001i would like to provide you with a brief overview of tonight's meeting after a few items the board will hear 30 minutes of public comment at the end of the meeting there will be another and final opportunity for additional public comments so if you do not get a chance to speak during the first fall we encourage you to stay to the end to request participate and public comment click on the participants button at the bottom of your screen and select the race or print button when called upon you will be unmuted to comment by phone you will be prompted to raise your hand by pressing star nine when called upon once again you will be unmuted support president will call our students first so if you are a student who wishes to speak tonight please
002uh indicate the right student at the end of your name so that we know that you are a student if there are a lot of people who want to make public comments uh once again that everyone will have the opportunity to do so during the first call and uh we do encourage you to stay the board president will determine whether to set tonight's speaking time at two or three minutes per speaker and on an individual basis also has the discretion to allow for extra time to those who need translation or have other speech needs when your time has elapsed you will hear your time is up if you are still speaking please finish your sentence but try to not speak beyond your allotted time there are really important issues that many feel very passionate about
003and in order to be fair and to hear from as many of you as possible we ask that you please adhere to these guidelines thank you proportion initiales um b if dr stevens might need help um getting director lava cutler um joining if you could maybe help with that yeah i'll check in with him thank you and i've just reached out okay great um good evening everybody and welcome to the september 16th meeting of the berkeley school board um president appel was with us during closed session and wasn't able to join us for open session so i'm going to be presiding over the meeting tonight and i'll try to fill her shoes and director brown will be um helping in the role that i usually play as vice president um oh and there's director levi
004cutler okay um miss jairus can you please uh call the roll director katie brown present cyanide here director miles miller here director bethany's name is and president appel is was present for closed session and was excused for open for the open session um thank you um now we will um approve the meeting agenda does anyone have any um proposed changes to the meeting agenda i drive a motion i'll move it question by director sinai their second second second by director brown uh ms jarvis can you call the role on the motion to proof the agenda director miles miller yes director levi cutler yes dr brown yes yes vice president yes um all right we have an agenda um we're going to have um a distance a snapshot of our distance learning program which i'll turn
005it over to dr stevens to present and then we'll have a report from our closed session and then we will move into public comment so dr stevens great thank you very much vice president alper we thought that it might be informative for the board and members of the public that we resume our school snapshot practice this was a practice we had fairly regularly pre-co-bid we would invite schools to come and just highlight a single aspect of their uh practice to serve students uh we haven't done this since we um have closed our facilities and so we're pleased that uh debbie lenz is the first of our presenters um debbie is a both a teacher on special assignment supporting science education and also works at willard middle school and she's put together a very brief presentation
006that we hope will give the board and members of the public a glimpse into distance learning as it's being enacted by our science specialist teachers so ms lens thank you and welcome thank you i just want to make sure you can both hear me and see the slideshow presentation can someone okay so good evening everyone it's a pleasure to be here tonight my name is debbie lenz and as superintendent stephen said i'm a part-time teacher on special assignment for k-8 science and also for the middle school stem and makers programs i'm also a teacher at willard middle school in this presentation i will give you a snapshot of how elementary science looks during distance learning this fall science and the other enrichment classes such as pe library garden music and art are held during live
007class sessions that last 45 minutes and they're spread in 19 different time slots throughout the week the home classroom teachers provide the information provide the enrichment teachers zoom links and also inform their students daily of their enrichment schedule the science release teachers themselves usually see each class for about one period per week although it varies slightly from school to school this is a short video clip of ms paske's second grade science class at washington elementary showing how she holds a class discussion over zoom just watch before you do any notice and wonders okay you watch that and now in the chat not muting and unmuting you're gonna practice everybody should at least put one thing they notice or one thing they wonder if you want to put more impress me lily and michael and carmack
008are suggesting it might be a skeleton and dylan thinks it might look like a part of the body uh josie thought it looked like little bugs making wedge gus that's great wonder i wonder why the light what all the lines are it grows a lot of vines for sure the lines look like a big zipper way to connect i wonder if that's holding something together josie and seeing blood cells june's thinking is something with a human gus's hypothesis is that it is a turtle and he notices that it's spraying oh jun's thinking it might be venom uh lillian thinks it's a tube in the body if it's a spider web and if it is where is that spider right there's a couple people who didn't get a chance to add something in the chat if
009you'd like to add something now in your voice go ahead i wonder where it is if you think it is some sort of fungus give me like fireworks hands so guys this is pretty cool and when you saw it going it went from small to big it is a time lapse but it was taken over hours and now they compress it into 40 seconds and when it grows up and comes out of its egg it's gonna look like that so what you saw growing there guys was the nervous system that you were correct it was an organ but it's an organ of a fish we created a new k-5 scope and sequence for science instruction this summer to adapt to our teaching during the pandemic this new plan allows for easier teacher collaboration across schools
010with both lesson planning and resource sharing as we adapt to online teaching and it can allow families with multiple elementary school-aged children to learn similar science concepts at the same time each month has a different science theme that highlights a cross-cutting concept from the next generation science standards for example in october the cross-cutting concept is patterns which is highlighted in the science theme for the month weather and climate we organized each unit to last five weeks with a specific topic for each week that's taught by grade taught across the grade levels while students in both first and fifth grades will study temperature and heat transfer in week two of the weather and climate unit shown here the specific activities they do or the way they will learn the content will be planned to meet their
011grade level skills and knowledge this next video clip shows a science release teacher meeting where we discussed ways the science teachers are making it work as they figure out how to teach science from a distance one thing that worked really well for me at bam was an engineering project about how strong paper is and different shapes it gave students the opportunity to get up and move and actually do a hands-on experiment all i needed was three pieces of paper and some tape and some books so they made circle shapes paper triangle shaped paper square shaped paper columns and then they placed books on top of them and they just waited to see in more and more books and study collabs see which shape was this pocket and so um i have been able to teach
012some breathing practices to my students and that's been very successful what happens is the breath actually is like an inbuilt mechanism to help the brain calm down okay so my highlight was reading for scientists for the students and i had it in spanish for some humanist so they added magnificent i think um and we paused and talked about it and talked about all the things she was doing that scientists do all the observations and predictions and questions the collaboration the intense collaboration that happens with the other srts and how we support each other so that's been wonderful i have enjoyed the students able to do experiments and share back and forth it's allowed us to have a common language to go back and forth and to show our work was that we're working on some
013engineering challenges and i had the kids brainstorm actual terrible ideas first which was surprising to them but it was great because it really got their anxiety down and the idea of daring to fail an alarm clock that brings you out of bed because it was really hard to wake up today because of the weird orange haze i've always started my classes with a notice and a wonder um where the kids take a look at a science picture and they in person they'll like raise their hands and we can get to like five students getting to share their ideas with the whole class in the zoom format which is kind of neat um in a weird silver lining um i just have the whole class enter exactly what they're thinking in the chat at the same
014time and so i can get 100 participation and the kids can really build off each other's ideas in a way that before five kids could share and now i can get 25. this list showing on the screen are samples of different kinds of science activities and resources that teachers will use while teaching science from a distance they range from teacher-led activities like read-alouds and science demonstrations to utilizing online resources like brainpop mystery science and fossweb we hope to be able to regularly incorporate hands-on science activities and engineering design challenges from home as well one fantastic resource this fall came from community resource for science which is a district partner through the berkeley public schools fund they got a grant for busd science from bear which provides a science bag containing the items listed here for
015every fourth and fifth grader in the district science teachers will be able to use these resources when planning lessons for those students this last video clip shows miss hill from malcolm x elementary school doing a live science demonstration with her fifth grade students to illustrate a new concept making a big list of mixtures i want to just think about an example of a mixture i'm going to add 100 grams of water and i'm gonna add in some salt and i'm gonna measure so i have a hundred grams now it says a hundred and fours put in some more up it went up to nine i'm gonna put in one more it went up to 13. i could see the salt down at the bottom and i'm going to stir it and stir it and stir
016it a little more the salt's dissolving where's it going it's gone i don't even see it anymore does anybody want to raise their hand and tell me how much do you think our new solution weighs we have 100 grams of water and 13 grams of salt the salt did disappear it's no longer there amelia what do you think uh it's now 100 grams because all the salt has disappeared into the solution of the water it's all particles it didn't know the salt particles are actually still in the water it's just melted so if they're actually still there and they didn't disappear we just can't see them because they're so tiny what would our new mass be 113 yeah it's 113. so the salt is still there so even though it dissolves it's still part of
017the mass there are a variety of challenges for all teachers as we adapt to teaching from a distance one difficulty for science teachers is around hands-on science instruction which is such a core part of in classroom instruction it will be challenging to ensure that all students have the supplies they need at home for experiments and engineering design challenges a huge challenge for all teachers is around the quality of technology and internet that both staff and students have at home this has such a big impact both on the teachers ability to lead a live class and on the way that students are able to engage in live lessons thank you very much ms lens thank you so much for the presentation and we hope that you'll pass along a warm thank you from all of us
018to your colleagues we really appreciated seeing all of this i will thank you thank you appreciate your leadership on this yeah thank you so much um okay now um before we before we do public comment we will um do what you might not have all known you were waiting for but um it is the moment you're waiting for director brown is going to report on closed session thank you vice president albert for item 3.1.1 um there was a motion by president appel seconded by director sinai a motion passed to approve um five to zero for item 3.1.2 we met with legal counsel and heard an update item 3.2.1 we heard an update for item 3.2.2 we heard an update and gave direction for item three point three point one there was a motion by president
019appel seconded by director leyva cutler to appoint the new director of student services all voted in favor and the motion passed five to zero to point to appoint dr philip shelley as the next director of student services associate superintendent um are you going to introduce um yes thank you it is my pleasure to announce dr phillip shelly as our new director of student services for the past seven years dr shelley has served as a director of student services for the vallejo city unified school district prior to transitioning to the district office phillip was a high school vice principal and a high school teacher dr shelley comes to busd with over 20 years of experience in public education please join me in welcoming him to our district it was a wonderful introduction in factory music sorry
020i apologize great thank you superintendent associate superintendent and then for item 3.3.2 um the board discussed thank you director brown um and um again welcome dr shelly i think is here on zoom so hopefully he's listening and watching and we all welcome you to the district um now um now we're going to go to public comment so as ms chairs explained earlier if you'd like to make a public comment now is the time to raise your hand on zoom um and in order to give a public comment in this period you have to raise your hand now and then if you raise your hand later you can speak in the later public comments so i'm going to give give people a few a few seconds here to raise your hand if you'd like to speak
