 19 remarks before public comment you stated to be clear district 99 does not now nor has it ever taught critical race theory this is simply not true the last board meeting speaker anthony chang discussed an incident that occurred at district 99 between his biracial daughter and her english teacher the teacher instructed mr chang's daughter to check her white privilege at the door i don't know in what context a person in authority like a teacher would use a patently racist term as white privilege to a student it is unclear to me also how using a racist term in any way is inclusive or sends a positive message to students and parents this is unacceptable to any student listening to this comment a teacher or administrator ever uses a racist term like white privilege please respectfully tell them to check their racist virtue signaling at the door then report this incident to your parents to any parent listening if your child reports any such incident report this immediately to the school administration and then please go to wakeupd99.com and tell your story and you say race critical race theory is not taught in district 99 next d-99's response to a four-year request has confirmed that taxpayers footed the bill for not only one but 16 copies of how to be an anti-racist by ever max kennedy for distribution to faculty and staff if you're unfamiliar with mr kennedy and his neo-marxism he is the face of critical race theory and can be seen on most news channels mr kennedy advocates the tearing down of all institutions government education business and restructuring them on a racialized basis his specious logic baffles my humble jesuit education here's an example of mr kennedy's critical race theory advocacy the only remedy to pass discrimination is present discrimination and the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination this sadly is this book sadly is a recommended reading list for our district is this what we want a teacher instrumentally your time has expired and you say critical race theory is not taught in district 99 thank you [Applause] prior to our next speaker would everyone please put on their mask larissa calvinis excuse me prior to our next speaker good i asked you you can come on up could everybody please put on their mask the clock isn't thank you uh my name is larisa calvinis i live in downers grove uh district 99 has repeatedly assured parents that it does not and will not teach critical race theory um yeah c99 paid over 28 thousand dollars in taxpayer money for this um equity audit report in 2020 to dr yvette people i hope i'm pronouncing it right dr diebel was appointed to executive director of equity in 2019 she's been on several committees isbe former teacher investigator of chicago police department makes big money selling equity and social justice this may sound okay until one reads how the d 99 equity audit defines equity although it was pretty hard to find out in those but it does seem that some some aspects include and i'll try to read these quickly for you but the committed systemic transformation at all levels of schooling organization to disrupt racism sexism normal beliefs associated with heterosexuality blah blah blah and other forms of superiority number two the demand for equal outcomes for each student especially those historically marginalized three the view that every major u.s institution including education has been designed to be inequitable four requires a mind mindset shift in every classroom to encapsulate the way schools should operate and five cultivates a courageous unraveling of power and privilege well these are a lot of goals so no wonder the equity report shows that math and reading scores for all dgn students and donors grow south students have been declining for the past five years we the people of district 99 do not want our children's quality education disrupted by alleged racism degrading sexism identity politics and far left-wing activism between these equity um efforts and grading policy which can include hey kevin don't do any of your homework all semester and then i'll call your mom and when it's time for you to almost fail i'll have you pass you know hand in half of something and then we can pass you this happens repeatedly throughout my students i have one student oh i'm never gonna get through it it's either don't embarrass me mom please don't say anything or mom don't worry i just tell them what they want to hear really so congratulations on all your little robots sorry so between the grading policy and common core our students are being dumbed down the equity audit contains five strands of recommendations to achieve systemic equity summarized oh i'm never gonna make it increase focus on racial equity equitable needs for marginalized populations continually examine systems and structures for anti-bias requires interviews for ethnic minority candidates and hire more people of color now wait a minute why don't we just hire the best person for the job i thought we weren't supposed to see gender we weren't supposed to see color yeah i don't know so which is it do we want to see color do we not want to see color i don't understand so i guess we better we better get an audit for that uh create robust equity implementation plans to transform mindsets please reject every aspect of this equity report [Applause] mario dowd [Applause] ma'am you're here to address the board you're here to address the board hi good evening my name is mary o'dowd thank you for allowing me to speak this is a book by a guy named carl marx in it he states that the interests of the collective are more important than the interests of the individual person marx argues for the subjugation of the individual to the general will the quote greater good built on radical egalitarianism aka equity marx argues that the existing society must be entirely destroyed in order to create such a utopian world this radical leftist philosophy has been carried out in places like communist china cuba venezuela and north korea utopian worlds indeed well carl i am not drinking your kool-aid but apparently some people are this is a copy of the 2020 equity audit report for csd 99 on page seven the report states it must be understood that individuality does not contribute to a holistic society collective voices foster harmony wow that is scary that sounds like it was written by carl marx i prefer the words of some old dead white guy who said it is important to foster individuality for only the individual can produce the new ideas that guy's name was albert einstein ladies and gentlemen we do not live in the united states of communist china we do not live in the united states of cuba we do not live in the united states of venezuela and we do not live in the united states of north korea we live in the united states of america so to those responsible for the creation of this equity audit you can hang out with karl marx because i am not drinking your kool-aid either and i vote thank you next up is marcela schwere let's please show some respect good evening my name is march hello geordi cherry and i've been a resident of downers grove for 25 years as i've mentioned here before i've been speaking out on the threats against children via public health initiatives for the past 20 years i've experienced firsthand how district 99 and its feeder schools have crossed the line from education to medical intervention and trampling on parental rights in the process members of the board we have provided testimony evidence and are pleased with regard to masking and it falls on deaf ears you have your orders and an agenda you're more concerned with losing your state recognition status and funding if you don't fall in line and do the bidding of the governor and isbe who by the way are acting outside the authority of the law than you are with the actual health and safety of your students it was true twenty years ago and it's still true today parents you have the power this ends when you end it so stop asking for permission do not comply pull your children out of school if you have to and if you're just binding your time until your kids graduate thinking things will be different in college i'm here to tell you that they're not knotwin the american college health association an organization that represents over 800 colleges and over 20 million students is involved this group is backed by big pharma receives grant money from the cdc had none other than tony fauci as a guest speaker at their conference this past june and pfizer was the underwriter for a project that in part aimed to address enforcement of the very same policies you're fighting here tonight but i digress this board can recommend whatever they want but they can't force your child to wear a mask be tested get the shot discriminate segregate punish or intimidate your child on school property or deny them their constitutional right to an education the minute they do they have broken the law hold them accountable it's not a child's civic duty to wear these metaphorical muzzles and suffer physically mentally and emotionally for a pandemic that's statistically insignificant gather with like-minded individuals contact the lawyer consider a class-action lawsuit it's time everyone understood that this country is not ruled by deceitful policies relating to the common good but actually on the rule of law [Applause] paul samada hello my name is paul zamanda i graduated from dgs in 2020 and tonight i just wanted to speak about some of my personal experiences as a student at district 99 while crt has become a popular topic across the country it's not merely the formal teaching of the entire critical race theory or dei or whatever you want to call it that people are opposed to more fundamentally it's the insufferable obsession with race that students are being passively as well as actively exposed to and particularly in the english and social studies curricula more and more english lessons are concentrating increasingly on race and identity and less on ideas in social studies classes students are increasingly being told to question america's history and institutions which wouldn't be a problem if teachers weren't simultaneously spending less time teaching why american history happened the way it did beyond just the vapid explanation of cause racism i had plenty of phenomenal teachers at dgs but i also had teachers and i heard of many others who abused their position of authority in the classroom by teaching their own political opinions about race as though they were objective fact if the board wants to claim that d99 does not teach anything resembling crt then it also needs to address those teachers who teach material that reflects the key tenets of crt namely indoctrinating students to fixate on identity if the board doesn't do anything about these teachers then that in and of itself is a problem it's been 245 years since 1776 and 402 since 1619 so it's about time we learn our lesson and stop obsessing about race in this country whether you treat a person differently in a negative way because of their race or whether you try to treat them positively or especially specifically because of their race we're still treating them differently on the basis of race it's still racism and i would hope that the board wouldn't defend teachers who try to teach students otherwise thank you laura hoist i'm laura hoyce district 99 is working against the interests of our high school students rather than for us district 99 quietly provided diversity equity inclusion training to all teachers in preparation for the now mandated culturally responsive teaching and leading standards we did not know this until now we do not know enough about what's going on in our schools but we're finding out through talking with students and former students like paul district 99 insists that diversity equity inclusion programs are good for students that they're not crt what does that mean good for our students and what students are they good for let's look at three examples of equity programs at downers grove north and south number one seed which stands for seeking educational equity and diversity it's a peer-led learning that promotes change through self-reflection the founder of seed peggy mcintosh is best known for her publications on white privilege for the last six years district 99 has sent 145 teachers to receive all expenses paid seed training costing thousands of taxpayer dollars on student-centered learning designed to change the culture validate each student's racial ethnic and gender identities allow students to hold on to their traditions from their home country while disrupting white dominance explore diversities of experience uncover biases did we the people of this district ask district 99 to fundamentally transform our schools to adopt this woke ideology no do we want our money spent this way hell no this journey into student identities has caused student performance in all classes to decline over at least the last five years it clearly shows on the equity report that students in all categories of skin color have been failing in their performance in classes i wonder why number two my name my story a change maker program also under the category of equity to change the culture to achieve social justice what does this mean it trains students to advocate for empathy and against inequity this political agenda is led by gary howard and others who believe in eradicating white privilege and giving advantages to students seen as historically marginalized and the my name my story website affirms the organization's support for black lives matter a terrorist marxist organization number three anonymous complaint system d99's equity and inclusion program and website urges students to contact a faculty member twice you're out of time thank you [Applause] janet winnisham winningham i'm janet winningham i'm a district resident and my purpose is to again uh congratulate you to support you as a board of education as you um work through these processes and listen to the same kind of screeds month after month and are subjected to disrespect and attacks by residents and others and i hope you won't get discouraged i hope you will keep up doing what you do as well as you can for the for the purpose of our students in our community thank you [Applause] christine martin district 99.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
i'm going to follow the sentiment of a lot of the speakers here tonight we have been in contact with a lot of students a lot of them don't want to come to the podium because they fear retaliation from their teachers so we are going to be reading things as the school board meetings go on i start with bryn driscoll dear district 99 school board my name is brynn driscoll i'm going to be a junior at the university of missouri this year i graduated downers north in 2019 and was president and co-founder of young americans for freedom being involved in this organization at north brought me some great memories and taught me some great life lessons however with those great memories came frustrating and upsetting ones being a conservative in a predominantly liberal school environment and area is challenging when young americans for freedom yaf began it was a safe place for students to meet and discuss current events most members belong to the conservative party which caused others with different beliefs to be upset one morning we were discussing a current event that had been the topic in the news and our advisor proceeded to stand up and announce that she was going to the office to slit her wrists but the inappropriate comments did not stop there on many occasions she would tell us she was going to kill herself because we were discussing the military economy or anything she did not agree with mind you yaf was filled with some of the most respectful open-minded and kind students at north and to be treated like this was initially surprising and definitely appalling after a few weeks of this we needed to find a new advisor the principal and head of student activities were helpful in helping us find someone however the original advisor was not met with any reprimands and was not encouraged to apologize for her comments she goes on to talk about how she was intimidated by her english teachers and her history teachers and was graded down for her political views when teachers she said when teachers knew that she was a pat part conservative when she was part of the conservative club many prejudiced heard right away i was part of my political debates where i felt teachers tried to persuade me to change my ideology although during my time at north i had not realized i was a victim of the ideas of critical race theory just because i was white and conservative i was considered a racist we can't continue to teach that someone's race is simply based on the color of their skin and political views this right here is a second one interdisciplinary and global studies by justin ashton a teacher at north high school it teaches kids to hate the police it's right here i talked to mike davenport about this some time ago to no avail this is uh you have retired policemen here helping students protecting all of you and you are teaching in your school to hate the police it's right here we've handed this out lastly in april of 2019 lessons of positively north microaggressions i will take this up next time i'm at the podium [Applause] paul drabick [Applause] hello my name is paul dravik i served in this great country's army first of the fifth field artillery for early kansas i'm a downers grove resident and a new father as of last year i grew up next door in westmont and my wife has lived here her whole life and we would like to raise our son here we would like to not worry that our schools are doing more harm than good critical race theory or anything that teaches children that they are bigoted by dent of their skin color or by nature is wrong it is also inexcusable to sexualize children with pornographic material or teach kindergarteners about consent that is wrong most parents do not want that critical race theory or diversity equity inclusion training is not about being inclusive it's about eliminating dissent it suggests that any thoughts that do not align with a theory presented are forbidden obviously if certain things are forbidden they should not be spoken about and criticism is certainly forbidden this type of program is a perfect way to attack freedom of speech these programs are made to divide people and aggravate mask mandates are no different you can find literature and studies on masks and they do not support the current policies being implemented no actions being taken by the government are supported by the actual science furthermore if science was the force mitigating this pandemic we would be innovating and testing and finding numerous ways of treating this disease but we don't see that do we we see the suppression of alternative thought we see orthodoxy and that should raise questions with everyone this is not about safety or health this is about control and abuse of power and we need to stand up and say no no to sexualizing our children no to equity programs and no damasks the powers that be do not want you to know that if enough of us say no we will overcome it is our constitutional right we should speak out as often as we can some of us should make it our life's work because this is about defending our freedoms and protecting our children there is no greater cause i risked my life for the cause of freedom once i would gladly do it again to ensure its preservation and i know there are many many many more just like me i stand with you parents of district 99 i will get in every foxhole with you stay in the fight thank you jim devitt mr devitt before you speak i'd like to just deprive the board of something uh i had gotten a um message about something posted on mr david's uh facebook page that's not fair let him speak i'm gonna let him speak but i'm sure citizens all over this great nation head to the polls and select people to represent them at every level of government from president to dogcatcher and then include school boards these people are entrusted to carry themselves to a higher standard in their public life and that includes social media with that said imagine my surprise on friday august 6th when i was informed that a member of this board went on a social media page that i run and used abusive language about me when they were asked about it they claimed it was erroneously posted on my page yet a friend of theirs replied to it as well the only thing they apologized for was embarrassing me not for the comment itself or even the misspelling of my last name which i believe shows they're not sorry about what they said apparently the member thinks i'm too stupid or too naive to know their post was intentional and meant to be seen it was not deleted until after i confronted them about it the next day so much for it being a message to a friend after looking at the code of conduct for members of school boards set forth by the illinois association of school boards it is clear that this member's actions have violated several tenants of this code therefore i'm asking that the board member immediately resign their position from the school board comments like this are an embarrassment to the board and to the district and cannot be allowed to continue especially during these very divisive times they call into question the impersonality and bias of members of the board as well district 99 does not need things like this interfering with the function of the board and working for students teachers and families who have already endured so much we need unbiased impartial representatives who hold themselves to higher standards we all expect them to clearly the board member in question has shown that they cannot do so and should resign immediately thank you again again it was erroneous i was messaging with a friend i apologize when you brought it to my attention you just didn't want to accept my apology that's your rules who's next the next speaker is janet novotny i don't even know where to start i am so shaking and i'm so charged right now like i am absolutely disgusted at how everything is happening with our children at the school i've been with this lived in woodridge for 23 years i've paid my taxes i've never had any problems until this year i am very upset at how our children are being used as pawns how people are being told oh all you need to do is simply tell your kid to mask and have a vaccination no one knows what is wrong with people why they can't get a vaccination why they can i'm so disgusted with just how there's so much animosity oh just go get your kid vaccinated and wear a mask and everything's going to be great and be little pawns and do whatever is told i'm disgusted to be being told be learned about the crt stuff right now i'm shaking i just found about this today i just feel like we're being lied to i feel like i don't even trust my child to be in the school right now because what is gonna happen what is she being taught and like she's trying to walk up the stairs with his mask and she's ready to faint and fall i said take off your damn mask and so you can like make sure that you don't have a concussion or fall down because i don't want her to hurt herself just to wear for a sake of wearing a mask going up down all these flights of stairs and she's hot and she's not as active as she used to be so right now i don't even know if it matters what i say i i would really rather take my my daughter out of school right now if i had my way but her mental health does matter i don't care what people think who say oh i care about my mental health that's why i got my child vaccinated and that's why i wanted to wear a mask everybody's mental health makes a difference and if you're not a bad parent if you don't get your child ma you don't get child vaccinated because there are reasons why people cannot be vaccinated don't make it seem like if there's a black and white area and that there's no gray you don't know what people have to go through their medical history you don't know you know what's going on you don't know if that child is going to be injured or if they have been injured already by a vaccination you don't know what the doctor says so i'm so sick and disgusted of like all you need to do is just get your child vaccinated and they you know they don't have to wear masks well the joke's on you because now we all have to wear masks regardless if you're vaccinated or not i'm really upset about how my daughter may not be able to go to school because you know she's going to have to be quarantined because she is not vaccinated when the vaccinated are just as possible to spread this disease just the same everybody knows this the information's out there i don't got time to give you all the information i can email i don't even know if it matters but then what she has to take a test what kind of test is it is it up the nose is it and the saliva is this safe like how safe is this test she's never been tested i've never been tested i don't know about these tests these tests are saying that they're positive sometimes and they're negative we don't even know if these tests are accurate and then is her information going to be um private can is her information going to be taken like no one knows how private this information is so i don't know where to go from anymore i just don't know if you guys care what we have to say i don't know what's going on so i'm saying this is what i feel and if it matters great [Applause] [Music] karen guglielmo thank you for the phonetic spelling that was very helpful hi i'm caroline gullilmo i spoke at the last meeting i'm a nationally recognized safety and health uh real expert representing three major industries to congress and major are you gonna be able to hear me because you know what i wrote the rules on respiratory protection for osha back in the 90s [Applause] i've produced respiratory protection videos and i have 20 peer-reviewed publications because i did fatality death investigations for firefighters and i had to go through respiratory protection training and hazmat people have to do that too in people in the army so i already spoke about that last time but i have something to say before i quickly start last month i spoke and i wrote my phone number down on the on a piece on the paper that i was asked to sign my name in and my phone number's unlisted i'm a former federal investigator and i have a phone plan with a colleague of mine so my phone number people don't know my phone number and at 7 00 am tuesday morning after the last school board meeting i got some texts who said they had seen me spoke at the last meeting that came from a 630 number i don't have a 630 number but this is where these texts somebody impersonating a um a oh the chicago tribune editor now i've worked with the media i've worked with congress and the political system so i know an editor-in-chief would never reach out to me so somebody obviously got my telephone number off my sheet come to find out another woman spoke up she works for an employer here in land development or real estate and somebody emailed her employer to tell her she's not vaccinated around the same time i was getting all those phone all those texts so please don't disclose my phone number secondly let me tell you the breakdown of this nation according to the u.s census bureau teachers i hope you are listening caucasian 16 latino 11 black 3 percent asian that's the breakdown now my former roommate was a black woman from west virginia have any of you ever lived with black people of black heritage or african heritage or lived in a community well i have and some of them are some of my best friends and they hate what is going on right now and they hate the fact that you're dividing in schools thank you it's expired thank you next is communications announcements that's it for reception of visitors this is a reception of visitors in which we hear from the community responses are not given at this point if you'd like to reach out to me or the board our information is available online i respond to all emails that i receive thank you lend lend jenny do you have anything to report forward no the meeting's not till the end of september okay sorry uh stan joanna do you have any report for sassett no i don't district 99 education foundation no illinois association of school boards chris chris anything from illinois association of school boards nothing to report thank you okay we have two upcoming board meetings september 13th will be our workshop at 6 30 it will be in the administrative service center and september 20th our regular business meeting at 6 30 also in the administrative service center we now need a motion to go into a closed session for the appointment employment the district including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee a specific individual who serves as an independent contractor in a park recreational or educational setting or a volunteer of the district or against legal counsel for the district to determine its validity terry i think terry perry was first i mean mike fine you can have it thank you terry pepperson mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye and nancy kupka uh we are going into closed session we will be coming out back into open by taking no action only adjourning thank you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
