on oh i could hear it immediately good evening everyone i'd like to welcome you to and open the august 25th meeting of chico unified school district board of education we are going to retire into closed session and i'd like to know if anyone would like to comment on closed session seeing no one we will retire into closed session m uh good evening everyone um welcome to the open session of the august 25th board of education meeting the board has been in closed session and there is no action to report we're going to start with uh the flag salute of course if you could stand and join us in the flag salute i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you and this is our first meeting at the new marigold facility what a fantastic accommodation and thank you to everyone that voted yes on the bond measures that provided us with the funds to build this school it is just amazing and our our kiddos i'm sure are enjoying the new facility this year okay next is um an update on oh no that was that was this excuse me yes student report well it is really exciting to be back in school we have a week and a few days under our belt here and one of the things that we talked about in the spring was how to transition back into school and how to make our students comfortable coming back to school after they had had 18 months of different types of education so we have a treat for you tonight we have some absolutely fabulous junior high school students here to tell you about how they prepared and how they prepared others for the start of school and i'd like to introduce mr shepherd who's going to introduce our web students thank you superintendents daily you're not here to listen to me let's go ahead and invite the students up to the podium they can introduce themselves and tell us all about the last couple of weeks come on up [Applause] hello chico unified staff board and families my name is riley carter i'm a web leader at marsh junior high this year and as well as being in web i'm in leadership i joined web as an opportunity to improve my leadership skills and leave a positive impact on the school that i love this is harder than i thought it'd be just for the record my favorite part of web is being able to see all the sixth graders on the first day of school especially the ones i got to make a bond with through the web experience it was a lot of fun meeting new people on the first day and during the web orientation it's really cool to see kids around campus as the year continues it meant a lot that they're comfortable enough to come up and say hi to myself and other web leaders it was a lot of fun going into a classroom with myself my partner and a group of sixth graders to cement a positive impact through games and conversations we can all remember what it is like moving schools let alone just finishing fifth grade this experience meant a lot to me as a sixth grader and this was another reason for me joining webb thank you again for letting us create an environment where everybody belongs good afternoon ladies and gentlemen my name is brooklyn vanderick i'm an eighth grader at march junior high school and i have the honor to participate and be a web leader at march this year this is very personal to me when i was in sixth grade i attended web orientation with zero friends knowing nothing coming from a school with about 11 kids in my class and i left that same orientation now having friends and excited and feeling socially and academically ready for the year it was such an amazing experience to repay what was done for me in that stage of my school career and to be able to positively impact students and support them in the best way i know how through our amazing school that i know will do the same i know our 10 hours of training was worth it to all of us seeing these sixth grade students in classrooms with only students themselves learning laughing making friends and most importantly having fun thank you all for having us speak tonight and being a part of something this wonderful [Applause] um hello my name is fia darcelas and i'm a web leader at chico junior high school i remember coming to sixth grade and i was very nervous coming from school who overall we were all very close but the idea of meeting new people going to new school switching classes was just terrifying so when we came here to the web orientation i was very nervous and just really eager to just see how it was and when i met my web leaders they were all very kind to me and it was a great like example of what i wanted to be like when i was in eighth grade and now seven or three years later i came to eighth grade knowing that i wanted to be a web leader and knowing that i wanted to help other sixth graders the same way my love leaders helped me and being able to conversate with them and make bonds and now it was their first day of school and they were all super comfortable super excited and i just know that me and all the other web leaders are very proud and we worked very hard um to help them all feel super comfortable at school and i really hope that we did [Applause] my name is faith roberts also at chico junior and i'm talking gonna talk about training so as web leaders we have made it a priority to help our sixth graders feel safe loved and prepared for school we had web training so that we were prepared to prepare them it was fun because we got to like um play games and design posters that would greet them and then the next day got to play those games with them and wave those signs as we greeted them at the door and i would like to thank mr caldera and mrs huss for making our web possible but also the school board for making it possible for not only our school but all those other schools [Applause] hello i am taylor shulkin and i am ashlynn and we are both web leaders from bidwell junior high and web is all about helping the new sixth grade students feel welcome at a big new school as we know there are many different types of kids with all different likes and interests during our web training training we were trained to do certain activities that we would be doing with our sixth graders on web orientation day at orientation there were some groups of sixth graders who were quiet while others were louder we chose to be web leaders because we remember what it was like in sixth grade being being a scared new student at a big new school and we also decided to be web leaders because we wanted to help the new students love so that they could love fidwell as much as we do we know that coming from an elementary school with only one teacher to having six is a big change that takes time to get used to that's why we're here that's what web is all about thank you [Applause] i just want to thank all of our students for being here tonight it is hard to talk in front of an adult audience and also know that it's being broadcast out there and each one of you were absolutely fabulous and my request of you is finish your education keep doing the great things you're doing keep welcoming people and go into education we need people like you to be teachers and administrators and superintendents or board members so keep going and we will not make you stay you can go ahead and go if you would like but you're welcome to stay as well and i don't know if the board has anything they want to say other than just i i would encourage as the superintendent did to stay involved with education after you've decided on your course of education after you graduate from high school high school is just the jumping off point there's many deep pools excuse me many deep pools out there for you to jump into after high school but you'll do great swim and enjoy the heck out of all of the challenges that are ahead of you and then come back and become teachers for the next generation thank you and as they are exiting i'm going to come up and start the superintendent's report each meeting when we're in session we give a superintendent's award to different members community members classified certificated but typically we do not recognize district office administrators and i am going to break with tradition tonight as was announced at our last board meeting our assistant superintendent for business is moving to san mateo county and i cannot even begin to tell you how much mr baltimore has done for chico unified i can't tell you how much we're going to miss his leadership and how we're going to miss him as a person but what i can tell you is some of the things that he has done during his tenure in chico unified kevin oversees our budget as well as the very diverse business division which includes fiscal services payroll nutrition services facilities and maintenance operations and transportation as many of you are aware as a district we've faced challenges over the years we have certainly had budgetary challenges we have had challenges at the bargaining table and we have had challenges maintaining our facilities kevin was instrumental in ensuring that we had got and maintained a sound budget because he is mr we absolutely will not deficit spend that has now been ingrained in my brain um he has just an innate innate ability to build trusting relationships he's very honest and direct and people trust him and bond with him and that certainly has helped us in our relationships with the community um as well as with our union relationships and he's very clear in articulating our three key budget priorities student programs employing compensation and balanced budget and that has worked so well for us so you have taught me a lot and those three things will be there but of lasting impact and kevin is the reason that our bond came to be he sold all of us on the idea that we could do it and really went out and led us in convincing our community that it was needed and that we would spend the dollars wisely and as this building is an example we've done that and if you look across the district we've had many many new facilities built and every single campus in our district has been touched by the major k major e or major a dollars everyone has had renovations and there are still major renovations to come to our sites so while you're leaving us please know you've had a lasting impact and we are forever grateful and for that i'll give you a piece of paper [Applause] thank you i'd like to add one thing to what kelly just said kevin you said something one time at a meeting at the district office that has stuck with me and it was probably three four years ago and we were talking about um deficit spending and getting out of that and what would we do with the excess money if we got out of that and you said something that let me know where your heart has always been and that was if we aren't putting the money out there to educate kids and getting it as close to the classrooms as we possibly can we're not doing our job with our assets and i appreciated that your number one priority was the kids in the classroom thank you i'd like to say something too so um in the dark ages um when we would have conferences with our union and kevin still worked for the county i'm sure this kevin can remember that a lot of members of the union would not believe our numbers they thought we were fudging well why couldn't we just move one money pile over to another money pile and so the skill that kevin had was that he could clarify and be believed that the numbers he was presenting were real and so as much as i like to harass kevin i am going to miss that punching bag but as much as i like to do that i think that's been an incredibly important asset uh to the district that when we say this this is the number it's real so thank you kevin um i'd like to yes remember dobby i'd like to add to this as well um because i didn't know kevin very well before joining the school board i this is my ninth year as a person of this district which is very exciting i started teaching here in 2013 and i can tell you teachers in the trenches yeah it's a special year i can tell you a lot of us teachers in the trenches you know working on the day to day focused on our students we don't really understand the total inner workings um except for when we get a chance to hear you know collaborate with our union representatives and our site um reps um and those first couple of years here were tumultuous and it was interesting that there was a shift noticeably you know in our culture and i just want to acknowledge that and also apologize for not realizing that that you had a big role to play in that and i didn't know that until i joined the school board so thank you for all that you've done in your time here with chico unified and i think that you're leaving us in a good way and we'll make sure that your work has continued so thank you yes mr lando thank you um i know we're also looking for someone to take kevin's place and that's going to be a hard thing to do uh the thing that i was always talking about you kevin is that you are both clearly an expert at what you do and you're so humble and calm about it like you you walk board members who may or may not know anything about budgets through this you can get along with the teachers union you're an excellent manager that's a rare combination of someone who is so good with the people side and the money side as well and i work with a lot of cbo's and you're far and away the best so wish you a lot of luck and i don't know how we are going to fill your shoes frankly but we'll try so i'll just want to thank the board and the chico community this was always my dream job was to work here at chico and people may or may not know at one point when i started in education finance i went to the cbo that was at chico unified and asked him at the time how do i get your job in 10 years and and it turned out it was almost 10 years to the date that i actually got to the opportunity to do the job so i love chico my family's here my grandmother was a teacher at chico unified so i'm just really thankful for the opportunity so thank you thank you kevin that concludes your report okay the next is number six announcements are there any announcements yes ms dalby i have two announcements um take this time to wear my hat as a rep from butte environmental council um tomorrow the environmental council is holding a community forum it will be downtown at bidwell bowl amphitheater near children's park this free forum for the community is about wildfire climate and our future we'll have a panel of experts speaking on their different parts of wildfire and how it affects our community and how we can become a more resilient community moving forward the second announcement is that the registration for the 34th annual bidwell park and chico creek's cleanup is now underway this is the 34th year of doing this cleanup with the environmental council in the city of chico last year it turned into a two-day event this year it's two two days again september 18th and 19th last year with over 550 volunteers we cleaned up over 21 tons of waste from our parks and creeks and so we are hoping to have just as good or better turnout this year so please spread the word and all the information can be found on our butte environmental council social media pages and also on our website thank you any other announcements board okay if there are no further announcements we'll move to items from the floor i believe we have one speaker we do have one speaker notification while it didn't come in in a normal speaker card format there's indication this person wanted to speak in person however i don't think brent mcguire brent mcguire is is not here so that's the only one we have yeah for just an fyi for the board there is a um email to the board from mr mcguire on our communications link that email was also linked as public comment so it is available for the public to view as well yeah thank you okay um mr hanlon negotiations update i have nothing new to report being the first week of school last week we will not be entering into negotiations until later in september but i see mr maddie stepping up to the microphone he may want to share some other things too i i think we're meeting september 9th and so we'll we'll be doing that we were uh and that will also be me this friday so we're looking at as we see what numbers come in student wise looking at compensation and we're looking at at another uh multi-year if it's if it's feasible another multi-year compensation deal will take care of me and jim until we retire okay move on this is a not an action item so it was just for comments so on the consent calendar is there um uh anybody that would like to pull yes dr kaiser i want to pull 4.2 4.2 anything else excuse me while i get okay any other i believe we'll need to pull 1.1 due to caitlyn's absence oh yes thank you 1.1 as well the minutes uh because of your absence okay um anything else okay all those in favor of um approving the consent calendar with the exception of 1.1 and 4.2 i we do not [Laughter] i move the approval of the consent calendar minus the two items that were pulled one point one and four point two six mr tennister and we have a motion from mr tennis in a second from dr kaiser um now all those in favor it's going to be um voice vote welcome dalby hi thank you kaiser i tennis robinson i okay um 1.1 was the is the first one in order and we pulled that because um ms dalby was not present for the let's see there's two dates on that uh were you were you absent for both dates just august fourth meeting just which one august 4th okay thank you so we need to approve the other one i don't know why my two agendas are fighting with me yes a motion to approve the um july 21st i some move the motion in a second to approve the july 21st final minutes um yes all those in favor signify by saying aye aye thank you for approved five nothing and then the um final minutes for the 8-4 meeting i need a motion i move acceptance of those minutes mr landau has moved approval second mr tennis has has spoken first and will second i can't see erica is if she needs it she's trying to see you too oh okay okay um all those in favor we're going to do a um we'll do a voice should be fine right a voice vote because caitlyn needs to abstain ms dalby huh yeah ms dobby abstain dr kaiser uh i vote yes mister mr landon randall robinson i okay okay educational services control that was in the um consent calendar let me get to where i need to be we need to go to four point four point two dr kaiser i am so sorry yes 4.2 so i have to recuse myself from 4.2 due to a potential conflict so that's why i pulled it yes i understand okay um i need a motion some move second i'll second that thanks i have a motion and a second to approve 4.2 with dr kaiser abstaining all those in favor ms dalby dalby i kaiser abstains mr tennis tennis eye lando i robinson i thank you i know we're okay item number 10 discussion action calendar educational services um we are going to go over the opening day updates for 2122 mr shepherd and mr sullivan yeah i'll actually go through the slideshow and if we have any questions for mr shepherd and mr sullivan they will be here for you guys and plus mr vincent also and mr hanlon okay so we're going to be going over our opening update we like to do this every year to show you how our first week of school went and i got some information to go through they gave me a new clicker so i'm hoping it works it does some of the things that i will be going over it will be the summer programs that we have um our staffing that we hire professional development enrollment facilities and management coal and extracurricular participation technology and safety protocols our summer programs approximate participation we had credit recovery that was our high school credit recovery program had 385 students involved in that our tk5 summer sessions that on the board approved through our essler dollars we had over 1200 students participate in that our kindergarten boot camp we had 18 students participate in that our extended school year our esy had 316 students involved in that and then we had junior high early back and we had 155 students participate in that this is clearly the highest number of students that we've had during our summer programs obviously the tk5 summer sessions with the 1200 students was a big bonus for getting kids [Music] for the learning loss and getting them back on our campuses um new staffing new to chico unified our certificate of staff we had our largest amount of staff i believe and at least in my time that i've been here um normally we would have 40 to 50 new hires for the school year this year we had 118 new hires 118 and i just want to say we we talked about this at the opening professional development day we had 116 out of 118 of those teachers show up for our new teacher training dave we had two days of that i believe was on the ninth and the tenth or the 10th and 11th it was 9th 10th and 11th we had them and they showed up in mass numbers which was great and i would like to thank miss moretti he provided lunch on the first day for all those new teachers so thank you for that um out of those 118 i just want to um again this is one of the things that we decided on the board was to add more counseling so we added 17 more counselors to our staff um this year so again we've um they're all working and we've been meeting with them and actually during the summer we started meeting with them to go over the structure of our counseling and how we were going to use all the new counselors and that's been a great um thing for us because it really got us back meeting with our counselors and the needs of our students classified staff we hired 125 new classified staff and that's a june 1st of 21.
large class sizes for our little babies they're five some of them are four haven't even turned five yet until september so when we're talking about what we need to do and the amount of information that we need to be able to have our students attain having that large of a class size is really hard um a lot of our students are coming in i'm a title one school so they're coming in with a lot of disadvantages and i feel like sometimes with these large class sizes it gives them even more of a disadvantage the pacing in our curriculum our curriculum is great but the pacing is so fast when we have kiddos who don't even know what their name looks like we're already at 12 sight words and 24 letters they think it's too much for them and i can't give them the stuff that they need when i have behaviors and we have self-contained kiddos coming into our classrooms which i absolutely love having them in but it does make it difficult to be able to meet the needs of all of our students i also want to talk about i was one of those parents that were out walking and talking one of those teachers that were out walking and talking i'm at my son's football games at ccv and at my son's swim meets when we were at surprise so i know that i put in forth my best effort to make sure that that override passed and then for the funding to not be there to have these smaller class sizes and that's kind of one of those things that i was pushing it's hurtful to me because i know that i was that person that was out there talking and i was that person that was out there asking to help that um and we also one of the emails that i got was that we had 23.4 students but i don't have a point for i've got a whole body and i don't like that our kids are just numbers because our kids are whole bodies and i want to be able to treat them like that so we're just begging for support for our earliest learners to give them the foundation that we can all be proud of thank you dr kellis are we able to follow up with those concerns presidents pritchard um we'll have human resources follow up thank you thank you that's all we have for this item thank you very much next we have item e1 i'll entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda items oh sorry my mouse jumped moving to item d1 do we have a student update dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet we are very happy to invite jocelyn poundstone to present the student information report good evening madam president members of the board dr kellis cabinet and the community my name is jocelyn poundstone and i'm a member of the dysart student leadership council we had our first meeting last week and we discussed how we could make this year extraordinary we brainstormed ideas such as a district spirit conference including feeder schools to show what that to show what is in store for high school we talked about school culture and how we continue to cultivate within our school community and across the district all of our councils are excited to work together this year we look forward to putting these ideas into action and sharing them with the board throughout the year thank you [Applause] thank you very much next we have the superintendent update dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet um visiting with uh principals and walking the hallways in our schools i'm just very proud to report back that kids are engaged in learning teachers are engaging kids in learning and there's a lot of learning going on and academics is probably this year not to say more or less than in the past but it's definitely a priority is coming off of last year and a summer school where we did a lot of work to recover from last year's covid and we're very aware of the academic needs of all of our students and so there's lots of focus this year on having an awesome extraordinary academic year thank you very much dr kellis next we have governing board update i do not have an update what does anyone else like to share i don't have an update but i just want to thank the community members who have been reaching out to the board in the district if i have not responded to your email personally yet i'm getting to it but i want you all to be assured that i have forwarded all of the concerns to our superintendent dr kellis and i know he's been following up so thank you for your concern and involvement and i just don't want you to feel like if i haven't gotten back it's because i haven't heard you i just am getting through all of them so thank you for your patience and thank you for taking the time to reach out i got to visit a classroom today and read a book to one of our classrooms and it was so nice to see all the kids smiling faces engaged in their learning and that was a great kid we have some really great students anyone else okay moving to item e1 again i'll entertain a motion how much the governing board approve the consent agenda items as presented second motion passes thank you moving to our first information item g1 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet administration has reviewed section two of our policy manual and have no recommended changes for this evening and president if i could revise my previous statement okay [Laughter] of course there are two recommended changes um under policy 2.13 there is um a and recommendation from arizona school boards association that the following statement be added and that is that the governing governing board president may recess the meeting without a vote of the governing board in order to maintain a decorum and governing board meeting rules of order this question whether or not the the board president was allowed to do this in the past we believe it's always been allowed but this just puts it in writing and makes it very clear to our our community that the board president does have that authority to do so the second changes section 2.23 and this again is based on recent legislative action that was signed by the governor it says no public monies can be used for training orientation or therapy that represents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race ethnicity or sex this does not include any training on sexual harassment blame or judgment on the basis of race ethnicity or sex is defined in the statute by some concepts and the statutory reference is cited so those are two recommended changes and if the board wishes to modify any of these policies or these recommended changes it will be brought back as an action discussion of the next board meeting otherwise if there's no further discussion between now and the next board meeting these will be presented in the consent agenda okay thank you for that um moving to information g2 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet this is a new addition to the board agenda that we will be enjoying this evening we have already experienced some previous reports from different departments within the district this is our first evening to receive school reports so we will first hear a school report from thompson ranch elementary followed by snoring heights middle school in that order so good evening madam president members of the board kel's cabinet community it's my pleasure to introduce principal dr rachel saunders who's here representing thompson ranch elementary school as well as with her staff thank you dr sanders thank you i'd also like to recognize my assistant principal danielle parnell for coming out and our amazing teaching and learning specialist um rhonda de la garza so thompson ranch elementary school what is our mascot we are the jaguars our school colors are blue and gray we currently have 730 students at our school preschool through eighth grade and our signature program is steem which is the integration of science technology engineering arts and math to provide children with a whole brain based approach to learning and really integrating those skills of collaboration communication problem solving and critical thinking and creativity to support them on authentic learning experiences and yes there's jeremy couldn't make it without being in the presentation lots of celebrations this year it's been an exciting and wonderful new year i'm starting out with our role roll out of the pbis school-wide initiative pbis stands for positive behavioral intervention support in order to ensure students success in modifying behavior in a positive way we've got partnerships with west ed and really focusing on improving instruction really focusing on academic conversations depth of knowledge depth of knowledge those learning objectives and alignment and making sure that students are provided with the best education tier one tier two and tier three we also have lots of recognitions for our students and our staff and families we had a big recognition program for those students that scored proficient and highly proficient on azm2 from the spring and we invited our families out to celebrate with their children and that was really exciting we'll continue with that focus those huge celebrations with that we do a lot of different things with our staff with our possum staff member on friday our share the love different recognitions just really trying to have some positive recognition for our amazing staff our fantastic students and also recognizing our families we do have a huge campus beautification initiative started out last year with our 50 trees that were planted at temps ranch provided by the arizona sustainability alliance they are looking fantastic and amazing i do check on them weekly we've got water to them so that's exciting because prior to having water to them i would have to drive with our maintenance person around in a golf cart and get water buckets out to them but fortunately all the water problems have been solved and they are doing well and thriving with our monsoon weathers also with our big beautification project we have 50 or no actually 100 tons of rip-rap rock in front of our school we have this drainage in front of our school not every school has it so we're unique so being unique and special we had a unique and special pro stem problem of we have erosion occurring in that area in front of that parking so we saw our students solve that real world stem problem by recommending that we put large rip-rap rock in front of our school to stop the erosion of that continuous decay of the dirt we got 20 tons one truck donated um from the super from a surprise organization which is absolutely amazing and we're continuing to raise money for donations thank you dr kellis for donating fifty dollars for one ton and we are taking donations for that which is exciting so we have ordered another truckload which is 20 tons and our goal by the end of this school year is to have 100 tons of brick wrap rock jesse red in front of our school so that's an exciting initiative one is to improve the curb appeal but just as important is to provide us with solving our real world stem problem at thompson ranch lots of opportunities 2020 was really a year to remember moving into 2021 2022 we are excited about having in-person and engaging professional development i cannot tell you how hard it is to provide exciting and engaging professional development through google hang google meets i try to be entertaining i try to be engaging but it was really difficult so we're excited about having in-person opportunities for professional development we're also excited about effective instruction so in the past we've had to use quite a bit of technology and now moving away from that technology and providing really solid instruction to support every child is super exciting so that is really a great wonderful opportunity yes there's gaps in student learning but we have systems in place to ensure that those gaps are filled through solid tier one highly effective instruction moving on to tier two which has that small group instruction provided by the classroom teacher as well as that tier three instruction which is provided by interventionists to ensure that gaps of learning are failed and having those assessment systems in place through galileo as well as 95 assessments and other assessment tools to ensure that our gaps in learning are really filled strategically and that we give students what they need to really fill those gaps we've got systems in place to support student behavior through the pbis program super excited about that initiative and also important to me but what is something passionate about for me is engaging families how do i meaningfully engage families in really supporting um our school provi making sure that they're supporting our initiatives that they're well informed communication is key to success providing them with those opportunities really engaging our families through facebook through our weekly auto dialer and having lots of opportunities for them to come in and have opportunities to celebrate with their students as well as provide some professional development to families as well what's our focus what are we focusing on this year well we're definitely focusing on instruction and in order to have the best teachers in classrooms we need to make sure that they're provided with professional development that's ongoing job embedded having those opportunities for coachable moments going inside those classrooms having in and out coaching opportunities having conversations and really focusing on west ed protocol on those academic conversations depth of knowledge super excited about focusing on improving instruction for the betterment of students so uh not only do we have instruction and professional development not that is with west ed we have west end monthly professional development provided by west ed as well as our teaching and learning specialist but we also have that response to intervention so if students are struggling what do we do well the good news is we meet with our plcs weekly on wednesdays an administrator always sits in those plc's focuses our this week's focus was on improving with our pbis program making sure that our systems are in place to ensure student success last week it was rti focusing on the what are we doing for response to intervention what assessments are we using to measure student growth what systems are we providing in order to ensure students are successful um so response to intervention is very critical professional learning communities they meet again we do have professional learning communities that to me they don't just it's not an event it's something that is ingrained in what we do as professionals teaching professionals meet to discuss curriculum to discuss district pacing guides to discuss assessments one assessment is given we have our unit one assessment being given out this week and next week looking at those results making strategic plans of what do we do with students that are still struggling with concepts from our first assessment and making sure that small group instruction is provided for those students so professional learning communities are really focused on data-driven teams that really focus on those lesson plans focusing on tier 2 instruction tier three instruction as well as tier one we've got positive intervention support systems which are super exciting about having those school-wide expectations school-wide skills having common vocabulary common conversations and it's really about modifying student behavior in order for them to be successful in the classroom and and beyond of course and then we have focus as well as family engagement opportunities we have a unique opportunity at thompson ranch to have a family engagement coordinator that person works with involving families setting up family success meetings as well as providing professional development opportunities to our families on different topics on what they would like to learn more about any questions dr saunders as somebody that has come out to your school on several occasions um one of the things that i always like to see is i think it was in may that you had the steam with the focus oh my gosh it was it was totally awesome will you continue with that type of um engagement because i know you have you had so many people there and they were still coming they were still i'd go big or go home so we had to unfortunately did we did we and we opened the entire school which is exciting so we'll have two huge opportunities working with the arizona science center was there as well i'm having opening up our whole school and we'll have our big jaguar jamboree in december and we'll also be showcasing our steam projects during that opportunity so our whole school will be open we'll have the sprint the nice lights we'll have our band we'll have our choir we'll have the students singing in the uh cafe as well as have the arizona science science center in the gymnasium all classrooms will be open really to showcase the amazing work of our students working in their engineering process to build and design and showcase their learning so we'll have that in december and i'll have one in may and because we can use the whole facility i don't have and if there comes to be a day a time and there are restrictions on numbers because our school is quite large we can have over 1 000 family members on campus to engage in those community events so yes it's super important that we showcase our school as an amazing school that's steam focused and really we love we love our families at thompson ranch and we're very family oriented and community oriented and we really do a lot of outreach with our community so yeah go big or go home december i'll send you the invite okay please do please do thank you i have a question for you so um it sounds really exciting as far as all the family engagement opportunities um because that's so important to get the community involved and i especially like how you had said that to celebrate the azmerit scores you had a celebration invited families in which is wonderful super important i was just wondering um since since last year like what would you say is your like what was your biggest celebration academically prompting that that family engagement night um and then what area would you say is still a little bit of your focus that you're still gonna make a priority this year for sure so based on azm2 um our scores were not where they needed to be and the struggle was real students we had 30 percent of our students that were online learners and then a lot of them going in and out and in and out and quarantined and the struggle was real and our test scores were not where they needed to be um so our focus was really i wanted to really recognize those students that really because of covid that was not a crutch and a reason why they couldn't be successful on acm too so we sent out invites and in july july 15 i actually had a mailed out to the home saying congratulations your child is being recognized at us at an assembly where they were invited to celebrate with their child for doing being successful they be to me they beat the odds and they really did an amazing and fantastic job so really focusing on celebrating those wins because they were wins and we want to recognize those students so test scores were not where they needed to be we know that that's why our big focus this year and our big push is making sure that we have we're utilizing high yield effective strategies each and every day in our classrooms and making sure that there's systems in place to ensure that every child is successful so what um what would you say was your biggest celebration and score wise like like where did you see the biggest gain and maybe fourth grade really proud of the fourth grade kids they did really amazing um and that was actually the highest grade level that uh they had the highest gains so really proud of them they did a really nice and fantastic job they did spend a little less time on the computer that great level than the others that's just one just wondering if you want to see what a variable was they spent a little bit less time on computers okay and what about your area where you're you really noticed okay we're going to make this our big focus this year our big focus focus and push is going to definitely be third grade third grade is a a year that um the students really struggled not sure i mean there's a lot of reasons why they