021um and then when i see how many people want to speak um i'll i'll let everybody know it looks like everyone who's raised their hand everyone who wants to speak is raise their hand so there are one two three four five six seven eight ten ten people raise their hand so each speaker will get two minutes um the first speaker is hannah margulies castle followed by yvette falarka i will keep the time on my phone and um when and i'll hold up a little sign when there's 15 seconds left and then when you're when your time is up and when your time is up if you could wrap it up so that we have time to hear everybody speak that would be appreciated um i'm just going to read the 10 people now um so
022that you know if you're on the list hannah margulies kessel yvette fellarca deborah tease jamila dunn linda clark jonas lamatory brownell john whitaker sarah and then the last speaker will be clement barthes apologize for mispronouncing anybody's name um hannah margulis kessel you can go ahead hi can you hear me yep good evening my name is hannah margulis kessel and i am a kindergarten teacher at washington and a bft member and have been for over a decade i am deeply concerned that superintendent stephens recently announced plans to begin some on-campus programs particularly those programs that would involve preschoolers students with special needs and english language learners i'm equally concerned about the district's plans to apply for a waiver to reopen elementary schools it is clear that it is still not safe to return to campuses alameda
023county is still in the highest rating of cova 19 infections and evidence has surfaced over the summer and fall of the undeniable capacity of children to be carriers of coven 19 when daycare's camps and schools attempted to reopen only to shut down again due to severe outbreaks among students and staff it is not safe for anyone to return to campus but the specific groups mentioned above are especially vulnerable firstly busd's pre-k special ed and english learner populations are disproportionately black and latinx the precise groups that have some of the highest cova 19 infection and death rates additionally many special ed students have health conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to this virus and make social distancing and mask wearing impossible pre-k students also can't be expected to socially distance or wear mass and lastly many
024of our ell students live in multi-generational homes with older relatives who are yet another vulnerable group we cannot ask our most vulnerable children and their families to risk their lives in order to receive an education that is not justice that is not equity instead we need to find ways to make distance learning work for all students as a district that holds equity as a top priority busd can find innovative ways to support these programs in distance learning by offering services like translators during eld zoom classes online tutoring home visits for students with special needs i urge dr stevens and the board to reevaluate plans to open campuses before it is safe to do so and to move forward in a way that reflects a commitment to safety and academic achievement for all students by providing
025more resources for distance learning rather than asking some of our most vulnerable to put their lives at risk thank you so much thank you next we have um yvette falarka followed by deborah thiess um miss falarka ready whenever you are okay i'm yvette fallarka i teach at martin luther king middle school and i'm here representing the equal opportunity now by any means necessary eon bam caucus like most of the state's population the rate of coven 19 infection in alameda county alarms even those who are the most cynical despite this continued danger superintendent steven's email from september 4 stated his intention to implement in-person assessments and instruction for students with special needs english learners and pre-k we cannot let our students who are already in the most vulnerable position become the guinea pigs or canaries in
026the coal mine for dangerous reopening plans countless studies found that children contract and spread the coronavirus and a new study published last week by the cdc found that in child care centers young children some who were asymptomatic and one who was only eight months old still contract and spread covet 19. in berkeley our students with individual education plans and english learners are disproportionately black latino latino and other children of color black children are hospitalized five times more and latino children eight times more often than white children and on mortality an analysis by the brookings institute found that among those aged 35 to 44 african americans and latinos have a mortality rate nearly 10 times higher than white people that's the age of many of my students parents students with special needs and those with disabilities
027are often medically fragile and more susceptible to contracting and spreading infection and many of my el students live in multi-generational households so bringing our students in these programs to schools for face-to-face instruction endangers our most vulnerable children and their families and communities as well as school staff we need to continue fighting for the additional resources like bilingual education and translation and one-on-one support services we have to remain steadfast in our commitment to prioritizing saving human health safety and lives no one returns until it's safe for everyone to return thank you miss valarca next we have deborah this and then followed by jamila dunn good evening my name is deborah thiess and i'm a full inclusion teacher at franklin preschool i would like to express my concerns related to the superintendent's september 4th email in which
028he stated that the district is exploring providing targeted in-person work with students this includes preschool dr stevens expressed that the district cannot yet offer a date for when these services will resume because of the care required to plan for these activities it is my hope that this date will not come until it is safe to reopen we know that young children can and do contract covet 19. we also know that they can spread it reopening has the potential to contribute to community spread and i am concerned about the potential loss of life as well as the increasing evidence that many survivors of covod suffer long-term damage to vital organs including their heart lungs and brain please don't rush reopening thank you thank you um jamilla done followed by linda clark hi my name is jamila
029dunn i'm a parent of a first grader at thousand oaks and i'm here to say that my first grader wants to drop out of school because of distance learning it has been a very difficult situation for us i work outside of the home my husband is unemployed desperately trying to find a job we don't have extended child care available for our son we don't have the capacity to supervise his schooling the amount of time that is spent online actually creates more problems for him two 30-minute a day classes with his primary classroom teacher are too much screen time and not enough teaching and learning time this is not okay i understand that people have health concerns but i don't want my child to hate school i never thought i would hear a first grader asking
030if he could drop out of school something has to change i appreciate that the district circulated the recent survey to find out feedback about how distance learning is going for families because i'm sure there's a variety of experiences out there and my hope is that you will take that feedback seriously and really adapt as needed especially for the younger grades first graders in most schools don't have homework at all right now they're being expected to do a hundred percent of their learning into independently through worksheets that doesn't work it's not age appropriate and it's really creating a lot of anxiety and negative associations with learning when at this age learning should be fun it should be made based on play hands-on activities exploration of the world and fostering curiosity don't let education be a casualty
031of the pandemic please prioritize reopening schools safely and make it happen as soon as possible from a parent's perspective and from the previous speakers it does feel like we're being held back by the teachers union by the terrible state of funding for public education and of course the real concerns about covid reopening but it feels overwhelming and i honestly don't know what to do with my own child right now so i thank you for taking all perspectives into consideration and moving forward forward with a safe and efficient process to getting back to the real work of teaching and learning thank you thank you for coming and sharing your family's experience um next we have linda clark followed by jonas lamatory lyndon oh there's london miss clark i'm here yes so i would also uh good
032evening everybody my name is linda clark i have this i think this is my 45th year as a teacher so i truly understand the value of in-person education i have also been a special education teacher for 27 years i'm in my 23rd year at king middle school so i definitely understand that the children that we're talking about the special education and el students need as much help as they can possibly get but i'm also very concerned about um them them becoming ill and taking that illness home to their families and spreading it further into the community as other people have stated alameda county is still has a very high rate of infection and it's very concerning to me to think that we're even thinking of putting these children back in school because they are the
033most vulnerable they they have the most underlying health conditions such as diabetes asthma some have heart conditions and um it's also you know they live in most of them most of the students of uh that we're talking about live below the poverty line or around the poverty line they're very under-resourced families they often don't have adequate health or money to buy food or all kinds of things so to actually have them coming to school and put an extra possible burden of them being sick and making the family sick is really untenable to me there's there also um they also as somebody else has always stated they live in multi-generational homes so it's not just the kids getting sick and taking it to parents there are grandparents involved and they're much more likely to get sick
034be hospitalized and die as everybody i'm sure is aware at this point they also live in the poorer areas of our cities and so in those areas the rates of infection are higher and the one thing that hasn't been talked about is stigmatization if these children are put back on campus the other kids are going to single them out and say why are those kids going to school thank you miss clark next we have um jonas lamattery brownell followed by john whitaker thank you um i have a request can you tell me or incomplete audibly when my time i have 15 seconds or my trip thank you so much uh so good evening everyone my name is jonas lumetri brownell i'm berkeley unified's herrick hospital teacher where i've been teaching and supporting psychiatric hospitalized adolescents
035since 2012. so i speak here tonight to share my concern with the usd's application for a waiver to provide in-person education and educational support to a range of students right so on september you know superintendent stevens on september 4th indicated busd's intention to voluntarily seek to begin in person all these services even while our county remains at what our state designates as widespread or quote substantial county risk level so that that waiver would allow that and the other group of students are allowed even if we're at widespread in fact the waiver would allow such in-person contacts even when we locally see above seven new cases per 100 000 population per day so the former former head of the cdc's office of public health preparedness and response dr ali khan along with a number of public
036health experts from the global center for health security and elsewhere produced a report called the covid19 back to school playbook guiding principles to keep students teachers and staff safe in k-12 schools and it says their number one prime directive is quote nothing protects children teachers and staff more including from getting infected within the learning setting than decreasing community transmission 13 countries that have reopened their schools without escalating covet 19 transmissions did so as a rule only after first reducing community spread to about one new case per 100 000 population per day 15 seconds oakland right now as of yesterday has 8.7 per 100 000 per day berkeley 6.5 alameda county 5.7 we're higher than the county right now and the playbook indicates we must get at a bare minimum to five and that goes for
037any in person any in person thank you thank you uh mr whitaker followed by sarah hello hi everybody my name is john whitaker and i'm just here to have my opinion heard uh my son my son goes to rosa parks and uh we are having a terrible time with this his mother has to spend much of her day helping the kid on the computer and i really want to stop pretending that this is working distance learning is not doing the job we need to figure something else out start moving towards something else like we need to opt in opt out kind of you know teachers who want to get back to business teachers that want to get kids back into their community with their friends where they should be those teachers should be able to
038meet at least once a week to start once a week outdoors someplace and let's just start getting the people the kids who want to get together and have their village back uh boom that's it thank you thank you thank you um next we have sarah and then our last speaker uh in this portion would be clement barths sarah yeah hi my name is sarah windler um i'm a parent of a first grader at rosa parks i also have a daughter who is in a private preschool i i joined tonight because i want to share my opinion about um you know our experience which um you know actually as far as compared to last year's distance learning um there's been dramatic improvement i can tell a lot of effort was put into it um it's still