a tuesday august 17 2021 meeting of the ann arbor planning commission this meeting is being held electronically to protect public health and safety due to the coven 19 virus and to comply with orders issued by the governor the michigan department of health and human services and or the washington county health department we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting however please be patient if there are technical issues to speak during public comment opportunities you will be able to speak through the webinar link or by phone depending on your method of access to this meeting and the device that you have available to you both the phone number and the web link are available on the published agenda which is in the public notices section of the city website for phone access this evening please call four 877-853-5247 and enter meeting id this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at a2gov.org ctn where you will select the government channel item 2 is the roll call mr leonard could you please assist us with that absolutely commissioner mills present in ann arbor commissioner gibb randall aaron ann arbor commissioner silvay here from ann arbor commissioner abrams here from ann arbor commissioner hammerschmidt commissioner dish here in ann arbor commissioner lee here in ann arbor mr clerk commissioner wage i'm here in ann arbor david very good um item three is introductions do we have any mr leonard none moving on then to item four and i think mr leonard you had a would like to amend the uh agenda yeah we had a petitioner i was trying to manage some scheduling and um i would request the agenda be modified to switch items 10a and 10b in order all right um would a commissioner move the agenda as amended moved by commissioner abram second and by commissioner white any other discussion on the agenda all in favor please raise your hand or say yes i see all hands now so that uh we will move forward with the agenda with that change um item five are the minutes of the previous meeting can i have a motion to approve the minutes of the august 3rd 2021 meeting moved by commissioner weich seconded by commissioner silvay any discussion or corrections of the minutes all in favor of the motion please raise your hand or say yes that is all hands except mr uh commissioner lee only because i wasn't president i had no internet so do i can i not vote to or abstain unless there was something attributed i guess it's up to you generally if you're gone and there's something attributed to you okay you weren't there then you would say that you have a problem with them but otherwise you could say no problem i'm sure all right so commissioner lee's in favor too so we're all in agreement uh the motion carries um item six are all of the reports um council member dish would you please kick us off i do not think that there was anything of specific interest to planning last night i have just combed through my notes and other than the fact that there may be a social district in downtown ann arbor which will allow you to stroll the downtown streets with a legal drink in your hand which may be of interest to you for other reasons i don't think there is anything specific but as usual i invite correction mr leonard uh no reports uh for ordinance revisions committee um later this month i anticipate a continuing discussion of uh rezoning of tc1 particularly focused on the state eisenhower area and some additional steps towards uh considering parking requirements very good and so and to clarify for anyone who is watching us and is following or wants to join in that meeting that is a public meeting it meets on tuesdays it'll be next tuesday seven o'clock it's not televised but the agenda will include uh a link to the zoom mr leonard is that advertised as well as a call-in number yes perfect very good thank you are there any commissioner officers or committee liaisons that have anything to report all right seeing none i will move on to item seven which is the first opportunity for public comment this is uh for persons to speak for up to three minutes about an issue that is not listed as a public hearing on this agenda so we have four public hearings um those public hearings are 30 90 gettys 700 tappin the mill creek town homes and the 336 south ashley if you have if you wish to address the planning commission on anything else um now is an appropriate time to do so to speak um if you've already dialed in you can press star 9 on your phone if you have joined us through zoom and want to provide a comment on something beyond those four public hearings you can use the raise hand feature and if you are watching us on tv and want to call in now the dial-in number is 877-853-5247 66 34 12 26 mr leonard will select callers that have raised their hand um and again uh you do that if you're on a phone by pressing star nine you'll get an automated message that the host is allowing you to speak please mute any background sound including television and move to a quiet area if you can also please state your name and address for the record at the beginning of your comments and please keep your comments to three minutes anybody want to make a comment now all right there's still another opportunity at the end of the meeting to comment on anything and as mentioned there will be four public hearings so lots of opportunity to participate tonight um item eight is the public hearings for the next business meeting one new uh item for the next business meeting it's a public hearing for 660 earhart road it's a proposed site plan and wetland use permit for city council approval the proposal is to develop 57 single-family homes on a 34-acre vacant parcel uh subject to a land division uh as part of that petition a wetland use permit is component to that application as well the site is zoned r1p and then as a reminder of the site plan review thresholds well not a new public hearing item that was postponed from our previous discussions to that meeting as well very good thank you there was another item that was postponed from tonight but is that postponed indefinitely uh that item will be pro proposed to be postponed to the october 5th meeting that will be based on action this evening of the planning commission very good thank you okay well we let's move on to the business before us uh first we'll start with unfinished business um from uh this is the 30-90 gettys avenue annexation and zoning for city council approval and if you remember this it's because it was at that meeting where uh we had an incorrect link so to make to dot all of the eyes and cross all the t's we're bringing it back mr kowalski you have a presentation and then we'll open it for public hearing great yes good evening everybody um let me switch over to i've been having a couple of little internet issues so please let me know if this does not switch directly over to my presentation um am i sharing not yet nope okay sorry all right let me uh try one more time apologize there we go is that good yep there you go okay good evening again okay so 30 90 gotti's um before you tonight for an annexation and zoning the uh there's my screen would advance it's a one and a half acre parcel uh they want to annex to hook up to sanitary as well as water and if we could i apologize my screen is not advancing at the there we go um okay so here you can see the subject site there's currently one single family house on the property again about an acre and a half and they'd like to annex and we recommend r1a zoning and staff is recommending approval at this time thank you very good okay so this is will now open the public hearing for folks to speak for up to three minutes about the proposed 30 90 gettys annexation and zoning if you wish to address the planning commission on this item and you've already dialed in press star 9 if you're listening by phone or you can use the raised hand feature if you're viewing through the web link if you are watching us and want to dial in now uh the call-in number is can enter meeting 877-853-5247 6634 1226 city staff will select callers who have digitally or well electronically raised your hand again to raise your hand that star nine on your telephone or the raised hand feature in zoom uh please when speaking move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sounds so that we can hear you clearly and state your name and address at the beginning of your comments we'll give it a little bit because it is being televised and so there's a delay just for your education commissioner weich everybody else knows that i usually do a little bit of a tap dance here on those kind of nights an actual tap dance would be better it would be yeah i was i was going to say is the camera going to shift you know do we have not well it's actually not me commissioner lee is supposed to be playing us the music at this time but he's asleep at the switch so we're just going to move on actually because that's been enough time and i'll close the public hearing and read the motion the ann arbor city planning commission hereby recommends that the mayor and city council approve the rothfuss annexation and r1a single-family dwelling district zoning this is at 3090 gettys road subject to obtaining an updated access easement description for 3100 gettys road moved by commissioner lee seconded by commissioner sovay any discussion of the annexation and zoning mr leonard i think we're ready for look for a roll call vote great uh commissioner gibb randall commissioner sovay yes commissioner abrams yes commissioner dish yes commissioner lee yes commissioner clark commissioner weich yes commissioner mills yes mission carries unanimously very good we're on to new business and we're going to take 10b again first so this is the mill creek townhomes rezoning and site plan for city council approval mr leonard is going to start moving in the development team i take it um and they will have up to 10 minutes to provide us a presentation um it looks like potentially uh miss thatcher will give us the staff presentation uh fill in any gaps and then we'll have the public hearing before our discussion thank you guys hear me okay we can all right thank you so this is the mill creek townhomes rezoning and site plan for city council approval it has landscape modifications the address is 3002 chelsea circle um the rezoning portion of the petition is um the site is currently zoned r3 townhouse dwelling yeah yeah your uh rusty bing time away we're gonna go to the petitioner presentation first and let you fill in the gaps after okay got it thank you for filling the awkward silence while i am promoting and adjusting everybody's all right mr hirsch you should be getting permission to share your presentation all right uh see you you have updates yet we can okay thank you uh so first of all uh thanks to all the planning commission for being here and uh hearing our project tonight um just as a reminder uh we're back kind of once again uh we did bring this before uh the planning commission at a working session in october of 2020 uh in conceptual format so um we've worked to incorporate some of the the comments from that meeting um as well as the staff comments uh during the review process and considered the feedback from the the residents to bring the presentation that we have in the project for you tonight i'll just start off with the uh the development team here um we have mike martin um darren mckinnon from first martin darin's not here tonight but mike martin is standing in um myself tom covert and tina fix as civil and landscape architects from midwestern consulting and then wayne chubb from hobbs and black architects with us tonight who david nims has also helped on this project as well so just to go over the the site location and give some background context we have the site here bounded by i-94 to the south stone school road to the to the west um we see the current zoning map here surrounded by similarly zoned r3 um r4a to the north our one seed to the northwest and then mary beth doyle park to the east so the as jill had mentioned our three zoning district is the townhouse dwelling district the existing zoning uh just kind of some stats here it allows for 10 units per acre we have 281 existing units at the sites which is about eight and a half units per acre but they only have the one home typology which is which is the townhome style um and an outdated community center uh as this development was built in the 1970s so the the rezoning um we have a couple of um criteria that we feel fits uh the needs for this infill project um rezoning to r4b allows for some diversification of housing allows us to propose some stacked flat type apartment buildings [Music] providing opportunity for more uh potential tenants different a wider range i guess we also have the the density that is maxed out by the rf 3d zoning we're proposing 102 new units which would be just above that maximum for our three uh but well under the maximum for r4b for the entire site um [Music] and as we see here we're also including this the infill of the sidewalk gaps along birch hollow road um just as a kind of a precursor to one of the more important points of this project we'll go over the the new building this is kind of the infill area kind of a modest area of the development the existing community center exists on the south side of birchallo so that will be demolished and rebuilt on the north side making room for these three new apartment buildings um in this fourth over here to the east so the new community center will have a updated amenities pool um and just provide kind of a modernized facility for for all the tenants taking a look at the overall layout here again kind of a modest area for the the infill here and then showing some of the the overall site the project aspects again we see the the green dash lines here are all um areas where existing sidewalk is or i'm sorry sidewalk does not exist it exists from stone school to mary beth doyle park along the south side but not the north so we're making those connections kind of increasing that pedestrian connectivity [Music] one of the things we've also incorporated throughout the review process was inclusion of a raised crosswalk here to help calm traffic which we think is going to be a nice addition to the project so we have some basic calculations here for for the parking spaces the r3 townhouse zoning district requires two parking spaces per unit um and that's what the site is currently parked at or around there um the rezoning to the r4b would require the one and a half per unit but the the proposed parking fields were um proposing closer to one space per unit um so it just kind of brings down that total for the site uh below that two per unit which um you know i think is appropriate and um the amount of parking that's actually necessary we get a look at the proposed and existing utility infrastructure here kind of another reason this is a great candidate for in-field development all of the existing infrastructure is readily available we have water main running along birch hollow and also throughout the entire site the same thing with sanitary sewer that we're pretty easily able to connect leads to there is minimal storm water management systems as far as uh detention or anything like that goes so part of the project would be to you see these big um orange highlighted areas uh on the north and the south side here that would all be underground detention that would be storing um and treating runoff from the development areas um and uh allowing that to really slowly into the city storm sewer rather than just free flowing as it does now we'll take a look at the landscaping it was mentioned that we were requesting modifications but again kind of similar to other aspects of the project that's just in a request to [Music] keep keep everything existing outside the scope of the infill area um and not necessarily bring all of that stuff up to current standards as again it was all constructed in the 1970s kind of under different regulations and circumstances although we do see uh one of the um modifications we're requesting is for landscape uh the conflicting lane use buffers uh that would result as um from the rezoning and that's strictly in just the number of trees that are provided in those areas but as you can see there's the intent is really met with all of the existing vegetation that is around the site here so we are providing uh proposed landscaping for the the infill area for current code um and then we're also making improvements to the streetscape all along birch hollow by um either planting new or relocating existing street trees then again adding that uh sidewalk infill um so that kind of presents a new face to uh to the birch hollow so right here we see the apartment buildings um kind of have a summary here but i'd like to hand it over to the architect wayne chubb just to kind of go over some of these finer aspects at about a minute and a half okay uh hey everyone it's uh great to see most of you again uh i won't reiterate a lot of what ted said but these are the three stories stacked flats uh the if you're familiar with the existing complex they're all a town home style two bedrooms um what we're proposing here is one all one bedroom uh buildings and a couple different sizes with outdoor balconies so we're we're excited about the diversity it's bringing to the project as well as the neighborhood and the city um and the fresh look the clubhouse of course is a is a great amenity to the existing tenants as well as lecture so being able to make that all ada compliant is is one of our major goals you can see the existing up in the upper left-hand corner but again a new amenity to the to the community we won't reiterate a lot more but uh be more than happy to answer questions about the actual architecture if anybody has them yeah so just to kind of wrap it up um go for the meeting obviously to answer questions and discuss with um all the commissioners project and anything uh that they'd like to see or have answered and then also um goal to to have recommendations for the approval of the rezoning uh the site plan and the landscape modifications excellent job coming in just at 10 minutes so thank you um now miss thatcher uh things to fill in from the uh planning department's perspective sure um so in the staff report you have the staffs analysis um both the zoning and the site plan there are two outstanding issues under the staff comments one is from transportation one is from engineering revised plans have been submitted and are under review but we do not have those two reviews back yet so staff is recommending approval of the zoning and approval of the site plan subject to satisfactorily addressing the outstanding staff comments that are that are still coming in if you want more information on those i have them or it's in the staff report but overall staff does believe that this meets all appropriate codes thank you very good um all right let's move then to the public hearing this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes uh about the proposed mill creek town homes rezoning and site plan approval if you wish to address the planning commission on this item press star 9 if you're listening by phone or use the raise hand feature if you are viewing through the web link if you are watching us right now and wish to dial in uh you can um access the meeting through dialing two four 877-853-5247 and entering meeting id nine seven seven sixty six thirty four twelve twenty six city staff will select callers that have raised their hands um using the last three digits of your telephone number or calling or calling on you by name if you've joined us through the web link um per usual please keep your comments to three minutes and mute any background sound and please start off with your name and address um again if you've dialed in and want to provide a public or comment during this public hearing you can press star 9 on your telephone seeing none i will start to read the couple of motions um but mr leonard if you can let me know if somebody sneaks in um we do have two motions before us tonight um the first is on the rezoning and the second is on the site plan and i'll read them both if we decide we want to separate them we can do that later um the ann arbor city planning commission hereby recommends that the mayor and city council approve the mill creek townhomes rezoning from r3 townhouse dwelling to r4b multiple family dwelling that's the first the second is the ann arbor city planning commission hereby recommends that the mayor and city council approve the mill creek townhome site plan with landscape modifications to allow landscape elements which are part of a previously approved site plan to be maintained and continued as non-conforming in areas where no alterations are proposed subject to a variance granted by the zoning board of appeals for ev parking spaces can i have those moved by a commissioner moved by commissioner sovay seconded by commissioner dish we are in discussion and i just want to note that i'm still seeing on my screen the presentation from the um [Music] from the petitioner which maybe is useful but if if anybody would like to get that off the screen just let me know um there we go uh so i was excited to see this i wasn't here in october i wasn't um i i wasn't sitting on the planning commission so i might raise some things that you already talked about um but it is really exciting to see a plan for infill housing and uh that will increase the diversity of housing in this part of town um so um i'll ask sort of a silly question which is your pool i'm so excited that you're you know refurbishing your pool um is is the lap part 25 yards because that's nice for people and if you have a chance to make it 25 yards that would be great i mean i don't live there but if i were a swimmer and live there that's what i would want um and i mean i am a swimmer if i lived there that's what i would want i noticed in the so i have two but i have two things that i wanted to raise and one is that i noticed that residents at the public meeting raised concerns about um the removal of the playground that perhaps existed or does exist south of the birch hollow road now so i wondered if you had thought about how you if you could respond to that or um i know that you're thinking that mary beth doyle is a great place for people to you know have recreation and i think that's really true but i can imagine that um if you have people with kids in this complex the playground is a nice thing too um and sorry if you have them in other places and i'm just missing that um and then just i i did want to inquire if there was a discussion in october about the bike parking um because um i uh it so i i noticed that you are providing um okay wait remind us on that you are providing at the community center six class c bike spaces um might be nice to have more of those your development's kind of big i think it would be great if people walked or rode their bikes to the community center uh and walking might be you know your the development's big enough that that might be that might start to get a little bit far so um just six class c bike spaces might not be enough there and um but but more more to the point um each of the multi-family units has four class c and three class a bike spaces and that just doesn't seem like a lot to me given the number of residents so you're talking about um roughly what 30 units in each of the um yeah in each of your new three-story buildings and um i imagine that some of these you know these are beautifully priced for students or young professionals and they do like to bike around um and a three-story um one bedroom a three-story building with a one-bedroom unit you don't want to store your bike inside so um i'm wondering if more bike parking could be added or and was that something you all discussed in october and thoroughly aired and nobody thought it was a good idea and if so i'm completely happy to be entirely ignored um and that is all i wanted to say so it sounds like that is inviting the petitioner um yeah i'm happy to speak uh a good evening thanks for having me and uh great to hear that you're a swimmer and a past life i was a swimmer as well but ended up the flip turns with the most exciting part so i've moved on but i do love swimming i don't know that it's 25 yards maybe ted could do a dimensional drawing on it my guess is it's probably a little bit less than that because we also have the hot tub there but um yeah it's probably is not 25 yards with respect to your second question about the open space in the playground i think at that meeting there was some confusion as to when that most recently existed i actually grew up working at mill creek as a landscaper and kind of a utility guy and that playground hasn't been in that field for probably more than 10 years and as you mentioned mary beth doyle park is their playground is just off the screen here and it's a beautiful you know city installed with you know the proper safety measures and everything else and for us to replicate that just seems like a waste of resources it literally is as just as you get into mary beth doyle park um in response to the last uh a point about the bicycle parking i think it's a very good one because i certainly agree with you that having a bike on the third floor one bedroom apartment isn't necessarily practical i think that what we've done as a product team is meet what code has allowed for but i think that there are opportunities as we get into the project that if the demand is there that we could certainly add some uh you know after the project is completed and the demand is there so it's a great observation and i think that would be something we would share with our management company to keep an eye on and if we need more bark i'm sorry more bike parking we'd be able to to put it in other questions or comments from planning commissioners commissioner clark and then commissioner weich um just to kind of tag off of that last question um is there space that you've identified that would be possible to build the bike parking um it could if it were to be set aside for later issue can you just like identify where on the parcel that would be i don't know that we've actually necessarily taken a look at that first time we're hearing the comment i think it's a good one i i would be happy to as we continue to move forward um you know look to address that but i believe uh who's in control ted if you went just down with your cursor i think there's some bike parking there that could certainly be expanded right there um yeah right in there it could also be expanded so i think there's some natural places in close proximity to where it is currently going to go in we could also do which we've done at some of our other commercial properties where we bring in for the summertime a temporary bike rack and then offsite it during the winter so you meet the demand as it's there and then if it's not there you take it away so that you don't have the permanent installation and we've again done that successfully at a number of our commercial properties anything else commissioner clark okay commissioner white i'm again because i'm new i wasn't in the conversation in october parking um i am always concerned about more parking a third of our land use in the city of ann arbor is for car storage so i see that this zoning only calls for one and a half units which would only really take up your existing requirement for the proposed change would only take your required parking spaces from 562 to 574 and a half let's just call it 575 but you're proposing another 100 parking spaces is that did you already discuss this this have we talked about why a hundred more parking spaces are being included in this and they could go for the playground that hasn't been there for 10 years or to get to that 25 yard swimming pool that commissioner dish once yeah it was not something that we discussed in october i think that there's the practicality of um in this location it's been our experience that we would need at least one vehicle space per unit just based on our resident behavior and the rest of the project isn't set up to necessarily accomplish having people park elsewhere and then be in proximity so it really comes down to commercial viability uh and so in this instance i think that we're again trying to deliver additional housing units and with that um you know does come a degree of things that maybe we aren't as supportive of uh with respect to parking but in this instance we've kept it to one space per unit um and uh you know we believe that that's uh at a pretty minimum level of parking to still have a commercially viable project okay i i may be confused so if staff or another commissioner can guide me in this so my understanding is there are already 562 parking spots in the development is that correct right um and if i'll just add to what uh mr martin had said and that just kind of the practicality of um the existing layouts what i've done here is highlighted you know the the buildings are kind of set up in this typical uh three building blocks surrounding uh a field of parking um so you know the r3 zoning requires the two parking spaces per unit um so when you go and compare that to the proposed rezoning obviously it's um closer to that one and a half that would be required for the whole development but it's just kind of impractical to have these three or four i mean this this building will utilize existing parking but these three buildings would be a little impractical to have them utilize parking um you know behind some of these other other buildings and then like i mentioned um you know for the new units um really just keeping that down to one space per unit rather than the the one and a half per unit that's required is that was that a design choice yes okay i have more questions but i don't know how to ask them appropriately go ahead mr leonard uh and then um there's other i'm i'll cut we'll come back to you commissioner weich yeah that's fine thank you i just wanted to follow up on the questions commissioner weich in short you know i think this is really relevant to our upcoming conversation about parking requirements but i just i just i i think you're there but i just want to make sure that it's clear our ordinance does set minimum and we over i would say over the last couple of years there have been numerous times where a petitioner has come in and said for marketing purposes for programming purposes i want to provide more parking than the minimum required by the ordinance and so you're talking about that dedication to land use i think that's sort of the policy decisions to what extent does the city want to you know we're talking about eliminating the minimum so by at a minimum we're not sort of having a heavy hand to drive up parking spaces but then the other piece of that is at some point do we want to start establishing maximums for residential uses we do it in some other uses but not there yet i also um commissioner gibb randall i see your hand and just thought i would jump in because we do have a lot of commissioners that were not here in october um to let you know what the context of that meeting was um just so that it's clear to everyone in some ways if and correct me staff if i'm wrong in some ways it was similar to the what we had at the last working session almost like a pre-petition um discussion it was informal but it was the petitioner asking us like whether the idea of you know told us what they were interested in whether the idea of rezoning won and and doing so without bringing everything without having to redo effectively all of the parking lots like but that was the context of that discussion it was um so we didn't have all of the specifics at that time but it was just generally discussing particularly in light of some of what if my recollection is right and you can correct me if i'm wrong mr leonard but what the what the comprehensive land use plan says for um the typology in this particular place of the typology of housing and so um were there other elements of the comprehensive plan that um were uh that it supported even if the typology was not exactly as indicated in the um in the comprehensive plan mr leonard go ahead and now you can correct me yeah no i i appreciate that and i i i i really appreciate you bringing up the zoning particularly because that was a a large component of that session um this is reflected in the staff report so the commissioners have seen this but i want to highlight it for the discussion the future land use map for this area designates it as attached single family and [Music] there is a different multi-family future land use on that same map and the discussion was how did what are those two land uses how do they relate to each other i frankly think that the attached single family it was intended to be really specific to the town hall model which this the existing development at that location um reflects however um our definition of the townhome district would prohibit stacked flats would prohibit units that are all on one level and so i think the petitioner wanted to have that similar conversation with the planning commission at that time recognizing very honestly and up front that that's a deviation from that but from a programming perspective they're very similar and it actually affords some additional housing typology if it were so hopefully that provides a little bit of background there um commissioner debrandel um i want to follow up on a couple of things one is that i think that in terms of my own opinion with the parking i think that one unit per space makes sense you know given the kind of practicality of that i i'm okay with that i don't i think it would be i think i would be frustrated if i had to park you know 500 feet away because the overall development met the goal and then you know you have to hike it over to where you're going so i think for me i'm i'm okay with one parking space per um per unit with this um i would like to push back a little bit on the bike parking i think that um i would like you to commit to making more bike parking for this i think that it completely makes sense that you would have bike parking here mary beth doyle is particularly connected um with viking because it has its own a direct connection over the highway it is specifically for pedestrians and bikers to be able to get to other parts of town and um i'm not interested in you saying you know maybe it'll happen if we see i think that when you're doing this work it's mobilization all these things yeah we're happy to do that so that's that's where i'm coming from with that okay um so the other because i just think it's easier to do it all at once then to sort of have promises and when you got the concrete truck there you just do it you know rather than getting them back again um i would like to get into the weeds a little bit on storm water and so i don't know if that's mr covert um or misfix that could go through that with me a little bit um so i noticed on the general overall site analysis you know existing site conditions plan that the the kind of general soils mapping which i understand is general is a fox sandy soil which generally has very good infiltration rate i noticed when i went into your storm calculations that you had class d soils which is about as bad as it gets and i understand that there's layers and all that kind of business and and that you likely hit some bad soil when you went down the thing that i would um that i would encourage you to do because these are not from my understanding they're not necessarily open bottom systems and that you know when you're first doing your soil testing you may not go down as deep as what these things are actually going to be because you're doing it early in the process and not later in the process is that um would you consider if as you're digging this thing you run into sand seams which i definitely have along mal's creek and other places um to be able to if you hit a sand scene that you would consider having an open bottom system it doesn't mean you get rid of the detention and the the metered um outflow rate but that you would consider not having some sort of bottomless system to be able to tap into that should you have conditions arise as you are doing your excavation that you might be able to take advantage of that yeah so i can speak to that a little bit um so i'd have to go back and look at our um infiltrate infiltration testing report to see exactly that we went down but um like you said a lot of times it's early in the process but um we kind of make a very concerted effort to understand where um the bottom of these systems would be and that potential layer for infiltration and then um even further than that we have to make sure that there's a three foot thick layer of that type of soil whichever we encounter that can that has infiltration capacity so um i i definitely know that we had um the elevations of these detention