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but if you go down to the bottom so right now this is what we're planning to use in next year's budget um this balance gets down to 77 000. we'll be at a point where we'll basically exhaust that next year if nothing changes um then one of my you know we talked about um you know kind of the risk you know it's going to have to be a priority in the fy24 budget to basically um just fix that in the boyleston budget where we can't rely on school choice anymore we could take a little bit basically maybe spend what we take in so i do foresee a fy24 budget challenge specifically for boylston elementary school it's not an issue for the other two schools um you can see they have healthy balances berlin has a for its size school has very healthy balance we could even use that to fund an unexpected facilities that came up um and tahanto is in in good shape as well although we do because we know it's in good shape we've been kind of planning to spend it down a little bit by taking in 370 000 next year plus you need to spend 570 we feel like we have a balance that's maybe more than we need to have it's nice to have but in a year with the challenging budget we felt like we should draw that down a bit to offset the budget increase similarly in circuit breaker so the revenue that we received in fy21 was based on expenses and fy20 that were high the um this is what we used and spent during fy21 the revenue that we received here was because we had a lot of special education expenses that um students had graduated or moved out of the district this year so our expenses were less so this is the revenue we expect this is going to come up a little bit next year and then jump significantly the year after so that'll help the fy25 budget what we typically do there is we typically spend this would be an example typically try to spend our beginning balance was 474 we typically try to spend what the beginning balance was and carry forward the revenue from the prior year this year we're going to be in a case where we need to kind of dip into and go beyond that in fy23 so we'll um be taking in 240 000 but we're planning to spend some of that we're going to end up at an end of year balance of 132 000.
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technically that 132 still serves as a safety net but you know one placement can cost 300 thousand that's nothing that's not a normal placement placement under collaborative is probably more like 65 70 000. but so i just wanted to highlight that we've seen a shift in over time you can look back at the beginning when the ratio of students from boylston over a period of time significantly increased to the point where it was uh more than double in 2017.
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we're seeing that come back to be a little bit closer what that means is that berlin's paying for a larger share of the times of budget than it has as those numbers become closer the budget's allocated by regional agreement which is essentially based on that enrollment level so now i'm going to jump into how this pulls together and leads to the town assessment so this factors in the revenue that we have in terms of state aid and factors in the expense budgets and the expense budgets are offset by the state aid that we're getting to arrive at these percent increases so we have for the town of berlin this is how they typically will look at their expenses look at their budget overall what is the assessment impact overall it's a 5.3 assessment increase to the town 361 000 they had initially communicated an increase of did they desired an increase from 2.5 to us what i've shown at the bottom is that an increase the different increased levels using the i'll use this one as an example because this is kind of my guess that's what my guidance 3.5 increase we would be able to increase our budget by 238 or at uh 361 would have to cut another 123 000 [Music] so we hope to make the case to them on what we're doing why it's important but those numbers kind of give us an idea of what we would have to cut to reach different level targets for boylston [Music] wells is a little bit less and you can see if you go back to honto's increase for berlin is 5.4 and for boylston it's 2.4 and that's really because of the increased number of berlin students uh attending toronto it's all enough to four point nine percent increase for the town of boylston it's either reached the different targets there um we're not as far off those would be fairly substantial numbers to cut if we were pushed to do so we also provide guidance to the town of boylston however on the vocational costs this is some potential good news um not necessarily for the students who want to attend assabet um it's very becoming very difficult for those student for those students of towns who aren't members of assabet which boylston is not a member the people who are in member towns are getting priority the number of students who are wanting to attend there may even be wait lists for the students from member towns it's not clear whether there's even going to be any spots for non-resident towns in the past we've been able to get students accepted from a financial standpoint this means we're we're likely going to see a decrease in asset value enrollment to all we're projecting a decrease of 137 000 or 19.4 percent when the town looks it's look at its assessments they typically also look at the vocational with it and this 137 thousand dollar increase would be pretty close to this number the town would look at that and said well three and a half percent i think they have a little bit more growth in boylston need to do berlin that might be something they can accept so we're hopeful again we'll see i will just mention too i'm not going to go through these but there are some supporting slides with how some numbers were derived and split out by school but okay did not go through those at this point i wanted to pause here and see if there's any questions on what was presented so one of the things i was like we were presenting the school of choice information um trying to understand a little bit is you know we're going to potentially bring a traditional school choice into the dds next year at what cost or what do we get for revenue for each of those placements we get when we receive 5 000 and if there's any additional special ed costs we will get an increment to cover those additional special ed costs who sets that five thousand dollar rating that us or the state one the state the state sets it and i've got the case you know all these numbers in the state go up every year why hasn't school such it was voted i think 20 years ago and it's not indexed to inflation so um i have my theories as wide they probably are not in favor of districts that are net school choice receiving districts i think they're trying to push in the impact of people to districts that lose students yeah that's more my political thought but what you're what in theory this is there solely for us if we have extra space we're not going to do this if it's going to cause us to hire another teacher because it doesn't pay for itself but if we have a class of um we had this case come up where we had i think 23 kids in an elementary school great at brewing memorial it's like it's an awful lot for kindergarten and that well we're going to have two classes 11 and 12. we can certainly afford to add three or four school choice students so we i think in aces case there might be one grade where we can probably take group two and another grade we can take one but we're not accepting any in kindergarten or first grade because we know there's time for that to grow uh over time but as we get closer to the third fourth and fifth would be the grades uh secondly potentially even second it's a really small class and look at it and then we also look at it when we get to when the students get to toronto um the combination of berlin and boylston but the class size is particularly small they might look at the incoming next year's sixth grade class is very small and it's simply smaller than typically a rising fifth grade to six would be that might be a case where we want to take students that then and we also lose some students in ninth grade to uh we also do something to answer also this one to the ninth grade aspect particularly with our own students so there's some certain points where it makes sense at toronto how much demand is there for seats from other district students that we're not meeting right now i don't know um we've already received for next year and we really haven't done um you know any advertising yet we haven't even given our recommendations um we already have five applications for next year yeah in comparison to what we've seen in the fall well because of color the past couple of years but yet we're seeing um applications come or request earlier than we typically would say okay and then using the metaphor before i did which was inflation to what extent are we calculating 7.5 percent annual replacement inflation rate into these numbers into the budget yeah we're not [Music] it becomes less and less possible to the you're gonna take school choices so not only do you you you start to grow the amount of students and they start to strain the system but you lose the revenue from the school choices also foreign there's a balance there we don't necessarily want to be filling up our schools with it but if there's opportunities we're also relying on right now in our budget when you saw that enrollment trend chart you might see that over time we're not going to have space to accept any school choice students so it might be something as time diminishes i think right now we probably have the lowest amount of school choice seats in the elementary schools we have in my time here so some of that's just happening naturally because we have more kids coming in in both towns that are of school age coming up to than in kindergarten past i just want to correct my previous statement about not factoring inflation into the budget that's not true we um we factored it specifically into the oil budget a little bit into the electricity budget every time i receive a contract if the increase is more than three percent i call the vendor um and complain and say we're in pandemic for schools and have pity on our kids usually it works so that's it so um we do we do fight inflation and then budgeted for it for oil and utilities and there's certain places where we know things to be budgeted bob yes i still see the fourth nurse uh being budgeted in there and i know when we talked about that it was specifically a one-year thing to handle the additional focus contact tracing and test the state stream we don't have that now so based on your numbers in the poll we will within the state guidelines for nurses it's a significant salary that i'm sure we could use another feature or another program or something so what's the continued need for that if we only need it if we can increase it well we're finding that uh going to look like so right um that's that's why we put it in as a point-and-position you know if we aware that they've asked for a permanent position and i'm not convinced of that but certainly not knowing what next year's going to bring you for a bit for that one year so i just want to type in with inflation for so many other services you know probably how do you balance that based on the fact that all that additional work that we wanted that for is no longer necessary well again you know may have been started [Music] we have the flexibility to decide what we're going to do between now and the end of the year budget it's basically in there so it could potentially change to something else that's necessary it could in the grant we you know we previously had some dollars in there for more tutor support than we were able to obtain um the nurse is a contracted position with company so you know we pay that over a finite amount of time so technically if we didn't need that nurse after x amount of months we could terminate that contract with the vendor so it's not like hiring someone permanently so all right yeah it does give us flexibility like you mentioned though you know it's a grand money um you said you could be spent on some other kind of position tutor or language coach or whatever we know that's sorely needed right now with everything at all the last three years i just um i wonder if it would be perspective but we'll certainly look at it you know we're certainly going to look at it as we [Music] you know we want all these things all these things are qualified priority on personnel but let's prioritize the ones that we really need this year and then the ones we can we'll need down the road like i say bes without a teacher this year they can't next year so it'll be there next year so it's not like they're going away if we don't get all the stuff you're not going to see it again these are important positions but we just thought in terms of we could get by without some of them this year so we can't so uh given the cost of some of those items all the items we've seen don't control them we just put priority on them so i'll give you the process from here so have you ever gone through this process in this seat before we're taking this budget to the finance committee is that correct yeah well in a regional district uh let me give you a couple of things to be aware of then a regional district has to present past two-thirds of the member towns well since we have two towns let's pass both of them if it doesn't uh you could potentially do a reboot but this is supposed to attend meeting if it doesn't pass we could potentially be stuck with a 112 budget which is set by desi and on again oftentimes it's flat so whatever our budget was this year could just be the same next year which is it's just untenable this doesn't work that's not desirable what's that yeah um so we do want to so the fincom will make a recommendation on our budget we do want to get their support we didn't present already to them or at least the burlington a preliminary budget um they have communicated 2.5 early we presented this and they gave us feedback later that kind of reiterated they didn't quite say two and a half but they kind of applied closer to two and a half um so i i believe that we want to demonstrate that we're kind of working with them to try to provide something we're also trying to advocate for students so we have to find a balance i think if we presented 12 things we wouldn't have incredibly presented they were trying to listen to their concerns at all [Music] and i think that we have developed a relationship where they trust uh trust us and they've worked with us we've received their support from um through every budget um a little russian from boylston in one year but um from berlin pretty much throughout and this is really the first time they've presented any kind of guidance that they were looking for something a little smaller because of their own particular challenges what that all translates to we'd like this to pass education across the three schools i think it's somewhere around six hundred thousand yeah that sounds about right you made a comment that that's not every year it fluctuates up and down so are they not here for 12 years 10 years no no this is this is represents an increase versus last year so these same costs could carry forward next year but it's not going to be a six hundred thousand dollar budget increase all right of those members of just anything um and then so when you're presenting this to the topic i'm a taxpayer or a girl okay um i see a five percent tax increase coming through or whatever that translates to on my taxes inflation is coming up next winter is going to be hard to you know most of the towns most of the homes in burling right so that's going to be a tight tight boiler fairly and then i look at the per pupil spending right the lower end of it right so so what can you tell that like what's your strategy to tell taxpayers hey listen we're not even spending as much as some other towns [Music] what do they get for this i mean they're not getting more futures they're not getting more programs they're not getting more it sounds like it's most of it just going to contracting increases in salaries no additional teachers or additional sports or arts or anything like that you know well a lot of it is i mean the reason we presented even in december the way we presented it is to show you know that even without increasing making these above level requests there are big increases this year and most of them are out of control so i think towns all times need to make a decision really in the reason we laid it out like we did that'd be one of those things on that level it has a cost that and tom has to decide if you know there's inflation if they decide inflation is too much we don't want to support this and then it translates to not supporting the education but students too that's how it translates and you know we've talked about this as a leadership team and basically the reason we presented that first project we did like is to say let's lay out everything we need we believe we need to support our students and then moving forward and then we'll cut in order to get close to what the town recommends but at some point it's not on the city did your decision as a school coming as a town's decision they said for example you know inflation's high all the time all of this stuff we can't do it we take all of that out but we want to make the town aware and to say well listen you don't have to support us but if you don't here's all of the things that you don't get because all of these have a cause it's just like everything else and i and we try to stretch our resources as much as possible but there are some things that doesn't feel spread for us that are just out of our control so we still try to we still try to move forward obviously at a slower pace because now we've got these other things just to maintain services i think that's what it is i think it's a pretty i don't think it's a pretty straightforward conversation here's what everything cost if you don't want it you don't want it i think my question was from the other perspective let's say we bumped up to like was it eighteen nineteen thousand percent what could that get to that or what to get what benefit could that mean to the students additional programs or well yeah that's very small prices well exactly all of all of the you know teachers plus the materials plus instructional instruction all of that is wrapped into perfect extension and if you want to function what [Music] so we want to expand we want to have an internship shadow in order to do that we need more more guidance now so that will increase effect that will theoretically increase uh per pupil expenditure a little bit so anytime you expand programming you you expand your people's expenditure a bit too so um if you just do level service then you don't you're not doing that we haven't you know if you think about it over the past few years we've put a lot in and we've increased per people expansion yeah everything everything's a cost and all of those costs to increase programming gets reflected in that peripheral expenditure you you know teach your salaries so you hire another teacher hire another guidance concept it gets reflected in him i don't know about how much but it will get reflected in the formula and and we should probably not at some point bring that slide that would be because i didn't know there'd be so many questions about it it has all the categories that go into their people expenditure from that [Music] so you're asking one way what would what would you get we would you would specifically get the additional school counselor the ela coach for giving direct instruction to the coach get instructions to teachers and you'd get let's be able to convert to curriculum assistant which will get carol in schools so those those are the things that you would get out of the increase but the other thing that we need to present is uh if i'm a town i'm gonna i don't have any context for assessing whether this is fair not like why you're asking for all these things it seems like a lot of money and by showing them for people expenditure we can remind them that with relatively wealthy towns um we um are a relatively high performing district and our permutable spending is in the you know high 30s percentile across the state relative to neighboring communities we want to compete with we spend less than most of them so it's a context and i think that they understand that it might not be something that they can say well we can't fix that right away but we i want to keep that in front of it and if we're about that then they could also make the case then we'll make you making the case if we were clear at the top of the state um we had a harder time being a case for a million dollar increase and those are the two things i would like to see right like along with the per people spending where do we rank and performance among those towns however you want to make a performance subjective but and then exactly what you just said you know the speech and language technologist curriculum assistant all that stuff i mean it's in here but to me you didn't gloss over what i was saying got lost to me and long everything else those are the things i want to see if i'm going to spend that much more money i want that to be front and center and blasting my face every time you talk about it and you know the other thing is like and we've talked about it at other times but even if you talk about personnel which is reflected heavily in this transition you look at bdf for example bes is about a 2015 uh of personnel levels and that's with a number of additions over the last four years now i can argument that the middle high school is probably three to four positions at least short of where they should be and we know that because we have a number of teachers who teach six courses so the reason that happens is because you don't know how to teach it so as you continue to stretch at some point you can't do it anymore and he said well and what happens in the argument of always well you know you sum it up your summative test is still good you still have good outcast course at some point that catches up with you and once you do that you can't hire five teachers in a year and that's one of the long long-term things we really need to stop looking at and by hiring more personnel and this is why we've we've made a big focus in this budget and in the district improvement plan coming up we'll focus our personnel because we need to turn that around and that will you know that's the biggest investment you can make in your students because you're personal people teaching them yeah that's what i want to say yeah no no question but again for a number of reasons we're we're playing when you look at things like you know the things that happen at high school and you look at you know we're at 2015 funding on you know personnel levels at bes a town that's increasing in the enrollment [Music] we've got to start turning that around and we we have we have done that the code is a little kicking it but that's what you get for your money your best investment is is just teachings good teachers no question about it right exactly a little more aggressive like saying and wonder why why don't you think that point be now to go and say hey these are the things that we are prioritizing from this list the ones that are getting yelled and that's a fair process but i i want the town to understand what it is they're not getting by not also go into that next level of funding that would have all those white section degrees right so you're by approving this budget you're saying no to the things that we're not able to do there and make sure that the time this and that's what we've tried to do that's why we laid them all out you know the original one so that was our intent so maybe we didn't you know we quite get it across what we were trying to do but the reason we laid them all off and like that originally is we asked everybody on the leadership team the principles what do you need in terms of personnel let's report that person we didn't even go to curriculum tears and things like that we're going to make a focus on personal because that's what we think it gives the students the best bang for their buck then you know you if you look at that that's what we're talked about except like you know the musical engine because it's a small item um that's what we're trying to do so maybe we didn't they were saying we didn't that i'm asking for us now you guys [Music] well i think you know going back to what bob was saying about them you know they do give us parameters um [Music] they have not this year they said they don't think they don't think it'll be two and a half percent like berlin but um typically we've had a problem uh challenging getting guidance from the town last year we were able to get it from the town i think um we're meeting with them tomorrow night hopefully on his own i think they're trying to schedule it and try it this year we tried to go on a little early and say give us a you know give us a framework to work with them i mean we were difficult to get uh you know difficult to sort of get another one like that i'll be honest i kind of look what adam was saying the point is the presentation i saw this at lunchtime today i did not realize the white was not actually coming through this buddy and so maybe this is just a presentation issue i looked at this and i thought okay there's a checkmark for that school so that school's given a classroom teacher that's what's getting kindergarten that's what i wanted yeah i mean it was misleading to me we just did the check to show where it was and then we added the colors for tonight yeah it threw me off i mean i'm thinking i don't know what i was thinking but it wasn't that but after you explained it yeah it was clear but it's not yeah i guess if you're looking at it for the first time i think we could just thinking okay this is what we showed in december you know we talked about the district improvement plan and how that would focus into these things but they're important so they're not going to go away they're going to see them again you might see some of them next year like again the the classroom teach which is a must uh the next year some of them maybe three years down the road but you know it's a point while taking the items are being requested that are above service loading requests the thing that we're not going to continue as of right now putting in the budget what's the total cost of those things as we look across what's in what's in white there it looks like we're looking at a couple hundred thousand dollars to cover the things that are in white teacher i mean i top my head in the classroom teacher with benefits maybe 80 that kindergarten aids it's not benefits maybe that's 40 especially a teacher 80 potentially more if it's somebody who's maybe needs somebody more um experience there uh single sign-ups offers some small software and if it's not expensive um bfbs preschool staffing again would be a teacher we might get some revenue but that's that's there's also some logistics involved there for us to organize that and set it up like i don't think we're ready to do that um even if we were able to budget it reducing school choice usage um i mean that would be a hundred thousand in boylston two hundred thousand in tahanto before you do that right away um instrument repairs is small and i feel like that doesn't need to be in the budget we have a donation fund we have actually a little bit of a budget for that user prepares so there's ways to pay for some of this without using existing funds part of it which is budgeted the stem teacher probably would cost more than the other two teachers that might be with with benefits over a hundred thousand including all three hundred thousand dollars of federal service of above global requests that we're not going to put forward yeah and given that boylston hasn't given this guidance i question that i'm just just didn't think they would fly based on what you know the guidance we you know we've had in the last four or five years and back before that um that we thought we'd you know have something later and we'd have a backup plan to introduce those positions um later on so that's that's you know that's the honest answer to why we we didn't like that okay but let's show a big thing back to to peer this [Music] earlier like even before we get to the fall about okay we want to do some things and we want to have a little bit more capacity in our budget or to get a sense from them i know that boylston may have another commercial development going in when the revenue comes on online i don't know but that might be you to say okay if you're going to get another 3 million in commercial revenue then that's the year we we put forward more initiatives so or just make the case so we meet with the towns i think if they hear from a resident and a school committee member it can help too we're happy to kind of go to those meetings um then we've had kind of a committee a little bit in flux for about two years so um maybe that's something we could build next fall do we have the author tonight to propose well the idea tonight was that you have a quota that says that's correct so so now your question is could we rather than voting it through as presented voted through the addition of i think you have the ability as i understand it to recommend a different budget number but you don't have the ability to decide which how we increase the budget but maybe you can certainly make your comments and recommendations but um you do approve what the budget number is and understanding [Music] again [Music] we get kind of confirmed you know we certainly jeff will talk about clients with especially but we would pretend we haven't come back before you know something very 2015 funding level personnel personality um [Music] we [Music] to put forward a larger number my suggestion if you did so would be to grand state and put it include the classroom teacher bes the kindergarten days of the bbs the sped teacher at bds the single silent software and the music which both seem to be small items for preschool teachers he seems to be on the table off the table for now when you consider that and then the stem teacher at tohonto comes to around three to four hundred thousand dollars more than what we're looking at right now and if they know that commercial stuff is coming online in a year or two they can come back with it and say okay did you hope to take the mask off as we start developing district improvement plan we started in march and then we have everything done and we linked the treaty and put together july excuse me so we would have to kind of go through and decide what was going to be a priority was out of that list and i mean i almost wonder if you can't go to the buying votes in particular because the documents [Music] come on well i think bob showed that slide but you know we were anticipating actually just them asking us to decrease to get down to even lower but not that i if the principal submits me a list of 15 items like i'm just going to say i'm not going to feel like they've really been in the list um i feel like if we present pretty much everything they're not going to feel like we can kind of build our list and they may just they may look at it and say okay well you haven't done any work on this we're not gonna you know that's a risk i don't know that they're gonna say that but i think bourbon will be the one that's um maybe we get a school committee involved and um at least some of the initial um work on the uh traditional one so maybe those are some of the things that you can talk about to us you know where you feel the direction of the of the district it will incorporate those and you know you prioritize your list also and so i think i i agree the time is now but i i think the time to do it is with the district approval which we'll start working on so for all of us [Music] what are you going to get if we increase the school budget to meet this thing where you're going to get the priority on this plan improvement plan like that kind of stuff we can figure out how to do it you're going to vote on it so we're going to put in there what how do you think we can this we can sell this too so yeah thank you so much great idea like who's i think it just a five percent increase in either down already it's hard to swallow especially with the weight i mean eyes inflated since the 80s right playing and working on also marketing job yeah would be probably easier because that's i mean let's start now this is february we usually start marching we just collected ideas so these are ideas that we'd love to hear from you to you'll have something that looks familiar to you and that'll be less direction for the next three years to you know increase the personnel through the program but we've been through today i think it does cause a relaxinator to go to approve the uh headaches we had one that was um how did you get in there how many speculative powers going when i first started we had two kindergartens and two full-time records sorry um the classes were don't call me honest for their [Music] i mean i think that's significant before you're speaking to adam's one i understand your front too but the idea is to have you have you ever gone to town floor without a print con recommendation i don't know we have to do that either no i know i know i mean i think that's significant also that's a honda stem teacher is their current one yes yes it's several it's science technology and engineering okay again that's one of those areas really we need to work on you know right that's why yeah that's why i brought that sure i remember the musical part too i mean the ones in white i know i'm [Music] music [Music] maybe we'd have to repurpose a different position to to the essence we have to meet in terms of the grant to shift the money around but it also is making a comment about boylston's budget because i think we painted a little bit of the picture it wasn't an awful place we've added two teachers in the last couple years we've added i think four or five eighties we've added a full-time technology teacher so like the tenant was the budget was in an awful place at boylston elementary we're making progress but it just the challenges that we're trying to digest um as much as we can as we go forward but we're doing it in pieces i think it's worth having a conversation about you know at some point if we have several things to put there maybe it gets to the point where it's an override um but i do think it's worth you know when we have a district improvement plan bring some of these and say you know we want to push this into one budget year and have it be voted on and um i don't think that's this year i don't know that we have enough runway but i do think if we want to be more aggressive we should present it as a package and say get it and not just talk to the parents i think we're going to get parents of course i can tell you but pretty much many parents support we always have especially from parents of students um i do think we need to to talk to the towns earlier even maybe before the school year and say here's the things that we didn't do we really want to get these on the radar we know that the increase is going to be more than six percent from boston elementary um you know more than a town typically see but um i think it would be helpful to have the school invader for those conversations too it's probably more impressive well everything everything except for some of these things when we start to rethink the personality some of those are new but for the most part we've stuck with everything in the district approval so nothing's been a surprise so you know just thinking about that maybe reading here's everything right here so there's no surprises um [Music] promoting that to the community especially as a newly general school committee i think it will give us an opportunity to share communities [Music] yeah i like that play that would be early september october [Music] cool any other questions okay could i have a motion to accept the fiscal year 2023 preliminary budget as presented [Music] discussion [Music] fiscal 2023 open hearing budget as presented next second no discussion all in favor aye aye as well opposed thank you motion to accept the fiscal year 2023 by adhering passes our next dates for um for meetings and just a reminder that we're accepting resumes for the open seat from berlin um from any residents in berlin we ask that you send them to either myself or christie churchian by our march meeting where we will hopefully be choosing another foreign as well this concludes our meeting thank you very much