039for a first grader very challenging way to learn i echo those sentiments um i also like to just offer even though i'm a scientist i'm going to offer some anecdotal information even though that's kind of a no-no but i'd just like to offer some maybe comfort around the fact that the science science-based precautions that my daughter's preschool has put into place for in-person learning at that preschool have been working really well one of the teachers there did in fact contract covet from outside the school and there was no further spread at the school due to the precautions that they had in place which are typical guidelines by the county health department for how to interact between teachers and students in a work environment like that so i think what i i want to just bring
040up as i hear the concerns of the teachers i don't i this is challenging for everyone obviously and learning is a part of students health too so i guess i want to know i think it's important that the district is thinking about an eventual return and what does that look like and the more and better we can plan for that to keep people safe i think that's really key so i really actually just want to know what that planning looks like because i haven't heard very much about it um and i think that's it for now thank you thank you sarah um and i hope that everybody who's here on that topic about the plans for in-person learning and what the district's thinking is about that we'll stick around for the discussion that we're going
041to have tonight um where the superintendent will share um our staff's thoughts and hear the board's questions and comments on exactly that topic so that that is coming up very soon um our last um speaker um for this portion is clement barths hi my name is clement i'm a father of a kindergartner and a fourth grader needless to say it's extremely overwhelming these days and you know i won't expand on that but it's been extremely hard and and i really understand that the decision on bus is extremely difficult and and it should really come from experts especially which i'm not uh and i i do not want to give the feeling that i'm here to neglect teacher safety and all that again i don't have any you know i i feel like this decision is
042way above my my knowledge right uh but so i do want to trust the health department to make the right call but i was very very puzzled by uh you know an anecdote that happened at the beginning of the year when our kinder teachers uh it came from teachers right wanted to meet our kids in front of our house 10 feet away or 20 feet away with masks with parents to make sure the kids don't run to the teachers and so on something that you know by any expert is extremely safe to do and and when the health department decided uh to ban that um we really felt like okay is busy trying to keep the teachers safe or is the usd trying to protect themselves in the case that the teacher comes with some
043copy positive tests right and and i really really hope it's not the ladder right i really hope we we can progress together on that uh not like parents against teachers where we want everybody to be safe not feel safe be safe and but we must avoid you know this kind of behavior where we just want to protect the usd by by not even allowing teachers to see our kids from 20 feet away um that all the parents i know felt like they were completely abandoned by the usd when that happened because you know we were like why why why would such behavior be considered dangerous i really hope it was a one-off i really hope you know busd will will consider some behaviors to be safe and and and you know go along with that
044and that's my comment thank you so much um that concludes our um open public comment and now we will hear from our union um leadership um mr nietzsche you're going to play a video from bft president matt meyer um do we know if there's other union representatives here i know that mr hernandez is in the audience um but i don't see anybody i recognize as a union leader raising their hand so maybe to start with you could play mr meyer's video we get to see you mr nicholson hello superintendent stevens from the berkeley school board tonight i want to speak about a safe return to schools as you know all of us desperately hope that conditions will improve to the point where we can go back to in-person learning unfortunately this conversation has been politicized
045making it harder to have a fact-based dialogue we must work together as an entire community to keep the health and safety at the center of this conversation it is essential that we use science-based standards for reopening decisions we now know that children can both catch covid as well as transmit it there are over 476 thousand documented cases of children who have tested positive for colbit this is also a population that is typically not widely tested although children do not typically experience serious symptoms their family members do children of color have higher infection rates than their peers they're also more likely to live in multi-generational households where infecting an older person is a greater risk all of this needs to be taken into account when deciding when is the right time to reopen our campuses our
046benchmarks for reopening are not made up out of thin air they are based on the guidelines from the key indicators of suppression study by the harvard global health institute and the edmond j software center for ethics the report was endorsed by some of the most well-respected public health experts and scientists from top universities including covet act now the center for infectious disease research and policy center johns hopkins and the university of pennsylvania it was written independent of political influence we'll be discussing these benchmarks with the district over the next few weeks berkeley is not a bubble only 30 percent of our teaching staff lives in berkeley i'm sure it is similar for our classified staff some of our students do not live full time in berkeley many of our students families work throughout the bay
047area i happen to live in an alameda county zip code where the infection rates are as high as florida and texas community spread does not stop at the city border it is unfortunate that our county and state have not put into place the amount of testing that is readily available and provides prompt results without adequate testing there can be no effective contact tracing to contain communities we are nowhere near the amount of testing necessary to actually contain this virus there are two testing sites in all of oakland and zero in berkeley that test on the weekend many sites do not accommodate children most sites only test during work hours and return results between two and five days later which is much too late to stop the spread it doesn't help that trump's cdc is putting
048out information that discourages testing even though the medical community knows this is necessary we want to go back to in-person school but the burden absolutely cannot be on the schools alone if the federal state and county governments want to bring students and educators back to campus they must invest their time and resources into making it safe by suppressing community spread we know that the virus spreads when and where people gather on kqed this morning a health official cited that 95 percent of cases can be traced to people gathering together this is exactly what a classroom is a gathering of people indoors for a long period of time this is the environment that cobit is most likely to spread in to us a waiver means that regardless of the outside circumstances the usd is so prepared
049to handle the spread of coronavirus at our facilities we can get permission to open our doors at this point it is simply too costly to return the millions of dollars that we will be required to spend on facilities improvements and custodial needs in order to provide a small increment more of safety will come at the cost of unmet needs for our students now and in the foreseeable future i advise you to proceed with caution the health of our community is at stake thank you all right and that was matt meyer president of the berkeley federation of teachers thank you mr meyer i don't see any other union leaders so i'm going to move to committee um committee comments and i think we have one unless jeremiah jenkins is here on behalf of a committee if
050not mr jenkins you'll be able to speak at the public comment period at the end of the meeting but we have anna vasudev from the pta council so ms fosudev you have five minutes thank you vice president alper hello my name is anna vasudev and i'm the vice president of equity and inclusion on the berkeley pta council my comments are regarding a robust discussion we had with parents from different sites at monday's pta council meeting about camera on camera off policies at schools during distance learning it seems like some instructors are being very strict about students having to have their cameras on for attendance whereas others are more flexible at our meeting we discussed the equity reasons why students may have cameras off including students feeling insecure about how they look or their background perhaps
051their housing situation is not the best and they don't want their peers to see it's pretty common for us as adults to sometimes have our cameras off when we're at work meetings for these reasons the fact that students are logged on who may be in precarious situations is already a plus the council did not take a position for a camera's honor cameras off policy but we want to make sure that we're keeping equity in mind versus taking a punitive approach towards any district-wide policy we also realize that this policy can vary at the elementary and middle school level versus a secondary school level thank you thank you and that concludes our public comment period our first public comment period we'll have another one at the end of the meeting now i'll move to board member
052and superintendent comments um is any board member who'd like to go first director leave a cutler do you want to go first no do you have comments tonight no director sinai uh i just um want to make one comment actually two comments this evening um first and foremost i i really [Music] um feel strongly that i want to maneuver through this very difficult time in a unified way i think our public comment really expressed the challenges that our parents and families are facing as well as our teachers and staff and it is all true it doesn't matter if you are a family member trying to get your child back in school or a teacher saying they don't feel like our schools are ready um we're in a situation right now that what i believe we
053need to do and i i think dr stevens is working with us to get there is to develop strategies that we can all agree and support are best for our children um and our staff and our families and it's not easy and i think moving forward on the survey from the county um was a way to express the readiness of school districts and i heard in a meeting that i was in recently with the county is pretty much what people expected private schools and charter schools because they're smaller tend to have potentially more resource and more agility are more ready to open and therefore the equity gap between public school students and private school students continues to persist i think we need to we need to look at what it will take to open in
054a way that is safe safe in a way that's in accordance with our public health guidance but we can't wait for the public health guidance to make a decision and then start planning i think we need to plan as we go and be prepared but we need to not be premature in our opening because we need to make sure that as someone said it's not just that people feel safe is that our students and our our staff are safe and so i really want to stress my own personal commitment that this is not a um parents versus teachers that this is a really difficult situation for everybody and we need to continue to work together to find solutions um so i you know i empathize and i'm committed to doing the work we need to
055do and my only other comment is uh speaking of on camera and off camera i am going to be on and off camera all night tonight because i have a pinched nerve in my back and when i get up to move i look like i'm about to like cringe and fall over and i don't really want everybody to see that so if you see my camera go on and off it's because i'm trying to stand up or sit down and it's not that i have left the room and have lost attention um so thank you for your patience thank you director sinai dr brown no comments director of color no okay dr stevens my student director oh sorry i'm sorry director miller thank you director cena director miller thank you director sinai um i just
056i think director sinai said things perfectly but i also want to say that really shouldn't be a teacher's parents thing because we all have the same goal here we all want to go back to school i want our students back in the classroom and so i would you know just suggest that everyone thinks of it in that light because we don't want it to be groups against each other because we're all working towards common goal a common goal and we're all just trying to figure out what's the safest way to get to that common goal well sad and sorry for skipping you director miller um dr stevens uh thank you very much vice president elper we will in only a few minutes begin a presentation and discussion on this very subject and we'll walk through
057in quite a bit of detail the sort of current status of the district's readiness as it relates to the elementary waiver application i'd like though to take this opportunity just to comment on a couple of other things before we begin a more detailed discussion about in-person instruction um so first i'd like to just uh join my colleagues as well in welcoming dr philip shelley to busb i think you're still listening in and so we're very glad to have you joining in uh you're coming on board in very interesting times i as well just want to acknowledge that sort of one portion of tonight's agenda which will come and go relatively quickly pertains to the issuance of the first tranche of bond funding for measure g measure g was approved by berkeley voters overwhelmingly back in
058march only weeks in fact before before all of this happened and so it just felt notable to me to sort of mark that that we are issuing a first bond on that that voter approved measure and to express again how appreciative we all are that we're able to continue significant upgrades to our berkeley facilities even during this time and then last because it feels important in the national news this week along with so many other things much has been made out of the 1619 project which was published a year ago by the new york times it was actually in august of 2019 uh just shortly after i'd come into my position that um the curriculum was published in fact i mentioned it in remarks about a year ago and so i wanted to sort of