systems kind of uh worked through more or less um before we did that testing and down to the depths that we were anticipating trying to be able to infiltrate and even below it was just all clay um uh there there was a lot of fill that we got through on on the north side um but below that was clay again and then uh even in addition to that um you know we have our outlet to existing storm sewer along birch hollow that um you know where we just kind of have to work with whatever depth that's at to have an outlet um so and having said that um the depths that we went down to um you know just didn't support being able to infiltrate um the only way to get around having that outlet would be if you were able to infiltrate your entire design storm which um you would need you know very significant um permeable soils which you know and we were just running into all clay so just we just really didn't have that opportunity and i'm not saying get rid of your outlet at all i'm just saying as the digging process is happening sometimes things present themselves because of glaciation and all those kinds of things and if should you run into sand because we did some of the wetland mitigation work in um in the park and there's all kinds of layers in there that um if the situation presents itself it would be great to be able to uh uh be able to take advantage of that opportunity i'm not saying get rid of the your connection or any of that it's more like create an open autumn system if if the situation presents itself um may not you know but i just wanted to kind of put that out there that you know the more that we can pull off mal's creek clutter um because we just know it's such an it's in terrible shape and it's such a big issue you know for the city in terms of flooding and all kinds of water quality issues and things like that so it's more just if the situation presents itself and you can take advantage of that obviously keep doing your detention the way that you're doing it no matter what the situation is but i guess i'd just say look for opportunities as you're doing the actual digging because you never really know until you really excavate the whole area so yep and then uh i guess i'll just add one last thing we did run into um a little bit higher than expected groundwater on the south side so these are um pretty shallow systems to try to avoid that situation so yeah we definitely we've run into those situations where you have clay and then a few feet below a permeable layer so you over excavate and replace with engineered fills so you can get right we did not run into any of that here okay well if if you happen to when you're digging out the entire area just saying keep your keys your eyes open for opportunities is all i would say instead of just being married to you know the closed bottom system um it would be great if if there's any opportunity to be able to pivot with that um certainly alrighty thanks um before we move on i see commissioner abraham's hand and then i think i saw commissioner clark's hand up there at least for a minute um commissioner gibb randall you had specifically said mr covert and i want to ask the the petitioner it looks like he's on but i'm not sure do you were you expecting him to join in to the discussion i just want to make sure we promote him if we need to i didn't realize that mr hirsch was the engineer for the project okay well i think he i think mr covert's name was on the slide too so and i see his name on the attendee list i just want to make sure that we've got your full team promoted that you planned a little secret little secret tom's running double duty right now so uh if we really need him he'll pull in but he's uh he's got another he's he's he's two two-timing so okay your hands weren't tight and that's for you tom so i had to turn um commissioner abrams and then commissioner clark yes you wanted to jump in i just want to say i couldn't really hear anything shannon was saying i wasn't sure if it was just me but then i was having to kind of like turn it up and then it was i was getting blasted by really loud volume i just wanted to make sure that everyone could hear i was able to hear her but okay so maybe something weird again there's always something new when we are zooming um commissioner abrams hi thank you i wondered uh was there a traffic study done i didn't see anything about that in the staff report that could be either the petitioner or ted i'm pretty sure we did we did one right yeah yeah there was a traffic study and that's that's uh all been submitted and um that was one of the last things that's uh under review that um [Music] yeah we're waiting for for final comments on we've had a couple of revision sense but the bottom line being that um uh there's really no significant impacts to um [Music] pedestrians or and or vehicle traffic okay um and then my other question was about pedestrian circulation um i just wondered i think i saw in the presentation or in the site plan a plan for a raised sidewalk that crosses north south across birch hollow drive i wondered and then of course there's the filling in of the sidewalk so there'll be a continuous sidewalk on the north and south side that entire way um i wondered about crossing to the east to the park and what the plan was for that and whether uh there's an existing crosswalk there yeah so there are existing crosswalks over at the chelsea circle intersection that leads over to the park okay great those are my only questions for now thank you commissioner white you're back i am i'm i'm stuck with parking i i get fixated on things all right so um i understand i cannot we cannot demand this but we can ask which is has the petitioner considered for these additional hundred parking spaces which exceed the minimum requirement putting in solar or coverings parking coverings that would have solar tops to help with the electrification of the development or uh to be moving towards the city's a2 uh zero guide so if we have to have the parking can we make the parking uh do something productive other than just store the cars uh yeah i'll take that one so in the new parking area we are going to meet the um requirements for uh ev parking uh with those delivered and then ready to be delivered and then you know in the future as the code allows for uh with respect to additional solar it was mentioned earlier in the presentation that the buildings uh have flat roofs so uh at some point in the future we could potentially add solar there but with respect to considering um solar coverings on the parking spaces you know one of the things we're trying to do here because it is a small project is is keep costs um you know in the realm of feasibility and you know there was also a slide here that talked about how you know the majority of our project right now is you know 70 to 80 percent of you know the area's ami and um again i think that uh you know our intent is to limit um you know the cost in this area to try and continue um you know in in that vein so we have not contemplated uh solar covering uh for the parking spaces and you know my gut reaction would be is it would just drive costs to a place where the feasibility of the project would come into question and that's just unfortunately the reality of of costs these days if i may just add to that [Music] just for clarification sake um [Music] i think it was mentioned that the 100 or so parking spaces that we were proposing was in excess of the minimum when in reality that is actually under the minimum that's required for the infill portion of this development it's it only would be an exceedance if it was considered you know as part of the the entire development which was developed for two parking spaces per unit yeah i'm i'm aware of that i'm i'm still holding my position that it exceeds the required parking uh but it it feels like based on the way the infield development is going you're sort of separating that out to provide the additional hundred units of parking up for those but when we i'm looking at the whole of it because this is the one opportunity that we get to speak before you develop this because then it is what it is for however many years i think you said it was first developed in the 70s if i'm correct so we're now sitting at 50 years with this development and that means that we may have another 50 years without the benefit of sort of this forward-looking position about the reduction of land use for car storage so i i i think you've answered my question i'm gonna actually chime in here commissioner weich because that was something that was on my list too um two i want to make sure that i'm understanding this appropriately staff before i make my comments so one of the things that's before us is the landscape modification and the landscape modification is effectively to not have to bring all of the parking a lot of that is about the parking lots and not having to bring to tear up all of that parking to bring it up to our modern standards and we have the power be according to the udc we have the power to grant that um or to recommend to city council because they ultimately would approve that but that's within our realm is effectively like landscape islands and shrubbery is that right it it is i'm sorry it's landscape islands and landscaping of vehicular use areas but also significantly it is converting raised landscape islands often to stormwater detention devices capture areas so it's i would i would say it's a little bit more involved than just plantings it is it also involves infrastructure and how drainage okay so to be clear i mean our current standards effectively say that that when water hits this site it shouldn't leave right away right it needs to be taken care of more or less but that wasn't always our standard and so there may so has any analysis been done on the site as a whole to know about whether the site as a whole is up to the the stormwater standards yeah i'll let mr but the short answer is no i'm sure it's not okay got it so it's within our control to say okay don't rip up your parking lots to allow for that infiltration um and to uh of stormwater the thing that is not within our control that if i'm reading the staff report appropriately is that when we added less than a year ago the ev standards in here we didn't have that ouch and that if they don't want to build the evc even if we even if we say okay we're gonna for better for worse like grandfather your existing parking in this you still have to have you still have to provide the ev spaces so that's why they have to go to before the zba because the zba is going to expect them to have e and for this land use type they effectively need to have some kind of ev infrastructure for every single space on this site is that fair is that right okay so this is where my suggestion we i we don't have any control and i don't think that cba and some just for other commissioners edification sometimes we have a planning commissioner that also sits on the zba the zoning board of appeals which um is the is the body that is quasi-judicial effectively that determines like whether there's a hardship i don't know all the deals but um because there is because it's associated with zoning sometimes we have some benefits of having a commissioner serve on both we don't currently have that because there wasn't an opening and we didn't get a volunteer honestly the last time there was an opening um but i would just plant that this is a place where i think the discussion around evs would be really helpful for them because what my recommendation would be is that if you're gonna build parking here knowing that you need that variance like if i were on the zba i would say well have you maxed out everything that you could possibly can on the new parking that you're building because i understand that what you're building of the new parking that you're building you're going with the requirements for the new things but but there's a whole bunch on your existing that you know if we were you know what this what the zoning or what the zoning currently calls for is for oh goodness the if this is in the staff report 67 installed chargers and we're getting 12 and so like you but you're building more than 67 parking spots and so in my mind that would be that would be the happy medium is to max out whatever you can on what you're building um i don't have control over that um and because that's not a standard that in my mind like it's not before us but i'm just i would i like commissioner weich i want to bring that to you as like that in my mind is showing good faith effort towards that um and if that's something that you considered yeah i i'll i'm happy to take that i think that um you know certainly uh appreciate the sentiment and know that you know that's the way we're going and again trying to balance kind of you know the car priority with the kind of human housing priority and still end up with a financially feasible project which everyone comes before you and says that and everyone's reading the papers about costs and everything else and so we're trying to be very practical what i would uh commit to this group tonight is that we have taken a deep dive into uh expanding um beyond the base for this infill area similar to what you just said uh we haven't contemplated doing all you know 67 spaces because we don't um again i think financially that that would be impractical or infeasible and would potentially put the project in jeopardy but we definitely want to uh and this is going to be part of our conversation with zba go to them not just for a variance and say hey we just want to do the minimum we want to go to them with hey we did an analysis this is what we can do beyond the minimum and bring that to them as kind of you know to your point kind of a hey we're trying to meet the spirit here and still um you know uh make all these things work uh between you know uh costs and priorities and all those sorts of things but we're definitely willing to take a harder look at it when we go to zva bringing them a plan that goes beyond the minimum in this infill area mr leonard i just just for just a procedural perspective i just want to clarify for the planning commission your proposed motion is reflective of the the plan that the petitioner is presenting here and the propo and that and part of that is proposed ev parking that they are proposing um conditioned upon variants being granted by the zoning board of appeals so as a recommending body i just want to i just want to be clear that you could modify that if if you desired you could say you know to your to your discussion your prison or your sort of summary you could the planning commission could determine no we don't think it's appropriate that a variant speak granted that you know that that in fact we would want that to be applied across all of the sites i want to be clear if you do that it is a recommendation the zoning board of appeals is not bound by your recommendation they are they apply their own standards to a variance ask so it may very well end up being something different but i just i just want to clarify from when the planet when you were saying that you know you really don't have that authority um you essentially you could send that message as part of the action any action that you take about eb parking being compliant or being compliant in this area in the manner that you wish to articulate it is a recommendation but i i just want to add that that it's it it's more than a take it or leave it in the current form if that's what the commission desires okay well then i welcome some additional thoughts on that um commission i have i have two other issues that are in this kind of realm or not in parking though so if commissioner right it sounds like you have an immediate follow-up so i will turn the floor over to you just really quick uh can i could you email the um motion to us so that i can see the wording of it given what mr leonard just said and then is someone from staff available to help modify the motion to come towards the recommendation that was just made that we tie the 64 eb parking spots to the variants so that that can be considered by the body i can i can work on that language and provide it mr munner is great at like helping to draft our what's in our minds and do it while we're talking um and for what it's worth the motion is at the top of the staff report so what i always read is from the top of the staff report that's linked to in the in the agenda so that's where you can find it um commissioner dish is yours about parking and this issue too go for it then okay thanks yeah sorry i didn't mean to interrupt it so hard to do the uh um i just wanted to note i i very much like this idea of asking of recommending uh going beyond the minimum of with evk uh ev installed or i think ev installed would clearly be the best place to go beyond the minimum um and i i just so i'm trying to think so i'm looking at the site plan and so you know my guess is that um it would be great to provide more installed parking but it would be great to do it in a way that is as accessible as possible to the town home people and i mean i know that anything is accessible because you can always go there but people want to come home park their car and charge it up overnight usually and i don't know how many ev owners you're gonna get in these stacked flats i think you'd probably have more in the townhomes if any and so um and so i'm not asking you to rip a existing parking lot and fix them it's just if if we could think strategically about where to place these so that they would so that it wouldn't feel like too much of a drag to go park your eevee you know by someone else's apartment and then walk back to your town that would be really fantastic because i i sort of i'm i'm picturing in my mind a picture where you provide a bunch of extra ev-installed parking in it and it isn't serving the people who it could serve and i'm i'm not i'm not wanting to have that happen so that's by way of a comment from practicality and i think that's that i think that that is well served i mean that was one of my i don't i don't know right now we know ev ownership is not not everybody that lives in these is going to have an ev and it you know there could be well people that live in some of the existing buildings and so in my mind it would be fine if that ev infrastructure was you know if it was possible to add into some of the existing parking lots without totally digging them up i think that would be actually preferable but my sense is if you're gonna build it um and i think that this is increasingly just so you know um and you know we're not there yet that's not what our ordinance says um but i think that there's been some discussion on parking that if you build it it should be future proof which in which means eevee ready but increasingly like and as commissioner white was saying and as has been a discussion among this body um we we want to not have people build it and so if you're going to build it it should come with all of these things that um are ready for the future um [Music] mr martin is if i assume that you want to talk on this issue and i'm welcome to that open to that yeah sorry let me get my mute off yeah um i'm again i certainly appreciate the conversation and we did take a look at what would be required uh if we were to bring it to the entire community and the cost estimate was probably in excess of three million dollars one of the issues that exists is that uh mill creek is served with single-phase electricity there is no three-phase electrical and so we'd probably have to go out to the street and have dte bring it in um to uh you know even have the capacity within the community the reason why we're asking for the variants is because the community's just not set up for it um you know and that's just the reality uh it would be incredibly invasive and again just given the cost you know if that's the way it's going to go um then i think that you know the the evs will have won and um you know we'll probably move on from the project because we just can't afford to pay for it uh and that's that's prac just you know practically speaking we would have the ability to meet the requirements in the infill location and even exceed them to a certain degree and we'd be happy to do that but our main directive here was that you know housing is of utmost need in the city and we thought this was a great infill location to accomplish that and take advantage of existing infrastructure and resources and the community assets like mary beth doyle park but uh you know at the end of the day we're also not trying to uh raise prices on everyone you know 500 um so they have a place to plug their car in which i got to tell you we don't have an ev in the community right now so um again i i appreciate the sentiment we're certainly willing to um achieve go beyond uh have a conversation about that but um if we have to go back out through the rest of the community it's just it's too cost prohibitive and that's not i'm not critiquing any of the thoughts or any of the rest of that that's just reality and so i would uh you know leave off with that that we have explored it and that's just it is what it is and i would um pulling together uh kind of where commissioner watch started is that there's almost enough parking i know it's not in the right location but there's almost enough parking already here and so if it's to be built um uh you know making sure that it's kind of future-proofed but i i recognize the the struggles and i mean this idea of affordability but at the same time our climate commitment is something that we deal with regularly which is among the reasons why we've encouraged not building parking um [Music] commissioner lee and commissioner silvae is it on parking commissioner sobe is maybe commissioner or maybe commissioner lee go for it yeah yeah my mine was on parking just as a point of information i was just googling hey what percentage of cars are ev in the united states right now it's less than two percent they're projecting it to be about 13 by 2035 so um i i do want you i'm thinking of 67 chargers um up front with you know non-electric cars parked at them and that to me is is the thought that i'm like ah that's i don't know about that but all that being said um i just want obviously equity and access was kind of where my thought was so commissioner dish bringing that up um so if you live at kind of the tertiary existing units you might not necessarily have the eb and i certainly understand the infrastructure doesn't necessarily exist to try and get it there is going to be difficult but uh so i think having it at least ready is i think important um but i just wanted to think from a practical standpoint of utilization of how many ev cards are actually going to be at the site requiring 67 when we have less than you know two percent current uh market share with 13 and this is a new york times so i think you guys could i could certainly send around the link i just want to make sure that uh overall at least my stance on this is i'm in favor of infill we do need more uh you know units uh i also do think that um some however we could try to balance out equity uh or accessibility to those chargers would be great i don't have a magic bullet for that but i just wanted to just say like from a utilization stand a point out of a hundred new spots uh saying that we're gonna have 67 new ev stations seems at least i i don't know i want to be realistic obviously construction costs are pretty much through the roof so uh from the standpoint of sidewalk continuity infill and supply uh i just wanted to say that i want us to have some sense of like uh perspective in terms of utilization so uh but all of that being said uh obviously i think access is very critical so i certainly don't want somebody living here that has an ev not have the ability to charge their car so that that's what i had to say on the matter thanks commissioner silvay i'll let the petitioners speak to that if they want to before i kind of go around it in a different sort of way if you want to let them go i would just briefly say that you know we are going to have ev stations at the community center and so um the ability for all residents to charge would be accomplished there and that would certainly be an area where we could focus on adding additional chargers uh almost like uh you know the supercharger lot uh something along along those lines where there's a majority of uh plugins actually up in that area for access mr hirsch were you going did you want to add on to that uh yeah i was just gonna say uh i think if i'm hearing things correctly maybe to meet the intent of accessibility um you know because we we do have the infrastructure planned you know whether it's installed ready or capable for all of the the new parking spaces but again strategically placing them um you know this is an existing building maybe the the installed units go along here um similar to you know installing some here accessible to existing units to the south or here just kind of strategically placing those as best we can that was my only comment thank you um commissioner silva go ahead then okay one i i actually really like i'll just wait real quick about the community center as the charging port sounds like a great balance and i think a lot of these things are really about balance and i think the other thing i was kind of going around looking at the plans maybe one of the questions i actually have um we talk about accessibility and making one making the community center accessible great um when i look at the 30 unit plans i know there's three buildings and there's one kind of standard plan um and there's a 12 unit which are all kind of walk in um what the plan tells me is that there's no elevators so there's already an economy in construction that is trying to find the margin of making this project work so um like no elevators from an architect's standpoint is like finding that balance but it does also raise the question i just want to know from the topography standpoint i guess it's hard to i can't kind of read into the site too much are all of the 30 unit buildings split level at entry or do any of them have ground floor accessible or is it only the 12 unit that has ground floor accessible units i would probably have hobbes and black answer that question but i would also say you know the the the community does again getting to our point about providing a diverse housing type um you know we do have 57 other one bedrooms scattered throughout the community 172 bedrooms and 54 three bedrooms and so there's a myriad of accessible units uh in the rest of the community as well uh and one of the things we're doing here is we are a bit imbalanced with two bedrooms and so you know these buildings would help get us uh you know the diversity and better unit mix for the community that's helpful yeah and if there's any kind of topography explanation about those three that would just be helpful but yeah and ted can respond on topography but there it's a pretty flat is from what i remember um the first four units um you know our are have the ability to be accessible in full nature because as you you mentioned there is no elevators in the building yeah and i mean the elevations look like that and so breathing between the elevations and plans it is kind of trying to negotiate which one we should be looking at for each of those buildings but it is kind of my roundabout way to understand you know where we're probably at a cost margin with no elevators in those buildings and really just trying to make some efficient single family or you know single bedroom to kind of add to this mix which i really support so that was it if you kind of come back and dig into that and can respond at some point that'd be helpful thanks so do you have anything to offer on the elevations or i think that was the question on the grading yeah so as far as topography um i guess what i would say is that um you know there's following the slope of the road um and tying into existing grades there is some some fall along the length of the building but created in such a way that you know there'd be that that access at each one of those um ground level entry points commissioner lee uh i i just wanted to clarify right now we are looking to approve the rezoning from r3 to r4b again i'm just trying to recap and then limit landscape modifications to improve landscaping simply because if we trigger a heck of a lot more site improvements uh just completely throws financial feasibility out the window um instead of uh i'm going to switch from the electrical electrical evic parking to the landscaping and detention i am not an expert in detention runoff calculations etc but i'm only bringing it up as a point simply because uh obviously this year more than i think ever we've had a lot of issues with you know five inches of rain falling in a single night um so can staff or somebody else speak to as far as liquid planning for the site uh whether the current standards are not you know necessary from that landscape modification perspective i i'm not really sure i don't know how to phrase the question as effectively as possible but i'm just basically saying i'm not an expert in water runoff uh do do we have any concerns from the detention perspective of making sure that this site and the addition of this info housing won't adversely impact overall water control um so that that's kind of a general question that i have again just i'm thinking of 94 being flooded in southeastern michigan having drainage questions on a more macro scale so that is the question i have regarding that limiting the landscape modifications to improve landscaping portion does my question make sense it does go ahead mr hirsch yeah so i just respond to that um in explaining that the the modification is essentially um so per code um a certain amount of these landscape islands um have to be kind of depressed and accept water um water has to flow into them and then uh ideally infiltrate and you know be kept kind of on site before before leaving so um again going back to the existing layout um you know we do have these existing landscape islands but the the site wasn't developed in such a way as to direct water or drainage to any of those islands um so to effectively add that stuff would be again as you know others have alluded to ripping up a lot of the parking and kind of redesigning that and then even beyond that you know we we did only uh do the infiltration testing in the infill areas but we do know that you know everything uh in the areas that we've tested is underlying by a lot of clay so really there wouldn't expect to have even really good opportunity for infiltration in landscape islands if that were to be required gotcha um that's actually really helpful from a layman's perspective so i appreciate that um that that's pretty much the extent of my questions overall i do support this based on that conditional um zva uh feedback but again as i said sidewalk continuity is always a good thing i like the design community centers are very important and making these eb ready i think is doing a pretty good job of balancing a lot of myriad of factors it'll help add more housing stocks so overall just wanted to thank you again for that explanation on the water runoff thanks commissioner lee's question about stormwater actually raised another issue that i hadn't thought about before um how much i mean not all of what is being developed here but some of what's being developed here or a good amount was green space previously i think that the arguments that have been made about mary beth doyle providing much of the functionality and improved functionality makes a whole lot of sense and our need for infill development but the question is was this green space relied on for um for effectively stormwater management of the existing development and is that calculated into the sizing of your storm water for this site like i mean is presumably if you're running off from the parking lots or whatever now um is i just want to make sure that that's you're designing this for that as well right so the the existing green space um wasn't it wasn't constructed in such a way to hold water at all it was just kind of sheep flowing across it and out into the street undetained um so and actually what what part of the detention system is um designed to do is accommodate so these these buildings to the south here have peaked roofs and downspouts that discharge at grades so essentially half of these buildings in the grading is in such a way that that'll actually contribute to these existing systems as well and those are designed to handle that volume so you're taking account for the new imperviousness that you're adding plus some of the existing and because you've got not great soils right now like even though it's green it's not actually doing the absorption that we would hope is that that that people imagine um is that fair yeah so so these systems are designed you know to accept anything that's flowing towards them in the post-development condition got it okay thanks that helps me give me some comfort on that um i wanted to also so on circling back to the discussion about evs i i'm not led to 67.