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um i'd like to call the regular meeting of the brookfield uh board of education for february 16 2022 to order let's start by rising for the pledge of allegiance i pledge to the allegiance for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all right so we have all seven of our board members here this evening both our superintendent and assistant superintendent had uh were out uh today so they won't be joining us i do have uh dr burrell's report which i'll read uh on on his behalf when we get to that part of the agenda um so first up on our agenda is the student spotlight for brookfield high school so uh mr melanda why don't i uh turn it to you to let you introduce it a little bit all right just making sure we are on all right we're good so uh this is an odd board meeting to be out with no superintendent assistant superintendent it's a whole new world for me um so i want to thank the board uh for allowing me to come here tonight and uh turn it over to some of our fantastic students just to give you a bit of background you're going to hear from two different sets of students i thought it was really important every year as you recall recently in the last i mean it was two board meetings ago you approved the program of studies and we're always looking in our work through the cape subcommittee to bring new courses and new opportunities for students to to experience at brookfield high school and there's two experiences you're going to hear about today one of them is the human rights course which is a new course it's semester eyes course and it really highlights some really ongoing and important and relevant work that's going on in society today but also it's one of the yukon ece courses which means students that take it can actually apply and get credit uconn credit on their transcript for taking this course so that is one of the fantastic opportunities that we have for students the second course you're going to hear about is our emt course we are very lucky to have a teacher on staff who is also a volunteer volunteer ems in sherman paid in brookfield does a little bit of everything all over the board and she has been approved by uconn as well it's another uconn ece course so students can also earn credit for college taking this emt course but also it's the first course of its kind here at the high school where students can actually leave with a certification to be an emt if they pass their tests which is an amazing opportunity there's a lot that goes into both these courses but i'm really going to turn it over to them um students because you don't want to hear from me really anymore you hear enough from me so i'm going to call our human rights students these are students that took the human rights course last semester i've asked them to come up and just give a brief talk about the course and what they've experienced so i'll have them come up first see how excited they are and i'm gonna have them introduce themselves so you know who they are um you can just come up and say your name grade and then um you can just while you see that it's like sitting in the back row high it all right so hi it'll start and then when it's time to go through the slides you just have to push to the right and it'll be your slides okay all right so all right hello my name is hi youssef i'm a senior my name is ben i'm a senior hi i'm alexis i'm also a senior um i'm kira cummins i'm also a senior so basically this is just kind of what why we chose the course that and why we wanted to do it so me personally i chose to do the course because partly i was interested in learning about certain rights that i didn't know that i had access to and when taking that course i realized there was more of that than i had even thought there was and then also because it was something new for me to do at the school and i've always really liked social studies and i'm not gonna lie to you part of the reason i took it is because of who the teacher was because i had mr buckley my junior year and he told me he was doing it so i wanted to look into it and i didn't fully realize how much i was going to appreciate the course but after i took it it was really something that i wish i could have had long like i wish that it had been a full year to be honest with you because i felt like the semester wasn't long enough because it wasn't just learning about like my rights myself but also like the rights of people in other countries and people that come from different cultures that i had no idea what they didn't have access to that i didn't even realize i did either so it was just really cool to see what rights i was exposed to and what rights other people were lacking in that i had access to the reason why i chose human rights is because i actually did an internship like a small internship i would say with turnip activism and they taught us about how to like be activists and we learned about issues and stuff like that and i really wanted to learn about it in school so that's why i signed up for it and i also signed up because mr buckley as well um yeah i signed up for the course mainly because i want to learn about how to like advocate um we see a lot of activism throughout our society especially in 2020 we saw a lot of that which is when we chose the courses and it was mainly about just because like we see a lot of activism like i said but we don't really learn how to activate for or how to like promote ourselves and how to activate for ourselves so i signed up for the course mainly to focus on that and learn about what our rights are and like our rights as children and students in school i signed up for the course mainly because i have friends who are in the human rights club and to be honest they said you could get college credit so that was why i chose the course but i'm actually really glad i did because i'm like the person who if i have a doctor's appointment i'm getting out of there as early as i can but this class i was like i'm staying till the end like i will be here until the bell um because and i didn't really know what human rights was like what it encompassed until this course and i'm really glad that i took it and like alexis said i do actually wish it was a year-long course and i also am just really glad that we were able to incorporate it into like clubs and the curriculum for this year um so this is basically just what we did in the course um the post the picture up there is actually from a project that we did based on the crc which is the conventions of the rights of the child which was not something i had heard of until i took this course and i found out that they're actually not required to teach it to us because the united states hasn't ratified it we just signed it and we're actually the only country that hasn't ratified it so that was something really cool to learn about but that's a poster that we made because a lot of the projects we were given were like in the form of getting to do like things that would be considered activism and so this is actually hanging in mr buckley's classroom now but it was based it was a poster to raise awareness on um trafficking of women that were minors but i really this was just an example of something that i really enjoyed in the class because i was not only did doing the project exposed me to um i was able to learn while i was creating it so that was super fun but it was also a way for us to ex use like our own sort of creativity and expression in a project because we were allowed to do it anyway we chose some some people did videos we chose to do the poster but i really just enjoyed getting to learn about things that i didn't even know were a problem for people especially people who weren't like me so it was really cool to see what was going on in other countries and in the united states and it was kind of weird for me because when i was doing this research it was kind of hard for me to find out that this was things that like happened to girls every day just like me so it was kind of it was an eye-opener really but i really enjoyed the projects we did solely because it was really centered around real world issues so a lot of the so not just this project but another project we did after it was i got to see like how it really affected people who were just like me throughout the class we learned about our rights um and we use the udhr which is something that we learn about in class but we don't fully go through every single write and learn about each one and in the human rights course we picked a couple for each project and we would focus on them and we would research the violations of those rights throughout our world not just the united states which is something different because a lot of times we do only focus on the united states and we got to learn about everywhere and then we would focus learn about solutions that we could take and as a class we'd have conversations about the solutions and then we would also focus on the ideal world and what it would look like there which is kind of like motivation for how we can do better in our world and the climate the conversations we got to have throughout the class we would have a class discussion like a fishbowl seminar type thing and we were basically you'd have to go in the middle and then there you could talk about what you thought about it and you could talk about your solutions based on your research and it was different because everyone could bring something different to the table like everyone had their own type of research their own violations that they found so that was something that's not seen in every class because many of the times you read the same article you look at the same thing but this is a thing where you get to look at everything differently and you each bring something and then you learn from each other so basically what ben said we learned about the universal declaration of human rights and we learned how to apply that to our lives but also the lives of everyone else and another thing that me and hyatt did outside of the classroom is we are part of the human rights close to home at the dodd center for human rights at uconn where we are helping them develop a summer program so that's something that we were able to take out of this course and actually apply to like our real lives so i think that's pretty interesting um yeah we learned one thing that i really enjoyed about this class was actually like getting like opportunities that i didn't really have in classes mr buckley recommended me for to like go to uconn to to make this academy and i'm really glad that i was a part of it because i now can spread my like ideas that i have for human rights and how we can actually connect to action to use um a project that i really enjoyed was the ripple of hope project where we created we had an issue our me and ben were partners and we talked about divert like um workplace diversity was it it was something along those lines but we talked about we talked about that and it was really interesting to learn more about an issue that connects to us and it was really interesting learning about child made in africa as a nigerian um i've been close to that like i've seen children who've been taken from their own homes and be maids and they don't go to school or they they're just there for they did not really recognize and it was interesting learning that in class um yeah so just sort of to wrap it up i think one thing that mr buckley had said to us when we were doing the class that really uh stuck with me and i'm pretty sure everybody who took the class was that like even like with this poster and like any of the projects we did like even if it was just the kids in our class or just him that was seeing it by doing this and just developing a better understanding and expanding our knowledge of these different subjects and topics even though we may have not covered every last thing it was a way for us to not just make a difference with other people but with ourselves because we were even if we can't we don't end up doing anything with this we now know this information and now we're exposed to it and we're aware that it's out there whereas before we had no idea that some of this stuff even existed so he always told us that like and even when we talked to mr like alessio because he was doing something with um two refugees trying to help them come to america and we got to actually talk to them like on the phone and stuff like that maybe it wasn't making a difference you know in the entire world but it was making a difference at least at our school and i think that this class and the club that he has helped run and create has just been able to really push activism at least within the school and i think even something as small as that made a big enough difference to us and the people around us anybody have board members have any questions for any of the students that took the human rights class you don't have to so um thank you so much to hear from i appreciate the four of them they all and you'll hear from a set of students that are also taking emt next but they all volunteer to do this i know wednesday night sure we'll come talk about it um so i'm so impressed with you and all the work that you continue to do they've made such a difference and it's just been an amazing experience so i thank all four of you so appreciate it thank you very much and i know i promised i was going to try to make this quick but i am a little excited we're in person again it's nice to see faces even though they're masked um i'm just excited also to talk about this next course which is our emt course we have a couple students here representing our emt course which is a year-long course and so our students here are going to come up and talk about that now all right so we just want to start off with a little introduction uh and getting to introduce ourselves to you guys um so i'm jack i'm a junior probationary member with the brookfield volunteer fire department candwig company i'm also a junior here at bhs [Music] and i moved here from fairfield in january of 2020 okay so a little bit about me is i'm sabrina i'm also a junior member at the brookfield fire department candle company i'm also a junior in high school i'm 16 years old and a little bit why i took this class was because i thought it would be a good background for law enforcement or the fbi which is a career that i was looking to pursue in the future all right my name is avidis i'm 17 years old and a junior at brookfield high school and i plan on being a doctor and a surgeon so this class was really going to help me out get into the healthcare and into like medicine in general all right so a little bit about this class this class is getting us ready to test with the state of connecticut and the nremt um it's training us to be real professional amts be able to volunteer or get a job when we turn 18 with the ambulance department um and it's just really exciting because we're able to actually test with the state of connecticut and the en and our emt um when we finish the class and pass it okay so the goals that we have when we were signing up for this class was for me personally like i said was uh to enhance my chances at getting into the fbi or or basically law enforcement i know that there's other people like jack he wants to be a firefighter so he has many firefighters have their emt with it and then again with avadis he wants to pursue like surgeon and doctor so again it helps with having a background in emt to help further prepare you for your healthcare profession all right so a little bit what we did in the class is we started off in the beginning of the year the first thing we did was we had a in-school field trip where we got cpr certified so we learned how to give professional cpr as well as helping with choking patients so we just pretty much learned about respiratory emergencies toxicology emergencies cardiac emergencies and also how to treat them and how to administer some of the medications we can administer as emts like oxygen narcan glucose and epinephrine and pretty much the course just helps us learn about these emergencies how to properly treat them and how to be ready for them when we eventually do get certified as an emt all right so my personal goals after completing this class and getting my emt and testing with the state of connecticut is to be able to volunteer as ems in brookfield because right now i'm only fire department and obviously career fire department as sabrina said earlier um you know all these career departments they require that you have your emt certificate or some even require paramedicine um so that's what i'm looking forward to after completing this class so for now now that i'm still in high school i would like to get my emt certification within like the summer that way i'll have my emt when i'm also a volunteer at the fire department and then after high school for college and my career choices i was really looking forward into getting into fbi like i said earlier and having a background in emt will really help you with that because especially in like the detective field if you already have a background in emt and you see a paper yeah you see a patient on the floor and there's like certain wounds you'll know exactly how it happened what caused it all these different kinds of things if it was like a drug overdose now that we as emts we would know how to figure out what certain drugs cause or does to the body so seeing that it'll just help me get a head start with that all right so my goals for the class is to get my emt certification and just to get experience in the healthcare field and just be ready so that when i become a doctor i can i have like a head start and i have a background in helping patients treating patients and knowing like causes and how to treat those causes uh and so overall emt class helps us and it uh gives us background in a lot of different fields um it allows us to get a feel for what we're gonna be doing in the future um like with avidis being a doctor surgeon and sabrina going into a law enforcement field it allows for employment um after taking the class with the certification and provides it provides real hands-on experience um that you wouldn't learn anywhere else so does one of you what about are you going to be writing doing ride-alongs how does that could somebody explain that uh yeah so does anybody else want to all right so right now miss healy who is our excellent emt teacher is coordinating with the town of brookfield to be able to get us on ride-alongs with the ambulances um so basically what's gonna happen is we're gonna go down there and almost take a shift with them and um you know wait for calls and ride along with them if anything happens let's talk about the pacing of the class how fast it's very decently paced it's um the whole year so we have a lot of time to learn about all the material because it's a very big book and it's got a lot of material in it so it's very good to you know have it spaced out so much and be able to learn the material at such a slow pace because i feel like because right now during high school we have a lot going on all the different classes it's nice to be able to take it slow so is there an exam or something that you have to take to to get the certification at the end of the class yes so with and i bump my nose into the mic but with mrs healy's um class we have to take an actual exam to be able to pass the class to be able to participate with the nremt and the state of connecticut to be able to test any other questions uh there's two classes there's one on the a day and the b day there's about i would say what 20 25 per class there's two classes wow so 50.
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i think teresa is trying to get in oh just came up ken do you see teresa i wonder if she doesn't realize it's another link they both just came in i'm going to get her and i believe kevin walston too who i believe is just kw great thank you teresa shows the bottom of the participants list got it okay all right so we are called to order our first order of business is selection of committee chair i will open the floor for nominations for chair of the policy committee nominee joe da silva please nominated by kate is there a second second and second seconded by brigid all those in favor all right any opposed any other nominations i don't know why i asked that congratulations joe thank you i thank you i guess i may want to revisit that later this evening for taking the baton and i'll turn it over to you i i'm happy to do it and i told rachel i would be happy to do this but only if she helped me because she was the chair prior to me and um is probably the only one who actually knows where our policy audit actually stands um this will for the new members of the policy committee this will be the uh most i i i should probably say the only really truly interesting meeting we will ever attend most of the policy committee meetings are going to be pretty pretty technical in in kind of like word smithy um uh but for purposes of tonight obviously the agenda only has one thing on it and that discusses the mask policy and i did a little bit of research and i've had a couple of conversations with rachel who gave me an update on where policy had been up through now think thank god um a lot of towns didn't have one we do um technically we have two um i don't know why there's two numbered oh we i think we look we can't hear you joe joe and uh looks like al's trying to get in okay is that better yes yes there you go um there's 5141.8 which is the numbered policy that's under agenda there's a second one numbered policy two of 4218.237 that's exactly the same i don't know why it's numbered differently but it's basically it there's a different title but it's exact the language and verbiage is identical i think we're assuming it's a mistake yes to be clear i think that is a mistake for whoever um i think it was cave loaded our policies onto their online platform we only have we only adopted five one four one point eight right yep that that was i was assuming that because i went back and looked at minutes and i didn't see anything about a second iteration or a second enactment um no there is you're ready kelly can take it from from here i think that's i think that's the way to go yes okay all right good evening everyone thank you uh for joining what we'd like to do is share a couple different perspectives to start the meeting um so we've asked karapunti um the health director and dr begg our medical advisor to start by giving us some overviews of some information from the city perspective on vaccination rates as well as recommendations um we then like to ask cathy o'dowd our supervising of nursing to go over um the data to date particularly from the holiday break forward on the number of coveted cases we have and and her medical advice on this matter um then move into a family survey that we've done and asked michael seeley to do a summary of that for us um and then finally i'll wrap up um with a consultation we did with a psychiatrist from yale on the social emotional impact of wearing the masks so i'd like to start by turning it over to kara prunty for an update um if you could provide to the board hi hi kelly and hi cara i just want to interject quickly good evening everyone this is kevin wilson um i i'm not in in a computer but i will be listening on the computer but i will be listening in um i just wanted to make the committee aware and the public aware we will not be making any recommendations tonight um just really sharing as objective feedback as possible um to inform any decisions that might be made later on just wanted to jump in and see that thanks kel and thank you cara punty for joining us and kathy and dr quebec thank you kevin go ahead thank you um so i just wanted to go over some of our most recent um case rate data that's been published um so if you see me looking to the side that's what i'm looking at i'm just looking at our um as of thursday our positivity rate was 10.8 percent in the city our covid case rate per 100 000 was 26.7 per 100 000.
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what i now call to order the chico unified school district regular board of education meeting february 16 2022. we will be going into closed session i'm here to ask if any member of the public has comment on closed session seeing none we will now go to closed session i will now call to order the chico unified regular board of education meeting open session for february 16 i have a statement to read at this time i would like to announce for the record that this meeting is being conducted pursuant to california government code section 593b concerning teleconferencing of meetings board president dr kathleen kaiser is participating in this meeting by speakerphone from chico unified school district large conference room at 1163 east 7th street chico california 95928 in accordance with the brown act this location has been identified on the meeting addendum issued on february 15 i would now like to ask board president kaiser to respond to the following questions are you able to hear our proceedings on this end dr kaiser yes i am do you have a copy of the agenda for this meeting yes i do has the agenda been posted at your location yes it has is your location such that any member of the public could participate in the public portion of this teleconference meeting from your location yes they could members of the board are you able to hear board president kaiser yes i can yep yes thank you thank you because we are having a meeting with teleconferencing all actions will be a roll call vote so just a reminder for the board here every action that we take will be by roll call where we each say our name and what our vote is that all being said i now am to announce that the board was in closed session we did take action during closed session the board voted unanimously to ratify a settlement agreement to resolve a special education due process complaint filed against the chico unified school district pursuant to the agreement the chico unified school district will establish a compensatory education fund for use by student for educational services independent educational evaluations behavioral services and associated lodging and mileage the district will also pay attorney fees to students attorney under the express terms of the agreement the board's ratification of agreement does not constitute an omission of liability by the district and with that we will move on to the next item which is the flag salute so if you could please stand with me absolute pledge 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 our next item is number four student reports well i am very excited to say we have a group of students here with us tonight and you have a wonderful audience to uh watch and listen to you so i would like to invite neil dell principal kelly steinbach up to the podium to introduce our students good evening i have with me our leadership club they are here to show off some of the many activities and things that they do for our near dao campus and students they have a special something after the video that they have helped to put together and i will let them introduce themselves hi we are the kneel down leadership team we brought a video to show you some of the things we do at our school good we morning kind we dream big [Music] additionally at nailed out we have a brag board which is displayed in our office and this is showcasing the students have that have made growth this year every student who has made growth on the iready diagnostic has had their picture taken with the percent of growth that they have made that was one of the things we wanted to share as well all right leadership team go ahead and stand up turn and face the crowd i got this feeling inside my bones it goes electric baby when i turn it on all from my city [Music] i can't take my eyes when we moved is it's i just want to say thank you to principal steinbach and our wonderful student performers thank you so much for sharing with us and you had a great crowd to join in with you so thank you very much you are welcome to stay but you can also go home and do homework or eat dinner thank you [Applause] so are we ready to move on to the next item um the next item is number five superintendent's report and recognition um also thank you for that needed a little hop in my step tonight so i think that energized me a little bit so we are going to move into the superintendent's report portion of our agenda each month we try to recognize outstanding things that are happening across our district and i'm going to start with julie kissel our director of facilities and ask her to come up and share something pretty amazing good evening thank you for having me here tonight i want to really quickly set the stage and then bring our honoree up so that you can hear from him directly in may of 2021 the board of education authorized the purchase of over pieces of furniture to include student desks chairs and stools for our elementary campuses vs america furniture was selected as our district standard for our elementary schools and vs america furniture is actually fabricated in germany in keeping with the safety reliability durability of their products vs is committed to sustainable production from product development and continues throughout the whole process chain from raw materials purchasing production adherence to quality and emission standards delivery and assembly and service right through to a return and recycling concept for the end of furniture's life our furniture was purchased through d who's an american distributor and logistics specialist dean and jamie smith are here tonight with their son owen and they coordinated the delivery of 15 separate containers full of our furniture on five separate container ships coming across the ocean arriving in the port of oakland and they successfully dispersed all of that furniture in seven weeks last summer so that it was all in place for the start of school in the fall vs is so committed to saying sustainability that the furniture is shipped fully assembled without unnecessary packaging in order to reduce waste the furniture is secured in the containers with a web strapping and a lightweight blanket and you see the a sample of the blanket right there in front of you to reduce the chance of damage during shipping you know if it was to shift or you know from friction the furniture rubbing on itself there's other materials in the shipping container like the wood pallets and some cardboard that needed to be recycled as well d d recycles 90 percent of those shipping materials thousands of these blankets were donated after our containers arrived here in chico the blankets were donated to homeless service groups the butte county humane society wags and whiskers and the mini pig rescue sanctuary all of this background leads us to our honoree for tonight owen smith can you come up with your parents dean and jamie please and if you look at the presentation you'll see the the flyer with owens photograph describing his eagle scout project and in the lower right hand corner you can see the web strapping materials and the plastic bags that were just full of thousands and thousands of these straps and then if you scroll down just a little bit there for me on to the next page you'll see the scouts at work on the project in the local park to to do their work outdoors as part of this eagle scout project owen's taken the sustainability goals of the chico unified school district and vs furniture one step further owen has taken the web strapping utilized to secure the furniture and turn them into dog leashes these leashes will be donated to several organizations one being rocket dog which is a traveling pet rescue from the bay area and also the butte county humane society owen has provided a sample of these for you to take home which his dad's going to pass out to you we want to recognize owen as he has displayed excellent leadership skills developing his product securing his workforce procuring his materials production management and overseeing the quality control owen we are very proud to know you and we are proud to present you with the superintendent's award tonight and we'd like to hear a couple words from you [Applause] all right uh good evening to all the members of the chico uh school district and all the wonderful audience here uh earlier that was quite a festive performance we got that was pretty fun to watch um so my name is owen smith i'm a life scout in troop 243.
