WSSD Board Meeting 09/14/2020

001good evening i now call the september 14th meeting of the wallingford swarthmore school board to order pursuant to policy 006.1 we are holding this meeting remotely given the current public health crisis in opening i will start with the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you i would like to start by asking our board secretary ms fagora for a roll call mr ballas here miss dimino here dr downey here dr huff here mr cutis president mrs lentz here mrs walkman here dr grandy here mr berman here dr palmer here dr grandy we have eight voting members present okay uh thank you ms fagora um i want to

002start with board announcements the board did meet prior to this meeting in executive session to discuss personnel the employment of a particular administrative employee i would also like to open the meeting with several comments this is our first board meeting of course since the start of the school year and while i know it has been far from a typical start to the school year it's exciting to finally have kids back in school and engaging with their teachers and classmates back to school is always an exciting time of year i can say my own kids were certainly a little annoyed when we made them take their first day of school pictures this year but the beginning of school is always special and i welcome all of our students and families back i also know how much

003discussion is taking place in our community about when kids can come back face to face we will begin that conversation tonight and we'll act soon if rates remain stable dr palmer and the administrative team will share more details during our focus topic discussion i'll just say that when we had to make the difficult decision back in august to start all virtual it was at a time when there was a large increase in cases in our county that was back in late july and early august and since then our case rates per 100 000 have improved a great deal about half of what they were in late july our weekly test positivity rates have also improved and as we look ahead to decisions i know some want to know what we are following and while it

004would be easy again to say that there was a single number there are several things that are important the first being the rate of new cases in our county and in our district the second being the positivity rate in our county which is data that's not available just for our district third the rates in the areas immediately around us and lastly and very importantly the trend are rates going up going down are they stable and that last point is very important the district is ready to welcome students back we're going to talk a lot about that tonight the key factor has been whether we have low enough rates that allow us to bring our students back safely and as i've said before i know families will have different views about the right time to come

005back to our school buildings and i said it before every single point of view is valid everyone has legitimate concerns and priorities and i want to assure everyone that is listening tonight that i know every member of this board cares deeply about all the students in our district and every action every discussion is always about the same thing which is how can we do best for our students both now and in the future and that is what will continue to guide us in every decision it is expected that people will disagree on the best path forward however we can discuss and debate this with civility and model for our students what public debate can be in a community as great as this one i also want to assure everyone that all of the emails you

006send get read by our board we are listening we are following the science we will always aim to do what is best for health and education and the overall well-being of our students in the end i do believe we all want the same thing to do what is best for the kids in our community lastly before we move on i do want to share that we had a board member damon orsetti resigned last week and this followed inappropriate and unacceptable language on social media his resignation was effective last wednesday and it is important that our board is a model for our students and other community members and hold ourselves to the highest standards we will appoint a replacement and more information is available at the district school board webpage thank you for listening and let

007me turn things over to dr palmer for her report this evening thank you dr granty but before i do my report this evening we actually have our new student representative mira patel is starting us off with her first report at this meeting and she'll actually precede me tonight so mira if you'd like to the screen is yours thank you dr palmer wes had a successful back to school night for all students who have west teachers this includes some children from other schools on september 10th with over 600 parents attending our live zoom teachers then hosted live sessions with their students parents principal savage thanks all the parents on the elementary level for their support in helping us launch a successful 2021 school year virtually at npe the staff and community are excited to begin another

008school year while not quite a normal beginning the teachers and staff had an opportunity to briefly meet and introduce themselves at the student bundle pickup in august our staff enjoyed the opportunity to share a friendly smile and pass along useful materials for student learning the first two weeks of school have been focused on establishing a sense of community in each classroom principal heinle shared that speedy the npe mascot has even joined in on the daily morning meetings to say hello to students the daily morning meetings are a wonderful opportunity for students and staff to share a bit about themselves and create a positive atmosphere in which future learning can occur classes are now up and running and students are in the early stages of learning new concepts and skills in their classrooms at srs dr

009tuck is happy to report that the first day of school presented lots of smiles to be seen through zoom teachers and staff are planning for virtual back to school night on september 15th at 7 pm let's work together to give them a bright cheer from the srs community consider setting aside time on monday september 14th or tuesday september 15th before 5 pm to chalk the block at srs bring your sidewalk chalk and write an inspirational message draw a picture or make a great game such as tic-tac-toe and please practice social distancing to stay safe join srs for spirit night at renata pizza between 5 and 10 pm on tuesday september 22nd a portion of all orders will be donated to srs home and school just mention srs as you order and enjoy come out to

010support a local business and srs feel free to pass along this information to friends and family plus there will be there will be an appearance by special guest swarthmore may or marty spiegel on thursday september 24th at 7 pm via zoom there will be the next addition to the srs home and school seminar series titled helping kids feel secure amid uncertainty now that school is restarting with a remote component for all and a fully remote component for some reality might be setting in that this will go on longer this might be hard for some kids and they are looking for boundaries and security come here srs parent and child psychiatrist dr patrick cleary discuss act discuss actions parents and guardians can take to help children adjust during this difficult time strathaven middle school will be

011having its 6th grade back to school night on september 21st from 7 to 9 p.m and its 7th and 8th grade back to school night on september 23rd also from 7 to 9 p.m we hope to see everyone there at stratheven high school the new members of this year's student council collaborated on a 12 question survey for the high school student body to collect experiences comments and concerns about the first few weeks of zoom school while online school has been a transition that we are all still figuring out these comments from the student body are incredibly important to consider moving forward overall while we'd all like to be together in person there are steps we can take to make this learning experience more enjoyable and productive for students while we have to be at home

012out of the 216 respondents to the survey over 50 percent of students reported that there is too much homework with 52 percent of students saying that they spend at least two hours or two or more hours each night doing homework on screens which does not account for other types of homework such as textbook work on a scale of one to ten with one being that screens had no effect on the student and 10 being that they felt completely zoom fatigued at the end of the day 67 percent of students marked a seven or above students also also had the opportunity to comment on the current high school schedule was 40 42 percent of students responding that more time between classes would be helpful for them here are comments from an open-ended section where students could

013provide feedback on what would be helpful for them the first comment is it would be helpful if teachers reduce the amount of work they give on asynchronous wednesdays some of them give me one and a half hours of class work and an additional one to two hours of homework the day is supposed to be a break from screens and i find myself spending 15 plus hours on a screen the second comment is it would be helpful if my teachers gave less homework on weekdays because i find it hard to stay on a computer after hours of zoom each day i wish they had organized weekly schedules so we could keep ourselves on track the third comment is it would be helpful if teachers did not give us so much asynchronous work and focused more on

014the synchronous times because that is when we learn the most and have an opportunity to connect with them and one another all work is homework for us and seniors have college apps to consider as well other general comments that were frequently repeated include students wishing that teachers had more flexibility in terms of due dates and that they gave homework that didn't require more screen time i'd be happy to discuss the results with any teachers or admin in more depth also the central league has made the decision to postpone fall sports and has made a commitment to stay in contact with pia to provide alternative student solutions for student athletes on another note thank you to all of the teachers and staff who have worked hard to get us off to a good start it definitely

015hasn't been easy and we appreciate it that's it and i look forward to a great year all right thanks mira and i'm so sorry for jumping right over your report on your first uh visit with us so um i will certainly remember that at the next meeting but thank you for sharing uh all the student perspective that's incredibly helpful and i'm sure the administrative team will love to get that information as well so with that let me now turn things over to dr palmer for her superintendent's report thank you dr grandi it is hard to believe that we're already starting our third full week of school and before anything else i'd like to express my sincere gratitude to our parents and guardians for partnering with our teachers the back to school this year is unlike

016anyone before it and the response of our parents guardian and children has been extraordinary our back to school on august 31st was absolutely remarkable and one that highlighted the true spirit of the wallingford swarthmore community i am so proud to be a small part of a very large moment in our community's history with a start like this i have every confidence that this will be an extraordinary year moving on to tonight's agenda on tonight's agenda we have three focused topics the first one is the opening of school highlights pretty much what worked well and what's an opportunity for improvement for us what's still a work in progress the second focus topic is a return to in-person learning and sharing out with you what is the timeline that we're considering for returning our students to school

017and a look at what's a day in the life of our students at the elementary middle and high and then our third focus topic this evening is the pennsylvania interscholastic athletic association and strathaven high school athletics and we have a guest with us we have miss leanne wenzel who is a member of the board of pia and she was very gracious with her time to come to talk to our community and what i'd like this to be is an opportunity for all of us to get a better understanding of how does the central athletics league work nestled within district one and how does all of that function in regard to pia guidelines so if you're watching the meeting please stay with us we have a lot of valuable information to share tonight and if you

018miss any part of our focus topic discussions please know that they'll be available tomorrow on our website now i have a few public service announcements for everyone so mira had mentioned that we are already in the process of our back-to-school nights with west already having theirs last thursday but a reminder for all srs back to school night on tuesday npe on wednesday strathaven high school on thursday and next wednesday the 23rd for strathaven middle school and all of the information that i'm sharing with you at this point is on the front page of our website the second item to highlight is many of you have reached out to us asking how can you help well how you can help is to work with the wallingford swarthmore foundation the foundation has created a covid19 relief fund

019to assist our district students and their families during this time for even during the best of time meeting the needs of your family can really be a challenge and right now the times are really unprecedented so the foundation is partnering with the school district social workers who's already uh very closely connected with our families and if you are having any particular family needs related to child care food household item school supplies please reach out to our social workers and all of their contact information is on the website if you don't need assistance but would like to assist you can also find information on how you can donate we know at this point that the foundation has already raised a considerable amount of money so we will be able to help a number of families with

020mini grants and the mini grants can be up to 275 dollars for child care and up to a hundred dollars for food school supplies or household items the next item comes from martha q and our food service department but we've had a change in our food service program this year i know she wrote to you a number of times last year about the program that was in place and it was the summer c seamless option or sso as it was referred to in a number of the um e-blasts that she sent to you so we were waiting for that program to see if it would be continued at the end of the summer we went into that program after we went out of school and stayed with it all summer but the program ended on

021thursday august 27th therefore when we started the school year the next week we opened up with the national school lunch program and we were able to provide breakfasts and lunches to some of our community members and this week we learned that the program has now been extended the original summer program has been extended through december of so as a result today any children 18 years and under can receive free meals it doesn't matter whether you are a student here or not if you are 18 years and under your family can pick up breakfast and lunch for you for the five school days and there is no charge for the meals when we return to school there will not be a charge for meals either so it's a really important piece for everyone to know we

022will be offering the program and you will not pay for anything uh in terms of pickup we are offering pickups on mondays and wednesdays and there are actually two different times that are available for pickup this is different than what we offered in the summer we're offering pickups the first one between 9 and 10 30 in the morning and also during the day between four and six we want to make sure families have that opportunity to come when it's most convenient for them whether it's the morning or it's the evening and we have three pickup locations it will be available at the brookhaven road entrance of strathaven high school at the front loop of nether providence elementary and at the main lot at srs so you can pick up whether it's at the high school

023and pe or srs you just can't make the rounds three times but you can choose any of those locations and one last piece about our national lunch program if you think you may qualify for a free or reduced price breakfast and lunch we still want you to apply fill out the application and let us process it because as they are saying this program will go away at the end of december this would allow you to have that safety net to be um getting the reduced or the free lunch through the new program when it goes in place or our traditional national school lunch program so don't hesitate to send in those applications will process them quickly so you'll be ready to go after this particular program will end and then the last piece that i'd

024like to highlight wssd is celebrating national arts and education week it runs from september 13th through the 20th uh through the 20th we'd like you to follow us on facebook twitter or instagram to see some of the highlights from our schools and all of the opportunities our students have to express themselves creatively and to develop their talents and their interests within the arts and dr grandi that concludes my report tonight all right thank you dr palmer um certainly good news about the ability to extend the food program because i know that was a big question mark and and certainly we're happy about those policy changes and also happy uh the district has been able to to implement that um we will move on to the focus topics as we mentioned there are three of them

025um i will ask dr palmer to introduce our first and these are three considerable presentations for tonight so i know i will ask mr cetroni how many people are watching because we have been getting some record numbers of viewers at our board meetings and we've been trying to have more information as focused topics because we know individuals watch during the meeting but we also will have individuals afterwards tell their neighbors tell their friends hey did you see that presentation you can go watch it so we're trying to be as thorough with these presentations as possible so the first presentation we have is our opening of school highlights and our principals are going to take the lead during this presentation so as not to extend our presentations this evening our elementary principles will be tag teaming

026across the first and the second focus topics so i know we will have angela tuck from srs gabe savage from wes joe buechler from the middle school and greg hilden from the high school there are also all of the rest of us on board for questions that may be coming up or we might be speaking during the second conversation so as the board listens to us if you have any questions for any of us feel free at any time to jump in but i believe the one who is going to start us off tonight is angela tuck angela am i correct that is correct and the floor is yours okay good evening everyone my name is angela tuck i'm the principal of swarthmore rutledge school thank you for giving us this opportunity to share our

027opening day experiences from the elementary level our teachers and staff were excited about reopening our school because we did not have closure at the end of the school term schools closed along march 13th with the hopes of reopening within a two-week period and then sometime in the spring but that never happened so therefore we went into isolation and just to keep our families and everyone safe and to learn more about the pandemic personal student items were left in cubbies and in desks so therefore it left us not having the closure that we normally would have in june so therefore when school opened this year it was like a breath of fresh air it was a new beginning it was extra special for all of our students and srs west as well as npe all of

