Special Public Board Meeting

001all right we're now recording okay great so katie can you please start us off with roll call yes mr badger here mr bliefeld i'm here mr frank here mrs ginsberg sorry mrs ginsberg here mrs heyman here miss kerry and i guess here mr stoloff mrs walsh here mr antonio here morgan wilson here sachi maida here nine present zero absent and two student board reps this evening thank you it's time for the pledge of allegiance um you can uh display the flat flag and please unmute and stay along with me i pledge allegiance to the republic for which it stands one nation thank you so i'd like to welcome everyone to the july 12 2021 special board meeting of the wizard hicken school district's board of directors tonight we're here primarily to review the district's proposed

002health and safety plan and the teaching and learning plan for the coming school year it's just review and discussion tonight no board action or votes but we will formally vote on the proposed health and safety plan and the teaching and learning plan at our next special board meeting which will be next monday july 19th i'd also like to note that the board met in executive session earlier this evening to discuss legal and personnel matters item two on our agenda is the list of meetings in june item three is a list of upcoming meetings through the end of august and with that i'll pass it on to jim with our main presentation for the evening okay thank you let me get my screen share cooking here everybody see that uh nope nope how about that nope

003how about that there we go okay okay okay so tonight we're going to uh present plans for the 21-22 school year um which is coming off of a full-year pandemic and with some uh uh leftover effects of the pandemic both in terms of health and safety and also in terms of teaching and learning the purpose of tonight we'll recommend or we'll share out the recommendations for the 2021-22 school year and and as joe mentioned there's no voting site that takes place uh next monday same time same channel so what do we learn over the past 18 months let's let's sort of set the table a little bit here in terms of what things are informing our decision making and our perspective moving forward first thing we learn primarily is flexibility is key we were good

004at that uh in 2021 we were not perfect at that uh we as everybody recalls uh all quite so acutely we needed to take a marking period in the secondary level for example to get the right staffing in place with the right certifications that was not ideal uh we were able to offer some uh pivot points along the year to change your uh family's preferred mode of instruction but we know that that flexibility all up and down the the plan is is key we know that teaching virtual and in-person students at the same time is not great i mean that's that model was our mode in grade six to twelve and teachers reported across the district across all grades that while doable is just not great and i it's most likely that uh both groups

005of students those in person that day and also those um at home got a little shortchanged everybody got the same lesson and everybody got the same teachers that was good but we learned that's not great we learned that virtual teaching and learning is doable in a pinch uh we did not get rid of all of our snow days like some districts did but on the other hand we did use virtual teaching learning to take the edge off of the number of snow days so we didn't go deep into june it's doable it's not great but our teachers really responded with some some creative lessons and our students really responded with stepping up to the challenge and we learned that in person teaching and learning is the ideal that's not really a huge um brainstorm but

006it is something that reinforce what we already knew so a little update on the governing agencies that deal with us in ter over the last 18 months we got to know them quite well um a little bit too well in some cases at the federal level we have the cdc now the cdc was silent up until uh i think it was last friday where they issued this new or i should say revised set of recommendations the cdc does not have the authority it appears to uh require things of districts although uh that's a little bit up in the air but any event their new uh recommendations for districts is is there's a website there that i i linked and um you can just google it it's there they uh have a recommendation for things like

007in-person instruction being a priority uh masking recommended for those who are not vaccinated etc the next level goes to the state where we have the pennsylvania department of education and also the pennsylvania department of health they were heavily involved last year and also with unique provisions that didn't necessarily jive with what the federal government cdc was putting out this year uh the word is both of those would like to be more in lockstep but uh they haven't yet issued any sort of position on this very recent cdc update so we're waiting for that and as you may recall we also have a county level agency the montgomery county office of public health worked very closely with montgomery county school districts very appreciative of their commitment to us so far moving forward last year i should

008say they did have actually some some hands-on prescriptive type reactions if you recall we were uh asked to close or required to close schools for periods of time when things fight or an even anticipation of spikes around thanksgiving well this year there's an indication that there's gonna they're gonna stay more in the micro level uh things like reporting um cobit is a contagious disease so we have to report cases what happens when we have a case in quarantine that sort of thing so there'll be a little more in the micro level this year it appears and there's one common theme to all these levels federal state and county and that is decisions are going to be left to the district which is in some sense good there's local control in some sense not so good

009because people at the local level now get um so we say have the the privilege of having lots of different viewpoints shared and we don't have anything to fall back on in terms of well we're being told x are we told why a lot of recommendations out there and not a whole lot of directions directives a very brief medical or science update uh over the last 18 months we have expert opinions out there many uh have been shared with me and other people and are very appreciative of all those they vary it's extremely difficult to find consensus on pretty much anything there's different opinions on masks whether they should be required or not there's different opinions on the variants whether they're a real thread or a minimal threat so far we don't know the long-term

010impact of covet on children or him or adults for that matter uh because we there hasn't been a long term there's people studying this and projecting out but long-haul covid could be a thing it could not be we don't know we just haven't had enough time to really figure that out and as we know the vaccine from various companies has been approved for people 12 and over or older but not for anybody under 12. and the best guess from the science medical profession field is that will happen around october or november of this coming fall so that's these are the things we're kind of working on and we're kind of in the background of all of this thinking and decision making and deliberating that's taking place now so we as you know conducted a survey

011uh of our uh two different surveys k to five households and then also a second survey of grade six households so we'll share out those results now independently the survey window was about eight days or so in early to mid-june we got a rather incredible response rate response which is very very high for a survey and the three questions are listed there i won't read them over but we'll address each one in detail in a second and also the ser the responses one talks about preference in general one talks about what happens if you do require masks and one if you don't and it's important to note that the responses were very similar across all six grade levels k to five in terms of the percentage who answered one way or the other so i

012didn't break it down by grade it's by entire entirety k to five so here's question one preference for requiring masks in general and here are the results you can say they're about mixed which is probably somewhat predictable given uh what we hear going on in the country now there was a size about five percent had no preference and then the arrest is split roughly evenly between those who prefer that masks be required versus those that prefer they'd be optional so about 50 50 there roughly question number two was the one that if masks are required what would you choose for your child's mode of instruction here we had the same plus responses and an overwhelming majority would choose in person if we did require masks over 97 and put in in terms of numbers uh

013only 54 people would choose virtual if we require masks or really only 54 students which is about 2.8 percent question three if masks are not required what would you choose what mode of instruction [Music] slightly different there actually appreciably different if depending on your perspective but um you'll see that the percent of people who go to in person dropped way down to 82 and then conversely uh the percent who chose virtual would went up to 17 or 28 so really though the number the the highlighted boxes there are what we're looking at which is to say there's 280 more or almost roughly 89 or so students more who would be in person should masks be required so that's foreshadowing what everybody's waiting for me to get to i know but that's that's what i'm drawing

014attention to at this point grade six uh sort of the same window roughly the same response rate uh three questions were slightly different in that we asked if what we would what would we ask or would we prefer for all um [Music] middle school students what would you prefer if we required what would you do if we required mask only of sixth grade and what would you do if we required uh no mask uh here are the uh question one responses uh we had about 284 total responses and if masks were required of all middle school students only 11 people would choose virtual 3.87 percent this now remind you this is sixth graders and the overwhelming majority would choose in person so that was good information to have question two if we required masks only

015of grade six students and only in grade six classrooms number who would choose virtual went up a little bit to seven point seven percent or so and then three question if masked were not required of grade six or for that matter any middle school students the number of sixth graders who would choose virtual went up to 62 or roughly a fifth of the class so the health and safety plan is a state required template remember there's two plans for this purpose tonight there's a health and safety plan that talks about things like mitigation and masking and that and then there's an instructional plan which talks about uh if we if we're gonna offer up a virtual plan if so what does that look like so we're gonna do both of them separately the state has

016a required template for the health and safety plan it has similar general mitigation topics as the plan for this this recently concluded year things like face coverings and distancing and cleaning that sort of thing and we now have to review the plan every six months or whenever there are significant changes to to cdc recommendations so you you'll note the link to cdc there even though with the recent cdc guidance to release friday this hasn't yet been updated so we're still going to in a sense be driven by what cdc recommendations are yet pennsylvania hasn't confirmed that over the last three days the main tenets of the plan that we are recommending are the following years i know where people are waiting grades k to five it is our recommendation that masks be required indoors only

017for students and adults until january and we'll talk about those asterisks in a second grade six same thing required in grade six classrooms only for students and adults until january and in grade seven to twelve it's our recommendation that masks be optional the rationale is that and we talked about it in the survey results we'll have quite a few more students in person in grades k to five if we do that if we do what we're being recommended here and a not insignificant amount more in grade six as well now uh as a as a point of sort of a minor point face shields are acceptable alternative for adults when teaching we got some feedback that is it's hard especially in the younger grades for some students not to be able to see the teacher's

018mouth and and if you're teaching reading or uh uh sort of early early grammar year so um that could be done for adults if they'd prefer and all of this presumes that a vaccine is available by january so for example the required masks in grade five until january presumes that the predictions hold true and the vaccine will be available say in november and students in grades k to six will have opportunity if they want to get a vaccine in time so once we have the winter break over and we get back sometime in january we could move to masks being optional everywhere because everyone will have had a chance to be vaccinated by that point that's the rationale behind the january and it could be i mean suppose january could get pushed back if something

019happens with covet 19 or if cdc or pennsylvania or somebody changes their mind it requires them so i don't want everyone to think like that's definitely happening but presuming vaccines are available and there are no developments from one of these agencies that's what would be our recommended plan continuing uh with maintenance of health and safety plan we envisioned distancing back to normal uh with an eye towards maximizing distance things like at lunch we can't do the same lunch that we did because we're going to have that many more students back in person so you know we don't have all those rooms that we used to or at least we did this previous year but to the greatest extent possible that's a phrase you're going to hear a lot we will keep the distancing as much

020as we can we'll certainly uh keep with hygiene and cleaning maintaining reminders and and we have our staff they did our support staff did an amazing job with established sanitizing procedures we'll continue to contact tracing only because that's something that montgomery county has to ask or has us do so that they can carry out their duties of infectious disease control and mitigation and it's our recommendations to not require a vaccine of anybody either a student or staff and that could change if an agency requires it i would be surprised if they do frankly but right now no one's requiring it and we're not recommending that we require it either and we're also not recommending by the way that we have a different approach for masking for vaccinated people versus non-vaccinated people and i think that's