059comment on the importance of this work and work like it and thought that i would read aloud a quote from the 16-19 curriculum and then offer a few comments about work that we have going on here in berkeley unified the quote reads like this and again this comes from the new york times out of slavery and the anti-black racism it required grew nearly everything that has truly made america exceptional its economic might its industrial power its electoral system its diet and popular music the inequities of its public health and education it's astonishing penchant for violence it's income inequality the example it sets for the world is a land of freedom and equality its slang its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it this day the seeds of all
060that were planted long before our official birth date in 1776 when the men known as our founding fathers formally declared independence from britain this quote i drew out of the new york times introduction to the 1619 curriculum uh because i think it sort of so represents a division that's taking place right now uh in our country and that threatens to cleave the educational system as well as curriculum like this is coming into question uh it is important that the usd continue its import uh its um focus on efforts that try to de-center the white experience from all of our various curricula that's the incorporation of ethnic studies curriculum which was recently passed by the state of california as a new high school requirement for all of our students it's the renaming of the jefferson washington
061schools here in berkeley in organizations like teaching tolerance the california indian museum and cultural center facing history in ourselves which is just right here in oakland all of these curricula are vital to our ongoing collective healing and to justice and shouldn't be considered just as a single act in the classroom but as a practice that all of us educators are engaged in in an on an ongoing basis as well there's been scrutiny at the federal level about funding for programs related to bias and education and i thought that i would as well offer comments about this brain research over the last several years indicates that all humans express bias and the anti-black bias specifically which as the previous quote suggests is fundamental to the creation of this country the effects of that bias are well
062documented both in the educational system and around various sectors in the united states and so it is as well a call to all of us educators and specifically to berkeley educators to continue our commitment to anti-bias education and to our own work as educators to understand the impact of our own biases in our classroom and so it felt important as in the midst of these important these these sort of weighty discussions about covet 19 to also remark that we all work in the context of a school district that is committed to this ongoing search both for truth and representation in our curriculum but also to eliminating the effects of bias in our school system and with that thank you very much i appreciate the opportunity to offer those remarks thank you dr stevens um i
063realized i just wanted to add a couple quick comments and then we'll move to the consent calendar in the discussion but um director sinai and director miller i think really well articulated what i think we all feel which is the the urgency of working together not pitting groups of us of our community against each other as we work towards what we all want as director miller said which is to get back into school um and as we do that um i know we also i know i speak for all of us and appreciating all of all the members of our community who are struggling to to do the best they can in this time so first i wanted to mention our teachers who um we're doing emergency teaching over zoom in the in over a
064google classroom in the spring but are now fully immersed in a completely new way of of teaching students and as someone i teach adults at the law school once or twice a week and find it incredibly difficult to do over zoom to completely transform the way i taught in the classroom and what i'm doing is about 100th as difficult as what we're asking our k-12 teachers to do every day and so um i'm just blown away by what we're asking of them and and what and the reports that we've gotten from so many families about how appreciative they are and how at least comparatively well distance learning is going compared to how it went in the spring even though nobody suggests that it's ideal or um or what what any of us want for our
065children at this point um so i wanted to put i wanted to call out the incredible work that our teachers are putting in every day and then our families who are having to manage in many cases impossible situations particularly working families um families who either just we sort of ask families to do it all but they just they just literally can't in many cases they they they can't go to work um and leave their young children at home to do distance learning by themselves um or they can't adequately supervise their young children in the distance learning because they have to go to work there's this pandemic is created lit situations that are not just difficult they're literally impossible for many of our families and we all know that the women in particular bearing the brunt
066of much of those um impossible possibilities that are placed on on our family so our families too are bearing a burden um that's almost unimaginable and then our students who are having as some of the commenters said and really hard for what i thought were really heartbreaking comments or having to you know learn in an environment that's not conducive to learning um and having an association especially the youngest ones and having an association with schooling and learning um that that's really negative and um and that's that is heartbreaking and i know that all that's it's one of the reasons why it's probably the main reason why is director miller said we all want to get back into school and we want to do it in a way that's safe for our students and our staff
067so i think we can both as we as we work together and not not at cross purposes for towards the goal that we all have um i think it's also worth taking a moment to appreciate how much all of us are bearing um as we do that um and with that i will um move us along to the consent calendar and ask for a motion to pass the consent calendar director brown is there a second i'll second second by director sinai ms chaires are you with us yeah can you um take the role please of course director cutler yes director brown yes director sinai yes director miller yes vice president alper thank yes thank you thank you ms chairs um the consent calendar has passed so now um we're gonna have a discussion item which
068is the update on public health and in-person learning um and then we'll have um three action items probably relatively brief action items but the main event is this discussion item so dr stevens i'll turn it over to you got your labor color you're famous great shot you're funny i'm i'm pressing the wrong button i apologize there it is including this which is uh now a new mural here in berkeley can can you all guess who this is i know i know it was a surprise to me too well congratulations to you it's it's uh it's wonderful i i just had to i had to tease a little bit i hope you don't mind thank you i just even say what it is yeah so this is um i actually don't know the location of this
069mural i i just learned about its existence only a couple of days ago so this is i understand new mural that's here in berkeley and pablo and bancroft and pablo and bancroft and here is our very own battery slava cutler featured prominently in this mural yeah with other education sylvia mendes is also on this i haven't really pinpoint all of juan alicia is right next to me on my left who's a muralist herself um actually i was in a meeting and somebody told me did you know you're on a mural so it's a complete surprise to me that's really wonderful congratulations to you thank you um so uh we'll jump in now this is going to be a relatively um uh streamlined presentation just uh focusing in on the elementary waiver and then as um
070was earlier commented upon by both teachers and members of the public on permissions granted to districts to do small cohorted in-person instruction so i'll be uh joined for a portion of this presentation by natasha biry who is the director of bcep and community relations again we're keeping this presentation somewhat short we'll do a very quick update on uh sort of current health conditions here locally uh then talk very specifically about the alameda county public uh department of public health elementary waiver application uh and its status and then we'll talk a little bit about in-person cohorted support and then move quickly into a discussion and questions uh so with that i'd like to just turn over to miss berry and she can walk us through this ever-evolving chart so this is just thank you uh good
071evening this is just one quick slide a snapshot of where we are right now and i i do we all realize that this is i believe the six month anniversary unfortunately of uh shelter in place and back then we talked about flattening the curve and now we're talking about i think getting out of purple and that applies to air quality as well as to uh as well as to covet so we now have this state system that has us in color-coded tiers according to um a couple of uh key measures one has to do with the case rate case rate by a hundred thousand residents and then um positivity of of tests and currently technically we are in the um the purple range for alameda county um but i've put down below here um where
072we are as of this week so um the way that the this new rating system works is you basically are have to be in the tier that you start out at for for three weeks and um we started out in as a county in this widespread um the widespread doesn't uh that has to do in our case it had to do with the um the case rate our pa our positive test rate was lower um however as long as you've got one of these indicators and a higher you go with the higher so we've been as alameda county in this higher rate we've been in this uh tier for two weeks um however our case rates in the county are dropping um so we're um we're at five point six percent uh in berkeley we're
073even lower than that we're about three point eight percent for our uh case rate and then for the testing positivity rate that's also uh dropped it's actually in the orange level for alameda county and it's in the yellow level for berkeley we're below two percent we're about one point four percent right now however the way that this works again is that you have to stay where you are um for three weeks and then um you need to achieve the levels of the next lower um for at least two weeks before you can move uh so we're getting ready to move to the red level and you're not allowed to jump levels either so uh once we move down to the red level that actually is the level at which it could be that schools could
074be uh permitted to reopen although you know with a lot of uh protections in place while in this purple level we would only be allowed to partially open and that would be with a waiver and or with targeted special populations and i believe that is what superintendent stephens will be talking about next great thank you very much miss berry so one of the sort of features of being in the widespread tier as it was just described by miss berry is that the alameda county department of public health is made available to local education agency school districts as well as private and religious schools an application to open elementary schools on a waiver essentially what they're proposing is that for schools that feel they can demonstrate that they are sufficiently able to implement a set of
075health practices that they can apply for a waiver and that a waiver could be granted both by the county and then ultimately upon state review there are two parts to the waiver process this got confusing last week as we tried to describe these two parts so i'll attempt to describe them now the first part of the waiver process had to do with schools and districts filling out what was called the in-person learning questionnaire the questionnaire was not the waiver application it was simply a survey issued by the alameda county office of education to gauge district and schools interest in pursuing either the elementary waiver or the targeted cohort based support one of the conditions of even getting to look at the waiver application was filling out the questionnaire and indicating that we were interested and
076so that's exactly what i did i wanted to see the waiver and so it was last week that we submitted our questionnaire indicating that we were interested in both the elementary waiver and the targeted cohort based support again that was not the waiver application it was simply signaling interest and in fact we had to do it if we wanted to look at the waiver document itself we now now have the waiver application it has 54 elements that a district or private school religious school would need to fill out the due date for private and religious schools is september 18th that's this friday and just yesterday the alameda county office of education extended the deadline public school districts until october 2nd so at this point i'd like to review just a few of those 54 elements
077and offer um sort of a point by point status update to the board and members of the public about each one of these these sort of waiver application elements so the way to read this particular slide the next two slides is that the item number from the waiver application itself is listed parenthetically followed by the the element title and then you can see in capital letters our own status report on this particular element of the waiver application so i'm only selecting a few of the 54 elements of this waiver application and i'll go through them just one by one so by the time you get to element number 25 of this wave rail application it asks for a district status report on labor organization consultation that's one of the requirements of the district submitting its
078waiver application i can only describe this as ongoing in that we currently are communicating very actively with all of our labor partners both about distance learning and about potential in-person learning experiences although we don't yet have agreements and so it's i think appropriate to say that these are ongoing with no date certain about finishing that work we're also then required to consult with parent and community organizations i would also list that as ongoing and school district reopening plans sort of part and parcel of the way of our application itself would be to be determined in terms of having cleaning and disinfection protocols for all of our classroom and schools that work is now done due in large part to the efforts of the facilities department ventilation is another element in the elementary waiver and so