028our schools and i have the opportunity to share some of the highlights from npe west and srs it felt like a ray of sunshine although we were wearing masks and just in social distancing it gave us an opportunity to say goodbye to our former students and to say hello to our new students and to our new families and this also gave us an opportunity to meet our new teachers our teachers they did an amazing job adapting to the virtual learning environment building class communities learning new technology collaborating with colleagues and communicating with parents they spent a great deal of time in august preparing the bundles the bundles consisted of workbooks pencils crayons notebooks packets all kinds of activities and instructions for seesaw as well as google classroom our students have the opportunity to also give

029a friendly wave or a social distance hello to their new teachers and to say goodbye to their former teachers as well as to welcome the new school year the teachers were so excited to distribute the materials via the car line and have an opportunity to again say a friendly hello and to have a big smile underneath their mask we are also planning another pick up in the near future regarding just some more activities to replenish some of the supplies that our families may need or have need of our technology team prepared devices they distributed 882 ipads to our students in kindergarten through second grades and they also distributed 893 chromebooks to students in grades three through five hot spots were also given to families that may have had trouble logging onto our system because of

030internet or wireless access concerns teachers were also given a guidebook to help them navigate this unprecedented situation with seesaw and with google classroom strategies and ideas for online teaching teachers became teachers of teachers because all the teachers from all three buildings joined together to create lesson plans as well as to share ideas and to get pointers and helpful hints regarding virtual teaching and also with technology within a seven day period our teachers pushed out 7500 items on seesaw that was an incredible number when i saw that number we just could not believe how many activities were being presented to our schools and then we also have our help desk we like to thank aj and nora regarding just all of their support and each building has a technology team that has given our students and

031our teachers the support that they needed in order to navigate the system and to find solutions to problems our teachers are enjoying the morning meetings as well as our students this is part of our responsive classroom where they have the opportunity to greet students and to do icebreakers as well as getting to know you activities and to build a school community virtually and hopes of hopefully returning in the near future and in person where we will be able to give each other high fives or warm smiles underneath our mask the teachers have missed seeing the students and that's something that all of the three buildings have indicated the teachers they miss giving students high fives hugs and warm smiles but we're looking forward to coming back in person in the near future and the bags

032that our students received they were heartfelt and they were laborers of love that all of our teachers and staff members have created in order to support our students and although i know our special area classes are pretty large however but i did receive some we received feedback from some of our parents indicating that the students really enjoyed having the opportunity to see their classmates from different buildings and to say hello to them on the zoom so this is an area that we are growing in and i'm going to stop now because i can continue to go on and on and on about the highlights from all three buildings so i just wanted to share with you just a little bit of some of the experiences that our teachers and families have shared with the principals

033thank you dr tuck uh hello my name is gabe savage i am the principal of wallingford elementary school and i want to build on some of the things that dr tuck mentioned in areas that um we know that we need to grow in things that we know that um we we can um do better and one of those things right off the bat was our typical time in in service is spent with our teachers um kind of talking about the year developing what's going on looking at specific projects and really bringing the staff in and this year we just knew we had to prioritize the mentorship of our veteran teachers with the new teachers that came in we had to prioritize putting those bundles together and making sure that students had the resources that they

034need we needed to prioritize um being able to interact be able to see those students for the first time it was a quick turnaround for our staff to come in prep everything get their technology ready work together um and then last piece that i just really can't underscore uh overscore enough is the fact that teachers collaborated i like like nothing i've ever seen it is so vital when you're doing something new i i always say that the smartest person in the room is the room it is the collective ability of our teachers to be able to work together and navigate this situation and frankly you need time to do that and that's what we needed to give them so that was one of the areas we knew that we were going to have to prioritize

035to maximize the impact that we were going to have for our students the second area and dr tuck did allude to this um we're looking at our specials um two of the things we appreciate it is the the the wonderful feedback we get from our community whether it's the encouragement or the constructive feedback one of the areas that we've been looking at is the size of our specialist classes at the elementary level that is one some one thing that we are investigating we're looking at multiple options to see how we can fix that um and adjust that as we move forward i think one of the components that we're working through is supporting students across now almost four four schools now with the three schools and the online academy so we're working through that and

036we have some options that we're going to continue to um to look at and the last one is i touch it on when doctor talk about all those devices when you have nearly 1700 devices going out and you have students on google classrooms you have students on seesaw you're using screencastify you know that they're going to be some tech technological issues that occur and again we do want to say thank you to aj and his team um dr wheeler and her team um they've been phenomenal um but we know we've had people having to come in and swap out devices we've had some problems with zoom you know people can't get in or they've been knocked out and in in for the amount of zooms that we have in the amount of kids it's a

037small amount but we know it's something that we have to continue to get better at and we have to continue to work on um so those are three of the highlights that we're growing in and and that we're trying to figure out i think at this time we'll probably move to uh the middle school hello everyone uh my name is joseph buchler assistant prince of middle school mr king sends his review for not being here tonight but i'd like to review um what's going on at the middle school since we started back i can say with great confidence that the middle school has had a great great opening we've received a great amount of feedback from our parents and it has been overwhelmingly positive most indicating that the teachers lessons have been both interactive and

038engaging we have been pleased with our overall student attendance we are focusing our collective attention now on students that have had any issues to date so far with any attendance issues our distribution of essential materials for learning went out the last few weeks and has been fantastic especially with our newest members of our family of middle school that's our sixth grade students um having the students be able to walk through and meet their teachers at a safe social distance was so important to us and certainly to them we administered our first social and emotional learning survey to our students getting their feelings about returning to school we've had a very high return rate on that survey and the school counselors administrators are reviewing that data now this past week we administer our first sel lesson

039to all students and that went very well the students and teachers truly had to go on running two months ago and through great preparation i feel there were very few problems we did work through some minor tech issues on our site aj citrone nora wheeler caitlin locke have been so quick in responding to help parents students and teachers solve whatever tech problem that may have that has arisen there have been some issues with connectivity some households but even those seem to be working out as we begin the third week of our school year we are beginning to hear about zoom fatigue that may be setting in so that is the center of our discussions right now at the middle school and as always um we can't thank our parents enough for all the feedback we've

040gotten and as always we welcome future feedback thank you greg thanks joe good evening everyone my name is greg hilton i'm the principal of strathaven high school um a lot of the information i have tonight is the same as what you've just heard from our other principals we'll highlight just a few minor differences in addition to our materials distribution for over 1200 students we also had our tech department issue chromebooks to all of our not rising ninth graders so our goals this year are to obviously maintain a connection with our students so the first week of school we also sent a survey to our students and we had a great response we had 1200 students respond to the survey about 80 percent of them stated that they felt fine coming back to school we had

041our a few students who are confused or upset or nervous we're tired tired was it was a big one we had 418 students tired to come to school the first day which doesn't surprise us at all but we asked a follow-up question one that i think is important and important to share the results with you all so we asked our students if they felt connected with someone at the high school and 80 percent of our students said they felt a connection and this is a pretty good return rate on that question as well given that 25 of our population is new to our building so the only person our ninth graders would know right now is their counselor who traveled with them from the middle school so i was very happy to see that 80

042we're going to do another activity in a few short weeks and survey the students and the teachers again if they know someone in high school and they feel connected and look and compare that data with our baseline from the first week of school another question we asked him was did you need to speak with someone did you want to talk to someone about the transition back to school so we had 64 students identify that they would like to speak with someone and our counselor is actually in the process of reaching out to all the students um some of which may have already been even been contacted this week um in addition that information we're happy as well with attendance we had over 96 attendance rate um during the first couple weeks but we've we've hit

043our glitches as well um we had some technical difficulties the first week with google going out the first day and we also had some issues as far as security with uh or tech tech in the beginning of the school year but again our tech department uh aj and dr wheeler worked hard to tighten up our access points and the procedures students go through to enter into our classrooms i'm happy to say we've had very minimal issues over the last week in the tech department so once again we're excited to get the year going it was a very uh odd beginning to the year you know you're standing out front of the building with no school buses and no children coming in we very much miss them and we can't wait to have them back in

044the building soon so that's it from the high school thank you so dr grandi that's what we're presenting for the first focus topic are there any questions from the board i'll ask people to uh put their hand up in zoom i'll just start with a question i think it came up um you know at all grade levels but you know i with online education there's always a concern about difficulty engaging some students and how to address when students aren't appearing in zoom for classes it sounds like that rate has been relatively low but i'm curious to hear you know how we're strategizing to address that i don't know if we want to start maybe with elementary and then maybe middle and high so one of the things that we're doing the elementary level is we

045spoke really as an administrative team to come up with a an attendance protocol and we wanted to make sure we separated that from the actual engagement in the class because there are two separate things um so we are going to treat it right now as if we were in the classroom if the students showed up and they weren't engaging what would you do well you would reach out to that student you would try to find out the background of what's going on at home you would you would want to see okay is there anything that we can do sometimes in those situations there's there's something else going on um especially in the circumstance that we're in uh whether it be a parent work schedule where students able to access or not access something maybe their

046comfort level in their own home um how things look on the video there's a lot of reasons why things could be going on like that um so on the elementary level we're separating attendance from um the engagement piece and then we're addressing the engagement piece by continuing to build that relationship between that teacher and the uh the parent and the student and kind of working that way to bring the student in to make sure they're engaged different different considerations maybe to comment on at the middle and high school levels i would agree with uh mr savage that we we have the same approach i uh we have the separate um attendance versus engagement uh discussion which as escape said we talked about as an administrative team um but i will say what i've been impressed

047with now we're lucky that they're that our attendance rate is so high that when someone is not there we can target them um between the the teacher the school counselor and the administrator um the phone call goes right home because what's happening is zoom now someone might be in attendance for school but by third period well where was she well we get the right to the phone call because we have a quick automatic system already um in the middle school it's been working out incredibly well so so getting kids engaged but also tracking where are they at pretty much every minute of the day because it's easy to do when they're in school but when someone disappears out of chinese where did she go well someone's on the phone with mom and dad pretty quickly

048i've been pretty impressed okay and that procedure is much the same at the high school we also are following the district hierarchy of attendance interventions that we developed as a district team this summer where we have a process in place for students who miss class so teachers first identify that there's a concern they attempt by to contact the student via email if that's not successful they're emailing the parent and then making two phone call attempts to the parent if those things are not successful then the expectation is that they reach out to the school counselor and involve the school counselor right now most of our as i mentioned our rate is is very high for attending many of our issues have revolved more around students not being able to log on where they were on

049and they dropped off but we've seen good results so far with attendance at the high school i see a hand up from kelly hi um so i just i two things one i wanted to thank everyone that's on the screen and the many people who are not that need this possible the back to school feedback um and what we've what you have accomplished for back to school has been phenomenal there's been glitches and we've talked about you know many of those but the experience for the families and the kids has been truly blew me away and i had high expectations going into this so i i can't thank you all enough um we've been talking a good bit about the um the student parent um experience so far i wondered if anybody could offer a

050few additional comments from the perspective of our teachers and what they think is going well or what they think might need to be improved and perhaps that's for a different conversation but if anybody can comment on that today that i'd love to hear that perspective as well i can jump in i i think i think what's going well is our our students feel engaged i think they feel very different than they felt in the spring it feels more like school to them i think an area of improvement is that we're trying to create a community online which is very different feel than it is in the classroom so replicating that feel in an online environment as opposed to the classroom i think has been difficult for our teachers and for our students so we're going

051to be working hopefully to try to do some things that allow students to have a little bit more voice or to have a little more sense of community in the online environment i i think for the the elementary level the teachers have done an exceptional job of creating community and that's feedback i've heard from parents and teachers i think being in this format for the first time no one was really sure would you be able to replicate it but i think the focus on the social emotional concepts the first week really went a long way and we're hearing positive feedback and about attendance students are engaged and attending i think the frustrations or things to work on you know zoom you know sometimes sound quality just troubleshooting uh sound in the classroom i think that

052right now is is something that has improved but um obviously it's a source of frustration um but also trying to instruct you know using materials i think learning how to use materials with students right now is what the teachers are kind of working through but overall i think the feedback has been very positive and that's a direct result of the efforts of the teachers and support of the parents our teachers are working extremely hard they're working from sun up to sundown they are teaching one another they are sharing different ideas or different strategies that they've worked on that um they're they're really spending hours and hours just to prepare because they're trying to replicate what we normally would do in the school day on zoom and or either on seesaw whether google classroom or either

053through this through the zoom links and they just want perfection and i think that they are pushing themselves in order to succeed and it has been a challenge for them because they expect for things especially for our teachers that have been teaching for many years if this is something that is natural to them however this virtual platform is not natural for anyone so it's going to take a lot of preparation and that's what i see from teachers from all of our buildings they're spending hours just trying to prepare because they want to be successful and they want our children to be successful and because they're driven it's that means that they're going to spend extra hours doing that so i must admit i do that kelly we're very proud of our teachers the amount of

054work they're doing it is so it is unbelievable um i can say anecdotally i have that the uh and the administrators here we get to pop in on our walkthroughs and i get to pop into classrooms and so i've been spoken about teachers about this directly but watching the engagement in the classroom i'll take that as their opinion their feeling because i'm watching the kids happy they're engaged they're having fun um i'm gonna take that as um the teachers recognize that too i know it's been it's a lot of hard work um but i i i i know that they they feel the children are present with them even though they're at their dining room tables they are present with them and i know they were nervous about that they wanted to make sure that

055it's a value a valuable experience for the kids and from my jumping into the classrooms i can tell it is but again thank you to all of you and to the teachers my my youngest told my mommy this is so much better i get to see all my friends and i can talk to them um and the older two aren't complaining at all so that's a good thing considering their high school so anyway congratulations and and really really terrific job done at the start of the year thank you kelly uh yeah there's definitely hasn't been a year where kids have been more eager to go back to school than this one um jen thanks steve um i wanted to talk about the online rollout in a vacuum if you will to start i sat next