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so if you didn't have this class how would you get this training so if we didn't have this class um we would have to pay probably a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars um it'd be very fast paced a lot of them are you know quicker and it yeah it would it would be tough it would be you know financial burden but with the brookfield high school it's very nice that it was free provided to us and it's you know the real deal and are the classes outside of school for your age or would you have to wait till you're older yeah you can test you can um take the class at 16 and become an emt that's great just to comment uh yeah i i paid a thousand dollars for mine it's expensive uh i didn't get college credit no i didn't have a year to take the course i i think this is just a golden opportunity employment wise i mean it's good money you guys are definitely in demand right now so you're not going to have a problem no matter where you go to college or grad school or uh wherever you're not going to have a problem signing up with the local department uh the other thing is so i have i have three knucklehead kids and i'm not i'm no longer an emt i'd let it expire i should have done that but uh i used that training i had you know 15 years ago to this day so on top of all the professional avenues this this course just makes you more of a valuable person and uh you guys i think it's awesome thank you any other questions so uh in addition i'd also like to say that the brookfield education foundation has also helped out significantly um they were able to make uh we applied for a grant and they got us some are able to provide some money and resources for us to help continue move this this program forward uh for both programs where it's whether it's the emt or the human rights course i think you're seeing that hands-on realistic real world applications are the the most important for our kids you're seeing them into very different venues but i just appreciate that the board's continued support um for both of these programs and allowing me to expand and try new things and you can see the success it's having building our our young adults and preparing them for the next step so thank you to the emt students to our human rights students and to the board thank you very much thank you all the course open important all right so next up on our agenda is uh the student representative all right so with events starting off we have parent-teacher conferences scheduled for march 10th running from 11 30 to 2 and parents and guardians can sign up using meet the teacher and mr blend will send out more instructions on that um and also we have the school day sat which will be administered to all juniors between march 23rd and 30th and that will be computer-based more information to come on that and just looking back we had celebrated national school counselors week which was a big success because i know the counselors got a nice treat when they came in on monday and also just over the loudspeaker we were able to say a few things appreciating them also we have the school climate committee that met and reviewed a student survey that will be sent out in the coming weeks and the program of studies as you know is now up for students to view different course offerings for the next school year and the student registration process for those courses begins in march and an updated morning drop-off plan is being created and will be shared soon with parents and students to help speed up the process at the high school since a big issue lately has been students either not getting to school on time or something of that nature because of the traffic build up so just finding a solution to help mitigate that as much as possible um and then with clubs we have friends of rachel club issued their february um challenge so they've been doing like monthly challenges to get into the ilts and do this different stuff like this month they're doing a poster so every iot will create a poster that embodies kindness inclusivity and diversity and that can be displayed throughout and they have a little contest between the iots and then also outdoors club we are going on a hiking trip um in the upcoming weeks and we actually just got a bunch of apparel in so it was really nice to get all that um and also national honor society is holding another blood drive because um we usually do two a year but especially this year with the first one there was like a shortage with the um red cross so we're trying to bump it up a bunch and do almost like double the number of people this time around and then also a lot of clubs are ordering different chords for seniors that will wear graduation and then finally with student government um we actually had a meeting today and i had dr brill i invited dr brill to join us because just from a personal perspective i felt like the new program that we have going on is something that mr buckley actually brought from his old school and created there um just it's normally we would have like different meetings during lts and they'd be short and it was hard to really get stuff done but now we have actually during the school day a built-in block every like month where we'd all meet here in the library and go through different different tasks that we had to do but more importantly it made its i feel like it's more like official now where i would walk into a meeting and we'd have like actual votes and um students could vote on which like issues we wanted to move forward with and approve different proposals so for example recently we're putting in place or at least trying to something where different clubs could come to the meetings and put forward like a proposal to get a grant or a loan for example so just stuff like that where it's making this group that was student government which seemed a little much a little bit smaller now into something that kind of incorporates the whole school um so yeah i just wanted to invite dr brill so that he could see how that functions and i called it a mini board of ed because it's really formal and official in that manner so and then overall we're just continuing to develop plans for senior and junior experiences that are unique for the upcoming months that's all i got yeah but what's an ilt ilt is the individualized learning time that's yeah in the middle of the day yeah okay thank you very much all right so next up on the agenda is uh written correspondence okay the capone family wrote regarding the brookfield high school program of studies class rank and s.a.t scores christina zimmermann wrote regarding indoor sports mass mandates jacqueline fischetto and stacy coburn wrote regarding the book drama laura orban wrote regarding school ranking and diversity monique matthews wrote regarding special ed discrimination deborah spinekia wrote regarding public comment marnie mcniff wrote regarding academic support logan sullander wrote regarding the changing covid protocols and we received emails regarding mask choice so rather than reading the 84 names they're all recorded and they will be reflected in the minutes so next up is uh approval board i'll move that the board approved the minutes from the regular meeting on january 19th and the joint meeting with the board of finance and the board of selectmen on february 10th second that's been moved and seconded any comments or edits okay all in favor all right okay it's approved unanimously um next up is the superintendent's update um uh superintendent barrel um isn't able to be with us tonight but he did give me a written report and if you're okay i'll i'll read that in um uh he he asked that we start with um some memory of two of our own who we've lost over the last week and he asked me to join him in honoring rosemary sarsfield and after receiving a degree in history from hunter college rosemary began her teaching career in the new york city public school systems after moving to new milford with her husband and daughter rosemary continued her teaching career in brookfield in 1976 where she taught until 2003 so a long-standing teacher who passed away this last week secondly uh dottie miles uh now dottie taught for 25 years in brookfield before retiring in 2000.
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um since that data has been published i um calculated our case rate to see if it has gone down at all because we have seen cases trending downward um and since uh since that data was published our case rate is 22.42 over uh the last 14 days per 100 thousand so it's gone down a little bit so we still are seeing community transmission but it's gone down a lot over the last uh several i would say last two to three weeks we've seen significant decreases in transmission we've also been really hard at work trying to get people vaccinated right now our five to 11 population is at 31 vaccinated um so that's our our age group that we are trying to focus on increasing the most uh with our vaccination rates um but we have seen we've been doing lots of clinics at all of the different schools we have clinics available seven days a week within the city and really trying to encourage people to get vaccinated as much as possible and that's where we're at with case rate data happy to answer any questions that we have about our most recent data dr begg feel free to jump in and kathy i know you're going to go over some more of the vaccination information so i didn't want to go too much into detail on that but happy to answer any other questions on that cara quick question are are our trends moving consistently with the state trends or are we more or less than than state trend yeah our we're pretty consistent with state trends we're steadily decreasing similar to the rest of the state thank you we're no longer that anomaly on this side of the state may i ask what is it compared to the rates around like um new fairfield brookfield how does that compare let me pull up the map um so the last published data is from thursday um our case rate is 26.7 uh new fairfields is 29.9 uh ridgefield is 28.3 percent bethel's is 42.9 newtowns is 28.7 and i'm sorry i'm talking in percentages it's not percentage it's our case rate per 100 thousand uh numerator is 7.6 i'm sorry i'm sorry no good what would that be naugatuck do we have that number nagatok norwalk stanford those are the those are the um the cities that we've been comparing ourselves to so i'm just wondering like new britain greenwich yep do you have that information yes so we compare vaccination rates to similar cities and we put publish that every week and then we also do a comparison to our uh local city so norwalk's case rate is 29.8 um stamford's is 29.7 um let me pull up waterberries is 47.4 in greenwich greenwich is hold on i gotta find it on the map 40.9 so in all essences so based on the numbers you provided danbury is actually lower than any other city that i just mentioned or town excuse me is that correct or is there a number that is less than dan barry's rate did i misunderstand or is everybody um i haven't compared to every speed no i mean every time that i yeah the ones that i just mentioned yeah okay so that's good to know thank you i'd like to know what is the hospital rate um currently today there is four hospitalizations at danbury hospital four what was it two weeks ago may i ask um it was ranging and dr begg please feel free to jump in and uh and uh compare but it was anywhere between 10 and 20.
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i'm dean and jamie smith's son and i've worked with d d security resources for a few years now and i'm standing before you to present my eagle scout project which julie just talked about thank you again and it all really started with the adoption of our black lab shadow he came home when we brought him home with just a piece of rope around his neck which you can imagine isn't really sufficient for a dog leash it's pretty crude and our family first my dad and my sister and my mom really we began making homemade dog leashes to solve this problem because it's not just our pet it's kind of a widespread thing and the base material excuse me once again for these leashes is like the straps that come in the furniture shipments to the schools that d ships to such as the ones in this district so i'm going to undo this this is one of them that has not been sewed that has been cut into a length of about six feet and then i am having people sew them separately volunteers that i've organized so we first started giving some leashes to rescues such as wags and whiskers butte county humane society and a place in the bay area known as jelly's place we also sent some to with a man that was helping dog shelters in baja and now this is really where my project comes in a while back i was thinking about what to do with my project and this seemed like just a wonderful idea to adopt eagle scout and the accompanying project are the culmination the ultimate culmination of a long journey that a scout has throughout their life i personally i've been in scouting since cub scouts all the way back in first grade so i've learned these values basically my entire life and it's a life goal of mine to be an eagle scout only about two percent of scouts make it to eagle which is startling and my goal is i will be a part of that two percent it's something that i've wanted to do forever i will make it happen and a scouts project is supposed to be something meaningful that makes a difference and thinking of those leashes i knew that this was exactly the case i had to do some minor fundraising to cover other materials and supplies other than the straps for the leashes and now i'm making this project a reality with sewing currently underway and i'm scheduled to donate early to mid-march hopefully that's what i'm shooting for so i'm working with rocketdoc rescue and i'm going to donate to them 500 of these leashes each with a custom tag with the rocket dog logo and their troop 243 name on it the leashes that you guys have right now they don't have the same label these have been made before um so it's not the same thing um yeah they're all here for you to keep if you'd like you can take them home you're welcome to them um and once again i'm hoping for distribution sometime early mid-march that's pretty much it for me in terms of my project i'm really honored to have been asked to speak here at this school board meeting about my project i really thank all of you guys in the entire district for being a part of making such a difference with me it's a life goal of mine and just i think everyone that's involved thank you so much for your time [Applause] so owen we want to present you with this certificate and a small token of our appreciation for your dedication and caring so much about our district and the community thank you mom and dad in here julian here [Applause] now we would like to move forward with recognizing some staff and i would like to ask emma wilson principal malay bins to move to the microphone good evening i'm going to start with um a couple of our classified staff members one of my favorite quotes talks about how folks will forget what you said forget what you did but they will never forget how you made them feel a lot of the past two years are kind of blurry and it's been easy to forget what we said or what we did but the work of our emma wilson custodians over the past two years has me and my staff feeling cared for without a doubt during the past two years we've all stretched to meet shifting needs our custodial staff has adapted to different schedules cleaning protocols and new facilities at emma wilson which are beautiful and thank you change is never easy but our custodians have transitioned through this period without skipping a beat dan our night custodian even manages to do it with a smile brian our senior custodian might not always have the smile but we know he loves us in his job anyway breakthrough performances happen when folks who are good at their jobs become teams who complement one another their strengths their weaknesses when i walk my campus i feel the care that dan and brian have for their work that care is felt by everyone at emma wilson and i'm so grateful for their contributions to our school community [Applause] right um on behalf of chico unified i want to thank brian and dan for caring so much about our kids and our schools we have a certificate for you and some water to keep you going through the day [Applause] and i get one more so thank you again if you google the role of a resource teacher you'll learn that resource teachers provide small group instruction to students with special needs that definition leaves out a lot of what our resource teacher emma wilson does on a daily basis she's a cheerleader for our students and families and she sees the best in everyone she's a counselor to families teachers administration and helps us through any challenge we bring to her she's an instructional leader supporting teachers and aides with the resources they need to meet our student needs she's a customer service agent fielding phone calls and soothing ruffled feathers she prepares legal documents for iep meetings and facilitates those meetings with grace allowing every stakeholder to feel heard jen lighty is a teacher for not only her k through 5 students but other resource teachers as well who are just entering the field that's only a small part of the magical work she does at our school the truly amazing thing is she manages all of that with one of the largest case loads in the whole district jen's the best of the best and it's my pleasure tonight to recognize her [Applause] congratulations all right [Applause] and that concludes the superintendent's report thank you so next we have announcements and i'd like to start off this session of announcements by introducing heather hackins the program manager for the fulbright teaching excellence and achievement program from csu chica [Applause] thank you i was trying to get my boss to talk instead of me um we're from the center for international training at chico state and we are really excited that we are hosting 19 teachers as part of the teachers exchange which is funded by the united states department of state and they are here for six weeks and involved in intensive workshops to learn how we do teaching here in america and starting next week they will be welcomed into our schools and they'll be at four schools in our district and partnering up with teachers who will show them how it really works here in america so we would love to introduce them briefly and have them say their specialty and where they're from and thank you for welcoming us yes in the fall when the group came it was postponed from last january typically this program is january to march each year but this academic year we had the pleasure of two one in the fall that was postponed from last january and then this group now and normally they're speaking to you after the experience but because of the four four-day weekend we wanted to start it the experience after the four-day weekend for continuity purposes so they haven't been in the four school sites yet but they all met their teachers yesterday at a wonderful ceremony um at the residence inn where they're located for these six weeks so they bonded they're excited about the experience and that they will now introduce themselves hello good evening everyone i'm swati i'm from india and i'm a special education teacher i teach children with special needs and i have 15 students in my school whom i cater to thank you [Applause] hello my name is carlo valave i am from chile and i teach in a high in high school school to students from 3rd to 12th grade and i'm going to be at pleasant valley hello my name is marina terterian i'm from armenia i teach in primary secondary and high school i am also an access teacher funded by the u.s embassy in armenia i'm super excited to be here yup and i will be in chico junior high school next week thank you so much [Applause] this is erica from peru i am a high school english teacher as well as most of us who are here and i'm happy to be here learning the u.s system education thank you very much [Applause] hello i'm rusoden from georgia and i teach different great students i also train teachers in my country and it's pleasure to be with you thank you okay i'll be at the beadwell school thank you hello this is sandra i am from colombia i teach in a rural school and i'm so happy to be here learning about all the school systems here so thank you for having me here oh pleasant bali ba it will be my school hello everybody i'm avir howard from egypt i teach in one of the stem school in egypt i teach from grade 10 to 12 and i'm going to be chico junior school assalamu alaikum as we greet in arabic hello everybody i'm limia from sudan and i'm going to join for the field experience the chico high school and i'm teaching english language to high school students i also do some trainings for teachers in my country also i train the undergraduate students also postgraduate students for doing the research so i have training on educational research and statistics i'm very pleased to join you and i'm very happy of your warm welcoming to us thank you very much thank you my name is sivara i am from uzbekistan i am very happy to be here and i am quite excited to visit chico high school upcoming week thank you hi everybody my name is daniela diaz i'm from peru i'm a psychopedagogy and i have the specialization in learning disabilities and neurodevelopmental disorders i'm gonna be working with a teacher in junior oh sorry chico high school hi everybody my name is i am from uzbekistan we are here at two teachers here and i teach i work at secondary specialized school in uzbekistan in tashkent and i'm very excited to be here and upcoming weekend week we will be in chico high school yeah i am very excited thank you hello my name is laura i'm from costa rica i'm very happy to be here i'm going to be working in pbs thank you hi everyone i am from moldova i am diana and i really appreciate being here in chico and i will be working with our partner teacher in junior high school and i'm really happy for this experience good evening my name is rosa i'm from russia i'm a teacher in a state school and i'm really glad happy and excited to be there and to work in your schools thank you hello everyone my name is eli sawadugu from bukina faso it's west africa and i have been teaching english language for eight years in a secondary school in rural area in burkina faso the second week i will be with a partner teacher in chico a uni chico high school thank you [Applause] hi and good evening everyone i'm shafiq aziz i'm from a small country in southeast asia called malaysia and i'm so happy to be here and i am an english teacher i have been teaching for 11 years and next week i'll be working with a partner teacher at pleasant valley high school thank you [Applause] okay good evening everybody my name is rafiq i'm from palestine i'm an english teacher i have been teaching for uh 10 years now and i'm so excited for this experience next year next week i'm going to be hosted in a police valley school thank you very much for hosting us good evening everyone i am from kyrgyzstan my name is jinaram my country is in central asia it's a dream of every english teacher to visit the usa and thank you for giving us such opportunity to share our culture experience and to learn more from you from you thank you very much [Applause] hello my name is irina karitina i'm from russia from south eastern siberia but it's not that cold there now it's only -25 [Laughter] celsius i run a private language school and i do administrative work and i'm a teacher as well and i'm a head teacher in my school thank you for this unique opportunity i'm very proud of being here thank you [Applause] we will be glad to answer the questions um thank you can you give us an idea of how long it takes you to apply for this exchange program before you actually get selected and plopped in the chico unified school district yes it was a very competitive process and it took us approximately a year yeah because it was very competitive we had to pass exams and the competition was really tough and especially speaking about me has him from russia so and you know the relationships between the countries leave much to be desired yes sorry to say so it was a tough uh competition but it's worth taking a plunge we enjoy every moment of our stay here thank you board president dr kaiser on teleconference has a question for you uh i am actually was going to make an announcement but i want to welcome them i am a retired chico state professor and frequently give a presentation to your group so if i could do that again for you since you're just starting i'd love to have that opportunity great thank you very much [Applause] um mike i don't have a question but my comment is just thank you so much for being here and um not just taking in what it is that we have here for our educational programs but also you know with what you have to share with our staff and students is super valuable and we're really grateful that you are here and just hope that you have the warmest welcome for the entire time that you're here and can't wait to hear the stories at the end hopefully as well thank you very much [Applause] i i have a comment too if i may um i was a foreign exchange student to israel palestine as a college student and um it was a really great experience for me to see what life was like you know on the other side of the earth and i did a lot of traveling while i was there and and um i just encourage you to just get to know your students as much as you can try to communicate with them thank you for taking the time to learn english our language and and i would just urge you to take every opportunity to to communicate with with our kids so that they can see learn more about you and your culture and and learn how you think and why and all those things because that'll be a really wonderful experience for them so thank you for doing what you're doing and welcome thank you very much for your encouragement and on behalf of fulbright teaching excellence and achievement group i'd like to say how deeply how highly we appreciate this unique opportunity of being here this meeting to tell you the truth promised to be very serious to be official but you deal uh with so many aspects of teaching with environmental issues with uh cultural aspects with we we enjoyed watching this awarding ceremony so much is going on here and it's so exciting thank you for inviting us here [Applause] uh so dr kaiser has an announcement um dr kaiser you have the floor thank you can you hear me yes okay thank you so i wanted to uh especially after our workshop that we had um two weeks ago uh on career technical ed and the consequences that that can have for a young student's potential academic and actual career i wanted to recognize the kiva margae i don't know if i'm pronouncing his name right he was a knight a 2016 graduate of pv uh and in 219 he graduated from duke college but he was in the sports medicine cte program at pv and this past sunday he was on the sidelines for the la rams as an actual um as a athletic medical training person so what an incredible jump to go from chico cte program to being on the sidelines of the la rams and i'm sure he is considered as having helped help them win the second group i'd like to recognize is that we now have national champions from pv hopefully they'll be able to come in person but we had the non-tumbling cheer team win nationals just last weekend coaches donna henderson so that's a tremendous accomplishment and i really thought they should get recognized and maybe the cheerleaders can bring their trophy jackets and their trophy medals for us at the next board meeting so thank you for that thanks thanks dr kaiser [Applause] i actually would rather the cheerleaders do their performance that they won with than see their jackets but that's just personal opinion um mr tennis member tennis has an announcement as well yeah i just want to address the people who've come here tonight to speak during items from the floor as somebody who has spoken from items from the floor before i became a school board member i can tell you that it can be kind of a cold feeling and the reason is because we're not actually allowed to by our the rules of this organization respond in any way to anything that you say it's just the nature of that that agenda item but i want to let you know that i do plan to ask for a couple of things from my colleagues at some point during this meeting i am going to ask that an agenda item be placed on a future agenda in association with the the issue that you're bringing forward so there will be a vote on whether or not to do that and i'm also going to ask for what's called a rule waiver at some point you know toward the conclusion of your comments i'm asking to move all the items from the floor to the beginning of the meeting so that some of you don't get kicked back two or three hours if my colleagues agree with that and then i'll also ask to jump down to a much later agenda item which is board member request to agendize an item i will ask my colleagues for a rule change temporarily so that we might be able to vote on that that request to put an item on a future agenda you know toward the conclusion of your guys's remarks during items from the floor so i just wanted to say that during announcements so you could be ready for that do we have any more announcements from the members of the board i'm sorry no um i have two short announcements one is that chico unified has partnered with butte environmental council as well as a card to do tree planting events with classrooms and so hopefully you all will start to hear more about that coming to your schools that is an opportunity for students to go through a workshop about tree planting and actually get your hands dirty we will be planting 65 trees on chico unified and card facilities and involving students in those the next announcement is that the environmental council is hosting this year an in-person event in the past in the past 42 years it has been the endangered species fair held in cedar grove this year it is reimagined as the endangered earth event and this is an announcement to let you all know that students in butte county are invited to do artwork for a contest to have their logo for the event uh printed on t-shirts and posters for for that family-friendly event that will be held downtown chico on april 23rd if we have no more announcements i will move on to the next item okay seeing none we will move on from announcements to item 7 which is items from the floor mr tennis already addressed a few things that i wanted to mention for this um for this item um so first of all because um these are not agendized items we are not allowed to have discussion or ask questions about these items however we can choose to ask for the will of the board to place any issues that you bring up on a future agenda in any upcoming school board meetings um it has been very clear and brought to our attention that the issue of masking policies is the big item for tonight's items from the floor so i just wanted to address first or up front that there will be an agenda item on the march 9th meeting agenda it's a regular school board meeting agenda to address coveted policy updates it will be an action sorry discussion action item and in that discussion action process will also be the discussion about masks and and you know these policies are always changing from the state so there might be a lot to talk about at that meeting and we welcome you to come make comments on that item at the march 9th meeting we do have a full lineup of speakers this evening four items from the floor our rules as they stand is that each speaker gets three minutes to speak at 30 seconds you will hear a bell ring and then you'll hear another bell ring at the end where i will yeah there we go where i will um tell you thank you for your time um and we cannot address what you say to us but we are hearing you and we do read your emails um and again look forward to the next board meeting agenda um so we have 17 speakers total for items for the floor signed up um we hear items um for public comment on each item has a title limit of 30 minutes there's a few ways that we can address this we can and it's up to the will of the board we can shorten the amount of time that each speaker speaks so that we can hear all 17 people in the next 30 minute public comment session so everybody can be heard during the first items from the floor we can also keep them split as they are so they were ordered by a priority so students then parents and staff and community members as well as by lottery to to create that order which is a board policy um i'm gonna actually read the order off to you tonight so you know where you may fall in the speaker light up and then i will actually ask the board if there is any desire to change the rules tonight and we will move from there so the speaker order for this current items from the floor in order is jericho britannia lauren mccann katie and jim muff brandi mccann ed rona katie posey calder colby deanna lindstrom and joshua flash um there also is a known name um person that fell did fall by the random order um didn't put their name but did uh mention boundaries and prioritizing our children so if that's you and you want to speak you just didn't put your name on but it did fall into that that top 10.
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she was proud to have been brookfield's teacher of the year in 1987 and was a finalist in the connecticut teacher of the year program always an advocate for education dottie then served on the board of education from 2001 to 2005 was a founding member and secretary of the brookfield education foundation from 2003 to 2005 and was a founder and coordinator of the hand-in-hand volunteer literacy tutoring program at huckleberry hill elementary school from 2007 to 2013.