021an important piece because some places may do that in my opinion that that casts uh or i should say that creates an environment where people can make assumptions about whether or not you choose to be vaccinated and they might just that might get at some personal information that's no one's business so we're just going to keep it that we're not requiring vaccines we'll make available opportunities should people want them you know like clinics and stuff but not recommended are not required by them so our instructional plan uh is recommended in-person instruction five days a week so that's that part is back to normal no hybrid we'll have a virtual option in all 13 grades with the wissa hicken virtual academy which is the uh the vendor that is provided for through our mciu montgomery county

022intermediate unit they can tailor it to a district's needs if need be it's asynchronous instruction it has some synchronous supports involved but for the most part is asynchronous it would not be the same virtual option as we provided this past year and then parents will have the opportunity to choose if they want virtual or not essentially by the end of this month and we have to have it that soon because we have to get some staffing plans in place we need to know how many people we need where and then it's our recommendation to have one opportunity to change in january presuming the vaccines available by then changing involves much more than might what might meet the eye there might if you're going to change from an in person to virtual there needs to be

023some syncing up of of curriculum and and teacher uh observations and connections and things so rather than have that be many opportunities we we really need to contain it to one in january and that's natural if we're going to have this turnover from masks being required to optional in january and we have the semester break and all these things i think that's the right time to have the changeover opportunity so we did consider some other options we considered um having some elementary classrooms with masks and some not turns out that's not really practical we couldn't make that work on the scale that we have we considered our virtual option with we're taking teachers instead of the iu's program again that was a little more viable last year when large numbers express an interest in virtual

024it gets much less viable when only a handful do and as i think i already talked about we we talked about maybe more frequent options to change but that just doesn't work logistically grade wise teacher communication wise etc now we will be ready to pivot to either a hybrid or 100 virtual should be required uh required by some agency i mean you know we all think we have a sense of where the pandemic is going and the trajectory of things but just in case uh we're all wrong we are building in flexibility as we mentioned earlier and building in the ability to pivot should we need to and the last thing uh instructional or interscholastic athletics to the extent they're instructional will fully resume and we'll keep some basic recommended mitigation practices in place things

025like um not temperature checks but hygiene not sharing water bottles staying apart on buses things like that but we we anticipate having a full inter-classic athletics program in place so we're getting towards the end here i promise guiding principles what principles drove the recommendation the first thing is we want as many students in school as possible that was one of the things we we used to as a lens to assess options and then recommend these we feel that 329 more students 289 at the elementary level and 40 to middle matters that's that's a that's a significant number we consider this to be a primary consideration possibly even the primary consideration and we feel that finding a common ground matters so for example masks won't be required outdoors they won't be required of all middle school

026students just sixth grade students and just in classrooms at least that's a recommendation there's people who are like different uh outcomes for those variables and many others we've got to try to find some common ground here so moving forward we've got a board meeting as mentioned uh next monday where the board will vote on the two plans we'll discuss them a little bit later tonight we've got that deadline for families to choose virtual or not on july 30th that means that we have the first part of august of finalized staffing needs we've got most of it in place now we'll have the certification issue resolved this year we've learned from our mistake last year and our first day of school is august 30th which is a little late this year compared to other years in

027terms of the day of august and no one is complaining about that believe me so in conclusion we as a team pledge to communicate as often and as comprehensively as we can uh we know we learn from last year that the more communicating the better it needs to be clear it needs to be timely and it needs to be often frequent i think this is important and i don't i sorry for the many words here but i feel like this needs to be said and also brought to the front is that we know that not everybody's going to agree with every decision quite likely people don't agree with many decisions that are being recommended tonight we tried to seek a compromise approach when possible or appropriate and related that we believe in the need to

028find common ground if we don't find common ground and if we don't move forward in a way that's pulling from a little bit of what everybody wants and providing an awesome experience for our students even though it's not the perfect one that everyone wants that's common ground we believe in the need for that and we believe that these this set of recommendations uh provides for that so that is the presentation i will exit shared screen and joe if you want to leave the board in in discussion comments that sort of thing thanks for the presentation and uh the outlining of your recommendations so um yeah board members i'll maybe just uh don't you have nic as you have questions uh just signal and i'll call you on each of you guys in turn ron has

029been uh uh raving his fan his uh hand uh early and often so uh ron let's have you go first hi uh question about terminology uh you said that the separation will be going back to normal you talk about the pre-pandemic uh class uh arrangements or or back to the uh three feet or six feet oh thank you uh answer is for the most part uh there's gonna be a blend but it will be pretty pandemic in the sense that we won't have desks spaced six feet apart in certain classrooms if a teacher prefers we might return to a odd kind of arrangement where four kids sit around a big table um there will there won't be any hybrids so we'll have all the students in a class there at once at the secondary level

030so uh back to normal means like before or pre pandemic not during um i saw other other board members have their hands up i think amy and then ronnie and then tracy thanks um so my first question i had was that we had received esser funds are there any requirements placed on us as it relates to our health and safety plan uh to keep those funds um yes actually this the uh need for a requirement for a health and safety plan uh is derived from esser uh the esser is the federal grant as everybody knows and we are required to re that's that one point that we are required to review it every six months and in the plan which we we're going to have ready for tonight we'll post on the website episode we

031just had to roll that very recent cdc guidance into it but you have to show in the plan how you're going to address the various recommendations of the cdc which we had ready to go and then friday's new change which means we need to have some changes so we'll get that for the website it's document seven one seven two is instructional plan that's much less um involved and that's not related to esr believe it or not esther only talks about the health and safety plan and we will definitely comply with those grant requirements so it doesn't have any specific requirements like you must have masking you must have certain distances you you you got to pledge to review it every six months or if some condition changes that you know indicates you should and in

032the plan you have to talk about how you're going to either comply with or at least consider cdc recommendations on the various things like hygiene and distancing and stuff like that okay and then the 54 students um that would be doing virtual um in elementary do we have anything like that they're all within like two or three grades is there any way that we could have it be with a wizard teacher and yeah be synchronous it would be nice if we could there's not enough students in a given grade level to do that practically for the first problem would be we'd have to um group everyone from all the different schools so it would which we did a little bit last year but let's say we let's just say we have one kindergarten class of

033eight that'll be two from blue bell and one from stoney and three from shady that sort of thing um that's that is not impossible to do we just felt that it wasn't the best way to do it um and including the fact that if if students come back in january let's say that eight goes down to four that's even less of experience for the four you really can't have a class before it's hard enough to have a class with eight kindergarteners frankly sure no i'm just concerned like as a parent of elementary students i just i know how difficult the spring of 2020 was with asynchronous i just i think that to be very challenging for our elementary students no question it's challenging for uh second sure it kind of depends on learning style but

034you're absolutely right it's challenging um see asynchronous learning in general yeah depends on learning style but it's it's on average i say not nearly as ideal as synchronous what's the synchronous support that we're offering with the asynchronous um virtual machine uh dr dewan has made herself a the resident expert on these matters would you want to at least try to answer that question please yeah absolutely um there are a few different ways that they're um able to have synchronous support and that's with weekly synchronous office hours with their um teacher through this uh mvp is the montgomery county virtual program um and there's also built-in synchronous chat support so in that seven days a week if at any time they need help or assistance or have a question they can chat with um with the

035teacher and then families can schedule one-on-one student-teacher meetings or family teacher meetings um and then they have newly established something that they're calling synchronous recess periods um with a focus on social and emotional learning and mindfulness lessons for students so those are the the ways in which they'll be able to access synchronous supports and i assume like when we ask the final survey we're going to make it very clear that it's asynchronous so parents going into that option know that it's not gonna be like it was last year uh yes excellent point and we will make it very clear okay and i just have one last question about um next year when when students are sick or about the quarantine what's going to happen then is it going to be asynchronous again for those students

036i assume yes if any uh well it depends on duration i mean it could be handle if it's like a seven day one we can handle that like we do now with any student who's out sick that their teacher gives them you know work to do at home while you're recovering from a broken leg or something if it's an extended period of time we can look to get them into the to the mciu's program entry in and out of that is not is not easy um in mid market period so it might be the case we just have an extended uh like we do now if we have somebody's out sick for a few weeks for mono or something um we hope not to have that too often but that would be our approach in

037that example you cite okay thank you all right uh next up we had to uh ronnie just wanted to know what kindergarten registration was like in our numbers is it a lot higher than previous years or lower well uh now they ask we had last year and this is very preliminary but it's a little high it's current our current account as of today is 3.89 uh last year we had three you can't really i don't really know how to compare to last year because i was different but um that's kind of where it's a little on the high side it could reflect that some some families chose to not go to kindergarten for a year um this isn't i would that's not terribly reliable up or down because we're gonna have we're gonna have a

038lot of of uh movement let's just say over the next few weeks as as things play out okay thank you crazy um so just piggybacking on what ronnie just said it made me think um i'm sure last year a lot of parents whose children were going into kindergarten since they didn't know what what our plan was if we were going to you know be in school or not a lot of them might have chose uh chosen to do uh something else other than with hicken for kindergarten have we looked at do we have like an uptick in first grade registration this year um initial look is the answer is yes but we can't discern just yet if it's any more than our normal uptick we normally k to one is a normal jump because uh

039families choose to stay in private kindergarten for whatever reason it doesn't look to be terribly higher than normal but uh we're definitely keeping our eye on that because the reason you spoke of it could well happen and we'll stand ready to respond just like we would any other roman spike okay and then uh my uh one of my other questions was um so it looked like we were not we were requiring masks for teachers in elementary even if they are vaccinated correct in the in the case of adults masks or wilder teaching uh face shield okay is and is that just because we don't want to have to ask the teachers if they've been vaccinated right we did give that a lot of thought and we could either ask them which i don't think would

040go over well at all and any any place that's that's this asking for proof of vaccination is running into some problems we could do it on the honor system um in the end we landed on the notion that the the vast majority of the inhabitants in a k-5 school don't have the option of being vaccinated or not so until sometime as they do uh everybody in that school should just wear a mask for the reason of protecting others whether or not you're vaccinated and uh you know asking adults to do what we're asking students to do i think is a reasonable approach okay and then um i don't know how they were working it last year with you know during covid but in previous years for the elementary lunches they always had overflow tables that