056to my kids i sat next to my fifth and third graders every day in the spring as they muddled through it i did not sit next to my kindergartner because there was just not enough of me so um she kind of did whatever she was going to do but now i have actually been in first and fourth grade every day for about two weeks i have my splitter headphones and i put them on and i have heard firsthand a tremendous amount of instruction i have witnessed all of the effort and i sit there all day just to not because anyone has to or should but because i want to see exactly how it's unfolding and i can say that um you know anyone that has seen what's being rolled out now in contrast to the

057spring i don't see how anyone couldn't say it's working extremely well i've been amazed at the lessons and the creativity and the stamina and the dedication that i've seen from my children's teachers firsthand and they do it with a smile a tremendous amount of patience and a great attitude i mean it really has it has amazed me to watch that and it i already felt really good about our teachers but it really really makes me again realize what a phenomenal group we have in this district i've been able to partner with my kids teachers and with my children in mind to help them get to where they need to be um i have been responded to uh in a prompt fashion every time i've reached out to someone uh seesaw which i can't ever say

058i'll be a huge fan of though is working much better now than it was in the spring it is versatile i really think for the little kids it's great that it gives that textbook option um because little kids have different needs obviously than middle school kids and high school kids um to develop things that the older children have already developed for the most part and um i just want to say that you know the administration promised that it would be better and while you know better may not have been so difficult they really did deliver uh you really have delivered on on that promise to make it a very comprehensive and i think your words were dr cinderella jones robust online experience that is uh definitely what i have witnessed again i'm not in every

059grade and i'm sure that there would be reasons why some parents would have a different would have issue with how i'm explaining my experience but i that has been my experience and um and it's it's definitely been a good one um so i do want to thank dr citarelli jones and the education education committee that you put together all the teachers that worked really hard it is evident if a parent or a caregiver um sits in those classrooms it has been completely evident to me how much work they have put in and the teachers are the heart and soul of this district that i knew that before covet but it's it's again become clear i mean it's been it's been really impressive so after speaking about that in a vacuum i mean i also think

060that and i'm hearing it echoed in the surveys that ms patel talked about i'm reading about it online i'm hearing it from everyone who's spoken the online platforms which is a no fault of any teacher um i have no no criticisms for any um teachers that i have witnessed working this hard because they're doing a phenomenal job but the online platform is something that is just it is impossible at this point for them to overcome it is really difficult for the younger students to connect um i've seen students that actually are supposed to know each other online playing alongside each other in my neighborhood and they don't know it's each other because they're just too little so um i think that's a challenge that our online education is is facing i don't know how you

061overcome it um but i think at the only reason that i mention it and again other people have mentioned it um i do think it needs to be considered along with how well the instruction is going because unfortunately um especially for the little kids but i also know up into high school that the online platform does present immense challenges for some of our students that just cannot be uh some of them just cannot overcome those challenges but to the extent that the instruction is is really wonderful thank you thanks jen um i don't know if there's any it doesn't sound like there's like a specific um question to respond to about the like the platforms themselves but i guess i would just jump in and say as we move in to talk about reopening strategies

062i think some of the issues that you brought up jen about our youngest learners are highly relevant to thinking about our strategy toward getting kids back in buildings and and where the highest priorities may be i think the last part that i would add is that i know that some families have asked for hot spots when they've had connectivity issues i've heard through my neighborhood that there have been a lot of connectivity issues i'm speaking primarily for the elementary school students i would just hope that when we know that kids are dropping off midday i'm wondering if there's a a proactive um i know you said you're contacting them but are you also and i think um greg hilden spoke about this are you also letting them know that a hot spot could be provided

063if if you determine that that is the problem because i think some families may not know that that's the issue and that they can ask for help with that we do have additional hot spots and we're asking people to email help desk at wssd gmail.org if they if they still need help thanks and maybe a another suggestion there may be that if you know it would be the teachers who would probably be kind of the first ones to see patterns like that where someone is having connectivity issues and maybe making sure that the teachers sort of escalate that to some extent to a tech department and and there's some outreach to the families to see if that would be helpful um that might be a good idea um so don't see any other hands and

064i have a feeling like our next focus topic will really just build on this one so i do want to take us to the second focus topic and dr palmer do you want to introduce that i do so where i had said in the last focus topic i wanted our principals to take the lead uh for this one i'd actually like to start us off and then i would like gina ross to follow me and then ferg abbott to follow her and then our principals to join in so kind of a little in reverse this time to give you an idea what we'd like to talk about i'd like to focus on the timeline and what we're suggesting my recommendation to the board about how we return our students gina to cover those health aspects

065ferg to cover environmental aspects within our building and then our principles to focus on pretty much that student perspective of a day in the life within our buildings so let me start us off and talk about our timeline so dr grandi had started our meeting tonight and gave some board comments about the types of things that we have to look at when we're considering bringing our students back to school and they will depend a number of factors a couple of which are the community transmission rates what are we looking at in terms of our test positivity what are we looking in terms of our incident rates so in case anybody does not realize the chester county department of health publishes information daily but then they give us a weekly recap on friday and by the

066end of the day perhaps between five and six on friday they release what our figures are so we're monitoring that very closely of what it has been for the past four weeks and to give you an idea our most current information in terms of our positivity tests it's at 4.34 percent and if we are looking at what our incident rate is our most recent incident rate is 48.5 um incidents per hundred thousand so when we're looking at those numbers we would today be in the category that would be virtual and or hybrid we all know that we're virtual and we're looking to go to hybrid we also know that the next time that we're going to see the data will be on this friday and it will be a really important week because when we

067talk with the chester county department of health we know that their concern had been what is that activity at labor day and for the tests to start rolling in meaning that people may have become infected during activities for labor day or on the weekend they may be going for tests and they may be getting positivity this week would be a really important week for us to see what kind of activity comes as a rep result of labor day let me be optimistic and hope that our numbers are looking good meaning that our numbers are low generally and would still keep us in that category where we could go virtual and or hybrid if that's the case and we're looking at our community what's happening here what's happening in the county what's happening in our neighboring

068communities and if everything looks okay i would propose to the board that we consider the following timeline so let's think tonight is monday the 14th we know we're going to get updated figures on friday the 18th assuming the numbers are in the reasonable range and the activity of our neighbors and county is reasonable i would propose that we consider a special board meeting next monday one week from today at that time the board could consider formalizing the timeline that i'm suggesting telling our parents what does this mean for their child's return to school you also have to take action would we be moving from virtual to hybrid just as you took action to move us from hybrid to virtual then i'm suggesting the following week so meaning today is the 14th proposed special board meeting

069next monday the following monday is a holiday but that tuesday i suggest we start our phased-in return to in-person learning with our youngest learners our k-2 coming back on tuesday the 29th and for anybody who might be tuning in at any part when i say this this is a recommendation it's not a board action until the board takes action on it so i wouldn't want somebody to stop immediately and say that you know because i'm speaking it somebody took action on it this is a proposal so that would be to have our youngest learners come in starting on september 29th which is a tuesday because we know our youngest learners have the greatest difficulty with the online learning then i would move us to the next week which is starting on october 5th i would

070continue with our elementary school grades three to five and also our students k-12 with our most complex needs or their most complex needs we also know that they have the most difficulty accessing online and i would bring them in as well the week of the fifth then it would be my hope to bring in all secondary students middle and high school on the week of the 12th and when i say all students this is assuming that it is the cohort model we have cohort a and we have cohort b that students would be coming in monday tuesday and thursday friday with our six foot social distancing requirements we can't bring all students into our classrooms at one time but it would allow us to do a phased-in approach with k2 followed by three to five

071and our students with most complex needs and then our secondary students so that's what i would recommend over a three week period assuming that the statistics and everything in our community still says that this would be something that's reasonable for us to consider well again we will know more by friday when we get the next week's statistics on what does the cove numbers look like in our community i'm going to actually ask dave a question on this one i'm going to hand off to gina at this point and i don't know if you have a preference that uh we take questions after we each speak or at the end of when we speak and dave i'll defer to you on that one sure why don't we um get through everyone because i think that there

072are relevant pieces to reopening that it's worth everyone hearing about because that may answer some questions that people have then gina with that being said i'm going to hand off to you thank you dr palmer um good evening i wanted to be able to talk about the health and safety components much of this is a repeat or refresh from the topics that we've discussed when we address the health and safety plan um there are four areas that i'm going to speak about the first is masking as you recall there have been many updates related to the masking requirements from dr levine at the as of the last update it was that all staff and students were to wear masks during the day prior to coming online tonight we received an update from the chester county

073health department um and we'll be going in further to that i have not seen any updates from dr levine so our anticipation is that staff and students would continue to be wearing masks throughout the day as we know and as you've seen in the guidance from the chester county health department they are recommending that we identify safe ways to allow students to have mass breaks as that we we will be looking at times during the day when we can identify a safe procedure for that to occur additionally there will be signage throughout the buildings reminding staff and students of that we've had some great um soft starts with our staff who are coming in utilizing the masks being wonderful role models for all of our students the second area that i wanted to address was

074social distancing as dr palmer indicated we are looking at the cohort model to be able to maintain that six foot distance within classrooms classrooms have been in preparation for school to start set up in that six foot model so that students can have that appropriate distance between them desks will be in rows and those assignments and activities within the class will be monitored to ensure that we are promoting social distancing and safety additionally um non-essential visitors will be limited to the buildings this is not anything new we discussed this last time there'll be safety protocols put in place to ensure that we are social distancing the third area is hygiene as dr palmer and ferg abbott have discussed previously the buildings are staffed with um hand sanitizer and staffing students would be able to use

075utilize that along with hand washing protocols that will be um completed during the day finally there will be signs and decals on the floor to promote all of our safety precautions um they are currently in the process of arriving within the district and will be put in place soon the last one that we briefly addressed but we have a significant number of updates to is the symptom monitoring if you look further on the agenda for tonight you can see that we're recommending approval of a symptom monitoring system the system is a web-based system in which parents would receive an email that is a special link for their students they would click that and then would answer the questions associated with the chester county health department symptom monitoring checklist once that was completed then the parent

076or staff member would receive either a all good certified to return to school or a notice that they needed to reach out to either our nursing department or to a private medical support person because there were symptoms or there were questions answered that were of concern on the district side we'll be able to monitor that in real time so that our nursing team can go out and support students and staff members who may have had difficulty completing it or may need assistance related to coving symptoms we anticipate that that system will be implemented and up and running with the start of our students returning um so you'll see that later on the board agenda overall we are continuing the process that we started it before we decided to go to hybrid we were ready to

077start and we continue to be ready to start and we're very excited to see students entering back into the building they are my four areas ferg would you like to pick up thank you gina and i'd like to review what has been presented at previous board meetings as well what is currently done and that which can be found in the district's health and safety plan with respect to air circulation ventilation providing additional spaces for students and staff to spread out and are cleaning protocols to begin with we're fortunate in that three of our buildings are relatively new with the other two having had renovations not that long ago relatively speaking that means our ventilation systems are functioning well the district will be implementing a variety of strategies to improve air circulation though the first strategy

078will be increa to increase the amount of fresh air by opening windows and by just adjusting the fresh air intake of our ventilation systems from 10 percent to 25 most of our systems are individually controlled through the computer and we have that ability to adjust as needed next redundant ventilation systems that have not been used fully in the past or frankly have been off at times will be operated throughout the day beginning well before the start and well after the end of each day all ventilation systems will run longer each day for our central ventral vent central ventilation systems we are changing the types of filters so that more airborne particles are captured i'd like to point out that in each one of our buildings buildings we have individual units in classrooms and then we

079also have central systems that work areas or our large individual spaces so we have those two different controls and these different filters will be put into our large central ventilation systems additionally each area has been reviewed and any area that we feel is in need of additional ventilation will receive a room hepa filter we are increasing increasing the flexible space we have for the addition of large tents at each of our elementary schools these tents may be used for multiple reasons such as outdoor classes and use during inclement weather we are not renting out additional spaces at vacant locations though because every time we add one classroom we need to hire one teacher so if you can imagine a full school on the hybrid model adding enough classrooms to have all students present at once

080while socially distance would require us to double our faculty faculty which is not possible from both financial and staffing perspectives now that is not to say we haven't added staff already the district has added eight new teachers as of this date to accommodate the additional online academy classes and switch some of our regular teachers over to the online academy as well unfortunately though the students enrolled the in the online academy did not provide us the opportunity to bring back all the brick and mortar students for five days per week when we return this fall those class sizes will be averaging 21 or 22 and we just need to keep the six foot distance with that number of students in the classroom so when a class size is 21 or you divide that into cohorts and

081you're talking about 10 or 11 students per class at a time and if the entire class size is 21 we can't bring them all back at once because we just don't have the spacing necessary under the hybrid approach next i'd like to talk about cleaning protocols through a combined effort between our contracted cleaning service company mets environmental and our own custodial staff the buildings will be cleaned and disinfected daily with a full disinfection between the cohorts which would occur on wednesday and after friday classes throughout the day our custodians will be disinfecting disinfecting frequently touched surfaces during the evenings and the time between those cohorts wednesday and after friday the cleaning staff will use electrostatic sprayers to apply the disinfectant these sprayers allow us to fully disinfect an area in a relatively short time approved