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Please. Okay. Brown is here. Mrs. Galbreth here. Dr. Hall here. Mr. Sales here. Mrs. Walters here. Vice President RP here. President Albert here. Please rise for the pledge of allegiance.
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good afternoon everyone thank you for joining us this is superintendent mike morris i really appreciate uh those of you who had made time we tried to figure a lunch hour that hopefully works for people to join this virtual meeting and what we're doing today is we're looking at three amherst elementary schools last spring we shared our thoughts of what was our plan uh for utilizing space given covid given some structural changes that have happened in multiple of our schools and we want to update the community before the school year started on what the plans are some things have changed we've had some slight movement in terms of enrollments and that affected things and make sure everyone feels uh knows what what the plan is for the current coming school year excuse me we will be sending a health and safety uh memo this afternoon to all families so today's really is focus on the space the health and safety memo will answer more of the health and safety questions so kind of the game plan is we'll have each school spend a couple minutes going over their map and uh then we'll take questions towards the end of each school and then maybe questions at the end to ask questions or make comments you see in the lower right-hand corner of your screen you should be able to type in a comment or a question and we'll try to get to as many as we can but again we thank you for being here so at this point i will introduce all three of our principles um so with us today are derek shea the principal of crocker farm school thank you for being here derek um michelle hernandez the principal of fort river school thanks michelle and nick yaffi the principal of wildwood school um while there are differences you're going to see a lot of overlap so our order we're going to go in alphabetical order had a little uh conversation about that earlier uh croco farm will go first then fort river then wildwood and i think nick has the sort of unfortunate or unfortunate part of saying oftentimes like michelle said or like derek said because there are more similarities than differences but there are differences and that's why we wanted to present all three maps uh for you this afternoon uh last comment is uh if anyone uh your friends or family that are missing this meeting that link that you're on that youtube link will it's auto recording and it will stay there indefinitely so you can certainly forward this this uh session to anyone who wants to hear about it but without further ado i'm going to bring up the map over at crocker farm and there we are so i'm going to remove michelle and nick from the stream at this point so it's just derek and myself and i think i'll probably make it full size so it's a little more viewable so derek thank you for being here and uh thank you for being excited to welcome students back about a week and a half from now uh and this gives a good snapshot of what they'll see as they come to a crocker farm for this coming school year so do you mind walking us through uh the map and where classrooms are where other um kind of critical pieces are at uh crocker farm school this year absolutely um so hopefully uh good afternoon everyone um hopefully everyone can hear me uh clearly um so i just want to first of all start with what you cannot see in the app and um uh and that's the outdoor uh property at crocker farm and all our schools but i'll just speak for crocker obviously so we're obviously off of uh um west street and chet street and um surrounding our school we have we have a massive outdoor property that is uh incredibly incredibly well utilized um by large numbers of obviously our teachers and staff so we do have the the the is it the luxury or the or the joy of having this like massive space um as we sort of continue to try and explore the outdoor space you know one of the things as we proceed in the future is is continuing to think about how he um to to sort of live outdoors and at least for example when it's like 90 odd degrees we probably have need a little bit more shade in in the outdoor areas to help us sort of be outside as more as we as as we can often as we can um but that's just a start to see like outdoors lots of action uh probably need a few tweaks just to help make outdoors work uh a little bit better um as you look at the map um the school i think was bill 66 if i'm correct mike um the the perimeter of the building um and then the on the the the top side here which would be the um north side um that's all classrooms all done that back hallway um so you'll see a whole series of classrooms that go from second grade all the way down to i think like third grade at the end there's actually a preschool classroom that we've um allocated to um our preschool friends i two of them room 22 and 24.
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good evening everyone welcome to the august 18th meeting of the dartmouth school committee equality and diversity subcommittee meeting per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of open meeting law glc 30a section 20 and the legislature's extension of that executive order the public will not be allowed to physically access this diversity and equality committee meeting members of the public can access the meeting via live stream at www.youtube.com dhs tv media the school committee reserves the right to implement additional remote participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as is practicable um so i looked i have some notes about what open meeting law says this new remote um uh dr gifford we it says we should record in the notes that all members are um attending remotely um and we will start with a roll call to open the meeting so you can just say yes or present when i call your name uh mr hayes president mr tebow president miss bloom present ms chamberlain present miss missari present uh miss murphy [Music] present uh miss scott yes uh ms amaral here um i am also here i am present um miss pamphiel is not here and miss walker is not here all right so um we just have a few things on the agenda the first is a presentation in support of the mascot um i forged you all an email from mr ventura and mr pereira on august 1st after the school committee met to decide to not allow public access to meetings i sent them an email to invite them to present to our committee i did not hear back from them and so on august 9th i followed up to them with them to see if i could uh if i could get any information from them i went out of town on vacation so i asked ms genther to follow up with them but because we had to post the agenda um and i had not yet heard back from them i asked ms genther to put that on the agenda so that if they decided to come we would have publicly posted that on the 11th um after i left for vacation um they responded stating that they will not be able to attend due to short notice um they said they are open to presenting at future meetings um and they as you see from their email um they asked they referenced the email from miss andrews mathias who's the chair of the wampanoag tribe that the tribe be engaged and further discussions they recommended that they the tribe should consult with us first and that's sort of what the end of their email notes i also forwarded you all today you should have received i got an email from the it was the national congress of american indians also asking to provide testimony to the committee in opposition to the mascot i would also like to note for the record that the other federally recognized tribe in massachusetts the mash p wampanoag have submitted a letter to the state legislature and it is publicly posted in opposition to the use of native mascots all right so i want to sort of make be clear about the full range of sort of opinion here um i apologize for that the presentation you're not we're not able to do that tonight but i did want us to meet um and to have a discussion um about how to move forward um one of the things i think i want to highlight um while i suspect that the miss anders and i disagree on the mascot issues um i do agree with her on the issue that and maybe i think this is a way forward for the committee is for us to have a discussion about um how we engage with our native neighbors around education around educating the community not just historical but also contemporary and maybe that might be something that this committee can focus on i also know you probably all saw that the select board asked for also for public input again at the last school committee meeting given sort of the rate of transmission in the community um we did not open our um our meetings to the public so they're not open to the public yet um we could proceed with a uh virtual public comment um if someone would like to volunteer to put that together and moderate that that's one way forward alternatively we can sort of maybe move forward on some educational issues working with tribal partners um you know while we wait to we have the ability to have some sort of public comment or perhaps there are other options so what i wanted to do was to sort of open it up again this is really the only way we can have discussions about how to move forward sometimes it would be nicer to be able to do it via email so we wouldn't all have to give up you know sometime um in our in our summer but we have to comply with open meeting law so i just want to sort of turn it over to you all and hear um maybe what your thoughts and ideas are about how we might sort of move forward on the mascot issues working with tribal partners other things that we might be able to do uh miss amarillo um i i'm leaning toward what you're saying in terms of like supporting in the meantime partnering in meeting with and and our tribal partners i think that would be um certainly rich and meaningful and important um so that's my my thought miss murphy so i do have a couple of questions um i have some ideas too which i i'd like to talk about tonight with this extra time but i'm wondering if we can get some clarity or maybe talk about the lack of clarity around just this idea of the select word now weighing in excuse me um and like whose jurisdiction this whole decision this is completely and holy and unambiguously the jurisdiction of the school committee um i've had conversations with masc about this this is the massachusetts association of school committees and they have been unambiguous about this this is the school committee's purview so the select board can hold hearings they can they can do what they want they're the select board um but um the decision about this rests with the school committee okay thank you all right so did you have other things you wanted to share with us ms murphy um yeah i've actually i'm coming to the end of my vacation so i've been thinking about this more as i'm kind of easing back in into work and what's ahead and i will say this so after the last meeting um i think right at the start of the july meeting i actually received the the letters that were sent because i there was some confusion in those of us who aren't school employees didn't get them right away um so i i spent some time really going through particularly miss andrews maltese's letter from the wampanoag and i i have to say that i i really found that letter to have deep within it a lot of i think it was perceived in the media let's say as like the aquina tribal leaders want to keep the the mascot in dartmouth and well i guess that's maybe a quick read i found that there was a lot in there um about really talking about we are concerned about erasure as we've heard right we don't if if this is all we've got in dartmouth we don't want to get rid of it and i've been thinking so much about that over the course of the last month because that is really sad and and really true in in so many ways and i think that if we can focus and if we have to pivot here and say we're we're not we're going to put our public comment on hold while we figure out how to do it online perhaps what can we be doing in the meantime and i think that we can be thinking about those ideas and those potential collaborations now whether we're voting yay or nay on on keeping the current mascot or not and a couple of the thing of things that i've come up with again and i think we should invite people to the table i it was great to just see this letter come in from the ncai that they would like to speak to us again i would like to see us make sure that they understand that we can't just do that on the on the last day because of all this public meeting stuff i feel bad when that those kind of things happen but what can we be doing now right to move forward and say we're not sure where we're going um with the ultimate decision but how can we actually work to bring more of wampanoag culture and history into our community um i do have ideas on that i don't know if other people want to talk or you want me to go through my my list of things or how we want to do that well kevin if it's okay with the committee given that you've thinking been thinking about it maybe it would be good for you to share some of those ideas with us and then we can um we can discuss those ideas add some of our own and and think about how to how to move forward with that okay so again keeping in mind the the letter that we received and also the the letter that came from mr pereira and mr andrews and mr ventura i believe where they they were talking also about not wanting erasure and they kind of pushed back a little bit on some of the things that we heard from uh dr davis delano two months ago right and saying well we can't educate the public and and she said it's hard to educate the public and they said well of course we can and so because i am not a curriculum expert but i do know a little bit more about the challenges of educating the public and getting parents to show up at things that are not mandatory um i think that we have to think creatively about how to do that and i think that we can do it but i think that it is not let's host an information night and see who comes up who who shows up to learn about this but how can we really say we regardless of the decision that is made on the current mascot we as a school department and a community in dartmouth care about educating and informing our community about the the history of these these lands and the culture that was indigenous right so one of the things that i thought about was again of course how we bring people together as we've talked about and actually have some type of advisory committee or roundtable or something where we can get those those voices in the mix to actually start to think about doing the work um the first thing that i came up with is i i know myself personally i need a lot more education and i would think others share in this in terms of talking about land acknowledgements when we hear people do land acknowledgements and what that means um but if we think about how we get tribal indigenous leaders to explain to us and and help advise us let's let's tell them what we're thinking and let them you know give some feedback how do we appropriately acknowledge the the lands in which we we are now operating so that's one thing and i think that we could do that effectively when we have public events if the nationalism is being played maybe that's the the distinction of how we decide when we're going to do this maybe it's something that actually gets posted in the in the schools in a written form i don't know i do know that there are lots of people that know a lot more about this so that's one thing um the next thing is that again because that's getting people the information when they're already at something else right we know that people come to the band competitions they come to the sporting events they come to honor society they come to anything in this school so we have to meet them where they are another idea that i had is talking about um actual physical space for kind of dedicated wampanoag history and current day culture things and again thinking in terms of our space is limited obviously our funds are limited but i do think we can fundraise for these things but we have spaces where the public tends to come in each of our schools and we all know i think if we think about that it's around music the arts and sports and our elementary schools and our middle school get a lot of use in the evenings for dyaa d gal all that kind of stuff this is where people are in our lobbies they're they're a captive audience so to speak in terms of waiting for the next thing to happen right so if we were to say that one of the things that we wanted to do was let's put up some boards or take some boards or whatever that are there and say we're going to have a rotating sort of display of history current culture different types of things that are put together by students at different schools of different ages the high school diversity and equity club partnerships with plymouth and patuxent whatever the case may be but we're actually saying like we're going to do this and we're going to prioritize it and we're going to do it well and we're going to have them printed and they can be sort of like a rotating museum type display so what's at quinn for for two months might rotate to dimelo school the next two months and so we we build these materials and then we can use them effectively and get get the word out get the public seeing them when they come into schools and then the other idea i had of course is our stadium is our biggest venue um it is outside and it is where a lot of the largest you know traffic moves through um with sports and band etc so um we could think about putting together some type of more like the museum displays that you see outside that you kind of walk by that kind of give us i don't know what this would be a history of of the lands the settlement of dartmouth by white people after that the the changes in the the mascot and the representation over time i know there was some mention in some of the letters too about giving proper credit to mr andrews for his design of this logo and these types of things we would have to do this in in partnership with different voices but to say here's a physical representation of our commitment to wanting this information to be out in in the public so we're talking about it as land acknowledgements and we're also encouraging you then to to look at this this history when you visit the stadium once or another time or um whatever like that so so those are kind of the ways that i think we can start to think about if we want to have a conversation maybe with um tribal representatives and other community members what's the starting point like what are we even talking about trying to do and i do think public education is super important because yes the curriculum stuff is super important on a whole different level but that's there are a lot of moving pieces to that and we're still only getting the students we're not getting the rest of the community which i do think is important um so that that's kind of the the basics of what i had thought about so far so i think just to sort of highlight i think common elements through all this is that there's opportunities i think not just for student learning but also for community learning because i think some of the stuff that you're talking about we're already doing some of this stuff throughout our curriculum right and so part of it might be thinking about well as we're doing that in our curriculum how do we create assignments artifacts that could then be also used to um to educate the public um which i think is you know it sort of doubles the effect of that and as an educator i'm also always a fan of you know engaged learning where students can do something and then they can see that it has a real world impact right like if you're a kid and you make a poster board and people are standing around and talking about it that's really cool like you learned that you know words matter and the things that you say and do can have an impact um so it sounds like what you're suggesting and you have several examples of this is you know sort of working with the tribes and then figuring out ways to create these things maybe in our schools whatever they may be a stadium display land acknowledgement a public displays that we could then write educate the community with so building that connection in multiple ways thoughts i i hate to put this on mr tebo but i always hear stuff like this and i think wow these would be cool sort of some of these cool projects for something like i don't know if you could integrate it into an ap capstone or something like that or an internship project or something like that for some of the some of the high school kids or or maybe it's something a club takes on but that might be something that we could explore right some independent learning projects for high school students who are capable of doing this sort of work yeah so i think there's a lot of different ways it can be done at the high school certainly independent uh individual students can can make it part of their you know their research but we have a number of clubs and miss uh chamberlain um advises one of them the multicultural club but there's a number of clubs that can certainly you know there's no um shortage of bulletin boards at the high school um it's actually one of the things i i don't like because there's so many it's it's impossible to maintain them all and so an empty bulletin board looks lousy right um but we certainly have a number of clubs uh that are dedicated to this type of of work that could certainly um take on you know um a rotating display as as was kind of explained right um so you know i mr pirati just chimed in too that right this is something that his students could work on i know they do a lot of amazing video projects um podcasting blogging um and that you know you put that up on youtube and that could be accessible to a lot of people um so i i think there's a lot of ways that we can sort of integrate this into the our curriculum and our learning experience i guess so i like that idea um you know miss amaral you said you sort of like that idea of moving forward on some of these issues do do we think that's how what we want to start working on and then i guess the other question would be sort of how would we do this right so there's some complications there's some limitations right on all of us meeting because we have regular jobs and it's slow because we can't do it all the time and so the question is whether it would make more sense would it make sense for us to do this and to invite or would it make sense to you know i think this would have to go to the school committee probably um to ask the administration right to maybe create some sort of group and i mean i'm happy to sit on it with the actual implementation would have to be on this a little bit on the school side if we're involving students um dr gifford maybe i might ask you some of your thoughts about that well to be honest i'm overwhelmed at the moment i think we'd want to wait right like until school has started we're going a little bit we see how the year is going before we pick this up for sure um but once the train has started leaving the station maybe do you think that might be something yeah um we do follow the standards and we do have many grade levels that incorporate various studies on the native americans already so i think a starting point is more to analyze that a little bit and when you were speaking about some of these things my thinking was it's more than the school department once again it's a community effort like what about the public libraries if you're thinking of moving you know rotating museums and stuff um i really hesitate to really get hugely in depth with some of this starting the school year because to be frank i'm the last week i'm in that inundated with covid response protocols and meeting with jesse and it's really pretty overwhelming right now and you know i don't i don't want to shortchange the topic but i think it's it's better to analyze what the curriculum is including already um and how we might move forward with that before we and again maybe some of the community uh groups might want to take up some of that cause as well because it's a great class let's just put more on new people again becomes a little bit much to be honest the other question is i know we've had other groups that have offered to sort of um help with this effort um i know dr hall who heads the new bedford naacp um you know the dartmouth democratic town committee has reached out so another thing we could do is we could ask for volunteers to work with some of the tribes to help us to help create that sort of stuff at least as a short-term start um that's another way that we might do this um i do know right having i don't even get half the number of emails probably that you get dr gifford or mr tebow about the start of the school year but i'm getting a lot of emails just as a school committee member um so that that is a challenge but we could reach out to some partners about working with local tribes and helping to create some of the sort of things that that miss murphy has talked about to start if we want to make some progress in this early in the fall also if you you know if you want to expand beyond um native americans etc just as an aside i have had a conversation with um it must be dr lasalle i imagine um he we we're meeting in in september via zoom early september um i asked him you know through the naacp to be part of the group that gives us feedback on the sr3 grants as we needed to reach out to civic you know the organization civil rights organization so might be able to mention something about it at that point too about because again expanding beyond the native american group if we're thinking of diversity and um all of it just enough right so i think though right to start right the focus would be on sort of native native history right and and at the that aspect that ms murphy talked about educating the public that sort of dual role um i'm wondering if um i'm trying to think if anybody has other ideas or thoughts please feel free to jump in miss amarillo um nothing really new but i just wanted to say that um you know after after reading you know the news and reading what you know the media you know locally kind of reported on it and then hearing that i guess on monday we'll receive a letter as a school committee from the select board i felt a little bit like i was in a soap opera right i'm looking through a glass like that's not really what's happening that's not really but i had a wonderful conversation with jacob ventura today who had been trying to get in touch with me but life is crazy and uh it was quite reassuring because a lot of the stuff that you talk about elizabeth we talked about um and it was nice to hear that don't believe all you need and that there's some humanity in this and that there's a lot of common ground where we can come at it from a certain point and kind of i mean that's beautiful um so it was really reassuring to hear and i'm excited about your ideas and i just um you know i don't know where we're going with this and and i think it needs to go somewhere irregardless regardless of what you know happens um whether the state comes and tells us we need to change it before we get to it because clearly we've got a lot of covet stuff going on on the onset of getting into school um but i just wanted to share that because you know you you often kind of think a certain thing and then when you talk to the people and you hear there is a lot of common ground and we can work with that right that's a really great place to start so that's it i do think this is the area of common ground that we all agree that we want to sort of honor native history native culture right and our partnership and so working on sort of that education is the the way to do this so i think the really sort of there's a couple of complicating factors right now right um probably the last time we met we were all like it's going to be a normal fall it's great we can work on this and it's kind of gone like this right since our last meeting and so that does complicate what we're doing in part because i know on our campus in the schools we're all overwhelmed with the logistics of getting school open and schools open safely and that has to be our number one priority and i don't want to take away the focus from our administrators or our teachers our staff about you know to do this because that's what we've got to focus on first so that complicates this a little the other thing that's sort of really complicating is okay their bandwidth is all really taken up now we could do work in this group right but were sort of bound by open meeting law and that's not to say that i don't want people to be involved in the process or aware of it but it means that in normal situations you have back and forth conversations right you pick up the phone you talk to someone you bounce a few emails off of each other we can't do any of that we can only work together as a group so i guess the question is whether we ask someone else who might not be bound by open meeting law to do some of this work with our tribal partners to create some of the things that we might put in schools like ms murphy talked about and to present them to us or whether we take a pause for a month or so while at least at least a month while we get up and running and figure that out i think that's because i don't think we can do this work in this committee maybe we can i don't know i'm sort of thinking out loud as we go through this right miss amaral one thing that just came to mind that i'm wondering and it might be available but our uh the google drive where we were sort of uploading and we talked about making that um accessible to the public for viewing and to read through some of the things that we've compiled there is that something that we that is available for for folks is there a link um for folks it is on my list of things to do okay no no i have not gotten to that dude yes mr gallashaw um you did mention that to me it is something i was looking to obviously we could have a google drive for us this group excuse me but for the public as well um that's something i've gotta help with yeah and i've gotta i've gotta i haven't reached out to mr galashaw because i've gotta if we're gonna make it available to the public it's gotta be clean and they have to understand what stuff is and i just haven't had the time to get to that um it is on my list um i'm i'm wondering um from go ahead and berlin i'm on vacation i i can do that i'll do that i'll clean it up and you can look at it and we'll move that along fabulous mr chamberlain thank you miss murphy ms chamberlain um i mean i feel like we got this letter today from the national council and we also got the letter from um the woman on martha's vineyard i mean does anybody besides me wanna i feel like we need to be including some indigenous voices in our conversation here and that's been said to us on a number of occasions that we need to be including them and we still aren't so i get that you know making whatever presentations or whatever for school sounds a little bit overwhelming but if we could just try to schedule some people for our next meeting i don't think that would take a huge amount of time on our part so i i don't disagree and i think we have two people who are willing to present to us i'm going to say this not as chair but sort of personally outside of my role as this um there's a division in the native community about speaking out on these issues right so on the one hand um there are native members tribal members who believe it is offensive to ask them to come present to us as to whether a mascot that they feel is offensive should be removed right and so this creates some challenges in creating public input because those people who find it offensive are typically less willing to present because it's kind of degrading to come and say yes that thing is offensive to me and could you please do something about it so to miss delano's point right those tribal members are