041the kids were not allowed to sit at for some reason are we looking at allowing the children to spread out during lunch and using all of the tables uh that are in the lunchrooms that's a really that's one where we spend a lot of time with principals it's the answer is yes to the greatest extent possible this year we had to make it our business to guarantee six feet and we were using every nook and cranny and library and things like this so sort of to ron's point earlier we're going to go back to quote-unquote normal but then again to the greatest extent possible so yes we'll use all the tables we can uh we wouldn't won't necessarily use the library anymore um and sort of compromise positions like that uh that we feel are

042the right common ground okay um and then my guess my biggest question is well all right so say we do say there was an outbreak we are covered we have figured out how we would switch from 100 in person to either 100 virtual or the hybrid we have that all figured out so uh right all figured out sort of um what we are going to do is we are going to make sure all students and all teachers in grades k to 12 continue to be uh to be ready to go to 100 virtual on a moment's notice and that's because it could be in place of the fourth or fifth snow day you know again we're going to have our snow days uh two or three or so but we do need that ability to

043be virtual so students will practice and teachers will practice and we'll be ready for 100 virtual i can't say that well yes well i can say that with regard to hybrid there's so many different uh types of it variations so we'll be ready for something but i don't know what yet it will probably depend on the grade level some districts aren't even or are just representing they're not going to do any hybrid it's either all in or all out and i would like to to think that given if circumstances change to the point where where districts need to consider or are being required to consider a hybrid i'd like to think we can figure that out but i don't want to go in into 18 different iterations right now planning for all of them when

044i when i can't quite tell what that will look like i can guarantee we're ready for 100 virtual though and we'll be ready for some form of hybrid okay and then i guess the question that the parents are probably sitting home asking that wasn't really addressed in depth is why wouldn't we be able to have classrooms of masked and unmasked i know you said that that you weren't going to look at that but i'm sure that the parents at home that's the question that they're thinking um it's it's a good question we give it quite a bit of thought um the thing about that is in a school with say four sections of at a grade level if we break it down that way all of the if that becomes the main driver of who's

045in which class then all of the first of all all the other considerations go have to be secondary you know first thing is okay where you want to be in the mass room or you want to be in the non-mass room then if only seven want to be in the non-mask room what do we do we didn't survey that um and i suppose to be honest we probably could have but i don't think that would have changed the answer because that would have required many more classrooms also in schools that really don't have that many more classrooms to offer up so um we weren't opposed to the concept it was more of a of a class assignment constraint as well as a available number available rooms constraint but the idea was was not out of

046the realm of possibilities just we felt this is better okay um paul you had your hands up too i did yep thanks joe um jim two quick questions can you just clarify um for k through five and through grade six what it will be what the requirement will be outside of the classroom so in hallways transitioning from classes recess and in the cafeteria whether those groups of students will wear masks or not and also transportation um will be required on on buses or not okay um a couple of questions and and paul you were you talking about k to five right i'm sorry k through five and and six yeah oh okay so k to five the masking situation indoors will be essentially like it was this past year um required at all times if

047you're having a snack or your lunch no it's not required uh it'll be different in that if when you're outdoors um they're not required and we we're going to ask people to keep decent distance but we're not going to get crazy about playgrounds and things everybody's got to go in knowing that indoors expectation is yes masks outdoors no uh you raise the point about busing which is a really interesting one right now our well i should say before friday our thought was yes they'll be required on k-5 buses and not required on secondary buses which as you know are combined so basically 6-12 buses combined however it's come to light that it's quite possible that a federal requirement for buses on public transport transit applies to school buses that isn't settled yet just today i

048got something from our solicitor's office on how that may or may not play out it's not clear whether we're going to have to require it on secondary buses or not we are going to require it on k-5 buses but i'm glad you brought this up because i i should have put added in the in the presentation but it's so new this this development is so new what happens on a bus 6 to 12 is right now not clear we right now the reading is we're going to require because everybody's forced required on buses including school buses but i don't know if that's going to be the way it's going to play out in the end i know it's unsatisfying answer but believe me last few days have been somewhat unsatisfying on that front okay thank

049you understand and uh paul paul's question also was uh in regards to sixth grade specifically as well those positive questions the same about classrooms hallways cafeteria so forth thank you yes so sixth grade is different um if it would have been easy the answer would be easy if we went with that top survey quest you recall like what happens if we require masks of all middle school students um first of all many fewer sixth grade students would choose virtual and then it'll be just easy okay well you're indoors just like k-5 indoors wear masks outdoors you don't we came down on the side of compromise and trying to find common ground and seventh and eighth graders do have the option of being vaccinated if they want sixth graders do not so we had this dichotomy

050within the same school building in our case middle school sixth seventh eighth grade so that was a major challenge and based on the survey results and based on what we thought we could pull off logistically we figured that while students are amongst others who haven't had a chance to be vaccinated yet in other words amongst their sixth grade classmates and then more precisely within the classroom we would require the masks once we go outside the classroom however we've if we don't require masks of everyone in the building then we've really kind of broken that seal of of uh uh like a guaranteed mitigation mask mitigation because they're going to be seventh and eighth grade students walking around in the hallways at rival this missile time without mask on tricky grade six is very tricky i

051i don't think anyone's going to be totally happy with this proposed solution um if we had went the other way and decided to require it of all middle school students because of the logistical difficulty that we're just finished talking about i'm quite sure quite a few other people would not be happy with that solution there's a perfect example of trying to find common ground and trying to meet people in the middle in some fashion as best we can so following up on that so a sixth grader in class wear a mask in the hall wear a mask cafeteria obviously not outdoors unmasked correct and on the bus on uh unknown unknown most likely mass but correct unknown a hallways just to clarify hallways doesn't know though because hallways is where everybody else is as well

052we don't want to create a situation where in one room or one place some people are compelled required to wear masks and some aren't uh we want it i mean could that happen yes we would envision a whole lot of of of peer pressure or just sort of unnatural differences between students based on their age or their ability to to be vaccinated and we didn't want to create that so sixth graders don't have to wear a mask in the hall correct okay so jen don't we have a sixth grade hallway we do and we gave thought to that and it may well be the case that if you don't have to travel across there sometimes they do see it's kind of tricky like so we we could say well while you're in the sixth grade

053hallway you don't have to but sometimes you have to go to gym sometimes you have to go to more language um it's they have to go places besides the sixth grade hallway so we did give thought to you know the the point of your question which is a good one uh we just didn't want to quantify that much and we frankly we don't really know how we can enforce it if we start you know like okay this is a red hallway you masks for sixth graders only in a red hallway every now and then an eighth grader comes down there for some reason and again in the spirit of kind of like trying to find some common ground we just decided the hallways were too tricky to deal with right and then to finish up

054for seventh graders in the hall for seventh and eighth graders unmasked masks are always optional for grades seven to twelve okay okay all right thank you then david um you've been waiting patiently thanks um yeah uh jim i believe the cdc's latest recommendations for elementary school students at least indoors recommends that we still maintain spacing as much as possible right um should we get to the point where the state or the county mandates that um can we accommodate three feet or more of spacing still yes to the greatest extent possible how's that for a hedge that is your question is very well taken and everyone is is falling back on that just the same way we fell back on that this past school year this past school year we were we first of all the

055number was six for most of the year and we fell back we were able to accomplish that to the greatest extent possible i mean if someone took a slide rule or a tape measure around some desks might be five and a half feet so i don't want to i didn't want to say at that time guaranteed six we were much better at lunch than in classrooms the the cdc's recommendations of distancing will be followed here almost everywhere in the sense that three feet is not that hard to uh to meet six feet is uh if you can pick your classroom like three feet is like basically like a yardstick away from desk we've got that we may not have that when they're lining up somewhere at lunch because maybe there's not enough space for that

056so our approach is we we value distancing we don't feel that it's a huge burden but we want to go back a little closer to the normal than we were last year in terms of the distancing and the cdc's recommendations do come with things like well if you can't accomplish x fully x mitigation strategy fully then a district needs to show how they're doing y and z because the layering of mitigation strategies is what matters not necessarily any one as a standalone so for us to get back to normal as much as possible and get as many students in as possible the distancing is the one that has to go to greatest extent possible and the masking doesn't have to go to greatest extent possible that one can stay where it is because we can

057do that and accomplish our objectives all right um marshall i didn't uh call you call your name any uh questions for jim most of them were covered uh by what uh others already asked it appears that from what you are suggesting to put in place um it is consistent with the cdc guidelines correct yes with that caveat with say with distancing to to david's question to the greatest extent possibly value distancing we're going to try three feet if somewhere is two and a half feet that's because we want to get as many kids back in as us and we want to get there as normal as possible but generally speaking yes we agree and we certainly would follow them on things that are doable like cleaning and and contact tracing all sort of thing are

058there any guidelines that we have decided not to follow in lieu of the cdc guidelines for instance i did a little research the cdc guidelines are consistent with the american academy of pediatric guidelines but are there any that you looked at um because obviously there are going to be differences of opinion um are there any that you looked at that felt we were not going to impose or not follow in lieu of these no not really uh with the possible exception of that the busing question because i really don't know where that's coming out but uh so if i could put that one on hold for a few days the answer to your question is no we'll we'll uh is distancing the greatest extent possible and all their other things are are uh pretty much

059in line with our health and safety plan and the guidelines or the the um plan that you intend to implement um this is uh allowable and or consistent with every other governing body that we would have to follow yes because they're all either deferring to cdc or my word hunting the cdc or they're silent now uh whenever somebody whether it's a county level or state level comes up with a requirement which they had many last year as we all know this year they appear to have almost none then we'll certainly comply and that's that's actually that's one of the things we have to state in that plan to amy's question earlier about what does esser require of districts in your plan you have to state that you shall comply with directives should they come down

060they fight from cdc or state or county level and we will and we will consider recommendations if something is new and will comply with directives and finally um with regard to the plan you intend to implement over much of the year we received a lot of criticism from all sides i mean it was across the board people were unhappy much of the criticism that i recall was um that it appeared we were not intending or interested in getting in the kids back into school or getting in as many as we possibly could um we were also criticized for not doing um you know putting out a vote doing a survey um based on what we did in this particular instance uh by putting out the survey uh getting the results it looks like it's 50

