001rock and roll when he walks in in 30 seconds we're going to tell him it was laurie's choice everybody just do this just kidding very quickly the meeting will come to order uh welcome everybody that's here mostly all staff it looks like and cabinet members all the most important people to the district i'm sure there might be a parent hiding under a mask out there but we'll see you soon um roll call please ater here annarino hunt here khan here all right the mission of school district 15 is to produce world world-class learners by building a connected learning community pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the lab of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god and indivisible with the liberty and justice of our
002own all right we are going to start today with a public hearing on the adoption of the fiscal year 2021 tentative budget um may have a motion please make a motion to open the public hearing on the adoption of the fiscal year 2021 tentative budget second second all those in favor aye aye aye opposed motion carries good evening uh i'd like to take this opportunity just to introduce myself i'm diana mccluskey i'm the new csbo for the district and uh prior to this mike damchick he retired on july 1st this is josh shoot he's also the director of fiscal services and we both started on july 1st and we're very happy to be here tonight um so tonight is the public hearing on the adoption of the fiscal year 21 tentative budgets there have been
003no changes to the tentative budget it is the same tentative budget that mike and corey presented back in june in your packet you did there was a detail sheet of account numbers and dollar amounts that will be incorporated into the final budget in september so we are uh well ahead of of the planning for that um and um and there will be more changes between now and then um but in particular there i am adding into fun 20 and fund 10 account numbers and we'll be budgeting for extra coveted expenses but again that will be on the final budget um so tonight again is just the tentative budget um and i think that's really all that needs to be said about it um you you were here at the for the presentation in xi'an beautiful
004does anybody have questions i just really quickly and i apologize for not sending this prior to do we have any expectation that there's going to be any sort of um dip in funds from tax dollars due to covid with people not working has there been any any actuary tables or anything run like that statewide at this point no i um through iasbo uh there really hasn't been any real announcements um we're watching the josh um can probably speak to the tax property taxes that have come in this month um do you want to mention anything about the property taxes um at this point it looks like the property tax is in line with last year we've been getting a number of larger payments this this past past month the last one we got was 11
005million dollars so at this point it's too early to tell what's going to happen for sure but we will track it on a regular basis and make sure that we're comparing it with prior year and expectations of what we think it should be okay great thank you the deadline is technically technically october 1st without penalty and interest so um i'm anticipating that you know we may see a little bit a little bit lower compared to last year but by october we're hoping that we'll still see similar tax revenues as last year um we in the in the final budget that cpprt will be lower okay um so but we'll talk about more of that next month okay great thank you all right um we will now open the meeting up for public comment because everybody
006hear me okay wearing this without where okay um please remember that this is not a dialogue between you and the board if you have a specific issue which requires a response superintendent heinz will get back to you please state your name identify any group that you represent and limit your remarks to no more than five minutes if someone previously has articulated something with which you agree please state that you agree rather than reiterating the entire comment finally avoid comments specific to any person student or staff member respecting that person's right to privacy this is not the form to comment on personnel issues is there anybody that would like to speak all right we'll move on took it easy on you for your first one thank you you guys did a great job for the first
007time up there minimal shaking [Laughter] may i have a motion to adjourn please make a motion to turn the public hearing on the adoption of the fiscal year 2021 tentative budget second second those in favor all right opposed motion carries all right moving into the next public hearing this one's specifically about the inter fund transfer may have an emotion to open please make a motion open the public hearing on the interfund transfer second second i'll lose in favor opposed motion carries presentation please okay again this is something that you've done in the past it is a requirement of the illinois school code to hold a hearing if the district and this district does fit within the parameters that it is required um to have if you are going to transfer money between from ed fund
008the education fund to the operation and maintenance fund and so there will be a resolution later in the meeting um we are transferring 2.5 million from the ed fund to the l m uh later this year we will then transfer 6.5 from o m to capital funds in order to cover the um 9.9 million of capital projects that will be budgeted in the capital funds capital funds so that is basically the background of what this hearing is about and later um the resolution that you will be asked to pass wonderful thank you so before i go through all of the public hearing information that i just went through is there anyone that would like to speak about the interfund transfer if there are no public comments we will move on may i have a motion