079i can sort of report that we have ordered portable hepa filters for all of our classrooms all roughly 800 of our classrooms in busd they are on order because of competition for those particular units we can't report with any certainty when we'll have them on hand we have conducted an air filter upgrade in about 40 percent of our classrooms this is the sort of maximum extent of those filter upgrades just given the variety of air handling systems or heating systems rather in our classrooms we have plans for physical distancing we can report that that's done uh entrance egress and movements plans for all of our sites is ongoing we are actively working through site assessments and at our current pace we've anticipated finishing all of those site assessments by november 15th and it's our special
080consultant to the district who's uh conducting those one by one site assessments we have a plentiful supply of face coverings we can mark that as done we're also as one element of the elementary waiver required to have a health screening procedure we're currently working with a company called frontline they're going through the contracting process and will need to work with them and their software engineers to be able to integrate their system into ours and have a approximate date of completion on that project of mid-october we're required as part of the elementary waiver to report on hand washing stations and sanitizer we can list the sanitizer as completed we have that now in supplies that are sort of suitable for all of our school buildings uh hand washing design is currently under uh sort of is
081in is ongoing and we anticipate gum coming back to the board on october 21st with designs as they're being completed by an architectural firm if we were to move forward with a hand washing construction project we'd anticipate that project sort of given back orders and approval back orders to be completed by march and then we're about three quarters of the way completed with the installation of touchless faucets in all of our classrooms we anticipate that will be completed by october 15th we're also required as part of the elementary waiver to have a procedure for the identification and tracing of contacts that's both workplace for our employees and school setting for our students and we anticipate that that along with the frontline software can be completed by about mid-october staff training is something that we would
082need to design for we're actively looking for training modules that would suit a district context they're actually remarkable hard to co remarkably hard to come by right now and it's daunting for us to sort of contemplate designing customized training for all of our staff so we're in process with that testing of staff is another major requirement and perhaps one of the most significant challenges that the waiver application represents for public school districts particularly essentially what this element of the waiver requires is that a school district private school religious school would be in contract or would have a partnership with an entity that can provide ongoing surveillance testing for its staff that is working in person in effect this is a rolling uh sort of universal asymptomatic testing protocol in which all staff would be required
083to be tested at least once every two month period and then finally contact communications plans are uh sort of in the works this is another area of close collaboration uh between the district and the city of berkeley uh but we can't yet uh uh say that we have all of our communications plans the sort of protocols for working through case identification and contact tracing as well as communication plans worked out in the full so uh this essentially gives the board i think sort of two sets of considerations this is true for myself and other members of staff one key consideration as to whether or not the elementary waiver is sort of feasible or wise is the set of community health conditions as it's reflected in the chart that we reviewed earlier in this presentation and
084then the second set of considerations quite lengthy and complicated are our own district's readiness to be able to offer assurance not only to the county and state health officers but to our community that we can implement this full set of health practices with a high level of certainty and fidelity and as you can see from my sort of blow by blow the sort of point by point review would it's currently not the case that the district is ready to implement all of the elements of the elementary waiver i'd like then to sort of move from the elementary waiver to talk about these sort of other set of permissions that have recently been granted by the state for school districts to begin with they're calling uh in-person cohort supports and there's a sort of limited set
085of these in-person supports that the district are sorry that the state uh is saying is permissible given the current transmission conditions around the state they include being able to incorporate the in-person components of mandatory assessments you see i lifted listed some of those assessments there parenthetically they include being able to provide targeted specialized support for student populations that are particularly vulnerable to learning loss in this distance learning period and you can see i've listed some of those populations there they're they're fairly broadly defined they include uh pre-k in elementary child care um so that is both uh our early childhood program is sort of on that list as well as the concept that we've been referring to sort of interchangeably as hubs or at camps this is her childcare model during the school day and
086then it also includes a variety of youth activities sports conditioning internships and poll workers we are working on these things right now although it's simply not possible given the complications of each of these efforts to say when we might be ready two weeks ago i shared that generally our planning process in each of these areas is as follows that as we develop our plans we plan to consult first with our local health authority and currently we haven't brought any specific plans to the city health officer we'd like to do that in the next couple of weeks but we're taking our time to think through exactly how this might work before we take it to the health authority simultaneous to that we would engage with our labor partners in any plan that we're devising these first
087two steps we really envision as critical and both our labor partners and the city of berkeley should count on our sort of full collaboration as we discuss any plans we have well in advance of implementation um uh also sort of some simultaneous to this effort is our own close assessment of our health practices those very same practices i just reviewed in the preceding slides assuming that all of those three conditions are met then we would proceed to communicating with staff to then think about staff and administrator training to then solicit school recommendations for which students would participate in these programs and then to think very modestly about small careful pilot efforts one at a time you can see that this is all fairly deliberately laid out that we would proceed in this in this order
088and at this point as i've shared we have yet to begin even the consultation with our local health authorities about any one of these particular programs and again that's because of the complexity of thinking through how all of this could work so we will continue to offer updates to the board and members of the public as we go along i do hope that this presentation has sort of offered some insights both about the complexities of the elementary waiver process uh it gives you some sense of where we stand right now with respect to our district readiness to submit that application i can share that if we were required to submit that application by the end of this week the original deadline uh that i cert i don't see that busd would be in any position
089to pursue that waiver and then we'll continue to offer undergoing updates to the board and members of the public about these smaller efforts as we begin to plan and consult both with health officials and our labor partners about them so we appreciate the opportunity uh to offer this update and we welcome questions and discussions at this point great thank you so much miss berry and director barry and dr stevens um let me open it up to my colleagues um see who's raising their hand here director lava cutler thank you sorry thank you for that presentation and that information certainly helps um and i'm speaking both as a child care director and who's gone through this in terms of opening up our child care after being closed for over five six months practically um and you
090know being very challenged by it and spending a considerable amount of time on doing this plan to reopen so while you were you know pointed question first the superintendent um are you planning to open in january are you planning to open immediately is it or is this just a plan to plan out this yeah i wish that i could sort of set a date the answer to the question are we planning to do this immediately is no and i hope that i really conveyed that that we're planning to go through these steps with each one of these smaller cohorted efforts and that we really have yet even to approach the county health officer with these so so none of this is immediate i hope to be able to allay some of the concerns that teachers
091expressed early in public comment that any of this is imminent we do feel it's our duty to sort of think through how to serve our students in a way that's as safe as possible but we also are taking very seriously that we have to adopt a really measured approach because the health of our students and staff is on the line thank you i think that's really important to know because um that qualms a lot i think it calms me down a lot in this but i also know we all have a lot of research and studies to do too in terms of how other school districts are doing doing this how other classrooms um because this is a it's a very thoughtful process and i think the the most challenging process is how do we
092calm our our emotions about reopening our teachers feelings about reopening our children's fears and um thoughts about reopening what does my classroom look like i mean those things to me are the most important things that we first have to tackle and there's a lot of emotions in this that have been developed in the community that and come keeps coming at us every time we turn on the news or we read another article we read another research paper so i to me there's a spending a lot of time on how do we calm those fears with good information about new practices and these are things that have been people have been successful with in doing and reopening don't see mass i don't you know i mine we've opened our centers in two programs and i don't
093have the numbers of children that i should have so it's very low and small and and so and it's very thoughtful you have to be very thoughtful about everything that you do and our teachers have really had some practice and thinking about it um showing their fears about it and talking about it and talking it through so i think if we spend any time doing uh we should spend a majority of that time with our teachers and with our parents and our children um about what does it look like and what could it look like because i think that this is um it's a very um big step for for anybody who to take and every day that you go in you're being very thoughtful and it whether we like it or not our teaching
094and our business whatever we do is going to be different from here on in it's it's it just will be and so i think that um that's an acceptance piece that some of us have not come to terms with yet that we think it's going to be go back to the normal we're like well we have large crowds where i feel that it's not going to be that way anymore and that we have to accept and this is our process and so we have to go through this process of understanding this so i you know you know i've been saying this because you know i continue to that's probably why i'm not speaking very much but it's something that we're all going to worry about um but it's going to take time and i appreciate
095that our district will take that time um to formulate a plan and it will change because new guidance will come and we'll have to pivot and we'll have to make it an adjustment so it's going to be something that's going to have to take a lot of time a lot of thought a lot of people to input get input on it and then training our teachers training our staff training you know giving information assuring our parents that we have this in place so i don't see this as something that's a quick and easy thing that we can do and nor will we want to do that and i i have feel that assurance is from you and i know that you know i know that there's families that both need this care but it won't
096be nobody will be obligated correct to to attend nobody will be obligated to attend it's a personal choice as a family that people will make about returning to uh in person or not um and but everybody needs to know what they're walking into so thank you um i'm gonna go to director miller and then director sinai um director leyla cutler um asked my question at the end of her talking so i'm good oh okay i'm director sinai yeah you're muted director's side the term of the year you're muted um thank you for the presentation i um i don't want to be a wet blanket but i want to remind people that it takes about three weeks from a major spread event before the coveted rates um skyrocket and we have not hit that from labor
097day so as the county is preparing us to transition from purple to red hopefully there really isn't any sense on whether we're going to see a surge from from labor day activities so i just want to throw that out there i know from our healthcare world it's definitely something we're bracing for um and it's you know it's a possibility hope you know one of the silver linings maybe of the fires were that people stayed in but it was a very hot weekend that people remember um and there was a lot of activity in outdoor areas so we'll see um dr stevens i have a couple of questions that i i want to ask um again with you know i think everybody has expressed an interest to be able to open when we can um safely