061to 44 in favor of masks um are we doing the best we can in order to get the most uh kids back into school uh to have as normal a school year as possible uh well the answer that uh marshall that's a very good question the answer is we we attempted to balance those two priorities of getting as many students in as possible with finding common ground so x actually answered someone's nose like if if we really wanted to maximize the number of students in grade six we would have all students in all of middle school wear masks because then we'd only have 11 students out virtual so in that case we tried to match up that very high priority with another priority which is to find common ground and being that seventh and eighth

062grade students are old enough to be vaccinated if their parents want them to be then those grade levels we felt should have the the uh a different approach than grade six so it doesn't exactly the problem is like like we found last year we're trying to solve equations with multiple variables at once and if you maximize one you have to take a little hit on another one um so as best we could we try to find that like that perfect balance it's not going to be perfect in many people's eyes we know that but like you said that just brings back to last year and and all the uh notes and comments we got from all all of the uh people who were not happy jim i don't i'm i'm probably to throw something out

063there that's not going to make some people happy to you um so if sixth grade because it is so weird and it's you know such a mixture of sixth and seventh and eighth and who's in the hallway and who's not in the hallway and who's mass and who's not masked and it looks like we're having about 22 kids in sixth grade that are saying that they want that they would do virtual would we think about having sixth grade as a synchronous class because we have we're looking at 22 kids sixth grade all a lot of it's the same i don't know just because they're just such a weird you know they're kind of thrown in the mix of yes and no and who knows and sixth grade is in the middle for sure transition year

064in every way um actually i should have pointed out in that list of things we consider different ideas uh we did have out there um as an option uh teaching to both live and virtual students at the same time and we definitely mixed it for uh all grades we could theoretically do that but remember those 22 are split amongst three teams or so so that teacher like the social teacher will have seven or so and and you know each team would have about seven let's say uh if they're three teams so um so that all of a sudden there's a not insignificant number on the screen and i don't know that that would make masking decision for parents any different necessarily because it's still being they still have to choose whether or not they're going

065to go in school i mean it would make the virtual option for them right better than this the synchronous but then we go back to then all again sort of the common ground all the other sixth graders who are okay with going to school in mascon have a lesser experience in the classroom because teaching to two things at once well no i wasn't talking about teaching the two things i was talking about having all of the 22 kids would be on the same team so they might have yeah jim think about it in terms of what we did at k to five okay or the k to five students who went virtual we had a virtual teacher fully dedicated to a class of virtual students so what tracy's suggesting is an approach where that entire

066group of sixth grade all virtual just get their own you know synchronous teacher virtually and it doesn't even have to be a different teacher but if they're if they're all on the same team and they would all be in the same class they could go to the social studies teacher that's you know how how many there's like how many uh classes on one team well theoretically i see what you're saying like that so that social studies teacher could have a class of 22 on period one and they're all virtual yeah um we didn't think of that option and that's that's not a bad thing for us to toss around i don't know uh dr juan you have any thoughts i mean we we certainly can confer uh you know tomorrow middle school team i i

067don't want to say yes or no right now because i i might not be thinking of a logistical hurdle but it's an interesting something to toss around yeah i'd love to talk to the middle school team to think through that a little bit more the one thing that comes to mind is something you mentioned earlier about the k5 group if we were to consider something like this is that transition um if and when students are able to get the vaccine and want to transition to in person then we might find ourselves with only four or three students remaining virtual so in terms of staffing something i think they might have to they would also well we can think about i don't want to think out loud they might also have to be forced to have

068a different teacher in some fashion we'll think about it interesting thank you for the idea and we'll toss it around thank you and jim um if you knew we could bring bring us an update on that prior to our vote or next week on the overall plan um zapier i saw you had your hand up again before i come back to you i want to ask our student board reps morgan and sochi if they had any uh questions or comments about the health and safety plan masking and such for next year well first joe yes how about if we um welcome sachi because this is this your first meeting well welcome welcome aboard so i think my opinions i like what you guys have said so far and i think that the sixth grade idea

069about having the 22 kids is a good one i don't know how practical it'll be because i know there's a lot of like k through five has only one teacher and then sixth grade is like transition so that they get multiple teachers and all the kids might be maybe in like different math classes or like math levels so that might be um difficult but it's definitely a good idea and um what you guys have said about the seven through twelfth grade i i also agree with that because i think that a lot of people who want to be vaccinated have probably been vaccinated so the optional optional masks i think is a good idea thanks morgan um i agree with like everything you guys are saying you guys are all bringing about valid points i

070just had a couple questions maybe about like athletics so you guys were saying how like you were trying to get back to normal and everything i was just wondering like so masks are optional for athletics clarify yeah and then what about for like fans such as like indoor events and and such is that have you guys talked about that yet at all um not really with from fans that's an interesting point morgan i think the answer would be optional because interscholastic athletics and attending as a fan is an optional matter okay whereas this is one of the guiding principles probably should put that in a slide i should probably run my slides by you next time i think that would be a very good idea but anyway um one of the distinctions is what's required

071like uh school day versus what's not uh extracurricular things so we are going to try to continue with some provision of virtual participation options for clubs and things because we noticed that we got a huge spike in kids who are interested in doing things that obviously doesn't count for impossible for interscholastic athletics which are also voluntary like if you're not comfortable then you take the year off of baseball whatever i know you wouldn't do that but some would and parents love to see their kids play maybe they don't take their younger child who isn't vaccinated yet and so the the whole our whole feeling of like being responsible for kids who don't have the choice of being vaccinated yet could go away with spectators so my my prediction is it would not it would just

072be optional and maybe some of those things where we say if you haven't been vaccinated please you know consider wearing a mask i'm not sure but it would definitely not require it because if you go to an event and you're over 12 or over 11 you've had the choice of being vaccinated or not that sounds great i just wanted to add that like i know a lot of students like play a lot of sports different sports i know every single student i've talked to has like missed having the fans they mean so much to us and we just love having them so i just want to just kind of emphasize how much like we appreciate the fans such as events like uh like our senior nights and our like silent knife for basketball like some

073of the biggest events of the year for student athletes and i just want to say like how much we appreciate like having fans there well that's a really awesome point and i think we can accommodate that if not younger fans who but again that's our choice so i think we'll i think we'll be able to meet your your point there and and get some fans back in the stands more than we had this year thank you um jeffy you had a follow-up question yeah i had a few questions actually um and i'm not sure if you covered this gym and i'm sorry if you didn't i missed it but we delineated um the survey to parents that were that had children under the age of 12 and those above is that why we did not

074go to the seventh through twelfth grade that's correct okay so what are we gonna do for seven through twelfth is that all going to be optional yes okay and then for those who choose to wear masks um are we for the seven through twelve are we and even even in the lower grades if and when things change you know are we thinking about you know mask etiquette and considerations for example something a comment like if you're not vaccinated please wear a mask is probably not the most appropriate thing to say um i'm fully vaccinated i wear my mask still so i think we need to think about that and make sure that you know whatever people are comfortable with is what they should be doing and not putting pretense or thought around how they do

075things so how about reporting of cases is that going to be something we're going to continue to do we are required to continue to do that with the montgomery county office of public health i don't know of any requirement to keep that 14-day rolling thing going again we can i don't know of a requirement to send out emails like we did this year and delaney it'll be a lot easier because we don't have to send those confusing emails and say well we have a case in middle school but it was a virtual student uh versus you know in person or things like that i'm not sure about the communicating out and to where but i do know we have to keep track and i will if we'll do whatever montgomery county has us do and

076again they're more their involvement will be counting of cases and quarantine slash contact tracing procedures so whatever i mean we'll follow their lead okay so what's our plan i guess in the health and safety thinking about if we need to quarantine a classroom a building how are we going to even have like the runway to know that things may be happening yeah well that the need to quarantine a classroom or a building would uh come from montgomery county office of public health like it did this past year we had an incident or two of that and that's why it's so important for all of our students and staff to be able to pivot on a moment's notice 200 virtual because if that happens that's different from the earlier question about what happens if a student

077has to quarantine for seven days or 14 days or something correct now the whole class does so now we've just treated like a snow day for that class and they have their teaching and learning done virtually in the whole building for that matter so you put your finger on one of the reasons why it's so important for us to to keep current and skilled at the 100 virtual um for a number of reasons one of which is what you just mentioned okay and then have we looked at our numbers to see how many of our um rising sixth graders are actually going to be um under the age of 11. we uh you mean i think you mean under under 12. oh yeah sure yes uh i just i just pulled that out because i

078had a feeling someone asked that um currently 359 students in grade five of those only seven of them will be 12 as of the end of august so that will obviously be a sliding scale and as january comes you know they'll be able to on their own get a vaccine whether or not it's approved for under 12. so we should be in pretty decent shape in grade six even if there is a delay in um you know the approval for people under 12 because just by virtue of time many students will age into vaccine eligibility during the course of the year right okay um thank you you answered the rest of my questions any other uh questions or comments jim i had several questions uh myself but uh each of them was answered by one

079of the previous questions from from my fellow board members so um if we don't have any other questions at this point i just want to remind everyone that we will have another opportunity for more discussion on the health and safety plan as well as the teaching and learning plan next monday uh before we actually vote on it um tracy yeah yeah so in what zephy was just talking about um if we are not reporting out our little spreadsheet of how many cases there were then the parents uh and i'm not saying we have to do it constantly but maybe we do it when we if we start seeing cases reported like right now if we don't have any cases then we don't need to report it out but i would think as a parent if

080you're looking at it and you're saying uh-oh uh you know there's so many cases in this school we might be looking at something coming in the next couple of days or i want to be super vigilant with my child because you know there's been cases in the school it's like i can envision something if they're trickling in or or maybe like a weekly update hey for this week you know like on fridays on a week this week we had a total of this we don't have to distinguish it between virtual and person where you said it right elementary index and uh we've shared them all with montgomery county office of public health and you know that kind of thing right if we get some spike for some reason or if we go into some you

081know there's a return of large case counts we can return to daily um yeah i don't i don't think dally would be needed but i i would think um you know weekly and then at least if we are noticing you know especially at one particular school if we're noticing that there's a spike at that school maybe maybe then we send it out a little bit more often like hey you know just let you know that this school is inch and towards yellow or yeah i like that idea i think i think if we can get rid of that 14-day rolling thing which no one really understood outside of katie meyer and a handful of people at montgomery county office of public health this would make this process way easier and also i think more useful