082epa disinfectants will be used in all areas lightly touching on transportation we will use these electrostatic sprayers in each one of our buses after each run and as gina pointed out all rooms will be equipped with disinfectant spray wipes and hand sanitizer for use throughout the day and that concludes my part i'll turn it over to navy elementary thank you ferg um i'm just going to take a few minutes and uh go through uh the previously presented hybrid a b cohort model for for the elementary return um the first thing i'd like to say is uh should we move into the cohort model um the staff students and community obviously are going to be extremely excited uh for the first sense of normalcy uh just seeing our students at the bundle pickup if that's any

083indication to see our youngest kids coming back i can't put in the words how excited our staff would be for that day but i'd like to take a few minutes just go through kind of the key elements of what a day would look like in the cohort model at the elementary level as you know students would be divided into two cohorts a and b students in cohort a would receive instruction in person monday and tuesday while cohort b students would be receiving asynchronous instruction also keep in mind there's the daily meeting daily morning meeting synchronous for all students to come back together wednesday is an asynchronous day for all also including the daily morning meeting so therefore all five days all of the students who are together right now would be back together in a

084morning meeting students who are in person whether they're in the a cohort or the b cohort their day would follow a typical daily instructional day and schedule students would receive instruction in ela mathematics social studies and science as well as a rotation of special areas and their daily lunch and recess each of the elementary schools uh during the summer time planned for the return uh in a cohort so several many eight-foot tables have been ordered uh to provide students the appropriate uh social distancing in the cafeteria to provide safety for for all in the classroom students will be spaced out according to all of the published physical distancing guidelines and obviously this is as mr abbott mentioned attainable due to the smaller class sizes of the cohort model now that we are currently employing the

085virtual schedule the administration and teachers are currently reviewing the lessons learned from the new online format and are working collaboratively to analyze the hybrid schedule in terms of adjustments to our synchronous support offerings uh for those receiving asynchronous instruction at home so that's just kind of an overview of what a day would look like the in-person cohorts would be very similar to a daily schedule that we've had before students at home would have the daily synchronous morning meeting plus the asynchronous work sent out via the learning platform asynchronous wednesday teachers are preparing that asynchronous work to be pushed out again could be a learning module a video wssd teacher created video but as i said we've kind of learned some lessons from the current format so we are looking at what synchronous could look like

086in the hybrid model across the week um but uh as i said in the beginning we're incredibly excited that uh potentially we could be having our youngest learners coming back to us in a relatively short amount of time so thank you we too of course uh uh echoing with alice that are excited about seeing our our kids in school again uh we do miss them the joy of the middle school hybrid schedule is that it's quite simple and we maximize the amount of time kids have with their teachers um just like mr heinle said all precautions are taken the cafeteria classrooms and all the safety every section of every class in every grade was went through to make sure the a b cohorts work evenly with the sections and they do the uh every child

087in the middle school will be assigned an a or a b cohort even if they are in the online academy and they don't plan on setting foot in school at all they still will go to an a or b cohort it does mirror our day um of course we're now going now that we're in virtual we have 41 minute classes we go down to 34 minute classes but they do see all eight of their academic classes including their lunch time um cohort a well of course monday tuesday they will be done school at 1 15 they will leave school at 1 15. so their academic day is over at that time the beef bee child children of the bees cohort they're working on um asynchronous work of course in the afternoon what i like about

088our schedule is even on an eighth of the cohort a schedule a and b the b kids do get to see their teachers on monday this appearance one two three and four get to see their teachers now they will be first 25 minutes so the time is shorter but they do get to see their teachers on monday and tuesday also wednesday of course as mr heinrich it is all asynchronous when we go to thursday friday we just flip um periods one through eight are seen by all their all the students and their teachers they are done at 1 30 and the a kids now get to see their teachers for 25 minutes for four periods on thursday and the other four on friday so we think we maximize the amount of time kids have for

089instructional minutes with their teachers um and we get this and they get to see their teachers more than just twice a week so at the high school i i would like to reiterate you know what both al and joe both said we are very excited to see our students as well our model looks a little bit different than both the middle and the elementary and part of the reason for that is we're servicing 259 students in the high school so to maintain a six foot distance between students both in the classroom and in common areas presents us with a unique challenge at the high school level we are running an ap cohort with a online model as well our a cohort will meet in person on mondays and tuesdays in the morning and will be

090provided a grab and go lunch if preferred on their way home and then that a cohort will complete asynchronous work in the afternoon during that afternoon time our teachers will then deliver a lesson via synchronous learning via zoom to the b cohort who will not be present in school on monday and tuesday on wednesday the entire school will be engaged in asynchronous work on thursday and friday the code would switch so on thursday and friday a student in cohort b would come to school in the morning and the cohort a student would receive their instruction in the afternoon via zoom what that allows is any student who has chosen to be a part of the online academy they would participate in the be cohort synchronous learning monday and tuesday and the a cohort synchronous learning

091in the afternoon on thursday and friday however they will also receive the asynchronous lessons that the other cohorts would receive throughout the week part of our issue with the time i've received a lot of questions about the decrease in the instructional time for in person in school and the issue is we there's not a capacity at the high school to serve lunch to that number of students maintaining the six foot distance that's our biggest hurdle second to that would be to provide an online appropriate option for students who choose to remain in the virtual dr palmer is that the last presentation that is the last one so we're good for questions now okay um so maybe um so where to start i see some some hands going up but i'll you know there's a lot

092of ground to cover and so we may kind of hop around to different issues um i guess i'll just start by saying just as a general comment um that i think dr palmer your timeline um makes a lot of sense i think that um you know while the chester county health department had originally set the date of october 12th i think many feel like our rates have improved a lot since early august at the same time i think many understand that our highest priority learners in terms of who struggles the most with online education are our youngest kids and so i think trying to accelerate that process to get k to two back in school in a couple of weeks makes sense and then moving on to three to five but i see some hands

093up for questions let me start with chapin thanks um that was very helpful to have all that overview in one place thank you so much all of you that was incredibly helpful um really easy question for ferg and then maybe a different kind of question for the principals but the third question is you said something about redundant ventilation systems will be operated and i'm just not sure i know what you mean by redundant did you mean not previously used because not needed or did i mishear the word that you said no redundant and also not used in some cases as i've come to learn in this job these buildings are over engineered um they're they're they're built for for a greater capacity than what they actually hold so um some of our central systems have

094not been operating at full capacity because they didn't need to but because this is an airborne virus yeah we now have the ability to ramp that up okay you said redundant and it made me think of like old musty things that haven't been used like that just and i guess i hadn't thought of this before but i didn't hear anybody talking about testing the water you know i've seen all those articles about the water systems that have been sitting for so long are is anybody on that i didn't hear that we we have a company that comes out uh monthly um but also prior to um well first off all water fountains are shut down the cafeterias have been using the water throughout the entire summer although in some of the buildings it's been off

095for a period of time but we have procedures to put in place when we're before we're going to use the water okay and do we have water for people if the fountains are shut down like i don't know if kids bring if they fill water bottles and they last them all day just just because we don't have the backup with the fountains i guess we are in the process of going around to each building and the high school is first and um if they come in on time we are scheduled to have two bottle fillers put in at the high school which would give us a total of three at the high school we only had one in the past we do have um bottle fillers at um at a couple of our elementaries we

096have sinks in the classrooms which suffice but we are in a process of going through the district and putting in bottle fillers um so that we so and bottle fillers don't have to be closed down as opposed to water fountains great um thanks um and then the other question was just generally about the asynchronous and probably this is something people are thinking about but i just wanted to name it um giving attention to having asynchronous also be screen free because asynchronous doesn't necessarily mean screen free um so i don't know if anybody if if you've had any conversations in amongst your staffs the teachers about that in particular i'm i'm guessing the answer is probably yes but it might make people feel better to know that those conversations are happening so yeah i i can

097actually uh speak to that in the first uh material pickup there was kind of a lens given to that for some of the materials to be um screen free so i don't i don't think it will be much of a change when we move to the hybrid um you know the teachers are um cognizant of zoom fatigue and screen screen time in general so should we go to the hybrid model uh or when we go to the hybrid model there will be attention given to that as well and those conversations are being had nice to see people draw clouds and stuff all right uh marilyn was was dr jones saying something yeah i know that oh sorry no it's all right dude thank you um yeah i was just gonna jump in here for a

098minute you know i think our teachers um you know over the summer the idea of teaching all online you know it was different than the spring we we wanted it to be different than the spring and so over the summer we worked to try to improve things to ensure that teachers had as much as they could have in order to to get it ready you know sort of ripen up that mango but at the end of the day it was untested and so as teachers came in and started collaborating and working together they were able to really feed off one another and the energy with that and i have no doubt that as we get into hybrid the same is going to be true so as teachers start to get more and more comfortable and

099more and more connected with students both on screen time and off screen time when the students are in the building i think they're going to be okay making more i'll go back to the word robust making more robust assignments that don't require a screen i think in the beginning everybody's so anxious to see their kids and right now the screen is our modality for seeing our students but once we're comfortable with that i think our students will get to have many more experiences that don't just involve a screen that gives them the opportunity to push away from that and do something that's tactile do something that feels experiential rather than just through a screen and i think it's just a matter of our teachers learning to you know that it's okay and learning different techniques

100and sharing i think that's why our our time for in service our time for teacher collaboration is really it's it's essential at this point so i just wanted to add that comment uh comment and and i appreciate the questions that you've been asking us all right then we'll move to maryland sorry about that so i have i think i have three questions um the first one is is a really easy one for for gina ross um so all the students and staff will be wearing masks are the students supplying their own masks are we supplying masks for them so yes students will be wearing masks unless they meet the exemption let me be clear on that and then we have procedures in place for alternative ppe supports um students and staff have the opportunity to

101either bring their own mask or there will be masks available for them um you know some students and staff members are really excited to showcase their specialty masks dr tuck is a fan of that um and i'm sure we have others who will be also but we do also have masks um within the district and included in those are masks that have the clear mouth part um to help support our students with social emotional needs or with a hearing impairment okay and so is somebody going to be um taking a look at the student survi supplied masks to make sure that they are adequate how do you mean adequate as opposed to a bandana tight around your face um so in terms of that we don't necessarily have those procedures set um if you read

102the protocols that dr levine set out in terms of that they are very vague um so i think right now we're more focused on covering your nose and your mouth um but we would certainly speak directly with anyone who had there were concerns about okay i i would i would be concerned that the masks were actually stopping the transmission uh viruses so i hope we have some more information about that um so one question about about shifting to the hybrid option particularly for the middle school and high school students i know over the summer there was a tremendous amount of angst about the online education being not as good as in-person education but and and families had to choose on if they wanted to be part of the online academy or to go with the

103hybrid option and i'm wondering if now that families have had the opportunity to test drive the online educational opportunities will they be given a chance to maybe opt into the online academy i'm actually going to take that one dr huff talking about the second actually let me back up for a moment we had originally asked all of our families if they wanted their children to be in the online academy or to come into the cohort and then when we went to virtual only i asked our elementary parents one more time to confirm to us that they wanted to choose the online academy and we asked them to lock in whether it was for a half a year or to let us know that they were going to do that for the whole year for whatever

104reason was right for them because we had very specific staffing that was associated with that choice so we told the elementary families you have another shot tell us now and we're going to lock in staffing we never went back to the secondary parents because it was something that we could be a little bit more fluid at the middle school and the high school we can't have kids hopping back and forth on a daily basis but with a relatively little lead time with perhaps a week lead time we could move children back and forth and we are definitely scheduling all kids to be cohort a or cohort b so this will be a surprise to greg and joe who have not heard this yet but i'm envisioning that our principals will send out an e-blast to

105the middle school and to the high school saying this is the proposed timeline that we would bring kids back let us ask you to reconsider your decision would you like your child to be remain part of the online academy go to the online academy or participate um in person as part of the cohort so that gives us enough time to ask our secondary parents to re-up their choice or to choose differently i had that in the back of my mind before but i had not shared that with gregor joe until just now well thank you guys thank you that's helpful and and my last question is i know that this reopening schedule is still just a proposal it has it has not been approved yet but i'm just imagining kind of the process that you

106get new information every friday afternoon from chester county so will it will it be kind of on a weekly basis making a decision on on if we're still moving forward with the plan i'm going to speak and then i'm going to ask dave to piggyback on me i'm envisioning that our most critical date is going to be this friday and if that is the case i think we're going to have a good feel for what that's going to be so that if we do have the special board meeting next week we can project another week uh going out to our parents and that's also while the recommendation was only k2 that way we know um what that would look like at our elementary school we would limit the total amount of children in there we

107would limit the total amount of children on our buses that that would give us that maximum protection in our building it would be very different if our numbers come in totally totally high and off the charts but my gut feeling was that we are going to be in that range uh depending on what they are my thought is that we should be able to give parents a really strong feeling with we think we're going to be okay and two weeks out this is what it looks like for secondary or if it's not the case we could communicate to parents we're going to need another week because we will have a board meeting on the 29th as well and we could communicate with we're not sure yet about the secondary but we'll update you at the

108next board meeting it's just one of those i'm getting a gut feeling feeling much more comfortable about the elementary and after this friday maybe we'll be comfortable about the secondary too or at least tell the parents we'll punt for one more week for the secondary okay i'm sorry dave do you see it that way yeah and i'll just jump in and say you know that that initial week being just cater to we're talking about a like dramatically lower number of students entering our buildings during that week than if we were trying to bring the full hybrid model back all at once so talking about very modest numbers of students entering the buildings we're also again talking about the students who i think stand a lot to gain from trying to get face to face as

109soon as possible and i think if we just look at our absolute levels of where we are in terms of incidence and positivity we're at a much better starting point right now than we were back in early august and so i think even if rates like you know ticked up slightly we would still be in a pretty good spot in order to to move forward obviously if there's a big jump then we have to revisit and so again i think it makes sense to um you know probably why we didn't plan on voting tonight it definitely made sense to see another week of data and then of course at any point in time if there's something dramatic that happens we always and that'll be true for the whole year we'll need to be prepared for