098um you talked a little bit about um that hubs or the ed camps um and are those uh being seen in the category of child care and if we were able to bring um staff back who were interested in coming back would we be able do we have to wait till we get into the red before we can organize those kind of ed hubs um or is that something we can begin to think about now in addition to whether the small group um and then i've got one uh should i ask my second question or let you answer that one well the answer to that well the answer to that is yes director sinai that that the the sort of hub concept is permissible now [Music] very clearly not meant to be a workaround for
099large-scale openings but is really meant to serve students who are particularly vulnerable right so we've been sort of using that permission to explore this particular concept and is that could you say a little bit about again not knowing you can't announce a date on when we're going to do that but kind of what are the conditions we're looking for to be able to maybe move on that yeah so so we would um you know the employee testing is not a requirement of any of these small cohorted um sort of in-person supports all of the other health requirements that i described in those slides are requirements of those small cohorted supports so they include things like social distancing the very strict cohorting of students at every level face masks they also include daily screening and they
100also include contact tracing capacities for the district and so i sort of offered an update on each of those elements and we're not quite there although each of these is really we are making progress on each of those areas okay and then i was on a call uh with alameda county board members when was that director liverpool last week i don't remember when it was and bananas is bananas the resource and referral agency is keeping an active list of openings for child care in the area um and they did say that while county-wide there are definitely openings the the representatives who were speaking didn't know about the availability of openings in any one particular city but we could get that information and so i thought maybe it would be worthwhile for us to to reach
101out to bananas and maybe just get a sense of what the um what the availability is of child care in berkeley and then maybe through our website or through our communication strategies we can put out bananas information and make sure that people who are looking for places for their children to be during the day that there are potential resources where online learning can also be distance learning can be happening in some of those child care environments including some family child care so i just want to say that there are county partners and i think we've been in conversations with the city about how we can better leverage outreach to our community-based partners and though the only other question i had which kind of relates to the ed hubs but is when we're looking at those
102indicators um where does like outdoor classrooms fall into the um to the model because you know we could potentially do these small grouper ad hubs outdoors socially distanced with mass and proper protocols and not indoors so are we thinking about that well air quality permitting air quality permitting that's right um yeah this um i know that the the idea of outdoor classrooms has been one that's got a lot of traction among families um best essentially outdoor classrooms or outdoor education is thought of as a best practice um to be combined with social distancing you know face coverings daily screenings there's no special pathway though that we can travel because we're contemplating exclusively outdoor learning experiences it doesn't accelerate anything there's no special permission that's being granted for folks who are considering only outdoor experiences so
103we plan to build it in to any model we'll have kids outside as much as it's possible but it doesn't give us any particular permission from the city or the county because we're planning to maximize outdoor space it's simply another best practice to add to a list of them that limits covet exposure director brown did you have comments or questions i did actually have questions about the outdoor classrooms that director cyanine just asked so thank you vice president albert oh that was your question okay i i was gonna ask about that as well and and i know that um oh so on that subject dr stevens and director sinai and i and a number of members of the community and probably other other board members too and some district staff i think visited some um
104outdoor classroom models that were really inspiring and interesting and also challenging to imagine how how they could be scaled and i know that one one thing i think that director khalis has done um is evaluate our facilities for the potential for outdoor classrooms um is there is there a thought that any of our facilities could could facilitate entirely outdoor education or do we not have the um capacity to do that and it would only be a component of whatever we were doing i understand that even if it was all outdoor maybe that wouldn't change anything in terms of our where we have what we have to do with the county but can you say a little bit more about that the latter of the two um the facilities department is assessing all of our school
105sites to see both where are the naturally occurring outdoor classrooms you know foyers and alcoves that kind of thing as well as how many temporary tent structures we could put up to be able to create additional classrooms while also maintaining play space so they are working on that that will be a component of the design but again there's no special permission granted because we're thinking exclusively about outdoor education it's just another best practice to include into a plan to bring students back okay are you from your conversations with other superintendents in in the county dr stevens are you aware of any other public school district that plans to seek a waiver um right now and this was just prior to the extension of the deadline uh no alameda county public school districts were planning to
106submit an elementary waiver for the reasons that i described in the presentation the sheer complexity of it okay um we gonna did someone just no oh director i have a cutler go ahead i you know i think one of the biggest challenges of all of this is having stable groups and when you have one teacher and your teacher is out sick then who do you bring in i think for that's the biggest challenge when you and you have these resource teachers and you have these other teachers that generally always come into our classroom i think that is one of the biggest challenges if there was error to ever to reopen how do you maintain a stable group of children and the adult that's working with them um otherwise you you don't have if you don't
107have the teacher well you can't bring in a new person inside because that totally disrupts the stable group so there's a lot of like i say it's very complicated and a lot of thought has to go into it dr stevens that um you can you can decline to answer this if it puts you on the spot but it um i wanted to ask you if you could just give a kind of a preview of the kinds of things that the broad categories of things that you are thinking you might bring to the board as recommendations for how to use the learning loss mitigation funds i know that's coming up in a future board meeting but as we it's just mind-boggling how much you and and our staff have to keep in your heads at one
108time but as we're doing everything that you're talking about and imagining how to re-enter normal in-person schooling we're also trying to improve what we're doing right now and making sure that the kids who are not engaged or engaged the kids who are engaged or engaged even more um and really how we how we're going to use in this so my question is about how we're going to use the funds that that we're going to get to address learning loss and i know that's on a later agenda but it might help maybe just to give us a sort of broad preview of the kind of things that you're thinking about yeah sure yeah we've been actively working on this and we're planning to bring a draft of the learning loss mitigation fund budget uh to our
109next board meeting that's october 7th so there's a variety of categories one of those categories is technology so that includes purchasing additional devices hot spots it also includes purchasing new applications licenses in effect so that's one set of spending there's another set of spending on tutoring we're actively exploring partnerships with organizations that can provide supplementary tutoring and mentoring experience for students who are going through distance learning we've also been talking about some of the money about facilities upgrades we're also talking about support for special education students uh as another category i'm trying to think of others and i'd welcome an assist either from bajay tiara or pauline follansbee if i'm leaving anything off just in this sort of preview list can either of you think of anything substantial that i might might have left off
110i think you've hit the broad categories and also we could add stipends um for distance learning we're doing a lot of that as well yes correct so so there was a huge amount of teacher work in fact um uh debbie lenz mentioned some of it the reordering of our curriculum over the course of the summer was an extensive piece of work by more than 80 educators over over the six six-week summer so we're also funding that curriculum project and all of the professional development pre-school year with some of the learning loss mitigation funding superintendent i might also include all the parenting the addition of parent engagement workshops and additional outreach services for our families thank you great thank you for that just high-level preview and we'll look forward to the more details at the next
111meeting um is there any other directory color do you serve your hand up but is that a a relic of uh earlier time okay all right well director berry dr stevens thank you again um and with that we'll move on to our first action item which is 14.1 approval of the 20 2020 2021 learning continuity and attendance plan dr stevens great now i may actually just ask associate superintendent baji tiara to introduce michelle sinclair force director sinclair did you want to share your screen sure is my screen up yep okay i'm kelly i was on mute i'm so sorry good evening everyone on august 16th information was presented to the board of education on senate bill 98 um senate bill 98 made changes to school accountability suspended the lcap and introduced a new requirement the
112learning continuity and attendance plan also known as the lcp a draft of the lcp was presented to the board on september 2nd tonight we will present the revised draft for adoption slide please between september 2nd and september 9th we hosted a series of stakeholder engagement sessions to review and solicit feedback on the draft lcp stakeholder engagement sessions were held with the following groups district english language advisory committee parent advisory committee education advisory group parents of children of african descent and black african african-american families director michelle excuse me director sinclair will provide an overview of next steps review feedback and share how the feedback was incorporated into the plan slide please thank you michelle oops sorry one second i'm having some technical difficulties here okay good evening and thanks for having me um for tonight's presentation
113i'm going to walk you through the stakeholder engagement meeting feedback and how that prompted revisions to the lcp and ultimately our request for adoption which is why we're here tonight this page includes a timeline for the stakeholder engagement process and the next steps which includes a summary of the feedback from all our four stakeholder group meetings reque a request for adoption and the process for submission first i'm going to discuss some of the themes that emerged around feedback that we received from families and educators after that i'll talk about how we've updated the lcp to address that feedback and how we've revised the lcp pertaining to the the feedback that was pertaining to the plan um the lcp was shared with the stakeholder groups and it was also posted on our website along with an
114email for feedback some of the themes and included office of family engagement and equity capacity um one of the consistent pieces of feedback was to get was to increase the capacity of the offi department accountability of programs during distance learning how could parents and families ensure that this plan was being implemented faithfully and how could they reach out for support asynchronous instruction the rigor and the time value of it how did how do we account for instructional minutes um cultural relevancy and anti-anti-racism considerations english language development and internet intervention times concerns about students missing out there was a question if students were being pulled for english language development would they miss out on in rate and enrichment classes and how we were scheduling that and also how we're integrating eld into our our distance learning
115clarity on the attendance plan and expectations for families and and teachers in person hybrid plan um there was a request for clarity about that just to ensure that we were all aware that this was really a hypothetical and that the situation could clearly change depending on multiple variables also um funding going to students and that's the cares act money and ensuring that the funding is going to our most needy students some of these concerns are not necessarily specific to the lcp and our distance learning plan but they're critical to our district at all times and they're part of our larger vision and strategy for our students and these are these these concerns are addressed in our summary which is a i have a link here and that was also included in the board document it's
116a complete summary of all the feedback we received and there's responses to those but tonight for my next slide i'm going to go over on the the actual revisions that we did to the to the lcp that were based on the feedback that we were given so we've update updated and revised our attendance plan and our policy around attendance we clarified that attendance is compulsory and um that that means that students are expected to participate in school including the teacher's daily online instruction and completing assignments made by the teacher and both of these elements are expected parts of attending school families received a communication from from our superintendent emphasizing this requirement and then also to comply with state law we're implementing a new attendance taking system and it tracks both synchronous and asynchronous instruction and