potentially struggles but bottom line is they need to get much higher they can do very well and we need to make sure that we're not reading slides from florida virtual and that we're actually providing students with quality instruction each and every day and i think those scores definitely will definitely increase you sound definitely like you're motivated to make it happen so that's a lot of it right there i appreciate that thank you thank you so much excellent presentation thank you madam president members of the governing board dr kellis members of cabinet it's my pleasure this evening to introduce andy frazier the principal of sonoran heights middle school previously the principal of sonoran heights elementary school sonoran heights elementary school or sonoran heights was recognized as an arizona a plus school and uh in the last time that labels were given sonoran heights is an arizona a school as well so we're very excited to have mr frazier here this evening to present information about the new sonoran heights middle school well thank you mr dean uh it's a pleasure to be here and i think you stole some of my thunder there in the first slide here um but uh the next slide for right there at the top you see we are proud that we became uh a plus school of excellence last year we had to wait an extended amount of time because when we put in for it they extended the times that they were allowing all those schools that hadn't been uh had their visits yet and so we were we're proud we finally realized that we got that um over it was probably over three quarter of a year so we're really excited that for the second time at sonoran heights um so yeah been a base a school for a while and and gonna be continuing that now as a middle school so excited about where we're going enrollment's up uh at 780 right now we had a little bit of a increase we've been hovering around 800 the last couple years we were projected a little lower than that but we've been seeing an influx of kids coming from some neighboring other schools that are in our district but not our public schools some charters and other things that kids are coming over to us i think that middle school experience is going to going to show and we're going to be able to to really um advocate for it for that what it does for kids we're a red and black a little bit of white in there and sometimes you see a little little gold in the hawk beak as well active mind and body we we are a school that definitely think that it's important to to be active obviously this is uh um mr hicks was talking about just being active being healthy is an important thing not just in in your body but also in your mind so we take pride in that and we want to focus on kids as a whole so opportunities obviously as a new school we we opened a new school i mean we we started with some of our staff that stayed with us at sonoran heights and some of our other uh staff went over to rancho elementary so we took some of their um staff and then we also had a influx of some new teachers as well so merging all of these individuals to one campus is is something that we knew we were going to have to focus on at the beginning of the year we took an extra day back before all teachers came back in dysart so it was a it was a nice opportunity to have one additional day with our staff we've done some just fun team building stuff obviously a lot of setting setting the tone for the school what are we expecting what do we want for our kids and our experience and so we're proud that we're continuing to blend blend our oral sonoran heights elementary into sonoran heights middle school because it is a new school and we're all in this together so opening the middle school obviously again it's a brand new school we are bringing in two communities this kind of my third bullet point shows is we're taking rancho gabriella community and sonoran heights community and actually expanding into other communities because our boundaries expanded pretty uh pretty vastly and so bringing all these communities together was was a challenge but we did a variety of things starting last year our pta and and some of the rancho community came together we did some events on our campus just either drive-through type things in a variety of things where families can come either meet admin or they could just come to see the campus this year as well even tonight we have our first spirit night so we have a joint ptso at rancho and our pta came together to do a joint spirit night so we know it's important to have these two communities coming together and be be one so we're still going to continue to do stuff like that throughout the throughout the school year instructional time so as a middle school um we're running a little bit more like a high school the kids have a little more opportunities they have some choice they have some freedom um and they're loving that i'll tell you that um it's a little bit of you know bringing them in at times but they are they're enjoying it and they're and they're thriving on it um it's good to see them i mean it just little things like in the cafeteria when you know you're always telling kids to pick up their trays you know the kids will do that they'll do that by themselves and you don't need to always remind them once you give them that opportunity to do so those little things like that they will do it but instructional time so just like high schools we're running on a period schedule and so we have eight periods throughout our day providing intense standards-based instruction during those times so even though we have a decrease this is an opportunity for our staff to kind of fit in their instruction into a little bit smaller amount of time than they they had in the past we're really standards driven and focus on that 50 minutes to make sure it's solid and is what kids truly need we're using our some common formative assessments weekly and some other module exams throughout the year to make sure our kids are meeting those standards celebrations tons of great ones so just like i said the kids are thriving at at a middle school so transitions our kids have two minutes it's pretty quick yes two minutes to get from one place to another especially if they're going from electives in our one building upstairs to a seventh or eighth grade room but they are getting there they're trying to find the best avenue so we've opened up outside doors and you know trying to you know get them go different given avenues but we're letting them go where they want to go and to get there as quick as they can and so we're giving them some flexibility with those two minute transitions but they are are thriving in it and they're getting there and they're going where they need to be they're not wandering around and they're they're taking that ownership there so it's lovely student opportunities middle school we have provided a variety of electives for our kids you'll probably hear this from some of the other middle schools that are going to present later in the year but i'll take take it all now so they're elected so we're offering uh percussion we're talking about choir this is during the day we have banned throughout the day we have cte labs so career and technical education um kids are loving that we have four different classes going for our seventh and eighth graders there spanish throughout our day over i think it's about 150 plus kids in spanish class so it'll be a one and two uh throughout the year so just a lot of exciting things and obviously athletics we have pe running throughout the day as well obviously the three a's are a big thing out you'll talk a little bit about some of our focus points for the year but athletics as well we're in a new conference so we're excited to continue to bring some sonoran pride uh we always are our champions in at least one or two sports a year so we're hoping to dominate some sports as well um in this new conference celebration um focus on learning so just like i said we're very focused on what our what we need to do um bringing these teams together and focusing on the learning so the three a's obviously and we want to make sure we're focused on learning as our primary source but making sure those other pieces uh blend in just like we've had in the past i've been at soren heights for eight years or this is my eighth year and we've always had that team approach at sonoran heights that that community that culture we we pride ourselves if you walk into that front door that we want everyone to have that positive experience whether you're a community member whether you're a board member whether you're a parent um that you you have that feel and as you walk around campus we want you to to feel that this is a team approach we're in it together and we're going to do what it takes and i think you'll always experience that there so we're continuing to make sure we're building that from what we have had in the past to make sure that that is there um you know in the upcoming years and it was a successful opening we did a little ribbon cutting at our um grand opening meet the teacher night um just like always we had i want to say about 95 95 and 80 to 95 percent of our families come through that evening and just a packed house over a thousand some people coming through our doors and it was just an amazing event so um it's been successful everything has gone very well um even better than planned as an opening so very excited about what what is still to come so focuses points obviously instruction is always a key one that's the top that's the top a one of the things that we've built into our schedule that the the principles of all the middle schools and uh dr dean um and some of the curriculum department really thought it was important to put an intervention block in all of our kids schedules so every day our students have a 40 minute roughly 40 minute intervention time focused on some either math interventions and or some reading interventions our school as well as some of the other middle schools are given common formative assessments every week on one standard to see where kids are at we're using that data to help drive where our kids need to be intervened at so we're really targeting that tier two piece as well as in that core core instruction as i talked about earlier so intervention a key piece we want to expand our arts program um just like i said we've been very athletic based we do have some theater performances that we put on but we want to do a little bit more now that we have a choir we want to have some more choir performances when i have our band maybe performing at some games or coming into um assemblies and things of that nature we'd love to see the drum line maybe we can do things like that even you know kind of bring some of those high school things down into a middle school setting so um we're looking at just having some art more around our campus and having kids see the different things that they're doing um on a daily basis so expanding arts can be a big one i talked about competitive athletics we're looking forward to you know competing winning and so we're looking forward that happening this year uh with not only within dysart in our middle schools but in the in the conference that we're playing out of district um data's database instruction just like i talked about we have um assessments that we'll be giving weekly for our kids analyzing those on our plc in early release mondays looking where kids are regrouping them some of our groups and our teachers are moving kids around weekly sometimes it's every other week we're really looking at what kids need and so when we get to these other assessments whether they're monthly or our benchmarks which are kind of quarterly we're not shocked where our kids are at so we're trying to really have that targeted focus along the way so we can intervene early and often and then the focus we want this to be the most positive middle school experience for for our kids and obviously we want to promote that to the community so everyone sees that and they want to be at sonoran heights so i think we're really providing that that true middle school so we appreciate this opportunity it's just got a different feel so welcome you guys to come by it's it's a different vibe in there come by during a transition it's got a it's got a good feel and and uh i know it's going to continue to be that way as the year has come anything else thank you i don't have a question but i'm wow like you answered all my questions in your presentation um amazing as always i mean just so many wonderful things always come out of sonoran heights for sure um just wanted to comment though i think it's amazing that your the ptsa at rancho and your pta pta are collaborative and helping blend those communities together and keep that parent engagement and parent involvement that's wonderful whoever thought of that i mean that was it was a lot of work but obviously some of our family members we have some here um but yeah it's it took a lot of a lot of coordinating for sure but it it's going to be a beautiful thing i think you're yeah yeah and the 40 minutes intervention time i think that's amazing um and then also i liked your idea about incorporating some of the arts activities in the high schools like bringing the band in sometimes or like just trying to um infiltrate some of that in to give them a flavor of what's awaiting them in high school but i also heard a lot of data-driven type of words and planning in your presentation which i just think as long as you're on top of it all the time which which you clearly are um you're gonna catch kids early and help them get where they need to be so amazing presentation thank you and congratulations it sounds like an exciting time over there with all the new middle school vibe so have fun with that definitely thank you mr frazier eight years i know it goes by incredible it's gone by too quick oh my gosh um yeah congratulations on you know getting the middle school off the ground and everything tell me what uh your cte is looking like and i know mr grace habers yeah yeah i think he's here as well um so yeah career and technical education we got to pick we have a seventh eighth seventh module our seventh seventh grade class and eighth grade class we have two of each um so we have about 24 kids in each classroom they're captured it's actually better to have around 16 but we have in each classroom there are eight modules we have the opportunity to actually choose some of those modules ourselves as a school um i won't remember all of them off top of my head but each one has eight themselves so some of them are building motors flight simulators um there's dentistry i mean you name it there's milling and there's um physical you know fitness and it's just a variety of different things that the kids will have about two weeks or so at each um each module and they'll rotate around so those kids in that classroom semester-based class and they'll have an opportunity to experience a variety of things that they maybe could wouldn't have a chance to experience in another capacity and maybe this is something that they'll go into in their career in the future that's awesome that is awesome for them to actually get a taste of that during their middle school i know some of our middle schools are posting that stuff on facebook i posted i think a picture last week too so check it out we're posting some different things that the kids are doing it's it's incredible and they're loving it awesome okay keep it going we'll do that we know you will i just have a couple of quick questions um with your enrollment do you is there one grade level that you're seeing i mean through the fifth five through eight do you see one grade level higher than any of the others or are they pretty much the same questions they're pretty close to where i say our fifth and sixth grade is in the hundred and sixty hundred and seventy range um and then eighth grade um our seventh graders are largest i wanna say around 225-ish and then about 200 or so for for our eighth grade so um i don't know if i've seen any influx one way or another obviously seventh grade i think we're a little bit higher to begin with i think we're just kind of getting them all all across the board we've seen a variety of kids come in and not as many uh withdrawal oh great and i know you were talking about spanish but are there other high school credit classes that yes i didn't even talk about those so yes thank you for asking um so those guys took off yes i'm glad all right yeah i'm happy to share some other great things we're doing so um we have been expanding algebra on our campus i want to say geez this has been maybe been about four four years in the making and i would say it's about year five um so we have high school credit algebra on our campus that was real one two we started about 10 to 12 kids i think it's about four years ago and now we're up in the i want to say in the six mid 60s now with kids that are taking algebra we have three courses every day um so we have three different classes that kids are getting taught algebra for high school kids that are ready for it too they're um they're showing data wise taking placements tests um showing through azm to benchmarks whatever that may be a variety of things and they're getting placed into those classes so algebra we're proud to have um this year as well as last year we have a high school credit pe so kids can take a freshman pe course um kind of some online base pieces and some physical base pieces taken videos and a variety of things and they can do that during the school day um with us so they can opt out basically a freshman pe as well thank you i just want to echo everyone else's comments but um one thing that you mentioned was just the being able to empower these students with choice and freedom in their education and i i just so appreciate that um knowing that we have or are going to have a really robust arts program you mentioned percussion that's something near and dear to my heart so thank you for that um so just an excellent presentation i'm very excited for sonoran thank you thank you thank you and madam president that concludes our school reports for the evening thank you very much all right so next we have item g3 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet mr hicks will introduce this item good evening madam president members of the board superintendent dr kellis colleagues and community members um tonight um presenting our sr3 plan this was something during our budget adoption in july i actually mentioned that i'd be bringing this back presentation to the board just to have an overview before we go we solicited some feedback and so wanted to present that there's no requirement that we do this um but uh for transparency there was an inc there was a interest from the board of learning more and so i mentioned that i'd be bringing it back so this is just bringing that this plan back and so um just an overview sr3 we have lots of esther lots of federal funds have been thrown at us since march of 2020 this is just specifically although i'm going to i think before we go into sr3 and see the plan on that and part of the survey we did i think it's a good opportunity to just give a little history of some of our other esser walk through esser and esg money and so sr1 started march 2020 when they identified a variety of code relief funding for schools sr-1 specifically for schools our allocation was 3.9 million dollars at that time everything was going quick they used the methodology of how title one funding is allocated among in arizona and that's how they distributed this fund so the total amount that the state was awarded after you took off administrative costs was it equal to maybe around 70 percent of what the title one fund so they just said hey seventy seventy percent push out the allocation we had some other little requirements of handling some other title requirements of some private schools and allocating some for them a lot of at the front a lot of information at the beginning and a lot of details really we got 3.9 million dollars we used it for cleaning supplies there was a lot of unknown at the time we picked up some online curriculum some technology some devices that we could um there was a little bit of a backlog also hot spots we did a couple cast classroom cameras and then we were looking at substitute teachers permanent subs and into this as well then that was march um it takes a while we probably didn't get approved for that grant until mid-summer but at the beginning of the summer we knew the governor was starting to talk about something with a lot of unknowns so it was fluctuating as we were going back in this time um back in uh over a year ago with some unknowns some of the unknowns were going forward uh was as things were spiking what are we doing are kids going to come back where we're at so the governor then pledged his covet relief funds to school districts to create an enrollment stabilization grant uh the esg and there was to try to address some of this so there was some loss of students and also going online was a loss of financials and so between the two uh components the governor try uh tried to bridge that gap um it did not fully fund because there was more requests than what alec what money was allocated our allocation was 5.2 i think we were supposed to get around six and a half million in that sense or maybe a little bit more um and so we got the the 5.2 they used the same um on this that so not deviating from the title one methodology allocation it was really based on actual students what learning path they took and then loss of students compared to the previous year we used this to address learning loss of revenue and so that we had more flexibility in this in this revenue from these funds from the governor so we were able to actually some of our cash accounts that we were if you remember in march keep paying everybody don't let anybody go and keep going so when you have cash funds and you're paying people and there's no revenue coming in they're going in the hole and so some of these funds were used to prop up some of that loss of revenue also if you remember at the beginning we started with learning labs and so our bus drivers our transportation staff were out at all the schools so that we had an in-person option as we're going we funded that through our esg we had increased insurance costs additional online software additional online security software network and server support and so that's how we bridged and then sr2 comes this was one that we did not think was going to come around because there were so many different lobbyists telling us yes going not going then late december it popped and we're told that we're awarded 16.1 million dollars use the same methodology as sr1 which was based on your title 1 allocation we are still using it so for supplies cleaning supports some increased insurance costs we did put if you remember when the board approved our air scrubbers this was pledged the federal funds on this was the sr2 we picked up more devices substitute support so the incentive the seven senate program that's also later on in this agenda that was picked up on this some additional online learning costs with some of the software and then some operational support moving some actual positions and other things in there to bridge the gap is also in this this also so the the one disconnect that a lot of people hey you've got a lot of federal funds actually we just got approved we just got sr2 approved just last week it takes a long time it keeps getting kick-backed returned so even though we're spending in some of that because all of our air scrubbers have been installed and billed we just got that grant approved and so the timing sometimes is not exactly aligned so everybody thinks we have all this money and no it takes a lot of work to get to even have the opportunity to get that money so here's our sr3 plan so i wanted to provide a little history much like for if you took the survey online we wanted to build a little bit of a knowledge of yes we've received some federal funds and so that they understood where all the different federal funds were coming from so that they were educated and a little bit more opportunity to educate them for when they took the survey on our sr-3 our proposed plan just looking at some of the things we've been doing and putting together a couple discussions we've already started the retention stipend we can continue that for a couple more years sr3 does go out to 2024 so we have a few more years so it extended that um we're able to put in some indirect costs which allows for the administrative overhead uh we did not put that in in the other funds and so this allows us to recruit some of the additional costs that are coming from our staff doing the actual work of applying for and managing and the um the compliance of these grants interventions lost learning um we're putting summer school in some additional professional development and looking at some school-based programs um we talked about let's put permanent subs back in maybe some social emotional health some of our current social workers we can move those in that allows us to stabilize our current budget devices interactive flat panel displays security cameras network infrastructure and some i.t staff so that was the original so we had to have a base plan to submit so that we could have people comment about um give us feedback on the plan and not just a blank check how would you spend 36 million dollars so and that is unique so so3 was unique from all the other sr and other federal funds that it did specifically require us to solicit some stakeholder feedback or input and so we created the survey we put it out on facebook on social media linked to it pushed it out local newspaper we emailed parents i sent an email to all of our directors and principals because also in there did ask us to specifically solicit feedback from our special ed director as well so there was a litany of lines to reach out to and so we connected with all of those and so just i'll go quickly through what we heard so we had stakeholder input i think it was open up until the last friday in july so i think it was open for almost a month less than a month but almost a month of july to go in 70 of the respondents were parents we had about 240 which actually responded staff members community members students and some people not identifying we just we tried to keep it really simple knowing that the longer the survey the less people would be interested in it and um to collect a little bit of data from it and just looked at what did you like about the plan so we had various people didn't answer or they gave some positive comments or they gave some negative comments there are a lot of people that do not like any federal funds in our district and think we should return everything that the federal government is maybe hemorrhaging money or something i don't want to quote them directly but when i take out some comments around 50 those are just comments so let's look at what they liked about the plan number one uh addressing some learning loss and number two was continuity of operations um then we looked at what do you think needs improvement so once again let's take the comments a little bit out of it set those aside we had 51 because they would be just general comments that had nothing to do with our plan and so i just set that aside um negative or positive and or they did an answer so you take 50 off and then we're looking at the number one and number two is to increase support for support uh support for staff some continuity of operation and more supports for students so then we asked on the next question then what would you add to the plan if we know what you like what would you add to the plan and so once again take the comments off is about 40 that leaves 60 the number one was more student programs intervention support increased staffing uh increased staff pay increased staff benefits uh was number two so looking at that feedback then also collecting some emails from our special ed director and our federal projects director and just talking with some additional people we said we probably need to adjust the plan now this is the plan that we submit for our allocation we can revise it as we're going and often does happen so for example uh the reduced we reduced the retention stipend because we moved it to what actually so we're doing calculations on the stipend that was approved by the governing board back in february that three percent three percent retention stipend uh the costs were less than what we initially projected so we're moving that down to some more actual costs allows us to reallocate some funding but some of them just because we're talking about it and we put it in some of them require governing board approval a retention stipend if we're going forward that require requires government governing board approval we would monitor and revise this as the board goes on some of those we also noticed that just having some conversations our summer school very robust in june uh july was lesser and probably what we first originally planned on the biggest summer schools ever for the next three years is probably not going to happen and so it's going to probably take a reduced capacity maybe have a very robust june but maybe not a july as we're hearing some feedback of um just going on the whole summer and not stopping um increased professional development we've heard some comments and and so some of this is me always listening can we bring our teachers back uh day or two early and and do some more targeted professional development on instruction and what we're looking for so there's ability to do that i heard a lot from uh either our assistant soups or superintendent or just some of the data looking at increasing some school-based programs so can we allocate an amount to every single school so that they can create their own interventions for the lost learning whether it be tutoring or some other canned approach but let's give them money directly so that they can make some decisions on their site using some of these funds and so this in this is an increase on the school-based program so even though the summer school costs are going down that's going up increased sub supports as we talked a little bit about a sub-incentive program or permanent subs going forward as we continue as this continues to evolve and the pandemic that we're sitting in we looked at maybe we should increase some of those costs and then increasing the i.t staff to support some of the technology and so we looked at can we there's some people that are allocated in that let's extend it a year or two as we continue to move and technology becomes a continued need and we're pushing out the interactive panel displays our security cameras and network we might need additional i.t staffs to support so we made those changes it was good to have some feedback it made us look at a lot of different things and so that is the revision that we have to the plan based on the feedback that we have and i will stand for any questions thank you i have a question um i'm sure we'll hear more about this on our transportation update but is there a possibility of using the some of the s or three funds to buy more buses um madam president members of the board um i don't know if dr kellis asked you to ask that question but if you might uh ask that question of me all the time um yes that is an opportunity as i tell pretty much everybody that says let's use essa for that asset for that we do have a general plan of how we're going to use it so something has to come out if we're going to do that we are buying buses with our regular capital funds right now so we continue to buy not enough um so could we look at more yes thank you you stole my question all right i'm putting down two for that question well don't forget dr kello but i am curious though if in addition to purchasing um the buses if we could use like we've done for um the sub supports um if we could do that for bus drivers to give sign-on bonuses um madam president members of the board i don't know if you want me to start next presentation right now um we are looking at a lot of things and i just wanted to call it um so that's a great comment no it's a great comment um there's lots of different areas that could either support directly or indirectly okay by moving something else over that frees up money um not to jump to the next agenda but we have we are looking at various monetary items regarding transportation that we're not ready right now because some of them were checking with attorneys on certain things we're not ready right now but we're hoping something next month is coming to the board thank you and as far as the total the 36 million that's ballpark what we were i would expect then from sr3 madam president members of the board when i did the survey was ballpark it is uh since uh finalized a little higher so it's moved up a few hundred thousand dollars so i'm not sure if it's 36.5 i'm sure mary dale's watching and texting me right now uh it went up it went up a little bit uh so it will go up a little bit so this was uh the original before we had our final allocation all right thank you you're welcome and a president if i could just interject also some comments that these funds were intended to be coveted relief funds to help districts across the country to deal with the pandemic and the costs associated with it what we have seen across the country is those those expenses have been put on the shoulders of the districts and even in in dicer we have spent an incredible amount of money to to make sure that we have i mean you you say clean supplies and you think well that's not very much money it's amazing how much money it all adds up when you start putting those in place technology we were in a good place when the state shut down our schools and made everybody go remote within literally days we were able to transition from in person to online a lot of that technology has aged out amazingly just within the last couple years but we have some new devices but we were dependent upon a lot of shelved devices that we pulled off the shelves for for that experience so our first priority is to use the funds to assist with student success and learning that success comes with lots of supports a bus could technically be justified because if we want to make sure kids are getting to school where they can learn we want them to be in person and a bus could be justified but with that but we feel like the the priority of the funds should be for supporting academic success and any other things that the district has in the past been burned with with regards to covet thank you very much and i know that i'm jumping a little bit but if so you mentioned ken that um that the amount was a little bit higher maybe a little bit maybe a hundred thousand or more if you could just tell us what the cost approximate cost of a bus is about a 190 000 thank you okay thank you a question for you mr hicks with regards to the proposed proposed plan uh permanent subs and then increase sub supports um right now all districts are having issues with getting people to sub um what do you see that looking like i mean as far as like with permanent subs in the proposed plan boy there's a lot of peas in that um the permanent subs what did that look like i mean did we have like one sub at each school yes you're saying madame president um dr croto could jump in and add a little bit to this madam president member sawyers think bill yes currently we have one permanent sub um at our elementary sites and two at every high school so and those are permanent guest teachers uh that are going to be with us every year they have to flip-flop by law they can only be on a certain campus subbing in that for a semester so we have paired up uh schools to have sister schools to flip-flop um when the semester ends so currently that's where we're at with our campuses and the guest teachers so permanent guest teachers so with the revised plan if you're increasing the sub supports that's going to be more permanent subs present members of the board added on another year um so there's there was a lot of conversations in the mid-year as things are getting better and we're winning in this pandemic that maybe we don't need permanent subs going forward anymore and limited funds and so there might have only been one year of permanent subs put in this extended the years and then also layered in the sub-incentive program gotcha okay which is coming up shortly and did i hear you correctly that only 240 people participated in this survey okay thank you i do have a quick question um i'm not familiar with a permanent sub why don't we just hire them um that's a great question we our subs are all brought to us by esi so we don't have a sub program per se run by the district so we use esi for all our subs and to hire them as a teacher i guess that's what you're asking they have subserts so they're not certified teachers they have sub cert certifications but not teacher certifications so they're they're a permanent sub on that campus to use every day as a need occurs or an absence occurs or we have to relieve a classroom they are there on that campus for them to utilize daily they are the first person to help fill the needs on that campus but they are not certified teachers they're certified subs they have a sub certificate all right thank you when you were talking about the permanent subs how did we jump from 2 million to 4 million madam president members of the board we added years and then we also added the seven incentive programs so there's multiple things happening but one's just extending it where we only had one year permanent subs we added a year to it and then layered in the seven senate program for just one year okay and then security cameras could you please say explain how that is covered relief related um madam president members of the board so technology in general was given a very blanket pass in all of the covered relief funds they believed that doing to maybe a remote learning environment and where we're going specifically identified that we had a lot of flexibility with almost anything technology related so we worked so right now we have hundreds of security cameras throughout our district that are very old and the one benefit of some of these sr funds was our i.t director that i was previously saying no to almost everything said well now technology is open let's start renewing some of these things or renewing them quicker and replacing them and so some of our security cameras are sold we actually have to upgrade the servers and the front end on all of it so it's actually surprisingly more costly than i thought than just buying a wise camera at the store and throwing it up there thank you very much okay now the long awaited uh information item for the transportation update dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet mr hicks will present this information madam president members of the board dr super if i could just interrupt real quick madam president i believe we do have one request to speak sorry i'll go ahead and read the statement this is the time for the public to comment members of the board may not discuss items that are not specifically identified on the agenda pursuant to ars 38-431.01 h action taken as a result of public comment will be limited directing staff to study the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for future further consideration and decision at a later date in order to facilitate accomplishing the business of the district in a timely manner a time limit of three minutes will be imposed for each individual or group addressing the board when you approach the podium please state your name for the record and tonight we have amanda evans thank you for putting this on your agenda i'm surprised to see that there's not more people here but i know that you guys have received plenty of emails and phone calls regarding the safety of our children being dropped from transportation i'm literally just floored with the numbers that you just came in with i mean we're talking millions of dollars um security cameras i'm glad somebody brought that up like we're not running a prison we're running schools we don't need security cameras we need safe transportation for our children um crosswalk guards like we're we're we're paying for permanent subs but we're not hiring full-time teachers and we can't we can't offer more hours to crosswalk guards so they're quitting their job and looking elsewhere some of them have just changed careers completely our education system is being given money for coveted relief how long were our students at home this the the new technology it was crap when it first launched and i know the frustrations came from parents from students from teachers all the way around so we're funding and we're improving all of these things but do not you know don't don't forget that our our students and our parents and our teachers had to go through a good amount of time with kids being out of school so like i i'm i'm all i'm all for covered relief but come on put your money where it counts right so um from my understanding you guys are 20 plus drivers short a new bus costs 190 000 i'm a mother of six i bargained for my money like go buy a used bus fix the ones that you currently have there are ways to pick from a pot and put in elsewhere where we need transportation for these kids my kids main main concern right now are my 7th 6th and 7th graders and everybody says well toughen up they can walk home they can walk a mile and a quarter to school they can walk a mile and a quarter home from school in like 100 000 degree attempts and parents should just change their career they should just get off work earlier they should just go and