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and and the weeks before that it was much higher from what i gather for the last two years that's the most important number it's a very important metric yes and that uh four is that from the beginning of the year or when is that um time frame reflect four is the number of current hospitalizations at danbury hospital today today okay thank you dr beg would you like to give an update on your thoughts and perspectives yeah just briefly um i think that the uh the million-dollar question here is um at what point do we adjust our masking policy and for me it's based on the data um in conjunction with um how the rest of the towns are also addressing um the um the evolution of the the virus um we are have different uh benchmarks uh green yellow red just a week ago we are three times the red mark we want to make sure that uh when we do transition wherever that point is to um uh not mandating masks that we don't put our city and our uh students and the families at risk so we absolutely uh want to be advocates for what's what's best for our children teachers everyone else but we also want to make sure we do it with evidence-based data so this is great news we're moving the right direction the the question is what's the sweet spot for us to um a transition to the next phase of protecting our staff and our patients without um having a um reversal of the trend so that's my may i ask uh what data is it that you're referencing and the 10 um that was just given as far as the infection rate where is that data as well where can i have that data located or what is that how do you come to that number so we uh because i'm looking at the connecticut i'm sorry i'm looking at the connecticut data sheet covid19 cases by the town and my numbers are different than the ones that you're providing so i'm just wondering if you could provide me with the data that you're referencing as far as what that benchmark would be and how we arrived at the ten percent yeah so again i i partnered with uh cara who's uh who has the more granular data but i'm trying to give an overall view on the the mindset on where we're going uh forward so if we look at a heat map of the various towns as the weeks and months have progressed um the numbers do vary week by week with town and those maps um highlight that we're in the red area or we're actually in a better zone so um just to give a highlight uh much earlier pandemic we're at much lower levels and still had masks but again we want to be advocates of what's best for the students and the teachers and the communities so cara maybe i'll refer back to you uh so we're consistent with our message as far as uh the data sure that 10.7 infection rate it comes from the state um there's a they report out weekly they update our covet case rates so that was published last thursday and that is the percent positivity that is listed for the city of danbury what website would that be located on where can i access that information i can send it to you but it's the it's the connecticut covid data portal and that's where all of this um information is the actual link like website is data.ct.gov yeah there's a point of comparison uh we had been in the range of less than one percent positivity so while we're absolutely moving the right direction um uh we still have uh some work to do when the rates uh um we're hoping continue to move in the right direction uh so again these rates are very good but they still we still have a lot of work to do they anticipate they will have the right direction can you tell us what your sweet spot in your estimation is uh so if we look um at the the data uh cara i believe the um the yellow to green number was uh in the low single digits for percent positivity um so again a refer back but 10 is is um when you're in double digits you're still um in a um concerning zone so um i'll refer back to cara the difference between the different zones but we only have four people in the hospital i mean the the question was about um the positivity rates and uh at what point do we think that we can transition so you're correct we have a lower number of people um that may be one endpoint but there's other endpoints too when 10 percent of the people are positive there's a lot of medical effects that may occur to that for populations that are not in the hospital i mean as a as a practicing er doctor i can tell you that most of the covered positives i see i don't admit but they may still have medical issues that are concerned so well what is that rate what is that percent in other words it just seems very broad-based um the information of the 10 infection rate of the 10.8 percent what is the other towns that are neighboring that have lifted their mandates what is what is that percentage of brookfield you know new fairfield greenwich some of this the towns that i just referred to earlier what are their rates so part of what dr beck was referencing is there's a document called community risk level mitigation strategies that was published by dph and it lists a red yellow and then a low zone so that when we're talking about our case rates when we talk about 15 cases per 100 000 that would be considered the red zone this document will most likely be updated we're looking to see to get more guidance from dph soon but currently right now that is what the listed guidance is and when you have a case rate of 15 cases per 100 000 or more it does state in that document that recommendation is that everyone would wear a mask in an indoor setting so when dr begg is referencing the different levels of community transmission in the red and the yellow i believe that's what we're talking about here so um i'm i this is most likely going to be updated and that's there's we're waiting for dp dph guidance to come out in the next week or so um but right now that is what the published recommendation is and karen they correct me from wrong last time i looked at the connecticut covet data tracker which was earlier today every town in the state of connecticut was read except a couple of towns for which they have no gateway is that accurate yeah in other words towns that have towns that have eliminated amass a mass mandate and to be clear no one's limited to mass mandate as of today because you're not allowed to do that for school as of today in fact the bridgeport diocese wanted to do it effective as of february 14th in the state said no you're not um actually it's not march 1st it's the director of the connecticut department of education may issue an order as of that can vacate the mass made in the state level it's not vacated as of 228 that requires the director the director of the department of education to do so are the secretary but technically if one eliminated the requirement now technically it would be in i don't know non-compliance with the guidance is that safe to say the current guidance that may change that guidance may change we're expecting to be updated but to eliminate mass management at this point would be inconsistent with the guidance we have from dph is that accurate yes it's expected to update their the guidance is expected to change but yes currently that is correct query and this kind of goes to some of the other questions the trend is good do we have any idea on and maybe it's too soon to tell maybe we don't have the stats do we have any comprehension of the steepness of the of the change the projection are we gliding down is it dropping precipitously do do we have any way to measure week to week how fast it's going down i mean it went up doubled and doubled every day i'm not expecting it to do you know have every day going forward but do we have any idea of what that projection looks like um i i have i can show you what we've graphed um kelly do you have access to that or can is there a way that you can show that graph that i shared with you earlier thanks just give me a minute okay um so it has it has come down pretty sharply and we've kind of uh evened off a little bit so we've kind of but i continue it i anticipate that it continues to decline over the next several weeks but so it came down quickly and it's leveling off but still declining yes yeah which we have a trend to map that sorry kelly i probably should ask you asked you before uh but i can show you um so that's the um there's another this is uh up through december 25th of 2020 but there's a more recent one um i think it's the if you go to the last image it's actually that one yep that one or this one has the case rates so it goes by weaker by day um so that's why you can kind of see the trend lines there where we've been excellent thank you one question again about the hospital rates at debris hospital uh is that reflective strictly of the city of danbury or is that for also includes towns uh patients from brookfield and fairfield that don't have a hospital yep that's that would be include danbury hospital's catchment area so um anyone that would be going in there going to the hospital so no that's not just for danbury residents that's okay so and brookfield just um got rid of their mask mandate so i i i don't see uh how that number can be held against danbury uh ten percent if you're including you know for the hospital or ten percent's not the hospital rates the number of four or the number four for damage yes but that's yeah so the hospitalization rate is for dam just that's the number of people at danbury hospital which could include people outside of the city with addresses in danbury but our positivity rate and our case rates are for only danbury residents and that does not include home test kits that are not reported that's correct oh it's good good yeah may i ask how many um [Music] how many people have tested positive like for every hundred thousand and right now in danbury like what is the current number that you have for people that have tested positive in danbury versus confirmed cases because i took information from today actually and it's updated today by connecticut um covid19 update it's it's updated on a daily basis and it says right here that the state has a projected uh positivity rate of 4.87 now i went and researched the numbers between norwalk greenwich danbury norwalk and brookfield and three of the towns just i randomly selected when you take the numbers based off of everyone that's been sick with covid and how many people tested the numbers it comes out to 4.7 4.4 which is really more in line with this most recent document so i'm confused as to where we get the 10.8 infection rate for danbury so that 10.8 percent like i said they update the daily the the city of danbury so the statewide positivity rate is updated daily when we talk about the published on thursday they give us an updated positivity rate and case rate every thursday and that was the last published positivity rate that i received from the state that and that would it be your expectation cara that that number goes down week over yes i think that you know tomorrow when we get our updated numbers i anticipate that the number is going to decrease significantly well this is listed town by town every single town is broken down with several different ways of breaking it down such as uh town uh total cases confirmed cases probable deaths rate tested per hundred thousand so there's a lot of information here and i'm just wondering where you're where you're getting that 10.8 based off of today's numbers that have been posted that 10-point number that i keep saying that is the number that was published on thursday so today's positive rate i could not tell you that information because right all of those numbers that you're discussing um there's a lot of factors that go into taking the positivity rate they eliminate do people who test multiple times um there's if you've tested positive in the last 90 days things like that so you're not it's considered new cases so there's may i have may i have a breakdown of how that is calculated then because that's important when we're really looking at an accurate number unless there's all these other factors that matter if you're including such as teresa said where there are people going to the hospital and possibly from outside me so i'd like a real breakdown granular um as to how you're arriving to all this information please thank you in for that data that i get is received from the state so i can ask them exactly what they put in which which fields they pull in order to calculate exactly but that is i think some of the data set information is actually on the page i think there's actually an explainer there that determines what's in the data set i think there was whether it's go ahead joe i'm sorry uh karen in light of the and i think terry asked a question about home test before which i think is a good one um home tester the state gave them out for free the feds have given them out for free they're actually available at drugstores at this point you can you can actually buy them um can anybody hear me yes you can okay sorry i'm it looked like i froze up um and i know the schools have them or have them available to at least to a certain degree would your expectation be that the positivity rate is actually higher or lower than the published positivity rate later those home tests i think it's hard to say you know we compare that people ask if the home tests are skewing our data but when you compare it to things like other factors and other metrics within the community can you know people who reporting sick to work reporting to sick to school um hospitalizations uh classroom closings and day cares things like that um it seems to be that it's not the the home tests are not really impacting that data they're not okay so that just the data looks pretty consistent we're not worried that there's a lot more a lot fewer based on home test okay yeah i think it's a factor but i think um you know i don't think it's one that's skewing the data heavily to where we wouldn't be able to use it thank you kara and dr begg for your updates i'd like to move to cathy o'dowd and let her give us more specific information to the danbury public school district thank you kelly hi good evening everyone um so i will update you on where we are at um on a week-to-week basis since returning from the holiday break in january in terms of our cases just a reminder to everyone that our source of information in the district for covet cases in our schools is our dashboard our kovid19 dashboard which is on our district's webpage and um that's updated every 24 hours by me and you'll be able to see you know every school that there are reported in and another of my job responsibilities is to report our positive cases to the state every day um so to the question that came up about the home tests um if we do have a student who reports a home test that is reported as a positive to the state so we don't report families um so there's certainly other many other people who are using this home test but we will report students to the state on a daily basis so i'll start with we've been back we're in our seventh week back since um our holiday break and um the first two weeks um they were rough uh we had a lot of cases you know schools were closed people were gathering for the holidays were off our first week back we had 179 cases in our schools and this is staff and students and that increased to 372 cases on our second week back and then we started um gradually coming down uh week three where we were at 161 cases week four we were at 84 cases uh week 5 63 cases week 6 33 cases and 213 until today we have 13 cases reported so it's i'm very happy to see that coming down but we are still seeing it spread through families in terms of our clinics um we've been um you know offering clinics as kara said there's clinics available seven days a week we've been offering uh the five to 11 year old vaccinations in all of our schools and we're just winding up our first um actually our second round for the five to 11 year olds so our those who have received their first dose ages 5 to 11 since the 1st of february 102 children have been vaccinated and during that time frame those that received a second dose um was 37 children ages 5 to 11.
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dr kaiser wishes to speak oh thank you i can't see that dr kaiser uh dr kaiser uh did you wish to speak actually raised my hand again so i'm sorry oh oh that's okay um so there are seven other speakers signed up for the later items from the floor that comes at the end um we have two different items from the floor in case there are things that folks want to address to us after they've gone through the full board meeting with us sometimes issues come up during the board meeting and people wish to speak at the end and that's why we have two items from the floor and why we have board member agendizing items at the very end is so that we can go through a whole meeting and hear all the things and then decide if we want to put anything on the agenda for the future so the item number 11 items from the floor we have art golden jordan eggbert another no name that addresses district boundaries uh mandy egbert ashley smith and then vaden hoffman so that is the order that speakers will be heard tonight with that being said those of you that signed up to speak you know the order and i would like to call on um member robinson um yes madam president thank you i'd like to um request to allow community member ed werona to speak first he's from the veterans of foreign wars and is not here to address the same topic as most everyone else so i'd like to make sure that he's um you know you know first up in the order before the other topic begins if that's okay with you guys um i would support that um but concurrently i would ask that we move the balance of the speakers who are on the original topic to the front of the agenda as well i mean after mr rona this is not conditional um i mean i would support i would support putting him in front but but i i don't i would prefer not to make people wait through the orange maps and and all that stuff since they're there in the second items from the floor they're they're really because of an overflow reality of that the first slot is a half an hour long i think we should let our constituents be heard tonight and so i think we should move move everybody up up up front but i'm happy to let the rest the bulk of them follow mr verona do i hear consensus did to allow ed to come up um okay so my so my suggestion and let's just see um how this all plays out is to take these into consideration and decrease the time for speakers to two minutes um but here all speakers that signed up ahead of time and then if anybody else who did not sign up ahead of time wishes to speak then we will open up items from the floor at the end of the meeting okay you you took my second thing i was gonna do was the two minutes okay but i just but you want to hear do you are you saying you want ed to be able to speak for three minutes i'm sorry are you saying that you want ed to be able to speak for three minutes that's where i'm getting confused yes okay that's my request um we will hear everyone tonight it just might not all be during this item so those were those are mr orlando i think we'd like to give every speaker regardless of the top of two minutes would be mine i think that actually the three i've researched this and i think that the three minutes is actually in case law paul gann i don't know if you know anything about this but i seem to recall that three minutes is some sort of um amount of time that's been redeemed by courts as being a fair amount of time for speakers to have the board has discretion so i'm going to move that we um we that we sorry i'm going to move that we pause is not the right word but that's what the word i'm going to use our rules as we suspend our rules there we go um and here each speaker regardless of topic for two minutes all during this items from the floor number seven so we may go over the 30 minutes by a few minutes but then we can make sure that everybody who pre-signed up gets hurt i'll take i'll i'll support that so i have a we have a motion and a second we have to do roll call vote um starting with uh member robinson oh just kidding hold on hold on hold on sorry time out uh so now it's up for discussion i have to remember my own rules of order so now it's time for discussion and then we can move to uh the vote i don't have any further discussion i think we've said what we each feel thank you i'm just trying to go with the rules of the order all right so let's um go ahead and um restate your so the motion on the floor that's been seconded is that we suspend our public comment rules and here each speaker that has signed up for items from the floor during the item number seven items from the floor for two minutes and allow flexibility to go slightly over our set 30 minutes so that we can hear all 17 pre-signed up speakers i have no further discussion okay then we can move forward with the vote i'm robinson i lando i don't be a tennis nay kaiser viceroy okay it it passes so we will move forward with the same order that i just discussed um and it will be a two minute limit um and if there's more to be said there is another items from the floor at the very end of the board meeting thank you so the first person we have on our list is jericho britannia i'm so sorry um we did have another suggestion sorry jericho um to move this is my fault to move the uh gentleman speaking on the the topic of to the to the beginning um that was something that was already i'm thought madam president i thought you were um over writing my request if you will still allow the request i would like to take the gentleman from the veterans of foreign wars um at three minutes not i don't think that we approved that three minutes for for this gentleman so he will also have two minutes equitable everyone will have everybody wants two minutes okay then i don't see any reason uh to move him forward he's he's only five down on the list so it will keep us in order and also you might remind the audience that demonstrations are not allowed during the meeting um so jericho i'm so sorry for making you sit back down but it is your turn so please come on up [Applause] so just to remind what has happened you will have two minutes and you will get a 30-second warning with the bell and then um just that's your cue to wrap it up thank you good evening parents teachers media and school board members my name is jericho bertagna i'm a freshman at chico high and i'm here to talk about mass mandates how can it be possible that the state of california wants to pass a bill sb 866 which allows minors 12 and older to get vaccinated without their parents consent but then takes away my right to choose if i want or need to wear a mask at school without my consent to me this is called hypocrisy and it needs to end now thank you up next i'd like to invite lauren mccann [Applause] um good evening i just wanted to thank you for allowing me to speak today i want to talk about what's going on in my school right now once school started i was happy to go back but since this has happened has changed the teachers kids and everyone's perspective of each other teachers are scared that the children in their classroom are going to get them sick the kids are having to wear their masks so tight that their ears are folded over and red just so they don't fall down off their face since i chose to not wear a mask i am placed away from my classroom and handed my homework without any direction i have been asked sarcastic and rude questions about my choice by some of the adults who work there i often do not want to attend school anymore because of what it feels like to be there i'm a good student and i do not get in trouble but now i am looked at like a troublemaker even asked if i'm trying to be a rebel all because i just don't want to my don't want my face to feel smothered thank you for taking the time to listen [Applause] so our next speaker is katie and or jim muff hi i'm katie muff i have a daughter at sierra view who's in second grade a son in fifth grade at parkview and a daughter at marsh in seventh grade on friday governor newsom said he wants to remove the mass date mandate but the teachers aren't ready the teachers union is bargaining is a bargaining group they weren't elected and you guys are under the mandate of governor newsom so basically the teachers union is acting as an elected official when we didn't elect them so i'm asking you tonight to represent the children in our community and not fall under mandate by one person and one bargaining group yes there is a mandate in place but you can control how the school is mandated you can also publicly state your support you can also write to the governor and cdph i've only heard the response that this is the mandate and we just have to follow it you can do more okay i also have a document called children covet and the urgency of normal it's an advocacy toolkit for parents students mentors and teachers and administrators i sent kelly staley forwarded you all copy or a digital copy and i made you all copies to look through too i'm going to highlight a couple things from it it was put together by a team of 15 or a team of 15 scientists and medical experts am i out of time okay 30 seconds um they basically say that um that kids who are unvaccinated it's like a flu kids who are vaccinated have zero risk of mortality um and you can now self-protect by vaccinating and wearing in 95s and an older population 65 and older a teacher in that situation can be vaccinated and boosted and has very low risk and there's lots of good information on reducing the fear and health harm of our current situation thank you for your time thank you all [Applause] next we'll hear from brandy mccann [Applause] first i want to thank you all for having me and i just want to thank all of you who came here tonight years ago i had a very difficult decision to make as a stay-at-home mom i had to leave an unhealthy situation i went to live in a shelter i utilized resources within our community to finish college obtain housing and now i work for my community it was not easy to get where i am today and i'm grateful i love my job i love my community and i love the stability that i'm able to provide for my kids my story is an example of success once again though i'm faced with another difficult decision as my children and i discuss their day at school regularly i realize i may need to protect them once again from yet another unhealthy situation i am often told stories about disappointment and sadness and reprimands and guilt trips and frustration all because their masks fall below their little noses or they're tired of wearing them but yet they eat and play with all the same kids outside right next to each other anyways in regards to this i find myself once again willing to sacrifice the stability that i've worked so hard to attain for the sake of my children's mental health emotional well-being it is my job to protect them from daily shame and fear pushing from adults just so that they can be kids i do understand that there are concerns for health and the very real fear some live with but this fear should not be our turn children's burden to bear the state of emergency has taken precedence over education i'm asking that you help us lastly i want to thank you for considering the changes myself and many other parents are willing to make for our children to not only have a physically healthy childhood but an emotionally and mentally healthy childhood as well thank you [Applause] i'd like to invite ed rona up next [Applause] thank you for allowing us to present to you this evening hopefully you have the handouts with that we emailed earlier i am ed rona and with me are mary wall and pat hurton we are from the veterans of foreign wars post 1555 and its auxiliary here in chico often when people hear vfw they think of us as an organization that only helps other veterans what you may not know is that we have sponsored several educational programs for years and we'd like to give you some information on those vfw has three education related programs patriots pen and voice of democracy are essay programs for junior high and high school students and teacher of the year is for teachers in grades k through 12.
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when she wasn't teaching and after retirement she was an active member of the brookfield community serving on the charter revision commission brookfield commission on aging and the brookfield library foundation so dottie was uh well for the my kids was very well known and she's actually a neighbor maybe six or seven houses away so i'll be i'm sad to see her go um next up is a covet update um the board held a special meeting on monday to discuss the department of health legislation legislative and gubernatorial decisions regarding executive orders and mass mandates i think we all are familiar with that meeting but for the public i'll continue to read this uh the dph and our medical health advisors recommending recommend optional mask wearing as of march 1st the covet cases have dropped dramatically over the last six weeks since we returned from winter recess on monday night the board thoughtfully considered these circumstances and unanimously voted to suspend the mask policy making the mass optional protocol effective march 1st as we transition to this optional model all other mitigation will remain in place including distancing cohorting where practical hand washing ventilation and staying home when ill students and staff who can return from infection on day six symptom-free will need to wear a mask through day 10 when in school masking on the school bus remains since it is a federal order and he asked that we remind the public that the best guard against uh severe ill severe illness and spreading is vaccination and to please consider getting vaccinated if and when you can the next up is the annual connecticut martin luther king essay contest we had a winner from brookfield one of only 15 students in the state to be recognized for their essay honoring dr martin luther king jr congratulations to lyden tessier we are so proud of her lyden her family mr renda and her ela teacher were in attendance last saturday as senator chris murphy celebrated all 15 winners next the college board connecticut women in science award from for brookfield high school brookfield high school earned the ap computer science a female diversity award recognizing the closing of the gender gap in ap computer science a brookfield high school has earned the college board computer science female diversity award for achieving high female representation in ap computer science a schools honored with uh with this award have expanded girls access in ap computer science courses more than 1 000 institutions achieve 50 percent or higher female representation in one of the two ap computer science courses or a percentage of computer science exam take takers meeting or exceeding that of the school's female population during the 2021-2020-2021 school year in 2021 in 2021 bhs was one of 199 schools recognized in the category of ap computer science a we're thrilled to congratulate our female ap computer science students and our teacher mr st scott zuka along with the stem teacher andrew hill and principal belanda on the step toward gender parity and computer science education next was school security planning and enhancement we're looking forward to working with three new police department leaders uh all who were recently promoted chief john pugliese major pete franks and youth officer mitch heller of course we congratulate chief purcell and youth officer grambling as their recent retirements on their recent retirements and thank them for their dedicating their entire careers to the brookfield police department and to the town of brookfield mrs farris and mrs white mrs faris and mrs wagonic joined me last week in a meeting with the new director of western connecticut center for school safety amory bernhardt from western connecticut regional services we're working to collaborate and enhance our crisis plans he's he is also providing threat assessment training that all administrators and their crisis team members will eventually participate in and lastly uh parent engagement uh last week i i'm meeting dr burrell i joined this center school pto where i was invited to discuss next school year's mid-year transition to candlewood lake elementary school next year's budget strategic planning and the recent change to the mask optional policy i will be visiting with a whiskeneer pto tomorrow night and i'm working to schedule visits with huckleberry hill and bhs i will also be initiating speak the superintendent parent educator advisory council focused on two themes budget resources and communications and engagement look for more information in the coming months so he kind of shot across the bow to let us know he's going to tell us some more about that one so that's what he gave us a lot of reading it was a lot of reading he told me he gave me a nice short report [Applause] okay so next up and i won't have to talk so much um are the super in the subcommittee reports and uh first up is finance and uh rosa why don't you do both of them while you're at it okay so on the first meeting i'll just go chronologically on 117 so january 17th we met and at that time we were still in the budget review process so at that meeting we had gone over we had just had our budget hearing our public budget hearing and so there were parents that had come out and spoken about adding the costs for boys hockey so we had talked about adding those to the budget at that day on that date as well as removing to student days from next year's calendar which i believe we talk about tonight a few other adjustments to the budget were talked about at that meeting and this was also the meeting where we as a committee voted to recommend this budget to the board of ed we had by that point thoroughly vetted it and had gone through our review process so that was the 17th then we had a special meeting on january 24th and the goal of this meeting was just to review the bids for the new transportation contract so we had our town purchasing agent walk us through the process of sealed bids it was a very interesting and intense process i didn't know a lot about this process so it was it was really nice to be walked through it ultimately we sent about 10 pages of specifications that we needed that included everything from the types of vehicles that we needed employee qualifications etc and two companies had responded with their sealed bid packages that were then opened live via zoom and so at this meeting on the 24th we went through these two bids i looked at them side by side and both companies were really within one percent of each other so they were very close but all star did come in much lower both the first year of the contract as well as lower overall but there is larger increases year to year compared to the other company which came in more overall but had a slightly steadier rate of increase year to year so at that meeting the committee voted to authorize our business director ken post to award the contract to all-star and that's that's my update any questions for rosa okay thank you uh next up is uh um policy and communications debbie okay uh we met on january 19th feels like it was so long ago the bulk of our discussion really was to continue to try to formulate a policy for school library media and really what we were working on was the addendum to the existing school policy that addresses how we deal with challenged materials or reconsideration of library materials so we spent most of our meeting going over some input that we had received from board members as well as input from the district's library media specialists and there was a lot to discuss and we agreed that i would make these suggested revisions with lisa's help and um we reviewed them again actually in tonight's policy meeting but they are in your packet to discuss later on this evening the other thing that we voted unanimously on was to add the boy scouts into a list of groups that will not be charged to use our school facilities for their meeting space um we had received two letters from actually a girl scout troop and a boy scout troop in recent months asking if we could waive the rental fee for them so that they could have their meetings and after analyzing the building rental income that ken provided and seeing how many meetings they have on an annual basis we decided that it was the right thing to do to waive that rental fee for the boy scouts and girl scouts so that was nice is that actually a policy change or is that a a regulation change of some sort um i don't think it was a policy change it's a regulation okay i just was asking in case we had to put it up to the vote yeah no okay um so that was pretty much it we really we didn't even get to talk about any communications in that particular meeting it really was about the um school media policy actually we had a question so with that was there any like stipulations like if the if the meetings were like right after school and so the kids were staying after school those groups or was it really sort of open to any time um i believe we we talked about it being right after school we said if it was a special event like a dinner dance or something like that on a saturday that's different that would be different you know where if we have to bring in extra custodians or open the school on a day that it's not normally open that would be a different case this was really talking about meeting directly after school when staff is usually still in the building okay thank you for clarifying that okay any other questions all right next up is facilities okay we met on february 3rd we reviewed the school dude reports the update at the middle school we're doing we're going to let the system run for another month or two before we do another sample but the water has been safe all along an update on the capital projects at the high school the hvac the bid was friday february 4th and we'll hear more about that in our next meeting the boys locker room project jules was brought in and is working with the nbc ken post is going to reach out to paul and jules the building management system at the high school we're supposed to have a training soon um high school plumbing fixtures there's a walk through with the guardian group there's a full proposal for three restrooms to be fully restored hoping for it to happen sooner than later the security film on doors we got an evaluation and different options to restore or replace paving at the high school it's being lined up for the summer the front parking lot and the main parking lot which is the teacher's parking lot the middle school replacing electrical services we're beginning the design services and the maintenance vehicle no luck so far so nothing's happening with that with the uh wall update at the middle school the winter rising is done and complete and we are still waiting for specifications for the design work which we actually did receive today so we're going to go through with that building condition study we haven't been getting anything back from tecton so we reached out to fuller d'angelo our encore architect to possibly do a study because he's interested in taking the project custodian staffing update we have an open night position at the high school but we're in the process of interviewing two internal candidates so we're finally in a good place all right uh there wasn't any new business but during our miscellaneous discussion we did discuss the arpa funds and our three requests of the enrollment study the condition study and the ac handler so the opera committee has been through all the reviews and there's a list of 23 items and they put forth the top 12 that they highly recommend they ranked r3 requests the ac handler was ranked number eight the condition study was ranked number 10 and the enrollment study was ranked 13.