082in the sense that we either twice a week or something share out so and the parents will feel informed yeah i like it okay so um at this point i'm going to move us to the first public comment period of the evening where we'll hear comments on agenda items only and because i anticipate that the health and safety plan is going to be a hot topic i'm going to relax our maximum of five speakers on the same topic for this evening but i also don't want us to go for an unlimited time frame on public comments so i will relax the the five max on on one topic but i want to cap the public comment period at no more than 30 minutes and by my clock it's 8 19. so at 8 49 if

083we still have um people who want to speak we're going to cut off the first public comment period um if there are no speakers before then we'll move on with the agenda but i see several hands uh raised or did earlier and i want to give folks an opportunity to express their thoughts to the board so let's see the same rules apply as normal that if you want to make a comment use the raise hand feature and zoom and we'll take comments in the order that hands are raised and when your name is called please unmute state your name your municipality residence and the agenda topic for which you want to comment and you will have up to three minutes to speak after which your mic may be muted and as always it's the board's

084practice not to engage in back and forth dialogue with speakers and with that i'm going to take a look at the queue and our first speaker is pb so you can unmute and please begin hi hopefully excuse me your name paula bladak from bluebell okay um i'm going to be discussing kovid um in the last decade or more public schools which are government agencies are being more burned in than ever to just teaching the basic academics of abc's in one two three and this is why the united states is number 21 globally schools now address a student's education emotion health physical needs food and clothing discipline as well as their home environment these days more and more is being removed intentionally and unintentionally from the parents hands and placed in the public school hands which

085is a government agency these past 18 months the school staff and administration have become scientists doctors and politicians politics have seeped into the school and the classroom with mask recommendations vaccination questions by the staff to the students during class not in a history class teachers are asking about political party in math discussing political events quoting the president in an email and culturally response responsive teaching also known as critical race theory how could a student feel safe and protected by their school or staff with these conversations that create divisiveness an educator's job is to teach george washington was the first president of the u.s along with he was a slave owner not asking a student in the elementary grade who should get the job a white person or a black person from birth a parent's job

086is to teach respect proper behavioral morals ethics to their children even those without a parent have values good bad or indifferent this should not be a teacher's job everything starts at the home and the parents are the only experts of their child i'd like to remind everyone that covet 19 is not approved by the fda as it is an emergency use or authorization mask they only protect those who are sick from those who are healthy masking healthy people is ineffective wissa higgins needs to be a leader by offering mass choice no cover testing to the students not requiring student vaccine teaching only history with pers without personal opinions and not being political the wizard hicken school district is number 12 in the state and let's get better than that thank you thank you our next

087speaker is kristin hello hi um my question is just pertaining to your name and your municipality residence this is kristen this is kristen stanton and i'm in whit pain i'm talking about the school safety plan in particular the grades k through 5 plan so it is my understanding that from grades k through 5 that we are going to be requiring masks indoors um this is based on the fact that these children cannot currently receive vaccines this is not taking into account consideration this is not taking into account parents need and desire for their children to be unmasked instead this is all this is doing is bringing in political propaganda in order to continue to mask our children and in my eyes at this point when we know that they transmit it so little they're so

088luckily they're taken away luckily they do not have the ability to get as sick as adults do they are blessedly really not that affected by this and in the end we are going to continue to mask them we're going to continue to keep them liable and hold them culpable while the adults are fear stricken and making them stay masked forever because really you're saying january january is in the middle of respiratory season and i don't know if i'm talking to a group of people that understand this is seasonal or not but it's probably going to be pretty high transmission wise right now montgomery county does not have high case counts and transmission the cdc guidance was nuanced it allowed us to be able to decide whether or not these children should be masked on a

089bunch of other different reasons but among them was community spread right now that's not there these children should not be masked in the fall if we have to mask them in january then so be it i don't agree with it but i can understand why you would feel like you need to do something like that as of right now this is not a viable option fifty percent said that they did not want masks they wanted to be optional fifty percent said they wanted to be required uh optional is honestly the only option why does somebody who wants them required get to tell me what i do with my child why are any of you telling me what i get to do with my child these are unproven medical interventions that you are forcing on us

090to use on our children it is not necessary right now if you need to do it at a later date please do so then this is the only school in the district that is doing this as of right now this is not appropriate thank you thank you our next speaker is donna lynch hello hello you can begin hi i wanted to just take a second to thank you please can you please state your name and municipality i apologize my name is donna lynch i live in whit payne township and the topic is the health and safety plan i just want to take a second to thank dr chris field all the administrators the staff and the teachers who did an amazing job in an unbelievably difficult year i just have two brief comments that are

091more information seeking that i would like to hear more about at the secondary k-12 level of the health and safety plan regarding lunches at the high school and the ability to distance to the greatest extent possible in the cafeterias when they would not be wearing masks and eating and i know we've heard in the health and safety plan about athletics but i'm also curious about the safety plan for drama and music and singing especially the high school level that's my comment again i just wanted to say thank you for everyone's very hard work over the last year thank you our next speaker is deanne morris hi can you hear me yes hi uh good evening my name is deanne morris i live in ambler borough and i'm going to be speaking also on the health

092and safety plan i have two children at lge and tonight i'm speaking as a parent and a pharmacist i know there are many feelings regarding masks in school but i am asking that wishikin would simply follow the cdc guidelines the center for disease control prevention guidelines are evidence-based and include expert judgment with consideration of risk versus benefit just a few days ago as dr cruzfield said they have released updated guidelines and i'm in agreeance with the points first this mass should be worn indoors by all individuals who are not fully vascular vaccinated and this means universal masking for anyone under 12. second they recommend at least three feet of distance when possible and third they recommend layering multiple prevention strategies which include screening testing hand washing staying home with sick and of particular consideration ventilation

093last week there was a study released by the cdc about the efficiency our efficacy of hepa filters combined with masking in rooms portable kappa air cleaners offer simple means to increase filtration of aerosol particles in a room the data showed considerable reduction in risk of transmission and i really hope that wissakin will consider putting hepa filters in all classrooms i believe this will help with other disease transmission and also children that suffer from asthma after the past year our priorities should be getting as many kids as we can back in school we should ensure this is safe limiting unnecessary illness and viral spread and minimizing the potential for disrupted in person learning we can best try to accomplish this by following the guidelines i think what it all comes down to is what is best

094for our children and that's getting them back in school following the expert guidance is our best shot at doing that safely thank you so much everyone for everything you've done thank you our next speaker is kara finn hi there we go my name is cara finn i am a resident of lower gwinnett township and i'm commenting on the health and safety plan this fall i will have two children at lge i want to thank the administration for focusing on following the best public schools our nation has to offer as well as on the mental and emotional health of our children by formulating a plan that gets as many children safely into the classroom as possible i want to thank you for scrambling to incorporate the latest cdc recommendations that came out just a few days

095ago into the plan thank you for putting our children's well-being first i do have two questions to consider answering at some point before the vote i want to ask about the notification of exposure to a positive case in the classroom i hope that the entire classroom will be notified of an exposure um as there will be less distancing because it just won't be possible and i imagine more movement especially in elementary school between kids moving around perhaps for circle time and the like um i also want to echo dan's comment asking about the possibility of horrible hepa filters in the classrooms is this being considered if not could it be and just want to say i strongly support the plan put forth by the the administration and i want to urge the board to vote

096in favor of it next week thank you so much thank you our next speaker is jamie purple hi this is jamie um jamie arfel i'm from woodpayne township and i want to speak on the health and safety plan for next year and i just wanted to highlight a couple of things that were already said one i think marshall first brought it up about maximizing the students in school for next year and i think that's all of our goals is to get as many students in the school that want to be there and whose parents want them to be there as possible and then what dr krisfield said about how he kept emphasizing common ground and i think that's important because we're on such extremes of this you know there's a lot of us that um

097really want our parenting rights back and we want to be the authority on what our parents our kids do there's also some of us like me for example where my kids are experiencing side effects from the mass a lot of times they come home and they have headaches or they're dizzy especially more on the hot days so it's important that they're not wearing them outside and i'm glad that you adjusted that for this year but i do worry about them in gym class specifically you know the masks were never designed for people that were exercising they were never really studied or tested on children we don't have any studies at the moment that i'm aware of unless anybody else knows of any that actually studied children's safety and efficacy for wearing mass in the latest

098jama study where it was peer reviewed it showed that our smallest children were the most affected by the increased co2 levels in their mass and while it was still below the osha recommendations you have to keep in mind those are made for adults and we don't really have any guidelines around kids it's kind of like one giant experiment i also understand talking to some other moms you know their kids have autoimmune diseases or other things that they're concerned about and i think as parents and members of the community we also have to see their concerns so my questions for everyone are if we have this 50-50 split are there other solutions that we can incorporate um like for the elementary kids um can we separate classrooms can we have like classrooms where the parents don't

099want the maths and classrooms of the parents masks their kids and at first i thought that might be like segregation but then i was thinking that we have the peanut table at lunch so it's not like none of that's being done in the school already um also can we have more mass breaks i think that kids are hesitant at a young age in elementary school to ask for that can we have more mass changing can we have to keep up the increased hand washing keep up the great efforts by everybody of not sending their kids to school sick i think we all did a fabulous job of that and the nurses would call and i think like that made a huge difference the hepa filters that kara mentioned are a great idea can we do

100more outdoor time vitamin d has been shown to lower um covet in general um so i think there's a lot that we can still consider and do to maximize students in the classroom and find that common ground that dr chris feld's talking about thank you thank you our next speaker is lori greene can you hear me yes okay hi my name is laurie green and i live in whitping township i'm also speaking on the health and safety plan they're as parents we want the choice whether or not we send our children wearing masks to school there are two specific studies that i'm going to reference that show that there is no overwhelming data to support mass mandates or that mass are effective against the spread of coven 19. on june 3rd of this year the

101montgomery county office of public health had a presentation on mass at their public board meeting entitled unmasking the confusion during this meeting dr richard lorraine the medical director for the montgomery county department of health gave this presentation on what studies have shown to date on mass he reported that studies have shown that cloth and surgical mass have done very little to prevent community spread over the last year he said quote the use of cloth and surgical mass although it varies from study to study but ranged from 0 to 15 in effectiveness the highest i'm able to find is 15 there are a number of studies out there that don't show a whole lot of improvement by using mass the second study i'm going to reference is published by the kobit 19 school response dashboard and