work later like i run a cleaning business and i'm hearing it from all of my customers this the transition from taking our k through eighth which is what i loved about deisert school districts and dividing our children i have three that are now in different schools they start at different times they end at different times transportation is huge today i split from one house went and picked up one my kids and and came back and then went and continued hurried up so i could bustle and get here you know it's it's el mirage is where i live the community is not as safe as it used to be um crosswalk guards i didn't even realize but there's kindergartners and first graders walking a mile and there's no crosswalk guards um el mirage elementary school particularly this woman just gave a fabulous presentation about thompson ranch i wish i was given the choice to transfer my kids to a k through eighth or preschool through eight school before just told abruptly that your kids are going to be divided i have three brothers that need to stick together i i love the neighborhood i moved to for that reason knowing that my kids were going to be safely transported back and forth to school so i just highly recommend that you guys all get your heads together i know that you want what's best for our students and really consider putting some of this money into transportation and crosswalk guards that's it thank you so sorry thank you um madam president members of the board superintendent dr kalis colleagues community members um so providing thank you very much for the request of the providing continued update on transportation i know i've mentioned some of this already and governing board updates before but so bear with some redundancy and some of that we continue to have challenges and opportunities i'm meeting with transportation uh doug curry our director if not every day i'm meeting about transportation every day i know dr kellis asked me almost every day we start cabinet with transportation so it is a top priority within this district of addressing our issues although dicern is not unique and i'm not trying to make examples or excuses of others but right now i'm sure somebody has read saw or heard a story about a school district in arizona in transportation with bus drivers it is it is a little more intense this year than i've experienced the last five ten years transportation at least the last five when surveying school districts the number one issue is not hiring teachers it's hiring bus drivers that is still remaining the same right now we still have challenges as mentioned yes we are looking to hire 20 more drivers we're looking for 12 to 15 bus aides it is our primary situation and when you're down staff right now for the last eight days we are averaging 18 bus drivers and aides calling out sick every day and so we have a challenge on that which then just puts more stress on the current system and requires our routers to start working every single morning to split bus stops and routes between the existing routes and so so that is our number one primary goal how are we getting more and more bus drivers we started last week came up with just a skeleton of a marketing plan we talked a little bit about it over the weekend and then yesterday we had five of us get in a room and actually start putting an action plan together of what are we all doing and going through all of that i think it was a very positive meeting i had a director of transportation call me at night saying that he was very energized and enthusiastic about our plan the difficulty is as bus drivers if you hire them it still takes about four to six weeks to actually get them on a route so we do have to do first training they have to pass and get a permit then we do additional training before they're able to test and then we have to do behind the wheel training so you have hours requirements you have dps requirements uh that i think there's four endorsements that they're required to get on top of that cdl and so there's a lot of testing that goes on and then even after they pass all of that our trainers have to sign off on them because we're not going to put bus drivers out that are in an unsafe condition that they're not ready to be in and so just recently we had a bus driver from another district come over and through the through the training our bus drivers just did not want to release him after a little more behind the wheel the gentleman quit i'm just saying it was too stressful and too much they don't have tiers where they are and we have multiple tiers we have our three tiers to help us spread out so that we could cover more ground with at least number of drivers and so um we do think we have a good message so we're continuing to market more do more it's a good place to work we have great people down there there's uh you'll see a super in 60 with a great energized bus driver promoting that and flexible benefits i think he loves weekends off and other flexibility in that sense some love to be around the kids so there's various reasons why we do think it's a great place to work it's just very stressful you did mention buses we did have a lot of stress over the summer of hiring shop supervisor and mechanics we were down four we have hired three of those and so we're now just down one mechanic right now and so we're now almost fully staffed in our shop and so that creates a lot of stress on our old buses um as we have a pretty aging fleet on how to dress that and so we are this last year i think we bought eight buses i don't i can't remember blending years but we they come in in different fiscal years so we are trying to buy uh buses so i appreciate the support i'm hearing from let's keep buying more buses it helps our fleet it helps the shop it helps when you don't have to worry about a bus breaking down buses break down then mechanics or trainers are driving out buses meeting buses and we've had some broken down buses to start the year with we have leaned on our charters buses to help with this situation and so we are pushing out as much charter bus contracting we have three companies that are on state contract or out on our contracts that we're able to identify um and so we lean on those three for field trips and or for athletic events to help us to alleviate as much as possible we have received notice this week that they're having trouble hiring drivers and that they are now blocking out days in the month of september that they're no longer eligible to provide any services and so it creates additional stress i know working with some of the sites they are stepping up they're using white buses as much as possible instead of maybe before they would have leaned on a yellow bus they now just taking two white buses so they're teaming up to try to help out make uh the situation as positive as possible the el mirage situation we are working we've met i met with the principal um i've gone out i'm driving the neighborhoods uh in the mornings when i'm coming in i swing by and just drive through a couple neighborhoods to see how they are uh see where the crossing guards are or aren't and how we're getting more into the plan of how we can combine jobs to give more hours so that we could open up the school earlier provide more cars and guards we need a better presence out in that neighborhood to provide that so we're looking and we're finalizing three different solutions to hopefully make that situation better working with the principal in that situation we've we know there's a lot of big challenges we're trying to address every single one and i'm not going to speak to all the different monetary ideas that we've come up with but i know dr croto is working with our attorney to create some of them are a little more difficult that we've not seen a little outside the box things that you've already mentioned that we're looking at four or five different things that actually cost some bigger money on how to use that and how we could do that so that we could then implement retain the ones we have and attract more into that pool to get more people applying to our bus drivers and so hopefully that's a good general overview of i know i provide weekly updates on this but just another opportunity to talk about it i have several questions please i appreciate the fact that you're driving around um the neighborhoods but have have you reached out to parents to get their input to see or at least suggest to them to give you input to somebody on where they think a crossing guard would be i mean rather because they know the neighborhood and maybe this intersection is busier than others so possibly let them give you some suggestions on where or how many crossing guards i mean we just heard about that where they could be used better and that's just a comment how much is a white bus versus a yellow bus the difference in cost madam president members of the board might be about a hundred thousand dollars so we could possibly buy more white buses for shorter trips than a big bus a yellow bus um we can there are dps restrictions on so these white buses normally hold about 14.
you stated that families will leave this district and that that's okay and then you emphasized kindness since that meeting we have lost in our district several families who i know personally and who have chosen to pull their kids or are on the hunt for other schools outside of this district these are families who put in time for teachers who volunteer for school needs donate items and money to help make usd husd a better place their kids are the ones you are excited to have your child be friends with these are the people leaving our district currently leaving us with parents who come into board meetings screaming about liberties accusing parents who mask their children of child abuse and generally behaving like kindergarteners throwing a tantrum that is who is staying and if we're truly okay with that kind of exodus of kindness and respect what does that say about our commitment to the mission of husd thank you thank you and mindy brocker and i'm back thank you board for your time you know this is three meetings in a row now and i know i'm talking into a void care for our children is displayed by actions and this board does nothing says nothing in any way that actually indicates to me that you have any intent to protect my children from covid so many people come up here and give you facts and figures some are really solid work you know them because our health department and your medical staff are giving you the same analysis and recommendations others will spout misinformation to fit their bias they feel things they know somebody who knows somebody they heard it on the internet that something is happening then they run down here and scream at you mass mandates are still the most safe and reliable method to curb transmission in an indoor environment and you all know that whether you want to believe it i can't change those internal biases but it's a tragic shame while kovit continues to decimate lives here in arizona hold on this board allows no changes in fact you twist the facts to fit your personal narratives you won't mandate mass because it's against the law yet when law clearly says that mass is required on school buses both private and public you change your internal definitions of what's actually transportation to allow you to speak out of both sides of your mouth still i've been waiting for this week i was assured that thoughtful mitigations were coming we would put out procedures in place that would help protect students i now know that's not true the level of mitigations this district is allowing is a sad shadow of what you should be doing in all they're actually decreasing and to be honest i've never been so stunningly disappointed in a set of adults in my entire life i ask that you remember you reap what you sell when you chase away all reasonable people in deference to the loudest and most violent all that remains is the chaos you've nurtured i haven't abandoned this district yet maybe i'll get the opportunity to help hold all of you accountable for your inaction i really hope so thank you we have no other requests to speak so we will move on we are now at our consent agenda items do i have a motion for consent i move that we approve consent agenda uh item 6.1 through 6.9 second any questions or comments regarding items on consent all right all those in favor aye aye aye that motion carries five zero we will go on to information items dr foley 7.1 progressive mitigation plan update president reese members of the board one of the things that we have tonight is just a overview just a few snapshots again this is by no means the complete document one of the things that we have done as we've shared with you in our status report is we've updated the mitigation plan we've been working with our administrative team on this one of the reasons why we work really closely with our whole administrative team is they understand their schools they understand their sites they understand the situations and they understand the cases we have recently updated um our mitigation plan and added in an additional piece that we just want to kind of talk through tonight and we put some things in here tonight to just kind of do a general overview one of the interesting conversations that we've had with our administrators is that what's very hard in this conversation is to find we use the term the goldilocks rule you know you know the story of the three bears too hard too soft just right when we're talking about about our strategies there is there is this goldilocks rule in the fact that some think they are too hard some think they are too soft and we're trying to navigate what is just right and one of the things that we learned in previous years and when we implemented mitigation strategies is that one of the things we need to have is some general guiding principles that we work through when their scenarios happen because in some cases there are as we've shared multiple times it the the dep the details are what determine what's most appropriate for the next level next step so today we're going to kind of talk through some of the conversations general just of this of the administrative team so we can begin this dialogue and discussion mrs richards president reece members of the board like dr foley mentioned we met with the elementary administrators aps and principals and our one dean and then also the secondary group of principals aps and deans it's important to go to them because they are the experts they know their kids they know what's happening they know their families and they're very in tune so three of the examples up here were put in place through the end of quarter one um suspend non-essential visitors volunteers and activities from involving external groups and organizations that was both elementary and secondary that thought you know this is a good thing for us to do right now to minimize the risk of exposure the other one was to suspend assemblies and large gatherings during the school day so i think it's important when you look at this list we're talking about the school day itself okay not before not after the other thing elementary administrators believed would be helpful would be to have their kids go straight to their homerooms when they get to school avoiding a huge massive group of kids on the playground at one time is that something we said we're going to do all year no we're doing it right now trying to minimize the risk and then we'll reevaluate it these other things on this list are examples of things that can be done um if it's not 116 degrees outside then we can take learning opportunities outside some of them are going outside for snacks and it's you know weather dependent but timing dependent they're also postponing or canceling non-essential travel or field trips are there plans for field trips later in this year absolutely so these aren't things we want to get rid of these are things that we're looking at this point in time with the number of cases that we have going on and of course we will follow maricopa county department of health quarantine instructions very carefully so i think we should all applaud our administrators our teachers and our families because i think in my lifetime anyway this has been the most challenging so they're out there they want kids in school they want kids learning and they want to keep them safe president reese members of the board we're going to talk a little bit about things that happen outside of the school day and that's the difference that other than miss richards remember outside of school they are optional these are choices that people have to attend they are not mandatory events and so when we talk about perhaps assemblies and gatherings during the school day they are mandatory because the classroom goes down and sits together and everybody's in the gym but when we're talking about an event after school or after hours or not during the school day it is optional for people to attend and that will be a choice that they'll have be able to make when we talk about different mitigation strategies of course at first i started from a sports aspect so forgive me if some of them seem athletic heavy but we started looking at that and remember the mitigation strategies that we had put in place last year and so when you take a look at some of these they're following what happened last year the ones i want to really jump into though are the reduced spectator uh attendance at events last year the aia came out and really had very strict guidelines on what they would allow or not allow at the competitions for what we did in terms of how many people were there by the time we got to the winter at first there was no one at all then they added some and we could get some people in there some people not this year the aia has not made any directive or any decision according to that there is not anything that's saying this is what you need to do to limit the people at the events moreover they gave us a list of guidelines and said very closely this are guidelines of recommendations these are not rules we're not expecting you to do everything that we have put in place in them and so while we have that listed up there as a possible thing to do as of this time we have not made any uh changes to limiting the number of spectators at events that's not just for sports but it would go for when we get into the concert season or anything like that we would continue to do that some of the other things that you see happening up there we do though for the people who are making the choice not to go to the event continue with the live streaming that we did last year and trying to put everything impossible as we can online so that people have that opportunity so they can still see uh the concert or the event or or the game as they're going forward some of the things that are already in place we encourage people to bring their own water and not have shared water different mitigation things like that cleaning after our practices and going through last year we're in the practice of inside the gym in between games they would clear the gym we'd spray it down and come back in and so that when there would be a new fresh group of people coming in and we would continue with those practices inside the gyms we additionally looked because the question comes up what about the people who rent from us because we are a community partner and there are a lot of people who who depend on our rentals and what are the expectations for them and we are expecting them to follow the same strategies that we're following up to and including if they are not following those than with cancellation of the rentals and i know that's a question we get we've already seen we will quarantine specific teams or groups at the direction of maricopa county health and we'll continue to work with them uh looking at specific cases and specific things that we need to do but once again the differentiation that truly after school or these are optional activities that people can choose to attend or can choose to be a part of as we move forward with some of the specific things we're doing outside of the school day so one of the questions happened one of the things that we're going to be discussing tonight in a public hearing setting and this is one of the things that the help that is part of house bill last year there was a remote model that no longer exists one of the things the state is requiring us to do is that for any purpose in the event that there was any kind of concern a quarantine or a water main break or a fire or for any reason we had to or were directed to close a school we would would move that instruction temporarily to a model which we have to define which is what we'll be going into detail into our public hearing and which is included in right now in our mitigation plan online that talks through what would that look like and again this is something that we do for the purposes of attendance this is kind of required by the the ade for adm but it's a way that we can transition and utilize from now forward so having these put in place is something these emergency plans the state realizes now that districts need to have in place in the event of you have your in person you have your online and then you have a instructional time model in the event of any reason you would be transitioned into or closing a school a classroom per se and so we'll be going into that in greater detail in the public hearing thank you have any questions dr foley i just wanted to mention um just briefly on the quarantine under the direction of the maricopa county department of public health [Music] it looks like that's changing a little bit i just want to kind of give a heads up that we have heard from neighboring districts who've already been notified that quarantining is changing and it will look what it looks like is that we will when quarantine happens that potentially we will be looking at quarantining more people per case so um [Music] we will follow the direction of maricopa county public health department like i said we've heard some from some neighboring districts who've already been directly notified because they don't have a mask mandate that there are going to be things in place so we follow what they tell us to do to begin with but it looks like our turn is probably coming and we will hear from them which will change some of our quarantining so we don't have the specifics on our district yet but change is probably coming president reece there was conversation that there was concern that there were districts we're not quarantining we've been quarantining all along we've been quarantining in consultation with the health department agent every time just as we are supposed to we follow the letter and again as we shared there are a lot of evolving parts and pieces to these that continue to evolve and we are part of all those conversations and discussions and when there's issues or concerns they are being directed to school districts and we are working through that with them and will be responding as we are as we have all along under direction thank you just want it to be a surprise that we know they've already been notified ours is probably coming so any other questions or comments i have a question mrs anderson uh for the last topic um you mentioned regarding the rental facilities um how are you guys confirming that they're following the mitigation plans do you have somebody there with them are you checking on them i mean i'm sure they're signing paperwork and have we had to cancel any um agreements due to not following so one of the best and i'm sorry board member anderson board um one of the most important things with that is training and making sure when our facilities are rented that these individuals are trained and expectations are laid out clearly to my knowledge we haven't denied anybody to this point but one of the most important things is our custodial staff and making sure they're trained and they go back and clean thoroughly because if you're a teacher in a classroom somebody uses your classroom you want to be assured that it's been cleaned properly so i think rentals are important for us as we work with our community that handling them appropriately is essential right now so thank you um if you don't mind one more question for mitigation strategy are we ever going to consider going back to smaller class sizes i know that funding is um not that you we went to smaller class sizes for mitigation but i'm saying class sizes have increased over the years and they keep increasing and i'm sure they're at numbers that are still considered pretty high even for normal years is that something that we can consider moving forward is start reducing these numbers in the classrooms board member anderson members of the board as you know you have a governing board policy that mandates class sizes in the elementary grades secondary is a little bit more challenging obviously that is something we adhere to and we could look at policy this is a budgeting conversation decision it's also a classroom space conversation and decision because when you make changes and you add teachers you're adding two spaces and obviously one of the things we now have a better understanding of after this past year is where are we on in our capacity site review as you know we now have walked every single square inch of this district to figure out where our rooms how are we using space if we had growth where would that be as part of our planning for so i think that this is a larger conversation and budgeting decision and it's also a policy decision the other issue is the sustaining of the staffing and as you know there's a lot of competing conversations for those dollars as you are aware today we sent out the esther survey where we're asking for feedback because there's these one-time dollars that can go toward investments and anything that we add once the funding ends we then have to sustain moving forward and so these are important conversations and discussions because we're also hearing people say we want we want social emotional resources we want additional counselors we want additional social workers we want additional so these are all of the pieces that we will be navigating through and the budgeting conversations and the priorities of what we do with our district but that's where we are right now any other questions just have one more question dr blake can you talk about why we notifi notify at a grade level and not a classroom level as far as uh um there is a case one of the things that was uh board member schultz one of the things that was we're doing an abundance of over communication in other words because there are you are you're at recess times together you're at lunch together in some cases there's departmentalizing of this so that that way you are notified that there is a potential case in that grade level so it's an over over communication when there has been in consultation with the health department identification of the need to quarantine those communications go to the individuals i can tell you that this has become a consuming all around-the-clock thing i will tell you that on sunday afternoon myself and the preschool director and the health department were identified being made aware of cases even coming in over the weekend even prior to our ability to get a hold of someone at the health department we were notifying families this is our knowledge of this is what we're aware of this is what it could mean and we will inform you as soon as we know more so those who need to know more are being directly communicated with even prior to us getting an official directive to do so just so that we can respond out of abundance of caution but you should know that this is an all-consuming all we are doing is coveting yeah that's a great question because grade level they have their specials at the same day so if it's sixth grade they've all had art and all of that so that's a great question our hope as we've shared with you is that again making people aware that there's potential exposure one of the things we've said from the very get-go is that one of the things we cannot and assure is that there isn't the potential for exposure our hope is is that making you aware you are paying attention to symptoms the thing that is the most important thing you can do is to please as as as we have said again and again and again please if your children are sick please keep them home the way that we stop having to notify potential exposure is is not being there to expose in the first place any other questions okay then we will go on to 7.2 paid sick leave benefit due to kovid 19 pandemic miss martins good evening board member pardon me goody good evening president reece vice president wilson and board members my fellow colleagues as well as our community tonight i've got in front of you some information items related to covid19 paid sick leave benefit you may or may not recall back in january we extended the federal ffcra families for families first response corona act i think i got that wrong but it's essentially something within those areas but um we extended it because of the fact that we did see and have high covert level cases still that were operating and felt that it was a best best option in the district to provide that for our employees as well as those that they had to care for whether it was dependents at home and or additional um maybe other dependents in relation to parents things of that nature so in cabinet a couple weeks ago we decided that it was worth bringing back because of the fact that we've seen those increases in cases all across the district as was reported last week when we did our presentation you know we have higher numbers now than we had had last year so looking at this and looking at the number of employees that have had to be out already from july 1 through august i think it's best given we've worked with individuals and they've had to exhaust all of their time because whether they're waiting on a test and or they had symptoms and encouraging them and what was great was our employees staying home because they were sick and or somebody that they care for were sick i'm not going to go bullet to bullet but summarizing in general the family's first coronis recovery act the actual component of ffcra was from january 1 to december 31st in terms of the federal component we then extended it um pardon me april 1st i'm all over the place i apologize from april 1st to december 31st and then after that we then extended it from january 1 to june 30th it's still 80 hours of paid sick leave we had had that and extended that part of the ffcra also included fmla individuals are still eligible for fmla depending on qualifiable cases fmla existed prior to ffcra the only difference with ffcra was that our individuals actually got paid traditionally fmla was previously a non-paid federal leave component we would not look to offer this to employees who've already exhausted the time so if they've already utilized it they wouldn't get additional time these are for all individuals who haven't had an opportunity or fortunately not so much an opportunity were fortunate to not have been sick prior but may be sick now and or sick as time extends as we talked about it we thought it should be probably for the whole school year so not just from now until december but to go ahead and look at it for until june 30th of 2021 uh and going back and retroing from july 1 to august 25th today's date so then for those individuals that have already had to exhaust their time and potentially in a doc status we would be able to credit their general leave time back and or vacation time depending on the eligible employee next slide so these were all components of what ffcra had prior to what we did and what we extended the benefits through the only difference that you'll see this time around if we do get this approved tonight and you'll see on your agenda it is not only for an information item but also for an action item we feel it's important that we go ahead and not only discuss it but move forward with it so that way we can address employees as more and more questions have been coming up so you'll see on there in bullet number four we did put an age component to it in surveying other school districts as numbers were increasing a number of them came out and said we're only doing this for our employees we're not doing this for anybody else we feel as though based on our population and issues that we've already seen where we've had employees need to be home for their young children and our younger age children and they didn't have any other option that we looked to incorporate that still but put what we felt was a an appropriate age limit for those who couldn't stay home alone versus those who could typically in middle school um they start to stay home alone for various reasons in terms of responsibility and are able to stay home alone so you'll see that age level there and then also if the individual of place of care is closed and the care provider is unavailable then you'll also see that we'll accept that for children under the age of three and we had done that last year because of the fact that we did see that too where whole organizations were closed as a result private day cares around the areas so if something were to occur i'm not aware and i've not heard anything legislatively on the federal level that this entitlement benefit would come back up but if it would we would void this and then do appropriately with the federal government in acts and then again as i mentioned earlier the employment benefit would apply this whole school year so returning back to july 1 and going until june 30th next slide questions president ruiz mrs wilson i just had a quick question why did we choose the age of three because we have a little gap between three and five is the under 11 still in place then like that's what i'm i guess i'm wondering like is that gap the under 11 is still in place but previously when we had had this back in the um back before june 30th what we were seeing too and what we did you may or may not remember was we offered some child care facilities for our employees we had uh kids club kind of work with us and were organizations where they were not sick but they were to quarantine we allowed them to participate in that i left it there as an option not knowing what may or may or not occur as we move forward with this but it would cover all those kiddos from 11 under okay great thank you we just don't have facilities currently in which we are able to offer that because preschool is you have to be three or over as well as potty trained thank you anderson where are you going to ask something forgive me if this request sounds outrageous would it be possible to add trying to get the vaccine numbers up and some people have reactions and they need some time off to cope with the the um the symptoms that they get from the shock could we open it up to staff who maybe are sick you know they get stomachaches or you know or whatever and sometimes they get fevers afterwards and if they can't get on a day they didn't get in the middle of the week because of whenever the appointment happened could we extend it to them as well or care for a child that may have something similar or do we need to just stick to straight up coded because i think given the dynamic um sticking to covet is probably best and because we're alleviating 80 hours for them hopefully they then still have general leave time in which they could a day of sick um you know i'm willing to share my own personal experience to where when i got vaccinated the first time it was just um my arm was sore i was perfectly fine but pardon me um the second shot it knocked me out fortunately i got my second shot on a friday afternoon so i was knocked out all on a saturday but then by sunday morning i felt fine again i know everybody's circumstance is a little different but the hope would be that um they're not having to utilize too much time as a result of that and maybe being able to coordinate the potential some of those shots as a result around schedules and what maybe might be more convenient but i think we'll start to get it'll get um squishy using the word that came up last week squishy i think is a good word for that because then we're gonna have to ask people to provide us documentation of their vaccination and i don't know that i want to go there you would have to ask that how else could we be able to monitor people say i got fascinated i'm not feeling well um this should be used for that purpose and not necessarily for the purpose of some other sick component for the for then for the coveted lead they have to provide proof that they had that they were swapped or whatever correct okay yeah so they have to provide us documentation of a positive covet test and or documentation um in which they were told to quarantine by a health care provider and our district nurse miss jillian fulton does qualify as a health care provider okay all right thank you i just thought i'd try i remember i understand i love this idea but i i think it would get squishy for sure as far as and i don't think you could legally ask somebody for their vaccine when it comes to yeah but it's it's it's an idea for sure president reece mrs caleb i'm grateful that you have um put this back on our laps and i will be happily you know voting yes for this and i'm thankful too that you chose through the end of the school year um just to you know give our teachers that cushion that they so deserve so thank you for bringing this to us and the retro yeah nope thank you any other questions comments this is teachers and staff correct it's district districts districts all employees staff as well i think when you said teachers i'm like wait i thought it was teachers and staff so i just want to make sure it was everybody that got this okay great thanks president wilson it's everyone yeah all employees no other questions all right then we will go on to thank you for the presentation we'll go on to our action item 8.1 do i have a motion uh i move that we approve the reinstatement of the sick or the paid sick leave benefit due to coven 19 pandemic second any questions or comments all those in favor aye aye that motion carries five zero all right we're going to go ahead and recess our regular meeting to enter into a public hearing it's our public hearing number one pursuant to house bill 2862 for our instructional time model dr foley president reese members of the board i'm going to ask dr sue borzicz to present parts of this and she'll be happy to answer questions when sue started with us last year i don't think she'd even been working with us a few hours and i assigned her immediately you got to start working on the remote learning model at the time that was what we had to work on and it was part of attendance and so obviously she was part of this with us last year and has been helping us interpret what does this mean with her department and with the district leadership what does this mean for us and what would this look like how would we document it so that if in the event that we ever needed to utilize this we have this in place and could use that code and capture adm as required for this for multiple reasons so she will start us through what the framework would look like and again once we put this in place this would be a model that our district would have in the event that ever needed to utilize for any purpose thank you president reece vice president wilson and members of the board it's an honor to be here tonight to present to you um the ins and outs of our instructional time model as dr foley mentioned to you last year we had a distance learning plan that we were allowed to write because we didn't have an aoi or an online school if you will and that distance learning plan was our accountability for attendance and making sure that we accounted for each one of our students for our adm it allowed for the parents and students to move into remote learning and back and provided a structure by which we were accountable for those students unfortunately the distance learning plan was just designed to be a temporary tool to use until a district crafted and was approved the aoi which is what we did last year during the time that we had that distance learning model in place at the end of last school year districts who had a distance learning plan those all those plans expired and um and we were either required to have an aoi or we could not offer online learning for students and so obviously we hva or higley virtual academy was born in our district in the meantime though the arizona department of education now has asked us to come up with an instructional time model and the purpose of this is just a little bit different than a distance learning plan the instructional time model is an attendance and accountability tool that um allows us to account for our students and receive adm through different models of instruction and the purpose of this time model is to create something that is a little bit more sustaining that will will last over time so in other words this isn't going to expire at the end of the year this will go on and it is a tool that we can use for multiple purposes so while tonight we may be looking at this through the lens of coved it actually is a tool we can use in case we had a flood in case we had to shut schools down for more than a day for students because of various natural disasters you know some mountain schools will use this to account for their snow days so there's multiple reasons that we might want to have this in place and so this is why we're bringing this to you at this time the um and of course we have to receive approval from the governing board and we have to present this at two public hearings and those are requirements of hb 2862.