110you know making quick transitions but we also don't want to be making lots of transitions either so we want to do this right right i guess that that is i i am comfortable with with the start my question is in this the potential next wave that may come with the flu season in the fall how is that how we're going to make sure we respond to that rapidly um so that's just something for discussion next week sure did you have another was that your last okay let me go to jerry yes that was my question uh no we're going to begin we're going to have students come in but i'm sure over the next week to few weeks we'll have a covert kids are we clear how we're going to deal with that and what

111level of isolation we're going to follow and what the protocol is going to be gina do you want to take that yes um so yes we are claire um procedures are in place um nurses suites to have isolation rooms so that we are ready ppe is in place for that we have already had um you know some suspected cases some positive cases where we've been in close contact with the chester county health department we've been very pleased with how responsive they've been and how supportive they've been in guiding us through we feel very comfortable with the procedures that are in place in terms of responding um both reactively and proactively to potential cases thank you uh jen so i wanted to go back towards the beginning of this presentation and asked dr palmer i only

112heard the second number the 48 um that you talked about i did not hear your rate of positivity that you quoted and i i was concerned that maybe i was looking at the wrong thing could you go back and say that again the rate of positivity is 4.34 okay then i am looking at the right numbers so when i go up to the recommendations the guidance that governor wolf has given which says we can go back in person with less than five percent is it that our incidence rates are not where they should be for the and portion of that guidance that is correct and when you have the numbers that don't match you go into the high category and that becomes an ore so we would fall into the ore with the incidence rate

113not the moderate no in the high in the high it would be greater than 40 but less than 80. so it jumps to the or i know when we were reviewing this with gene kassner she's like look at the end look at the end and then when you're in that other category you hop to the oars okay but we're actually not far out of the moderate if i'm reading that right correct you are correct all right okay so based on that and based on the following presentations that i heard if we were to get into the low which which doesn't seem impossible uh are we unable to get kids back into our buildings five days a week um i'm going to start this and then ferg i'm going to ask you to jump in the

114issue for us is if we are still at the six foot social distancing or physical distancing of six feet we cannot get all of our children back i believe the best we can do is on average four and a half feet if we bring everyone back that's the one piece of all of the guidelines we could mask we could have the hygiene we could do the symptom monitoring but we can't do the physical distancing ferg am i correct with those numbers yeah you are and you know if you take a look at a normal classroom on a normal day pre-covered from center point of the desk to center point of the desk that is about four four and a half feet um so it is really you know four and a half feet puts us

115right about at a normal normal class um with normal spacing just like any other year okay and um back to the the comment question that chapin had about the zoom fatigue i will say that for especially for the younger kids if it is going to stay on the asynchronous days as it is now while there have been textbook assignments given out which are appreciated by parents such as myself they're still not screen free days because the only way to submit those assignments are through our screens and it requires the child to go on and either fumble through it on their own depending on the age and the savviness of the child or the parent to go on and submit those assignments uh in addition the lessons while it may be asynchronous are delivered through screens

116um for every child that i every grade that i'm aware of so if they're going to be moving forward with learning during those asynchronous days i do think there is still and correct me if i'm wrong but a decent amount of screen time that i am witnessing as it stands now so i guess i'm wondering if there can either be more thought given to how um especially the elementary students but our middle school students and our high school students are still young kids i mean they're still young especially the middle school students can there be more thought given to how those asynchronous days work because there is still a significant amount of screen time for young learners that's happening to answer your question jennifer yes um that is part of our discussions like greg said

117um i i believe the struggle too is in our culture in 2020 that's what we were building to that anyway you know before covid that more screen time more screen time where textbooks have gone away and in classroom kids on screen so that that was something we were dealing with anyway um so now you dump on this and all everything has to be delivered you know so that that was something we were struggling with before covid um about lessening screen time for for all kids but it is definitely part of our discussions and i'm sure i'm thinking for greg too about during those times when they don't have to be on screen get them off the screen yes and i would also say that i hope for the follow-up for those two days a week

118that they get into the classroom which you know who would have ever predicted that two days a week would look so good right um but for those two days a week that they get into the classroom i really hope that the emphasis really is on um tactile hands-on not dangerous hands-on uh with virus hands-on but clean hands-on learning because i think another thing that parents are witnessing is for the first time in recent history we're not saying it off the screens kids are begging us to get off the screens they're begging us not to put them on the zooms they're begging us to end them and it's not because they don't want to learn these are kids that love to learn these are kids that don't want to be on a platform that's designed for

119adults that we're now using for kids and it's it's a sin i mean it's very difficult i understand the predicament that we're in i understand the balance but i do also understand that screens weren't good for these kids prior to covet and kova didn't make them good for them so i think there are a lot of parents experiencing that and that would share that sentiment a lot of parents um and caregivers so i do hope that inside the classroom that will also be a huge focus because it's it's a it's a major problem um uh the other thing i wanted to ask about is from miss ross uh you talked about this website that is on the agenda for approval tonight for uh symptom tracking is that a fair way to put it yes okay

120is that to be used by families when their child has not felt well and they then want to evaluate whether the child should go back into the classroom or is that to be used by families prior to sending their children in the morning the guidance from the department of health and the chester county health department is that districts must have some type of monitoring in place so the um online system is designed for every parent and every staff member to complete prior to the school day so in a cohort model if you are supposed to attend school that day your parents should be completing it okay not just limited to when you're feeling well it is for everyone and it is a universal screener and so the guidelines from the health department require that family

121to complete that for that child to attend school that day is that correct that is the guidance yes the guidance okay um and just so that i mean i'm not don't necessarily have to go into all the exemptions but you did talk about an exemption to ppe um i'm wondering if some kids that went into school may feel unsettled by not understanding exactly why that's happening with some of their fellow students um is there a way we can either explain that you know obviously within the bounds of the law or um will they be wearing alternate types of ppe so if you're familiar with the governor's and um dr levine's mask update and mandate um there are specific areas one of them being for individuals with a medical issue or with a disability and they're

122not able to utilize masks so there are other ppe within the district we have shields we have plexiglas barriers that are you know for the desk um for standing and in aisle things like that um i'm sure that we will be speaking um with students if there are questions i anticipate that there will be individuals who may have medical issues that will be documented and they'll have an alternative need um so there will be an understanding to all of that okay okay and um just so parents and caregivers can get a visual where will there be plexiglass um that's i don't remember hearing about it before plexiglas dividers on the desks so not every student will have a plexiglas divider however if there are some students or staff members who are at a higher risk

123or part of the exemption from the mask mandate um then they would have access to these alternative ppes in terms of other um plexiglas ferg might be able to address that and that's more from a a staff perspective in that any area such as a front desk such as a library desk such as maybe a nurse's area or somebody who's at high risk we've been working to create plexiglas dividers for those areas okay thanks everybody uh kelly yep um thank you um following on to the symptom tracker uh question would our athletic departments be able to use the same let's say we have an event um let's say some when we return to competition at some point here would we be able to use that same symptom tracker to check um symptoms for our our

124students who might be competing outside of normal school hours on a weekend i anticipate that that is a possibility we have not specifically targeted that yet um i've been told that it can be used for other times outside of those guaranteed students and staff are due into the buildings there are other methods that we might need to implement to be able to utilize that for um maybe unexpected visitors at the building or for athletics okay okay um and then i had a second i'm not sure if this is a comment or a question frankly so we'll see how it comes out um following on to the the conversation about um zoom fatigue which absolutely is real we all know that many of us that are still working from home at the same time when we

125think about the lessons learned thus far um in these these first two weeks and how might a cohort model um look when we come back so we've talked about what that day in our life looks like and we've talked about the fact that we want to build in any lessons that we've learned and and make adjustments to that as we go i looking at parent comments i i feel like we have this um like inherent dichotomy of we feel the zoom fatigue and we want to have less of it and at the same time i'm seeing a real ask from parents for more synchronous learning when we go into a cohort model and those things are not compatible so you can't not have you can't address the zoom fatigue and have more synchronous learning in

126a cohort model um unless somebody has an answer to how we might be able to do that i really feel like we've got these two different dynamics happening at the same time and if you don't mind i'm just gonna i'm gonna throw out a little bit of a comment on that um you know jen alluded to this before i think the answer lies somewhere in what we do when students are in the building so if we can decrease some of the screen time there and find a way if necessary to increase the synchronicity piece of it when kids are quote unquote asynchronous that might be some of the solutions so we can increase having more synchronicity during asynchronous days it might just be to tune in for a core lesson piece let's say 10 minutes

127of ela 10 minutes of math at the elementary but for the times when the students let's think specifically of elementary students when they are in the building for the full day that our activities try to eliminate that screen so it's almost flipping when the screen happens so that it is not happening as much when they are in the building and and jen when you mentioned that i thought that's actually where i think the answer may lie and i think that that requires some further exploration okay now i i do think that dr satorelli jones and i think that an extra piece of that can be for um you know for the students that just can't get to a special or a parent that just is watching their child and they know yes i understand the

128value of art yes i understand the value of pe and all of the other specials this this is requiring us all to think about how our kids learn in completely different ways and i think working with the teachers and having those teachers continue to be open-minded about a partnership with the adults that are witnessing their child who may have a smiley face on that screen but are breaking down at the breaks which is happening to say um to sort of honor that that parental opinion and to say i know that you know you should be going to these specials but i understand that you're not and that there won't be um sort of this negative implication that arises because of that i think that's another thing that we could think about uh because i do

129agree with you kelly that there is this there is this push-pull and they don't work together and we do hear both of those things but i will say that it is very it is difficult also for the children and the parents witnessing those children who again it's i mean it's some really wonderful students that just can't do this type of learning um so i think that partnership being really strong as we go forward as well is really crucial and and sort of uh trusting a parent when they say this isn't going to work because we all have the it's about the kids right we all have the kids best interests in mind and if we do that i think that partnership can work well on top of making the most of those in-person days i

130agree i agree with everything you said oh yeah anything else no thank you okay yeah i mean i think that um you know the way i think about a lot of these conversations we're having you know is that we will continue to learn a lot as we go and um you know while i think families want stability at the same time i think we also need to embrace the idea of recognizing when things are working and when we recognize that there's challenges and we can make improvements and being open to continue to iterate on this model because you know everybody's doing this for the first time and i think we will learn a lot as we go i think we've already learned a lot about the fully virtual model in just a couple of weeks

131of implementing and i'm sure the same will be true as we move to a hybrid so you know again just being open to the idea of making modifications as we go i think will be an important principle in all of us i just had one that's kind of a a high-level conversation about like the quality of education i have a very specific question about uh environmental issues ferg um have we already i think you said this already but have we already moved as much furniture out of rooms to space kids out as much as possible or they return back i would actually like to defer to the principles because that's been occurring in the building level now keep in mind with the elementary it's not really moving furniture out of the individual classrooms because you

132got to have both sets of furniture in there because the kids will be switching and and because the elementary have um will have certain belongings inside the desk i know at the middle school we've moved um they have moved uh just about all the furniture if not all the furniture out as well as the high school we had we had been using the middle school cafeteria as a warehouse for all the additional furniture we had to buy so that we could create so uh the six foot distance that was shipped out uh just about all that was shipped out to the individual buildings last week so i know the custodians are currently assembling that furniture so they'll be ready for use by september 28th in the elementary buildings do any of the principals want to

133correct or add you are correct go ahead joe i was agreeing with ferg i would just add at the high school um we've we've moved the furniture in the individual classrooms but there are some large common areas where we've kept furniture for example in the library under the cohort model we we have a few singleton classes in other words classes are only offered once in the schedule and where we didn't have room to make scheduling adjustments for students to maintain only 15 students in a class those classes will take place in a larger area where we can still spread students out to maintain the six foot so other than those areas all the furniture has been moved out i would also say that it's been a lot of it's stored in our locker room area

134because we don't anticipate using those anytime soon so if we were looking forward six eight months or whenever if we were ever to return to a full in person we would need some time to transition all that material back into the classrooms great thank you um and ferg i think you alluded to it um with respect to uh ventilation plans in general in most classrooms are we able to get at least some windows open in the classrooms yeah just about all our classrooms have windows that open they are they aren't windows that you can open um fully because um those days came to an end a while ago and insurance companies don't want you to but the reality is you can't bring too much fresh air into a system that has a ventilation system or

135air conditioning where it will shut down the the humidity will shut down the the air conditioning system so just about all classrooms do have the ventilation i mean windows that open the classrooms that haven't as i indicated earlier i have gone through that through those classrooms with our hvac technician to take a look at the ventilation in there we also purchased a tool that allows us to measure cubic feet per minute and make sure that we are turning the classrooms over or any area over as per recommendations great thank you um so i don't think i see any other hands i'll just pause for a moment to see if any other board members have a question okay um so just to let board members know i do intend to schedule a special board meeting uh

136for a week from today uh based on dr palmer's recommendations um so we will um plan to meet on next monday which i believe is september 21st if i'm correct um at the usual time at 7 00 pm and we'll take up at that time the item of this phase reopening plan so let me turn things back to dr palmer we have one more focus topic for the evening and i'll let her introduce that we do have one more and i have to say i am going to oh leanne wenzel for agreeing to come to our presentation this evening let me give you just a piece of background as to why i asked for this item to be on the agenda we have been having a tremendous amount of conversation relative to our ability to