willing to be involved and speak when the decision is eminent right and so my concern is in how we find this balance that if we say we have input now it favors some positions over others and i'm not sure how to rectify that i don't really know but that's a concern i have personally mr tebow he's working on it sorry about that yeah i had shrunk on the screen there and i couldn't find the new button um so to your point about when a decision is imminent um that's when some some groups will be willing to speak um to us i i think maybe that's what this committee this subcommittee could do is to establish a timeline because i i we were expecting a presentation today and i understand and respect you know communication can can be a challenge and that's fine but if if we allow ourselves to continue to be delayed and not progress we'll never get to that point where a decision is imminent by this subcommittee and so uh can i interrupt real quick mr be clear that what miss delano has said and what members of her group have said massachusetts is when the school committee's too many sure go ahead sorry right sure so but i don't think the school committee will get to that point until the subcommittee has made some recommendations conundrum right right so i think if this subcommittee could just establish a timeline like this this is our timeline for making a recommendation to the school committee then maybe that would um you know at least keep us on track to kind of get to that point i think that that would be helpful because what i would not want to see you know um the the cleveland baseball team right just got around to changing their their mascot and um one of the resources that was shared by the the council that emailed us today um was a 1997 paper written about chief wahoo right so i'd hate to be around in the year 2047 and still talking about you know this and not have moved forward um so i i i would love for the subcommittee to just establish some kind of a timeline for when we are going to feel we're going to be reaching a point to make a recommendation right and and i think the other complicating factor that i wanted is as always in the last oh it's forever now is coven right the idea was is that originally this meeting was going to be our public comment and we agreed that we wanted to allow the public to speak and then the pandemic happened and that's the other thing like i don't know when we're going to be able to do public comment okay you can't pay me a million dollars to moderate an online discussion on this issue right if someone else wants to figure that out i would be happy to let you do that but my concern is is are we willing this is something we should discuss as a committee are we willing to move forward without public comment if it comes to that miss amoro miss murphy and then mr tebow my thoughts on that you know um certainly we can't you know i agree with you ross what you're saying you know we don't want like 20 you know 15 20 years down the line nothing you know to have happened either way but that's where the education piece i feel is really important because uh i just looked it up this morning just to see where it is and you know the bill that sits in the state legislature had been sitting there since march and on uh july 19th it was favorably reported out of the joint committee on education and it literally sits in the senate committee ways and means so we might not have to that deadline for the topic of whether or not the mascot stays may be decided for us before we get to it um which is where i feel like that education and honoring and that common ground piece is really critical meanwhile um on top of all the coveted get back to school stuff miss murphy i was just going to say that i agree with mr tebow i think that a timeline is really important on this at this point i understand the competing priorities i don't think that we should be putting something else on the plate of the administrators to try to tackle large project management at this time but i do think that this committee um needs to keep moving this forward and i do think that it is possible to do public comment online and given the state of the way that everything's going i think we should probably try to figure out how to do that um and i did look up today um actually on that google doc there's some information on the hanover public school system and their change and they actually on their website have really clear documentation of all of the steps that they took and how they um communicated that publicly and they did do public comment electronically last fall actually the timeline is quite similar um to what we're heading into right now so i haven't i didn't dive too deeply but they gave instructions on how you would make comment and how they were going to work it and everything like that it's available on their website so i'm guessing there's probably a couple other resources like that from the various towns that have made similar um actions and i think using the zoom webinar format like we can can figure some of that out i have big reservations about saying let's let's try to wait until we can do it in person because it does not seem to be trending like that's going to be possible anytime soon mr tebow so i was just going to ask you know where this is a subcommittee and we're making a recommendation to the school committee i was just gonna you know pose the question to other committee members how important public input is for this subcommittee i think public input is important i don't know that it needs to be to this subcommittee um you know to your point dr jenkins we're not making a decision that is binding in any means we're making a recommendation to the school committee so i respect the you know the authority and the responsibility the school committee will have to act on whatever recommendation we make and i certainly value the importance of public input in that venue but i i wonder if again i i wouldn't want to see that be the reason we um get stalled in terms of making any progress um in this subcommittee that's all so let me let me suggest we we've talked about back to ms chamberlain's point about bringing sort of native voices right mr ventura is a member of the uh the gay head wampanoag tribe right as is mr andrews um and and miss maltese andrews we could have them present the ncai is also right a tribal organization so in terms of doing a timeline those are tribal members that represent two different sides of the issues that could be step one in our timeline is hearing those presentations and hearing those voices to ms chamberlain's point um step two if someone would like to volunteer right to figure out how to run a webinar maybe work with mr galesha we could do we don't have to but we could do a public comment we don't have to mr tebow's point because when it gets on the agenda the school committee it will be subject to public comment but we can doing having two opportunities for public comment would be fine i just don't have the bandwidth at this time to figure out how to do that webinar so that might be step two and then step three is perhaps those are the two things that we need to do to when we're ready decision point would be after those two things miss chamberlain you had a your hand up you want to make a point i i mean i don't know if mr galasha or mr peratti would be willing to work with us to figure out a way to do an online forum but if if miss murphy and i and one of them could work on it i think i think we could figure it out especially if as she said she already saw some things that might be helpful to us that other communities haven't done so i'd be willing to volunteer for that i'm volunteering you also so if you just do that i think that would be great do we would then want to do to give you guys a little bit of time i will contact mr ventura and mr pereira and mr andrews and try to find a date i want to say like no earlier than mid-september because i know that seems like a long time but i know the teachers and the principals and the administrators need to focus for like the next month on getting the schools up and running so we can do i will work with them to find a date maybe in sort of mid-september for them to do those presentations and then maybe looking at end of september for public comment that gives us like another month to set that up and then we can do a meeting after that and decide to make a decision on that does that work for everyone in terms of timeline i'm seeing a lot of nods okay that's mr peratti or mr galisha which one should i contact about working on that i would start with strongly suggest mr peratti but because i opened my mouth you'd be contacting me no i'm just teasing well we'll work it out well technically we'll work it out thank you mr galasha okay so i think we have a step there i'm gonna rather than us setting a meeting date and inviting mr ventura mr pereira i'm going to ask them for dates that work for them and then we will set that up sometime in the the mid-september range hearing that and so that would then give us a timeline i will also see this i don't want to put down the things that miss murphy talked about um but if we do this in terms of this timeline i think this gives the administration teachers right time to open up the schools and get breathing and then our next step can be this what we're going to do on this um and so to that end i think we as a committee is part of our mission i think i'm asking for your affirmation that we are committed to doing this sort of work and inviting our tribal partners in to do these public education displays i think that's an important part of our mission that we can work on and maybe work with miss chamberlain and her uh i think what are you the multicultural club ms chamberlain and some other groups getting some student groups once they're back in school up and running to do some of this work because um you know again i think i think it would be really great to engage our students on this um and so we can we can sort of explore that does that seem seem right to everyone somebody have questions comments this is good but it's hard because you have to process everything like on the spot right i totally understand what open meeting lies but it's like i feel like my brain gets tired after these meetings because the gears are spinning all the time right ms murphy sorry i would just say one more thing that i think it is it is helpful for us to think i think a timeline for where we're going with this next is super important and we're we're on a good path for that right now i also think that by not losing sight of the educational piece as we work towards that goal can help us again going back to the comments in some of those letters so much of this debate becomes sort of like more of like a scarcity mindset right like i don't want anyone to tell me what i can't do or what you're going to change and we need to look at this more in terms of like the opposite would be like an abundance mindset i think right like what are all the different ways that we can bring this positively to the forefront um for our students and our families in our community and the more we can be thinking about this as a larger diversity equity inclusion issue than just a yes or no on a single vote is going to get us more in the direction on all these other types of issues i think that that we hope that this committee will ultimately go right yeah and i think that's really important to reiterate is that i think to go back to miss amaral's point about sometimes the reporting is can be very simple on this that that this committee is just this we're the mascot committee but i think we're all here because it's more than that right that we're committed um to say we make this decision and hand this off to the school committee in october or whatnot we're not going to go away right there's more work to do and more issues to work out and this is a continuing effort um and so both right or related to education and to um to just you know not just on this issue but other issues as well that we'll continue to work on this all right i have a child to pick up in a few minutes so i'm either going to hand this off to miss amber all i don't want to stifle discussion but um i do i do need to go in a couple minutes um are there other comments questions suggestions i think you know i think this is good i think we have a plan i will be back in touch with you once i have sort of a date from them that works um and whoever can make it can make it and we know that this is always recorded mr parotti puts it up on the website um and so i'll arrange for those presentations and miss chamberlain and miss murphy thank you for volunteering to work on the the the webinar um and then we'll we'll meet after those two events and make our sort of decide you know how we're gonna pass this along um if there's nothing else i would entertain emotion to adjourn i make a motion that we adjourn this amaral made this motion you have a second second oh thank you all right so i have a motion and a second is there any discussion about our motion to adjourn all right so i need to roll call this mr hayes you say yes or no yes you or you you don't want to stay here yes okay chivo yes miss bloom yes miss chamberlain yes miss missari yes uh miss murphy yes uh miss scott yes miss amaral yes and i am also a yes thank you everyone it's always a pleasure you guys have lots of great ideas um and i super appreciate everyone taking time out of their summer um a busy time of the summer to to to meet with us tonight so have a good evening and i will be in touch soon yeah so sandy i went to work
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
i think are we streaming on youtube yes well good evening everyone and uh welcome to our azusa unified school district board of education regular board meeting it is seven o'clock and we are calling this meeting to order and we will begin with our flag salute which will be led by yamilette luiza sanchez from center middle good afternoon buenas tardes azuza my name is yamilette i am an 8th grade student at center middle school please stand place your right hand over your heart ready begin i've pledged 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 thank you so much tell me that moving on we have our 4.2 roll call and so i will call for board member rodriguez pena president board member bo board member cruz gonzalez here and board member arianes here can you hear me and uh board member i am here as well moving on to uh item 4.3 approval of the agenda do i have a motion for uh the approval of the agenda i'm making motion to approve 4.1 1.3 i'm sorry so that's a move by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member beau let's go ahead and vote and the motion passes uh 5-0 moving on to item 5.1 a report action of closed session matters we're looking at student matter final settlement of our office of administrative hearing oah case number two zero two one zero four zero seven five six student number 21-21 is there a motion on the floor i'll make a motion to you have approve second second that's moved by board member cruz gonzalez and seconded by board member bo any discussion being none we will go ahead and move to a boat and the motion passed passes four uh to one abstention and that is uh approved moving on to but i just mentioned i'm obtaining because i was not in the closed session moving on to item number 6.0 recognition and awards and 6.1 california school employees association member of the year recognition and we will turn the floor over to principal gabriel fernandez mr fernandez are you here i hope so can you hear me yes sir welcome all right uh good evening board of education superintendent ortega and members of this cabinet on behalf of all the faculty at gladstone high school we are very pleased with the high honor that our library technician elizabeth morales received over the summertime she is a fine example of a hard-working cse employee she goes above and beyond for the students especially last year in this pandemic with the services she was delivered delivering daily um we're very appreciative of of this honor that she brings to herself into her family name and i would like to now turn it over to csca president laurie ray hi well hold on my there we go i'm here now hi um my name is lori ray and i'm the csca president of azusa chapter 299 and i'm so happy for rc pro liz morales for being named csea's member of the year for 2020 just to give you some background on the award the member of the year award is one of csca's most prestigious member awards this award honors chapter members who have gone above and beyond to enhance their school their chapter and their community and liz morales does just that whether it's serving our students uh in the library at gladstone high school and also keeping our staff informed there whether it's serving as our on our e-board as our um community our community our chapter public relations officer or also we're working in the community with uh foster youth and so we're very happy for you liz our holy board congratulations and thank you for all you do and miss morales would you like to say anything yes thank you um i just wanted to show you the wonderful award that they did i did receive my courier and um i'm just so honored to have received this award and grateful to be a part of this as a community as a library technician it gives me the opportunity to help others in providing resources for all ages and needs i'm thankful for the support from my family and the team at gladstone high school i also want to highlight some of the great resources that i work closely to to do the greater good uh the adult education team eggleston youth center and the zuzu city library i'm glad to know that there are so many others willing to help lastly and most importantly a great kudos goes to all our classified employees and ours was a chapter we are stronger together and doing the best for our students and children they are the ones that i hold dearly in my heart and hope that each and every one of them knows that they are a special part of my life thank you so much can i say something i want to congratulate you miss library liz i always see her in the library and she's always smiling her face even there's a lot of parents in there and we have our um coffee with the principal and students and she's always willing to help thank you very much and it was well deserved thank you any other comments from the board i would just like to make a comment that um ms morales not only received thank you for showing us that award uh we also uh received a really nice award for miss morales here at the district office and so in collaboration with miss president lori ray we think that we have found the perfect spot for it and so it'll be centered uh it'll be a focal point when you walk in to our district office and so we're very proud to to be able to display that thank you thank you very much and and to add to your collection of awards uh we also have on behalf of the board we congratulate and celebrate you and i have your certificate the zeus unified school district uh certificate of recognition is proudly presented to elizabeth morales for receiving the california school employees association member of the year award uh dated august 17th 2021 thank you for your dedicated service thank you so much moving on to item 7.1 public comma on agenda or non-agenda items this is an opportunity for the public to address the board of education on agenda or non-agenda items individual speakers may be allowed up to three minutes to address the board of education on any agenda or non-agenda items to address the board of education please raise your hand while in the zoom attendant lika do we have anyone with their hand raised we do we have one to start uh claudia you may have meet your mic good evening board cabinet members and superintendent ortega i am claudia tonte and i'm an employee of asus unified school district's business service division i am also part of csea's chapter asusa chapter 299 negotiations team and this evening i'm here to request your consideration in a dire matter regarding benefits that affect 100 of the classified workforce in your district i could tell you that employees can no longer afford to carry medical coverage but you already know that i could tell you that the family coverage plans available are no longer affordable due to the cost that falls in the range of sixteen thousand seven hundred thirty eight dollars for the most comprehensive coverage down to eight thousand five hundred and fifty four dollars for the least comprehensive coverage but you already know that too what i'm here to ask is that you consider what happens to an essential part of your workforce when the wages offered are not enough for this work classification to meet basic needs and making the cost of coverage a burden that can no longer be afforded what happens to your workforce when the relationship is no longer an equitable relationship between employee and employer what happens when an employee has to make difficult decisions between basic needs such as food under table and to whether continue medical coverage what happens when an employee is demoralized and no longer engaged or feels devalued because working an eight-hour day is no longer enough when eight hours if you are lucky to have an eight-hour job is no longer enough to provide basic needs now just consider how this affects the workforce that works less than eight hours i ask you to consider the damaging emotional and mental effect that this has on your workforce and the repercussions from it it's especially damaging when we continually hear how valuable we are how essential we were during the peak of the pandemic how invaluable classified employees are to the district and how much we meant to the community but in reality as a workforce it is clear that to the district to you we don't mean enough not enough to earn better wages and not enough to receive a higher district contribution towards health benefits it is truly an alarming thought it is specially alarming when you consider the importance of a school district to its community how this special purpose government entity plays a significant role in the general improvement of their respective community how a school district connects people within the community how it promotes positive changes and promotes positive impact in the lives of students and parents how it shares in parent engagement is a critical factor affecting the success of students and how working together and supporting students sets path for higher grades and eventually enrollment into higher level education ultimately improving the social and economic platform for the community and improving lives my final request for consideration to you board and cabinet members this evening is to consider how fragile this relationship truly is the impact it has on so many of these community members not only as parents in your district but also as your employees to understand that a change is imperative because you are hurting the same community you are fighting so hard to improve please consider the repercussions of that thank you for your time thank you ms tonsei for taking the time to come and share your comments with us moving on to item 8.1 comments uh reports can we double check with uh lika to make sure there's nobody else absolutely lika is there anyone else in the room with their henries we do not have any more hands raised thank you thank you mr tigger uh moving on to 8.1 on uh comments reports and requests by the board of education we'll go ahead and start with board member rodriguez pena uh good evening everyone um i just want to um let people know that i did attend the um staff leadership seminar it's really great to see um your employees out of the boardroom you know you you get to speak to them and spend time with them have coffee with them i really enjoyed the bright spots video from the disney unified school district also the um ted talk that had a great ted talk video regarding why credibility is a foundation of leadership you should look that one up and and he has a very great message the icebreaker that was great too i really appreciate that reminded me when i went to the western justice and um it um was about getting to know each other i partnered with frank chang and brian ellen which i didn't know very well due to the pandemic um i seen them in passing but i didn't know too much about them but we had great conversation i didn't know much about them they didn't know much about me and now we do know and it was good for that time spending with them um uh the parent zoom meeting i i seen that on on zoom and it uh it was done very well superintendent ortega and and uh in your cabinet and normal camacho a great job parents were available asked very great uh questions and questions were answered and i know if they didn't get a chance to speak they were answered afterwards and then another successful event the 12th annual kathy cool cuts for kids three haircuts backpacks with school supplies over 200 children were there assistant police chief verdessen gave out three 7-11 flipping certificate it's all done by donations and volunteers i want to thank mayor gonzalez for continuing this great service to the students and the children here in in azusa community uh finally i noticed the left turn yield green light signal on the corner of air ohio and eden going to glaston high school i happened to be going there and i looked up like oh it's working now it's been over 10 years that i know that parents and community members have asked for that light and i don't know how it happened but i want to thank whoever made it happen and then i did notice the bright lights at all the school sites they look really bright and they look beautiful shining you can even see to the backyard of murray school so no one can hide in the bushes anymore and um it's going to come in really handy during their open house during daylight saving time and also for safety reasons thank you board member rodriguez pena board member bo thank you good evening everyone and as this year's district representative to azusa golden days i'm happy to report that the golden days has met a couple of times and in considering um the tradition of golden days as one that's deeply held here by the community as well as concerns over the delta variant um at this time the golden days is not going to host a carnival nor a parade this year however the planning committee is very committed to creating a series of virtual and or smaller pop-up outdoor events um including a concert and so we're looking at ways to continue the tradition create events for people to gather in small groups and safely outdoors and um i look forward to reporting back additional updates as we get closer to you thank you board member beau board member cruz gonzalez thank you i'm really looking forward to the first day of school in a couple days um and i appreciated being able to also participate in the just at the beginning of the the management meeting earlier this this month i did want to say yolanda i'm not i won't say that that gladstone high school can take credit for that but i think that the work that they did um with when the uc berkeley trek people came in and we did a walking audit and um the community there both students and parents got involved in sort of mapping out how to make the walkability around gladstone high school that process we did that about four years ago i think i don't remember um but i think maybe that had a little bit to do with that like going in there so it's great to see community action and engagement turn into reaction from the county right to the reaction to our needs so i look and that's a really great example of how our empowered students were able to make something happen even if it may we may have forgotten because you know it happened so long ago and those students have moved on but they can look back and see that they had an impact on on that community so that um and i think with that i think that's all i have for right now thank you thank you board member chris gonzalez uh board member already honest i have no comment and i myself just want to stay a couple days to go and and school will will commence and so we're grateful for the the staff and and uh just everyone doing all the hard work to ensure that things are ready to go here and and those are already back at work doing doing the work um and just are excited and can't wait to see our students on our campuses um and just know that you are in my prayers for uh for a healthy for a safe and for a rich school year with that we will move on to item 9.1 which is comments and reports by the superintendent and cabinet and so mr ortega i will turn it over to you thank you lord pres i'm vice president um i will start it off um so our maintenance operation team is working diligently to get our campuses ready um we have been hit with a lot of absentee of our employees so we have been trying to work and multiply our manpower to make thursday work we're confident that our team at hand will achieve that goal um also we are happy to continue to announce that we will continue to offer curbside meal distribution in addition to providing all of our students with breakfast lunch and supper on campus while having instruction and then lastly tomorrow we will be celebrating outside at gladstone high school in the quad to celebrate all of our employees to show them how much we value and appreciate them which is a little token of a lunch of a subway meal with the drink cookie and a chip we will have some raffles we'll have music so we're hoping everyone can stop by and we welcome all to just come by say hello and say let's kick off this 2020 dude 21-22-22 school year thank you uh thank you um a couple of things uh number one just wanted to share that uh azusa unified school district in partnership with california ed partners uh has been um accepted uh our proposal was accepted we wrote a proposal for csba and i'm happy to announce that we got a a thumbs up on our on our uh presentation uh it is titled the case uh for coherence building capacity pre-k to third grade and so we're we're happy that we're gonna be able to share uh our story and the journey that we have been uh on in uh in the primary grade uh also another uh highlight uh last week um we were approached by edsource edsource is a publication educational publication um and we were contacted to interview azuza they wanted to talk about three things they had heard about our summer extravaganza and some other and some other things and so they wanted to just pick our brains we spent about an hour with them the three things that we talked about were summer extravaganza or community engagement and our reopening and so again just proud that that through our work um we're garnering some of some attention um and so just very proud of the staff and uh what we've been doing with that board member rodriguez pena alluded to our town halls again thank you to all the staff that worked so hard not only for the meeting but the website the guidebook uh everything that that goes behind the scenes to prepare for something like that um we had uh i believe somewhere around six to seven hundred attendees over the course of the two meetings they had extremely good uh questions um and we are close to being being able to publish an faq uh that we will post on our reopening um website uh as well for the questions that we couldn't get to uh because of time and then just like everybody else has shared um just really excited uh we are two days away uh from opening and so just uh excited to to welcome back our staff to welcome back our parents and welcome back our students onto our campuses thank you good evening yesterday we held our certificated staff development day and one of our presenters was the western justice center which included a panel q a that included our teachers counselors administrators and two students from gladstone high school and i want to give both of these students kathy cortez and yet theory ochoa a very special shout out and thank you for sharing their perspective they were not only poised and articulate but they just absolutely um represented um the program and the students just so well and we're just also very very proud of them and want to