not too bad i wasn't really expecting something like that when i was looking at the stat sheet at first or the roster at first but then once you you add everything up we do have a little bit of size this year that can hopefully control the line of scrimmage i took a word from a phrase away from you yeah that's right yeah well uh you know the name of the game is controlling the line of scrimmage you can't get anything done if you can't control the line scrimmage and you know we're gonna have a tall task there's no question about it mosquitoes guys will be big they'll be aggressive they're always strong and quick and you know everything everything you want and all those kind of football players but we do have a little bit of size um we never have a ton of size anyway i mean when you look at the just the numbers and how much we weigh but most times our kids are pretty good at getting off the ball and getting into people and maintaining blocks long enough to give our skill kids a chance to to go make plays so um yeah just talking a little bit more about some of those guys you know owen brewer i can't say enough great things about this kid and there's a there's a lot of great kids out there but this is a kid that you want to talk about training all summer you want to talk about being in great shape and you know he's a quiet kid he didn't say much he loves to be coached and and he's hard-nosed as can be so he's really going to be the guy that's going to anchor a lot of things for us uh you know our center and grant matthew he'll be our emotional kind of guy you know sometimes uh he lets his emotions get to him but that's not a bad thing you know for me i want those guys that are emotional as long as they can control it um you know and and uh those two guys are going to be our guys that really kind of kind of set the stage for us on the offensive line and you know we do have a tom kingstein coming back after starting a little bit last year as a as a sophomore so he's got experience he's a big kid he's still trying to i think figure it out but but i think he's almost there so we really like those guys and then jason kuczynski who's going to be a first year starter guy again quiet kid and he's tough and he's not real big but he'll get after you and so we like that about him and and mason schnabel is another kid that uh you know he kind of surprised us last year as a sophomore when he'd come into games for us and played on the defensive line and and he's grown two three inches and put on about 40 pounds in the offseason just because he's you know maturing and getting bigger and so um i look for him to to be a special kid for us too and then you know obviously can't say enough about our quarterback i've been starting since he's a freshman the only kid in my 28-year coaching career that i've ever started uh as a freshman and not because i had to but because he was good enough to play and uh you know he's just that kind of special kid and he showed it last year at the quarterback position and obviously on defense as well he's kind of that it factor kind of guy and uh and we like elijah jarvis too he's not very big as our running back but uh he runs hard he does run hard he's only about 145 pounds but i feel like he runs like he's you know 185 or 190s again he's not a kid that's not scared but you know one of the other running backs that's not on the list jeremiah biltman will see some time uh whenever elijah needs a break and and he's a little short guys not real big but he is kind of stocky uh he's got great vision good feet and and so i think he'll do some great things for us and then the receiving core you know jay played quite a bit of receiver last year even though it was more from a kind of a sniffer standpoint if you will more of a tight end full-back type he you know he'll this year he'll do that and play in the slot and then with mcconaughey out there and then uh you know i think the hicks kid will see quite a bit of time at one of the receivers just because he's a great target to throw to it six foot five and um and then saigon and colin sagan and drew megginson will split some time at our uh our z receiver and and um you know depending on how tired kid kids get you can see receivers they could be moving positions all day long so um but we know we've got some guys who can make plays and that's what it comes down to our line and just have to give our guys just enough time to get in the open field and try to go score touchdowns so i'm going to ask you this and you're probably going to tell me i can't give you that answer we're going to be a balanced attack you're just going to give me that simple answer sure yeah we're going to be 50 50.
and that is going to do it for tonight's match a 2-0 victory an emily ellis goal topped off by a jenna lange strike in the closing minutes the difference in tonight's crosstown classico at bcsc soccer complex for the evening north held an advantage 17-4 in shots and a 14-1 corner kick advantage fairly competitive halves at a 0-0 first half and if in a even second half until ellis found the back of the net and in the late the late game tally by east at the end or by laying at the end excuse me looks like teams are exchanging pleasantries after the game not sure everything that's going on great crowd tonight spirited expect nothing less for the east north games expect have same type of turnout for tomorrow nights boys contest which kicks off at seven we're going to be streaming live on the bcsc youtube channel it should be a very exciting match tomorrow for east women girls team they're going to kick off monday against franklin here at bcsc and north will actually be on the road against newly appointed jordan vahard's floyd central highlanders saturday the hoosier hill conference foe of columbus east but they're going to be playing columbus north we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back with players of the game stay tuned and we're back from the bcsc soccer complex anfield in the corn field tonight's match the bulldogs from columbus north secured a 2-0 win over the olympians from columbus east player of the game be number 10 for columbus north emily ellis she was a stalwart in the midfield regaining countless 50 50 balls creating off the dribble creating key passes and then ultimately scoring the game-winner for east number two norah dwinger was able to impact the game from her outside midfield position um nor unable to play in this match last year sustained an injury very early on and most of the was out mo most if not all of each season um showed that showed her medal both attacking and defending phases and is going to be a key contributor and a key player to be reckoned with in future matches so as we close tonight player of the game for north would be emily ellis the game-winning goal nordwinger from east and we will sign off i'm ty smith we will be back tomorrow night 7 p.m for the boys match if you can join us out here the bcsc soccer complex great if not we will have it on the bcsc youtube channel so signing off good night everyone we'll see you tomorrow
the article said the exact same thing about norwalk yeah and so somewhat contradictory as you know providing a remote experience for kids when it's not allowed as part of the um but you know nonetheless that's that's kind of where we are right now so i you know just just to acknowledge that question joe because i noted that you know there are a lot of families that are requesting uh the remote as a remote learning as an option certainly understand why you know there are varying reasons why uh families have made this request and i empathize with a lot of families particularly after last year and going through last year and a lot of families chose to stay home and keep their children home because they didn't feel like it was safe to to send kids in um but we we are the district that is we're we're following the guidance from state and federal guidelines uh prioritizing 100 return for students we understand that there are going to be instances where there are some anomalies as part of you know some some individual circumstances where we may have to do something different but we'll we'll take those on a case-by-case basis thank you my last question is do we it's wednesday school starts monday do we know what our total enrollment is do we know how much how how many students were up over last year so i i i can take a look um i'll need a second i i can just tell you that it's a moving target yes yes and i'm smiling because karen and kelly know i'm in meetings for the enrollment i think i started twitching when you said enrollment joe um i mean danbury continues to be popular uh we're we're about 950 kindergarten students um this year and um a 975 kindergarten students already so one of our wonderings was were we going to get for the families who kept their kindergarteners home last year were they going to resurface as first graders and kindergarteners and what we have learned is kind of been a split so it looks like we're going to be over a thousand easily in kindergarten this year um and it and it also looks like we're going to be close to a thousand in the first grade wow but the last time we look we're 9.75 kindergarten we anticipate we're going to surpass that number by at least another 75 to 100 and i'm pulling up our numbers for first grade right now i'm mentioning these two grades because these are kind of our growth growth areas if you will um so safe to say overall enrollment so um it certainly has not declined and just had a meeting with our middle school principals yesterday their enrollment continues to grow and with social distance and in the lack of options that we have at the middle school i think it's just another reminder that we need more space for our middle schools you know we we had that realistic conversation yesterday uh and social distancing guidelines and no guidelines uh we really need space for our three middle schools we need some other options and joe i'll i'll look for this document i'll circle back and answer that question for you that's fine thank you very much okay miss cooper um any other questions from you or board members um i have one other question um maybe for carapante kara is it is it um the mask mandate is only through october or is this for the entire school year so currently the school mask mandate under the executive order is only through september 30th the city of danbury mask mandate does not have an end date at this point and that covers all indoor spaces which would include schools got it thank you welcome i entered any other questions from boardman saying none um i want to thank everyone for the presentation and uh it was a lot of information and i know it took a lot of working together to put this together and and on behalf of the board i would just like to say thank you if there are no other questions uh or no other concerns anyone have any uh question for mr watson or uh carol or anyone else mr uh sympathetic uh we want to have a quick one yes uh right just a quick question um once this is approved um will this be posted on the website and if so um will there be live links within the document um you know i think the the public just saw our agenda which they can't click on the links embedded yes um i'm sorry rachel yes it will be available on the website and i have not tested it recently but once you open it on the website the link should be live but i will confirm to make sure that it is thank you absolutely you're welcome thank you rich are there any other questions cnn uh kate there's no other question kate i will make a motion that the board of education approves the 2021-2022 school reopening plan as presented promotion made by kate seconded by uh al so we've had discussions so kate you want to go right into uh the motion um as far as a roll call got it uh joseph britton yes richard chaleski aye kate caneva aye gladys cooper yes lauren daly aye joe da silva aye sorry catherine hodgson aye rich jannelli aye cathy molinaro aye al russo roll dog yay and amy spelino hi all right that's unanimous unanimous thank you all if there's nothing else it's about 8 22.
i wanted to let you know too along with that counseling we increased the counseling assistance days it was 160 before and we increased them to 180 days so they were on our campuses to help our elementary counselors and administrators to be ready to go on our campuses professional development uh we we had curricular training new teacher orientation behavior supports mtss our big day was august 12th professional development day where we had all of our teachers um we split them up between marigold and pv we had a main speaker we had two main speakers groups that we had it was shadrach and was our guest speaker he first talked to the secondary teachers in the morning and then while the elementary teachers were doing their bias awareness training from a couple of our butte college partners that led those trainings and then we flip-flopped it then shadrach talked to the elementary teachers next and then our secondary teachers got their bias awareness training the the numbers you see up there 4.7 4.1 we surveyed all of our teachers after each one of those things to see how they thought that went one being low and five being high shadrach was a a big hit at 4.7 and the bias awareness training actually scored very high at 4.1 so um they went really well i want to do a shout out i know he's in the back back there with a little mic up but phil morgan did an excellent job making sure that we had classrooms and facilities ready for that day we had them spread out all over the place so again that's probably around 760 teachers that we had um there that day and we fed them breakfast and lunch but they were all different classrooms here on marigold and also pleasant valley so phil thank you very much because phil had to do a lot of work on that and a lot of meetings with us changing classrooms constantly on them so i appreciate phil on all your hard work on that oh and vince and sarah with all the food thank you um providing all the food services his and his crew were amazing getting that food in there for breakfast and turning around and coming back and feeding everybody for lunch so that was also a great big hit enrollment as of august 19th i mean you can see we have 5191 elementary students and 6 725 secondary students and 242 other so a total of 12 142 on that same date last year we had 12 131 so we're right about the same um we will continue to look we usually really sit down with kevin and his crew and jacqueline right after labor day to see the uh we always see rear ends in the seats we want to make sure that our kids have been showing up during those times but that's our total as of august 19th for our enrollment facilities and maintenance some interesting things we have um on the left that's a picture of one of our whisper rooms that's the one that's at sierra view that basically gives you a sign room for our students and our counselors to meet with and talk with in a silent area also construction at citrus preschool neil dao our wellness centers and peavey high school cte facilities so those are some of the things that are going on pv if you haven't been into that ct facility it's pretty darn you can see the picture on the right it's pretty amazing to look to see uh we just had our co and extracurricular we just had our web students and our and we had an abundance of our link crew i don't know if you've seen any of those pictures from the high school it's amazing amount of freshmen that were brought onto our campuses and fall athletics right now we're an estimated we about to have a 900 students participating in fall athletics school side updates and this is our technology this is john vincent and his crew few sonic touch base panels were continuing to be updated and installed our new phone system is on track we also deployed another 4 500 new chromebooks again where you have new students that are getting them and we will take them out every four years so that's the 4 500 new chromebooks we also john and his crew are we're adding more into every classroom so we had spares there it's a constant uptake for them to keep those things going so i appreciate john you and your team at marsh at the computer lab over there doing the best they can to keep us on site also i want to give a shout out to john it was sunday i believe that uh he was saving our servers him and one of his colleagues where justin were down there um making sure our servers were okay and we kelly and i always kid because we said hey if you need our help let us know we we i was going to wipe the sweat off john's forehead and then kelly was going to use the fan on him to make sure that he was cool because that's about the extent of how we could have helped him support for our families i just want again this is our tech number for our parents can still our tech number still available for parents to get support for if they're having any issues with their child's technology on our campuses again that number is 530-801-2716 if they need to call into that number and we can give their family support for our tech line new this year our safety protocols we have a coveted reporting line now we have right now we have one of our nurses running that 14 had to rent it for the first couple days i appreciate that tina we have right now debbie campos manning that for families to call in to report on different covet situations so we can give them the information that they need on quarantine or or you know days that they're going to have to be on our campus we're also looking to have that person full we're looking at hiring somebody full time for that right now we just have one of our nurses taking care of that until that happens face covering compliance right now we're we are pleasantly surprised in how that was going our students have been amazing and our staff and our teachers have been amazing in the classrooms and on our campuses we've had very few of it any situations that come up on the mass we have people at different campuses and again we it's just amazing kids are excited to be in class and have been wearing the mask and not having any issues with that at this time i can go over the modified quarantine that is a change there's a couple different ways when a child is being quarantined one they can just take the 10 days and not have to get tested and stay home for the 10 days if they've been vaccinated they can go right back into the classroom and wear their masks as long as they're not showing any symptoms on the modified quarantine a little different is if the family their child is not showing any symptoms they can return to school but they have to test two times during that ten days to show that they they are negative it's on the third day and the seventh day i want to make sure i'm correct on that tina yes she's looking at me so i want to make sure that i'm saying this correctly third and seventh day they just need to check in and be make sure that they're not showing any systems symptoms and they can go right back into the classroom we've had families choose both those options so get any questions for me john tina ted john vincent john shepard board members do you have any questions yes i wanted to ask if you had pictures of kelly holding the fan while john was doing the work on the computers i would just like to thank john he did not take us up on the help he let us stay home on sunday how many athletes i i miss we have 900 athletes right now particularly 900 900 okay approximately 900 yeah and just a reminder of the mask requirement requirement is for in school buildings inside the classroom and it's in built inside buildings yes so when any adults when students are present yeah so when any adults are coming onto campuses they don't have to wear a mask until they enter they get one walking and we have started having volunteers come back and they have to be matched just like the students do when they go into inside the classroom yeah i would assume that everybody would assume during school hours that students would be in buildings well they have recesses lunch and passing periods at the secondary level which they do not have to wear a mask i guess what i'm trying to say is that in my experience at marsh for example there's never any time of the day where i would enter a building and there wouldn't be a student present correct unless the teacher has a prep period right okay okay thank you and that's my presentation i do want to just add that we have amazing kids amazing staff and amazing parents and this has been one of our smoothest starts the kids i think really truly missed being in school they came in and they want to stay they're there they're excited so thank you to all of our kids out there and our parents and absolutely our staff for setting that positive tone do we have any public comment on this issue we do not we do not okay this is for information only there's no action um needed mr shepherd good evening thank you president robinson so as you can see in your packet we are bringing an action item to you tonight to consider just to roll the camera back to a previous board meeting we had a conversation about assembly bill 104 that included some ed codes related to learning recovery and specifically one of those ed codes 49066.5 referenced 2020 and 21 students who are in the 9th and 12th grade could have their grades adjusted and while we have had some students take us up on that offer it's been well publicized we've had we've had pretty solid communication with parents and families what we've realized is some of the intent of the legislation in our opinion didn't cover some of the students that do need to be included in that in that process in those criteria our incoming ninth grade class was not included in that ab104 language and we're asking the board to consider including them for one year only for this past year only and for a myriad of reasons in rare cases and a great adjustment could support a student's seal of bi-literacy eligibility in rare cases it could support a student's a through g eligibility in some cases it could support a student's athletic eligibility and then also for clubs again rare cases but we don't really know yet because we haven't been able to do this cjsf eligibility so we're bringing this to the board tonight to consider and see if i can answer any questions about implications implementation it would be very similar process to what we used for ab104 dr kaiser we had to consider this at the university level and i was a little surprised at the number of faculty who were very concerned that letting students have a great change to fast fail was going to affect their futures and what i found out was that the law schools were already doing it so here was university faculty worrying about quote unquote supposedly professional careers or grad school and they had already moved ahead so i think it is a very positive move that we know there was a tremendous amount of disruption to everybody's last year educational experience and and when you add the fires and all of that that we had to deal with so i think it's a positive thing to do for this year of incoming freshmen mr landau thank you um one of the big issues with ab-104 was the very tight deadline they gave us they gave students for getting those great switches do you have an idea of what kind of deadline you would look at once you start advertising this to parents and whatnot so the challenge here is that we want to ensure that we cover all kids and make sure we're clear with parents that we're going back a year so we would like to take longer than 15 days we'd actually like to have this go through september 30th if the board is agreeable that would give us enough time we would implement it as quickly as possible knowing that there are some immediate implications for example athletic eligibility would be a pressing need to try to implement it as quickly as possible but we feel like having a longer deadline would be beneficial for for parents absolutely yes ms dalby um i have two questions um so just so that i'm clear this was something that was offered for students who are already in 10 through 12 but just not the incoming freshman students and then the second question is is if what if and when the board approves this and we open that up until you see the end of september um four suggestions right your suggestion for end of september for freshmen students now freshman student would we open that back up again for all the students who had been eligible before so everybody has the chance to rethink that decision and and you know have that a second opportunity to be able to change their mind if they have realized that that was not the right choice that they made before unfortunately while we'd love to be able to do that believe me the applications that have come in have been well well supported the legislation does not allow us to open back up the window that was related to av-104 is there a corresponding resolution or anything i don't see anything for us to approve other than the um implications language here yes frankly we were just asking for this to go into the minutes for one for one year only it would not be board policy we would have procedure in place much like ab104 but it would not become board policy which would then be supported by admin regulation it would just be a decision by the board for one year only as as documented in our minutes thank you do i have [Music] any questions and for additional clarification from board members yes we have any public comment there's no public comment do i have a motion associated with this request have a second well second i have a motion dr kaiser second by member dalby any further discussion board okay um i'll call for the vote was our last vote unanimous no okay so we need a voice vote dolby aye tennessee randall i robinson i thank you passes five nothing absolutely i'll report back thank you okay um we have this on from business services the um uh local control accountability plan final revision stressing final hopefully finally and i i would like to um let me get to the one of the attachments because it was noteworthy there was um a letter attached along with the um the notices for reaching for revisions that um states that uh that the um okay where with many um and changes in the lcap process these last two years as well as the completion of a brand new lcap template many districts and county offices across the state are taking advantage of this edcode provision with that in mind the county office of education worked with chico's administrations to provide clarification to the following sections and that we they're asking for adoption they also state in the first paragraph that chico's lcap is one of the cleanest most transparent and student focused that butte county office of education received this year and that didn't happen by accident it happens because we have a team that works very hard to make sure that um soon well we're probably already started on next year but that the process i see you smiling that the process is is done thoroughly and well and i would like to say thank you along with what butte county office of education recognized okay now you can present good evening board so before you this evening um our revisions to our annual lcap for the local control and accountability plan so this plan is brought forth every year in june along with the next year's budget is fine adopted by the board and then submit as part of their oversight they then review this document and provide feedback related to compliance so as ms robinson said we had a pretty clean el cap this year with only basically four revisions so i will speak to the fiscal components there are two fiscal components that marked incorrectly so as a result our total expenditures in the document increased slightly as well as expenditures related to our increased and improved services but what i do want to point out is those dollars were already included in the budget so it was just a poor mapping piece related to the lcap so those dollars have already been allocated for those services that performed this year we also had to add on the increase in and improve services research-based rationale for each of the actions that's a perfect example of what was mentioned in that letter about the new template not maybe entirely clear at the time but we've learned that and we know that each action does require research connected to that or data connected to that so we were able to do that is everybody hearing okay okay just want to make sure everybody can hear the board also the stakeholder engagement one piece is additional there and it is our consultation with aaron benton who is from butte county office of ed in the selfa with a special education consultation and then we had two very minor priority numbers to swap out as you can see they're a four to a seven and a four to an eight so very minor but wanted to make sure we did all of that as well so those were the changes dr kaiser including homelessness so direct certification is documentation that we receive from the state for students who are getting let's say state aid via it could be through food stamps or subsidized housing of that nature so students who are the families are already connected with the state and getting social services so we get direct confirmation our nutrition services department does to say these students are automatically eligible for free reduced and those situations those students don't have to fill out an application okay thank you that really helps so this evening we would just ask that you approve these small changes to our lcap and then we can be in compliance with bcoe driven any additional questions from the board no thank you once once i found the uh the explanation that was only six sentences long i was in much better shape i was trying to find it in the full document um do we have any public comment there's no public comment on this item thank you do i have a motion as ms dalby i move to approve the final revision of the local control and accountability plan for 2122.