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in our 12 to 15 year old age group first doses received two and their second dose uh one child received their second dose vaccine so this round of clinics will conclude on march 8th and then we will start a new round of clinics again on march 9th again focusing on the five to 11 year olds but we'll also be offering them uh to the 12 to 15 and 16 year olds and up okay we've been partnering with the state and griffin health the yellow vans um you know and thanks again to cara and her team who have been helping me to facilitate these clinics so we're still actively um you know pursuing the vaccination for our kids and kathy do we have clinics scheduled through march yes actually with second doses we'll move into april excellent they have to wait 21 days first they get their first of course and i automatically schedule the clinic for 21 days excuse me i ask when the mask mandate is lifted will there be a mandate imposed on vaccination to the children or those especially that already have received or have already gotten coded or just parents that choose not to vaccinate is there something down the line that is being discussed where one will replace another just curious there is no discussion right now of mandating the cova vaccine um in schools for children yeah michelle i'm not aware of anything at the state level i'm just i'm just not aware of anything like that yeah right i'm just asking if there's you know kind of anybody leading in that direction thank you i i think that would have to come from the state i don't think we could do that no that way if for if or no if for no other reason we cause a collective bargaining issue for sure with our uh our um uh collective bargaining agreements but i think that would have to come from the state i've not heard anything in that direction no and i participate weekly in dph and sde calls and that has not been discussed at all okay because i did have that question from someone um and i just wanted to ask you when we had or intended on lifting the mask mandate before it started up again with the you know omaron or whatever um how many students did we have that were infected currently you said we have 13.
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all of these are competitive and i'll carry with them some monetary awards for the winners and in the case of teachers of the year for the schools as well in a brief overview patriots pin is for junior high level students who present an essay on a patriotic theme and compete for local awards at the post and district levels with winners moving on to the state level where even higher awards are possible state winners compete for a five thousand dollar award and this year we had 31 entries for the junior high programs throughout chico with the first and third place winners for our posts coming from chico junior and second place from notre dame school voice of democracy is for high school level students who present an essay on a patriotic theme in oral and written format they also compete for awards at the post district and state levels with state winners competing for a thirty thousand dollar scholarship at the national level this year we had five entries from local high school programs with our first place winner coming from pv high teacher of the year is for three levels k five six eight and nine twelve we did not have any teacher of the year entries this year but teachers can compete for a five hundred dollar award at the state level and a thousand dollar award at the national level and those are amounts are also awarded to the winning teachers school there are also awards at the post and district levels thank you ed that's uh the time is up thank you so our next speaker is katie posey [Applause] good evening school board members so i ask you to strongly advocate for mask choice for the kids in our schools school boards all over the state have the opportunity to stand up for the students and families they serve by making decisions reflecting a solid understanding of the science of masking and awareness of the shameful hypocrisy of giving the rest of the community an off-ramp for unmasking but not kids in schools and the recognition of the damage masking has done to the mental health of children and adolescents last august i presented you with three points advocating for mask choice i continue to stand by those points two of which are that kids are the least likely to be struck ill by covid and probably the least likely to spread it by continuing to force masking on the kids in our schools there are several implications to consider number one students are watching the erosion of trust in public health in the science this trust must be based on evidence and data and not just based off of wishful thinking and we have to do something because we need to be seen as doing something we here wear anything wear a cloth mask to oh actually now you need two masks two now two mask isn't good enough you need a surgical and an n95 it seems shady downright odd and frankly i would hope that our students would become skeptical this guidance gets progressively less evidence-based and more theoretical and it has diminished trust in public health that's going to have long-reaching consequences down the road in terms of other illnesses and diseases where people don't take their advice anymore because they don't trust them number two our kids are going to start asking to move to florida under ron desantis florida's children have lived freely without math under newsm california's kids have largely lived a mask existence from january 1 2020 to january 15 2022 99.99 of kids in california didn't die of covid in florida it's the same both states numbers match the national average so where would you rather be growing up thank you [Applause] all right next up we have calder colby yes and that makes a lot of sense because we calder was uh signed up for the last item but it was really late so we weren't sure if that was going to work out for them but okay we will move it to the move that to the end thank you we have deanna lindstrom [Applause] my name is deanna lindstrom and i stand here before you to be a voice for my children as well as a voice for the rest of the children in this community regarding this mass mandate that is harmful to them on many levels our children are being mentally emotionally and physically harmed by you continuing to enforce this mass mandate when you should be fighting for all of our children to have equal rights to be in a safe learning environment and not segregated by any means you have now become the problem that is destroying our children their learning and their childhood my young child that stands here next to me stated that he feels like he has cracks in him that he doesn't know what to do and wants to cry because of this because of adults like you that refuse to stand up for him he cannot see the smiles or any other expressions of his friends and his teachers faces so that he can better connect with the uh ones around him you are supporting the suppression of our children's social emotional skills that they so desperately need to learn and grow up to become healthy functioning adults he struggles to breathe in his mask as do so many others i'm assuming you do as well since there's picture proof of some of you not following the same mandate before it expired how can you sit there and enforce something on our anderson children when you yourselves do not lead by example no seven-year-old or any child for that matter should have these things i mentioned placed upon them because of your inability to reason and use sound logic you perpetrate covid and its harmful effects on our children that are the at the least risk using continued fair mongering and greed because you continue to accept coveted funding instead of looking at how your actions will affect the mental stability of our children and making appropriate decisions that benefits our youth and not your financial records as board members you have full capability to allow mass choice it has been shown by other school districts that are saying no more to this and allowing choice for the well-being of our youth tonight is your moment to show your community and our youth that you do have their best interests at heart by ending your enforcement of this mass mandate now you can call an emergency meeting thank you goodbye [Applause] give a round of applause for our children [Applause] up next we have joshua flash [Applause] i'm joshua flash i'm here tonight to ask you to do what's right for our children i viewed previous board meetings so i know you've heard cover data from both sides of the argument all signs aside anyone with a shred of common sense can see the hypocrisy displayed by politicians and our government health agencies their actions prove that what we're facing what they're forcing us to do is purely about power and money our terrible governor was caught blatantly not wearing a mask at a football game two weeks in a row and the day after the super bowl he extended the mass mandate for children in school doesn't make any sense um how does that not confuse and anger everybody as well understand and in school right now the children in class that refuse to wear a mask are either put outside by themselves or they're punished in some cases when in reality right now in the cafeterias every day they sit side by side without mass are we not getting sick by eating because i don't think that's real science we keep being told that masking restrictions may end in the near future but we need it over now we've been waiting for two years and that's too long roseville school district has already decided to ignore the mandate as well as many other schools across the u.s so you can choose to make this happen by not taking action you're just proving you don't care about our children you've already allowed my children's mass exemption from a mental exemption a mental health exemption from a psychologist and you said it wasn't a physician however last year in um august of the fourth i believe you guys all agreed that that would be an exemption i was told that it was because the mandate changed in december however i doubt that they changed that it can't be a psychologist versus a physician my children many others are getting headaches from wearing a mask that's from a lack of oxygen and trouble breathing i won't allow anyone to force me to do that or to force my child to do that masking isn't just the only fight because california wants to require the vaccine for all children it should be a choice masking and vaccine should be a family's choice when all this mandate nonsense is over we're not going to forget who was willing to fight for her children who wasn't thank you so the next person on the list um was actually somebody who submitted a speaker card but didn't include their name i just want to give opportunity for that person to come forward there was a statement that um talks about boundaries putting children first i got confused it's okay that's i didn't want to not let you have the opportunity to speak to you i could not figure out how to put my name in i emailed you guys with gmail but we got seven nine years ago all right i have i'm a grandma i have three grandchildren in your school system i have seen for the past two years what's been going on and i'm talking about now your imaginations and line concentrating and spending your our district's money on on maps so that in i was here when you downloaded the surprise orange maps and i really felt that that was a way to make it a little better for each of you to stay in those seats and i am here oh anyway i'm here to tell you that if you these parents are angry i mean they are enraged yeah um what you've done except for one of you has been trying very hard to advocate for our children it's very obvious that the underlying reasons are not prioritizing our children and their health and their education and i want to tell you here and now that each of the districts that you're in have parents and grandparents that have seen what you've been doing in the last two years for their health and well-being under covet i just i really really think that you need to stand up to the state the way roseville has been roseville unified has decided to forget that and make it an option parents should decide whether or not they will send their kids to school with masks and be vaccinated we need to take back you need to let us parents and grandparents take back our choices with for our children and prioritize that thank you [Applause] okay up next we'll have art golden he also takes medication to assist in managing his disabilities i was called by principal shaunice heath last monday regarding the incident involving patrick that occurred at school according to heath she reviewed video surveillance and said patrick was acting extremely unsafe swinging his arms around with other children nearby while standing in line after recess and hit another child with a straight arm and a hand hand in face when he talked to patrick he told her that he had his arms bent and in his sweater and hit his friend on accident i asked to view the video and i was told no by chance that afternoon my wife went in person to speak to heath she told my wife it was an accident my wife asked if it was typical for a child to lose an entire lunch recess for an accident especially a child with disabilities that needs their recess he said it was because he was being extremely unsafe that day my wife and i asked patrick what happened at school he said he was playing football recess and while walking back to class not in line they were talking about football moves he said his arms were in his sweater sleeves as he spun towards his friend while imitating football moves his right sweater sleeve came up and hit his friend in the face patrick told heath his arms were bent but she told him no they were not when the stories did not match i called heath i again asked to review the footage and was told no again i talked to the other child's parents who said patrick and their child were talking about football moves and patrick sweater accidentally hit him i then talked to ted sullivan who's to my right and submitted a public records request to see the video the next day i viewed the video the events were exactly what patrick said his arms were bent he spun around his sleeve accidentally hit his friend and at no time were they in line heath lied to my wife and i regarding the events after viewing the video i did a public records request and it had a meeting with sullivan sp uh sullivan and heath during this meeting my wife and i shared that we would like an apology to patrick for not believing him when his story was true and accurate they would not agree to apologize and said that this discipline i want to file a formal complaint with the board and here and not to mention that my wife and i is up so if you have papers you can pass them over and they can distribute those to the board thank the board you for the administration of chico unified art thank you um and you can also email us but we do need to move on on public comment i'm not saying that you can't leave your papers with us but we do need to move on in public comment [Applause] to the other board okay up next we have jordan egbert that's fine [Applause] governments all over the world and states all over the u.s are beginning to see the truth surrounding masking and making restrictions they're easing restrictions and following the science why is the science different in california than the rest of the world than the rest of the country the answer is that our science is not any different it's that our political science differs the facts are simple children under 18 represent .08 of all covid19 deaths in the u.s now before the seasonal flu just disappeared nationally children deaths made up 1.9 of the national flu deaths in america that was the 2019-2020 flu season so that's the flu season that's more deadly to our children than kovid yet during the history of the flu we have never resorted to such draconian measures like masking our children that's because children don't belong in masks and teaching them that the air that they breathe is toxic and that everybody around them is going to get them sick is child abuse you're complicit with that masking children impairs their psychological growth and harms their social development it dehumanizes them my name is jordan egbert and i've got two children one in the second and one in fourth grade at shasta elementary i'm here to address the ongoing abuse of my children and let you know that my children will no longer comply with your cultish rules and mandating that they wear a mask at school in your recent letter you sent out to parents justifying your continued abuse of our children by enforcing mass mandates you stated that public schools have no other options other than to follow the law you state that these violations of the mandate will negatively impact revenue that will directly fund student programs you don't want to send our dollars to external government agencies you want to keep them in chico i think that is you throwing the monkey up the hill you're not taking responsibility uh for being complicit in this abuse you're wrong and thinking that you can't do anything about it you can stand up to them sometimes laws need to be broken in order to be changed think about what rosa parks did she stood up just one person and the law was changed about segregating buses i think your time is up jordan thank you [Music] uh next up we have mandy eggbert [Applause] i don't know if i was heard mandy egbert is up next [Applause] hello i'm mandy egbert mother of four like everyone i've tolerated a lot of shenanigans in the last two years jumping through hoops in the name of science and compliance the letter you sent out last week was really what pushed me to the point of speaking here today you publicly acknowledge that your motivation to mask our kids and deny rightful mask exemptions is purely for financial incentive and that was a pretty bold move who wrote that all of you thank you thanks for identifying that to me because the reason i'm here you've already seen roseville adopt an anti-mask resolution hamilton city high school has allowed mass to be optional since the beginning of the year 15 minutes away from my house we will no longer stand idly by while you hide behind your masks and your mandates because you work for us you see upholding the checks and balances of government requires backbone it requires you to do your job and to stay in your own lane parents the government is not responsible for masking your kids gavin newsom is not the one handing your child a freshly laundered mask on the way out the door before school you are and i want everyone to know that my children have been given the option of outside learning mask free you do not need a doctor's note for your child to be permitted to attend school without a facial covering you have options assert your rights you are in charge and when the loss of funding associated with enrollment outweighs the loss of funding related to mass compliance you will see a shift in the choices being made here under this week leadership they bow to the bottom dollar we are facing a historic battle for our freedom teach your children to take a stand and take off their masks now not in two weeks now today next is ashley smith hi my name is ashley smith and i have two kids that attend shasta elementary one is in kindergarten and the other is in second grade when is this going to end i'm standing here today to ask the mass mandate be dropped immediately the hypocrisy we have witnessed these last few weeks around sporting events is absolutely insane to me how can you ask that our children who are the lowest risk for serious illness to show up with a mask on when more than 75 000 fans showed up to the super bowl on sunday with virtually no mass no negative coveted tests are proof of vaccination the elite celebrities whether it's jay-z ben affleck j-lo or lebron james cited again with the la mayor getting caught without his mask on no one in the entire stadium wore mass but yet the next morning i was expected to drive my five-year-old kindergartner and year old second grader and gave them a mask as they got out of my car how does this even make sense and what you're essentially saying is adults are able to make their own decisions and flout the rules that they don't feel apply to them or shouldn't apply to them and we don't have any issue with it but when kids if your child refuses to wear a mask in chico they don't get allowed into the classroom and are sitting outside like my kids are in the freezing cold they um the mass mandate was removed for the entire state tuesday for all indoor spaces but not for the indoor space of a classroom again how does this even make sense to you guys this is no longer about a virus this is about politics money and greed if it weren't then there would be clear data to cite in support of the board's policies there is simply not if it was really about the kids being protected with mass and n95s would be enforced but they aren't the district is going along with the mass mandate only because of the funding and the money they will miss out all your time is up i have sold 30 seconds i'm sorry it's time that we operate based on facts and non-emotional fear chico unified does not have the best interest of the kids but rather is too scared to get cited by cal osha and pay fines it is heartbreaking our money is being chosen over the well-being of our poor kids who have already been put through the ringer the past two years two years we want mass choice leave the healthcare choices to our children to the parents if you think we're ignorant or not informed then you have an enormous misconception of us as parents we think long and hard how to keep our children safe we do it daily i have many questions for all this school board thank you next up is vaden hoffman [Applause] this move down hi my name is hudson i'm in third grade this is why i think we should choose if we should have a mask or not when i wear my mask i can't breathe as well sometimes i get headaches from the mask i cannot see my friends smile or laugh sometimes it's hard to unders understand people you have to speak loud i'm in speech and sometimes in class people have a hard time understanding me i hope you hear these reasons there are many other kids like me please give us the choice i want to say i'm sure you guys noticed the act of civil disobedience that went on on tuesday across all of the state of california where students peacefully stepped out of their classroom or showed up without their masks on i hope you also saw that in el dorado high school 200 kids all didn't go to school with a mask on and the board instantly reversed their mass mandate policy this is important because the winds are changing and this civil disobedience is going to come your way so you have two options either be reactionary like el dorado did and have to act after we do this at the district over and over again or be progressive and what i'm calling for obviously i'd love to see the mass mandate removed right now but what i'm calling for is probably from mr tennis or someone to put a motion forward that says when cd ph comes on uh february 28th if they say this is at a district level to remove mass mandates we have something in place instantly so at that moment masks come off so we don't have to wait for the march 9th meeting put it on the record right now vote for it if they say it's a district decision it already happens [Applause] [Music] [Applause] um so we are going to go back um it it did um is it i just want to make sure that i got it right no no no um we need to come back to calder okay um we'll still keep calder on the list for the items from the floor number 11.