137have sports our desire to have sports and i know that we are part of the central athletic league which is part of district one and we are governed by piaa bylaws but i can't with certainty tell everyone on the call or in our community what that means with all of the nuances associated with the league the district and pia so i have the opportunity to work with leanne as a colleague from another school district she is the superintendent of ridley as well so we meet regularly but in this particular instance she is before us because she sits on the board of piaa piaa has a number of board members and the part that she represents is she is a member of the professional association that we both belong to the pennsylvania association of school administrators

138and she is the pasa representative to piaa for instance psba also has a representative to pia as well there are a whole group of individuals and leanne is the one who will update us so i had called her and asked her to explain those nuances with district one central league how are the votes taken what does the bylaws mean to us when can we play sports what's going to happen and i asked her could there be anybody who would come out and be able to talk to our community to be able to educate us all as to what those intricacies are and she was very generous with her time and said that she would do it so she is here in that official capacity tonight to educate us on central league district one and and

139let me preface the conversation with the superintendents have been in touch with pia we know piaa has a work session scheduled for this week on wednesday the 16th and we also know the piaa board has a board meeting scheduled for next week on wednesday the 23rd at that time we are anticipating that the piaa will sanction authorize develop an alternative sports schedule that can be presented to the central league so we are very hopeful to get more communication but i thought i'm not the best one to communicate it also on this call you will see pat clancy who is our athletic director i've asked him to join the call and greg hilton is on there both pat and greg are representatives to the central athletic league so i thought the board should kind of know

140what all of this is very specifically and since i can't speak articulately about it i am indebted to leanne to educate all of us so leanne the screen is yours now well thank you dr palmer it's it's been enlightening for me to be able to sit through and hear you know your triumphs as as you've moved through the opening of school and hopefully we can uh respond in kind at some future date um i do sit in one of the 32 board member seats for the piaa board um representing our state superintendents association the piaa is actually divided into 12 geographic regions um ridley school district as well as the wallingford sophomore school district actually sit within district 1 one of those 12 districts within the pia and sometimes that gets a little bit confusing

141when we refer to districts are you talking school districts are you talking piaa districts but district one references the school districts in southeast pa as well as we kind of branch up a little bit as well so when you think about how those structures fit together what we look at is all 12 districts have representative seats on the board depending upon the number of school district members within their particular district and then within each district there are structures as well so within district one we have a chairman an assistant chairman or vice chairman as well as an executive director and an assistant executive director to manage operations the central league fits into district one as one of the representative groups that organizes school districts in the district one every district in the state every pia

142district in the state has a little different structure to it based upon their geographic region the number of school districts so for example in western pennsylvania district 7 falls within what's referred to as the wpial or wpeel that actually represents 10 counties so not just district 7 but it also picks up some some school districts that are outside the district 7 piaa membership and they actually have sections the teams are organized by classification or size and geographic locations so that organization um is different on the other side of the state how they organize competition within their member schools district one traditionally has these different leagues so in delaware county the central league is it is represented we also have schools that fall into the chesmar league and the del valle league so there are different

143leagues and the leagues don't necessarily always conf conform to piaa classification or size but the leagues are pretty much generally have always revolved around geographic location um to determine who belongs to what league and some other historical um background that has developed over time with these leagues so the leak the central league's responsibility is to primarily design schedules and make sure that the rules of the piaa are being implemented properly as we roll into what the pia's responsibilities are the p-i-a believes that a system that best serves a student-athlete is to emphasize the amateur educational and character character building aspects of high school athletics and recognizes that athletics is not the driving force the students are in school primarily to obtain an education and that's a primary piece of the piaa so with that in

144mind the piaa has created bylaws and regulations that every school must abide by and part of that deals with the scheduling dates for sports seasons and making sure that the sports medicine advisory committee's guidance is being implemented and followed appropriately for each of those sports seasons so the piaa has four major areas to focus on one is eligibility of students two is the rules how they're implementing the rules for every sport training and registering officials as well as then designing the championships so those are the four primary focus areas of the piaa as their responsibility when it comes to the interaction between the central league and district one and the piaa the central league is an organization that is pretty much primarily for the principals and the athletic directors to consult and communicate and act

145on behalf of their district as a member of the piaa the boards and you know none of us were really here when we joined the piaa but the application to be a member in the piaa commits the district to have the principal as the responsible individual to the piaa on all matters pertaining to interscholastic athletic relations within the school that is the principal's responsibility and hence the central league isn't just all the athletic directors it actually has the principal component with it as well so those are pretty much the structures and and how they each fit together in making um the system kind of work and move forward so be happy to answer any questions that anyone has i have a question um and again i don't know if you can answer this but i'm

146trying to understand uh for our s we'll just take fall sports as an example um you know right now we don't have a central league competing and if an individual school decides to resume a particular sport or set of sports and want to compete against another school like one of the things that that's been suggested in public health recommendations is to find some schools to compete against how does that relate to the central league piaa is a district allowed to do that or i guess if you do that does that cause any negative consequences for future opportunities in the league or pia well there there are two things in play one is it's the league's responsibility for scheduling purposes that needs responsibility because district one doesn't manage scheduling that the actual individual needs to um

147people may be well aware of major league baseball the nba the idea the idea of creating a bubble um in which you're trying to restrict the contact and that was the approach that this central league was trying to to mimic so if you choose to go outside of the central league bubble you now put yourself at risk in that you're tr you're most likely traveling outside of delaware county so that's that's one issue that goes with that the other commitment is the central league part of being part of the central league is that commitment to play central league schools so if you're choosing to go outside of the league then you're requesting to actually leave the central league and the central league would have to decide how and when to sanction individual members and um

148so in a situation where if the central league wasn't having a season right now and you wanted to to set up a competition with another central league school what are the implications of that in terms of the you know participation in the league future eligibility all those kinds of issues so essentially what you're asking you're asking to have happen is if central league schools want to play central league schools then the central league is allowing for competition um if you're not going outside the central league um the the issue comes in if you're opting to go outside the central league to seek your competition and so if a um even though the league itself wasn't organizing a season would um you're still like if you contact one other school and say hey we want to

149play you like we're resuming practices we want to set up you know with these two schools some some competitions like that would be within the central league and you wouldn't be departing the league in any way you're not you're not stepping outside the bubble okay um um every sport has specific rules in terms of practice and competition so if you are if you choose to engage your season the number one role in the sports medicine advisory committee will not back off of this you must have 15 days of practice prior to the start of your competition um so that's one aspect that has no wiggle room you have to have the 15 days but once you start your competition you have a limited number of competition eligible times that you can play so that's within

150the bylaws and the regulations of the piaa that the league must uphold so for example football has a limit of 10 competitions that can be played during a regular season um with that with that limit uh in order for you to qualify for postseason play you can you have to play at least 50 of those games to be eligible for football so that's five for football now there is in the in the bylaws and the regulations there is the opportunity for a waiver um that in the case of the pandemic let's say we only get four games and we don't get that fifth game in does a school want to apply for the waiver in order to be eligible for postseason um so those are other things that are in consideration so right now the

151central league has postponed act upon the alternative schedule that the piaa is permitting so as the pia has a had to know how many schools it seems it was about 15 percent of the schools across the state have opted for um an alternative schedule um and once they knew that then they have to as a as a board we have to have a work session to sit down and say okay we've been advised these are all the bylaws and all the regulations that we have to consider in order to make a plan to move forward with an alternative opportunity um so that those are the next two meetings that dr palmer um pointed out the work session as well as then the general board meeting okay and then i i promise i'll have questions over

152to someone else in a moment the um and i may just be like uh not thinking about the central league in the right way but um so let's say that piaa comes out with these alternative accommodations to to compete um and essentially decided we want to have our fall seasons at some time after the new year but essential there were central league schools who decided we were going to set up competitions with each other right now um in that situation can you do that and you just sit out the other season that the central league is organizing it's going to get a little bit tricky in terms of the central league's decision about what they're going to sanction in terms of that schedule because once you start your competition you may lose the opportunity now

153you can start practice but if you don't compete you may lose the opportunity to take part in an alternative because you've started competition because that is that has come up in our board discussions as we were looking at these possible ideas that what happens if someone starts competition and somebody tests positive when we have to shut the team down can then we move to the alternative and and there are bylaws that have to be reviewed and those decisions have to be made where is that line can they play one game do they have if they play less than 50 percent because there's a 50 rule um those are the bylaws that the pia has to look at okay and i must say thank you so much for attending our meeting i'm sure you have uh

154many things to do in your own school district right now so we really appreciate it uh but i see kelly's handwriting um i i am aware that the i'm sorry thank you first of all thank you for being here tonight and i'm going to put you on the spot because i think right before we all joined uh meetings tonight chester county changed and released some guidelines and i wondered if any if you'd had a chance to look at that at all yet and what that might mean for us because yet another wrinkle in all of this my first glance at it because you're right it did come out like right before this meeting my first glance pretty much um some i can sum it up by saying they're leaving it all on the districts to

155make a decision um they're they're fully supporting a local the local authority and have and will continue to do so um i wasn't i didn't dig deeper but that's what i saw and that feels like a pretty significant change from what they had said previously they're still advocating for the january 1st to follow the e and department of health um recommendation however they doesn't mean that they are they are opposed to districts exercising their right to make that decision okay i will note that um any competition and this came from legal at pia every district has received the liability posters the covid warning posters that must be in place at every competition site to alert spectators of the risk of participating so those did go out to every district as well as a copy of

156a liability waiver should a district want to use it that information did go out from the pia as well anything else kelly okay uh jerry jerry you're muted i'm going to try to interpret what i heard and see if i heard things right fundamentally number one the piaa has to allow an alternative schedule number two the school district has to agree to practice for the giving period of time and in the sense i got if we're gonna compete the central league needs to decide to establish some kind of a competition schedule and then if those three thing happens then we choose to compete then we can compete that sound about right that sounds pretty concise and pretty direct yes thank you thanks jerry for summarizing appreciate that um jen thanks dave hi thanks a lot

157for being here am i uh correct in understanding that the central league is actually within it's underneath the umbrella of the piaa then so they are they're they are charged with um implementing um the rules the bylaws and the regulations of the piaa as well as creating the scheduling opportunities for for the pia yes to implement the pia guidance okay and when you were going through the principles of um piaa and you said that education is first are you talking about the academics in education the academics that it that is within the um statement about the purpose of the organization while they do believe that you know the participation in athletics builds character and interpersonal skills that are difficult in other settings it's still school's primary purpose is the academics so do you think the

158fact i mean so i i've recently learned a lot about sports it's not that i didn't know anything about sports before but i was not an athlete myself so i've been asking a lot of questions about this and i learned that um and you probably have the exact numbers that the piaa actually regulates is it 582 different is it districts within pennsylvania oh um with the the piaa actually oversees not only high schools but junior highs or middle schools so there are over 1400 individual schools they are public private parochial and charter schools within the pia okay um so of those i i guess i was told that it's 580 that's about that's about half that's probably the the number that are the number of actual high schools that participate in the pia okay probably

159public high schools would you say um coming for a second please i believe that number resp uh is the number of football teams that participate in the piano belay um i believe it's close to 700 high schools that are members for basketball and sports that require a few members okay and that of those only 80 or not i guess in that case would be football but of those only 80 across the entire state of pennsylvania ours is one of them are not playing is that correct i don't i haven't approximately the numbers don't have to be but i mean that there's that you know that sort of rough ratio does that sound about right to you the only thing i had heard was it was about 15 of of the members schools were not participating

160that's the only thing i've heard i haven't seen any of the data okay and that's because they haven't they don't have the the opportunity in the sense that in our case the central league has decided to push the sports back so it's not that they don't am i understanding correctly there are there are there are school districts in different counties all across the state that have opted not to participate so elk county i know of one in washington county like bethlehem going north their events norristown uh downing town there are districts all across the state that have opted not to participate in athletics but in our case it's not necessarily that and i guess in those cases that we've opted not to it's that we don't have that we don't have that avenue the way

161it stands right now is that correct i'm not well like the delve out like in terms of the league yes so the del val league the chessmont league and the central league have all um postponed opportunity for fall participation until an alternative is presented okay so i guess what was so surprising to me and maybe it shouldn't have been was that i didn't realize how many people kids high school kids junior high kids are actually playing sports across the entire state of pennsylvania almost every day of the week a variety of sports because even though we're not playing um there's tons and tons of club sports that are playing i'm imagining that the piaa is fully aware of that fully aware and that was a concern and i'll be very honest for my district all

162my high school student outbreaks have been associated with those community-based sports well i mean that may be in ridley and i i i'm saying in my in my case that's that's that's the case okay but i know that they're playing as far out as in western pennsylvania where i'm not sure how their numbers compare to ours and that they have not seen at least not yet those sort of tumultuous starts well mount lebanon lost their first two games because of an outbreak elizabeth forward lost their two football games before because of an outbreak like they were cancelled they were they were canceled because they they had an outbreak yes and they're you know the we're hearing the football ones because those tend to be the ones that newspapers report on we don't know about the

163soccer teams that have shut down i just know that during the course of the summer from my colleagues across the state we did hear of other teams that have had to stop operations because of outbreaks okay but i mean across the state hearing of a few teams doesn't sound like a whole lot i mean i i guess i guess what was really startling to me and i know that you're not individually responsible for this so i don't want you to feel as though i'm you know cornering you in any way but i just have discovered all this in recent i guess within the past week and it was just so surprising to me how many how many athletic teams are playing all the time and we and and they've been playing safely so i guess

164i'm wondering with the recent recent lifting of this parameter with the uh of this guideline with the chester county health department do we foresee that bumping anything up well a i don't think it was lifted they the beginning the first line it clearly says they're still advocating for the july 1st they are allowing school districts to endorsing that school districts have always had the opportunity to make their own decision so they're still they're still advocating for july for january 1st but they have added to the fact that schools can have the choice to continue their operations should they choose to do that with the caveat of the strict health and safety plan and the other guidance that's in place and i guess also i'm wondering and i i think this is the last of my