13 or 14 students and there are dps restrictions on to and from school meeting some of that i i think doug said most of those are okay but an 84 passenger bus will handle more students and volume on that but you do require the cdl where our white bus does not require the cdl in that sense and just going back to the crossing guards we actually don't identify where our crossing guards are the cities actually will come out and do studies and look at patterns and then they will come out they paint and stripe it and then we staff it and so we work with each city the city of el mirage and surprise to identify those positions so the city would tell the school district where to put a crossing we work in conjunction with them but they go out and start walking i mean uh the 129th and meyer location that they're looking to put in crossing guard right now i think we requested about three months ago and just got approval a couple weeks ago for that so we talk to them they go out together we go out together and then we look at best places there are certain requirements and guidelines to make sure that things meet the international county or city safety walk guidelines that has been quoted to us i'm not exactly sure what that is and so they make sure it meets all their safety requirements and guidelines and criteria and we work in conjunction with them and how many bus drivers do we have total not not the ones that do dual like uh athletics and that sort of thing because i assume we have just a core group of bus drivers that do to and from school madam president members of the board we do have some sub bus drivers that will fill in and just take afternoons we have about 95 95 to 100 positions we're we would like to hire more because we have a lot of our drivers continue to identify that they'd like to be sub drivers but we're asking the drive every single day from that standpoint and has there been any discussion as far as wes mech or somebody offering some kind of cdl license to um i mean i'm not crazy about 18 year olds driving a bus but if they're qualified is there a discussion about through westmac offering a cdl license program madam president members of we've talked to westmac about maybe they could hire bus drivers and do some transportation they cannot hire drivers so i would lean on mr gruyshaber to advocate west mack to create that cdl program we could definitely ask for cate ford i know that they have a bus engine component so maybe they could move into the bus driver components i'm just saying i mean there's a job they get out they're certified they have a job and i'm just thinking myself because i when we think about hiring bus drivers we always think oh let's go to the retirement communities they're looking for part-time work are we looking at the other extreme madam president members of the board uh from my earliest days i remember tempe union the majority of their drivers were college kids uh so have we uh explored ideas with ottawa um yes i think we geofenced them i think we try to push in some advertising on some of that so we have identified we do have our own in-house trainers so we pay people to you want to be a bus driver we will pay you come in and sit down we'll start paying you we'll start treating you teaching you and we'll create a safe environment that you'll be successful to go out and drive our buses so we we have trainers on board right now good to know thank you i know that miss grant asked you how many bus drivers we have and you said 95 to 100 positions so are all of those filled like or madam president members of the board no um i know we go back and forth because i keep saying we need to hire 20 bus drivers i think there might only be 12 positions need to be filled but because i mean we're down 18 drivers every day from sick and everything we'd like to hire more than what we need so that we could staff effectively every single day and pick up sometimes there are drivers that only want to pick up extracurricular routes i'll just drive in the afternoon i'll just drive that so we're trying to create the flexibility that allows them to do that okay thank you and and i know that it was mentioned about westmech but i thought that for cdl you had to be 21 is that still true um madame president members but i thought it was 20 so i didn't say anything because our trainers when you apply our trainers will handle all that that's why we probably go after college kids but if it's 21 and maybe it's 21 and not 20.
so how this will play out in elementary schools and keep in mind once again this is just an accounting and model for attendance but at the elementary schools right now if a student is quarantined for a day or two or up to 10 days independently outside of their classroom or outside of a group of students that is handled independently with schools through canvas through a learning platform and and that's how we contin we'll continue to do that however if we get into a situation where an entire classroom an entire grade level or the entire school has to be required to temporarily quarantine then we will jump into this instructional time model and this will be offered for students at the elementary level then students will be attending daily live sessions much like they did in the remote learning model and attendance will be taken during those sessions for students and that will be reported to the state in that model so student would be remarked remote present for the day now to note lessons will be a little bit shorter and the duration of and supplemental assignments will be provided through canvas very much like what they were in the remote learning model last year so for example this might this is just a samples of what us elementary school schedule might look like this might be a little different depending upon the elementary school but you get the idea that you know there'll be live instruction throughout the day in core subject areas and then office hours and independent work assigned at the same time for our fourth and sixth or fourth through sixth grade students who might be in diads and triads or departmentalized depending upon what school they go to the idea is the same their schedules will still match their master schedule at school and they will receive instruction from that in that diet triad departmentalized model the same as they would if they were in person but it would be some live instruction and some independent work now at the secondary schools this looks a little different if you can imagine if a student or a group of students let's say student council or the football team for example has to be quarantined those kids are in multiple different classes throughout the school all day long so the um the ability to provide live instruction to those students if they get quarantined is impossible because the teachers are teaching in-person classes you know at the same time so if we have a school group or a team for example at the secondary level that is required to temporarily transition to virtual learning then asynchronous um learning is what they will engage in and that's very much like what we also had in remote learning last year students will have the ability to access canvas they will get their assignments videos instructional pieces on canvas they will be able to do them at a time that is convenient for them they don't have to do them at the same time that their online or in-person learners would be doing them but they will be marked present in our system remote present and the accountability will be through that canvas model where they have to log in and complete the work now at secondary schools we do have an option where it does go i mean where it does go to synchronous learning but it would only happen if the entire school was quarantined and then if you can imagine the entire school being quarantined means that teachers are not teaching in person so then we would jump back to that model where students would be attending the classes as they would in their master schedule during their the regularly scheduled time and we would take attendance in each class and remark them mark them remote present and then assignments would still be provided through that canvas learning system so just as a this i'm not going to go through this but you know by line but this is just an example of what a secondary class schedule might look like if we had to um quarantine or if the entire school had to be shut down for any reason so all in all this the there this doesn't impact husd in a negative way this is how we this is a tool that we will use to account for attendance and account for our student all of our students and they're learning should the model of instruction change for whatever reason throughout the year and this is designed for students who we would have we would be telling them they couldn't attend school in person for more than a day so natural disaster whatever any questions questions mrs anderson i'm sorry uh to avoid scramble because as you said you know some quarantines may be coming some may be coming our way how are teachers and support staff being prepared for this i know that there's been sufficient trainings we have some really good people that have been hired and i know there's been trainings in place but to avoid that stress on teachers because i know it's hard because i just want their students to succeed and adding on this training i know adds on more to their day which is more stuff to to do is there is there anything that's kind of being taken off their plate as well i'm just going to put it out there but the main question is how are we preparing them right now for this board member anderson members of the board obviously part of part of development of this plan and that's one of the reasons why we've been building our progressive mitigation plan this is a component of it and why we've involved multiple administrators in this conversation as well as representatives from the teachers association the the fact of the building of this is part of the beginning of the preparation you'll also notice that there's we're required to have two public hearings so this will be public hearing number one then there will be public hearing number two which we will have on the 22nd of september which will be our next scheduled meeting in the meantime what happens is communication begins going out from this is like this is information about what this is in the event that this needs to happen obviously behind the scenes of course with any mitigation strategy there's the work that happens behind the scenes the communication that goes to the community the schedules that'll go out the information for teachers and how you alert it i think you've probably been even reading in status how we're even trying to get our own our own student information system to be better at alerting to communicate with people because oftentimes when this happens there's short notice but this is the plan that we'll be helping people understand will happen in the event of any reason because you know let's take an emergency a fire that can happen and overnight things need to change and communication needs to go that's not the time to start the drafting the communication for which which happens so basically the preparation is in preparing people for this transition fortunately the transition this time is going to be easier than when we were to harken back to to march of of last year or year wherever we were like 2019 it was like 100 years to be honest um where we had never even here we were we launched a school year this last previous year without even having ever trained people in person or showed this to students the elementary level so we've come we've come a long way and hence we're sustaining that but obviously it would require ongoing follow-up and communication with but we've come a long way but this is this is the beginning stages of how do we help prepare and plan for people so in the event that this has to be utilized people know what we're doing and how we're doing it and what what what information comes so hence there will be sharing of this is the plan this is the communication this is how we would transition this is what you need to do that we're building behind this so with that said does that mean that this is on our professional development coordinators radar as well for the teachers that weren't here who haven't gone through it um brand new parents to our district you know i mean it was a learning curve for parents as well um not that our professional development coordinator but just that there's information um on on how this will happen so with the start of this is is that all part of what's coming together so we can see what professional development needs to be done what teachers are are comfortable with this some saying wait i know i i got through it it might have been a blur because i think all that time was a blur for most of us but um you know i could use a refresher or things like that and again as you saw one of the things that we built into our new teacher orientation was a heavy emphasis on our learning management system and how we're utilizing that and that's something that sustains across so this is ongoing and and sustaining so this is not a one-and-done kind of thing because the learning management system is is is a component that stays with us regardless of the model in person um online or in a time management model president reece mrs keller um just and maybe it's just a refresher but because of covid our teachers were trained in canvas quite extensively and again our new teachers that was i know mr treat dr dr i see his name all over status too he's a busy man um but i know his emphasis was on canvas and with that said to this day every teacher i think the expectation was that canvas is updated on a daily basis anyhow because that they know at any moment's notice one or two or three or ten of their students could be absent in a day so i was under the impression correct me if i'm wrong but canvas is just part of their daily routine is that true yeah yes richard um board member taylor yes he's being very intentional with his instructional coaches as well as um dr borzich and mr lotzenhazer with their administrators so without saying it to sound bad they're ready to go should this happen so it is important that they keep up with it because i think the little kindergartners it's still a big struggle so we probably still have work to do there that when they get home and have to get into this isn't the time where they have to learn it so yes they're working really hard it is a huge learning curve for many even us parents but i'm thankful that canvas is part of our daily routine i know it's something that all of our students now starting in kindergarten and first grade when they get to college they're going to be pros also i think it's important for our community to realize that remote learning was just for a season and it will its remote learning is is so different than online learning and i only know the difference and knew the difference because my children took online classes way before covid and there was never a live teacher on an online class that just did not exist in online teaching so just to make sure that again the remote learning was for a season for a reason and now it's online and and as much as you know i i never want to see us to go back to remote learning if possible but i understand the reason for it and again it's not the same as online so i think we need to make sure we're clear on all that president reece this is wilson dr foley president reese brings up a good point is there a parent refresher on kovid because i haven't been on that website sorry on canvas sorry we're still living covets so um on campus like covet is just always on my mind so you know now you know um is there a parent refresher like part of a night or something i know we do some nights i know it's a little different during covet times but is there something on our website or something that's like a little parent refresher on the program we'll remember wilson a governing board we may need to put together probably again we created a lot of visual tutorials on how to one of the things you would see that again in the progressive mitigation plan we even talk about device distribution one of the things we've even had to think about is at the elementary level should this have to happen there are students who do not have devices at home and so obviously on the night before you don't send your your kindergartners home with a device home we would have a process for those who would need it to do a drive-through pick up kind of thing so obviously there's going to need to be resources sent to families to communicate devices logging on access and a lot of tutorials and visuals were made but those parent resource pages would be revitalized and re it re-utilized for the temporary in the interim dr when that's uh president sorry um when um according to when they are quarantined is there i'm sorry a letter that says like here's the instructions on what you need to do or how you need to do as far as canvas being sent home right now there would be obviously communication with the individual teacher on the case-by-case basis depending upon whether it is one an individual situation or it's a whole class situation is there any questions for a public hearing any questions from our community so in this discussion there has been talk of canvas is being updated regularly and is now a part of the daily uh routine for but as a parent i can say who had kids who were exposed we got a letter we had symptoms we stayed home at first grader with nothing and i had to ask for the rest of it so and and i am a former teacher and i think we are expecting too much of our teachers nationally it's not unique to husd but i don't necessarily think husd is setting the teachers up having friends who are new teachers this year around the district i don't think that that is something that is happening and i can only speak to an elementary level but i have friends at multiple levels in the district who are all very frustrated and we're four weeks in so i'm hopeful that this will alleviate some of that potentially um what is the plan when the teacher is quarantined if the idea is that there is some remote learning versus online learning which i will argue my husband's an instructional designer there's absolutely live instruction in all levels of online learning um but if the teacher is quarantined then what is the plan for the students who because that teacher is taking time off potentially of symptomatic or caring for someone who's symptomatic the ripple effect of that especially at an elementary level is there plans for that is that what is coming in part two mrs richards thank you for your question so i think um a couple pieces good feedback that you're providing to us about what you've seen or not seen in regards to updating on websites and communication i think sometimes too it's depend upon if it's been a few students or several students that's very good feedback for us because again we're developing this and supporting our administrators through this whole process and again we have new people at different levels and so they're kind of entering into this and i think that we're going to need to provide additional support second um the part about the the what it would happen if a teacher is out we would have absolutely have to have a substitute who would be part of of supporting that during that live instruction if that teacher was if the teachers weren't team there would be or the students are quarantined there'd be a substitute who would be working with and supporting the instruction at that time they'd be logging into the canvas class and meeting the students and engaging with them at that time so when you say a substitute and i just want to understand this because we have a shortage of substitutes here in husd and most of those substitutes are not equipped to deliver actual instruction so the teachers are now being asked not only potentially to come up with this module but also essentially the much dreaded sub plan for a remote learning model for someone who is not trained to deliver that model is that correct potentially mrs richardson's one of the things that i know that we've been working on with our substitute who is training in these tools but that would be one of the things that we would have to make sure that that that anyone who had that was in the position doing that would log in we also might end up having in some cases teachers if if i had a grade level who might be who might remotely then have multiple class students in that class at the time they might need to help cover for two at that time if we needed to um one of the things we also have our instructional coaches at the district level who also have stepped in to help in situations when they and and they are experts in that as well so obviously in in you you are right it is a case-by-case situation by situation basis and we're working on building the capacity of everybody um and i will say more intentionally this year in our new teacher training than we ever have historically okay um and then where do the kids who are sick fit into all of this so covet can knock a child flat on their tush and delta is very different and the expectation that a mild case is what every child will experience in terms of checking in on canvas the expectations and then subsequent to that the makeup work that's associated with that what what will be the process or is there is that in in process to create one of the things that we have been talking with our with our teachers and administrators on all the time is to be very flexible and to work with families obviously we understand that and to be accommodating for work um and to communicate with us on the situation so if a student needs an extension or we need to provide more time that is something that our administration and teachers are understanding needs to occur and i think that we will be responsive to that um i think what's important is for families to communicate what's going on and and as you've seen it's kind of a different you know element you know this age of the student also depends because there's as a kindergartner first grader my ability to do independent work looks very different than a senior who's working on course credit so obviously we're going to want to be responsive to those needs okay thank you you're welcome and i think also just for clarification um obviously if we have to quarantine a classroom or anything the teacher although they would be quarantined would still unless they're sick yes okay so yeah the teacher even though they're quote unquote quarantined with their class yeah then the expectation is the teacher would be the one logging into canvas and everything if the teacher is ill yes that's a different expectation okay we would never expect a teacher who is ill to be trying to log in but if the entire school or sure classroom is quarantined then that teacher would be quarantined but the expectation is that they would they would still run that that i understand but i think that we're looking at a potential for more adults and children to end up sick especially given our setup in the classrooms so in that respect and knowing that we have a shortage of substitute teachers and knowing sort of what level they are at as a parent i'm already stressed out when a teacher is out and i know that the instruction is not quite at the same level not that we don't appreciate substitute teachers but um that so i wanted to understand how that fits yeah and then like last year when we were kind of in that remote environment um i mean we had teachers who said you know yeah i've tested positive but i'm okay and and they would still teach you know so they would be working with their administrator because again this would only be in the situation what we're specifically talking about is if we had to move to a different learning platform for temporary reason and so yeah if the teacher was unable to like dr foley said another teacher from that grade level may be the ones popping in there and providing some of that instruction and adding the um coverage for that or an instructional coach um someone who can can help do that in a remote environment and any of you correct me if i'm wrong out i would not i know we're working with our substitutes but if we're in a remote environment we have some different flexibilities i don't think we would be specifically asking a substitute to step in in a remote environment when we could have a another teacher from that same grade level who knows the kiddos when we have an instructional coach who could just log in so the re the remote environment would be very different than the in-person environment okay so and you guys don't have limits to how many you can have in a canvas classroom at a time because i know those exist i don't know does anyone know if there's a limit on the canvas classroom technology wise there's not a limit in the number of people that you can have in a canvas classroom so if a situation came up where we did have a teacher that was out sick we could easily combine some classrooms or split some kids up into other classrooms so that they could benefit from instruction from another grade level teacher if we needed to without worrying about whether or not that was going to work within the canvas platform it does get very slow when you do that does that help it does thank you okay whoops mrs carey i don't want us to forget either that our teachers have always been super accommodating when a child is sick that's not that's never been not a thing so i want to make sure that we understand that if a child my child had mono in third grade which was very rare a third grader having mono she was out for three weeks and i mean her teacher was more than accommodating for a sick child so i hope we understand that all as a whole that there would never be a strict deadline for his child who needed help getting through an illness in their schoolwork and typically we've had our normal rule of thumb that we've seen is the number of days out they have the number of days to make up but again like you said it can affect people differently um and the number of days may be the same but more one student may definitely be a little more functionable if you will and can get through some of that work where another student just i mean i've talked to a mom who their kid got up and showered had to eat something and was back down you know so they're they're clearly not going to be working on their work at that time and so i i think that the expectation from everybody in this room is that if we have kids that are are sick that we will absolutely work with them and give them the time they need to make it up and um i know sometimes it sounds like our new word is squishy sometimes that can get convoluted when in in the older grades because we have semesters and and everything else which um in high schools i mean that those timelines matter and and there's not a lot we can do but it we can still work with somebody we're not going to let that happen so i don't think that would be the expectation so yes absolutely i yeah president reese members of the board to that point this last several years we have had to create plans and back and backup plans for those plans for sub coverage both in person if there weren't subs what would our internal coverage be what would the plan be if if we didn't have enough and needed to for any reason temporarily close a site obviously those have been plans that have been internally operationalized so that in the event that they're needed they're there the same kind of things we are finding is that if there's concerns with this particular situation we need to be aware of it because we can accommodate and modify for it so i think one of the things that we have learned is that each and just about the time we think we have figured it out there's a new scenario that emerges with different complicating factors that we're going to have to work through again and as long as we're aware of them we work closely with the administration and the school side and the teachers to address it and we just need parents to communicate with us so that we understand what's going on so we can we can do our best to respond to the point that when we're talking at the high school level and there are credits involved and there's timelines involved there's processes we follow but there's also there's also um processes that we follow when we have to make exceptions and extensions or incompletes until we can make it up as long as we're aware we have been able to accommodate and again we just ask people make us aware of those situations we've got to remember too this is also these are temporary that we're looking at not like when we went from april till the end of school and then from july until september we're not we're not looking at even long think long-term things if we had a building issue and that building was not able to be used this would be used temporarily and if we still couldn't return to that building we're going to have to do something else to get them into other buildings um so again this is not something that we're that's meant to be a long-term thing um like we didn't know if it was ever gonna end before but so this this is meant to be very temporary president reece oh yeah oh it was still on the other topic but i can wait do you want me to wait okay yeah i just have a i have a few questions you know mine no go for it um so for this instructional time model to apply you would have to have the closing of a large community say an entire classroom right so i guess my question is well first of all is a child considered quarantined only once the county has stepped in or can a child be considered quarantined like if their siblings are ill and the county has not yet notified good question so it depends we've been working with the county health department we have not implemented additional but we've been following their direct exclusion guidelines on all those situations so we work with them to determine when we need to quarantine so yes this model would kick into place when if we were directed to quarantine a classroom a grade level or a site and the question that once last year we had um we had adopted initially thresholds that would trigger potential closure um one of the things we found was is that we never hit that threshold what what happened though is that the last few weeks of school at a particular school san tan when we removed the mask mandate there was an influx in number of cases at a particular school one of the things that happened at that point was we found it was concentrated to a grade level to a few classrooms they could track it back to an event that several people attended that caused a potential outbreak um a tight the the threshold we had would have caused us to have to if we it was one that we implemented upon ourselves would have caused us to have to close the whole school when in reality the health department said you might have if we have any if we see more connection here we would we would quarantine this just this classroom so what we're finding and and what all those schools are saying is that we're determining at the more we learn is that it's a case by case school by school situation by situation because complicating factors tend to make this more difficult and more challenging and hence why we do this as per state statute literally i have the documentation from dr sun and shine ourselves uh when and how and when we follow what and on and we're in consultation with them on all of those things so then sort of a follow-up question like i know that an ongoing concern in these meetings has been people sending their children in sick and despite no matter what side of the aisle you fall on i know people are worried about a restrictive attendance policy like if you miss 10 days then you get this nasty gram that you could be charged so people are worried about keeping their kids home when they're sick is does this or could this ever cover and could an instructional time model ever cover those children that are still waiting for their test results or have a sibling that's ill and the county hasn't yet made the notifications good question the challenge is is that this is for us there's synchronous and asynchronous the challenge is is it's really impossible for a student who is at home awaiting to be able to get live instruction when their teacher is teaching live it's really almost impossible to do quality in person online and for the teacher in the classroom to do in person and online at the exact same time that has been a challenge so this our model is for for entire classrooms or entire grade levels or schools for it to be synchronous the asynchronous component at the secondary allows there to be some more additional flexibility the part you mentioned about the attendance last year we really stressed the fact that there was no letters there was no tracking and we we tell people if you need to be out be out this year we are still selling people if you need to be out be out we are required still by law per the attendance similar to the same one to make people aware but there is no punitive punitive follow through because of attendance or absence we just need communication and to be able to document and track that okay so all right i appreciate it i'll think i'll email you the rest of my questions because they're not exactly about this model so thank you thank you mrs anderson um i i just wanted to add on um is it is it miss richards okay to to uh what she was saying and i'm glad you brought this up because it is i think mindy um touched on it when students are out and i know that it's a little separate from the plan that we're bringing forward but i just want to reiterate that there is universal communication the whole school for that leniency for assignments and for time to make it up and and maybe even just the understanding that they're now really behind um so so thank you for bringing that that was something i wanted to touch on and also it's interesting how things work out we and i know i'm in a different school district but we just went through this and in my department where we had a teacher out with covid even after being vaccinated and for for two weeks and she was gracious enough we used google classroom and she was gracious enough to upload and daily and daily and daily but one of the problems we came to even though we had guest teachers in the room they didn't have access to the programs and it was so frustrating because the kids could see what the guest teacher couldn't see and so there was this disconnect and i think it led to changes in guest teachers they were frustrated and they couldn't get that content covered and the students were wildly distressed and so i just want to make sure as you know we're training the new teachers we're training the guest teachers um and for these extensive leaves that we have like i brought up before that there's just not this scramble um that there we've looked at the technology we've looked at the access we they know the guest teachers know how to communicate the parents know how to communicate and the students know what to expect mrs martins can we confirm i think can you confirm the training that's happening for our subs so what i can confirm board member anderson is the fact that we did offer all the training for what we were calling rescue subs so our permanent subs that are at each site that are there daily we made sure in addition to the training that they had access so that way they could go into a classroom as needed to do that we've attempted to look into training for our guest like daily one-off situations um and depending on the circumstances we might want to reevaluate that and look a little more it's a little bit more difficult because of the fact that they're not technically our employees here at higley we use esi as you're familiar with and so because they're not technically our employees that access component is a little um more difficult but we could potentially look in working with it to see whether or not we could do a generic login in which that after like a day it's automatically reset so then that way it doesn't stay um depending on the length of their their time and with us at higley in that classroom if it's a couple of days or just a day and going from there but i do know that actually we just had a um a conference call this morning with esi and we were talking about a number of things in terms of strategies to build pools in addition to the fact that what other districts are doing to be creative to incentivize their own subs to keep coming back so i know some of those things i'm going to kind of take to heart with our hr sub and volunteer specialist and decipher whether there's a proposal we want to bring to cabinet to discuss it a little bit more so board member anderson along those same lines last year when we would have a teacher out for two weeks or whatever and we had a sub we did use district level coaches to go and help support as well as well at elementary we have site-based coaches so they just worked in tandem with them and it it honestly went pretty well and i know that's not the one day situation but these were sometimes two four weeks long but it seemed to work well one of the pieces that was an important component that we would maintain was those rescue subs that were kind of our employees that are intended to be like our traveling teachers if you will for these cases so again that's a component that's been an important piece that we learned as part of covid management for for covering classes which is one of the reasons why we sustained that this year hey there um so i know there's talk about confusion for parents for kids with getting onto canvas just because they're they're not using it often why can't we implement canvas just into our daily classroom routine um i think i heard we were one-on-one with devices or close to it at this point why can't we make the change to utilize it daily weekly really get into using it for assignments to mitigate the problems with you know forgetting how to use it when we're outside the classroom so that's been a discussion and it feels like we've been in school for six months and i know we haven't yet but i think it is a good suggestion because as a kid even if i'm on there two or three times a week it's not as scary or i don't get as confused because i know what to click and where to go so i think working with our principals that's something that we can continue to do because they update canvas as needed but some of them are doing this i know for a fact yeah some of them definitely are and it eliminates paper overall so i know you know paper is always a big thing but if you're just submitting doing your assignments online and submitting them there anything that would have been paid for it really enhances the experience makes you learn how to use canvas and feel comfortable with it and takes away that paper cost so absolutely all right thank you thank you president reece mrs wilson uh can we uh we would still be passing out our food and it would probably change a little bit right if we were to have to go to a model like this where a whole school may shut down would we like do a pass out at that school because i know that's a big part for parents right now a lot of parents are enjoying and utilizing that food the free food program from our federal government that can that started with president trump and continued with president biden so i just want to make sure that that would still continue for those families that rely on that vice president wilson that would be one of those components similar to the device distribution that would be communicated out so let's say in the event that it was at a school and there was a fire at that school we would translate transfer to another where they would be something similar like a drive drive through pickup we got really good at drive-through things after we figured this out um but we got better at it so that would be something that we would work through and communicate thank you i just know that's very important for a lot of our families this is kind of off topic a little bit but can we uh same talk but can we uh when you talk about the letters that go out and the concerns um that i think mindy had about it um concerns about uh the letters for the 10 days of absences can we send something to our community i mean i know we're talking about it now but not everybody's watching or paying attention as an email letting them know that hey we're required to send out this letter but we really want you to keep your kids at home if they're sick any kind of sickness you know right now and just make sure we're communicating so that it it's not passed on to facebook and then it loses something in the telephone game a little bit of communication about that remember schultz we'll work on putting together something like that and i think one of the things we're finding is that sometimes when these are sent from the schools directly they tend to be uh read more closely than if it comes from us from the district so we can work with uh our pr team on putting something together perhaps to have the schools send i i i know you have a lot already on your plate but if i think just the communication and people understanding more of it would help us and even the canvas stuff and how that works as well i agree that's something i know we talked about it prior to going back to school and um and everything but it's definitely worth reiterating yes because we we indicated there was the change we're these letters by law we have to send them out but but um just keep your kids home when they're sick but the important part about that communicate with us that's the important part we need to know that your kids are homesick and you can do that through parent view you don't even have to call and do the machine anymore you can do it through parent view but we need to know where your kids are that 10 days is is truancy but if we know where your kids are then that's okay we have another question yeah my daughter missed to several weeks of school she has an iep and she has different learning needs when between being sick and then having to quarantine for a different reason she missed about almost three weeks of school in that time period she probably could have been doing some work but she didn't understand the assignments particularly she's a freshman math and science just dropping in a powerpoint presentation and expecting her to understand what to do without that learning now she's back at school she has double the work and building on math skills is hard like and if she has to quarantine again what's in place for her so she can like continue learning without getting left behind mr watson mr lutz mr latin houser can you respond to her question i think any time when we're looking at providing supports that are for our special education that we would have to work directly with the case provider and to see what other different opportunities we can and so i hope that we would be able to reach out directly to her um case manager at the high school yeah or because i just said freshman correct yeah at the high school and then in as well as working with shauna and the special education department to see what other kind of resources we had to be available during a quarantined period i think it would have been great if there was something in place that time you know in the beginning when she needed it so he dropped videos or something if i would like for you i'm gonna i'm gonna point to someone in the audience i'd like for mrs miller mrs miller right here in the audience she is our special education director i'd love for you to talk with her directly afterwards or soon after because i think she can she'd like to work with you and follow up on providing additional information so let's see what we can do to support your student and help her out with the situation and i'm bringing it up also for other students that are probably going to be experiencing this or who already have i think that i understand your concern with the time and making sure we intervene because you're right getting starting behind and trying to catch up we may need to identify how we can modify and support um and accommodate with the needs that have occurred so shawna will be following up with you directly and i think that's a fantastic point that as we continue we still we're still working through this plan and as we continue and we have more to more work to do i know it does have a schedule for special education students and and what that would kind of look like but how do we how do we support those with ieps if we have to move to this type of this type of learning environment for temporarily and and i know that for mrs miller but but yeah that's an excellent point that we need to look at and make sure that we have the ins and outs of so if this were to become our reality we're not then trying to figure it out now details for sure because each student's different it's an individual plan and we would have to see but how that would be coordinated i think is is more important that it's in the plan how do we coordinate that because that is a lot of students but what would that there's an identified process of coordinating supporting our ieps and things like that so that's a fantastic point thank you yeah thank you for bringing that up with as i have a daughter with an iep and i wonder the same thing if she had to be quarantined you know not falling through the cracks because with putting canva in place with regular learning she would still have the issues and fall behind so i appreciate your question very much perfect and maybe there would be a contact person if your child is falling behind and needs help and i don't know if it would be like a at the school site or if it would be more at a district site and maybe we could put something together like in that quarantine letter if your child is falling behind and needs some assistance contact x and i don't i've read the quarantine letter multiple times but um haven't vice president wilson members of the board i think one of the things we have found is one size rarely fits all and really the closer to the student that we can make that contact the better so when it's we're talking with the teacher the principal because when when they when they come to the district we're five six seven layers removed and of course we're happy but we our ability to help is to go back down to the closest source to the teacher the teacher the student the support systems administrator the team around them and so what we will do is always encourage to start there now with that said if you're not if the answer is not being reached and your support is not getting there then you need to make us aware so that we can intervene and i think one of the hard parts is is that um sometimes by the time we get brought in it's late too late or not too late but it's it would have been better if we had been intervened sooner if you will well and the maricopa county public health has made it very clear we have to use their letter so um but it doesn't mean that we can't have supporting information please reach out to your child's teacher perhaps if they're on an iep their case managers um you know things like that so but yes i'm sorry i forgot that we did have to use their letter and i have seen it many times it has come under our emails but it has forgotten the letter dr sunshine's name at the bottom yes their letter so all right well thank you for putting this together it was great conversation so at least we got a lot of different topics discussed and and everything so we're going to go ahead and adjourn our public hearing and resume in our board meeting and at this point we're on future agenda items does anyone have anything president reece mrs kaler no i don't have anything dr foley thank you so much on your plate and i just want to say thank you so much for all that you're doing all of our staff each and every day all staff all teachers i really went into this school year a little more encouraged and hopeful and again it's been just a challenge after a challenge i would love for us to just get back to educating children and focusing on that and i know that you would love to do the same thing but like you said earlier today you were just coveting all day long and i just want to say again how much this board appreciates everybody that's working so hard um and and we just i look forward to the day where we don't even say the word and we can just educate but thank you anything else i think we all agree with that all right then we're going to go on to adjournment i move that we adjourn second who is that amy i'm like all right all in favor hi hi motion carries 5-0 have a good evening you
yeah exactly 100 yeah unless they line up with six or seven guys in the box and then we'll be 20 80. they line up with five guys in the box then we'll be 80 20. you know they predict what we do i don't predict that you know after five years i'm starting to understand what answers i don't even need to give you a coach's interview anymore i'll just be able to answer them for you that's right so i've done this for five years you said you've been doing it for 28 this is your 21st season at columbia 146 and 60 overall 96 and 20 in the conference you're the longest tenured coach at columbia the most wins in school history eleven conference champs nine of them have been undefeated now you say just because nobody else would hire me well you say all that stuff but you got to go back to your assistant coaches coach maine's been there for 21 years with you it started with coach touche same way but now you got kendall stump baker uh amson coming in you got a pretty good crew that helps you out week in and week out and makes your job easier well well beings at practice started five minutes ago and i'm not there yeah i've got a good crew you could say the least and i don't feel at all concerned that i'm going to be a little tardy today um but no yeah i mean what can you say i 21 years as a head coach never thought i'd be doing it this long uh you know spent five years here as an assistant but uh there's there's two things uh i mean maybe i can i can say three things two or three things i think that that has led to all those those wins and and number one on the list is having players you got to have players i don't care you can put any kind of rinky dink monkey system together that you want if you got players they're going to go out and win games and that's what our kids have done all the way back from um you know the buzz and half dozen that we had back in 2001 we first started and uh all the way up through the great years of 07-08 state finals and through the your years in 11 and uh in 2012 we've had a couple you know weird years in there but we've had players and great players and guys that are dedicated your program come from great parents right and that's the other thing that we've had and then thirdly uh great coaching staff you know anytime you've got consistency in your staff when you've got consistency in your staff uh that's huge it's just it really is and scotty being with me for 21 years and the rest of the guys have been around for a really long time too it's you know our our kids it's just an easy transition from one level to the next right and that's you got to build it from the blue jay system all the way up to the jv system to the varsity and you're just the guy that gets all the praise but there's a lot of guys underneath of you too but you also get the headaches too i guess if you don't win but those gray hairs come in there a little bit too on those on the stressful days but all that being said week one muscuda haven't played them in two years now overall record two and two against muscuda i believe 07 was the first year you lost that was the year we went 8-1 in the regular season i can't think of when the other loss was but then we won probably three four years ago at their place 36 35 that was actually me and jared's first night we had everything under control we were doing good and then we didn't hit the record button so it was a great game that we called but there's no proof that we called it and then had the victory a couple years ago as well so now going in fifth matchup what are you expecting out of them this year i expect the same from them that the that we we got from them in 19 and you know even before that i guess in 18 it was uh they're going to have athletes all over the field like they always do their school 1100 students they're going to be quick they're going to be aggressive they've got a great program over there in all their sports they do have a new head coach this year which you know i i my guess is they'll just continue moving in the direction that they've been moving he's definitely a good football coach coming from the watseka program up there that's been successful so they're going gonna be good there's no question about it you know a handsome kid coming back at quarterbacks gonna be a load i mean this kid's legit he's really good um you know then then they've got a uh kendrick i think's the kid's name one of the receivers that's back um you know he's he's lightning fast he's gonna propose some problems for us but uh you know they're they're i guarantee you they're gunning for us because the last two games we played if you remember back the first time we beat them um here not too long ago was london little's 97-yard 94 yard kickoff return in the wailing minutes of the game and then a block uh field goal to seal it and then uh in a game that looked like it was the tide was turning in 2019 with a score i think was 21-7 and they've got the ball in the five-yard line and and little picks a pass off and runs it back 97 for a pick six they kind of put it out of reach so they're going to be ready i can promise you that they're going to be ready and like you said having a new coach it kind of you know i think we're going to watch this i think we're going to see that you're going to have to go on the fly and i expect you and coach mayne be able to go on the fly you guys have done it for this many years i think you'll be all right so uh we'll find out here in 24 hours in six minutes when week one officially kicks off underway and coach like you said now you're 10 minutes late don't speed to practice make sure you get there get the boys ready to go for tomorrow and uh we'll talk to you tomorrow and hopefully we get a eagles victory appreciate it alex thank you thank you all for listening this is the first week of the coaches corner presented by houlton meats we will be here every thursday 6 30.