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so we'll see how that i'll just add as a follow-up that it was presented to the board of selectmen at their meeting in uh in february and that's it any questions okay uh next up is cape we met february 9th we had deep pearson give a report well she gave a summary of the report that the ad hoc school committee gave on the book challenge she summarized and answered questions on those we discussed guiding principles for removal such as outdated text poor quality of books number of books with the same material sexual or violent material we moved on to the discussion of the canada wood lake elementary school library setup the library set up is going to be made up of two floors the bottom being k through two and the top being three grades three to five the two floors are joined by a staircase i thought this was pretty interesting that the staircase is only accessed by the library staff and teachers and the two libraries you actually have to go out of one library and go into like travel around to the other library so while they're joined they're only joined by the staff members uh and then we adjourned it probably okay any uh any questions uh i will just add that we the cape committee did vote um to recommend to the board that the book drama be retained in the hhgs library and that was a unanimous vote i see that i thought that was a new business i'm sorry yeah it's it's it's there i just it just doesn't mention the vote so i think we probably ought to amend the minutes to recognize if a vote was taken what that vote was yeah we should put that in the minutes and if we're editing my name is spelt wrong so apologies since we're already editing might as well just fix that so i just missed the word voted right and the account account should be noted that it's unanimous okay any other questions okay now i think the just for clarity we have to decide as a board first on the policy right right so that will be tonight's business item and once we've settled on the policy and we've all agreed on the policy then we would bring a specific vote you know report up from the cape committee to the full board at the following meeting since you guys have already met on it so um but i do think we need to have the policy done first with everybody unless anybody disagrees i agree okay all right thank you next up is equity inclusion okay we met on february 10th the results of the google poll that mrs hawley sent out was that the teams wanted to do a joint presentation both the stakeholder equity and the teacher quality group so they will be presenting will both be presenting at our march 16th meeting hoping for about five to ten minutes each and then after that we went into breakout rooms and the teacher quality group looked at the stakeholder slides and provided some feedback and comments and the teacher quality looked at the stakeholder is that what i said we each looked at the other slides i don't know what i said first and then we sort of made some comments on them and discussed the other team's presentation then we regrouped discussed the feedback offered some small suggestions on visuals um language vagueness specific specificity etc and um so we'll continue to work on those and then at our next meeting we'll do like mock presentations each group will do a map presentation to prepare for coming before the board on march 16th so getting close looking forward to that yeah any uh any questions for amy all right thank you all right so that's it for the subcommittee reports uh next up is consent agenda i will move that the board approve the items on the consent agenda which are new hires transfers terminations resignations and retirements second okay it's been moved and seconded any discussion no but i will just say i'm very sad to see dr ruby's name on this list and uh gina quagonic or she's not here tonight but her as well so yeah we lose two huge assets to the to the district um and they both have wonderful opportunities for themselves personally so i understand completely why they're why they're uh where they're pursuing um you know pursuing their next step um i've asked dr barrella in our next meeting he could have dr ruby stand up and talk about the teaching position she's taking i thought that would be very interesting for us as a board a little bit of flavor on what's uh what's going on and i think we ought to do that okay any further discussion all in favor all right any opposed okay it's unanimous okay so we're moving on to new business first item is a setting of the graduation date for the class of 2022 here we are again so let me turn it over to mr bellanda all right um i'm sorry before we do that you gotta make the motion yeah make the motion i remember that the board set the graduation date for the brookfield high school class of 2022 as recommended by vhs principal mark belanda second it's moved and seconded okay this is pretty uh relatively straightforward in terms of um recommending a date for graduation we do this every year this is the seventh time i'm coming to the board this recommend uh the graduation date be set as saturday june 18th time tbd but most likely in the morning we've had a resounding support for having the ceremony here at brookfield high school and we want to continue that uh tradition and a whole host of other things working on with grad party and things like that currently the last day of school is the 17th based on snow days we're not going to have any more and um we'll be good to go okay all right all right any uh any questions okay all in favor all right okay any of those all right i told you up and running good job um next up is the approval of the candlewood lake elementary school furniture and fixtures and equipment ffne i move that the board authorized techton to prepare documents for the procurement from the state of connecticut for public bidding for the purchase of furniture fixtures and equipment f and e for the candlewood lake elementary school as recommended by the municipal building committee second okay it's moved in second and i'll just say that uh last night uh they had a formal presentation at the municipal building committee meeting and i think at least six of us i think were able to attend last night and got a chance to see that presentation um anybody want to say anything about it uh you know while we're here i thought it was a very thorough and very thorough good-looking set of furniture yeah i spoke to my daughter's teacher at huckleberry today too and she's just like i can't wait like she's so she said that john shared the slides with the teachers today and they're like so excited okay yeah they really did involve the the stakeholders and the staff um whether it was the special ed teachers or the office leaders or the nurses or the nurses or the or the the classroom teachers you know there's a lot of input they had gathered on that and made a lot of changes i gather from you know the initial thoughts they had and the recommendation of the municipal building committee um did have a caveat that was one type of furniture that they were going to go do a uh more detailed review of all right but by us making our motion that we're following their recommendation we we incorporate that by reference so um it was the they were like little foam stools in the gathering areas at the end of each of the wings so that they could have informal events with the classrooms with a you know a smart board out you know to be able to you know get out of the classroom and do something a little differently and they were more like foam stools and they wanted to see how durable they were in particular and if they would tip them together they were only 14 inches i mean they're that tall they're not going to do a lot of tipping i don't think um jump off it i was just thinking what mike has been doing jumping off them yeah i was worried they were gonna there was once somebody said maybe well will they throw them the uh in any case that that secondary review is going on and otherwise the municipal building committee approved it so i think the presentation has been posted has it not yes i believe it has yes yeah it's on the candlewood lake elementary school uh website right yep it's on the website that we have so for those of you who do like to look at the material it's supposed to you can get to it through the brookville board of education website and there's a link there okay any discussion okay all in favor aye aye opposed all right we're off and running um okay old business um the we should continue our discussion on the 2022-2023 school calendar i'll move that the board approved the 2022-2023 school calendar as recommended by superintendent dr john burrell oh second okay it's been moved and seconded now if you recall we all have the updated calendar proposal in our deck um and uh um and what we had asked dr brill to do is to remove the additional three plc days and then move them from wednesdays to friday so that we weren't interrupting the middle of the week and he's done that so and this is then what the resultant calendar would look like that's i think the only change since the last time we reviewed it and um election day was incorrect on the previous one november 8th so he's although i feel like kids would have liked to have november first off the day after halloween i always found election day interesting it's the first tuesday after the first monday that's how it's written in the federal law the first tuesday after the first monday it's not the first tuesday it's the first tuesday after the first monday so which means since it's the first the monday the first november first is a tuesday it you can't do election day ever on the first i think they never wanted to have election day right after halloween are there any discussions on i just want to tell you i just want to say i don't support the calendar um due to the impact of covet and i think that we need to maximize student instructional time so i think that we can scale back more on less pd days or early dismissals so that's just why i'm not going to support the calendar okay given and the transition with the new school so what we're losing with that so dr burrow made some comments that he wanted me to share um he did say he understood that by the way you i know you and he have exchanged notes about that um he he says we don't really have a great deal of teacher collaboration time in spite of the admins and teachers being creative on the daily schedule having the uh the plc time gives them a sustained and reliable two and a half hour common block that they can use to collaborate um and that they plan for units data analysis curriculum development integration and technology and sc elder in those times um the having its schedule allows them to develop an agenda and dr ruby has coordinated that in the past and by having them specifically having four days that they can do it they can actually organize them in a in advance and it allows them to do the things they need to make the schools effective so that was his input and he says and he says to be frank the other thing that they always deal with is there's iterative issues that happen during the school year and so having those days throughout the school year allow them to react if they need to so so he is still would like to keep the four days so um so one more although he acknowledges the point yeah one recommendation i would have would be to even start august 29th um you know i know the first three are t new teacher orientation which is very much needed um and then the 22 25th and 26 could stay as is and then start school on monday because if you add up the number of weeks full weeks that the students have is less than um you know they're out more they don't have a full week they have less being in school for a full week then not so i'm and i'm and i'm not and i'm making the recommendation for this coming year not moving forward but given the impact of transitioning to the new school are you proposing an amendment or do you want to just take it to vote yes no yeah i guess we just take it to vote okay and then any other discussion points all right uh hearing none uh all in favor of approving the uh the calendar as uh recommended by dr burrell please raise your hand and say aye all right all opposed so it passes 4-3 okay the first time we've had a next boat in a while that's uh um okay uh next up is discussion of policy 6563 the school library media and there's a possible motion there's no pre predetermined motion but let me turn it over debbie to you and let you lead the discussion okay so as i said earlier um [Music] the purpose of uh amending this policy is that the previous policy 6563 really only addressed uh the procurement of school library media there was no clause within it to identify what the board's role was if any school library material was chat material was challenged so over the last couple months actually we've been working on this document that is now entitled appeals to reconsideration of library materials and this was pulled together with input from the american library association the connecticut library association and other school library policies and this really outlines um the steps that the board can take should take if a parent challenges or asks for reconsideration of school library material and the school forms a committee and the parent is not satisfied with the outcome of that committee review and in which case it would then come to the board so um you had seen this once before this is the second round because there were some changes so this copy reflects in yellow the changes that were made with input from board members as well as input from the school media specialists they were very involved in this process we've had several conversations and this reflects all of those all of that input so i don't know if anybody has i have one question so actually too um so the first is so this is the material here is going to be added to policy six five six it'll be an addendum to that policy okay um and then the other question was just on point number eight and on the la in the second page um the board reserves the right to remove material after all steps and proper review have taken place does that mean after the board has voted if there's again another challenge or i think it means that if the board's decision is that the material be removed then the board has the right to remove it oh okay how are you interpreting it rosa i i don't know i think i was confused because i was like well if all the if all the proper steps have taken place and one of the steps is that the board votes i guess i was just like confused like if there was i don't know well we could you know i think what's maybe a little confusing is that under number nine where it says the board of education shall render the final decision it doesn't really address what that decision could be so if we move oh okay you know what i'm saying if we if we say something like the board of education shall render the final decision and reserves the right to remove material after all steps and proper review have taken place does that make sense yeah i think so go with you so i'm going to make sure i'm clear so you're going to move the the words and eight on the second page to correct that's just a continuation of nine on the first one yeah yeah okay because it it really in number nine it really doesn't say how like what's the conclusion right when the board renders its decisions should we also add retain then to remove or retain the material sure yep and then that also just got me thinking and i apologize i didn't think of this before um should there be any language in here on like subsequent challenges to the same book do you know what i mean like if like let's say the board renders the final decision and then there's another challenge for the same book like i guess if it's the same concern like do you go through this whole process all over again or do we say no we voted on this it's a different concern unless it's a yeah like maybe should there be language that says like no this like if the concern is the same we're not going to repeat the process if the concern is different we do yeah we might need i think that's probably a good idea yeah so maybe add a number uh i would actually put that that thought at the end of number one on the first page the board may form an ad hoc committee to designate appropriate subcommittee to conduct the review the board also reserves the right to decline a review okay right yeah and that will cover that covers everything right yeah the right to decline a review of a book that has already been considered reserve the right to decline a review period okay yeah because you know you never know what our our board or our future board will be facing right so that's i mean you need to leave it flexible enough that the board can act appropriately okay and then there's just very minor changes on the corresponding regulation which is [Music] after that see says yeah let's see regulation c six five six quick yep do we actually vote on regulation we do not so was this just the consideration for dr burrill yes okay so what is a way that you've just added the words age appropriateness yep and i notice that it's an editorial chart right and why is our question mark the question mark and we actually talked about that at our meeting tonight um the question mark is because age-appropriateness shouldn't really be brought up at the weeding stage it if the book is already in one of the school libraries it's been vetted for age-appropriateness like it wouldn't be there if it hadn't met the criteria to be in [Music] say an elementary school library so it it really just doesn't belong in a conversation about weeding because it it's very unlikely that it would happen weeding is really what we do when a book becomes obsolete or it's in poor condition or it's not circulating because it's not popular so that was really what we were discussing tonight whether or not age appropriateness is even a factor at that point because of the selection criteria it has age appropriateness in the selection criteria already right so to the extent we were following the our own regulation it would it would never be an issue but right [Music] although if it's a it's a very old book the age of the age may may be very different than how we would you know what i mean a book that's very old that's or if an error was made right yeah you know i've never i've never believed in things being perfect i would leave in an age appropriateness if if there was a judgment that said oh oops you know that would be me is it it's not required that all of these conditions be met that's just these are possible true so if he's going to do it that's a possible criteria for weeding would make it a lot easier for me okay a little bit more open okay and the edit on the page before that so that that's weird when i was reading this that was actually like that was i think that was supposed to be taken out i think it was it just somehow made it in yeah i think that was an old edit it was very old it just sounds something the edits are in yellow yeah we ought to probably just make a note to them that they'll fix and fix that i see that every now and then and the policies of strikeouts that you just left as a strikeout yeah [Music] so the real change here is this point and that's the point that said on review it goes to the superintendent yeah okay so do we need to bring this back again or can we make a motion with them is everybody comfortable with uh the edits as proposed yes okay everyone's okay with that okay so um i will make a motion that the uh the board um approve as a second read uh the policy number six five three with edits as proposed by the policy committee and disc and and the edits as discussed in this evening's meeting second oh go ahead amy okay amy seconded it any just formal discussion all in favor aye aye that's unanimous all right um so um this is a question because i know the cape committee was working in parallel as our ad hoc committee on this one the um did we follow the steps explicitly on on this so there's documentation that says we completed steps one two three four five six seven eight nine i think we probably went over it i think we probably went over it there you go we probably ought to when we talk about it at our next meeting about the book itself kind of walk through it by steps you know here's what we learned at each step of the way i think that would probably help we had as you saw in the minutes and mike mentioned we had d pearson attend our gate meeting and she provided very very helpful insight and so maybe maybe we might would it be useful to have dee come to our board meeting and give us share some of the same insight yeah was that that was influential to your thinking i thought it was very helpful yeah okay well let's let's uh let's note that we'll we should invite you to the next meeting lisa will you talk to uh dr bruhl about that okay good all right so uh the uh the next is a uh uh the board of education adopted budget it's uh just to continue any discussion on that um just an update to everybody the uh we submit the presentation i thought went pretty well wouldn't you agree when we met with the three boards together um i want to thank mr post for all of hard work and uh eric for all his last minute work on doing editing changes um and came together i thought very nicely um the just what's going on right now is the it went from us we sent the formal uh our formal submission on the 30 and the end of january the 31st of january it then went goes into the hands of the first selectmen who did her work in a two-week period it's a pretty fast turnaround for the first selectmen she presented her budget yesterday to the board of selectmen who are now doing a series of workshops for the second half of the month of february the as i understand it uh and i haven't actually i've seen the document that was sent out but in her recommendation she were making adjustments and uh changes and it would reduced our budget submission by 91 000 and change and ken did you find out anything on if there's anything behind that yet i asked mr post if he would talk to the town controller to find out if there's any mechanical adjustments that were in there because if you remember you know they had to update um the insurance premiums and there were some other some small adjustments they were going to do at the top and i don't know if they made them in our piece of the budget or they did it elsewhere so we'll find out more once we do that if you have time they're doing daily almost daily uh workshops at the board of stockman and they're televised so if anybody's interested um i don't know there's no particular day they're talking about the board of ed though so it's not like we're on the agenda um they the the board of selectmen then presents their budget to the board of finance on the first of um the first of march which is coming up pretty quickly um and board of finance then we'll go through a good solid month of deliberation so we are on their agenda on the 8th so please mark your calendar we should all plan to go if we can right to do it that meeting is just a q a discussion there is no formal agenda we're not doing a presentation um i've asked mr rooney if he could ask his members to send us questions by the first so we'd have a chance to staff them out if there are particular questions um i don't know if there will be particular questions so we'll find out so do you have a time for that meeting i think it's at seven o'clock all their meetings seem to start at seven but i will find the agenda once it's published and make sure we all get it in fact at least if you could just keep your eye on that when they publish that agenda make sure we all get a copy of it but i would block at seven o'clock because that's when they normally start their meetings and it would be at i think they're doing there's a town hall but i'm not sure they did uh two years ago they didn't hear yes so um i don't i haven't talked to glenn about where yet so that's what's going on with the budget um next up is an update on candlewood lake elementary school building rosa you want to give an update on yeah anything you've learned i think we've had some fun stuff yeah um well the obviously the biggest news is the ffne package that we just voted on tonight so that is that marks a really big milestone in the project marks the completion of that phase and so now they can actually start to procure all of the finishes and furniture for the new building the only other exciting update is that all of the roofing material is on site so as long as it is above 32 degrees they can work on that so this really good news we got the roofing materials when we expected to so now our late schedule is still on schedule and he did say that once the roof goes on progress then it then it goes really fast it'll accelerate because they have an enclosed building they can eat yes that's what he said the biggest thing is to be able to heat the inside so that it's a dry and workable environment have they said anything about setting up a walk-through yeah sort of an intermediate yeah i think they haven't yet i think they were waiting for the weather to warm up a little bit um and then for sure we should be able to do that and they'll probably return to having their meetings there so they can do their monthly walkthrough and we can probably join them on one of those exciting yeah okay next on the agenda is public comment thank you rosa um is a public comment we didn't have anybody sign up for public comment this evening correct okay so we have nobody signed up for public comment we'll move on to three main points so i was thinking of um the student spotlight presentation from my school students yeah it was very exciting and maybe the update on the last day of school on the graduation date and then um i thought maybe the school update on the ffa approval and update on the school progress would it be weird to put maureen ruby's resonation there or is that not yeah i think if she's going to come make a presentation at some point we should do that yeah i think that would be good yeah does that sound okay good all right okay upcoming events um at center school on friday february 25th is the community meeting spirit day and the kickoff for one book one read and the week of the 28th is read across america's spirit week and reading bingo begins at huckleberry invention convention presentations are due next week and judging will be on march 4th and they also kick off one book one read for read across america on the 28th at whiskenier there's a pto meeting tomorrow night at 7 pm that's on zoom and on sunday the 20th is family fun bowling night at strikers that's to raise money for the 8th grade moving up ceremony and activities and at the high school just coming up in the next two weeks is as ben mentioned the blood drive for the national honor society that's on tuesday march 1st and all schools are closed obviously on monday and tuesday for president's weekend the 21st and the 22nd that's all i have okay thank you um all right that's it for the agenda this evening any last comments all right to save for the fundraiser on sunday at the bowling alley it's not a drop-off event you have to stay with your child parents should stay okay there you go all right so without objection we're adjourned thank you all
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so what was the number this week right so what was the number that was suitable like a benchmark in the past where you were considering what number would that be if it's lower than 17.
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um so they didn't miss their opportunity to speak but we'll just since they're not here right now we'll move on to our next item that concludes our items from the floor and we will move on to um i'm actually going to ask for a suspension of the rules okay for us to uh i'd like to request for a suspension of the rules that we might go down to um item 12 which is board member request to agendize an item and i think it might be pretty painless because you made an announcement earlier where you said madam vice president that we had a discussion slash action item for the march agenda is that true it's action so theoretically we could take up um a proposal similar to what we've heard alluded to in other school districts and and theoretically we could take that matter up for a vote at our next meeting is that correct okay if that's the case i'd like to you know based on my understanding of the various public bodies that i've served on it's not up to me to say what's going to be on the agenda to my knowledge we have not had a vote specifying that it will be an action item so that discretion barring a vote from this body right here tonight that agenda could come out and it could just say information only right that is not the intention at this point but i understand your point as well well it's theoretically possible um despite whatever assurances i've received that that agenda could come out 72 hours before the board meeting and it might just say information only at which point we would not be for sure guaranteed an opportunity to vote for a policy change so i would ask for a rule change so that we can take a brief very brief hiatus down to agenda item 12 please for this purpose yeah um i i actually would like to let calder speak so that calders have to wait till the end of the meeting to speak um so we will continue this items from the floor you can come on up and address the board that way you can go home and have dinner [Applause] go gators thank you hi i'm cal and this is my friend brooke um yeah we want to talk about the mask mandate and how we feel like we should not have to wear masks at school anymore we've been wearing masks for two years now in school and i've just been waiting for the time when we actually had a choice it's within our right to have a choice to wear masks and at school i at school i walk by kids who are wearing their masks and they have these humongous hoods covering their faces because they feel like they don't they aren't heard or seen by you district officials who could allow us to show our faces and say how we actually feel right now masks made sense back when there were no scenes or boosters but now that we have all that stuff and we have good n95s and those good masks people can cover themselves up if they want to but i know that i want to have a choice thank you for listening thank you [Applause] uh so back to mr tennis um was this uh so mr tennis are you asking for um you would like to move to suspend the rules briefly just for the purpose of agendizing for the next meeting that it will be an action item pertaining to our masking policy in association with whatever else that that agenda item might say this is to give our constituents the courtesy of knowing that they were heard and that we're gonna you know i can answer that the reason you can't vote on it tonight is because there's a law called the brown act where you have to publish stuff like this 72 hours in advance it's just the law so i would be in favor of that but um so just for our point of order just yeah we're having a discussion right now yeah just for our discussion on the agenda let's get on with that so um what we need is a second to suspend the rules um and so i would like to i would like to second it with an amendment um the amendment i'm going to offer is that we um we leave this on the agenda for later also so that we if there is anything that comes up between now and the end of the meeting that any of us would like to add on the agenda we have the opportunity to do that so actually to do it twice tonight um and agendas i don't have the opportunity to agendize items now and also have the opportunity to agenda items when it is normally on our um on our agenda later in this meeting so we have a would that be a friendly amendment yes i would accept that and consider it friendly okay um so we have a motion and a second and um if i need to repeat that will you do i need to repeat the motion with the amendment okay so the motion is that we are going to suspend the rules and um move our agenda item that is bored it gets a little wordy so i'm looking for my my cue cards here it's a agenda item thank you 12 which is board member request to agenda's item thanks matt's on it um i can't find it in my packet and with the amendment that we will also do do that again at agenda item 12 so we're going to do it now and then um so again roll call vote all votes tonight will be roll call because we have president kaiser telecommuting for this meeting starting with member robinson because i'm going to vote no i'm going to explain why before i vote no which is my which is my right as a board member this is um a meeting of the board of education you are all invited here as um as this is our meeting and not this is not this is not a town hall that is a different type of meeting it's not so this is our time to speak this is our meeting to hold and we have the right to hold our meeting and member robinson has the right to speak so please stop interrupting her thank you um we have received assurances from the superintendent that the item will be on the march 9th board meeting and that it will be an information action item and i um i will not vote to [Music] cast aspersions to the superintendent's word that that will happen i trust her i believe the board should trust her and i also believe that by the vote tonight without having the specific agenda item before us with a recommendation that we are giving a false a false indication as to what that particular agenda item needs to be and how the vote might happen we don't know where we're going to be as far as the california department of public health i do not want to believe that i give people a false impression from me that a decision by this board has already been made we have sent communication to our public officials indicating that we want the mandate to be made locally controlled that went out signed by the board approved by the board so we have taken action consistently to say that we do want local control from the state department of public health but that as long as the state department of public health has made a lawful mandate i believe it is my fiduciary responsibility as a board member to follow it it's the law i vote no we're voting to suspend the rules or not to agenda as an item okay come on okay so we are um we are doing item number 12 board member request to agenda's item do i have a motion from a member to agendize an item at this time i move that chico unified school district's masking policy be agendized either in and of itself or as a subset of another agenda item for possible action at our next board meeting that's i thought that's what we just voted on i'll second that and do we have discussion we can't really discuss too much i guess because yeah it's not on the agenda um i'm considering an amendment i don't know that it needs to be agendized um but yeah i'm just gonna leave it at that actually um if there's no proper discussion then we can vote on this as well so the motion is to um agendize this discussion on covet update policies with especially masking as an action item at our next board meeting yes and it's been seconded by mr orlando um we'll take a roll call vote starting with member robinson thank you madam vice president about half of what i said was because i misunderstood what we were voting on but it it still applies um to my no vote on this item i believe it's already a settled item and i don't believe we need to take any further action orlando i still dolby i tennis eye sir um do we have any other members that want to agendas at this time um i would i would actually like to move to agendas i don't actually know that this would be an agenda item because it's not for a future meeting but something that a public person just did say is i guess it's a question for staff um if the current mandate changes to being under district control before our next board meeting is there a policy in place that we will call a special meeting at that time so our current policy states that the uh chica unified school district will follow the law we will not go beyond the law um and we will not go below the law we will follow what the law is so if it was to be lifted then we would immediately lift the mandate right so what i'm i guess what my concern is is if there's big shocker that california could leave some gray area and basically say it's up to the district so if it's if they're saying it's up to the district then that basically means it's that's not not the law anymore that is correct okay got it so so can we is it is it appropriate to to let the audience know that let's just say next friday we get an announcement that they are now putting the policy making on the district the decision making on the district for masking that chico unified will be lifting the masking mandate that is correct thanks superintendent haley um okay so we're going to move on to our next item if i can find it in my packet thank you we are um on agenda item number eight it's the consent calendar um do we have any public comment on consent calendar okay um are there any emotions associated with an agenda item on the consent calendar yes um for bookkeeping i need to pull the uh minutes from our last meeting so we will pull 8.1.1 8.1.1 the minutes from the last meeting are there any other requests dr kaiser do you have a request no i don't think so okay thank you are you ready for motion uh yeah uh is there any sorry is there is there a motion for passing the consent calendar minus item 8.1.1 yes i move approval of the consent calendar with the exception of the uh of 8 1 the minutes of february 2nd i'll second that all right so we have a motion from member robinson a second from member lando we'll do a roll call vote starting with member robinson oh robinson aye lando aye dolby eye tennis eye nicer okay so that passes um now our pulled item is the approval of the minutes um item 8.1.1 uh mr lando you pulled the item did you want to discuss oh yeah i pulled the item just because i need to abstain from it as i was president of that meeting so that said go ahead that's it i thought it was going to be something more exciting than that i move approval of the minutes and i'll second them okay great um another roll call vote starting with uh remember robinson robinson i landed upstairs dolby ai tennis eye thank you all right passes with four one of stein from mr lando alrighty moving on to item nine uh discussion action calendar number one is board point one one point nine point one point one is um approval of updated board policy so i would like to invite mr john shepard up to discuss this but as he's making his way up which he did really quickly i'd like to talk about the process here we are going to see a presentation first and then to help us better understand the california civic engagement and then the board will be asked to vote on board policy that ties to uh the civic engagement so with that i'm going to turn it over to mr shepherd thank you superintendents daily so as you can see in your packet we're we're bringing this updated board policy to you and it's not lost on us that it's focused uh this presentation is focused on civic engagement but there's also some other aspects of that board policy that we want to make sure we highlight so i've asked mr carris to come up and talk about just some of the other pieces of it so it's not we're not just talking about the seal of civic engagement yeah this board policy previous to tonight included the golden state merit seal as well as the state seal of by literacy there's very slight there's a very slight language change to the state seal of bi-literacy language to reflect um current ed code basically what what happened was there's a suspension of the elpac test based on the fact that it wasn't given um due to covid um in 1920 so that's reflected here that's the only change in those first two awards that were previously in this policy so we're excited to introduce gina snyder from chico high school and beth burton from pleasant valley high school and they're going to walk you through a presentation that we think will cement our recommendation that you take action to update this board policy as the father of two daughters in chico unified i've always wondered how they're going to be able to compete with other students and in addition to obviously we had many examples of civic engagement tonight we also want to make sure our kids are competitive as they as they leave our schools so there are many benefits to this update and ms burton and ms snyder will walk you through the presentation hi board superintendents uh thank you for having us here i wish the rest of the group was here because this is what we're talking about is civic engagement uh showing up to a meeting letting your voice be heard uh any kids here who's left or ah so that's who we're really looking at getting those kids the little boy who came and gave his speech yes like just getting the confidence to come up and talk to the board how to engage how to write those emails all those things and that's really what we're getting at uh with the seal of civic engagement a little bit of background with the seal so back in 2020 the state board of education shifted the program originally it was an entire school that could earn a seal of civic engagement in 2020 it shifted to individual students could now earn a seal that would go on their diploma they made some criteria and we locally get the choice of how we're going to implement that criteria uh so myself and a number of my colleagues at pleasant valley as well as jake sarah at chico high we worked with the glenn county office of education all through 2020 into 2021 examining what the seal would look like and going through the process to allow our students in chicago unified all students juniors and seniors to go after the seal so let's talk a little bit with this in case you didn't know northern california is considered a civics desert there is not civics education uh taught at a high level uh both pleasant valley and chico high have advanced placement government politics we also have on college prep government classes and civics should be taught in eighth grade when you're looking at us history and again as a social science person throughout all of your courses not just in social science classes but in english science math you name it uh civics should be there in 2019 pleasant valley did earn the distinction of earning that civic learning award of merit and so our kids were recognized by the butte county courts as well as from the state superintendent for earning that distinction and so now we get the opportunity for our students to pursue that seal so what we did at pleasant valley is i ran focus groups with my own classes as well as a sampling of kids from both college prep um modified classes and my other ap classes and we did is we ran this group so we asked kids to adhere to the norms so how to actually engage in a conversation it's okay to abstain if you're not comfortable talking about something all of your responses are valid yes we want to hear what you have to say because your opinions matter we ask you to stay on topic try not to interrupt people speak as openly as you feel comfortable so again these are the norms that we're teaching our kids how to have civic engagement um here's the criteria that the state put up and i'm not going to read all that i think you have the packet but here's what the state set up for us to do wanting you to be engaged in academic work demonstrating the understanding of the us constitution and yeah got a prop so yes i do have my constitution pretty much in my backpack at all times i think it's important for kids and this is the textbook really in my classroom you know we go through the constitution uh fairly regularly uh also noting what the california constitution deals with as well as tribal uh constitutions and how those run we ask our kids to get involved in civic engagement projects and we'll talk about those in just a second and we ask them to demonstrate knowledge so yeah they have to take the u.s citizenship test they have to pass the u.s citizenship test also reflecting those character traits so being able to come to a board meeting being able to go to any type of public forum and let their voices be heard and again this is not partisan this is not political we're just asking our kids to come to a meeting we're asking our kids to get involved so what we did with the kids in the junior and senior year this is really where they can use outside work that they're doing so if they're in boy scouts if they're an ffa if they're in any type of church group organization yeah absolutely count that towards their civic engagement um so this is where the the board and the district comes into play so we set up our local qualifiers but it has to be verified so the district office they would have to verify gpa stuff they'd have to verify passing of exams that kind of work because we as teachers we can verify with students and what we plan on doing is doing exit interviews uh reflection journals things like that but it really is the district who will present the award hey well one of the wonderful things when we were talking about this and some points that were brought up that this isn't just a distinction for those high level kids everybody gets this opportunity because it doesn't have to be oh you have to have four years of science and this and that to get some seal of you know honor or uh this is really trying to hit every kid out there to provide them with those opportunities so that's the big attraction um on our on our end and uh talking about that has been super inspiring with my department at chico high and uh when i was presenting it with to them uh they got super excited about it and beth made the great point that we do a lot of these things already with our students and now we're just sort of trying to formalize it capture it and honor them for those that hard work so that's what we appreciate about this opportunity for our students i've got a question on that point and this might be kind of a high high level question um perfect so um by the way um beth i thoroughly enjoyed our conversation the other day we were able to kind of go through this stuff and i was able to get clarity and and become more comfortable with it and stuff like that um with the phase out of sats and acts for uc and csu admission do you see this seal as maybe being something that high achieving students will consider to be or will become just a standard item that that that applicants to you know prestigious prestigious california universities will pretty much have to have i can you know look into the future yeah please do the prediction um that yeah this would be one of those things so if i can put i'm an eagle stout on an application bam that's going to set me apart from how many other applicants if i can put that i'm involved and not just in an organization maybe i'm a leader in an organization since this is brand new to the state of california i think fresno is the only school district who has actually given out seals at this point but really our class of 2022 would be part of that first group of seniors that could earn the seal and my one of my goals is for those kids who are already doing a lot of these things within the next two months they could actually graduate with the seal of civic engagement on their pv chico high fairview diploma you're speaking my language talking about eagle scouts and stuff like yes you had some dad to your point um i made the point that this is for everybody but kids who are like highly motivated might take this and run with it because like beth was saying you want to be able to set yourself up set yourself apart in some way to make yourself competitive on a piece of paper for those admission officers so this could become part of that norm um what i think we would be careful to make sure that we're doing is that it doesn't become an elite thing is that we make sure that we are catering to all levels of students all different activities all different interests not just those you know hard charge and ap kids who want to go to all the ucs or private schools out there so yes i could see this being a platform for that but i also think that we have a commitment to make sure that it's levelized for everybody madam superintendent do you think now is a good time for me to ask about what i was going to maybe ask about in terms of the actual policy stuff that's written in the policy or should i wait until dr kaiser has a question right now so it might be that dr kaiser has a question related to the presentation sure okay thank you thank you my question is that um and uh it's kind of reflected in the language so we say that anyone can uh go for this and we want to recognize all kinds of service and my attention is taken back to the students that we had a couple of weeks ago who came and did their presentation on recycling and those were special needs students but certainly their work about recycling for different groups and bringing it back and you know using the money for effective things i just am wondering as a sort of a a deterrent to us getting locked into it's only for kids going to berkeley or duke to go for this that we could really keep it open that a lot of students might be doing things that are very much civic engagement and not recognize that as what they're doing i definitely hear those concerns so yeah and again this is something it's been a working draft since last may i believe i shared the working draft with the board as well as our admin last may as we've been putting this together and as we've been more and more formalizing things over the last oh yeah almost yeah nine months at this point that yes i'd love for those additional inputs because we did make changes from student request because i had a student who was in modified u.s history the original criteria said college prep or ap but the student says well i couldn't even earn this because i was in modified you're absolutely right we need to make sure we have accommodations in place for students so that again there's we're lowering barriers for kids to actually earn the award um and again one of the things that we talked about or the kids brought to me is like could we have different levels i said well that's beyond my you know you know permission to do that we're gonna have a gold silver and bronze level award and i said again this is i'm just trying to get it out there for kids to earn it once we get deeper into this we may be able to delineate what that would look like so one of the things i did want to share with you before we go on um and this was my way to kind of get kids excited about this so you know a college prep kid a modified kid um are they enrolled in an 11th or 12th grade social science class again doesn't say college prep doesn't say ap just are you in a class did you pass an 11th or 12th grade class with the c are better okay so again we're trying to hit those kids who maybe didn't have all a's in their classes but they're going to show us in other ways that they're there yeah sorry when um so this slide says 11 to 12 but you said 11 or 12 so is it 11 or 12.