thank them for presenting to the entire certificated staff yesterday thank you and good evening board of education staff and community i want to welcome everyone to the upcoming school year while this is an exceptionally busy summer i look forward to seeing our students staff back at our school site also last thursday august 12th they are hosted our annual new orientation we invited 28 of our new teachers counselors and a nurse orientation was held in person and we followed all of our folded 19 protocols we were able to present each of our cabinet members and their fees to our newest certificated team members in addition to the 8-star information that i presented our new teachers counselors and the nurse were introduced to our instructional focus and priority a huge thank you to dr mitchell and mrs framer for leading this presentation i'm also grateful to our aea executive board who were also there to provide valuable information and a delicious thank you board and cabinet if i could just remind everyone as they're speaking to ensure that you have your microphone pretty close to your face uh we're hearing that there's people who are having a challenging time hearing it moving on to 10.1 we will now convene a public hearing to receive public testimony concerning the composition of potential trustee voting areas associated with the district's transition to a buy trustee area election system in advance of the preparation of draft trustee voting area plans by the district's demographer under california elections code section the board must hold at least two public hearings over a period of no more than 30 days at which the public is invited to provide input regarding the composition of the districts before drawing draft maps of the proposed boundaries of the district may i have a motion to open the public hearing make a motion to approve moved by board member board member rodriguez pena do i have a second second second by board member beau and now we will vote to open this meeting and the motion passes uh five to zero mr ortega thank you vice president grier um at this at this time i would like to introduce jonathan salt who will be walking us through today's public hearing thank you good evening members of the board staff and district community my name is jonathan salt i'm an attorney with fagan freeman full frost and i'm joined by justin rich a demographer at cooperative strategies um tonight is the first of a series of public hearings regarding the district's transition from at large to buy trustee area elections i think you all remember back earlier this year the board took action to start this process and now that the census data is about to be released now is the time to pick up the baton so to speak and run the gamut of all these hearings and transparently build trustee areas for the district so first i'll give a little bit of background about the process justin will talk about some of the demographics and about the kinds of information we're looking for tonight and we'll hand it back over for additional comments and questions so first what is the california voting rights act or the cvra well it passed about 18 years ago so my new favorite joke is that it's old enough to vote um and the cbra prohibits at large elections if that system impairs the ability of members of protected classes from influencing the outcome of elections or electing candidates of choice there's no intent like the federal voting rights act so it's very easy for a plaintiff to bring a claim against a government entity like a school district or a city because proof of intent to discriminate is not required for a plaintiff to show another big reason why you're hearing about this around the state is that a prevailing plaintiff earns the right to reasonable attorneys fees and expert fees if they were to prevail on a cvra claim but if a school district or city or county successfully defends itself it's not afforded that same right and so some of these costs get pretty astronomical pretty quickly the only safe harbor from a cvra claim is the transition to a buy trustee area election system think of this like congress where the district's divided into roughly equal population areas and one board member will be elected by the residents of each area and that board member must live in that area now those of you are already elected at large so this doesn't impact your current term but prospectively this is how the transition would work so right now step one was to adopt a resolution which the board did several months ago so step two is to hold these two pre-mapped public hearings before the demographer is able to draw draft map options and so the point of it is to receive community and board comments about sort of uh input on what you'd like to see in these maps justin thank you my name is justin rich and i'm with cooperative strategies i'm the demographer that'll be helping you through this process and so i just want to talk a little bit about the data that goes into creating these maps and just walk you through some of what we see from our perspective so we've included a map here that shows the district boundaries and obviously this is our starting point when we start to separate the district into various voting areas we've included the various jurisdictions that are within the district and right outside we've also included some of the topographical features you'll you'll see those on the following slides as well we've included here a table that has the 2010 census data and it has the total population based on the census at that time jonathan talked about the fact that we're expecting 2020 census data it's been released uh we're currently going through that and the state is going through a process of validating that data uh so we should have that shortly and we'll be using that throughout the process we've also included the various protected classes that comprise the district and that the percentage uh and breakdown of that total population again this is from the 2010 census so we'll be interested to see what the 2020 census data shows us we've also included what we call a graduated color map here and we're looking specifically at the latino population within the district you'll see these blocks of colors that are darker and lighter in color this represents the concentration of latino voters in the census blocks and it's important to note that the foundational puzzle pieces if you will for putting the map together are based on these census blocks which are the smallest units uh that the census releases in in terms of geographical information we'll use those in order to to make the various map scenarios that we present to you and we will be very interested in the the composition of those areas once we put them together to ensure that they are compliant with the federal voting rights act i'll note that this is based on the 2015-19 citizen voting age population this is a figure that comes from the american community survey this is run through the census and it's updated periodically this is the most recent data that we have but it's really a proxy for uh who might uh might be eligible to to vote in in an election and it's it's important to ensure compliance with the federal voting rights act uh that's distinguished though from the total population which is a requirement in terms of drawing uh drawing areas that are balanced in total population and so the purpose of this pre-map public hearing and the one in a couple of weeks is to solicit feedback on what the community thinks or basically where should the lines be drawn you know i'll zoom in here on a map where the population is concentrated um so this is sort of the information we're looking for tonight you know i think neighborhood x and neighborhood y should be in the same trustee area where i think the 210 makes sense as a trustee area boundary because it makes sense geographically or i think azusa avenue etc so um you know you all know the community better than we do and so this kind of feedback for that makes sense or uh portions of the district that makes sense to maybe be boundaries is the kind of feedback we're looking for tonight and so i'll hand it back to justin to talk about the actual criteria for drawing the maps he alluded to it a few moments ago and so our our uh task is to draw uh the the draft plans and share that with you all um and looking for input and feedback again at that time about how we can uh improve those map scenarios how uh from from the sense of creating better representation and keeping certain communities of interest together so that's that's important for for us to do uh i alluded to the balanced population um uh requirement that that is in keeping with the one person one vote doctrine uh so what we have to do is make sure that when we put these areas together that they're roughly equal in population that threshold that we have is that the smallest area and the largest area can be no no more than 10 in in terms of differential so so that's a really hard and fast rule that we have to comply with uh and and that's certainly one of our foremost charges here um that i mentioned there's a certain amount of deviation that will happen but uh they have to be roughly equal in population and so we must comply with with the us constitution uh we we we try to to achieve that population equality but we also have to comply with the federal voting rights act which uh means that we cannot impair the ability of of a protected class to uh to uh elect the candidate of their choice there's those are hard and fast rules that that we need to comply with but there's also other things that that we take into consideration because we want to achieve good representation uh and we also think that this is uh this keeps communities together so that their their vote can be as one so um we we we have to make sure that these areas are are contiguous uh we also take into consideration the the communities of interest that exist within the district so that we're not splitting those uh we we look to keep these areas relatively compact so that when somebody looks at the map that it doesn't appear that they're being drawn in a in a particular way to to manipulate the uh the the electorate um and we also have to take into uh into account the incumbency of of those candidates as well um these are all things that um as long as we're meeting those those first two requirements um that that we will also consider these other ones but i would uh really characterize them as being uh things that we should do as opposed to things that we have to do and that is being balanced in population and complying with the federal voting rights act a few final thoughts about this transition itself it does not change the district's overall boundaries it doesn't change school attendance areas where anybody goes to school or even how the board is governed each board member regardless of trustee area which he or she resides still owes the duty to the entire district so it's still one district with common goals and challenges this transition just changes who can run for board when and who is voting for them and so um one thing i want to draw some additional attention to i mentioned that there's another hearing coming up so tonight is the first pre-map public hearing in a few weeks at the next board meeting there will be the second one somewhere after that and before november the full census data will be released as justin mentioned and so then uh justin based on the feedback received tonight and on the 7th and also just based on the data for the district's demographics justin will prepare uh you know three or four draft map options that'll be shared with the community posted on the website uh for uh you know public consumption um and then there'll be three public hearings uh into november one in december where folks can chime in on what they like or don't like about each map option or which map option is their favorite or if there's any suggested changes and then at the december 14th meeting the board would ultimately vote on one of those options to be the district's trustee area map option which then goes to the county for approval and then to stay up to date on what's going on the district created a tab on the website underneath board of education where there's some information some frequently asked questions and some updated um information as we move on here about the process and ultimately this is where the maps will be posted so if you have questions about this check out the website if you have more questions feel free to to email staff and we'll get back to you with an answer but so with that um you know what let's uh the public hearing can continue if there's comments from the community or board thank you gentlemen for uh this presentation as part of this public hearing members of the public may submit comments on the establishment of voting area boundaries for the new trustee voting areas that will be established as part of the district's transition from an at-large election system to a buy trustee area election system speakers will be given three minutes to make comments on this matter and this matter only if you wish to address this subject please make sure to raise your hand in zoom lika do we have anyone raising their hand at this time we did not have any hands hearing none uh thank you for uh your comments and uh this public hearing to receive public testimony conserving concerning the composition of potential trustee voting areas is now closed at 7 39 pm i have a clarification question so we don't need to make a motion to close the public hearing that is correct that was clarified and it was determined that we do not need to do that okay moving on to item can we ask questions now okay great yeah i have a couple questions um maybe a point of order if we could have our attorney speak to that it being a public hearing if there's any matter uh anything that will prevent us from asking questions at this time mr jonathan salt um can you address uh that is that is that can we do that you can it's it's it's common for boards to ask questions as part of the public hearing just for um it's also public hearing for the board too the community can share their thoughts with you but you can also share your thoughts or ask questions as well um maybe before formally closing the the public hearing this would be a good time to ask questions we're happy to answer them um and help any way we can so i actually prefer to have the questions after the public hearing is closed so that it's just a board discussion or conversation not necessarily a public hearing conversation so is that that's why i waited till the public hearing was closed you can also close the public hearing and just ask some questions since we're still sort of on the item you know the public knows that this item is on the agenda and that the topic of potential trustee areas is here before you thank you yes so i just have a couple questions um could you just please um explain uh just a little bit about the difference in terms of when you use the population data i know you were clear about that versus or actually just maybe focus on the c-vap the citizen voting age population and why you would use that data and how will be how we'll see it being used sure excuse me um the total population data that's that's provided by the census and that we'll be getting soon is how we balance population uh and and that's to make sure that the various areas are roughly equal in population and then in terms of the citizen voting age population if we are looking to making sure that we're not splitting communities and we're not you know impairing the ability of a protected class to be able to elect the candidate of their choice the the citizen voting age population is a more accurate measure of how you would see potentially a majority minority district and see see those types of dynamics so because there's going to be differences in terms of age groups and uh eligibility to vote that's that's really a better measure to see whether or not we're achieving that okay that's great and then my other question is so i noticed on the presentation that the um that you're saying that you're going to bring the data the updated census data not at the next public hearing but but at the when we do the map the map setting hearings so so are you able to use the data that just came out last week and use that to give us information at the next public hearing or is that you're just you're going to wait till after these two pre to public hearing two pre-map hearings yeah i think our our goal is to bring that to you as soon as possible and and we're going through that right now what what happens is the data comes from the census and goes to the statewide database that's held at the the university of california berkeley uh there's a certain amount of validation in aggregating of that data that happens and then they will release that in september now i know that we have access to the data as well and so we're going through the process of pulling all that together and i think in conversation with with jonathan and making sure that we're not jumping the gun so to speak as soon as we can share that data we will and i think it makes sense um so hopefully by the next public hearing will at least be able to share the uh the total population based on 2020 as opposed to 2010.
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um i think i would like to send the message to zba that more than what is currently shown is important so as we i'll just voice that i'll let others duke out what that number should be but i wanted to voice that um uh on bicycle parking i also heard a commitment from the developer that like yeah we can add more bicycle parking but i think that we ought to be drafting that into our approval language as well in terms of numbers or where that is and i would just voice that what in my mind is missing here is class b parking by the by the entryways because as a renter um some people will want it class a inside locked the spaces that you have right now class c kind of out on the curb are great for guests but class b covered by an entry door is where if i lived here where i would want to park my bike and so i that's him i think upping that would be great um and also had a question for staff and maybe this was just a typo but it suggested in the staff report that there's already 224 existing class a spaces and 224 existing class c spaces and that was not my perception having admittedly it was pretty quick and it was a year ago cycled through this neighborhood uh myself like i didn't see this as a place where there was a bunch of bicycle infrastructure so do you know either that for the um miss thatcher i don't know that you put together the staff report but even um the the development team like where those ex where the existing bicycle infrastructure is i'm afraid i don't know the answer to that just because uh we don't have the floor plans to all of the other units that exist so it would be great if the developer could uh fact check that for us yeah yeah so the that number um was based on the number of existing basements in all of the existing units um considering those as um potential locations for storing someone's bike oh is that is that um what we normally is that our normal procedure staff i'm just curious oh we do it we we specify indoor storage sometimes it is accommodated in a desert like a bike room um and other times projects have accomplished that by providing garage or interior space so um it it can meet that yes it's i mean if it's an indoor storage space available to that to that unit it would be a class a okay and then i mean this is i've seen this in other places and i don't know that the residents there know that that's bicycle infrastructure so um uh the but the the class c so this is this is effectively bike hoops are there that many bike hoops throughout the existing development i think um might have been the typo i don't i'm not looking at the report but the intention was just that the 224 existing basements um it just says you know we were considering the the required number of class a and c is provided within those basements um [Music] got it in my mind class c at the um swimming pool the community building additional class c is important additional class b where you are doing new development is really important um i would at minimum want to see if what you're required to have is 77 spaces i would want to see 77 new spaces in what you're building which doesn't i mean you're um i think that collectively across this space in public spaces and also something that is covered um seems like it would be about right that's i'm weighing in but commissioner gibrandal i know you brought this up before so i like i welcome thoughts on that um so that was that was point number two that i had and then point number three is in the com um the discussion with or the the meeting that you had with neighbors there was some discussion about existing covenants and is this rezoning aloud within covenants and i'm not quite sure what that was all about but one of the things that i noticed is the shape of your parcel is weird it has this weird thing off to the north and honestly in discussion tonight at the dinner table um my husband noted that there's a park there a city park that he couldn't find a sign for um and it there is it's it's mill creek park um but it seems like it's part of your property so i'm not i'm this is a question for staff or for you all like is that city park land is there an easement and i'm really curious about how rezoning this affects like the my my reading between the lines and pulling these things together is the discussion about the covenant is what agreements were made in the initial development that our rezoning would negate or override and i want to make sure that um that we're aware of those things so mr leonard i'm guessing that you've got yeah so um this is this question has been raised and i'd welcome um i'm i presume the petitioner has been part of this too um i i want to acknowledge that a city planner alexis deleo is the one who has been sorting this project but is out of the office this week so jill and i are doing our best but what i can tell you is on this question it came up from a city staff perspective and just like you observed or some member at the dinner table observed this it shows up in many uh documents as a park however weak um to my knowledge we have not yet found any um indication that it has been officially dedicated as a public park or there is an easement there um as far as the original zoning my recollection is that this was actually planned and constructed prior to being annexed into the city um i'm not positive about that but um so um so um i think that is something that we were investigating i don't know if mr martin has any follow-up information on that but we were trying to answer that question um but in short i don't have the answer now i believe that it's been passed down to me again this was built i think maybe i was one or maybe not even alive yet but uh that it's been told to me that all the negotiations for the development were done with the city of ann arbor so um it's probably been lost to time with respect to files but um you know around here the development was approved by the city it was part of it was part i believe it was part of the city so maybe it came in during the approval i don't know do you know the status of the park i all i know is that a gentleman in my office and alexis were you know talking about that as you just described and that there was not really a conclusion or concrete direction one way or another presumably it's been part of our survey part of our legal description and part of our tax bill for all these years so um it's just again i think one of those things that uh we don't have clarity on and it's it just so i mean as uh commissioner mills pointed out it's uh very it's maybe what 10 feet well i mean it is a very narrow strip odd shaped and basically is just a little bit of a green space buffer between two housing communities that i think even if there was a sign there that designated it we would be lucky to ever find somebody utilizing uh said park and they would probably migrate to mary beth doyle so um yeah it's just kind of a mystery yeah it's listed on the city's website as a .95 acre park because this was an active point of discussion and the petitioner may not know that uh and maybe not all planning commissioners it was our coveted project to go to every park in the city of ann arbor and take a picture with the sign and the discussion table was there was no sign and that was crazy um but also like it the reason that i think it's important to sort out clearly is because you know unit density like is based on the overall size and so understanding that i think is really important when you're trying to think about you know allowable units because again while we're talking about development on just you know the central portion here what is before us tonight is rezoning the entire all of the acreage um and so um so that was part of it but also maybe this is for the petitioner too there were discussion i mean in the in the citizen the meeting with citizens there was a lot of the there was a lot of discussion about covenants or previous things can you shed any light on what that's all about uh again um we don't have any records of any covenants i think that um simply put it was neighbors that objected to the potential project and um had uh created that um you know messaging um but there's no record of any covenants and any title work or anything that we found that talks about that space so um again i think that was just something that was thrown out there that um got traction just because it was in the record but there's no evidence of a covenant that exists okay well and i mean covenant can have lots of different meanings i was just curious what was going on okay um overall like i i'd like us uh i welcome ideas about the right amendment related to bicycle parking and the right amendment related to ev infrastructure on any parking that is built here um overall though i mean i as i said before in october i like the idea of infill i mean i and um i mean one of the reasons for infill is to use the existing infrastructure that's around there and this is i think why among the reasons i'm pushing like commissioner weich on the parking that you're building i understand why that people want to have something by their by their unit and so and it's not like you're building a bazillion spaces right around the new development but but also thinking about future proofing this i think because we know that um there that this infrastructure with any hope will last decades um and there's lots of changes that will happen um to the the way that people get around um in that time um that will that will have to happen um and so making sure that it's resilient to that i think is really important commissioner abrams um and mr leonard sorry can we go to mr leonard first in case i said something wrong and then commissioner abrams i just forgot to lower my hand oh okay thank commissioner great um yeah so i also generally am in support of this project i think you know as we all know and talk about a lot in these meetings we need more housing built um and this project definitely achieves that and it increases the density um on the site which is something that allows you to provide more units than you would otherwise i think the other thing we talk a lot about in this body is sustainability and how ann arbor is going to meet its carbon neutrality goals by 2030 and this isn't something that we can mandate but we often just talk to petitioners about any possibility there is to make the project more sustainable in particular around um i'm thinking here in particular around fossil fuel energy so two things i'm wondering about one is just if you've looked into building electrification and if you haven't uh i'm asking you to just please do so i think we're hearing that it's possible uh maybe for maybe not no cost but low cost and lower and lower cost i think it's getting cheaper and cheaper so i think it's something worth looking into um if we're thinking about future proofing in regards to easy parking this would be another aspect of that so having the new buildings that you build here not be dependent on fossil fuel energy so electric appliances uh and electric hvac so heat pump systems and then the other of course is solar panels so um this isn't news to anybody right but like 20 you know i mean 25 ish uh of the carbon emissions are due to residential use right and there's some subset of that which is big in ann arbor which is which is renters um who don't have the ability to to pursue solar on their projects i think somebody else might correct me on this it's upwards of fifty percent of our community our renters 56 57 i think is the number um and so i think any time that people who are doing multi-family developments can invest in solar it's a huge boon to our community's ability to reach those goals so i know that there's a cost uh and and the project has to pencil out and that may may or may not work but i just i hope you're looking into it and considering it and thinking about the kind of longer term operation and maintenance cost for the project and return on investment in addition to what it costs you to just get the project off the ground so those aren't things we can mandate but they're they're things they think we're kind of obliged to ask of the people who come before us and and show us new construction thanks commissioner lee yeah i'll make this brief y'all echo also electrification um similarly i saw that the new lighting going is all good leds so because this is a capital event if the existing site lights could be also i don't know if they're led or not but looking at retrofits would be really something that's great has a great roi um and then just getting back to bike parking um this site does have a bicycle or 57 i've actually biked there to play disc golf before so um i definitely know it's bikeable it's fairly flat and it's a viable mode of transportation for that particular site so anything we can do to obviously encourage that so led lighting looking at the overall site if it's not already led i'm sure you guys have already done that um and then also just looking at uh bike parking and electrification and that's contributing to the overall uh a20 goals so that's it thanks i'm not seeing digital or real hands up um but i'm wondering the two hanging issues on bikes and trans and parking lots mr leonard had you drafted some language for commissioner weich that he could play around with um and throw out potentially as a as an amendment i did i provided some language to commissioner white his request the proposed change would modify the motion regarding condition upon a variance and the way i structured it um this this obviously could be modified but the way i structured the proposed language to commissioner weich would be that condition upon a variance being granted for ev parking not to exceed 37 evi spaces or 118 evr spaces what that would have the impact of resulting in is that your recommendation would basically be saying hey a variance to provide at the end of the day this site should provide a minimum of 30 ev installed spaces and 50 ev ready spaces and it doesn't specify any minimum standard of the evc so that would just be either complied with or it would be granted by a zoning board of appeals so those numbers are modifiable but i just tried to structure it in such a way that it would give the ability to um consider a medium commissioner and i i i sent the um an email to ms thatcher but i don't know if she saw it with a clarifying question because mr leonard was talking because i wanted to make sure that i understood that the variance is so that they do not currently comply with the um zoning requirement which would be much higher than what we're looking at so when i look at both the staff report and i look at the site plan they are called both of those documents are calling for well required and permitted is not distinguished so i will start by saying that so it's in the same column so it was 65 percent of the parking be um ev capable which would be 436 25 ev ready which would be 168 and ifd installed which would be 67.