second have a motion and a second any further discussion board we're ready to vote all those in favor signify by saying aye aye thank you board um it's approved five zero no tennis opposed oh i'm sorry sorry i i did not hear that there was a non-response i'm sorry so we have um we have a four yes a one no okay thank you much um um again i don't know why this response is coming the way it is okay our next is the 45-day budget revision for 21-22 school year mr baltimore yes as a reminder the timing of the state budget adoption doesn't always match up with the timing requirements for local budget adoption so typically we see material changes changes are large enough that we think that you the board and the public should know about we bring back a 45-day revision to that original budget we are bringing that to you this evening you'll notice it's on a different format than our traditional standardized accounting code structure format but this format is approved by butte county office of education is provided as their template the changes are fairly minor as a reminder at the time we thought that we had a state budget but there were trailer bills that were coming after the fact that we weren't sure what was going to be in those trailer bills so that's what really is the change here we did get the local control funding formula and the cost of living adjustment correct the only adjustment to the lcff was related to our duplicated account percentage prior year was a little bit higher to the tune of a hundred and twelve thousand dollars so that unduplicated account percentage is what drove that additional dollars in the lcff you'll see additional revenues also in state and federal funds those are on the restricted side of the budget and we budget not only for the increased revenue related to those grants but also we budgeted to spend all of those dollars as well obviously we will need to talk that services and talk about the details of how those dollars will be used but for a budget standpoint we budget both all revenue and all expenditures probably the biggest change is related to the unemployment insurance percentage we had projected a 1.23 percent and that is a very large increase compared to 0.05 that we've been living with prior to the original budget but the state put more money into offsetting the unemployment insurance percentage increase and they dropped that down to 0.5 so although not back to the 0.05 it still was 0.5 less than the 1.23 on the unrestricted side of the budget that had an improvement or reduction in expenditures of eight dollars 448.88.
but there is a lot of criteria so i know on some of our brainstorming i took four or five of them back to mr curry and dps won't allow half of them through some of them he's checking with dps on some of those so there is a lot of requirements a lot of criteria um thank you for correcting and it's not 20. there's 21.
if anybody wants to come up we're going to be doing them all up at aces wild so come on up listen live and we'll be on youtube on kchs uh tomorrow night and every friday we'll be starting at 6 30 6 35 for the pre-game show presented by aces wild 7 p.m kickoff and we'll go from there so thanks again we'll see you all next week and have a good night [Music] you
on the restricted side of the budget two hundred and sixty two thousand six hundred and seventy thousand dollars the rest of the changes again on the restricted side are related to those grant dollars on their expenditure side and one of the more confusing things is we also saw improvements related to special ed funding through the av 602 allocation from the county so as a reminder special ed dollars through eb 602 come into the county and then there's an agreed-upon allocation methodology that is adopted that methodology actually provides more money to chico unified so that does two things one it increases the revenue on the restricted side of the budget for special education but it also then reduces our contribution on the unrestricted side of the budget so you see a correlation increase in revenue on the restricted side but then a reduction on the contribution from the unrestricted side of the budget so it ultimately helps our unrestricted side of budget we've talked about this before additional dollars or expenditures in special ed have a direct almost one to one correlation to the bottom line number on the unrestricted side of the budget so with those changes on our projected change in fund balance on the unrestricted it went from 3.8 million up to 5.195 million and again that is because our revenue is based on 2019-20 and not based on the enrollment in the 80 you know the enrollment number you heard earlier the multi-year projection i'd point to the board we did have small deficit spending in the second and third year with these revisions we only see some deficit spending in the second year very minor and that's eliminated in the third i would also point out that that's based on the same decline in enrollment that we had in original budget so we did not change any of the projections we had at the time for enrollment because we just didn't know what those were going to be if our numbers hold based on what was reported although it doesn't get us back to where we were in 2019-20 so from a funding standpoint we're still deficit we have a deficit or a reduction in enrollment it's still as much improved compared to what we have projected for our myp here and if those numbers hold and if we can project either less of a decline or flat enrollment that will also help our multi-year projections substantially so if i understand you correctly we are currently reflecting what we projected in the way of the decline if that decline doesn't happen and our current numbers hold that will be an adjustment that we will go back in and make yes it will be an improvement at first interim we know that numbers typically do go down from the first week however and this is the one challenge that we're still dealing with is you still need to go back to 2019-20 where enrollment was 12 362.
but there's a lot of criterion so as we're identifying some out-of-the-box thinking criteria we have to check with our dps liaison to see if doing this is okay okay thank you um i'm wondering if we can advertise what like that checklist is that dps checklist is so that we can encourage more people or let them know that they are eligible matter yes um right advertising yep okay um and i know that one of the one of the concerns that i've had and i know that i've shared this with you but just so we can do it publicly is that some of our buses are not full um so at some of our schools we might have three drivers with three different routes but their their buses are not full and we still have little ones walking to and from school without their older siblings when you have the k through four split with middle schools i i would like to see some of that expanded if possible um ida i know that that's difficult right now with the bus driver shortage um but if we can get this remedied in any way i would like to see those boundaries expanded um madam president members of the board the first two weeks is kind of a little uh rough as we don't know who's on who's off so we do have all of our bus drivers filling out routes uh uh reports on how many kids on every single route every single day our routers were sick last week or else they would have at that time started condensing some routes moving them around and also we opened up a program to allow people to apply to be on the bus that are not eligible to see if they want to ride the bus that not so we have we normally let all that shake out first before we start expanding our bus coverage in that sense but it's something i've written down okay thank you i do have some questions um of course my first question is is what is the mileage like is are is transportation offered to students who live a mile or more away two miles or more what is that mileage i believe our policy is uh one mile k-8 or k-4 depending on the school you're at and 5-8 is 1.25 and high school is 1.5 and our policy says radio mile on all of those a while okay um the next question what about behavior on the buses um i know that some of our children especially with last year being so wonky they weren't really in school the whole time what are we doing to address behavior on the buses for the bus drivers madam president members board that is a great question it was a huge issue about three years ago i actually was having bus drivers come to me directly expressing a lot of frustration of the behavior on buses and that nothing was ever being done to kids in that sense we had a referral program but they stopped using the referral program because it seemed like nothing was happening so they kind of felt like they were at their wits end and didn't know what to do at that time richard moore was our director and we asked him to put a group together and include some principles so that we could figure out as we looked into some of them some the problem was it got to the point that drivers were not turning in referrals very much and then when we looked at some that were turned in referrals sometimes most the time the school was dealing with it but they never let anybody know about it and so there was a lack of completing the feedback loop and so we put a committee together to work on a process and get more clear defined rules and guidelines and how that can improve and then so that was done a year almost two years ago a year and a half ago and then um unfortunately as i found out from a driver that asked where's all that nothing was ever submitted to me and then our director left and so we're hoping to resurrect some of that and get that up really quickly so i do think that is still a little bit of a gap is our completing the feedback loop and letting our drivers know the referral process and how it is supported and how and when discipline is being done i feel like that man president if i could just add to that response there are some schools that are working with transportation where rather than a teacher working after school duty on the pickup drop-off lane they will jump on the bus and i can't hear you a teacher will be on the route the the multiplying challenge with that is then the bus has to come back to the school to drop off the teacher and that delays their arrival at the next tier the next school but there are some schools based on the situation that you described where teachers are writing buses or it could be an assistant principal so i guess my next question is is what are we going to do now that we've identified that there is a gap we're getting the team we've already asked a team of bus drivers team get back together if we have the notes to reach out to the bus driver that was people that were on it last time let's get it back together and institute as soon as possible so with the behavior thing too i'm wondering do we still have our behavior analysts and behavior coaches sometimes ride the buses especially um with helping to coach aides or assist with um like ieps and things for behavior on buses do we still do that to help madame president miss pritchard i don't know specific examples i couldn't answer yes or no to that madam president i believe they do so and we do the crisis prevention institute training on some of that um and i will say and sorry multiple conversations we have teachers we have principals we have assistant principals we'll jump on buses to help with this situation too from a special ed standpoint um those are mainly handled very well and they're trained regularly on that some of our regular bus drivers maybe once a year or once a month or is not enough and so we're looking at some of those gaps that we think could be how we could make things a little bit better in that situation so so are we trying to fill that gap so teachers and principals don't have to ride those buses anymore um madam president members of the board teachers and principals never had to ride those buses they care and they're trying to make it better and they just jump on and do it so right so what are we doing so that they don't feel like that they have to do that anymore our main focus is the referral program we have training with the cpi and we have training at the beginning of the year and we have our monthly meetings they were stopped for covet and stopped everything as we're bringing them back in person we'll focus back on that uh the referral program and the behaviors to loop back is our main focus so we're talking about like within like a month or two we'll get that going uh we need to get the team the team will get back together in less than a month will it be instituted in a month implemented probably not at i'll have to figure out i don't i haven't seen the report so i don't know all that all the recommendations if it is just to the referral slip go back to the bus driver or a summary that's a simple thing that could be implemented immediately if it's more intense then it'll probably take a little longer okay i feel like we need to make sure that and i'm sure you will in your committees making sure that that gap is bridged so there is follow-through a bus driver doesn't feel like oh well why it's pointless why am i even gonna fill this out if nothing's gonna be done maybe we need to make sure i don't know if it's like an auto thing every time a bus driver you know if whoever addresses it just clicks done and then it shoots it back to the bus driver's email to where they say oh okay that's taken care of i agree with clear measurable consequences not just don't do that again like okay you get a warning you get a second warning we're gonna call your parents and then we're gonna talk about your behavior on the bus and if you can't behave on the bus we're going to have to talk about other options because i i feel for our bus drivers and then my next question is is last week we had an update about kids going back and forth from an elementary school to um the middle school and just not being not having enough time and feeling really stressed about that do we have something in place to where we were going to address that particular issue the dysart medical school in el mirage middle school is what i was talking about earlier about working on a solution to help with that and the solution was crosswalks not completely i'm working with the principal so i don't want to say something that's not going to get done so we're working to try to finalize that okay so maybe ask for another update in a month or a few weeks madam president members of it there'll be as you've noticed there's a weekly update on transportation is a topic that is hit every week i would that will continue to be okay and if need be i will ask for it to be on the agenda again of course um first a question do we have students that are crossing reems road right now without a crosswalk whether it be from the oh sorry from the um rancho to the sonoran or vice versa um i would love to say no but we drove by and saw a kid run across the street yeah so um what are we what can we do like immediately or almost immediately only because i'm feeling like i i'm almost positive we had an agenda item in the past where we specifically talked about reams and for some reason i was thinking that because we didn't want children crossing reams we um accommodated them with bussing like i wish i could remember the exact agenda item but but crossing reams okay it was the one where uh they were crossing cholla yeah from one side to the other yeah and so i was hearing um that you know we've got kids crossing rooms again but when we came up with the um when we decided to move toward the middle school model i guess i assumed that since i knew like we were already cognizant of rheem's road and some dangerous ways to school those things were addressed resolved and kind of non-issues so now i'm feeling concerned that we have this problem like with some of the el mirage families and some other families that are feeling like we're at least with open enrollment as parents if you open enroll in a school you know you're responsible for getting your student to school but for middle schools for some of our parents it wasn't necessarily a choice it was just their school was one was chosen that was split into middle school elementary school and so they're in the situation and i would hate to have it be where students are getting injured or worse because we moved to a middle school model like i feel like probably these things should have been resolved before we actually moved forward so and i think if we're waiting on because anyone who's ever worked in transportation knows being short drivers is like their life like it's you always have a shortage of drivers unfortunately so if finding ways to recruit for more drivers is kind of what we're our solution i'm really concerned that it's not going to happen soon enough so what can we do in the meantime because now it sounds like the fact is we have some students that are not having safe ways to school and i feel like we almost have to address it immediately like what what is our plan now that we know that students are at risk what are we going to do now to attract president if i could address that so for clarification the intersection that you're talking about we do provide bus from storen heights to rancho gabriella and back and forth so there is busing provided for all those students the student that mr hicks referred to was outside of the pickup drop-off bus transportation period so it was an early a student who had left school early and was walking home so he could have waited until the bus routes picked up at the school and went and dropped them off so yes we have planned for it we have buses that we are shuttling back and forth another similar one is at west point where we are working with the city as you're well aware of putting a an intersection lighted intersection at um 137th and greenway but until that's done we are bussing students across the street at reims or busting students across the street literally is there is there a rheem situation that impacts countryside um for countryside and this has nothing to do with middle schools there has always been boundaries that included students on the east and west side of reims there are crossing guards at the intersection of greenway and reams to assist students across reams so just again to reiterate it has been planned for and we do have safety solutions there if a student stays after school and all the buses have left and they get tutoring after school we don't have transportation at that hour if they stay for sports we don't have transportation shuttling them back across the street at that hour so are those the scenarios though for the parents that have always concerned they're they're those anomalies those after-school tutoring situations because it sounds like it's more and maybe it's not a ring situation or a busting situation it's more of just a maybe walking too far or the distance but all the things we've and you've heard and read too those are the things that i'm talking about yeah in the distance i believe tomorrow night i don't want to jinx a neighboring district but they have a board meeting tomorrow night and they're proposing to extend it to two miles it's an elementary district um another district um over on the east valley they're proposing to their governing board that they eliminate all after-school activity buses this other districts are taking extreme measures not to solve the problem but to eliminate the problem by drastic measures that we don't feel like is best for the school experience for our students we want them to have after-school activities we want them to be safe when they go to and from school we are not at this time looking at extending the routes further at the radial miles further out we'd like to bring them closer in mr hicks has looked at other district models where it's even broken down further where instead of three tiers there's five tiers number one challenge right now is hiring more bus drivers i'll solve everything pretty much because then we don't have students getting home late we don't have students who are having access problems because then we can provide an additional driver to a particular neighborhood whereas right now there's only one driver and it will solve a lot of problems so a lot of our efforts right now are focusing on getting those extra drivers we will be coming forward in the next weeks for some monetary opportunities to address the problem obviously changing the route side the radio mile is a free option but we believe that with some of the funds that have been discussed earlier that we can address some of the incentives to attract bus drivers and to keep our current bus drivers mr hicks mentioned that he has a long list of ideas we're intentionally not putting those ideas all out here right now just because if we say these are all the things we're researching and somebody hears that and says well i thought you were going to go the airport and hire all the bus drivers of the airport well that didn't work out so we don't want to tip the hat to something that may not work out but we do have a long list of solutions that we're looking for i appreciate that the timing of it seems to be long four weeks to process a bus driver from higher date to in the seat date we would love to do it in a couple of days and get that turned around but when we are paying for their cdl training and we are paying for their bus certifications and we're required to do all those trainings we are one of the few districts that actually pay training drivers to be trained while they're being trained and that we pay for their cdl fees that's a risk because we pay for their cdl fees and then they bail and go work for swift so that's okay we'll keep training them because that's an incentive that we offer that other districts don't offer it's a very competitive market but we feel like we have the the staff and the expertise to jump ahead of the competition might be that swift or peoria or litchfield or whoever else is competing for the same drivers we are and we are committed to tackling this problem but would you say that the list that might be coming in a couple weeks will address the concerns that our parent brought up tonight um we have a solution for that exact situation we don't want to make that a public solution that's something we can talk to the parent and explain this is what we're working on but to announce that publicly before all the appropriate pieces are in place may be premature thank you um you just said something and i've got it i'm curious um you shuttle between sonoran heights and rancho gabriela uh madam president miss grant for clarification the neighborhoods okay so not specifically school to school but there are students in the rancho neighborhood that go to sonoran and we will bus them from that neighborhood to the school okay then i'm missing so you're not taking them from rancho to sonoran to catch the bus home or to walk home with their siblings right it's neighborhood to neighborhood okay then i misunderstood when you said shuttle it made me think well why did we do it with that one and we're not doing it for the other ones okay thank you for clarifying that and we can buy buses with us or funds right madam president members of the board um i think we bought some white bands about 11 months ago we're still waiting for him so also put that in mind buses but but anyone could drive a van as long as they have a driver's license right uh madam president on a special crazy van okay endorsement is that what you're asking for some special license enforcement no okay how many students does that hold or are they equipped for special needs 12 are are white buses are you talking a van van sorry vans less might be nine uh maybe nine and are those equipped though for special needs they're not are we planning to equip them for that ones that we ordered were not okay um can you share and i know that these may not be final towards the end of the training are you able to share with us how many drivers are in the process of being trained now um madame president members of the board i believe we have five taking a class right now yeah okay and are they like one or two weeks in i believe they're two weeks in but i'm just estimating from the last time like twice i've heard five okay dr croto might know a little bit more detailed on that maybe we can go bring him some you know cookies or something um madame president members board i know you're joking but when i'm over at support center and i see people in the training room i'll just go in and say thank you at times just thank you thank you for being here and um thank you for joining the team and thank you for making a difference we and it's not just uh you heard crossing guards we're down 13 crossing guards we're down 40 food service workers we're down six landscapers 20 bus drivers 12 aids i think it's around 33 to 35 parapros we there is a labor shortage out there if people will not apply for work we are trying to multiply through marketing efforts through incentive efforts and through other efforts attract more people to buy to apply to these positions we need people and sometimes it may not happen but when the labor pool shakes loose and people start applying we want to be out in front of everything to put ourselves in the best position possible seven are in the class right now thank you thank you thank you do they have friends i mean uh i know we keep joking on this amount of present members of the board but i know uh a referral i know madam president you posted about our job fair uh friends to friends and uh contact will get the most traction of applying for jobs and so we ask that everybody promote that and i normally when i'm talking to parents that are upset i will ask them to apply for some of our positions not insultingly but we do need help in person-to-person contact promoting pushing out will help get traction the more more people to see it the more opportunities are for people to actually apply well i know it's difficult also and i mean i guess we need to start talking about the benefits of working for the district because not just salary because i was talking to somebody today and they have a job at ups making 18 and 50 cents an hour and they're right out of high school and that's that's just a warehouse job not just i mean it's a warehouse job at 18 nice salary and that's what we're competing with now i don't know about the benefits but working but i think that rather than the salary we need to start stressing the fact that what kind of benefits the district has to offer as well agreed i think we need to get like that total compensation package out there and that work life balance and whatever flexibilities that we have to offer i think that would be good one thing i wanted to mention i know that thank you miss pritchard for bringing up the the rheem's crossing and i know that other streets are being crossed as well but whether or not that was a pre-issue before we transitioned to a middle school k-4 situation we have to understand that we had siblings assisting you know sometimes older siblings assisting with those k-4 students crossing a busy street and with the transition they the families just simply don't have that same support so in that sense having a kindergartner across a busy road like reams as a parent it just seems insane um so i i think that we just need to re-look at the model i know you have some suggestions in the works but i just want to stress the importance of that we can't have little ones crossing busy streets so and i'm we're we're competing with a charter school on reems so for those families on the other side of reams for countryside for instance we're competing for those for those students and those families and if we're not providing supports for those families then then we're at a loss it's not i don't think it can be really a win for us so i think that as we work towards all those solutions that you already have in the works we we really need to keep that in mind any other conversation thank you all right moving to item h1 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board members of cabinet mr croto will take the next four items thank you dr kellis madame president members of the board superintellis cabinet and guests tonight administration is recommending the addition of an interim elementary school principal at west point elementary in order to provide appropriate coverage at that school additionally administration is recommending the appointment of amy michaels to fill the interim position for the remainder of the school year that position will be posted in the spring in order to find or have a permanent principle not interim tag as you know miss mikos has previously or she currently is uh the assistant principal at west point elementary school and um we're happy to recommend her tonight um to fill that interim spot and she'll receive the salary and benefits appropriate for that position so i'll stand for any questions she's here she is here no i just i think this is a great move for her and uh i moved to approve the addition of an interim elementary school principal position and appointment of amy michaels as interim elementary school principal for the remainder of the 2021-2022 school year second little button didn't come up congratulations cool position i'm sorry it's not coming up congratulations and welcome back mr kerr [Applause] okay moving on uh item number three um kind of a background tonight we bring to you motion to a continuation of our guest teacher incentive program last year you approved two guests and teacher incentive programs one in the fall and then one in the or actually the winter excuse me in the spring as you know this was based on a need for substitute teachers we call them guest teachers in our program and we were in desperate need at the time last winter and the last spring the program was very successful and a matter of fact just briefly to give you some uh background on that we have two last year we had 291 guest teachers on our pool for esi to work with before the incentive program only 76 of those 291 guest teachers worked in our district at any time after you graciously approved our programs in the winter time that number rose to 130 guest teachers which was an increase of 54 and during the springtime it rose to 159 guest teachers at that time and that's an increase of about 83 of those teachers so um last year the spring program ran from january january 4th to march 12th which was about 48 days we had we had 24 or excuse me 35 teachers work in the tier 1 which was 50 to 74 of the days they earned a 1700 stipend we had 67 teachers work 75 percent or more days uh which was in that band of the 36 to 48 days that they worked in our district and they earned a stipend um of about dollars so that total cost with taxes fees and all the and all the payments to them was about 279 thousand dollars for that spring program it was a good success and our schools are again needing that this year we're asking you we have 268 guest teachers in the pool currently only 55 of those 268 teachers have worked two or more days in our district so not very many of those teachers are working in our district and our fill rates as of last week when we were preparing the agenda was at 65.