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we we never considered lifting the last landing ever not one time ever because the governor the governor's executive order left it in place okay so then we're looking at half this number two like what is what would be a number you know just out off you know the bench market we're waiting for guidance from the state department of health before we make those decisions um they uh tell us it's it's in the coming days that we'll receive that guidance but we won't be making any decisions on that until we see the recommendations from the state and does do we have any data showing any actual results from kids wearing masks and others not wearing masks as far as data showing that it they work or not because we know that there's significant scientific data saying that they are being affected socially learning developing speech so i'm wondering to those factors get weighed in with um [Music] basically the children having to take on that burden for possibly an adult that would be vaccinated and if so chooses to mask where a child perhaps isn't going to get vaccinated and should be able to speak smile so i'm just wondering is is that calculated in with the face masks and lifting the masks and how the children are affected not necessarily by spreading the uh the covid which is i believe a strain of the flu um but the damage that's being done and there are results and studies um clearly defining that as opposed to the ones that i have read there's not really any case study that i can find in the 150 that i was looking through right here and highlighting and so i'm wondering you know when does that weigh in to the decision that the board will make regarding lifting masks yeah dr beg your question i understand the uh psychological concerns and the effect real is your question um having to do with whether there's any effectiveness and decrease in the spread of uh covid when someone were to ask is that your question yes that's one of them i could say with 100 confidence that the use of masks absolutely decreases the spread of coven and furthermore decreased spread of other viruses including the flu rsv and the light what what uh it also suggests is the type of mask uh dictates the um the percent chance uh the overall chance that the virus will be red meaning if you wear a an n95 mask where it's fitted and really superior face granted uncomfortable the chance of spread is sniff though the next level is a surgical path on down to a cloth uh or what have you so uh yes with confidence and again the the purpose of this meeting is to um see what point we will transition um and that's for the rest of the group here to render everyone i'm sorry from the information that i had read the increase possibly um for extra protection if you wear the n95 mask is somewhere around 20 but once the mask is worn for a period of like 20 minutes if it there is any transformation of fluid um that the mass starts to break down and is not effective it is also not recommended on case studies done from the the um cdc the work i mean basically what they're saying is that they're not effective in my role as a er doctor and as a administrator within the network for which we all live that early in the pandemic when uh staff had asked not only for hours at a time but the same mask for more than one shift at a time that if they wore their mask uh appropriately and properly they did not could cove the masks did not break down it's for either improper use or not wearing the next that's where um patients are in staff and or at risk wear them wrong they don't wear them properly dr peck if i can ask you to re-answer a question you actually answered for us two years ago um because you clarified it very nicely covered 19 is not in any way shape or form a strain of the flu correct it's covered and it's on the spectrum of in fact covid the coronavirus itself is within a spectrum of milder cases or severe cases this brain that has taken the lives of almost 850 000 americans today has been the more severe strain the omicron was actually more uh transmissible but less deadly but the fact remains though within our hospital network we actually reach levels of uh admission uh that we had seen during the first weight of the pandemics though yes there's a virus and it is much more lethal than the than the flu so to suggest it's it's similar to the fluid is not an appropriate medical representation of of the cova-19 virus thank you well didn't the omeron become a respiratory infection which is why it wasn't as deadly and at the same time was not effective with the masks with the booster shot as well as people that were double and triple vaccinated so um i understand that it isn't is it deadly but my understanding was that corona was somehow affiliated with or a strain of the flu and this last go-around a lot of people got infected but it was nowhere near deadly i mean how many people from the omaron um i i could play with it was absolutely deadly it was not as deadly as the first wave but we still have upwards of two to three thousand americans per day die and i personally witnessed multiple people in the hospital system within the last few days and weeks die from this variant granted it's not as deadly as the first wave but it is absolutely still a deadly exponentially more um concerning than than the flag doctor would like to make a comment on the masks please please please kathy i'm sorry so in terms of our masks effective um i absolutely believe that they are and uh we have the data to support that in the schools um every time we have returned from a holiday we have seen a tremendous peak in positive cover cases because people have been out of school not wearing masks gathering with families gathering socially i remember just before the christmas break um one day we had 20 cases reported and that was very concerning to me because that was one of the highest numbers we had had um and we were reaching case numbers you know in the in the 30s for the week the week we came back from christmas we had 179 cases so that tells me that you know people were were socializing and gathering as as they do over the holidays and as we were back in school we were seeing the masks being worn we can now see how much our case rates are coming down and is there the data that you have do you have that that you can forward to it's on our dashboard if you look on our day um all right from the day we started the dashboard a year and a half ago all the case is there um and we're not seeing the spread in school in school transmission is very low i'm not saying it doesn't exist but it is extremely low and then when we have these holiday breaks that's when we see the cases spike again so right because we saw that coming in october and there was anticipation back in july when they were originally going to lift the mandate that there was supposed to be another round coming in november december so it was anticipated correct i'm sorry can you repeat that question in other words did we not have information um anticipating or uh stating that the um coronavirus or the whatever you want to call it omron was there was going to be another uh wave of it in november december usually when it's flu season um i did hear that is that not the case that we kind of as a state anticipated that happening right because when people aren't vaccinated and then more people get coded um that allows the virus to mutate so that's why you know we are we are advocating for vaccines because that's our one of our best mitigation tools that we have right now but as long as then how do you how do you get it again then if you take the vaccine twice if you've got both vaccines and a booster how is it that you can still get covet because one it's a this is a different variant and the vaccine doesn't say you'll never get covered the purpose of the vaccine is to prevent you from getting seriously ill and ending up in the hospital and possibly dying that's the goal of the vaccine yeah well originally the definition of vaccine was different right yeah after bag i'll let you speak to that i tell you from the hospital experience it's crystal clear there are three buckets of people those who did not get vaccinated had um ten times the uh uh poor out poor outcomes than those who were fully vaccinated with the booster um the once in the middle were those who received the first two vaccinations but not the booster um we still had uh admissions but they they're uh we're tailored with minimal compared to those not vaccinated the only ones who were vaccinated and had the booster that were admitted were the ones who already had uh private logic history of it being immunocompromised uh but there was a significant a difference in those who had bad outcomes when you were not vaccinated versus when you were special isn't there another bucket for the people that have immunity isn't that a bucket as well how does that get addressed because that's very that's a very good point but the data suggests that if you took two groups someone who got the vaccine as who got covered the ones who uh got the actual vaccine um did much better in the long term as far as any additional infection versus those who got one round of covered virus without the vaccine so um so while getting cold it does provide some degree of immunity it's not nearly as good as those who get the vaccine but that's actually a very fair point okay because i had heard that 27 higher um effectiveness if it was a natural if you had it um you know if you had received it you could be asymptomatic and not even know that you had covid um so i just don't understand why people that have already had the covid maybe once maybe twice aren't considered in the bucket that you just pointed out again just because the data shows very clearly that when you compare the two groups those who had no vaccination but a round of a covered virus for those the vaccination those who received the vaccination statistically did much better with less much less mortality or morbidity morbidity meaning they had some long-term effects and those who had therapeutics that apparently shortens and also reduces the um the symptoms and the outcome is that another bucket that would be considered you know what that's a very good question but the reality is the number of people who were within the window of being diagnosed and then within the window of a couple days and then getting the um the monoclonal antibody it was there it was literally a handful less than 10 each day so that did not make a statistically significant difference in the overall um care of our patients i will say that when we end up getting that oral agent that's readily available that will that will make it but that's not readily available just yet but the therapeutics were not made available correct like that was not an option for people the way that the vaccine is being pushed with clinics correct like you just were not able to really get your hands on it is that correct the reason why people were had minimal opportunities because by the time you ended up getting the diagnosis for you to still be within that window of of just a few days for it to make different so that was the biggest you face okay thank you very much no doctor i i just want to say that your questions are really good and i want to say that you may not believe it but i also want to see the day when our children do not have to wear uh masks i think the only thing where we differ is what's that date but again i i believe i actually do see a lot of your points thank you that's what i i want to know when that day or what the metrics are so you can say no mask i haven't heard that we'd all like to know that and from my understanding the csd the state department of education and the state department of public health we are going to set criteria and guidelines around how to make the decision number one and number two how to um set guidelines for when it is optional we're still we they are working around the clock and as from what i heard being on the call just uh yesterday um and they're getting that to us hopefully yeah and if anything what what the last year should tell us is we need to be humble and and eliminate hubris every time we think we know this is gone or every time we think this is over it's demonstrated we were wrong we thought it was over in the spring we were wrong we thought it was over in the summer we were wrong we thought it was over in the fall here comes omicron um it looks like we're trending in the right direction right now i'm not going to crawl out in that limb and assume that i know anything about what the future's going to hold because i don't um and it just to me it's just hubris assuming that we know what's going to happen in three weeks um doctor question for you um in the emergency room setting um what were you were you seeing a lot of pediatric cases or adolescent cases um over the last you know few weeks six weeks four weeks three weeks two weeks so a great question what's really interesting um we were but because they present with some variable complaints many times we kind of backed into the diagnosis meaning that they had uh signs of a pretty significant upper respiratory infection which we couldn't get her figure out what's going on and then we tested them in their positive or they were being admitted for uh appendicitis or or or they broke their arm and they were going to be admitted for surgery and we tested and they were passed with that subset of folks what we found is that if you had the virus you had some other medical problem your you it took you longer to recover and you had a more protracted course or you had more severe so that's what we the general um idea of what we found was thank you and i know i'm sorry i have i have i'm sorry one more question i see that the rates have gone down you said for the younger children which is fantastic but i'm just wondering have you seen an an uptick in you know mental health depression with children have you seen a spike there as far as uh your treatments and diagnosis well i don't have specific data the overall my overall gestalt over the last two years is yes okay so that is i'm assuming uh a really really important matter for the board to consider when um the percentage for the face mask versus uh you know the impact and and uh every day they wear those masks they're suffering many of them many of them already are fine with it but many really struggle so i think every day that we uh postpone is you know something to consider i i and again i i just want to be honest with my answer that we absolutely but the bump we don't know the exact reason it's partly maybe from what you described but it's also partly because the children have lost grandparents uh they've uh they've had other issues associated with the virus family members have um lost their jobs um and there's been other structures but uh granted that some of the stress is from what you describe as well we just don't know the exact percent okay that's what i wanted to ask you doctor just to clarify it's that that increase in emotional issues isn't necessarily tied to masks per se it's the whole global mess it's it's the glow it's the all the issues associated with the pandemic and part of it is part of it is the stressors that we hear some of our concepts right for sure thank you i'm sorry kelly no that's okay go ahead i'm sorry that's okay um i was just going to ask joe if i could ask a question at the medical of course okay of course that's where they're here to steer it in a slightly different direction do we have any guidance as to when vaccination will be available for the under five set no we'll just change that i think pfizer just went through their request did i'm sorry i couldn't hear you that's okay i'm sorry so what would that mean for us you know what is the um so is if there is no longer a projection if you're saying that uh pfizer just withdrew the request um for fda approval what is the is there a projection is there any sort of guidance you could give us for the students who and the families who have children in our district and the teachers who have children uh under five um is there anything to look forward through to down the pike for the possibility of vaccination you know in a month two months i know you're more up on on the information than i am so i'm hoping that there's something hopeful you can tell us in that round yeah they're supposed to reassess in april they're supposed to be they're waiting for some more data to come out in april and then there will be um another discussion starting then so i don't think it's too far off um i i do think it is coming i just i i don't know the exact time frame and anyone else who feel free to weigh in who might know more details but um i do think it's coming it's they're just waiting for more data yeah i know you're right karen and the challenge gonna be um if and when that when when the time comes when it comes um because it's gonna be the under five population the actual dose of vaccine is gonna be different so that creates a little bit of an extra layer of um challenge for us if the record was for adults um and you already have the adult a vaccine manufactured uh and we already knew how to give it in that arena then it would be a little bit easier you give you know temperatures or whatever it's going to be it's an extra layer for us to get it out uh to the under five population thank you both and we haven't talked about i'm sorry kelly we haven't talked about vaccination rates i mean we can we compared um positivity rates but do we know how we compare and vaccination rates to other cities now good question kara can you share that information regarding vaccination mates sure so um we did a comparison of danbury brookfield new fairfield bethel new milford ridgefield newtown and reading um so uh we're pretty consistent um so our i'll tell you what the highest is um we're for our five to 11 population right now we're at 31 uh percent oh good you can show the graph um uh this is a little bit this is last week's but um so we have a little bit more date updated but it's very it's it's people are off um so you can see where the green and the rest of the colors are the surrounding towns so um five to eleven uh we are oh you know that's 29 we're at 31 percent now um we're still at 78 percent for 12 to 17 population and uh for 18 to 24 we're at 64 um so you can kind of see a comparison of where we are to the surrounding towns on this graph and that's fully vaccinated yes this is fully vaccinated and not necessarily boostered right yep just full that's this is just uh taking into account two doses and that's citywide that's not damper schools that's this isn't school related this is municipality related yes yep this is thanks cara thank you if i could just next one other piece of information uh mr walleston had also asked me to connect uh with a child a psychiatrist and so i did consult with dr landau who is affiliated with yale um he's also done some work with us with our pupil services staff and the particular conversation there was to focus on the lens of the social emotional impact on that mask wearing um can have on some children um and so i'll just share his perspective with the team for consideration in making this decision um some of the information has been previously brought up but i think it's important just to note um that one of the things to consider is the lack of children's ability to see facial expressions which has impact impacted their ability for socialization their ability to um read and engage with their with their peers or adults um there is also um a challenge at times with children at the younger years learning to read um and it's difficult to hear sounds through the mask um and particularly for speech and pronunciation with some of our younger folks um not to mention some of our students who have uh deficits or struggles in that area that those can be compounded um for the um upper uh you know middle school and high school age students again very similarly not as not as profound of an impact on the pronunciation and hearing but still the reading of facial cues and expressions is another thing to know also to consider he had mentioned that um you know some students are going to have a difficulty um when it is time to remove the mask it has been another layer another protection um and so for some that could be a mask he gave one example hiding um you know teen acne or things like that so it could just be another layer for as an adjustment as kids um make a transition uh at whatever time um this team decides um but he did also suggest that this information be met uh be merged with the medical folks and experts information when making a decision so i just wanted to note that and highlight and i know we had one other piece of information um michael c league had um conducted a commun a survey outreach to some of our parents um and while it is representative of a smaller portion i think it's important for us to know um who responded and what the thoughts were there so mike thanks kelly so in combination with our office of family engagement and dr anmead we um we put out a uh we actually made it an email address we didn't want to just have it a click yes or no type of thing we wanted to actually hear what people had to say about it and we went back and coded all the different emails that we responded we received about 339 and we coded them into three categories one was keep the mandate one was lift the mandate the other was some combination of give people a choice maintain some social distancing if they choose to remove the mask let teachers have a say in what goes on in their classroom some some sort of in between so keep the mask mandate came in at about 38 lift the mandate was about 30 percent and the sort of give people a choice social distancing kind of half in between was about thirty one percent [Music] uh go back uh i just wanna say that a that data on the one-third one-third one-third split is actually very helpful and also that the physician's report on the effects of masks on children was very insightful and i'm very appreciative we got that uh balance to the report as well very helpful thank you thank you dr beck and i'd also like to remind the board we did receive um feedback from the teachers union as well that was distributed to all board members we received a letter from the secretary's union i believe as well didn't we right when she didn't take a position it was just do it thoughtfully i think was their position right right have certain metrics to to guide the decision right rachel are we gonna are the letters that were submitted um or emails from the public being read at the next hearing or how does i know that at times we read them out during the hearing but i didn't see that happen at the last one so i'm just wondering is that part of the hearing part of it is not part of public participation no the emails that had been read in the past were when we were doing emails in lieu of public participation because the public couldn't come um the correspondence we generally received we wouldn't read out at a meeting i see so much michael what you're basically saying is like roughly as dr banks said a third or third and a third defended basically three groups of people definitively all over the place yes and i don't know whether this goes to karen or rachel because you're on the call or um we're expecting new guidance soon but we don't know what soon means yeah both um dph is supposed to put out new guidance specifically about going mask optional and then also it was reported that the cdc is going to be issuing new indoor mask guidance uh sometime as early as next week so is it is it to the extent that you're making any recommendation are you recommending we wait for that guidance before we decide to do anything cara you're you're the health director i'm going to defer to you and you and dr beg on this stuff and kathy yeah i think in order to make a more formal recommendation i would feel more comfortable having that information from both the state dph and cdc if they're going to make significant changes to their guidance over the next week or so that i would like to hear what they have to say so then what makes us different than the surrounding towns that have made decisions and then they're going to wait and hear what happens they've made decisions that are inconsistent with the guidance that's currently out by the state department of public health care actually answered that question earlier so the decisions they made are actually inconsistent with the recommendations they've been given by the state at least by the current recommendations yeah i i really feel that it was premature to vote on anything without i mean number one anything could happen between now and when the order is lifted essentially um so i if it's if right right and i know that um norwalk has paused on making any decision um stanford is extending is waiting i think a month to make it any decision as well um and i i think i heard i could be wrong i think i heard bridgeport was going um was keeping mass for the rest of the school year through june there yes and perhaps there was one other was it new haven might have been new it might have been new haven can i ask one question more how come three united states in the united states don't have this but we're we've become such a nanny state how come only 11 states in the country have this business and we have more important things to think about it should be up to the parents this is not up to us what if they want to wear a mask fine but this is not our role actually terry respectfully you're wrong it is absolutely our role to protect the students in our school it's kara and dr begg's role to advise us on how we best do that and scientific excuse me excuse excuse me excuse me excuse me that's silly our positivity rates 10 when we were trying to flatten the curve the positivity rate was that excuse me our positivity rate wasn't 10 and we started flattening the curve that's the whole point this is what i'm talking about before about hubris when we think we know what we're doing it demonstrates that we don't i'm not suggesting we need to extend this mass mandate to the end of june i'm not sure suggesting we do anything of the sort i'm suggesting that i think karen and dr bank have a point we wait for the guidance and we wait to see what the data says going forward it is absolutely our job with the advice of our medical professionals that's why we have them to act to protect the students in our school is including but not limited to the whole building on granville avenue full of students who cannot be vaccinated because they're not old enough or the students in our elementary schools who can't be vaccinated either because they're not able to be vaccinated for medical reasons or their parent hasn't been able to get them vaccinated for whatever reason or teachers who i happen to know two or three teachers that have had children this year that have been out on maternity leave they have infants at home that can't be vaccinated so there are considerations beyond just the notion of it's that easy achievement it's their business that's their choice excu excuse me respectfully no it's our job to manage the schools and provide policy that's our job and that's the point that would decay i think karen dr begger making that we wait for the guidance to determine what's the safest way to operate our schools if you look at the definition of public health it's essentially making decisions on behalf of the greater good to decrease to increase the um the health and well-being of the public so that's like the most basic tent of public health is what's making decisions on behalf of the greater good um cara you may want to elaborate i just so is there like so is there a decision made i'm not sure like we've already made a decision but what is the point of the board then i'm so confused and frustrated tonight we're not well we have to be careful and kim's going to like yell at me in a minute for sharing this meeting in this way because we have to be careful that the degree that which members who are not on the committee participate i obviously anybody who's a member of the board of education can participate tonight we just have to be careful as a general rule going forward that we don't create a foia problem when we're all participating in a committee meeting because we make up a majority um can you guys hear me because it looks like i'm freezing you're free yeah i can hear you can hear you okay lauren i don't i i think it's the way i'm understanding things from cara it is not advisable to make any decision this evening and the this committee can't make any decision anyway all this committee can do is recommend things to the board that that okay it seems that karen and dr begger not advising we do anything at this point good or bad for to extend or not extend until we get data and advice from the cdc and department of public health is that accurate care is that your advice for now yes that would be my we have a board meeting next week so it's not as if we're not meeting again soon we can address this again close soon yes michelle i'm sorry may i ask you a question so you had mentioned the um the infection rate and that we can't uh you know vaccinate um sure we can't right granville we can't vaccinate them so is there a difference is there a significant increase between transmission at that school percentage or ratio wise as opposed to others where we can see significant data or um i think everybody's wearing a mask right now so it might be hard to bring that data down kathy alter to you on this in terms of we didn't community spread we did see community spread after the holiday it's hard to know whether it was in school out of school there were so many cases is there a way to break down that data granville versus other places uh well it would be on the dashboard the the number of cases that have been reported at granville and um it has not been as many as some of the other schools but it's also a much smaller population smaller right but we were talking i mean you can you can break out the percentage but what we were just focusing was the the need uh for vaccination so i'm just wondering has there been any you know substantial difference between a school that has no vaccination and one that you know i don't know 70 30 whatever number you had quoted is already double vaccinated and possibly boosted so in terms of our schools we ask parents when your children are vaccinated will you share that information with us they are not obligated to do that some people have um the most information we got was back when we were doing contact tracing and quarantining in terms of so we do not the schools do not have accurate data as to how many children are actually vaccinated what we have are the percentages that um cara gives us from the city i'm just talking about percentage the percentage not of of the actual transmission from an area that has that from a school that is vaccinated pretty much and masked versus the um the the younger children that are not vaccinated but perhaps are wearing masks and if so we know that they're not wearing them properly because they're young we can't we we can't know how many kids are vaccinated in school that's the point not vaccine no i understand that but the ratios okay okay i'm just looking at this i have a couple i have a couple questions um the first one and i apologize i'm going in a different direction here do i understand correctly there's still a federal mandate as far as wearing masks on trans pub school transportation right and that's that's not uh scheduled to be reviewed at any point soon from what i understand is that right as well and then my other question is about you know the density of population in our schools i mean i think one of the conversations we frequently have around the table is um the the crowded nature of our schools particularly at the high school but also in our in our other schools as well um to what degree does that become a factor as far as you know um determining what the appropriate actions are to take you know given that social distancing is considered one of the main mitigating factors that we've used i mean to the point where we had our school system closed last year we had our schools close the buildings um you know to to try to give um you know to to create conditions that were protective enough for the for the students so to what degree does that also you know does that continue to be an issue for us um i think it continues to be an issue you know for every layer of mitigation that you remove if you're not able to increase some of the other layers um then yes it is a concern um and you