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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. And Miss RP, would you please read the mission statement? Sure. Our mission is to empower each student to positively impact the world for a bright new future. Thank you. So, we do have some public comment tonight. Um, couple, we have three in person and then two uh that came in via email. So, we'll do the excuse me, do the inperson first. First up is Kathy Seaffort. Topic is heat concerns. Hi everyone. Um I'm actually reading this comment on behalf of Linda Greenwood who's a teacher at CSK and our elementary teachers are at back to school night this evening. So that's why I'm here speaking on her behalf. Dear CM 2011U school board members and administrators, I have been an early educator in our district for 17 years.
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i can talk about that in a second but mostly in the premiere of the school you'll see our classrooms we have 18 classrooms for next year um we also have a second floor which you can see um probably um in the purple which is off to the side um and so we'll have four classrooms up there that's where our sixth graders go um and we give them the sort of luxury of the space upstairs um classrooms are very similar in terms of size um picture window you know in in every classroom uh you know we're finding that in covert times we could do with the room's been a little bit bigger um but we've managed to to make it work um what you'll see in the interior parts of the school are much more the sort of small group instructional spaces um for things like um special education speech and language uh or gym uh or music room or art room are all uh in this interior part of the building right in the center um we have a cafeteria fairly large cafeteria over here on on the east side um we hope to use that this year for a small number of students who would go and perhaps need to eat there when when we won't use a classroom or when the weather's pretty rough outside um in previous iterations we had up to 100 students in there obviously that won't happen this year our library is way over here in the east side we have an absolute beautiful library design wise we kind of wish it was in the middle it is what it is it's a beautiful space right here in the front in the red you'll see some like first grade classrooms kindergarten next to them um things that we are struggling with a little bit and i did mention earlier and i love our pre-k friends pre-k has a very uh growing population and i think we're looking at possibly adding another classroom this year to sixth classroom so there's clearly six rooms designated for preschool and small group instructional spaces we struggle to find space for our part-time staff you know speech and language ot psychologist type folks we have a medical waiting room this year that is in um this east side here i believe it's in the green color um that the previous iteration was like our family meeting community room so it feels a little um sad to have lost that room um and it's something that as we go forward we would always want to have like a community meeting room our instrumental music folks are struggling they have a tiny little room right next to that green room room 49 it's very difficult to see it's actually not to scale that map the map completely because it's much it's about half the size of the green room next year um so that's a struggle um and in our after school program we'll probably get like anywhere from eight to 100 students who come to after school and we're trying to figure it right now in terms of the cafeteria and other things how to how to make all of that work um i mean i do think we've got a beautiful school i think probably any given time about 360 students in the property makes it a little tight because you're probably talking anywhere from 80 to 100 staff so so that's a fairly large number in a relatively small size school um yeah i mean i think there's a few things that can get fixed over the next few years we have cubbies inside classrooms that take up you know two meters by 11 meters of space that we could probably you know change there's definitely some tweaks that need to be adjusted we'll get some roof issues that need sorting out um but overall you know we love our space and we're hoping we're going to continue to improve it and make it relevant and better over the next few years thank you so much derek um if i could just add one or two things or just prompt changes do you mind speaking to the change uh the computer lab what was the computer lab that was one and the other one was about the gym yeah compared to when students were in studio in school in the spring and how those rooms are going to be utilized a little differently as well yeah i mean so the computer lab which is on the again on the east side here i can probably point to it um it looks like the color is uh like a light pink color i'm not really good with the color i think yeah i think you get it um so previous life that was a computer lab with like 20 like stations you know like um desktops very difficult to have any flexibility with that space um and so we will remove the desktop tops um laptop stuff and it's it's another room that we're going to try and use is like a multi-purpose room and again we're trying to be very efficient here and smart about things so we're going to use the room during the day in the middle of the day for like lunch for for staff lunches because we need a place for staff to have lunch um um we're going to use it perhaps for some meeting times for some testing times for some kids to do in small group instructional times it'll be a multi-purpose space it's not a huge room but i think we're trying to get the right furniture in there to make it to make it work the gym uh which is agreeing over here on the the west side the gym um we're just about finished cleaning the gym of all of the materials that were taken at our classrooms in the last 18 months so excuse the phone's ringing um this whole sort of de-densification of this school the gym was just like from floor to top full of stuff we're in the last little eighth corner of the gym trying to uh take some stuff out um and the hot would be that we can utilize the gym um as the school year starts we were not able to use it at all when we were in the property last year like the cafeteria because the cafeteria was also a place that still is probably half full of stuff hoping to clear that up in the next week but again we're hoping to get our gym back working and perhaps we would use it for some larger scale meetings after school let's get some possibilities um but we really need it back in in action pretty soon thank you derek i think the only thing i'll add is that both spaces also didn't have ventilation that met our standards last year and so our facilities team spent a lot of time uh spring and summer and putting in um pretty large a little noisy um our purification units that that now meet our standard so that was the other reason we weren't able to use them last year was uh we have high standards for the ventilation a room we have uh kids in and they weren't there last year but they are this year so thank you derek i think we'll make a quick transition we'll do questions at the end if that's okay with you derek yes thank you and i'm going to bring michelle hernandez on who is the principal at fort river and if i can figure out this system a little better than i am at the moment there we go um so there's fort river school i'm going to make it even a bit larger so i think it's more viewable if you are watching and double click on your youtube screen it'll maximize it on your phone tablet or device so just if you're looking to make it larger but michelle if you're able to walk us through a little bit of what fort river will look like this year and say that more formally welcome to the district we've really been thrilled to work with you since you started this month um and or at the end of last month and uh you know really hit the ground running with lots of thoughts and and some tweaks that made um this map look perhaps a little better than when we were presented in the spring so really appreciate your creativity michelle thanks mike thanks and and and i i'm feeling super humbled and excited about um starting here with with uh you know fort river and and being part of amherst community now i'm really looking forward to a positive year and with that said like you know let's look at the the calendar i'm sorry the the map i did when i thought i did make a few changes um everything of course benefiting learning spaces for students and of course having giving teachers a private lounge where they felt safe that and had some time they would have some private time to have their meals um so if you're looking at the um the map all the classrooms um are in the outdoor i'm sorry at the perimeter of the building um and so they all have large windows of exterior exits and that kind of promotes the outside learning that we want to promote this year for fort river i'm giving the teachers easy access to get outside and have the students be outside fresh air and social distance the all of the classrooms have stayed the same with the exception of one of the fifth grade classrooms that we have moved over if you see by that kitchen area right next to that top one henry fifth grade we kind of added another fifth grade right under it so that all fifth grade classrooms would be together it would be easier for them than to collaborate and continue and promote that student learning we've also moved some of the specials classroom we when i first looked at at the at the map i noticed that the library was really congested it wasn't being used last year and i really wanted to promote that library this year with students but of course there was way too many people housed in that library we had art music the tech teacher all housed in that library really not giving the librarian enough space for students in there so we have moved music and tech out if you look at the map they're right under k1 right in that cluster of kinder k1k2k3 music and tech have now their own space music teacher now students will be able to go into a music classroom which they did not have before the tech teacher will still continue pushing in but that area there now is the space where that tech teacher can keep all their his equipment um in one central location we've also given the art teacher her own classroom so if you look at the map and right at at the bottom of at this uh h2 sixth grade um right next door is a singer um for art class that used to be that fifth grade that we moved over into that fifth grade cluster by the kitchen um so now our class has her own space um and students will have that travel time to go there also we just feel that promoting some kind of movement throughout the day will will keep the students engaged and and um and give them a different environment throughout the day not only in the classroom but now moving to their specials and then going outside right um we did keep in the center of the school we did keep you know there's there's the specialized um classrooms that are like this for special ed um l classes the math interventions reading specialist otpt all of that is still you know some testing rooms that's still in the center of the building those are those smaller offices um right by the library on either side of the library all those class all those offices there are still staying the same with those um specialized teachers um we did move bright if you see right inside you see right above the bathrooms bright program now has their own room and we have moved everyone out of that inner teacher lounge area that now it's the teacher lounge it that was full of offices we've moved everyone out there minimizing any traffic through there so that the teachers can then go in there and have their lunch and they there's absolutely no um traffic going through that inner um classroom um we're now this year we're going to be using the gym we are in the process of cleaning it out we're about 50 done clearing out the gym um and it will will probably be done um by the first week of student return and um so for the first week the gym teacher will be taking if if the if the weather allows the gym will be outside for the students for the very first week and and you know as as long as the the weather allows there the gym is going to be outside um but that gym area now is being cleared out like i said 50 and that will be another area that will be used not only for only for the students but also like if we have big staff meetings things like that same thing that they're doing at cracker barrel with their gym we're going to be doing the same at ours as far as like lunch and stuff the students will have that one cafeteria only it will only house one classroom at a time but other classrooms that have lunch at the same time will either eat um in their classrooms or they will have outdoor time to have their lunches outdoor we're really promoting as much outdoor time as possible of course weather permitting um and then our after school program um we will be taking about 40 kids and after school program and the areas that they will be using is the orange cafeteria the library and the gym area um for the for after school program and then our medical waiting um room is right next to the nurse if you see right up right by the principal's office right by my office is the nurse and right across the hall is that medical waiting room and some of the interior testing rooms that were right by the main office i think i think i covered everything i think you did um the only thing i'll add much like derek said is that fort river has lots and lots of outdoor space that will be utilized it's very fortunate that it's flat and hopefully it doesn't rain too much bad day to talk about it with a lot of rain coming in the next day or two but we want to we want to support outdoor education as much as possible the only other piece i want to add those fort river families who are here may remember that last year we had a failure terminal failure of the cooling unit on the roof we thanks to our facilities team from quick order right before heatwave installed a a unit that was a ground based unit and that is the plan for fall to continue with that unit it actually pumps out a lot more air and a lot more cooler air so it's helping us with ventilation as well as cooling so we're going to continue with that and then over before next spring we'll make a permanent decision for what uh fort river schooling will look like but we do not have any concerns about cooling at the river this year it worked very well having been a former fort river teacher when i was hearing complaints on a hot day that it was too cold inside that was a really novel thing i think mr shea who worked at fort river could also have a good chuckle about that we were back there in the early 2000s and that was not the concern so our current systems are working and are durable and that is the plan moving forward i said there was a question i think i tried to answer but the orange rooms are the commandantes rooms so because in the combinators program there's two classrooms um half day english half day and spanish they're just noted that way and we are now up to kindergarten first and second grade as that program grows over time i think it is worth noting for everyone on the call that uh fort river situation will get more complex over time unless there are other changes because uh fort river is adding a classroom each year because the kaminantes program means that that we have three or maybe perhaps even uh one grade level four classrooms um as it goes up so just something to be aware of that over time we i think principal hernandez did a great job figuring out creative space but but there is some finite limit on that and we do have concerns moving forward in that and last but not least we'll bring up mr yaffi hi nick how are you very good mike all right let me see if i can successfully navigate to your map yes i'm gonna need my glasses i think so okay well let me help you by making it a little bit larger so as hi everyone out there i can't see you but i know you're there um and as mike said at the beginning there's a lot of similarities between the schools and how we're solving problems and some unique uh differences on behalf of all three of us and the entire staff as as derek mentioned and michelle too like thank you to our custodial staff this has been an enormous undertaking uh to find stuff to welcome people back who were remote and get it in the proper places because at wildwood we really had to do some creative thinking i think there was only uh one teaching team and the two kindergartens that stayed in the same place so it's been a lot of moving of stuff but we are getting things settled so if you if you look at it you know like fort river you can see um six half these on one side and six halves these on the other the former quads are now these beautiful huge spaces and on one side with um you have our second grade first grade and then one third grade now at the far end and then on the other side you have the two third grades three fourth grades and one fifth grade so that left the question like where do we put the other fifth and sixth grade classrooms and so creatively uh we came up with some different solutions so we have uh two fifth grades the remaining two fifth grades are in adjacent so like michelle was doing and derek we're trying to keep in terms of collaboration and teachers working together the the grade level classrooms together so we have actually a husband and wife team side by side with uh mr owen in the art room and this being owen in what used to be our ell space um so these are three classrooms that are have walls and windows and really work well so then we had to figure out what our solution is both for ell and and also for music because the former music room now has one of the sixth grade classrooms i'll get to that later but i just want to point out the sixth grades are close together we have one one sixth grade classroom in the music room one in a cafeteria that has a bank of windows and a door to the outside and the other sixth grade classroom is now in a kindergarten which also is self-contained with a bank of windows so they're close to each other because in our sixth grade model they move from classroom to classroom uh to take math in one room ela and another science in another so going back to the solution in every solution there's also some advantages so with ell not having a space that's just their classroom each ell teacher is embedded and we're going to be enhancing our co-teaching model for ell um so they're embedded in halfsies and the hamsi's really are work well for co-teaching because the teacher can be in the back of the room but also co-teaching everybody and then have small pull out but they don't have to leave the classroom itself are our very creative art and music teachers they have a home base in the back of the library which was our former maker space which is now moved to the front of the library and they'll be doing push in into the classrooms also as michelle said you know and derek said too encouraging people to go outside as much as possible but we also now have freed up a cafeteria cafeteria 2 in the middle now will serve as a breakout room for the adjacent sixth grade but also for the art and music teacher when they as we move into more extended projects they'll be able to bring classes there for especially in art where you have large-scale projects over time whether it's print making and then she can have things uh dry and it'll be available the next time she comes in the remaining cafeteria is going to be used for staff lunches both cafeterias will be used by our after school program as well as the gym for after school we have a variety of small group areas uh our cater to intervention team now has been moved into what used to be the green room um that's here thank you mike and now we'll have smaller green rooms along the side you can see mike they're kind of next to the library there i can't put my finger there you go yes and a green room for those of you that don't know is to get yourself into the green zone so it's really a take a break spot um monitored by our therapeutic team to help kids when they just need a break and they need to get themselves into that green zone where they're calm self-regulated and ready to go back into the classroom our tech teacher like at fort river and crocker farm will be doing push in into the classrooms and has a home base here with what is called our grades three to six intervention our math and reading specialists so one thing and you look at the map that i realize that i'll be emphasizing with our staff is is we're all going to need to be flexible we're all going to need to as we say to the kids get along be nice to each other be kind because we're all coming back you know in some cases we have staff members and children and families who haven't been back in 18 months so this will be a really great way for us to model what we want to see with kids mike did i cover everything dude anything i think you got it all um so i'm actually gonna take the map down add your colleagues back to the call and see if there's any questions that um any of the viewers would have about um here we go uh about in the maps or kind of how the flow is going to work or how students will go i mean i think as we're waiting for people to perhaps weigh in with questions i want to note um there is um it is tight in our schools you know i think we've had declining enrollment for for many years for over 20 years and we've i think made thanks to principles really good use of space over time and we've had a pretty good luxury people may not think that but compared to other schools of having lots of small group spaces lots of pull-out spaces that were really optimal and i think this uh covid and the changes particularly at fort river and wildwood have really challenged us and parker farmer's had space and challenges for since i was a principal and that was that was quite a while ago so it's it's you know it's tighter at crocker farm than it has been but it's not as new and at fort river and wildwood you know we have had you know pretty sufficient space uh for a long time and this is definitely getting quite tight um you know you may have noticed that the exception of a couple classes at crocker farm pretty much everybody's eating in their classroom which means food's delivered it's a little bit of a different process and some of that is just there's no space that we could keep kids distance if they're eating inside other than the classroom there's not a space to go to i think people principals are working really hard on the after school programs i know that's a major interest particularly with the chance change and start time earlier end time to provide space that is needed for the aftercare programs which do such great work with our children but that is also another piece that is going to be challenging um for the year so um i'll stop talking now and see if there's um any questions or comments i think the one about fort river was answered um while people are thinking of questions maybe the only other thing that i was thinking is could each of you talk or maybe one of you could speak to the group just about arrival um just you know where do students go when they get to school we've seen the maps but maybe talking through that a little bit i know mr shea thinks a lot about this one as do his colleagues but um do you mind talking a little bit about when students arrive the plan for where they would go i said i sure mind jumping in quick so um i we i was just writing a little thought about this um so last year um we had reversed our arrival and departure process because we had all the cars come to the front of the property and the west street entrance and all the buses to the shea street um we're going to reverse back to what we had some previous iterations um and the reason being is that we now have a larger number of buses coming back to the property and i won't say hopefully because it's not what i mean but it is challenging to have you know 100 150 cars come to the property our schools are not particularly well designed to have large you know flow of cars so our hope is that is that cars will enter through the shea street engines and arrive at school similar to last year where you know you get around a circle you you don't actually park you know it's a flowing moving um piece where your student will get met by someone and then go straight to class um and and the goal would be to arrive you know again if you're driving the goal would be and we'll send this as a letter no earlier than 8 10 a.m so you know 8 10 i'll say 8 25 would be arrival for cars and that'll be similar for buses probably 8 10 through 8 20.