so when we report that we're at 12 that's still 200 down from that funding piece so you know we're not back to where we were in 2019 20 but it's not what we were projecting for our multi-year projection so we get better in that look so overall this is good news for chico unified i think it puts us in a good position moving forward and so we present this to the board for your approval okay any for the discussion questions from the board mr tennis you have a questioning look on your face no no i'm just wondering how quickly i can make a motion to approve this recommendation [Laughter] you're you're almost there do we have any public comment thank you board are there any motions associated with this agenda item i move that we adopt this recommended change thank you second we have a motion and a second by mr tennis and dr kaiser any further discussion board kevin if you can't keep us in the money we'll jerk you back so member identification is dolby dolby ai kaiserine robinson i 5-0 thank you board thank you kevin okay we have an exemption mr baltimore this is yours as well it is uh just for the board and the public we are required we are operating a school program in a facility that is not field act approved that is has not gone through the department of state architecture for their compliance then we have the ability to do an exemption that resolution is presented to you this evening related to our oak ridge program that is currently being operated out of the chico marketplace um there is a requirement that we do this again every two years so one of the important pieces is that we can't have more than 25 students in the facility any given time you do see this type of exemption often with independent study programs where students are coming in for their one-on-one interaction with a teacher or even some small instruction but you don't see an actual classroom or large educational programs where multiple kids are on the site so we bring this for your approval for the current program and if oak ridge finds another location at some point in time we'd want to do that again for that location so it is facility specific in the way of the waiver request it is facility thank you okay board anyone else have any specific requests uh clarification do we have any public comment thank you do we have a motion from the board relative to this agenda item i'll move to approve resolution 1549-21 thank you second i have a motion from member dalby a second by dr kaiser any further discussion board okay um since the uh the last vote was not unanimous we will oh it was am i too my two votes away okay thank you um i'm going to call for the vote all those in favor signify by saying aye hi any names okay got got it covered this time that's 5.0 thank you board i'm going to just say it again i am so enjoying this facility where you can see everybody that's here and it just this is this is wonderful this is just wonderful yep okay um mr hamlin we have a motion to continue the increase in substitute teacher pay yes very briefly as you recall last year i came to you to increase the substitute pay in order to compete with surrounding districts for regardless how you look at it fortunately or unfortunately the surrounding districts have continued to keep their pay at a very high rate and we've already seen some uh substitute teacher shortages so i'm coming to the board again to extend that for this school year given the coven situation i expect that we're going to continue to see shortages especially when we start requiring our subs to be vaccinated that will cut down on the pool even further members do you have any questions for clarification this this is to um just continue the what we approved earlier correct yeah so the rates would be the same as we did after i came to you in november of last year to raise them to 175 and 200 a day thank you do we have any public comment thank you do we have a motion associated with this agenda item well i'd like to ask a question first so we did this hoping that it would increase our pool of substitute teachers and is that happening yes it did last year after you passed it we ceased having um shortages in our classroom so it was very effective okay 100 effectives in fact great okay any any other questions discussion okay do i have a motion associated with this agenda item move to approve mr tennis thank you i'll second the motion you guys are being way too slow any further discussion okay i'll call for the vote all those in favor signify by saying aye aye any nays thank you that was unanimous five no five no okay the discussion action on the resolution to allow teachers with a multiple subject credential to teach a specific subject area below grade nine mr hanlon so i bring this to you each year and essentially we have two types of teachers that teach um outside their credentialed area um but they have to have a certain number of units as dictated by ctc um in that area so the two are if you remember a few years ago we brought sixth graders up to the junior highs and we have some teachers that are teaching specifically like math or or english but they have to have a minimum number of graduate units in those areas in order to teach that so we're asking for that exemption and the other one is teachers that have multiple subject credentials that are teaching fine arts in the elementary schools so we have itinerant teachers that teach music and art and they have also the same minimum number of units in those areas in order to teach so we have to bring that according to education code to the board for approval each year is dobby um i i don't know if i'm remembering incorrectly but when we did bring sixth graders up to the junior high campuses um wasn't there a time limit given to teachers to obtain this those single subject of the secondary teaching credentials at some point no what we did is we grandfathered those transfers in and but as those staff either left us or retired all replacements had to be specifically credentialed in an area so subject area so we as you notice here there's a lot of sixth grade teachers that came to us you can look through here there's only a handful left at this point we're only three or four years into it so the list has shrunk considerably some have chosen to go back to elementary some have retired some have resigned so as the years go by that that should shrink down to zero any further questions well they do have the courses though yes and they do meet all the requirements of ctc so this they allow us to do this it's just that the board has to be aware and publicly vote on the waiver okay do we have any public comment okay thank you i would like to move resolution 1546 1546-21 is there a second i'll second that yes thank you i have a motion dr kaiser a second by member landau any further discussion board okay call for a vote all those in favor aye aye aye that's five uh any nays that was i haven't voted i'm actually pretty conflicted about this still i guess it's something maybe to bring up at a later time when we're not in the middle of trying to vote for it but i do feel like there needs to be a little bit more accountability to teachers who've been riding this wave for several years now just by experience of being a secondary teacher and knowing how sometimes it translates into in the classroom and not having as much subject matter competency to be able to support those teachers to obtain higher qualifications in the actual certification um so just maybe something to talk about at a later time but i just wanted to i didn't get to get that out in discussion we jumped so fast into the vote um so anyway um i guess i'm gonna vote no just out of out of philosophy and you know it'll be what it is because it's otherwise unanimous thank you we have a four yes one no thank you member dolby okay next we um this is also yours mr hanlon the single subject class based on appropriate coursework so this is the counterpart to this at the secondary level we have a handful of teachers that teach out of their credentialed area for example the first one if you look on the list is uh mr albuster he um is the football coach and he does a weightlifting class but he's credentialed in social science so but he has the requisite units in order to teach that and be classified as pe so sometimes teachers will teach outside that area and but according to ctc are qualified to do so so we have four teachers in the sec and all our secondary schools that are teaching at least one class outside their primary credentialed area but they also have taken the units as required by ctc in order to do that so we're asking approval of resolution 1547-21 okay this is resolution 1547-21 i just want to make sure i have correctly um identified our item the other one was 1546.
i can tell you that has dropped this week 65 percent and it's going lower so we're only filling about 65 percent of the vacancies that are out there and remember we just talked about the long term our permanent guest teachers those teachers are filling some of those spots too um they are counted in that and so we have those filling spots and we need many more so we put together another incentive program we'd like to run this program from september 1st to december 3rd that's 55 work days the tier 1 incentive so if you work 29 to 43 days of the 55 we will give you an incentive of 2050 if you work 75 or more of the 55 days which is 44 to 55 days worked you will receive a 3 100 incentive we anticipate utilizing the data from [Music] from the springtime and projecting the costs we we project that the estimate for this incentive program through december 3rd would be approximately it's roughly an estimate of 335 000 so um and those guest teachers we worked with esi because they pay them but they would receive that money on honor around december 17th before the holidays so we are excited about this um we we know it works and and i think um we have some guest teachers out there again the labor market everybody is is competing for these guest teachers and the substitutes in the school districts and we're trying to get out in front and secure some of the guest teachers that we need for our schools so with that i'll stand for any questions you said last week was since the first day of school our fill rate has been 65 up to last week when i pulled the data so i can tell you looking at a few days since we get the agenda about a week we get it ready a week before it was at 65 it's going lower than that in the last few days and have we well we wouldn't reach out to the guest teachers um to find out why they're not being taken or do we go back through esi to find out why that is correct we we go to esi and it's just we have other districts that are paying a little bit more they've raised their rates um and so you know the incentive to work in those districts has been increased we have roughly a district south of us that has raised 200 a day which is almost double of what everybody's paying so everybody's ramping up their game as far as trying to get the guest teachers because like like the bus driver conversation we had there's a finite pool of these people wanting to sub in our classrooms and so we're all competing for that and we have the advantage that we have you know 159 people that are familiar with our incentive program that appreciated what we did in the incentive program in in the winter in the spring and you know we we want them to work for us and i think this incentive program shows that and i think the numbers will be positive like the last two times i think some of it's also just still covered related people are hesitant especially if they're retired maybe coming into the classroom right now absolutely there's a little hesitancy about that so it is up to the school to um go into i don't know the ei esi system and then request a sub is that correct madam president the teachers go in into the system and request the sub schools do do it also if they find out late and that they can't get into the system but primarily it is the teacher's job to enter into our substitute system that they're going to be out that day if they know ahead of time they can put it ahead of time and people go and pick jobs saying i'll take this job i'll take that job so they enter and sign up for those through our subsystem well typically what we do with teachers is if we know we're going to be gone or if we just are feeling sick at like two in the morning we'll go in and then we'll create the absence and then what that does is it goes into a bank and then subs can log on and look at all the different open jobs and they can pick and choose what they want and then sometimes if it's like a last minute thing they'll do an auto dialer hey this school needs this press one to accept press two for no so the subs can pick and choose and more than one district can show up on their screen so they can say oh that district's open i oh they're paying 200 bucks i'm going over there versus over there so how would they be notified then of the incentive if you if the governing board approves it tonight we work in conjunction with esi and there is a mass email an announcement that is prepared to go out first thing in the morning to promote this so we are prepared to do that we have a lot on monday we we sent a precursor email letting them know that the incentive program was going to the governing board to be discussed and that stay tuned we'll give you the details after that so they know that we're discussing it i think they're eagerly awaiting your decision tonight and we're prepared actually after you vote and it comes out if it comes out that you approve it i am going to text the vice president of esi and let him know you passed it so he can hit send on that email so i've i've talked with him today and he's awaiting the news for us so they have been very good to work with and helped us out tremendously with this let's get it done i move to approve the continuation of the guest teacher incentive program as presented second i have a problem i still didn't get it so i'm an eye but i've hit refresh every time motion passes thank you very much i'll get to work thank you next we have item h4 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet mr dr dean we'll introduce this item madam president members of the governing board dr kelson members of cabinet this evening it is my pleasure to provide a brief update on our covet protocol as well as a recommendation from administration moving forward since the last board meeting we have been in touch with the maricopa county health department and dr sunshine as well as our legal counsel as it relates to quarantine and the requirement of quarantine through the county and what was determined between the county and our council confirmed as well is that it is maricopa the maricopa county health department's requirement it is their responsibility to notify parents of quarantine and not the school district's requirement to do such as such we have amended our protocol in consultation with our attorney that should the maricopa county health department determine and notify parents of quarantine that the district will enforce such so we we continue to remain or to have our protocols in place in which parents continue to receive contact from the schools if they are in direct contact with a student we continue to have our protocol in place that we ask parents to monitor symptoms however parents can choose to send students to school or keep them in home in isolation that is their choice however if the county notifies that family that a student has to be quarantined then that quarantine is enforced so that is the piece that was determined through conversation with dr sunshine and again confirmed with with our district legal counsel as well also this evening um we would recommend to the governing board that we reinstate um the dashboard and bring that back up we receive emails consistently from a few folks that are interested in the number of students that we have that are positive and so we would recommend to the governing board this evening that we reinstate the dashboard in the manner in which we held it last spring thank you dr dean madam president we do have some public comments on this topic i'll go ahead and read the statement this is the time for the public to comment members of the board may not discuss items that are not specifically identified on the agenda pursuant to ars 38-431.08 action taken as a result of public comment will be limited directing staff to study the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for further consideration added and decision at a later date in order to facilitate accomplishing the dis the business of the district in a timely manner a time limit of three minutes will be imposed for each individual or group addressing the board when you approach the podium please state your name for the record and first we have hillary love hello my name is hilary love i am a daughter of educators i am a granddaughter of a survivor from the sorry he was an orphan related to the spanish uh pandemic that happened he was a horrible wretched man i can only assume that losing his parents at such a young age due to the pandemic uh caused him to be an alcoholic and an abusive person um but that is my family lineage i am also a nurse for 25 years i'm a director of nursing of a nursing home uh dr kellis you don't have to feel necessary to notify my boss i'm sure he's watching this on the video if you want to send him an email you go right ahead uh as a nurse i've been following a federal mandate that is recommended by the cdc based on evidence-based practice uh i take care of the elderly they have evidence of doing something for us that we are not effectively doing for them and that is taking the smallpox vaccine they have a little blister on their arm i don't know older people do that i don't have to have that anymore because we've essentially eradicated smallpox but i've been doing everything possible for the last year and a half to protect the elderly at this point in time i'm asking for somebody to do something to try and protect my children i'm new to having children i've been a nurse for 25 years i've only been a parent for seven years i feel the mediation that you're doing is completely ineffective you are taking let's see if you're supposed to support education believe in science and most importantly create and implement policies to protect our children you are failing no masks no temperature checks no symptom monitoring no public disclosure of active cases although i'm if that website does come back i may minimize my snotty emails um your website has been evasive as is your policy of notification i am requesting that you do better i want my children to go back to school they are currently pulled out based on the message we received on monday that due to an increasing number of cases not able to verify on a website um that they were recommending social distancing in a cafeteria please we need to do a little bit better than that to protect the kids the delta variant is coming for the children it is sending them to the hospital hospital system is already too full there's not going to be effective people to treat them when they get this we have to do better social distancing temperature monitoring you're taking guidance from a person who doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about and that's governor ducey making decisions on medical practice that is not the person you need to take your direction from you need to do better you can't enforce masks do something else maybe spend some of that money you got on those walk-through thermometers that all the casinos have that would be an interview thank you thank you next we have nicole king good evening manning president president members of the board dr kellus cabinet and guest my name is nicole king and i'm a mother of three children in the district an active district volunteer and a pediatric icu nurse first of all i'm here asking that the district bring back the transparency of the kobit dashboard as a community we have no idea how many cases are impacting our district last week i asked around and heard from just six of our 26 schools these six schools required school-wide communication due to the nature of the clusters and reported 65 confirmed cases research tells us that actual cases on average are eight times higher than confirmed cases so in just six schools we have up to 520 kids walking around potentially infecting other children and staff what about the other 20 schools hospitals in the valley have reported over 100 pediatric admissions in july that same number was reached in just the first two weeks in august pch is at red sentence meaning we can't admit any any children's at this time as of last week 18 of new cases are pediatric cases the letters that are sent home after district exposure do not call for quarantine the exact wording is your child will remain at school and you should watch for any covet-like symptoms and keep your child at home if they become symptomatic you have the option of keeping your child at home for up to 10 days from the day of direct contact how do i know this i got this letter five days after my child had direct contact meaning that he was exposing everybody else for five days my entire family is fully vaccinated except for our youngest because he's only 10 years old i should know he wears a mask to school every single day but he is only one of five children who does this in his 30 student class his mask is primarily protecting others and though it does give him some protection it would be much safer if others wore a mask as well communicating masking reduces likelihood of contracting the virus by up to 70 we saw this last april when you stopped updating the dashboard because the cases were so low that brings me to my second request i believe we should be mandating masks in our schools children under 12 years old cannot be vaccinated yet the academy of pediatrics the american academy of pediatrics and the cdc all recommend that children over the age of two wear masks to schools not requiring masses putting our children and families at risk have you walked their crowded halls at schools or been in a classroom where social distancing is not achieved at all this delta variant is more infectious and it has increased transmissibility when compared to other variants even in vaccinated individuals we don't require vaccinate vaccinations here and roughly only 30 percent of children over 12 years old are vaccinated on the website we claim that dysart is committed to providing a safe learning environment to students and staff how can we claim that when we are not keeping them safe and we're not doing our due diligence to do so we have children and staff are immuno compromised families fighting cancer and multi-generational families with vulnerable adults i hear well if you are worried about your child keep them home for remote learning we saw that last year those children that were remote learning were struggling academically how can we keep them at home and have them struggle just for someone else's convenience what about those families who can't be home with their children while they're remote learning are we supposed to put their health and safety up against the family's ability to pay their bills we are arguing about a piece of cloth designed to keep us individually and collectively safe we are friends neighbors and a community but we sure aren't acting like we care about each other i'm asking that the board makes decisions to keep our children staff safe and our schools open thank you next we have jessica strakata uh state your name please can you state your name for the record yeah my name is brian strachan i'm a father of two daughters that go to canyon ridge uh main thing i'd like to address today is the issue of mass a recent experience of ours with my youngest daughter who's on a double iep suggests there might be a push from teachers to get schools back into mask and defy state orders you know to get those masks back on i'm asking that we stay the current course of allowing the parents to choose whether or not to put their kids in mass science has actually shown that mass really don't work even n95 uh shows that the mass standards of lung resistance are long resident aerosol particles are around 2.5 micrometers which are too fine to be blocked by a mass the minimum effective dose of covid is smaller than one micrometer the best n95 mask can only stop about 3.5 micrometers so basically it's like trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence so masks don't work second i have a daughter who's on a double iep from one of which is for speech delay since she was a baby she's been hypersensitive to things touching her face not only does the mask create an uncomfortable distraction it also prohibits her ability to communicate effectively kids make fun of her and don't properly hear her one of the things that we've tried to accomplish in private speech therapy outside of school is is facial cues and learning how to speak properly move your mouth and that's really the progression we had up until coveted once coveted hit and mass went in place it really put a detriment and took her 100 steps back secondly or thirdly i have another daughter who not only despises mass just the constant wearing of a mask throughout the day the sweat getting food on them render them useless it's been recorded that n95 masks are no longer viable after 20 minutes of use everyday bacteria and germs that we cohabitate with to build and create they build and create a toxic barrier on the mask so recent studies also showed that after 15 minutes of wearing a mass children have up to 12 times normal carbon dioxide levels in their bodies preventing oxygen getting into them ultimately i'm asking that we keep our current cove policy on mass and if mandated you know i think it's us as parents we would resort to pulling our kids out of school just for the fact of it's not how our kids are going to learn thank you okay so next when we'll have jessica strakota hi my name is lillian srakada i'm from canyon ridge and in fifth grade i like the way it is right now when masks are optional i don't like math and here are my reasons why they give us rashes and make it hard to breathe they also make it hard to focus in class i also see lots of kids at my school not worth wanting to wear masks they have the same problem as me all the kids at my school also don't like to be a part at lunch i would like to have a choice of where to sit at lunch so please i'm sorry to interrupt you honey um can you state your name for the record lillian strokida yeah i'm sorry i was i was jessica signed her mom i just put her on there honestly i have to what's the protocol no i think i think that's fine it's just we need to be specific for the record so what is her name well and just angus policy unfortunately and it was signed in as a parent so just per policy having them signed in prior to six and since she didn't sign in to speak it's just a protocol issue so does jessica still want to are you jessica ma'am yes okay and jessica needs to speak and you know i would be more than happy to speak with you afterwards but formally like this because we have the process and you and and she didn't sign in then um we have to stick with protocol but i would be more than happy to listen to what you have to say afterwards i have a question is it possible for jessica to read lillian's statement yeah if you could just maybe stand up there with your daughter okay that way you can be present as you website yeah do we want to start the clock over again and then maybe we're to lunch maybe lillian would you mind restating that yeah do you want to start over again yes thank you thank you very much my name is elaine strokada i'm from canyon ridge and in fifth grade i like the way it is right now when masks are optional i don't like masks and here are my reasons why they give me rashes and make it hard to breathe they also make it hard to focus in class i also see lots of kids at my school not wanting to wear masks they have the same problem as me all the kids at my school also don't like to be a part at lunch i would like to have a choice of where i sit at lunch so please keep the way it is at school where we have a choice to wear math at school thank you and have a good night thank you very much next we have katie vertell hello everyone my name is katie bertel i am the one that has been sending you all the annoying emails i have two daughters at marley park elementary they aren't old enough yet to receive the vaccine they are some of the few that wear masks to school every day my third grader is actually the only one in her class i'm here to please ask you to bring back masks to dysart i emailed you all a graphic a short while ago from texas tech university that shows the efficacy of masks isn't wearing masks a better alternative than returning to online school the following are some facts about the delta variant and rate of transmission according to dr emily smith an epidemiologist at baylor delta has up to thousand times higher viral load than other variants delta is up to 200 percent more transmissible than an are not of six to nine this means that one kid teacher bus driver or person can infect six to nine people if a virus with an iron on of 2.5 spreads among a completely susceptible population the mass list an estimated 9536 infections would result after 10 cycles of transmission however for a virus with an r naught of 6 like delta 10 cycles of transmission could result in an estimated over 60 million infections here's a tweet going around about dysart unified school an unmasked teacher in break room coughing teacher a are you sick teacher b yes but my symptoms come and go last night my legs hurt teacher a are you vaccinated teacher b no teacher a are you going to test teacher b i'm waiting on results there's little to no social distancing happening at dysart schools kids are going to school sick absences are very high this is the environment that has been encouraged by you the school board the group of people assigned with protecting our students and staff the dysart website specifically states the mission of dysart unified school district is to create a safe diversified and engaging learning environment and it goes on with at least 164 positive cases i was told this week in our district something needs to be done please bring back the kova dashboard on dysart's website so parents know what is happening in each school most importantly bring back masks my third grader wanted to come with me tonight we decided against it i was watching the local news the other day with her in the room she heard an anti-massacre call masks child abuse she looked at me and stated masks aren't abuse masks keep everyone healthy she's eight years old and she gets it thank you thank you [Applause] that's all we have to say so madam president our recommendation this evening for our code protocol would be to reinstate the dashboard and that would begin on friday afternoon thank you i need to start okay i'm very excited and not excited that's not the right word i'm very happy to see that we're coming back with the dashboard i think that will it's information and that will help everybody with their decision making i is it enough i don't know but we'll see but back to maricopa county is going to notify the parents of a covid positive test right somebody tested positive did i understand that correctly madam president member grant maricopa county will notify parents of those in direct contact with a positive case that they need to quarantine and they have been making those notifications um previously so um the school dis does this oh shoot the school or the district notifies maricopa county madam president member grant that is correct so every day we send maricopa county the maricopa county health department information related to students that have tested positive and i would remind the board that if student test positive that they are quarantined for 10 days that is non-negotiable additionally we notify the county of those students that have been identified as being in direct contact with any positive case that's been reported to the school additionally not in addition to providing that information to the county information is also provided to the parents as we spoke earlier i'm indicate or letting them know that they had been in direct contact to monitor symptoms etc the county then takes their responsibility and they determine whether students should be quarantined the process that they utilize i cannot tell you every step of that i know part of that has to do with if a student is vaccinated or not vaccinated how that is determined the county has indicated to me that they have access to a database in which they can determine if that's if a student has been vaccinated or not and so that is the process in which the county goes about determining who's quarantined as explained to us but for parents to get letters like five six days later that their child was exposed is that madam president miss grant that would be a problem um and that would be an anomaly from what um we have heard and seen our schools work very hard to notify parents um by phone the day of direct that they've have discovered um direct contact a letter may follow but as stated um that would be an anomaly and i was certainly more than happy to speak with um uh the young lady that spoke with us this evening to determine what school that in which that occurred and follow up with that school as well and that's what i was going to ask would you please follow up absolutely there's two ways that parents are being contacted one is the through the county for the quarantine issue and then the other is through the school notifying that the in or whatever kind so there's two that is correct and the school notification would come first um the school notification would be the same day in which the direct contact uh was disc the direct contact was discovered and then the county follows up at some point in time with them related to if there's a need to quarantine if the county does not follow up with them then there was my understanding would be that there was not a determination made by the county for a need to quarantine can you interrupt really quick because it's a follow-up on that piece super quick just so i understand so but this we still require we still determine quarantine for our positive students madam president ms prichard yes if a student tests positive that student is is quarantined for 10 days at a minimum no i'm so sorry um so i know there's a whole discussion regarding mask no mask state law following state law federal funds etc i totally understand all that but if we take that aside and we just heard a presentation on esser money for cleaning supplies are we be coming back to having the additional cleaning taking place in the in the schools either before during and after madam president member grant uh we have continued with our cleaning cycle that was implemented this year which is the cleaning cycle that was imp that was in place pre-covered our teachers and our students have access to cleaning supplies should they wish to clean addition in addition to what is happening in our schools on a regular cycle why aren't we going back to the covet cleaning system madam president member grant the protocol that we put in place was based upon information from that we received from the county health department in terms of this the spread of covet i am while i'm a doctor i am not a medical doctor and so i don't want to make medical comments um but i will tell you that um it is our understanding that the spread of covid it has been mitigated in terms of its spread related to surface contact and that information has was shared with us in in webinars and in conversation last spring with with medical authorities so if i'm understanding you correctly the mayor the maricopa county health department is saying that the district does not have to go back to the coveted cleaning but they just go back to their pre-covered cleaning which was before and after school etc madam president ms grant we have not had that conversation with the county our recommendation to the board in the last meeting in july was based upon information that was shared with the county or shared by the county last spring could we please go back to the county and follow up on that particular issue madam president member grant we certainly can make a call to the county and then my final question is again we have all those thermometers um is there any why aren't we doing at least the temperature checks again madam president member grant i will let you know that in conversation last spring with the maricopa county health department that com that particular topic was brought up the county health department indicated that temperature checks were no longer needed they were not an effective way to monitor students in a school setting but now we're dealing with a different variant so again is the county health department has there been any discussion about at least temperature checks and i don't know i'm not a medical person i'm just asking to do whatever we can to make this these schools a safe learning environment for everyone certainly and and uh ms grant we we would indicate to you that we believe that we are doing what is necessary to have a safe learning environment for our students we have had no conversation with nor um any inkling of conversation from other school districts related to temperature temperature checks from the county health department and then i just have one i'm sorry just one more follow-up that in case i misunderstood you because i don't remember the dashboard and i'm sorry but the dashboard by school includes does it break out the number of students at test positive and staff or is it just one number madam president remember grant uh it's been a while since i've looked at that dashboard as well uh i believe the answer is i know that we report the number of students per school i do not recall if we report the number of staff as well again i just i think information on this is so important for everybody for all our parents for the staff to know as much as they possibly can and we certainly agree and that's that is the reason for the recommendation this evening to reinstate the dashboard madam president if i can interject uh staff is included in the dashboard and the process that was described earlier is followed with the staff also we require our staff to quarantine if they are positive we track our staff that is reported in the dashboard so it's one number so if a school has 10 cases it could be one teacher and nine students correct that's correct i believe so okay thank you i'd like to make a motion to approve the just the continue with the current mitigation plans with the addition of the kova dashboard oh i haven't asked any questions yet oh sorry sorry i had a question too but go ahead nice one do you want to say second and then we'll discuss i guess some madam president just for protocols motion has been made at this point it would be appropriate if there's a second that somebody says and then at this point there's opportunity for discussion my question is how many current cases do we have within the district madam president member sawyer sink bill um there are 23 260 students in the dysart unified school district there are 193 total cases as of today that is 0.8 of the student population that has a positive test additionally i would indicate to you that between friday and monday of this this week and next week 118 of those students will return from the 10-day quarantine which will take that number to 75.