know as as we all know um you know the distancing we we aim for six but we are we're lucky if we can do three feet um you know moving forward um you know hopefully this weather will will change in in the next month or so we'll be able to open more windows so that's another um the ventilation will be able to improve but you know for every layer that you remove you have to be able to amp something else up i'm sorry but i the guideline changed i don't know maybe six months ago but it's three feet of distance now that is suggested um not the six but three is the new like five days three feet now six has always been the goal but three feet is acceptable and it has been for quite some time okay so that's pretty much what it's been kind of reduced to to make things happen right in offices schools you know three feet to come back right for us okay i just wanted to make sure that that was the actual number and six speed is desired but three feet is what's recommended by the guidelines correct it's acceptable okay thank you lauren um can you just explain because maybe parents that are watching are as confused as i felt um can you explain that this is a policy committee meeting and that there's nothing happening absolutely go and explain that because this is frustrating for us so i can only imagine parents at home are like what where's we're not having to like i just i know it's a really good idea no really really good idea lauren thank you yeah to to for anybody that wasn't the here at the beginning this is a policy committee meeting um we cannot take the policy committee can make recommendations to the board of education as a whole it cannot act on behalf of the board or bind the board of education more importantly the this is this meeting was to get information um to discuss some ideas and obviously there's a great divergence of opinion in in on on the committee and probably on the board as all which is good um and hopefully this was to get information and advice from kara our health director uh dr bang our medical advisor and kathy who obviously is on you know overseeing this stuff on a daily basis for the district and first off by the way thank you to kathy carr and dr beg for doing this um but that's what this is in lauren you're absolutely correct this is we're not taking action tonight um only the board can take action anyway and as i'm hearing it from our medical professionals it's not advised to do anything yet hopefully by next week we may actually by the next by the board meeting next week maybe we'll actually do something more take some more definitive action because terry we might get the benchmarks that you were looking for earlier um we may get those benchmarks from the state department of ed and from the cdc and hopefully we will because this way we know if we're what we're doing is at least you know has some you know guidance in science oh but yeah warren that's a great point this is just a committee meeting and this is an informational meeting we're not taking action tonight um the action will be the board of education would have to take the action this is just a committee thank you no thank you it's a good idea does anybody else have any questions for our medical professionals anybody okay of course i can't even hear me or did i freeze up again um if there's nothing else um can we let can we let can we free our doctors for the evening and cara yes excellent doctor beg thank you very much for giving us of your time actually i want to thank all the uh members who attended today for your comments um i will compliment you that you're um your um you've done your homework uh and i again i think i think we have more common ground than we don't we all want to do what's best for our children uh we do want to see that point when the masks are removed it's just a matter we got to find out uh we have to collectively decide based on uh guidance from the state um and our own internal metrics uh what that best state is but again i do want to thank everyone for their time their opinion i've actually learned a bit from this meeting well thank you thank you thank you doctor thank you kara um who's stuck in your office because i can see the light continuously go out keeps going out on you've been stuck here so long um and i'll leave i'll defer to rachel on this because she is our fearless leader but i'm guessing she is going to invite the two of you back for our next board meeting or at least that one upcoming if not the next one one coming soon probably not the next one but yeah soon okay don't mind yes and i also want to thank um kelly for taking the lead on behalf of the school you can be here and for all of our cabinet members who are here this evening thank you for your time and your input and i think this was incredibly helpful to have the conversation um and to begin learn to learn more about you know how this is impacting danbury specifically i mean we're we're very i've i've always said we're very unique in many many ways um we have to do what's right for danbury um period so um with that joe i think i think we'll just have to play it by ear yeah um and hopefully we'll receive further guidance from the state uh before the executive order is lifted and policy members be ready we may have another policy meeting coming up maybe in the next week uh certainly i would imagine the next two um [Music] but you know i definitely will be back together for sure um sooner rather than later i'm guessing questions comments thoughts if not i'll entertain a motion to adjourn the policy committee meeting so moved kate ii michelle seconds kate and michelle stucken kate made the motion michelle seconded uh kate michelle terry and bridget all those in favor aye aye eyes have it motion
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you can start the process in your junior year you cannot do things to count towards it in your 9th or 10th grade year okay so it could be 11th or 12th really this year i'm primarily focusing on the seniors okay um and like next year's juniors we would start with them pretty much day one of their classes to say hey this is available for you but if a junior maybe didn't do great their 11th grade year but then stepped it up 12th grade and the nice thing with our 12th grade social science classes their semester classes so you could get that qualifier in your fall semester in either your gov or your econ class and it was the opposite and they were rock stars their 11th grade year and then slacked off a little bit and they're smaller you know i understand senioritis and all that i've been teaching seniors for years and years my best year was my 11th grade year i'm just going to say a lot of kids um question is c level or better for the social science class is that aiming a little low and that was a question that at was asked in our department like should it be higher again we're looking at that kid who may be involved in a lot of different things and this is the grade that they're earning in the class i can again i understand that concern um that a c is too low but we're also looking at those kids who that is the best that they can do is earn a c i think what's nice is that it's not the only criteria oh yeah yeah so a c as a qualifier okay but then you have to have done all these other things too and that 60 percent or better is the entry level to actually get your us citizenship you have to get six out of ten questions so that's why we put it at 60 because that's the same if you want to become a citizen of the united states you have to get 60 on that test um so with your advice we did add some other extracurricular as well as co-curricular activities including ffa i know at pleasant valley we don't have ffa chico high does but including band drama csf cte program student newspaper again lots of different ways that students could fulfill that extracurricular piece as well as that second part having scouts having church youth groups having other organizations that students are involved in that absolutely because it's showing civic engagement i would count that towards it and again the nice thing is we have local accountability for our indicators the state said these are the criteria but we in chica unified can determine what that looks like so i believe you have access and this again is a live document that you know anybody can access that goes through what is in that state seal and i don't know if you wanted to go through specifically with that but i think i think i want to ask first if there are board member questions about this program in particular and then open it up also for the board policy that we will be voting on um thank you madam vice president hi beth um this is just so exciting um [Music] you know i i didn't i didn't do well academically in school but boy put me in front of a cattle judge and i could tell you why cow number one was better than cow number two better than you know the rest of the folks being able to express your ideas is so important no matter what the subject is you know and so i'm i'm thrilled i was thrilled when you first sent this out like you said eight years ago ago and i'm not bothered at all with the sea that was as good as i could do and i was working my fanny off in school um and it's it's it's a recognition of being part of your community and that is what we are wanting for all of our kiddos be part of your world and so i'm i'm thrilled and thank you for the work you guys are doing on this mr tennis i've thought a lot about this um and um paul gant i want you to be awake back there because you may be called up here to to chime in on a couple of things um engaging kids with civics i think it sounds awesome you know i mean i have worked in and out of politics been involved for a long time you know and i always kind of say like the canvas that politics is painted on in america is maybe this is a little different nowadays but apathy apathy is like like like the the baseline for what everything else takes place on top of most people are just kind of going along in life and you know you get into the rat race so the realities of putting food on the table and stuff like that when you become a grown-up a lot of times being involved in civics on any levels kind of down on the list but with kids in school you know we're catching them at a moment where you know in theory unless they're overwhelmed by their studies um i can relate to a lot of what you were saying full disclosure i mean if if if you guys could see some of my junior high report cards you would be shocked okay at what you would see and how poor my grades were on some of those but i think this sounds like a really really promising thing um i will be honest i did have some concerns and i know that um a lot of members in the community who i've been in communication with on this topic as it's kind of come to the fore also have concerns that um you know high school students if you will will be weaponized by uh people who have a political agendas you know as a way to get them to hit the the hit the streets you know campaigning for you know the pet projects of of you know influential teachers or something like that you know um and so that was kind of the focus of our conversation the other day and you really put my mind at ease about that um you know you mentioned how the district at least as long as you're involved in overseeing this roll out you know we'll take into consideration kids church involvement scouts involvement things like that i would like to see us be able to codify that so that beth burton when you're gone you know whoever whoever might replace you you know doesn't create that that multi-headed hydra civic seal program that that i'm would be afraid of and concerned about um so enter paul gantt at this point is there a way to when we approve this policy and maybe we can't throw language in there tonight but um to write this policy in such a way that some of what she talked about you know where like there was a pre-check list i don't know if you could see it mr gant but basically there it is right there you know it mentions that uh the pre-checklist a student is a member of the asb a school skype school site council scouts youth groups other leadership positions this is like these kids are out there in the world they're participating in a club of some kind can we codify that as part of this this little very little red regulation that that we're going to have on our books to signal to our community that that this is a uh this seal is is a program and is a is a a credential if you will that's kind of open to everybody uh so if we were to add this pre-check list right here into our that ms burton came up with um into this policy could we make that decision right now on the fly okay so i'll plan on raising that later unless you guys want me to raise it right now as a as a motion an amendment to the policy document um so i'll go with a member robinson with a question or comment um i wanted to to be clued as uh mr tennis is asking for too when we're ready for that kind of discussion slash modification to the um to the policy that we have in front of us tonight um i think that um what mr tennis is questions are appropriate just to get clarification on what we can or can't do with this policy um and then if he has an issue to bring up during our vote then he will um then then he will bring that forward in an emotion or an amendment possibly but we're not discussing that change at this time okay okay is that what was your concern well yeah i i had a suggestion and i uh it doesn't involve beth or i'm i'm sorry chico high staff person gina i missed that two summers um i i i just had a suggestion and uh need to know when to make it okay gotcha i think that we would have that discussion during our um when we were when we have a motion on the floor dr kaiser has a question or comment for the presenters um so we cannot hear the background discussion so i heard him calling on paul gant for legal advice but we couldn't hear any of that so please if there was to be some kind of directive make sure that it gets stated you know uh so that it can be heard yes thank you for the reminder um mr again would you please come up and just kind of summarize what you shared with us about um changing any kind of changes we might want to make to this policy so then i would have you uh after that just come back to me please yes you got it so typically uh matters such as proposed regulation or a proposed policy come to you in a draft form it's a proposed draft it's not the final as long as the topic is adequately described to the public on the agenda there's nothing to preclude the board from making amendments or technical uh changes in the language or in this example perhaps adding uh the pre-checklist as as as on the screen as an admin as an addendum or an attachment the only thing they do okay so so it it it it may well be something that you want to consider as you adopt it to explicitly include it or at least consider including it as part of or incorporated by reference the only thing i'll add to that just so we're clear in case other similar questions arise if if there are matters that are to be added to a regulation or policy that may not be in accordance with law or regulation state requirements uh that can raise issues so just be cautious about that and if there's you know if we can identify that our staff identifies that there could be an issue that's a situation where you would have to get some analysis from staff before you pass such a policy or regulation do you see anything here that raises red flags for you i haven't researched it but uh on the face of it no i don't i i suspect there's nothing that is listed in there that would be contrary to state law regulation i i see nothing unfortunately the presentation that's in our agenda the online agenda does not have the modifications that that ms burton mentioned on the second to last bullet down there that i like so much as i understand this these are these are examples of of various types of activities that may be in part uh the qualification but it's not it's not intended to be an exhaustive list like if you go on to the actual document it has this we're referring strictly to the board policy number 5126 document that's what we're going to be voting on right now except i'm going to propose an amendment to it okay i'm going to jump in here and say there's a couple different ways that we can do this we do have administrative regulations that define the board policies and really clearly state how we would implement board policies and this would be an excellent point to put this we could also put it as an addendum to the board policy sometimes in our board policies and we're searching furiously for an example um but in the policy we will have an a uh form here's the the form that is used we could attach the pre-check um to the board policy just like it is here with whatever amendments the board makes and then that would be um for reference in the board policy as well so i think there are absolutely ways to get to what you're trying to do here um i'd like to come back to dr kaiser please yes i want to be very careful that we don't list as if it were an expected requirement that something like the scouts is given when we know that they have run into many legal issues nationally as well as in the state so i think we want to be very careful and i'm going back to paul all these are are suggestions of where somebody might consider participating there may be a lot of other ones where they might think of that so i think it's important that we just keep these as potential ideas and not as any expected uh absolute requirement okay thank you dr kaiser um i do want to just remind the board that we are in question section right now so we should be asking technical questions um and we can get to further discussion um when we when we come to the motion um do we have any more technical questions for any of our speakers on this on this board policy awesome well thank you gina and beth you have more to say for us or anything else to add at this time we may bring it back up when it comes to the discussion time other than just the pre-check just think of it as a way for kids to look at it too to say oh look i'm already doing these things it's not i mean i don't think the intention was to codify that it was more like hey i'm already doing half or more of these things i'm well on my way and adding in that second to last bullet point was just another way of encapsulating that for kids like so whatever those amendments are things that you want to do with that i think yeah this was really the hook yeah this was saying hey kids are you doing this stuff sweet now let's look what the document says you need to accomplish right this is what this was i do have i guess one more question um and i already asked this kind of but would it be appropriate to just change the first two lines the first two bullets um to say 11 and or 12 just to be more clear i don't know it makes no difference to me okay sometimes it makes a difference for policy okay um [Music] i take it till you make it no just [Laughter] um all right i don't have any uh um remember robinson has another question yeah i i think the uh the answers have been in front of us the ar that follows a board policy is what will put all of those specifics down including the you know the and or or adding or subtracting the things on the pre-checklist that's the ars get developed in-house to go along with what we establish as board policy and i think that we've been pretty clear on what we want in the state zeal of civic engagement description so i don't think we need to worry unless administration has some kind of a worry that they need more in order to establish ars that follow right i think again that'll come into discussion when we get to that point um so um did we have public comment on this there's no public comment on this item okay thank you um oh we do a public comment yay we have public comment from the audience thanks for the reminder we do have an audience tonight it's so exciting so i'm not speaking as a pta representative my name is jessica hunt i'm speaking as a mom of two boys that are currently freshmen at pb and i heard miss burton say that this program was going to be it could be modified and i just want to make sure that the board and everybody knows how important it is for our kids to be involved and stuff like this my children have autism but they do things they are mentors at a program called the little red hen for younger children they were mentors went online playing minecraft and i want to make sure that stuff like that would also fall under these checklists of things that our kids do that neurotypical kids you know think might be too easy or stuff like that so i just want to make sure that this is going to be fair across the board thank you for your comments um do we have any other comments from the audience okay seeing none i will ask the board if there are any motions associated with this agenda item i would move approval of this item um with um an amendment that i'm going to propose right now so maybe you as parliamentarian can can counsel me on how to approach this it's your motion um i guess i i move that we uh amend this to put whatever you said um a addendum or to attachment to some yeah thank you mr gant so one option is uh when passing a policy or regulation would be to attach it as an exhibit or an attachment to the policy another option and i think it was brought up would be simply direct staff to include the information in a in a follow-up administrative regulation a lot of times there's more material that needs to go in not just the checklist but there's additional material that guides staff in how to implement the policy and this type of information is more typical in a regulation than it is in the base policy okay i like that idea better that way it would just be codified right there in the regulation i really like that second to last bullet that was on the screen over here because i think it signals to kids from every walk of life that hey this this seal thing this is for you you know um [Music] and i i also think it'd be kind of nice to have maybe some intent language in there to that effect i'm open to any thoughts of my colleagues but um so just for clarification uh can you restate your proposed motion for myself and mostly me well i'm having trouble parsing this i mean i'd like to i'd like to move that we pass it or but i'm not hung up on that i think somebody else can have that honor too my main thing is i would like to see it amended um a little bit so the character of it is made clear to future generations so it sounds like with direction to staff to add an administrative and at an ar with the language on this pre-check there you go yeah okay this is what i'm looking for right here yeah so if we could pull up the actual board policy because what the board is voting on right now is the board policy language and i think the uh intent is clarified at the top where this is covering all of our awards for achievement but um the seal of by literacy i'm sorry the seal of civic engagement is new for chico unified so we're adding that language if you could scroll down please there we go a little bit more it goes on to the next page like a half turn more oh never mind yeah it looks like there should be more there but oh i see no it's one little line down there at the very very top of the page yeah so it's pretty because kind of not wanting to criticize that i mean oftentimes i don't spend a lot of times time personally pouring over all of these policies although i know they have their little place in life but on this one i i'd like it to be signaled to future generations of of students and families that that this is a credential that's kind of really open to everyone we're not trying to produce some kind of ideological work product here with it but it's really you know church kids can participate in this scouters can consider themselves um good participants in this you don't have to be uh you know a political activist on special ed kids yes thank you so this would be the policy language and then what we would do and we can bring it back at our next board meeting is put the items that you're referencing into the administrative regulations which their purpose is to define how we implement the policy that the board set so you know the pre-check as well as the items that are required would all go into that the process for doing that okay so basically we can't put it in this tonight the board absolutely can put it in into the actual board policy you can do that yeah i move that we do that i'm waiting for a second are we still on discussion about the amendment we're actually not discussing yet because we don't have a second so the motion fails um is do we have a another motion well it it's i i moved to approve the um ford policy 5126 with uh an assurance to mr tennis after having lived through years and years and years of ar development the ar is what's going to make you happy if we put too much do i need to interrupt you for a second do we have a do we have a second on the motion i made the i made a motion to approve but we can't discuss until we have a second second thank you okay now we now we can discuss okay um it's my experience that when you start trying to add too much specificity to the policy it limits what you're able to do with broad implementation and and making it work as a as a working document the ar is what you you need to focus on and i believe there is enough highlight in the first paragraph and in the red language of the state seal of civic engagement um [Music] that that it says what we mean and then the ar will be developed to make sure that all of the things we intend get in the ar so it can be implemented along the spirit of what we're intending uh mr orlando thank you i'd also just like to remind all of the board members about the difference between board and administrators in this capacity at least we're not professional educators and i want to be very careful about us dictating curriculum by putting it in a board policy it's a really slippery slope it feels a little bit like a mandate from on high if you will so i would vote against that language every time it came up i want to let the educators do the educating yeah and it's my understanding that the administrative regulation is going to come anyway and we will be seeing more details about the implementation but yeah just to reiterate what mr orlando is saying we are here to set the policy and then our administrators are here to see that policy implemented and see it through working with staff so is there any other discussion dr kaiser i don't see you having a hand up but i thought i'd just call it your name anyway i appreciate that but no i think okay this is lean and clear so the motion on the floor um that was uh put forth by um member robinson and seconded by uh member lando uh is to pass the board policy 5126 as written i will call for the vote now robinson i lando i dolby aye tennis name kaiser i it passes 4-1 all right um we are going to move on to the next item which is 9.1.2 the public hearing discussion action on the california voting rights act draft maps and sequence of by district elections point of privilege oh yes i hate to do this but do you mind if we take like a five minute break here not at all i don't mind that um let's go ahead and do that take a five minute break okay we got three all right well we're gonna take a five minute break all right i am reconvening our regular board meeting we are on item actually before i move on to this item just an announcement that member lando had to step out so he is taking an absence for the rest of this meeting we will continue to do roll call vote and record the votes as they come the next item is i would like to change my vote on the last item from nay to not voting to to to abstain abstention i'm a little unclear on the rules on that sorry just of our rules or our policy oh good we have an attorney come on up paul that's a motion for reconsideration the motion for reconsideration would typically need to be made by a member who voted in the affirmative uh that doesn't mean that you know board member tennis cannot he can request but he would need someone who voted in the affirmative to make the motion to reconsider um and so since one of our members that voted in the last session our last item isn't present anymore um i don't know that that's something that we we can do only one of us who voted right exactly yeah yeah but i hear your request so um thank you uh okay so we are going to move on to so you're not you're denying it it's no so there was no request because the request has to come from somebody who voted in the affirmative who voted yes so i'd like to change my vote on the last one from nay to abstain or is anybody willing to grant me that opportunity no i'm not because we're down a member now so that's that's my reasoning i'm not going to put that request on the table at this time we can we can make note of that in the minutes you know just a note mr tennis requested that uh it be noted that he wanted to change his vote from no to abstain is that acceptable thank you okay yeah thank you again like gray areas for me so all kinds of new things tonight all right um so we are moving on to item 8.1.9.1.2 public hearing discussion action for the california voting rights act draft maps and sequence by district elections i would like to turn it over to superintendent staley great so we are entering into the time that now the board needs to be making a decision about moving forward i'm going to ask mr rob murray to come forward and just briefly take us through the steps where we have been and the options that the board has now narrowed this down to mr murray all right thank you superintendents daily and so really i think there's one key new slide with this which as requested was a side-by-side comparison of all maps that have been previously presented that have not specifically been removed from consideration by a board vote uh so if uh i don't know that i have oh yeah perfect yes i just want to keep uh so clicking so we uh have uh information that i've kept in the presentation in case uh the board wants to discuss it and have it up to answer questions but i'd really just like to keep you can go ahead and just move forward uh so we're on to that date in the timeline but you can just keep moving forward uh several more clicks uh we'll get to there we go here's the one so we have now the green map and the orange map a and orange b uh just there's the note there of the uh blue and purple maps that were previously presented that have been taken from consideration then we can move ahead again past the election sequencing which we have been over you have the examples of the maps all of which have been seen before i just wanted them here in case we need to look at them and then here is the one other slide that has not been previously presented though this has been up on the website uh but for the data that has been discussed most frequently uh for the remaining app map options the green the orange a and the orange b uh just to have a little bit more accessible side-by-side comparison uh and then the but then all of the four criteria data as previously presented is all still in subsequent slides and again kind of in the interest of time we won't rehash things that we've been over but i'm happy to answer any questions that anyone has about any of our [Music] options and data and maps here so i'm going to just take a moment to ask if any board members have technical questions for our consultant dr kaiser you have the floor thank you yes um i uh when i looked at the two orange maps i did not see a major difference when you talked about expanding in the orange map schools covered and someone had told me well yeah there's two additional schools in area five but is that really the case oh yeah if we can uh back up to the where we show the maps we'll just show that really quick and yes it's uh if we just go back to where we have maybe the full screen ones there'll be a few more clicks but it will be a little easier to see okay so back one more to orange a so on the original map and i'm just gonna move over to the screen in area 4 here in the blue you have uh pleasant valley and marigold that in loma vista that are all right near that edge previously the only brick and mortar school site located in trustee area 5 had been shasta and then on moving ahead to orange b the only change is this area between marigold and sienna this and then down to manzanita such that it includes the pv high marigold and loma vista school sites move out of area 4 and into area 5.
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