102brown university they reported on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student cova case rates in florida massachusetts and new york this study concluded that there was no correlation between mass policies and how many cases of covid that the school had whether it was student or staff cases in our neighboring bucks county there were schools the past year that never had mass mandates the entire school year these schools were faith christian academy regina academy at saint john the baptist travoz day school calvary baptist school and many day cares the case counts at these schools were identical to those of the public schools that had mass mandates for the school year currently lower marian school district souterton and upper perkieumann school districts in montgomery county current they currently have optional mass finally we reference the

103cdc recommendation for mass that is just that a recommendation i want to remind everyone that last year it was not recommended for schools to go back in person five days a week and we did it anyway so we do not have to follow the recommendations we can follow our own in conclusion i please ask the board to vote vote no to the proposed health and safety plan for the upcoming 2021-2020 school year thank you very much for your time thank you we have time for one more speaker and that is colleen simprola hi can you hear me yes okay i'm addressing something different i don't know if this is appropriate right now i'd like to address curriculum sure okay um colleen's in parola i'm in ambler barrow um this is currently a national there's currently

104a national narrative that you don't support all of the racial sensitivity and equity training in schools then you are against teaching history this narrative has filtered down to our school district i have been assured that racial equity training in our district is being done to encourage discourse increase sensitivity and understanding and to promote unity i am going to read one excerpt from training that was done this past february at wissacon high school today we want to talk about reverse racism and close out our series with an understanding of of what it means to be anti-racist miriam dictionary defines reverse racism as prejudice discrimination or antagonism directed against the person or people on the basis of their membership in a dominant or privileged racial or ethnic group the priest the presentation then goes on to say

105before we go any further we must emphasize that reverse racism is a myth here's why first to clarify what reverse racism means um one must understand that it implies that a class of people form a dom from the dominant racial group have been negatively impacted or discriminated against in favor of a racial or ethnic minority group it's an idea that a racial or ethnic minority group can somehow cause a negative outcome for the majority group through political economic and institutional means for race reverse racism to exist another group has to be able to enforce its power and privilege over another race we have already learned that due to historical racism and structural racism in particular racial and ethnic minorities do not have power nor privilege therefore it is impossible for there to be reverse racism

106the idea of reverse racism represents a false ideology that is used to diminish the painful reality of the african-american experience when you are or a pure suggest the existence or claim to be a victim of reverse racism you support a very degrading and hurtful narrative now you all may agree with that excerpt but that's not the point that excerpt presented one side of an issue as factual and all but forbid any dialogue is that encouraging understanding and discourse it does not sound like it to me it is pitting student against student because they may hold or be willing to see different viewpoints it is divisive i found many different resources which frame both sides of the reverse racism issue including pieces from economic the the economist the wall street journal and other reputable sources there

107was a legitimate discussion to be had on this topic but instead one viewpoint was presented as fact and any discourse was shut down with anyone not in agreement being told they were being degrading and hurtful this is not history and it is legitimate to express concerns about this this is not for promoting understanding immunity this is just a small portion i am using as an example i did not i did email my concerns to both the administration and the board i did have a discourse with the principal and dr chris field but it was eventually made clear to me that this training was going to continue for both educators and students i have no confidence that it will be handled in a way that will encourage conversation and understanding i did not hear back from

108any board members it's easier to dismiss me and other parents like me as conspiracy theorists who don't want to teach history nothing could be further from the truth i want our students to have a well-rounded education and to be able to engage in meaningful debate teaching american history to our young people is critically important hearing opposing viewpoints is beneficial and educational for all involved shutting down students with opposing viewpoints and instilling guilt for their viewpoints is unacceptable and harmful for all involved thank you for your comments so that closes out the first public comment period for those who didn't get an opportunity to speak we do have a second public comment period at the back end of our agenda but with that i'm going to move on now to the board president's report i have

109one informational item this evening and it is regarding a new public meeting format which will become effective at our august 23rd 2021 meeting and at that meeting we are going to have i guess you could call it kind of a hybrid meeting going forward the board will meet in person um in the board meeting room as we used to seated around the board meeting table but we will allow the community to attend the meeting in person obviously but also allow attendance virtually and with the new changes that we're putting in place and some of the technology upgrades we're making we'll be able to stream the public meetings via youtube and broadcast them on the district's cable channel the community will be able to make public comments in person as as we always did in the

110past but we'll also retain the ability to have people make public comments via zoom um i think the logistics of it we're still trying to nail down but we expect to have that fully functional and in place for our august meetings so stay tuned for that i personally am looking forward to gathering with my fellow board members in person but i'm also happy that we're going to retain the ability for a broader public audience to participate virtually and even make public comment virtually questions about the switch and format for the august meeting no okay so then i just also wanted to mention one action item that we're going to be voting on next week and it is for the approval of a resolution which is emergency declaration pursuant to section 520.1 of the pennsylvania school

111code essentially what this is is a document which in essence gives us as a district the ability to count virtual instruction days as school days so we had this in place last year with the pandemic and that allowed us to um in essence not take a snow day because we could have virtual instruction and still have account as an instructional day this is just re-upping that um ability for us to do that for the coming school year and you have questions about that oh except so for the younger grades that don't have computers like of their own k through five will we like i'm i don't understand how we would be able to do that or k through five or will there be you know is it like when we have noticed and we'll give

112them laptops the day before like i like i just don't understand how we could make that happen yeah sure the answer is that we do have portable bags and a a device sometimes a chromebook for each student but you're right if the snow if we have no forewarning and we can't get them home the night before um the that day or however many days will be uh dicey so i think uh moving forward we'll know that sending the computers the devices home as a precautionary matter might mean they just come back the next day because we don't have a snow day but we do have a device for each student and we will continue to uh to do so thank you any other questions okay so then um we'll move on to the superintendent report

113jim okay thank you my one informational item is just a um a highlight of acts 66 which was uh recently passed by in the state of pennsylvania and it provides for the ability for families to request their child be retained for a year related to effects of the pandemic so we of course uh shared that out with all of our families because it's something that you may not have naturally come across in your your media travels or social media discussion groups what have you um all of our families are aware of this and the thing is it's the state's deadline is really tight it's imposed as july 15th and we cannot extend that so we did advertise it or we didn't share it out we did uh translate it and we stand ready to honor

114any of the requests that come in and i'll have i can share out perhaps next week you know numbers i wouldn't of course your names but i i don't know that will be a very large impact here in the wish of hickens uh it might well be a huge impact in different districts jim do you know have we had any yet we've had a handful i mean you know would you know if we have like maybe three or something at this point yes one more question um how did we disseminate that information i saw it through email and other you know digital platforms correct we we did not do it a hard copy we we pretty much refrain from that except for in circumstances where we know um we know there's there's a trouble with

115access to technology but on the other hand this year we kind of created tech access for everybody so we we hope that we got everybody and school dis buildings are aware of families who typically don't respond to digital information and we get we reach out to them otherwise right this timing is really tight um so just hoping that everybody who might want to be aware of this option is yep great okay and then the uh the action items are all uh for review only tonight we have uh the previously presented health and safety plan and the teaching learning plan again those two documents are gonna be i'm gonna get all of that recent communication i may leave the busing part blank i'm not sure but we'll get all those out and posted our website so

116people can look at the details we spoke at length about just about all of the plans on either on either case but uh the documents will be there uh probably tomorrow morning and then very exciting we have for next meeting appointment of both our new director of equity and cultural responsiveness as well as the incoming principal of bluebell elementary school and information will be shared out with all the community uh on both of those uh shortly it's all pending of course uh board approval at the next meeting but uh the board has met both candidates and uh the interview process is over the reference checking is over and i cannot be more excited to have both of these people on the team starting as soon as they're able to to get here and that's my

117report right any uh comments jim one quick follow-up question um in the event sorry one question joe sure um in the event we didn't address a question or provide information that a parent may have about the new plan what's the best course of action for that particular person should they reach out to the building principal like how how should how should that outrage happen what i think we ought to do is uh we took some notes of questions tonight and we'll we'll do those in the usual way on the website you know board q a um people can certainly reach out to principal i think the questions are going to come more when it when it's about okay i've got to choose between virtual or not what does that look like at stoney creek elementary

118school or you know we're second middle school those questions would definitely go to the principal before july 30th okay um we're going to move on to the assistant superintendent report thank you no items at this time all right then board solicitor report kyle i also have no items but thank you all right uh board secretary report wait yeah thank you no informational items and at the next meeting we will request approval of the may 24th work session the june 1st public board meeting and the june 2nd board racial equity committee all right any uh questions or wait uh can you continue with the board treasurer report please thank you there will be no items uh at the meeting all right and then we're going to move on to the director of human resources report and

119this is our first one from our new hr director danielle hey danielle good morning good afternoon thank you um so right now there are no informational items uh we do have some action items that we'll be reviewing next meeting uh 12.1 which will be retirements resignations and terminations 12.2 and 12.3 which is extended school year professional and support staff we will have 12.4 which is approval of volunteer list 12.5 uh the substitute listing uh 12.6 will be an extended contract with explorations um for consulting services for the agreement with the principal this is an extension of a previous agreement and then finally 12.7 which is the approval of the release and settlement settlement agreement um reviewed earlier in executive session tonight um danielle item 12v6 that is the contract for gary avamon to uh serve

120as interim principal at bell is that correct correct it's an extension of that time okay um other questions for danielle all right so uh we're going to move on then to the communications committee report zappy i um first time in a long time we're not showing numbers but i do have an informational update on june 15th we had a working session with the communications committee team that i chair along with ronnie and ron the topic was later start times this has been a topic that has been brought up quite a bit in the past couple of years in fact right before covid it was a topic that we were about to embark and then covet happened um we all as uh school board members agreed that this is something we wanna take a deeper dive

121and a better understanding of what that is and what that impact may have we have asked the administration to um start a plan targeting school year 2023 2024 so for fall of 2023 so we're looking for us to have the administration start a plan of what the impact is what their recommendation is and what we will be considering as a board this is something that we will be incorporating into the superintendent's goals to capture this to your goal and there will be probably a few more communication meetings coming up in the next year and a half to have more discussions on this any questions i have no other items all right thanks evan uh the curriculum technology committee report ronnie i have no items dr davon do you have anything to report thank you we