46. there we go hanlon 15 46 21 is where we are no 1547-21 this is the one we've passed what i that was whatever i thought we were okay um any technical questions for clarification purposes from the board do we have any public comment no public comment thank you do we have any motions associated with this agenda item so i'd like to move 1547-21 do i have a second second i have a motion and a second any further discussion okay call for the vote by member i do have just a comment um it's it's the same as the last item um and i just um i'm i'm not supportive still of the concept of extending people's special circumstances um beyond a reasonable amount of time for them to obtain the proper credentials thank you any further on that note um do can you tell us roughly how long these teachers have been teaching outside of the credential i don't recognize three of them i just know that the first one that i mentioned has been doing that for a number of years because he has been the football coach for 10 or 12 years so i will add in these sometimes for example like the health classes it's it's a one semester class so sometimes you have to have a teacher that other than the one health teacher you have pick up some extra semesters of health in order to make your schedule work so so they actually benefit the district as much as it benefits the teacher to be able to teach those classes that otherwise we may not be able to to hire a part-time teacher and yeah honestly the health ones don't bother me so much but um you know i'm a social studies teacher i'm a little concerned about someone who doesn't have as much subject competency so in that one what i can speak to that is typically they have a history degree they don't have a social science degree so they can teach all of the all of these social science classes except for government and econ so they can teach world history they can teach us history and those types of things so those are the classes that because of the classes they've taken in college they're those are the only things that they are qualified to teach so those are those are not really teaching outside of the area of expertise okay thank you yeah and just to follow up i i am the opposite of tom and take issue with the help teacher one because i'm very intimately familiar with the health subject matter and think that it i've seen it taught by people who are not trained in health and it's not it's really sometimes could be a bad situation so i'm not this is not a personal thing for this particular teacher i don't know this teacher i don't know their background or their credentials except for what i just googled but that's why i want us to maybe visit this concept in the future and and maybe think about long-term you know requirements or or assistance as a district to help them obtain the the proper credentials in the future another question mr hammond i have seen concerns with the health being taught by someone who didn't have that as a specific interest especially but is there anything that we can do to through um in-service training or anything to assist the people that that are not fully credentialed to teach health um because that's that's an important subject that can be very difficult for someone that's not um wanting that specific area of instruction shall we say yeah right we are not requiring them to teach um there are typically they are typically physical education teachers that there's a lot of overlap to some degree in those classes they have to take additional classes in order to meet the requirements for the the supplemental credential and um so it is not mandatory it's a volunteer type of a thing so these are our teachers that have volunteered to do so and take have taken or have even gone out of their way to take summer classes in order to teach those classes so um so it's not a situation where they're being mandated to take those classes in order to teach them yeah that wasn't my concern my concern was was just i i believe is what remember dolby was saying it's just the level of competence and it's a it's a uh it's a very important subject area and okay thank you any uh any public comment did you have a question i have another comment i mean how would this philosophically relate to the fact that we're allowing students to change their grades based on the convenience of the pandemic i don't know if if these staff recommendations if that's what they are are pandemic related at all or this is just the normal course of non-availability of you know desired staff this is typical i come to the board every year for a handful of these of these exceptions okay thank you okay i think it's important though too to point out that they have had the coursework but they didn't do a degree certificate in that particular area so yeah i can counter that with well maybe we should wait till discussion okay do i have um i asked for a public comment correct okay do i have any motions i already had a motion we didn't no i thought we did i'm sorry i at least i don't think so do i have them i thought i moved it 1547-21 erica might be validating you so we are in discussion okay here yeah we can't hear erica so 1547.
so and that was just students that that number is students yes madam president the employees this evening the count is 12 employees four return tomorrow so tonight there's 12 tomorrow there's eight plus whatever we receive from four o'clock on but there's 12 employees currently right so not not counting any students that in which we would be made aware of a positive case tomorrow or friday those 118 students will return and then there will be 75 plus whatever number students report positive tomorrow or friday for monday um and just just for clarity too i know i talked to dr carlos who confirmed it that they're because this is so broad and there's so many different areas because i had a few different questions on a couple different things that we can have several um several motions under one agenda item so if it's rather being like an all or nothing vote it could be broken out so i cause i i know there's like several different pieces so pardon me if i just have three different areas i just kind of want to cover thank you first of all for bringing back the data dashboard i mean i think we can know that our numbers um you know seem lower compared to maybe other parts of the state but i just feel like if it's information and if it's something that's going to make our community have more comfort in their decisions on what to do with their students then i think it's it's an easy fix people can make their own decisions so i appreciate you bringing that back um cleaning protocols that was that was on my list as well and then listening to mr hicks going through the um the esser funds and how they're spent and all those areas the cleaning supplies were part of all that so again i don't know that there's much harm in increasing our cleaning or going back to pre-covered cleaning i personally would like to do that also in regard to are we doing anything yet for capacity type controls like someone had mentioned that elementary school cafeterias are being more mindful of distancing you know are are we putting any type of limits on assemblies right now or like like we did last semester just to again if the pandemic is what it is as far as the numbers and we're our mass are optional and we don't currently have masks then are there things we can still do to mitigate like not cramming hundreds of kids in a small space that are unmasked so has there been any thought or discussion around capacity type or social distancing measures madam president mrs prichard we we continue to encourage our schools to provide distance when possible to answer your question directly related to assemblies we are working with our schools as it relates to assemblies i will give you an example we worked with a school yesterday who has a high school who has assemblies planned next friday prior to the football game high schools typically run two assemblies in a day two different assembly periods in working with them they were concerned about the number of students in those assemblies yet wanted to continue to have the assemblies and so we worked with them to look at an option of having four assemblies in a day one for each class of students in which they would be able to spread out approximately 500 students in a very large gymnasium and that's kind of what we did last semester i and i just think that it's just a smart thing i mean we know it's doable because we did a lot of it last semester and just again because the numbers are getting higher i i personally would like us to be mindful of that because it's um you know again with mass being optional you have some students that are uncomfortable and this is just with the cleaning it's one extra thing we can do and here's here's the big thing for me so um and i always tell people i'm always torn between parent choice and also i've just always been i've been healthcare for years and years and so i can't get that out of my head i can't i can't just disregard the medical piece of it so last semester when we voted to make to keep masks in place through the end of the year for me that was to honor parent choice on both sides it was to um because at that point the window for those students to go back to online learning was closed so if any parents or students had their children in classes because they knew dysart was requiring masks they were denied choice then to take their kid and put them back into online because the window was closed so it's like i want to make sure everyone has the opportunity for choice not just one group of parents so back with this keeping masks optional you know it honors parent choice but what about those students or parents or families who don't feel comfortable having their student in a classroom with someone who's not wearing a mask what about offering online instruction although i know at least for my student last year it was not ideal but it's still a choice it's still a choice for those parents who feel uncomfortable having their children surrounded by other students that aren't in masks to have an option to not be in that environment if they don't want to so i feel like that would be giving both sides of the house opportunity for to do what they feel is safe and i'm not suggesting that everything go back on one teacher but looking at you know again dr mr um i almost gave you a doctorate um going back to his presentation you know esther one funds some with online curriculum classroom cameras same types of things for sr2 s or three permanent subs i.t support so with some of that money aren't there ways to find opportunity to where if we have families that are like i feel uncomfortable with people not having masks they're not going to be stuck in a situation they feel unsafe where they can even if it's just the webcams that we have in our in our classrooms now um whether it be the numbers are too high for their comfort or something changes in their life and they just don't feel safe they can they can have like online instruction adam president miss pritchard that way dr dean it would be because one side can't we can't decide we can't say who what parent choice take trump's another parent choice like parent choice in general is important so then this way those who feel that we shouldn't mandate mass and i don't feel i don't feel comfortable and and they have all their reasons why they don't want masks that's honored for the people that feel like i prefer my child to wear a mask i don't feel safe around a lot of unmasked children they have an option that's going to make them feel comfortable so is there a way with practice madam president mrs pritchard to answer your question we can certainly explore those opportunities you mentioned that we have web-based or web cameras in in the classroom from a data perspective we had a very large amount of students fail that were online last year a very large amount of students fail and the learning loss is real the learning loss was real both online and in person last year because instruction was different in the classroom than it typically is we are seeing dr polling and i are seeing as we visit schools classroom instruction is back our teachers are doing a fantastic job of teaching our students without relying on the computer to do so and so we are seeing instructional practices return and we believe that the best environment for our students in terms of an academic component is in the classroom and and that's what our data from the last year would show uh and and so that's i would indicate that we could certainly continue that conversation um but we're seeing success with our students in in the classroom well that would be something and i understand that and i we all on the board saw the numbers and it was a horrific situation academically but parents would be going into it eyes wide open they would know the challenges and they would decide whether or not they want to try online with some extra supports and but this would be different too it's not florida virtual online it would be with the webcams they would be able to be in their classroom possibly madam president i i will and miss richard i will tell you without stepping on dr croto's department that it is very difficult to staff a full ground campus and a large online component as well not that that trumps student safety and and that never would um but there are significant challenges that that are presented as well madame president if i could also just add to that turning on a webcam is not instruction and we don't have enough teachers to pull teachers out of schools and dedicate them to being online teachers so what we found and what we experienced last spring is that we had teachers in their classrooms who were also trying to manage students who were online and inevitably the students who were in the classroom got the attention of the teachers because the teachers just can't feasibly stop instruction and then turn their attention to the students online and work in the two different environments simultaneously and we asked teachers to dedicate time during the week where they could reach out to the students who are online but it didn't work is the challenge so we do have cameras in the classroom that if a student is isolated or quarantined or even if they're just sick they don't have to have covet they could for any other reason they can request the teacher to turn on the camera while they're out and they're part of the classroom but for three five ten days they're they're going to be absent they're coming back to the classroom and so they can request that the teacher turn on that webcam during their instruction they can follow along um so to indicate and to even suggest to those families who go online that they're going to have a similar even experience of learning would be a disservice to them we found that it was not successful and we would not recommend it what about is the is the window to registering for i school closed right now madam president miss pritchard in terms of how you're speaking about high school correct for yeah because i know and i know elementary school had the cut off and they're done but i mean um would that be an option to open that up high school students are so let me differentiate the two we have a k8 online program that is not part of ischool and then we have high school online school which is high school high school ischools enrollment is open however there is a capacity number due to staffing of the number of students that can can be accepted into high school so that's open for them now should capacity exist the answer is yes and then hypothetically would it even be possible to open up the k-8 for a short period of time if people right now are reacting to the very real numbers that are being reported and for their comfort level they don't want their child to be in a school with unmasked children they would have the opportunity to take advantage of the k-8 online school madam president mrs pritchard i would point you back to dr kelly's comment in in that the ability to effectively staff online programs for elementary school is very difficult we currently have classroom teaching positions that are unfilled that are filled with with permanent subs because similar to bus drivers and similar to to cafeteria workers and other positions there's a teacher shortage as well while dr croto and his team have done a fabulous job of recruiting and filling the majority of our positions there's competition for teachers across the valley as well and and we're all in the same boat in in terms of of not having enough teachers we are able to educate the students that are in the current k-8 online program with the limited number of online teachers that we have currently adding students to that would create a tremendous challenge of education but are we kind of in that anyway like i know we wouldn't ideally do this but in the pandemic and in this situation is it one of those things where again it's not ideal just like just like that first spring wasn't ideal but it we made it happen for those that well at the time we didn't have a choice but we continued to make it happen just because of the circumstances madam president miss prichard i would indicate that from both sides of this conversation the situation today is different than it was last year uh from from both sides of the pandemic conversation we certainly are in a different place than we were a year ago in in several capacities our teachers ability to provide both ground instruction and online instruction would tax them in a manner that is simply unfair well that's not what i recommend that's not what i'm asking i'm acknowledging the fact i think i said earlier um that i wouldn't say to put it all on that one teacher i'm saying finding ways to whether it be grouping grouping some classes together or grade levels together or just coming up with a creative way or seeing what the options are but certainly not just piling tons more kids on one teacher for one class madam president ms pritchard the ability for us to expand our k online program beyond what it in which it currently exists is incredibly difficult from a human capacity perspective and that human capacity perspective is the ability to instruct students we are barely keeping up with the number of students that are on k-8 online now with the dedicated teachers to k8 online in order to do that any further not speaking from any perspective except for the human capacity piece i'm not sure where we would find teachers to be able to teach to expand cade online um to the beyond to the point in which it is right now what about with the permanent subs or the esser funds madam president ms pritchard i would remind the board that our subs often do not have teaching certification they have subcertification and they are not able to stay in one location per ade beyond is it mr croto is it a semester beyond 120 days so we could certainly look at that option but we're going to take away we have two issues there number one throughout the course of the year students would have more than one teacher because we would have to remove that teacher at one point in time that substitute teacher that would be the first piece the second piece is that we would remove we would remove a an opportunity that we provided for our campuses in which which they have a sub on their campus to cover unfilled classroom positions on a daily basis i don't know i mean i hear what you're saying i just i struggle because and here's the thing too i can say well our k-8 you know they are um maybe more at risk because lots of them won't be eligible for vaccination if they even wanted to be and and that's the thing too where it's unfair to say that and just look at k-8 because there's some high school students who are old enough to be vaccinated but maybe they choose not to be which is fine too it's their their choice i just i just wish there were there was a way that if we if we're trying to honor parent choice and not mandate mass like a lot of other school districts are doing then we need to find a way to equally honor the parent choice of i don't feel comfortable sending my child to school without a mask we want i want to be able to offer them an option they're comfortable with which would be an online option knowing that it's not going to be the same and it's and they'd have to acknowledge that and know that and we're going to do our best but at least it's optional and i appreciate that conversation and i would indicate that um as you're aware that parents who would like to send their their children to school in masks certainly have the ability to do that under our current protocol as do parents who do not wish to send their children to to school in a mask right but in fairness like the optional piece if you're a parent that wants masks um you know people them being in school with students who aren't wearing a mask doesn't make them feel safe though so even though we're like you can wear one if you want there's going to be kids that aren't going to wear it and so that's going to make those other parents and families and feel unsafe i understand sorry i may have jumped the gun ask questions no i just have a follow-up question of what you were talking about when you said that i school is open capacity so if i if there's a student who's registered will just pick a freshman and this is their schedule and then they decide to go to i school not all of those classes are offered on high school is that correct madam president mrs grant that is correct you are correct the same classes they would end up either losing a credit that is correct so i will give you an example as a very specific example so if we have a student who is taking let's say sports medicine as a cte course i do not believe we offer sports medicine as a cte course online so that that is a ground course and that is a course that is available only to students online as the board is aware high school students can make their schedule hybrid and they can take a class two classes three classes online and on and on ground campus as well we provide that option for our students when they have online classes in that schedule they go to the collaborative commons you know in which they have support for high school there but i would state again that our high school enrollment for high school students also is has a cap based upon teacher capacity numbers but again i just want to make sure i understand you correctly you are correct that not all classes are offered yes that is absolutely correct got a schedule now they've got a problem if they the parents decide that they're going to put them in high school they really can't well they can for certain classes but not for their entire schedule correct there are core classes all of the core classes are available via high school as well as elective courses in which a student may attend ischool for four consecutive years and graduate they just may not get the electives that they would have access to on a ground campus automotive is another example of that not that they're all cte courses um but there are other courses that we offer only on ground and not online culinary too culinary is a great example yes and one of my favorites kind of tastes so just for clarity for per procedure um since there's already a motion on the floor if the if a board member wanted to [Music] would a board would would the board the majority board need to vote no in order to be open to other options because the motion um that crystal made was to approve everything that's in place as it is is that right how can you receive what was your emotion unless she wants to amend her emotion my emotion was to keep continue i wrote it down continue the current protocols with the addition of the copa dashboard madam president the maker of the motion can amend the motion as long as the person who seconded the motion can agrees to the amendment as well that's my understanding of robert's rules of orders madam president um mr pritchard so to your question the question you asked a couple days ago when we got legal opinion within this agenda item you can make multiple decisions it's complicated with the original motion as you just stated because the original motion is to move forward without any changes except to activate the the dashboard if the bor and so that is the the motion on the table and needs to be voted on after that there can be another motion to amend the the plan and to make a different change to it so if this one passes by majority then the action is to approve the the current protocol with the exception of the dashboard after that a board member can make another motion if it's not seconded then it dies on the table if it's seconded then that would go to more discussion or to a vote if it passes then that would then supersede the first one so i'm not saying we won't get into dueling actions here because then somebody else could come back and and say well i want to redo my first one so you cannot have conflicting emotions because you could be here all night just going back and forth on the same topic um right yeah so so would it be better than if you had a motion that would maybe combine a couple things maybe just do one at a time that way it's like one person can be okay with one part of it not the other and then they just vote it down because they're not good with both you should just probably do one at a time okay correct and it was stated um the person who made this original motion that's currently on on the table can amend that motion if the person who seconded it agrees to it if they don't want to amend the motion then that motion stands and will be voted on as i just said you can't come up with a conflicting motion which is complicating again because the original motion is to prove everything and if you're if you're saying okay this is everything that's currently in place but now you want to add something that would not conflict with it because you're adding to it not changing the current protocols so legal advice was sought on this agenda item uh madam president yes um chris thomas asba who's kind of the resident expert on boardsmanship responded to that question was was that communicated to the rest of the board madam president was not communicated to the rest of the board thank you i'll be honest like for transparency i think it was a big deal i asked because i knew there was a lot of different things encompassing this and i didn't know if i if there needed to be i just if there was a lot of different discussions like there is now there's masks there's cleaning there's the dashboard like that it wouldn't be an all or nothing there'd be opportunity to otherwise it would be an all or nothing and there's too many components to it so i just wish we had all had that information ahead of time so that we could have planned it's duly noted thank you dr tell us if we could address the disruptors in the audience after the meeting thank you if we have a current motion it's madam president at this point for um procedural discussion if there's no other discussion to be had on the motion then the madam president or another member can call the vote for the vote okay so i will call for the vote on the motion that has been made should it say addition or reinstate of the doesn't make a difference activated okay that was my motion i voted just took me a minute motion passes so i want to make another motion i move the governing board direct administration to resume [Music] cleaning protocols per what would that be back to um spring 2021 semester guidelines the covet protocol cleaning yes second motion to reinstate protocol covet protocol cleaning yeah call the cleaning protocol because he said there was a difference um there we go motion passes i have another motion i move the governing board direct the superintendent to explore an online option online learning option um could i just make a point of clarity the previous ones are they just adding it's to explore um no no i'm saying so we want to explore that but we're also keeping the cleaning protocol and we're also okay just for clarification this is just this is just to be in response to community members concern and to let's just have a presentation to see what would be how can we make this work so let me think of the exact wording superintendent too um explore an online learning option for students for the and we can even have it be like a um for just for this first semester but just it's completely butchered i'm sorry i did not think of that motion before i um before we proceed dr kellis have you already examined what the cost of something like that would look like uh madam president members of the board we have nada where there's last year's model that if this motion were to pass that would be part of the exploration couldn't that be a future agenda item rather than a motion madam president miss grant the the motion to explore is very different than the motion to approve an online program no i know but rather than making an emotion to explore couldn't that be a future agenda item to say i want to explore and president yes that can be no no explain what you mean then because i i'm assuming that if for directing the superintendent to explore this option i guess i'm assuming he would bring it back to the board for just for a discussion item or an action discussion item uh madame president pritchard yes that is my understanding is that administration would explore the the possibility of an online program and it to bring a recommendation or not yeah but you were talking about for first the first well because here the only reason why we're looking into this is because of the pandemic right now and the positivity rate and the concerns that some parents have and sending their student into classrooms or schools where there's unmasked students so it may just be kind of how we've done our protocol covered protocols ever since this started it was a we're going to continue to reassess and so maybe it's just we're just looking at this semester god willing in january it's going to look completely different and maybe we won't have to worry about it as much but so i have no preference on whether or not it's just for one semester or two my my concern is or my request is again being responsive to the community and exploring that possibility for online instruction to address the um online learning concerns regarding during covet pandemic president miss richard so that's a different motion than we were looking at could i ask mrs brown to read the emotion that she has as draft okay direct administration to explore online learning option for first semester of the 2021-22 school year okay so i have a motion by christine pritchard do i have a second never mind my present at this point um it would be appropriate for you to say hearing none the motion fails okay motion fails thank you do we have any other motions pending um not for this meeting yeah okay thank you moving to action discussion h5 dr kellis madam president last week the governing board held a study session to continue the conversation developing the superintense evaluation and this evening the board is presented with the evaluation tool that was discussed and the changes that were requested have been noted and this is presented to the board for approval thank you dr kelos i'll open it up for any discussion or questions does it matter that the points don't total 100 or because they're weighted it doesn't really matter man present miss pritchard that's correct just like um as we it was on one to five scale this is on one to three scale the multiplier puts it on a 100 scale so since i was not at the study session but i did listen to it i just want to make sure that the um and if you could walk me through this so that we have the superintendent's narrative and then we also have the board member comment so these two items are um sent to our governing board administrative executive assistant or whatever else you're called um before the board meeting that we will be discussing this excuse me the executive session we would be discussing this correct no we decided that we are going to all bring our own to the executive session and have discussion already completed individually and then as a group discuss and finalize is what i remembered us saying yeah i think how it's going to work is we're each going to fill this out on our own then when we go to executive session we're all going to collaborate and kind of look like okay so this category i did this and that and then we'll have the superintendent's narrative already there to kind of help explain and say this is what i did for this and this is what i did for that and then we'll all agree on the document and then we'll make our decision but our board member comments will be completed before we come into the executive session yeah we all bring it with us it's already completed and we bring it with this two executive session for a discussion but then there'll just be one that we decide on together okay so are we we are going to score it before we come to executive session as individuals but then only one will count so we'll have to decide on the scoring when we're together okay so are we going to run into the the um the problem of taking three hours in order to complete this i would hope not but i mean that's this is our like we've said in the meeting this is like our biggest role as board members is hiring and evaluating the superintendent so i mean i wouldn't want to rush it but you would think by i think there's only three areas meeting does not meet or exceeds where in the past we've had a lot of we have several numbers and there's a lot of ambiguity between those numbers which i think took a long time this should be this should not in my opinion take that long i don't feel like we're gonna have to sort through this and that that and that we'll already have it like ahead of time we'll have an idea we'll have superintendent's narrative to kind of say highlight certain things that we might not be sure of he can say oh here's some data points check this out we'll already have it ready to go and then we will come in hopefully we will have you know a good discussion about it and then we will come away with one document or dr kellis had mentioned if we thought it was going to be a long time we could have a separate meeting to do it but um just for clarity purposes we we get this document um i don't know a month prior to no two weeks whatever we decide prior to and then we fill out the score and dr kellis will fill in his narrative and then we do our comments then do we then share are the all of those comments then shared with him or do we decide as a board what comments will be shared with him along with the score so if we all agree or whatever to a three and then will there be comments will you to go along with it to him to say this is why we believe you are it is i'm just curious as to how the comment section is gonna be handled i don't remember how we decided i was asking i think that anytime a superintendent is evaluated i think that it's up to each board member to share their personal feedback with the superintendent yes we could just make a copy and then and i would hope that everyone is doing that when you go to music festivals you have three judges and they each score you and they each give you comments and then they each hand it to you so you can see what each judge you know said oh this was really good that was really good and this judge might point out something that that didn't and you go oh okay so i think it would be advantageous not only to hand him that one document but to make photocopies for us and then hand him the document with all of our personal feedback if that's what we choose i just went clear again yeah or um during i mean i think i know we have to decide on one score one com like comment sheet but i don't know why we also couldn't as we all go around share our own individual comments with him at the moment just and he can you know it may not my comment may not be on there but at least he'd have the opportunity to reflect on it and it may be one of the comments on there officially okay so i stepped away is there a motion on the table not yet i would like to make a motion to approve the superintendent's 2021 through 2022 goals objectives and evaluation plan second seconded by ms grant motion passes thank you madam president if i could just do comment i would like to thank the board for all your work over the last month of meetings and even before that i appreciate your attention to this two study sessions thank you all right item i one request for future agenda items is there going to be a discussion on class sizes for maybe the next iga agreement for our public comment this evening madam madame president chaffin are you requesting that that be at this point we would leave it up to each of the employee groups to bring their priorities to the iba process um administration can certainly bring that item to the iba process as an interest for uh for consideration yes please miss grant did you have something you know okay sure i hope we adjourn this meeting second there it is motion passes meaning is adjourned