009to adjourn the public hearing please i make a motion to adjourn the public hearing on the intra-fund transfer second second all those in favor aye opposed motion carries thank you very much thanks thanks guys okay so it feels like it's been a while since we've been together even though it's only been a month but it's been a busy month i can't think of a month it wasn't busy since i've gotten here but this one seems exceptionally busy from our last meeting to this meeting i'll just share a few highlights in terms of what we've been up to for the last month so one of the things i'll talk about tonight will be um modifications and updates and kind of the ongoing work and development of our return to learn plan like every district in illinois
010and across the country um each day we work to refine the plan um more and more and respond to feedback and to those shifts to really um put forth the most comprehensive plan that we can with the hopes of being able to return to in-person instruction for the 8 000 students that wanted to do so in the 4000 that you know will stay home for all our portion of the year in terms of construction you're sitting in one of six construction projects in terms of secure vestibules and some office enhancements the team has really pushed to get to this point so we could have uh our board meeting live here in august and they will be turning the building back over to um members of the staff at welter are settling here on friday all
011other projects are really moving forward and are on time we are we're under budget we have not used all of our contingency funds and we're really excited about that nicholas has been a great addition to you know to help manage all of these projects especially as jim and andy join um our team is the the two new leaders within the facility and maintenance department they really as i was telling lisa earlier hit the ground absolutely running so we made good hiring decisions both with diana and josh so far and and andy and jim they understand hard work and so far are able to keep pace with the many things we have going on in such a large district especially then during a pandemic that has a whole other layer so hvac projects are done mary
012and jordan's flooring project is underway it looks really sharp but things are coming together very excited for staff to return to see all the work they're gonna i think even though we're nervous to come back i think they're all very excited to see the construction projects the custodial and maintenance staffs have been working very hard and the buildings are really ready to welcome staff and students back you know when when we can do so so the buildings i don't think have really and truly ever looked better the finance and facilities department as i've said you met diana and josh they've been really doing a heck of a job it's hard to start in a new district and within a month you have your budget hearing and to get your head around such a large budget
013in and of itself as a task but to really be ready to have a budget hearing and then in another month you know to be ready to really present any changes and and reactions and pivots that we've had to make is is really a pretty comprehensive task layer covet again on top of that and you're going to hear that probably all year you know covenant takes it to a whole another level because we will talk to you in september um you know we've spent that 1.6 million in karazhak dollars but we're spending additional monies and josh and diana although one hired told us they were penny pinchers which is you know part of the reason they were hired uh they're actually finding money so we can hire the staff that we need because there are
014just so many additional expenses and needs uh in covin so they're they're working uh well they've slipped right into the weekly construction meetings and um we're moving and grooving we had a call with elizabeth we'll talk uh she'll talk in a little bit but our moody rating came in our ae2 rating we had a nice couple conversations and we'll present that information to you we also had another meeting with rsp that is the group that's doing our capacity study we have invited them tentatively to come to the september meeting i know lisa and i when we spoke a few weeks ago we said september or october but we really just didn't want to do it in august because we are so very focused on how we are going to start the year that we we
015decided to table that and i know there's at least one person in the community that's very concerned that we haven't talked about capacity but i hope everybody understands that that is still an absolute priority but nothing is a greater priority than safely opening our schools so the board can let me know at this point in time if they'd like them to come in september or if we'd like them to come in october there are some travel restrictions you know coming into chicago and at the corporate level of rsp so more than likely they will join us virtually so we have to figure out what that will look like because i don't think members of the rsp team can travel here to illinois but would you like september or october do you have a preference probably
016september yeah yeah as long as it works okay so we'll make sure to schedule september um we have been working again at this at the building level not only to do construction projects and to get the building kind of in in top shape we have been removing furniture to allow for um the greatest amount of physical distancing in our in our classrooms our numbers are looking at the elementary level to be classrooms of 13 14 all the way up to maybe 19 or 20. we're trying to get those 20s kind of down to no more than 19 and in many cases we're you know we're being successful uh so we're trying to allow for the greatest amount of distancing more than three feet but we're going to be anywhere between probably four and six in
017most of our classrooms so that the custodial staff has really been working um andy and jim have been working to find desks to replace tables because we think it's just easier for kids to keep track of their own space and it just provides a real definitive like this is my space that's your space adults can separate and stay separated little kids not so much they're like magnets so they can really be helping they've been helping us find desks and somebody i know had asked about student fees we received one email about student fees and 211 unbeknownst to us decided not to collect fees and i know i talked to president chupai about student fees and you had asked for me to find out what um value you know what do we gain in terms of