122have no informational items uh there's one action item we'll seek approval for at the next meeting it's approval for the cost um there's been an increase in the tuition cost for the montgomery county community college gateway to college uh partnership that we have the board previously approved the expenditure of up to 36 thousand dollars for this um we're requesting that increase um not to exceed 40 excuse me did i say 36 000 yes for that not to exceed uh 4 40 200 dollars that is a typo here is that a typo that is a typo it it looks like it should be forty thousand two hundred dollars we will correct that okay thank you any other questions for money all right we're going to move on to the facilities transportation committee report gracie thank you

123joe um we do have two informational items uh and then we have some action items wait uh do you want to go over what we have going on yeah um hey amy you jump jump do you want to jump in or do you want me to walk this one through you can walk with the review don't mind thank you okay so um uh um mrs ginsburg forwarded to me information regarding a request to support legislation to provide 30 billion dollars worth of federal funding for electric school buses at the previous facilities meeting we had a discussion about solar panels and then we also fielded a couple questions about buses and then very shortly thereafter there was this request for supporting additional funding for electric school buses and um mrs ginberg wanted us to just have

124a quick discussion about it um this the background information is not surprisingly that most school buses are diesel buses and there is the emission of in this article it says 5.3 million dollars uh threat 5.3 million tons of greenhouse gases and that they are hopeful that uh conversion to electric school buses would decrease that um that amount and be more uh clean for the environment so that is it i can forward uh the individual information to all the board members if the board decided to make an overall resolution it doesn't seem like there's a place where the entire board would have the ability to say hey all nine of us said yes it looks like individually you would have to do so um but that's what this discussion request was for amy did you want

125to add anything else uh just by way of background i just asked at the transportation committee meeting about the possibility of looking into electric buses for our next contract and we talked about you know that it might be cost prohibitive but that we could look into grant opportunities uh to get funding to assist in doing that transition to electric buses and then this came along about possible funding um that we could support so i just thought it'd be a great opportunity for us to try to do something to get funding down the road for us to hopefully our other districts to move towards getting electric buses um so that was my my reasons for bringing it up so wade are uh is there a letter it looks like uh you know we're discussing signing a

126letter to congress so is there already a letter out there are we talking about composing a letter yeah thank you tracy um so it isn't a letter so much as it's a um it's a form you fill it out as an individual board member and you push send and you send it to them and you know that registers the fact that you uh believed that this was being a good thing to do so ward could vote as a whole and support it but i think individually the board members would uh represent what their position would be okay so you're going to send that out to each individual board member yep okay all right then it looks like we have some action items for next week oh tracy before you get to that do you want

127to give a recap of the facilities meeting that we had on the 9th um well wade did cover some of it just now we also were talking about uh looking at some uh turf options at the high school uh and i believe that's gonna be one of our action items uh having dewey give us some you know the numbers that we had run previously uh were from a couple of years ago also i believe that we were talking about the yes the middle school conversion from the the pool area um you know those two things were kind of sidelined uh when everything happened with uh kovid so the numbers that we received for those before on how much it would cost to to do any kind of renovation or to do the turf field are

128a little outdated so i believe we'll be we're asking for approval to um have the engineers run new numbers for us to find out uh you know if it's something that we want to push forward and move on um i think that that was it i know we have this the one other approval for a security system uh but i i don't remember was there anything else to be covered at that meeting yeah so you you hit the the items other than we we also talked about just the overall money um and how much money we have we have about 14.9 million dollars in capital projects um as we spend the money down over the next five years it goes to about six billion dollars under the current plan and that sort of set the

129context for the discussions that you talked about and the other one was the update of the first student proposal which will also be requesting for approval at the next meeting okay and i think that's it all right any questions for uh tracy or wade all right we're going to move then to the finance committee report david thanks joe our finance committee report doesn't have any informational items we have three action items that we'll be considering next week first is an approval to waive a stadium usage fee in the event that lower gwinnett township would move their pike fest to the school and off of the sunday town pike either september 26 or october 17th second is uh to consider approval of waiver of school library property tax penalty for a property in blue bell and

130the third is approval of the first student contract that we just mentioned and i think that's all wade would you elaborate if necessary uh i i think you hit it the um the one correction that i would just like to provide is um the township is i have put it down as pike fest but they are now calling it the fall festival to try to differentiate it from the uh pike fest um and other than that um the first student contract is a reduction of uh fifty thousand dollars from the last time that we talked about it um and years four and five the increase would be reduced to two percent from 2.5 percent um i the one um the one uh reduction for the 50 000 is already provided for and the two percent

131will be a change to the next meeting so that's the only update sorry good paul you had a question and then marshall just wondering just wondering the first student has the ability to provide the electric transportation that that you're discussing i'm sure they would provide any um vehicles that we requested uh the current pricing is listed um with vehicles much like they are right now um as we set forward in the proposal that went out a few years ago if we changed as a board to requesting electric vehicles uh we would have to get an update proposal from them as to what the cost change would be per vehicle i can certainly do that in any uh in any change it would be a negotiated change that i'd bring back to the board and say

132this is a change this is what's requested and go from there thanks we marshall do you have did you have a question or comment uh no just getting ready oh okay um i had a question like maybe a comment regarding 16 b2 um it's for uh waiving uh tax penalty um this is for a property owner of i think a large property um in whit pain and we had received some information from the from the property owner requesting a wave a wave us waiving the tax penalty which we generally do not waive penalties on uh late payments for taxes but based on the description of this individual situation it seemed i guess on the surface that there was a good faith effort made to pay the taxes on time and due to possibly some covert

133related delays of the post office was what led to the delay in payment beyond the the payment window but i guess in uh some follow-up conversation i had with wade those facts might not be um 100 accurate um but at any rate uh wait so wait did you get any further uh clarification on um this tax waiver request i did and i don't have anything that i would say is completely conclusive i'll forward what i receive from the um two entities uh one being the taxpayer one being the tax collector i don't think uh i or you are ever going to know exactly what happened um and that's that's where i am at least and joe um i guess it's worth mentioning as well that the the township has agreed to waive their portion of

134this penalty as well that is true yeah so um yeah so just by way of information for the other board members um a similar tax waiver waiver request was sent to whit pay township which they approved for this property owner um i don't know the circumstances of of that approval um but that's something to i guess take into consideration as we consider this request any other questions okay so then we're moving on to the policy committee report marshall thank you joe i am happy to report i have nothing to report all right the racial equity oversight committee report paul there's no report for this evening no updates well we had a meeting on june 2nd do you want to provide a brief recap of that meeting from last month sure so the last meeting uh

135we had we actually had a presentation from uh from guests uh in the form of uh pccy joe can he you can hear me yep yep i can hear it yeah that's from pccy yeah i'm sorry we so we had we had a guest presentation in the form of pccy uh who came in to speak about their uh recent report on uh school districts in the suburbs uh in terms of diversity uh and inclusion as well as uh gaps within the education system um we had great attendance uh we had a fantastic report and discussion around the topic uh as well as um the ability to have some ongoing communication and discussions moving forward uh on the topic um to hopefully address issues um get um the most current uh up-to-date thinking on the topic

136uh and hopefully be able to implement some of that thinking into action items moving forward for our district um it was a very productive meeting i get a lot of good discussion and i think a start with a good relationship with this group that uh does a lot of uh formal and in-depth research throughout the commonwealth and also uh within the region uh and so very very happy with the with the outcome of that meeting and looking forward to ongoing communications and discussions and paul i also recall that um the jim and when you represent us presented uh the group with some information about our gifted programs in wissa hicken and in particular the lack of uh black and brown representation in the gifted population and um talked about some possible root causes why that

137may be and um some actions that we're going to take to try to improve that representation going forward i think that to me the most significant one was the implementation in the this coming school year of universal screening for giftedness of all students um i guess maybe in second grade if i remember that correctly is that right in the spring of first grade okay great all right thanks absolutely and that will be a fantastic initiative that i think will help to address the issue of the lack of inclusion um within the program uh and also i think there will be a direct tie-in with the director of equity position that will be coming on board within the district that can help to look at some of those issues and address the root causes of those

138by determining really what the problems are where the disconnects exist within the district and again a plan to move forward so the combination of those efforts i think will be tremendous and really help to move our district forward can i just one question if if we are doing that in the spring of first grade how do we handle it for the students that come that transfer in um to wisa hicken after first grade we do have that tool available um so that's something that buildings can track and monitor and can work with our department of student services to ensure that we are catching catching students in that way so was there any discussion about you know those kids that are past first grade at this point like this is great moving forward and i love

139that we're thinking about this and actually thinking about the earlier grades that's fantastic but there's a cohort a significant one of students that are outside first grade so would we think about and maybe we're not there yet but how do we kind of do a little bit of catch-up too for that one of the things that we talked about is um it's a great question um in a really really good point um so at this time we don't have a plan to for example screen every student in grades two and beyond however the other aspects of this of this conversation included the importance of providing professional learning for our staff to be cognizant of what diverse gifted learners looks like in the classroom we talked about making sure that we are having meaningful engagement with

140families to inform them of the process to inform them of the ways in which they they can make requests as a part of that process so that in this way we're hopeful that these other elements will help to identify students who might be in need of that evaluation who are after first grade and that's something that will help those students in the younger grades as well families and the younger grades as well but that's a really good point and it's a it's something that we are continuing to have conversations about as a as an administrative team um to to give some thought to how do we impact the group of students who have gone beyond that grade level thank you all right we're going to move on to the report of board representatives um the

141extracurricular committee tracy sorry nothing at this time and the mciu board of directors amy's name is listed there but um is actually the last meeting was my last meeting at the mciu as our representative on their board and the primary update is that um my term ended and amy's term started july 1st so going forward she'll be attending the meetings and providing a report out on what's happening with the mciu the mciu legislative committee ron yeah there was not too much movement in the state legislature uh beyond uh wolf's request to uh increase funding uh uh throughout the state including uh support for uh for pre-k uh though uh interestingly enough i've received a uh a very large email from from the uh the sponsor of that group just this afternoon i have that chance