117that's being rolled out on monday um also increasing um our office staff we are we are doing that we're increasing with a part-time 0.53 district position and a full-time position for a long fellow middle school for a specialist we clarified our in-person hybrid model like i said just to be clear that that it's subject to stakeholder feedback to state county and city health policies to union negotiations and of course research we identified our current and proposed work work-related anti-racism initiatives um we added our board resolution and how it will affect student learning we updated the stakeholder feedback section of the lcp there was a specific section about that and that it just includes all of our stakeholder meetings and then how we responded to that and so for tonight that's all i have and we
118are proposing to adopt this new and revised learning continuity plan once it's adopted it will be submitted to the superintendent of schools and alameda county office of education thank you director sinclair associate superintendent tiara is that the end of the that's the end of the presentation yeah okay thank you for that concise and comprehensive presentation i know we've had a number of board meetings to discuss this and it's here for approval but if there's any questions or comments that anybody has now is the time i i think there's there might be some for some people who are just newly joining us in terms of this is the replacement for the local uh the local accountability plan that we had that is targeted for students correct so it's just just to explain but i think we
119might have people that are just joining in and i don't know yeah let me just just briefly say that this is a a document that is um it it really just um memorializes our ongoing process for creating continuity of learning during distance learning so it's very specific to distance learning the lcap was suspended for one year yeah this replaces this but it's it's targeted for our targeted student population or it's for all students it it's for all students but it certainly addresses people learning loss and how we're serving our most marginalized students thank you it doesn't replace it in the sense that it's supposed to be the same thing or do the thing as the lcap does it replaces it in the sense that we we have to do it and we didn't have to
120do the lcap correct we were yeah we were we will be starting um the process for a a new three-year lcap um once we move past the lcp okay thank you any other yeah director sinai um and just to to clarify again it while the focus is on distance learning the hybrid learning the ability to come back in school and do distance learning is also incorporated into the plan yeah let me be clear about that this is about this is about the covid pandemic really and how we're serving students so it could be both in person and distance learning okay all right do i have a motion to approve the learning continuity and attendance plan i'll move this one question by director brown director miller do you want to be interesting did you say yes
121yeah i was like seconded by director miller um ms chaires can you call the role please divert your life of cutler yes character sinai yes director miller yes director brown yes vice president alper yes all right dr sinclair thank you so much for all your work on this thank you thank you um all right now we'll move to um approval of the 2019-20 unaudited actual this is that assistant superintendent follows me yes it is vice president so good night everyone um i'm gonna ask dr stevens to share his screen over here hold on i can't get in okay so good evening everyone um i'll be presenting the unaudited actuals and this is how the district closer books for fiscal year 2019 20 for the year ending june 30th um 2020. so um the action item
122is for you to approve the unaudited actuals and i will walk you through um the results of us closing the books on the following slides so we met um the three percent state reserve and we actually closed um with 2.4 million dollars above our projections um for the undesignated fund balance so below i've shared um the the results of our change in fund balance our ending fund balance and the um and our undesignated fund balance so you could see we had projected deficit spending of 249 000 and we actually ended up with a surplus of 1.8 million um or ending fund balance we thought that was going to be two two million dollars we ended up with 4.1 and our undesignated fund balance was we had projected 632 000 and we actually ended up with
1233 million so the variances are listed in the last column um we did assign 1.1 million dollars we did 1.1 for revolving cash and 1 million dollars for the lcap um in accordance with the board policy and of course um in 2021 we'll be reassessing this in light of our the completion of the learning loss mitigation budget um the board had um had we had discussed uh setting aside 200 000 um for um from the lcap reserve so on the next slide um oh one more okay so um the i mentioned earlier that we ended with a significant increase over projections and this slide just kind of demonstrates here over here what our ending fund balance looked like and then the components so you could see um we had significant declines from 1516 and then
124um this um this additional funding that when we close the book scanner we can see ourselves going back up somewhat in 1920. um next slide i mean looking at our lcap um supplemental designations um we had talked about um the the board policy for setting aside a million dollars and this is just looking at how we're building the fund balance um for lcap supplemental year over year so we look at what it is for the calculator what we spent on what we budgeted and then what's the balance um in the actual resource and then we have another resource where we look at the carryover so we're um our balance right now is 1.4 million dollars um the reserve a million dollars and carry over 370 4 000 which we'll be looking at in more detail
125um at a later date so on the next slide now this brings us to the variance report and when we open the link we where i'm looking at the the variances that we had um with our revenue and our expenses so i'll walk you through some of the um significant changes here so um our revenues came in pretty close to projected so there wasn't a significant change but when you look at our expenses you could see um we kind of fluctuated um we had savings in salaries and benefits for the most part for about 400 500 000 closer to six actually and that was because um we were able to transfer some of our expenses with our um our stipends for distance learning and other costs incurred as a result of distance learning we transferred
126700 000 from the unrestricted general fund to the learning loss mitigation funding so this savings that you're seeing here actually is largely in part due to the transfer out to the learning loss mitigation funding or other changes our books and supplies and our services that had to do with unspent balances across the district programs and sites um some people some sites and programs were just weren't able to spend what was projected and that gave us another 1.1 million dollars between books and supplies and services and because there was significant um decrease in spending in our other programs and funds we actually had a decrease in our projected um revenue that the unrestricted general fund gets for direct and indirect costs so moving down or going to the next slide um there's nothing that significant there
127on this page however um you can see that um in psep we transferred out um we received actually an additional four hundred thousand dollars based on the actual staffing um classroom staffing um bicep share came in four hundred thousand dollars above budget um contributions especially usually we would see a significant swing here this 55 000 reflects the fact that we're now budgeting more accurately for um projected costs um for both state and mental health funding there's a flip here um which means that we still have to work on the actual buckets but overall um we can see that the difference is only 55 000 so just looking at this um overall um the variance report the two million dollars um had to do with significantly unspent balances in um in various programs and sites and
128then the fact that we transferred out seven hundred thousand dollars to um to the learning loss mitigation funding so on the next slide um so so they um the other slide just that goes into more detail of the variances that have just gone over so we could go to the next slide we could get out of this actually like return to the slide the slide presentation is great yes thank you okay so this brings us to our committed reserve and um those of you who are um on the board in 2017 we passed a board policy where we're required to look at um whether we met the requirement for setting aside an additional one percent um towards our reserve and this is above the three percent reserve um state required reserve and you could see
129there are three conditions that have to be met um we have to make sure that the committed reserve is less than one percent well it is we have absolute we have not actually started funding this um having a positive certification and adopted budget which we do have and then in terms of our assigned um general honors and general fund balances being greater than two percent of the combined um general fund expenses and then the um that other section tells us what the reserve should be what we should be putting into the reserve but when we looked at um 1920 the two percent of the combined reserve is actually 3.3 million and our honest and general fund balance is 3 million so we did not meet the requirement from the committed reserve this year we came
130close but we're not required to fund it and this is probably the first time in several years that we're in this position so um and on the next slide the special education trend i mentioned earlier that our budget to actual was was actually very close but we need to also focus on the fact that um we're spending 3.1 million dollars above the prior year and um this is one area um we're obviously meeting the needs of our students and um and this is the impact on of the cost in terms of meeting uh our students needs on the next slide we looked briefly at other funds and programs um our transportation program is subject to the maintenance of effort um and they actually have met that maintenance of effort our adult school education their ending
131fund balance is 1.4 million and they're also subject to the maintenance of effort our child development fund we're not contributing from the general fund they had a 0.4 million dollar balance and our cafeteria fund we actually were able to transfer costs from this program as well to the learning loss mitigation um one of the categories in the learning loss mitigation is ensuring our students are fed and there's a nutritional um fed nutritional meals and we transferred um funding to that program and and in effect we were able to contribute a hundred thousand dollars less from the general fund to the cafeteria fund and on the next slide um it's our um next steps where do we go from here so we still have to be mindful about our stairs and purse costs um the state
132is assisting us in these rates but they um there is still an increase that's not as much of an increase um current special uh are increased to special education it does absorb a substantial amount of um it contributes towards our deficit um and of our structural deficit actually and we need to continue to monitor that um and of course we also have to have ongoing cost containment efforts um district-wide and special ed um we will be bringing the first interim back to the board um in december and that's for the period ending october 31st and at that time we should take um the opportunity to look at our multi-year projections especially the out ears in more detail um a lot of the impact that we're feeling from coved and our budget um we're getting a
133lot of um breaks if you will in terms of our attendance and um our reporting in this year that i think me manifests itself as cost implications in the all year and then on the following slide um i'd just like to thank our team um we have liz karim she's now our interim fiscal director um ben sue craig miguel monica mario russell richard city and vivian we could not have done um this without their help i just want to make sure um that our team knows they're valued and um the district relies heavily on them to ensure our fiscal um the district has good fiscal health and then um and the last slide talks about um the outcomes again i'm asking you to approve a the unaudited actuals for 1920 and i'll take any questions
134you may have at this time thank you assistant superintendent um for that presentation questions i'll ask one to start um one just to clarify so a big part of this savings is from the learning loss mitigation funds that we haven't actually allocated yet but this but am i right that you've sort of built them into the into the budget on the assumption that the board is going to approve um the proposed use of those funds correct so what we did because we're closing the books we identified costs um even though the funding is technically starting in 2021 we were advised um by acoe that we could identify expenses in this year that would meet the requirements for learning loss mitigation and and actually transfer the costs um to this new resource um it's a restricted
135resource so it's out of the unrestricted general fund and it's in the um restricted resource um even though there's no offsetting revenue um that was one of the allowances that um we were given um when closing the books so like maybe i could jump in here as well i i think it's the case but you please correct me if i'm i'm wrong uh miss follons be that there was also revenue received by the district during the 1920 school year and that's specifically the coronavirus relief act funding correct also provided an offset to the general fund during the last fiscal year right but we actually elected not to spend that funding because that was a funding source that didn't have a um an expiration date so what a lot of districts are doing and um just
136for fiscal prudency we're actually transferring it to the funding sources that have a december ending date and that funding came in in 2021 so so we're carrying over the revenue that we received this year to be used in our ears and then we're actually using the um the funding that came in in 2021 that had a december used by date right okay and so these are this is essentially one-time help that we've gotten but correct that the the our special ed costs for example are continuing to escalate we've it it's it's um it's heartening that our um projections have gotten more accurate i think that that's something that has been a real concern for for years and so that's i think that's great um but as you pointed out the actual costs are still going