165questions for other people have their hand up i'm wondering you know especially so piaa is also responsible for the private schools that are continuing you said private and catholic schools if they are members of the pia so for example some of the catholic schools participate roman catholics a big basketball school they participate in the piaa but a school like episcopal chooses not to participate in the pia okay so it is not consistent obviously across the certainly not across the state that's for sure and even across the region in some ways am i am i right about that i just want to make sure i understand yes the pia does not um is not the governing body over every team uh in the state of pennsylvania okay and so also lastly as the do you think

166the central league would be rethinking just as schools that had had to rethink all of education do you think they'll be rethinking what you talked about with the sanctions and such if schools that are within that central league do you decide to play one another i i think what we're looking for is what guidance the pia is going to give us because it's not just sanctions from the central league it's also piaa sanctions because there are rules about what you can do and when you can do it so we want to make sure that everybody not only that everyone is able to compete in a safe environment but they're also competing within the guidance and the and the rules so um when you look at you know for example some of those those rules are

167about when a sports season can start when it can end you know that you have to have 15 days of practice prior to the first competition that you have to compete in 50 of your games prior to um to be eligible for post season the other thing is the guidance on post season from piaa we're looking at as well to see if if it's really about making sure kids have the opportunity to play as much as possible what role does post season have with it you know do we say well if you're not eligible for post season but you can play for the entire window and get eight games in versus just five do we allow for that so those are the things that the pia has to take a look at okay and especially

168i suppose considering the fact that there are so many sports going on they're payable pay-to-place boards for the most part right now although football does not have that opportunity which is why i think some of the conversation has surrounded that because i've also learned that all of these almost all the other sports have a club opportunity but football does not because of the regulations so i think that's another thing that adds to that conversation that they don't have that opportunity and then there's of course a huge equity piece for the kids that cannot pay to play absolutely equity has been a top figure when you have all the schools in district 8 which is the city of pittsburgh and the schools in district which are the philadelphia public and catholic school leagues not participating this

169is a this is an equity issue and even an equity issue beyond um football it's you know the parents that can't afford to have their child you know go out and participate in a travel volleyball team you know these this is a major equity issue it is it really is okay thank you so much for your patience with me thanks uh chapin thanks um i just wanted to um make sure i understand jerry's summary with that last bit of information so this 15 that jen just said only 15 of schools are opting out does that mean choosing to follow the piaa and central league you know 15 not going rogue right is that is that the 15 that we're talking about because you can always go rogue if you go rogue though you're subject to

170these sanctions and you know the participation isn't official anymore so you have two options under the pia right now you have the standard fall sports schedule which officially started august 24th that's the 85 the 15 are waiting for the alternative guidelines from the piaa and then you have that other group that if you want to go rogue then yes then you're going to be subject to sanctions whether there's central league sanctions or pia sanctions okay um okay i think that i think that clarifies thanks jared uh my assumption is that the 15 percent that chose not to participate in the regular season was at least partly due to the positivity rate and the general rate of the virus in their region and i'm assuming that is why that district one and the leagues in district

171one chose at least for now not to participate in a regular season is that correct i think that's a pretty safe when you look geographically at what districts chose to um pursue um the community transmission rate heavily weighed on those in in on those decisions so when you look at city of philadelphia the city of pittsburgh the southeast region even even up through the northeast region um that did impact greatly the decision that was made to look at the alternative and now that we chose not to participate in the regular season unless the p-i-a gives us some dispensation for an alternate we're kind of stuck so hopefully they'll consider right and and it's still it's still not too late to participate in the regular season um you wouldn't you would not have as many opportunities

172for kids to play but you still could compete in the regular season so that option is not completely off the table at this point in time don't only if the other schools in your district also choose right i mean we just can't do that ourselves that's a collective action yes i think that's an important piece too yeah that if the community transmission rate is such that schools feel comfortable then and engaging in creating a schedule um then you could pick up your season with your 15 days for practice going into um your competition so i'm gonna circle back to my questions because that just confused me slightly so if you were to essentially decide soon that you were actually going to enter the season that had already started the fact that the central league hadn't

173created a season of competition in our district if you went out and said we were doing that and found again a few other schools who were interested in that arrangement could the central league still come back and say no no no the central league would have to agree as a league okay set up an in in season schedule okay that would be the alternative regular season as opposed to an alternative schedule okay so all roads do lead back to the central league because they have to do the scheduling correct okay uh kelly just to one one one or two points of clarification then so if you want it to be a regular schedule that allows you to go into post uh postseason competition playoffs or whatever right now we need the league to help we

174would need the league collectively to help make that happen alternatively you could play in a bubble that you could set up with a couple schools but it's not the sanction season season then yeah so the other p like if you're just looking at post season there are a lot of unknown variables there um so postseason requires um you have to qualify for postseason so how many games did you win how many quality points versus your competition so and you have to play you have to play in at least 50 percent of your games to to get there so and it remains to be seen how the pias structures the post season to begin with um do does the postseason still consist of 16 teams do they reduce it to eight teams none of those decisions

175have been made yet so facing your decision just on postseason um may not get you not get the kids the kind of play you would you would hope they would get okay what one final question for me the if we want them if we were to want the students to participate in regular season given the 15 days of practice that has to precede it that's a decision that would have to be made very quickly to at least begin the practice correct right so you know we were looking at dates today so if you um would start practice or start your official practice or declare that you're officially practicing um and pat i assume you're still on the call if pat would say that you know sports practice are going to officially start on tomorrow on

176september 15th you would have adequate time to get your 15 days in and this i'm using football as an example to get five games in if you started tomorrow now you could also start your 15 days of practice and it could come out that the piaa alternative is a more attractive schedule to guarantee kids playing time that the central league says hey yeah we really want to do this we want to set it up um so you could still at that point in time you would still be eligible because you got your five games in that's 50 you could play or i'm sorry you could get four games in because you play one game a week um and you would request a waiver because that's built within the regulations that you couldn't complete 50 of

177the games because of the pandemic so you would still be eligible to request the waiver to be eligible for postseason um now one of the other things that the pia could talk about is if you don't qualify for postseason you can have those extra weeks to actually play games when playoffs are going on so that yours your children get more opportunities to play so the central league you know if the schools in the central league that don't qualify for a postseason game they could continue to play there there are options out there that we don't have answers to yet until we go through the process with the pia board okay thank you and i see dr palmer how's your hand up maybe she's trying to rescue you from moscow i i wish i were i

178actually have a question that came to mind as leanne was explaining that leanne do all sports have to follow the same for instance if we had one sport that we wanted to play now but every other sport we wanted to play later or do they all have to be all now or all later um that that can be a decision that the league could come out and say hey we think you know i think there was i don't even know where it was in this i don't even know if it was our state but somebody had talked about the fact they were allowing tennis to play in the fall and golf but no doubles tennis it was all singles tennis only so um you know that was a decision that was made to allow tennis

179and golf but they didn't want to do doubles tennis so uh you know but the central league could decide that you know tennis and golf okay we're gonna play those sports in the fall and and let them run out um because their time schedules are different so every sport has their own window their own calendar of uh when their competitions and how many competitions can occur i could just turn in for a second um all of our team sports for the most part in the fall season require three weeks of practice but if we're specifying tennis and golf there are less restric less requirements for them you only need three practices for golf before you can have your first competition you only need one week of tennis those two sports start up a little quicker

180partly because their regular seasons usually end earlier so as weather and daylight become more of a concern for those two sports um it's a quicker startup for those ones oh miss wenzel sorry dave it it it feels like this is very time sensitive but it feels like there's a lot of answers that the pa piaa still doesn't have how can we at least have the opportunity to think this through so that we can try to do right by our students without some of these answers because theoretically it's in the lapse of the school board but we are sort of beholden to the central league and it's circular and the last i mean it's very confusing for someone who's sitting in all of our shoes i mean we want to make this a value i i

181mean really i would think that everyone on the board wants at least information to be able to come up with the answer that they think is appropriate and i really feel at a loss i was gonna this is related i was gonna ask when is the central league meeting like how does the central league meet you've told us about piaa meetings and i'm wondering about that essentially we are beholden to them everybody's writing to us but we're sort of beholden to them sure the central league athletic directors are meeting thursday morning so it sounds like just um to piggyback on this so the work session for pia that's scheduled for this week we wouldn't expect to hear anything from that we would be waiting until the board meeting next week to get some more official

182guidance on accommodations yeah the the official action i mean it's like your your board meeting the official action cannot take place until the official board meeting so the work session next week is to look at truly what bylaws and regulations have to be now the staff at piaa has had to pull in and we've gotten samples from all different kinds of states um you know delaware went to a three season model after july one or after january one so that's the delaware model new jersey has a different like we have models from all over the country to to really look at and the staff has been looking at that so um i don't and pat you can correct me if i'm wrong i don't think you heard anything by starting your official practice um you

183just we just can't proceed with competition at this point until we get those answers from the pia you're safe and if you get your practices in and we can start competition then we start competition but you know that's that's one way you can work around that time-sensitive nature of this decision sure that's that's the one no we have that authority so that's the one thing we can do and we have control over when can we start practice and then practice and then when the central league and the pia you decide what they're going to do we're prepared to do it if we choose to that's about all we can do pat what were you going to say i was just going to say that yes we could start practice i would imagine that most of

184our coaches need a little bit of lead time before it um just so they can get all their arrangements in place but we could start practice and if we decide to take that alternate model in march that would be considered open gyms um you know it was basically voluntary workouts continued um but we could also structure it in a way that it would allow us to start in october if we were looking to move forward with that option and does the work session does anything get shared with the public from that about what what models are being coalesced around or not really at point in time no because we don't we don't literally act upon anything what we do is we receive the information about what bylaws have to be adjusted to to accommodate any

185type of alternative they want to put out so other than that that information doesn't come out public until the week after okay now the districts may communicate back to the different leagues um information to consider based upon those bylaws and regulations that get pointed out to us on wednesday but i don't know if they'll have it to the central league by thursday or not okay well there's definitely a lot to think about here and it seems like we'll have to decide whether we are waiting on that pi double a board meeting and that's a week from wednesday right right okay um which would give a lot more specificity around the options on the table which maybe make a lot of sense at this point but um this was incredibly helpful to share all of all

186of these mechanics and logistics with us because it's not um it's not obvious let's just put it that way more intuitive um so thank you we'll let you we'll let you go i'm sure you have many things to do and again we're really appreciative of you spending your evening with us thank you thank you all right um dr palmer anything to wrap up with our focus topics are we ready to move on we are ready to move on a lot to swallow okay all right uh so that takes us to um the section on the agenda for audience recognition for response to items for action on the agenda members of the public wishing to address the board have been and continue to be encouraged to call 610-892-3470 extension 1102 to leave the recorded comments for

187the board subject to a three-minute time limit anything left prior to five o'clock today has been transcribed and made available to the board um anything called in after five o'clock but prior to the end of this meeting is will still be transcribed and still distributed to the board and made a part of the record but will not be acknowledged uh during the meeting uh this evening uh kelly um do we have any comments for items on the agenda i know we have some comments but i think they may be for yeah they're they're all related to items that we are not actually voting on today and so therefore would um technically be part of the later audience recognition in the agenda okay so we'll come back to those um hopefully soon um so our first

188items for action are the approval um of the august 17th regular business meeting minutes an iso move do we have a second chapin uh thank you chapin uh any discussion okay miss fagoria can you please take a roll call vote mr ballas aye ms amino hi dr downey i dr huff hi mr cutis hi mrs lentz hi mrs walkman hi dr grandy hi the motion passes eight to zero thank you miss figura so that takes us to uh personnel we have quite a few items on personnel there's 16 items for action are there any on the list that anyone on the board would like to separate from the rest okay so bear with me we have the approval of two retirements as indicated in the agenda we have the approval of new appointments with the

189dates as described in the agenda and i'll just read through those uh quickly julia cooperstein a kindergarten special education teacher carly del roose a second grade teacher in the online academy megan del rossi an ela teacher at the middle school nicole delente a special education teacher at the middle school anna gabriel an english language arts teacher at the middle school cassandra karcher a fourth grade teacher at west brook kuberski a special ed teacher at the middle school david neal a computer science teacher at the middle school sarah pincus a ela teacher at the middle school alyssa pine a fourth grade teacher in the online academy emily reader english language arts at the high school amelia cisco third grade teacher in the online academy kristin sukowski an elementary school counselor in the online academy amy white

190a fifth grade teacher in the online academy david bear a science and social studies teacher at the middle school kathleen wert a special education teacher in the online academy lawrence kelly a special education teacher at the middle school and emily freese a health and physical education teacher at the high school moving on to the next items we have 10 leaves of absence as described in the agenda we have two changes of assignment effective beginning of the 2020 2021 school year as described in the agenda sorry i'm just scrolling through the agenda here on my screen we have uh one uh one change of assignment effective august 26 is described in the agenda we have one change of assignment effective august 27th as described in the agenda we have three additional assignments effective august 31st as

191described in the agenda we have a change in salary status for robert zakrzewski as described in the agenda we have one teacher eligible for tenure tenure marlena o'kane with the approval of compensation for additional staff allison schmidt for the student and staff wellness committee earned during the 2020 summer at the rate of 37 per hour as stipulated total hours not to exceed 15. with the approval of five additional work days for marlena o'kane at our per diem rate during the 2020 summer we have the approval for all school nurses for an additional five work days at their per diem rate or per hour rate not to exceed 55 days total during the 2020 summer we had the approval of flex time compensation for speech and language pathologists during the 2019-2020 school year at the rate