142to uh to even open it up but i will i'm i'm sure there'll be something interesting and if if there is i will forward that to the uh the entire board okay uh the north monkey technical career center ronnie or david well they were going over their security and safety assessment at their last meeting their virtual their meeting virtually as well and i don't think too much is happening there either okay uh psba liaison guppy nothing to report and they're actually taking a break for the summer all right joe can i ask a question yeah sure um so uh ronnie or david has north monco said what they're going to do moving forward for masking or not masking i don't think they've made any decisions i don't remember the details about their masking plan either

143um they're coming back i guess full time in the fall they're going to still try to maintain distancing as under as i recall i could be wrong but i i think they're going to make masking optional but okay jim may have some word on i think that's right david i think the key there is their kids are older grades um i'm not sure it's official yet but they're definitely leaning towards optional okay thank you all right well that takes us to our second public comment period where we'll hear comments on any school related topic anyone wishing to make a comment use the raised hand feature in zoom and again we'll take comments in the order that hands are raised when your name is called please unmute state your name municipality of residence and your topic

144and we'll take a maximum of five speakers on the same topic please limit your comments to three minutes after which your mic may be muted and again it's the board's practice not to engage in back and forth dialogue with speakers so let me check the list and i see a few hands raised our first speaker is gen d hello hello this is jen dovin from what pain township um i just have a a couple things that i would really like to be considered one i know that the teachers cannot be asked directly because of hipaa if they've been vaccinated i do know that there are numerous amounts of teachers in the mission school district that do not want to wear masks i think the first thing a survey needs to be sent out and it

145can remain anonymous um asking whether they want to wear one or they or they prefer to wear one or they don't want to wear one the other thing with the results of the survey it's pretty much split 50 50 for k to five why can't we consider we have four elementary schools why can't we consider splitting having two of them that you know they they're the child wants to wear a mask the parents want them to wear a mask or and have the other two you know optional if they want to wear one they can if they don't they don't um you know all this goes back to recommendations none of this is mandated i know that the k-5 kids are not old enough to get vaccinated again it's a personal decision um as is

146mask wearing it's not it's not a law it's not required it's not mandated it is recommended and i think that a lot of parents are going to be very angry when it's just a cut and dry no masking is required and i don't think that's fair i mean we pay tax dollars we are in a phenomenal school district and i think that it needs to be considered to be able to have you know i think about segregation and stuff but this is temporary hopefully covet is temporary um you know maybe next year we can go back to our our home school um but i think that we need to start there i think that it can't it's not just a cut and dry we're making this required um so i mean that's all i really

147have to say just just a couple comments there with that thank you our next speaker is carmina taylor good evening i um would if it's possible for the board questions if we could get some more details on the esser funds that have been um allocated for with the hicken i noticed that 90 percent of the money is going to salaries to maintain some of the covet standards and i was just wondering if we could get some more details and what is going to be formulated around the comprehensive plan and the reason why i was astonished to hear that paul didn't have any more details or plans out of that race and equity committee meeting because i was in the room when the superintendent presented his first report on the achievement gap attack plan and at

148that time in 2016 there were seven black students identified to be in the gifted program that was over five years ago i brought up the issue then and i find that it's very interesting that you're talking about it now and i think that the way that you have to address what has happened to the black community the black and brown community but especially the black community for decades in this district is restorative justice you have to make a concentrated effort to reinvest in the kids and the families and the the decades of black students that have been marginalized systemically by this district and you could use that by incorporating a multi-pronged approach with your esser funds and i just think that the public and i'm also representing the movement for black and brown lives in

149montgomery county i'm going to all the school districts and asking them how are they effectively utilizing that esther funds because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to come up with a three-year comprehensive plan so i find it interesting between tamiya presenting talking about the gifted program knowing the statistics knowing about the coveted slides knowing about the kids that had f's we didn't even get whole numbers on the kids that had f's or what kind of efforts are being made with that team so i think that the public deserves more details about the specifics and how you're going to move forward because this has been a decades-long systemic issue at wissa hicken and the only way you can make it better is make an effort for restorative justice so that's the answer whoever asked

150that question and the assistant superintendent is in charge of all that what's happening into the schools you can look at the pssa um the outcomes to identify some gifted students that are already there my son's friend was tested but tested gifted in third fifth and eighth grade years ago and he was never brought out to be put in the tested in the gifted program so i just would like to know if you could give more details about your esther plan how you can incorporate the community how you plan to restore justice in the black community thank you thank you our next speaker is maureen boga maureen boga hello hello yes oh hi um yeah i'd like to uh sort of comment on a similar topic that colleen spoke earlier regarding the videos that were played

151last year during the history month um february and there the videos that she was referring to uh really sort of just took me by surprise so i don't think i spoke to anybody about it for a long time because i didn't know what to make of it but they were um quite controversial and filled with terminology that i never thought i would hear in my children's schools because it really has nothing to do with education they were terms such as white supremacy white privilege white fragility implicit bias systemic racism and then the children were asked to decide and speak to how they were biased or racist not if they were but how they were i i just was shocked that the children we put into these types of situations and and it brought much distress

152i can tell you uh into the home um it's not education it's an ideology that was being taught as fact these lessons were claimed to be based upon fact and truth and the students were told in these videos that if they denied any of these stated assertions they were showing inner racism and being hurtful to others it did not allow for any discussion or dissension is silenced those who didn't agree it opened doors for abuse and bullying which did occur outside that classroom i can tell you that to those who protested its content it did the very opposite of unifying our students i ask how is this helping my children to learn how is this creating a trusting and safe environment you know we we speak to inclusion and safety in our school but this

153really uh did the opposite i did raise my concerns to this but they did not really get addressed um so i say to the board administration we parents have a right and to say in our children's education and and i would hope that you would listen and respond i i don't need to be told what is best for my child regards to this type of indoctrination the children uh you know i know how to raise my children as good citizens uh and and these types of lessons have nothing to do with my children's academic education they don't belong in our school you should be attentive to the needs of your parents and students and not to some personal social agenda you have a duty to listen to parental concerns and the parents should be heard

154so i hope if more speak to you about this that you actually uh respond i haven't heard from anybody about it it was it's a very distressing situation i know there'll be more i've been told there's more plans to have these types of education seminars to our children and truthfully i don't see how it's going to help my child succeed in her academic pursuits it really only brought just trust and and a lot of distress thank you all right i don't see any other hands so i'm going to close out the second public comment period and we'll move on to board comments any comments from my fellow board members uh marshall and then ron and then tracy yeah if jim i just would like a little clarification uh because i think there may be some

155confusion on the survey results i heard several times that it was a 50 50 split between those who wanted a mask optional and those who wanted masks i have written down here that it was about four and a half percent who had no opinion it was forty four point four percent who wanted masks optional and i had fifty point eight percent who wanted masks uh to be um for school in the fall for k to six could you just uh make sure that we're all on the same page in that regard you you stated it correctly okay thank you uh ron yeah uh that the last item we heard about how all of our students are going to be screened for giftedness i think is a fantastic idea uh it will probably uh put a

156lot of stress on our staff and i think uh if the board if the administration will come to the board if they need additional uh people to help this i'm quite sure that i know you would have my vote uh to move some extra money into this uh fund this is a uh a fantastic idea and it would take uh but we uh take the gatekeepers away from our our students potentially getting into the gifted program and uh it is a really fantastic step in the right direction thank you tracy and then ronnie thanks um so there was a couple of points made uh in regards to uh you know if it gets voted in that the k-5 is going back with masks on um you know there were a couple things that were brought

157up making sure that we have more mass breaks more outdoor time with us going back it you know in august september you know we generally have warmer weather so i'm i'm hoping that we're putting a plan in place that we are getting the kids outside more so that there aren't as much you know there isn't as much time for them to be indoors with their masks on um also i wanted to make sure that did you say that we will do that robocall for that act 66 just so we can make sure that we get that out to everybody yeah i'm gonna inquire tomorrow as to how we initially did it and if we we didn't we'll uh we'll do it again okay and then um well i think i said about the the hepa

158filters could we get those uh videos that were being discussed uh tonight can we get those sent back to us again i just want to rewatch them yes okay ronnie that was it for me all right ronnie and van zeppie i just wanted to agree with ron that universal uh gifting script gifted screening so many kids slip through the cracks this is a wonderful idea to do and do it early so um i also have opinions about gifting um so gifted programs in new york city public school system parents can self-select their children to be screened and there's massive screenings that are done every single year um granted that's across the entire five boroughs everybody gets this option but let us not over index on gifted i i think i love that we offer the

159gifted program but there's let's not um make that the proxy for everything like making sure our high school kids have access to honors classes access to ap classes there's other things we also should put in the consideration set let's not over index um one parameter just because there's probably a whole host of kids who would benefit from a lot of the other amazing things that our school offers that we may not be as inclusive as we should be so that's the only other ad i have thank you i just want to say one thing i don't know if this is different now but in the elementary schools when the gifted teacher would come in to say a fourth grade classroom they would do the less a gifted lesson for the entire class so the gifted

160children would have their opportunities to have the gifted teacher there but everyone in the class would participate and that was awesome so hopefully that keeps going yeah i just want to follow build off zeppy's point i mean i think it's very well taken to get the program and what we're doing with universal screening i think is fantastic and probably long overdue but it only affects a small portion of our student population and i think it is important that we also take a look at what we're doing more broadly across the rest of our academic program and jet offerings in general in particular uh honors and ap courses we have similar lack of representation in particular with our ap courses um as well and so i one thing i think it's important to stress is that

161this was one um topic or issue that was on the agenda of the racial equity oversight committee but it was one of like a long a long laundry list and we are going to kind of work our way through through the list and another one on that list in particular is the lack of representation in honors and ap courses as well so um you know it's a great point it's a very very valid point um but this is hopefully just the start of a much broader a more expansive process we're going to be undertaking to improve educational equity for all of our students throughout the entire district other comments student board reps any any comments you want to add all right joe just to piggyback off of your last point for those who are interested

162in the in the topic in general tune into our our committee meetings we have a list of priorities unfortunately we can't address everything in one time we are taking them in a systematic order to have a hierarchy addressed you know in order and as we move forward there will be more discussion more details coming out and more action items coming out to address the issues as they're identified and as we talk through them but please we participate we welcome the input and we look forward to moving in a very positive direction all right seeing no further comments i'm going to ask for a motion to adjourn the meeting so moved second all those in favor say aye hi hi