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so so that's my goal and important importantly um the new data the data that was released the other day that's ultimately kind of siphoning through at the state level now and they'll eventually be finalized in the next month or so that's the data that's going to be used for eco population when the maps are drawn not the 2010 census data we just wanted to show um more or less you know that there were about 66 000 people in the district at the last census you know which equals you know roughly i'm not sure 14 000 or so or 13 000 people per trustee area based on five um you know that's obviously going to change a little bit uh depending upon the census but we just wanted to kind of ballpark it and show what the old data would have been and we can compare that to the new data when it's ready yeah i really appreciate that yeah so i just my request is it would be really great if you're able to bring that data even if you're getting it from the raw data and we just would have understanding that it would it could it could and will probably change just because we know it hasn't been fully validated i would appreciate that because i think that would give me as a board member a better sense of what we're looking at um so that that would be very much appreciated yeah i think we'll we'll we'll do that to the extent we can and just uh provide the appropriate caveats or or clarifications adrian that's it for me thank you any other questions from the award okay then we move on to item 10.2 the 2021 summer extravaganza programming presentation and so i will turn it over to mr frank king good evening board i will start us off this evening we are excited to provide you with some of the highlights of our summer extravaganza programming um i want to tell you that the team this year really pushed themselves to reimagine a summer learning program in partnership with our think together partners and focus really not on remediation but on acceleration and also focused on hands-on project-based learning we were able to see firsthand the reciprocal relationship between project-based learning and social emotional learning as well we learned a lot along the way and in a cycle of continuous improvement we're going to take our new learnings and provide an even better summer extravaganza program next year so with that i would like to turn it over to mr frank kang but we'll take it from here good evening board of education superintendent ortega cabinet and the ausd community um before we start the presentation i would like to take this opportunity to thank all those involved with our 2021 summer extravaganza so many people made it happen teachers including ptosis classified staff counselors administrators citrus college think together staff with particular thanks to stacey gautamas and samira mejia we were able to offer both online and in-person summer opportunities for three 12-day sessions for a total of 36 days not only does students have an exciting enrichment and learning opportunities but our high school students had the opportunity to recover credit thank you to the ed services team for their collaboration site administrators who accommodated all the students who wanted to participate the human resources team particularly dr alexis norman mr ortega for his leadership and dr dana mitchell for her vision to realize the extravaganza now i would like to present mr david luebenos who did such an amazing job as summer principal he will speak about the summer program at both gladstone and azusa high school david thank you very much frank good evening superintendent artur ausd board members administrators colleagues friends and families i will agree i will be presenting in somewhat general terms for both glaston and azusa high schools james arianis did a fantastic job at this is a high school but he's not available tonight because he has since accepted an administrative position with the bassett unified school district therefore the four middle and high school slides may be displayed while i present first i would like to express my appreciation for the opportunity to serve the summer program at glaston high school i personally attended azusa schools including gladstone so it is a service that is close to my heart i would also like to recognize and express my appreciation for all those that work together to make the middle and high school summer programs a success the director of the summer programs at the secondary level frank chang and his secretary georgina rodriguez maldonado the clerks irene rodriguez and annette campos the data entry technicians magdalena vargon and laura navarro and the counselors dr janae korum joyce de leon and jackie oak the citrus college and think together directors coordinators and leaders and of course all the teachers and instructional aides for their instruction and care given to our students each brought their talents to the summer programs and played an invaluable role as a member of the secondary summer school team i would also like to express a special thank you to the sci principals gabriel fernandez and dr martin gomez for their and their staffs for welcoming the summer programs and providing their support and an environment conducive to our work at both high schools middle and high school students were engaged in project-based learning activities middle school students were enrolled in math language arts and art classes where they worked collaboratively and culminated each session with presentations or their projects to their peers they also received a wonderful opportunity to to familiarize themselves with the high school campuses and the rising ninth graders were able to earn elective semester credits this will help make the transition to high school much easier as they begin the new school year the high school students were also enrolled in math and language arts classes as well as physical education at azusa high school in the computer-based apex classes students were able to complete courses in a variety of subject areas depending on their needs and through the sped program students were enrolled in math language arts science and social studies classes students had the opportunity to recover from five to thirty semester units and advanced in their high school course requirements in addition to the in-person courses many other students were able to complete their courses virtually in 17 different apex classes during both sessions one and two in association with citrus college again the students were able to advance in their high school course requirements through both grade report recovery and grade improvement opportunities the combination of the modes of instruction and the variety of courses available allow the summer this summer's program to reach and meet the needs of a larger diverse group of high school students thank you i now pass it on to dr dana mitchell thank you very much david i appreciate that so much um we also had uh our um as they mentioned our summer bridge program um one of um there so many projects stood out there's one in particular that stood out in a math class the students were learning uh geometry principles but they for their project they were building um a designing a blueprint and building miniature uh tiny houses um and it was just it was just so fantastic to see the students just uh so engaged and being able to apply um their mathematic as well um so it was just excellent um in terms of our elementary program um we were at six uh elementary sites this summer and we had three fantastic summer administrators uh we had patti abalo david hartman and anna kwok um who were um our summer administrators and so i'd like to introduce uh patty abalo who is one of our uh fabulous teachers at powell elementary and she was one of our summer administrators and she's going to give you a couple of highlights from our elementary summer program so patty i'll turn it over to you good evening everybody thank you so much for letting me have a few minutes um i really want to start off by saying the best part of summer extravaganza was hearing kids laugh i would be in the office and you would just hear kids and teachers laughing and it was just heartwarming they were so excited to be on campus and it really was it was great it was at lee and powell you would hear just kids giggling and just being excited to be there um so yeah we had some kindergarten teachers who really um dove into the project-based learning um they read a story to their class called um oh my gosh can't think of it right now um oh my goodness they were planting seeds though and the book was about seeds and what was it called again the empty pot that empty pot oh my gosh great book yes thank you yes so they read the empty pot and so the teachers took it definitely um to the max with that they got seeds they put seeds in dark closets they put seeds with too much water and did all the different kind of experiments you would do with seeds these were the littlest kids so these were our kindergartners and our first graders um and of course project-based learning isn't about craft but with the kindergartner who doesn't want to put a paintbrush and paint and great stuff like that in their hands and dirt and so they did and so you can see on this slide that they had some pots that they got to plant and they were able to see how their seeds were growing and how they grew best so it was a great project for our littlest kiddos um the other thing also that they did at lee um which was pretty amazing um yasmine trujillo she read the book the wild robot and so she decided that they were going to build robots and she gave me this list of supplies and i was just shocked of all these different things but she put it all together and these kids it was amazing to go into this class these kids had motors and batteries and there was glue guns and it was just chaos in that class that the kids were just learning and enjoying and learning off of each other and i know i had told this to dana a few times that um this one boy he kept trying to put the battery onto the motor and this little robot kept trying to take off and you know he looked at mrs trujillo and she said you know try making a switch for it and the first thing he said was okay well where's the aluminum foil which blew my mind because if somebody told me to make a switch my first question would not be where is the aluminum foil it would definitely be how do i make a switch um it was just it was really heartwarming to see all of it and again just like david lewevano said think together and everybody else they were amazing some of the things they did and so i really appreciate it we had a great time thank you so much thank you patty um just uh just a couple of other highlights um part of that curriculum that patty mentioned is that um the students uh read grade level literature and then they engaged in this hands-on project um and that was aligned is something that was going on uh some kind of concept that was in the story and so um for example um here's some on this slide you can see some of the books that they read um there is one book ada twist scientists they they uh did a lava lamp um project with uh and made their own uh lava lamp uh they read rosie revere engineer and tested propellers with paper and created leo airplanes um they read after the fall and created ways to protect egg from dropping um uh they um they read holes and they engineered a machine that would dig dirt faster they read the lemonade war and they created lemonade stands and so um it was also a chance for the upper graders to um to work with the primary grades and they the little ones enjoyed pretending to be customers and so they they had to create a business plan and so um it was just a fantastic project that was able to uh incorporate multiple uh grade levels as well um they read charlie in the chocolate factory and did several experiments to test buoyancy and weight they read hoot and they um created environment for owls um just absolutely fantastic um we we did we learned so much and again um we are just so grateful to um everybody that participated um and really made this happen uh teachers spent a lot of time uh with their um pbl uh professional learning over the summer and worked with our high tech high graduate school of education uh project-based learning camp and um we just really were able to put a lot of those things into place and so again super grateful to everybody who participated um now i want to turn it over much of this we had a tremendous partnership with our think together partners and so i'm now going to turn it over to samira mahia and who's going to talk to uh to you and just tell you a little bit about how think together partnered with us good afternoon damon thank you so much for the introduction um good evening honorable board president board cabinet and community um as dana mentioned my name is samira mejia and i'm the director of program and operations for think together programs in our san giber valley region and i'm really excited to be here today to share about our summer learning extravaganza programs in azusa um so as you've heard the summer was really one like no other in partnership with azusa unified our student learning recovery program really provided the summer learning opportunities resulting from the covid related disruptions to the teaching and learning experiences of that typical school year and so in collaboration with the district and through our leadership with dana mitchell and frank chang uh we were able to collaborate and really design uh the instruction and the program offerings for our programs supporting and staffing hiring and training our paraprofessionals as well as our certificated teachers and providing that high quality summer program so as you can see we had the opportunity to provide summer programs at six of our elementary sites and our middle school students had the opportunity to participate in program and expose themselves to that high school setting and so you see here our students from center had the opportunity to participate at azusa high school as well as foothill and then our students at slauson participated at glaston high school and then we were servicing our full programs at isuzu high and gladstone um and some of the uh continued reinforcements and and program aspects uh included a lot of the safety uh protocols so reinforcing our social distancing our temperature checks those hourly cleanings and just ensuring that our students were our students and staff were maintaining safety throughout all of the program and so with our think together summer extravaganza we had the opportunity to reach and serve over 1300 students across our elementary middle and high school sites and so students that attended the full session from june 14th up until august 3rd had an opportunity to receive 36 additional in-person instruction days which is huge a safe space for them to one interact with their peers and start participating in the hands-on activities that we provided and so that equated to the 252 additional hours of safe interactive hands-on learning and so the design and supplemental instruction provided that active and engaging positive school environment and so we integrated subjects throughout our program offerings that included visual and performing arts science technology engineering physical education and enrichment activities and so embedded throughout our summer offerings included on-site excursions and workshops some of the fun things that we saw in elementary sites included bubble shows where students had an opportunity to engage and learn about the signs of bubbles and participate in bubble assemblies for our middle school students we had an opportunity to participate with bricks for kids lego workshops and so we had a lego expert provide instruction and support students through their own design of robots and each student had an opportunity to receive their own lego kits and so in addition to the academics as dana mentioned programs included the highly engaging enrichment that introduced our students for high school and so similar to elementary and middle school programs our high school students were able to participate in offerings that included the social awareness aspect the visual and performing arts life skills and stem and so i'll be able to go through a little bit more in depth as far as what each of those look like and so in terms of our academics as presented earlier our students participated in that daily instruction support from 8 a.m to 12 p.m with that emphasis on project-based learning and so throughout summer students were able to receive that additional 144 hours of academic instruction provided by our credential teachers included many of those that were as a unified teachers and so it was really nice to see students having an opportunity to see face to face with some of the teachers that they hadn't seen for months back and so in our elementary middle school students again engaged in that project based learning with a focus on grade level literature and in addition our ninth grade summer bridge students participated in math and ela supports and so specifically as you heard students participating and presenting their business plans and branding concepts and developing their lemonade businesses and so in partnership with mrs rossi at valley dell students a little quote that i wanted to be able to share from one of our students he indicated that it has helped him in various ways and it's given him the opportunity to advance himself in mathematics and language arts and it's helped him to be more social and interactive with his peers so it's truly a testament to our certificated teachers um that supported our students and so as you can see with our stem offerings with our invention adventures our paraprofessionals our program leaders supported students through a variety of exploratory inventions so students had an opportunity to engage with a kit of different household materials and they had an opportunity to engage from the design concept discussions how to build the eiffel tower with um aluminum foil or um q-tips and laminate um and so it was really interesting just to see all of the different inventions and how different materials really impacted the invention success in our high school programs you saw our high school students focus on drone building and technology and successfully accomplishing drone mission and design in terms of our physical activities students were able to perfect their skills and time by participating in a very competitive game of sports stacking so each school each student received their own individualized sports decking kit uh and week over week they were changing their methods of collapsing and building the cups and participated in many student tournaments also including dueling different program staff in addition to the sports stacking curriculum students also participated in outdoor team building and problem solving activities and so through our continuous partnership with the u.s soccer foundation each student also had the opportunity to receive their own pair of cleats and soccer balls and they engaged in weekly skill building summer program moving on to our visual and performing arts our students participated in weekly dances on perfecting their skills and showcasing some of the new moves that they were able to groove to as programs reconvene together at the welcome and closing of programs in our middle school and high school students they explored reading comprehension through music as it relates to history and so they had an opportunity to take a walk down memory lane as far as how history and how music has really impacted how music has developed time and time again and so it was really exciting and interesting to see and and have students learn about history the events and the artists that are impacting our communities today and then finally with our high school program uh students participated in some life skill opportunities so with our workforce readiness education program students participated in resume building job interview skills they participated in live mock interviews to better prepare them for either college interviews or future workforce interviews with our driver's ed program in partnership with state farm we had about 20 students participate in the teen driver education program that really supports them and prepares them for the driver permit test and then with project citizen and dude be nice students really had an opportunity to revisit current events um policies that are important to them specifically dress code and maybe how they would want to impact and and advocate for their peers and each other and really being able to build and create that positive environment in the school setting so as you can see with our summer extravaganza it really was an exciting time as mentioned to see students laughing once again interacting with one another and i cannot thank you enough for just the support and the opportunity to be able to bring expanded learning programs to the children and families of azusa it truly has been an honor to be a part of this learning community and we're thrilled that we can continue to support rss unified children and help them grow and really become productive young citizens and leaders of the community so i thank you again so much to our partners dana mitchell frank chan and all of our summer administrators for their continuous support and site visits students really were excited to welcome you onto campuses and showcase the work that was happening um for the 36 days of summer so thank you again um for your partnership and for your time thank you so much damira and again thank you to everybody um to frank chang who oversaw the summer program and the entire ed services team all of the summer administrators and of course think together who partnered with us to reimagine this innovative learning opportunity for our students so thank you again for um uh providing us some time to share this with you thank you any questions or comments from the board um i'd like to make a comment i i thought that the program it was really its name the summer school estrada i did go to some of the elementary schools and i did see the kids in motion they were doing that sports stacking that they were talking about and the move and groove that was really good it was really cute yes to see all the kids laughing and playing and the teacher was even dancing and um i do recall uh some of the projects that i seen the the building and the inventions i recall in the past the students that were gate students where the only students are able to do that at pictures college now here we have it here with azusa and any child was able to participate so i want to thank you all everyone include administration thing together and i know dr dana mitchell was a captain of the ship and you know it worked well the kids were having fun and i want to thank you all for taking that time board member roderick espana did did you personally get out there and move and groove with the students and i wanted to but then uh mr ortega was there and i didn't want to embarrass him that's a good call i thought about it you know i'm like i want to jump in there with those kids they were having too much fun you know any other questions from any other board members yeah i have my hand raised i i probably can't see it though um yeah just i'm just first just say i so amazing and as we heard um arturo saying earlier right i think we have um people at the state level recognizing the work the hard work that you guys did the amazing work you did that you pulled together in a very short time period i will just i'll just say um and so that's actually leads to my question i have two questions and maybe this is for dana and arturo so do we anticipate trying to offer a summer some kind of summer offering next year as well that's the question number one and then i'll follow up for that yep sure we do actually plan on offering summer programming again and we we actually start planning um we start planning uh the in the fall uh for our uh summer programming so we uh we have meetings on the calendar already i believe in i wanna say november is when we get the team together to really begin to look at what we will be offering for our students that's great so anticipated my second question is that was going to be around the planning process and and how and how do we anticipate building in enough time enough collaborative time to be able to really have a really um full experience i would just add i hope that we could find a way to engage the city um i think um the city was running a parks and rec program at the same it and there was some overlap in the time and it would be great especially if these offerings are going to be available to everyone that we find ways to collaborate i've seen other places too where um where there's like a connection where kids go are going to the day program the school program they get like a pass to go to a free swim with the swimming pool so i'd love to be able to incorporate the city in our planning and make this really a true community summer extravaganza so that's that's one request that i do have thank you board member cruz gonzalez any other comments or questions from the board i will echo much of what has been said i i thought uh dr mitchell and mr chang when when i heard the name summer extravaganza for a moment i wondered would we live up to it it only lasted for a moment because then i remembered all of the those who are involved in making it an extravaganza and so now hearing this report um i can say that it definitely was an extravaganza and so ms mejia thank you so much for for your partnership and and please on behalf of of the board and the district uh send that thank you to the rest of the think together team we're grateful for you and grateful for the partnership i also have to say just some of some of the names that i heard mentioned during this time appeared miss abalo mr luevanos my former science teacher uh dr coram former my former english teacher miss de leon miss hoke miss trujillo miss kwok my former uh math teacher i mean name after name that i hear who are not only heroes in my own life but legends in our community and so i just want to say thank you so much for all of the hard work that went into truly making this an extravaganza uh during i mean a a very unique and challenging time period a very unique and challenging summer um and so just just thank you so much for for for everything um that that was was done for for our our students this summer board president board vice president if i may um add uh i have had uh such an amazing opportunity this summer to connect with over 100 families and one of the things that i go out of my way to ask is how summer's going how is summer's going and then to follow up to say did you happen to go to summer program summer extravaganza and overwhelming uh sentiment of gratitude of um content like my child is now going to be ready for the first day of school um comments like i see new life in in my in my kid i see excitement comments like i actually could use summer extravaganza as a as a as a ticket to say hey if you don't clean your room you're not going to go to some extravaganza tomorrow um that's how engaging students were were connecting to to the program and so uh to hear that um directly from our parents um is is one of the greatest testaments to uh to that and so i also want to join in the in the thank you salute to all the people to all the folks who came together to provide this love it moving on then to item 10.3 ausd restorative restart and we will turn that over to mr ortega uh thank you uh so we had uh an opportunity to uh to listen uh right now uh to uh summer extravaganza right um and so um that that closed out a couple of weeks ago uh but now uh we want to focus uh our next attention to uh restart um in two days um we open our doors uh to our students uh to our community uh to to welcome them uh to our new school year and so uh tonight um what we'd like to do is is kind of give a multi-dimensional look uh into what a restorative restart means and by multi-dimensional i'm talking about health i'm talking about safety i'm talking about program i'm talking about academics talking about social emotional i'm talking about really looking at a system as we as we get ready to open our doors uh two days from now the summer extravaganza gives us a little preview into what we can do as a district and so i'm thankful to uh dr mitchell's uh comment and i i praise the team that really lives to um this this this mindset of continuous improvement uh so uh with that um if we can go to the next slide um i would like to turn it over uh to miss uh latasha jamal thank you superintendent ortega so we're going to talk about health and safety so all of our campuses are equipped with um their own stock of inventory for perps on personal protective equipment this would include but not limited to additional face shields disposable masks gloves gowns additionally we have sanitation that will be taking place on all our campuses so nightly all of our classrooms will be disinfected in all our offices uh we will continue having hand washing um stations outdoors all of our campus had one installed as well as most of our classrooms have hand washing stations indoors in addition to that we are going to continue to have the hand sanitizers throughout the campus as well as inside the classrooms all of our high entry points like our entry points outdoors and play yard they will also have the touch list and um sanitizer stations um upon entering all of our campuses including district facilities you all staff and students will be required to have their temperature scans that will be done through the mega scanner that are in most of the cafeterias or the multi-purpose rooms and each office is equipped with the touchless individual scanner also all of our campuses also have the handheld thermometers that all of our staff can use at leisure we will continue to provide our ausd transportation on our buses mask will be required the students will enter from the front and sit through the back and exit from the front first our bus drivers will take all of our students temperature upon entering the bus as well as having a screening question and as i shared earlier we will continue to offer our meals we will have our breakfast lunch and supper in addition to our curbside distribution that will continue twice a week throughout the school year and at this time i will pass it over to mr monkeyo thank you mr mall i'm going to start off and talk about the notification protocols that we have a notification process that we will follow once we're made aware of a confirmed positive state this process begins with this school or district being notified of a clovit19 positive employee or student that process is directed that's why that person is directed to isolate and they are interviewed and the contact facing process begins the individual is also provided with clovid19 resources notifications to the schools and to on the employees are sent via email as required the district will also communicate with lacdph and cal osha as is required moving on to the decision tree uh we have multiple decision trees that we've uh shared with community and staff uh and it starts with the student or employee indicating that when upon entering that they have no symptoms or exposure and the employee or student enters a school site or disability if however on the other hand the student or employee screens and screening indicates symptoms for pulvin 19 the employee or student is directed to not report to school or work and then seek medical attention if the uh if there is a the symptoms are not consistent with clovid19 then the student and or employee i must stay home for medical provider guidance uh if on the other hand the um employer student is provided the test and the test is negative the employer student must stay home until they are symptom-free if they employ your student test positive then the employee or student must isolate we go through the process that i explained earlier and if the employer student is not tested we treat those cases as if the employee tested positive and must also isolate if the screening identifies that the employee symptoms is not consistent with cloven 19 then the stat administrator in hr if appropriate will determine if the employee should be sent home um i wanted to talk now about close contact um because this is going to be a term that we use often as we talk about close contacts and whether or not quarantine but first let me allow i mean let me um define what a close contact is it's a person who is within six feet of someone who is a confirmed 12 in 19 positive for a total of four or 15 minutes or more in a 24 hour period so it could be 15 minutes all at once or it could be a set of five minutes here another five minutes there totaling 15 in a 24 hour period another person who could be close contact is a person who has unprotected contact with bodily fluids from someone with cloven 19 for example if someone passed without a phase covering and you're in that space where the cough particles may be coming uh so uh allow me to distinguish between a closed contact that is vaccinated versus a close contact contact that is not vaccinated uh vaccinated post contact are recommended to take it over 19 tests five days after exposure and will be provided in medical grade face covering uh if the student or staff member who is a close contact is asymptomatic uh and vaccinated they are they can continue to go to school or work uh these clothes contacted i'm sorry these close contact vaccinated individuals to monitor their symptoms for 14 days any change in their symptoms to be reported to the school or to hr uh employees uh if on the other hand the student or staff member who's a vaccinated post contact test positive for cloven 19 the individual must isolate for 10 days uh until fever-free without um for 24 hours without people reducing medication now unvaccinated close contact uh these uh folks uh are also recommended to take a cloven 19 test and if they're on campus they'll be provided a medical brave face covering if the test is negative the close contact or staff member i'm sorry the close contact student or staff member was quarantined at home for 10 days and if it's a student and the student remains asymptomatic while quarantine they may end the quarantine after seven days if they receive a negative test after day five from their last day of exposure employees do not have this option to have a store and quarantine period if they are asymptomatic these individuals these individuals must all still monitor their symptoms through day 14.
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