192of 37 dollars per hour is stipulated with the approval of curriculum and activity supplementals as described in the agenda the district does reserve the right to rescind this contract due to the pandemic if such programming can't take place with the approval of the 2020 2021 game worker rates as stipulated and we have the approval of payment of unused sick days for four employees as described all items in this section are as attached or described in the agenda do i have a motion don't move marilyn thank you marilyn do we have a second second jury balance thank you jerry any discussion all right miss fagor can you please take a role called it miss tomino i dr downey i dr huff hi mr cutis hi mrs lentz my spacebar button isn't working i guess just one

193eye mrs walkman hi mr ballas aye dr grandy hi personal items passed with a vote of eight two zero thank you mr borah and so that takes us to uh curriculum where we have four items for action are there any items on the list anyone would like to separate from the rest okay with the approval of the related service provider contracts for the 2019-2020 school year the 2020 extended school year and the 2020-2021 school year is stipulated with the approval of the 2020 extended school year in 2020 2021 school year tuition contracts has stipulated we have the approval of the educational services agreement for the students noted in item c with the approval for educational research by gina ross in the district items in this section are as attached or described in the agenda do

194i have a motion go moved thank you do we have a second second larry kids thank you larry uh any discussion all right miss fagor can you please take a roll call vote dr downey hi dr huff hi mr cutis hi mrs lentz hi mrs walkman hi mr ballas hi miss amino hi dr grandy hi the curriculum items pass the vote of eight to zero okay thank you ms fabora that takes us to finance we have three items for approval are there any on the list anyone on the board would like to separate from the rest okay first we have the awarding of a contract to bertolet construction for an amount of forty eight thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars for the high school mezzanine project pending solicitor review to be paid from capital reserve

195funds uh next we have the approval of the proposal from cyrilli associates incorporated to provide engineering consultant services from july 1st 2020 to june 30th 2021 next we have the approval of the proposal from qualtrics and red pepper software to provide symptom tracking software at an annual cost of twelve thousand dollars with a one-time three thousand dollar implementation fee and this was the item uh described by gina ross earlier um all the items are as attached or described in the agenda do i have a motion so moved kelly walkman thank you kelly do we have a second second marilyn huff thank you marilyn uh any discussion okay miss fagora can you please take a roll call vote dr huff hi mr cutis hi mrs lentz i mrs walkman hi mr ballas miss mino hi dr

196downey aye dr grandy hi the items pass eight two zero thank you miss pegora um next we move on to other items for voting on the agenda uh we have two in this section first we have the acknowledgement of the resignation of michelle downey as our dciu representative effective august 27 2020 and related we have the appointment of lawrence cutis as the gciu board representative through june 30th 2021. uh do i have a motion i moved oh moved i heard jerry i think yes uh a second is that coming from michelle maybe a second from miss charl downey thank you michelle um any discussion well i just want to say that um you know one of the reasons this is on the agenda this evening is uh an enormous amount of work that miss downey

197has been doing for the board um and so she's not one to walk away from any responsibilities but i asked her if this is perhaps something that we might move over to someone else and um but she's given a tremendous amount of her time uh to the board um you know particularly over the last six months and so we're deeply appreciative of all of her commitments and thank you uh larry for taking on this responsibility um miss figora can you please take a roll call vote mr cutis aye mrs lentz hi mrs walkman hi mr ballas hi miss mino hi dr downey aye dr huff i dr grandy hi the items pass eight to zero thank you miss figora um so this does bring us back to audience recognition for response to topics not on

198the agenda um so i will turn things over to kelly here i think we have um eight comments yes pardon me excuse me yes we received eight comments that were phoned in by the 5 pm deadline for tonight's board meeting and just a reminder that it's um we read into the record um only those comments that were phoned in by 5 p.m and anything that's received after the 5 pm deadline is included in the minutes of the board meeting that are posted following approval uh first item first uh comment comes from todd strein on riverview road in swarthmore dear wallingford's westmore school district school board and administrators at tonight's meeting for as soon as possible or as soon as possible thereafter would you please provide the community with an update on total student enrollment compared

199with last year along with statistics on daily attendance since the start of the 2020-2021 school year both for the online academy and also via the virtual classroom sessions thank you it's our follow-up item for us on that one uh second comment is from david and jennifer bloom of guernsey road and swarthmore dear board members we would like to pose the following questions to the board for the board meeting on pardon september 14th number one what do the teachers in our district need to feel safe before re-entering the schools number two what preparations within the schools need to be completed between now and october 12 to open at least the elementary schools to ensure the safety of both the students and teachers number three does the district have thermometer sanitizer tents masks plexiglas dividers etc number

200four have the hvac systems in every school been updated number five does every window in every classroom open number six has a professional cleaning service been hired to clean or train our cleaning staff number seven does each school i'm sorry does each school have a designated isolation area in case a child or teacher becomes ill at school and needs to wait before being sent home and number eight what strategies can wssd adopt from the preparations private schools and parochial schools have implemented thank you number next comment comes from jency weeks of sykes lien in wellingford i'm leaving a message for the board concerning that there's not been an announcement about voting to get our kids back into school it's becoming very detrimental to these children they're getting depressed people are starting to have to buy

201blue light glasses for their children because of the retina damage school academia is starting to fail and as a whole this is starting to derail our community so the lack of the board not being village vigilant and on top of this is very disappointing this needs to be taken care of as soon as possible and heard with open ears and i'm i'm sorry it's a little difficult to tell the next part of the transcription there is a lot of he said she said and a lot of political play going on in the school board and that is starting to affect our children so this vote needs to happen and be in the favor of the children not in the favor of the board members who are sitting and giving a call that they want to

202get i'm calling on behalf of the swathmore well and for children to get them back to school thanks uh next comment is from oh sorry it's been a long night albert federico good afternoon i'm calling to register my support for the immediate return to in-person education at our schools in my opinion the board's primary function is to provide for in-person education of our students otherwise we would have enrolled in online education years ago i believe that the board was unreasonably cautious and delaying in-person education and i would support it restarting immediately thank you next comment is from rebecca tenny so euro i apologize if i messed that up um pronounce that incorrectly good afternoon i would like to say thank you to the many teachers and administrators who've worked incredibly hard to start the school

203year virtually while it is still not an ideal situation the engagement of the teachers and their ability to juggle internet issues multiple learners on screens and the occasional inattentive students speaks volumes to their dedication while the virtual experience is much better than the spring i would like to encourage the board and school leadership to begin to think about how to open schools again soon infection rates are fairly low and there are effective ways to get children back into the schools even if we start with elementary and work our way up through the grades our children continue to miss out on valuable social interactions the expected new experiences of moving up to a new school and also lack the physical and emotional safety that some of them need we also continue to exasperate disparities and resources

204in education as the district considers getting the children back into school i do encourage leadership to reconsider the high school hybrid schedule the schedule does not seem to engage the students in a meaningful way and there are alternative schedules that we should consider to allow more interactions with teachers and peers in a safe manner i thank you all for your ongoing work during these unprecedented unprecedented times thank you uh next is from autumn mansour in on dartmouth avenue and swathmer i have three questions number one why in the cohort model are high school students slated to go two half days as opposed to two full days it seems the risks are the same but the best benefits of two full days are significantly greater compared to the benefits of two half days second why are

205high school students going on a monday to why are high school students going on a monday tuesday or thursday friday schedule for the hybrid model as opposed to alternating by week it seems like alternating by week would give the students and teachers more in-person time and would lessen the large disinfecting efforts that need to be done between cohorts in fact there will be a 25 percent increase if they did alternating weeks in the in-person learning i was just wondering what factors went into that decision and three when will the decision be made and communicated as far as what model we will follow for october thank you very much uh next comment is from derek ryder on vdb road and media i'm appreciative that we have focused topics tonight on return to in-person learning and our

206athletic program since we have many residents supporting back to school i will focus on athletics one why at the present time are we taking the position to delay fall in winter sports until 2021 when hundreds of our district student athletes and thousands of central league athletes are currently playing competitive competitively against local and non-local teams outside of school with private or community-run sports programs not every district athlete has the ability to afford or have transportation to such programs so we are so we are taking that public school opportunity away from them by canceling sports to the end of 2020. in addition football does not have that opportunity as there are no club sports for football two if we go with a modified winter and spring sports season and place fall sports in between will we

207have coaches trainers officials etc available for the delayed fall sports schedule these individuals may already be scheduled for their events sports or be unavailable due to the new seasons we created three something to consider if a student athlete is injured in a winter sport and cannot play in the now rescheduled fall sport in february but the fall sport was their best opportunity to earn a financial scholarship or admission to post-secondary education can the district be held financially liable remember 90 of pennsylvania student athletes are playing fall sports right now in school and we are going to change that seasonality order these athletes are also behind others due to due to recruiting and will miss out on evaluations and open positions at the next level thank you and the final comment is from patricia lee on

208briarcrest drive in rose valley our family has two children in the schools we just want to say that we are in support of the school board having our children go to virtual school until this pandemic is over until there's a safe vaccine safely administered to all of us otherwise we're just going to be put into a never-ending cycle of come back coming back to physical school having positive cases being shut down going back to virtual school return and have the cycle repeat over and over again and for the most normalcy for our children for the most consistency for our community staff teachers and parents it is best to follow the science right now and remain virtual until the science allows us to go back thank you that concludes the comments thank you kelly um i

209believe our solicitor kyle uh mr berman would like to uh raise an issue yes uh i noticed on the agenda and the item that was voted on was to appoint mr cutis to be the new delaware county intermediate unit representative from the district however the school code calls for it to be a nomination from the district with an appointment by the um by the iu itself so i would simply ask that the that we take that motion again so that we correct that for the record okay and so because we voted on those two items together i assume we um vote on both of them again is that we don't need to vote on both of them again if somebody could simply move to nominate mr cutis to the iu that would be sufficient then

210we'd have that vote on just that one item so moved what would like to move to nominate larry cutis to a position on the dciu board to be posted by the dciu board and i heard it i heard a second from jerry yes thank you jeremy do i vote on this kyle this is larry yes you can vote on it as well that's weird that works larry let's just say i would hope that you would choose to vote for yourself for it thinking that you're qualified and any other discussion i is this in the new business now dave or no no we went back to re-vote is that correct kyle or are we actually no no that's that is correct we're revisiting a vote that was already taken yes we moved back back before audience

211recognition okay um i have a question under new business so okay let me know miss fagor can you please take a roll call vote mrs lentz i mrs walkman hi mr ballas aye ms amino hi dr downey hi dr huff aye mr cutis dr grandy hi the nomination passes eight to zero all right thank you everyone um so that takes us to uh school board reports it's a time for reports from board members serving on district subcommittees or out of district roles does anyone have a report that they would like to share this evening i will okay go ahead michelle um i had i'm in the interest of time i'll try to make this short or short um so the diversity equity and inclusion board subcommittee has been busy and coordinating a number of things

212one is an equity audit that would be conducted by bob jarvis at the delaware valley consortium of excellence of excellence and equity which would involve a very thorough objective process of looking at our debt listening to the voices of students and staff to really look at how how equitable many of our processes are regarding student achievement student outcomes placement access to resources student treatment discipline things like that which should help us create develop a sense of what we want to focus on going forward i would add that the teachers had their first component of the southern poverty law center's teaching tolerance program which brought 20 to 20 to 30 social studies teachers together to look at social justice standards and anti-bias education we have a history vertical team conducting a curriculum review really looking at

213what we the course work that we offer now how we can strengthen and diversify and make sure that we cover all aspects of all individuals histories in in our curriculum and then the committee itself the action committee met and um broke out into a couple of different groups that will be working on a few different areas for us one is around communication and feedback from the community and basically like how do we how do we hear from voices that are often not heard in from the community how do we move outward and listen more and have a better sense of the experiences of all members of our very diverse community a second area that the committee is working on is on establishing more clear guidelines on hiring practices and how to recruit and hire and

214retain diverse staff teachers and administrators and then the third group is working on some very specific ways to operationalize the incorporation of diversity in all levels of the curriculum from k-12 and we have our next action committee meeting um on the 17th this wednesday thank you michelle and and thank you to you and to kelly and jerry i know you all have been putting a lot of work uh into pushing this effort forward and i appreciate that um any other reports from other board members before we move on okay do we have any old business do we have any new business jen i think this would technically fall under new business um it's that um you know i know that the typical protocol and i think there's been some reason for that in the past

215has been that we get these comments these audience comments and um and i guess i'm not exactly sure how or if they're addressed after our meeting so i mean i can read some of these comments and know that during the course of our meeting there were several questions that did have answers during our meeting but for those that are for those that are within the purview of our school and that were asked i guess i'm wondering in terms of new business if you know i know that some of them are directly related to the high school and is someone going to sort of follow up on them and either answer them or reach out to those people because i'm looking at them and some of the questions are very relevant to this meeting and we're

216kind of we kind of move on uh with some of and it's been a long meeting i understand that but i guess i'm just wondering how those questions will be answered or addressed um after this meeting ends sure i mean i think that um i guess many of those questions i think maybe dr palmer we can determine can be um directed to particular administrators because i think how they get answered um people ask a variety of questions that i think are best directed to to individuals and and for ones that were hopefully addressed during the meeting tonight then maybe the question is really you know was your in some cases was your question answered or do you continue to have questions and so dr palmer is there a way we can kind of go through

217those eight that were sent in and then direct them to the appropriate staff member i will do that afterwards and i'll make sure that the right person gets it and that we know who's answering what you're welcome any other new business all right thank you this meeting is adjourned good night everyone good night good night thank you david you