137up and yeah we're just projecting them yeah well which is a we're just going to celebrate but um but i just i guess and it's and we should also appreciate the one-time funding help but it doesn't it's not going to help us next year or the next year after that no it does not help our structural deficit and just my last question i'll turn over director sinai um i lost track of the audit committee and has the audit committee met to review the unaudited actuals the unauthority that no they have not met they have not got we have not gone over this as yet so we'll set something up they the committee usually does right yes who's on can someone remind me i don't think it's me is it dr brown okay drifter sign i
138go ahead so um just to piggyback on that because that was one of my questions so um usually it goes to the understanding circumstances are different now but it usually goes to the audit committee before it comes to us for a vote right because you're asking for action tonight yeah for the unaudited actual so these are not the audited actions i know but does the audit committee usually look at these before they come to us for a vote i don't recall i'll have to look into that okay so it's not necessarily required it's not required now so i have two um specific questions that i just um would like clarification on 400 some odd thousand um that is a positive variance in visa um was that because with the end of the spring and i
139don't know if director berry is still on but now it looks like she's not no um is that because of you know we we couldn't spend the funds in the way we thought we would no no we got we got more funding so what we do at the end of the year we look at the actual number of teachers that we um that were in the classroom that we have that we are compensated for being in the classroom and then b set picks up their share based on the teacher template and in this case we actually the general fund got more from from visa just in terms of this the makeup of the staffing um at the end of the year the actual exact 400 and some odd thousand dollars is not a carryover in
140visa no it's actually b transferring more funds to the district okay thank you and then my last question not having been here in 2017 and i don't know if director brown has a similar question i don't understand the committed reserve and how that compares to the required reserve that we have so um i can probably speak to that unless um vice president alpert were you on the board yeah either way i could i could speak to that so the thinking um director sinai is um in the in the years when there's additional funding or we have a substantial ending fund balance compared to unaudited actuals um the board's thinking was that it would be prudent to set aside an additional one percent which is called a committed reserve and we would keep that amount as
141a line item in the um in our general ledger so um so we are required to look at this when we close the books every year um if we meet this requirement we would have had to put aside um from the formula the two percent of it gets very involved okay so it's not the lcap reserve no not the required reserve is there actually no money in it because we've never met this matter we've never met it we've we've we assess it every time we close the books and we have to remember to do that um and this is the closest i think we've come it's the um it's the josh daniels reserved it's a josh daniels reserve exactly correct um any other someone else sorry no any other comments or questions for our assistant
142superintendent all right thank you so much and thank you to the team it was it was nice to see their names in lights [Music] hopefully they're not up watching i don't think well we don't you can show them the recording and give them our appreciation okay um oh wait we gotta vote sorry um is there a motion to approve the united actuals do you want to you're on the committee who right this one thank you who's gonna second it i'll second all right director leyla cutler miss cyrus can you call the role please of course director sinai yes director miller yes director lava cutler yes director brown yes and vice president alper yes thank you very much ms chavez thank you assistant superintendent follensbee um action item 14.3 there's no presentation so um and the
143superintendent discussed it in in his comments um we just need a motion to approve the resolution related to the um general obligation bonds so anybody like to move this one item 14.3 i'll move this one dr brown well you're on a roll director bro don't let all this new power go to your head okay miss chirons uh director levi cutler yes director miller yes director brown yes director sinai yes vice president albert yes thank you mrs all right that concludes our discussion action items and now we have the um opportunity for extended public comment um i'm gonna give everybody a minute to raise your hand if you'd like to speak um be able to speak for two minutes right now there's three people on the list um so and jeremiah jenkins has been waiting for
144a long time so mr jenkins um you can you can go first and you actually let me get my phone and you have two minutes uh hi everyone i'm here with my wife natalie um i'm gonna basically hand it over to her to say her her piece uh we have a for a second grader at jefferson elementary and we just wanted to say that um of course while our child prefers in-person instruction she's had a really very very much improved experience with distance learning this fall her classroom teacher has done an amazing job her pe and library teachers have really done an amazing job and we just really want to appreciate the hard work that everyone has put in to make it a better experience we also live in a multi-generational household and it's really
145important to us to have this distance learning option and we really appreciate it and we also have noticed just from talking to other busd parents that it seems like the experience really depends so much on on the classroom teacher um as well as you know the home situation and we are we are privileged in that we do work from home and we have been able to offer support for our child um so we just wanted to say thank you and that we feel like it's going really well yeah and you know i think um in terms of um you know discussions about attendance and uh returning to in-person options i it seems like it's a really you know huge undertaking to get back in person but as vice president oprah said i i hope that
146there is a lot of effort being put into improving the online situation as well um in the in the time being um you know and also you know with kovid and the fires and everything that's going on this is a crisis education moment and um you know the parents and the teachers and of course most importantly the kids are dealing with a lot and i think having an awareness of that and acknowledgement of that and and planning um both on the daily and in the long term uh as well as offering resources for that is very important and thank you thank you so much to you both for sticking with us um mr lamatary brownell i know you spoke in the earlier public comment but are you are you back for more i am just
147based on something i heard okay and first i just want to say thank you thank you thank you this is really tough and i really appreciate how you are trying to hold everything um even though no one can hold everything um so uh i want to say this as clearly as i can so earlier in the update on public health and in-person learning the usd staff gave a presentation that included the california's blueprint for a safer economy classifying counties into the four risk levels you know from minimal to widespread during this presentation uh the busd staff member correctly read the number of alameda county's current daily new cases per 100 000 population per day as an average of the past seven days as being 5.6 as of today the staff presenter then noted that the
148current community spread rate in berkeley is significantly lower than the current rate for alameda county as a whole in contrast to the current county rate of 5.6 it is quote and this is exactly what i heard 3.8 in berkeley i wrote it down right away that's what the busd staff presenters stated the presenter added the comparative language that alameda county's current rate which is 5.6 it's right there in all the records very clear is clearly quote higher than berkeley's at 3.8 i have no idea where this figure of 3.8 in berkeley comes from it does not come from the city of berkeley's covet 19 dashboard which as of today and i took a photo it's all very clear to see you can look at it still today on september 2016 2020 it says average daily
149new cases for the last seven days seven you have to compute that with the population of berkeley divided by the population times that by 100 000 to get the number of 5.7 that's berkeley's number it's higher than alameda it's not lower thank you clear on the numbers that's basic thank you so much um i saw someone else just raise their hand i'm gonna there's two more public speakers and then we will close it down for the night um our next speaker is elsa alamo is this really elsa hello elsa is that you it's a very cute picture elsa joy who do we have here i'll give them a second i know elsa is one of our students but i don't know if that's actually her it's not her can you hear me now yes okay
150um elsa is one of your students at bam she's a fifth grader i'm her mormor her grandmother and i am also a former uh a parent and a former teacher of busd and i am also the grandmother of twins at rosa parks who are first graders and i'm responding after this very informative discussion tonight which was very helpful for me um because i um i'm caught in the dilemma of understanding where a teacher might come from having taught in berkeley unified for 30 years plus and also as a parent and now a grandparent guiding first graders and a fifth grader i want to say first that the fifth grader is motivated loves school and despite longing for her friends she has a wonderful teacher in a program that's very um involving and she's doing well
151but the other side of the coin is the first graders are the first graders who um who are not as involved at all their need to learn to read to write to be involved on a very personal interactive way is is limited very limited and as a person who feels strongly about interaction and the involvement of a child in as many ways as possible the computer is limited to say the least so i'm want to after this discussion tonight i want to recognize the health concerns of the community and the teachers um but i also want to uh acknowledge the fact that many parents who depend on someone anyone like myself being a grandparent um people who are parents who are looking for help uh teaching their children on this in this special circumstance i
152want to acknowledge the fact that we can't do enough to we we need to continue this um this search for ways to better educate even in this difficult time um i want to acknowledge that i come from two different points of view in a certain sense but that i have become very interested and concerned about um the the um the edhub and the pods and the the chance for a younger child to become involved in smaller group situations especially outside um thank you so much thank you for your help to um to search for ways for look for answers to this problem we're going to get through it i i believe that um but we won't do it by dividing each other into groups but i think by what was returned as a measured approach
153uh i would strongly recommend that we we pursue this and and be unrelenting and know that we we can we can find a way because the child uh and i want to thank you for acknowledging and really supporting these children who in first grade in particular kate tk and kindergarten first and to third it's so difficult for them to find the interaction that's necessary thank you mrs osborne i have to cut you off i'm sorry thank you but we really appreciate your perspective and um please give your grandchildren our best and thank you for being here tonight um now our final speaker is lee levy hi my my name is lay levy and uh yes you've heard from me before i've been very passionate about this this subject and i feel like i keep having
154to attend these calls because there really is no urgency to get our kids back to campus and superintendent stevens i'm glad you smiled at that because i really do call you responsible you've been working at this hybrid model apparently and distance learning i think you know they should be you'd be working on them both but it feels that there's really been a focus on distance learning and it's really being pushed down our throats in a very concerning way from the parents i mean i just keep hearing from parents that are exhausted they're spent they don't have three hours right now to spend on these calls i see kids who are on the laps of their parents who are selling fruit in berkeley during school hours these kids should be in school there is no reason
155given the fact that the health director has given us the ability to apply for a waiver that you are now saying that we won't have hand washing stations ready until november are you kidding these are not real timelines we're dealing with these are all theoretical and we are dealing with real life consequences every day that goes by that our children are not on campus is a day of learning loss that we should all be concerned about if you look at all of the kids around who are really frustrated they are very scared about uh the fact that they can't be at school why uh why are other kids going to learning labs why are other kids at camp i get that i only have 15 seconds left but you really didn't stop um the person
156who was speaking before and and i just really feel that there's a lack of urgency on the busd's part and it's it's sort of there's a lot of trust being given to superintendent stevens to be pushing this this this uh procedure along but it's not being pushed forth as we're seeing that he's not giving us answers concrete answers of timelines real timelines to get our kids back on campus either through outdoor classrooms or through safeways it's it's really upsetting to me as a parent and i'm speaking up for all the parents that don't have the time to be on these calls for three hours to get to the point that we can make these comments so i'm i'm speaking up as an advocate for all the parents who are working who are exhausted who have
157been doing this for the last three weeks and we want answers thank you very much thank you and thanks for staying so late um all right i think that concludes our agenda unless anyone has any last words seeing none i'll adjourn the meeting good night everybody thank you thank you