018our fees and it's around 800 000 annually so it's a fairly significant sum of money we do have a process for families that are receiving free or reduced lunch or can't afford it to either have their fees waived or to have them reduced and i would say that that was when i talked to diana our recommendation for anybody that's experiencing a hardship to go through that waiver process otherwise we would like to we've pushed out the fees we're spending more money in covid not less everybody's wondering if kids are home you know are we paying fees well everybody received a chromebook that's way more than the fees that we collect they are still going to receive their other materials we will be distributing chromebooks with readers notebooks math workbooks and other consumables so we're still
019spending money on supplies regardless of if we're home or at um or in a combination of home and in school i think it's also worth saying lori no i think any of us haven't gone through the packet but for the public that hasn't there are a number of expenditures in the packet this month that are things we would not have been spending money on if it wasn't for covid like the sel programming that tom had in the uh in the packet then there were a number of other things or some curricular investments and and things that are impactful but are very particularly invested in because of distance learning so um i am with you you know fees our costs are not going down they are going up and we do have that process in place
020and the process can be found very easily on the website um the person that originally had brought it up was was happy just to know that that was the case so we pr that and make sure people know all right in terms of curriculum and professional development that department is always extremely busy in the summer um we do a lot of summer writing teacher committees come in and and work uh extensively to be to be ready for any curricular changes or rollouts and pilots so that has been taking place a lot of activity this summer certainly building our virtual learning classrooms and figuring out how to make our um our current curriculum able to be accessed by staff and students while we're remote whether it's just for those three weeks or while we do the
021roll in or if we have to go back into remote at any point uh if we if we change from phase four to uh to a lesser phase so a lot of great work coming out of curriculum and the professional development team we're getting ready for four very big days ahead we launch our institute day kickoff is tomorrow and it will be a combination of teachers in their classrooms or teachers working with their teams and virtual lessons or virtual learning experiences that'll be wednesday thursday we will have an opportunity for teachers to learn about how to be digital teachers how to do how to teach virtu virtually how to use the platforms and use digital resources there's a lot of information that janice will talk about when we get to that slide slide presentation um
022then friday it will be another institute day which is a combination of district and building topics and then the following week will uh so that'll be monday then tuesday we'll go to another e-learning plan day so everybody has two very rich days of learning how to teach differently and and more deeply than we were able to do in the spring when it was such an emergency that we closed school and we had to really pivot our whole delivery model it's going to look and feel very different and then our teachers will have one day of teacher plan in the calendar multiple times a year they have teacher plan days we had to move the november election day that we had scheduled as a teacher plan day we had to move it because we're no longer
023through uh omnibus legislation allowed to be in schools even just teachers during on election days so we quickly captured that day to allow the teachers to apply everything that they were learning and get ready for to welcome students the following day you'll hear from lisa ness at just how how intense she has had to work in a number of people in her department uh two new hires there lorian um and phil again hit the ground with their running shoes on in terms of the staffing implications we had to hire more staff we had to work through accommodations and whatnot some of our staff are going to be working from home it's been just a very busy time in that department we've had several sessions of administrative boot camps so we have new a lot of
024new assistant principals that went through some extensive onboarding we had a very tremendous new teacher orientation again live across four different locations at winston so everybody could be distanced but we really provided a wealth of information and support to our new hires additionally we've been working to collect clean up and uh redistribute chromebooks we have a plan that will start on the 17th for families to get their new devices as well as any materials physical materials that they're going to need that are not just delivered through a chromebook that will be happening on august 17th and it'll it'll probably happen over a number of days so everybody has the resources that they need for the first day of school partnership works continues i still am a member of the poc executive board we had a
025meeting this year to kind of plan out the year and how to continue to push support into the community during these very challenging times we had a very successful supply domain donation drive for path and we will be doing another cleaning supply drive because we had such a successful drive oh it was a few months ago and we received word from the community partners that all of our families have depleted those supplies so we want to make sure that we get supplies in their hands again as quickly as possible and i think we're looking towards the end of august to do that to do another drive and hopefully it will be as successful all right a few other things our next board meeting is september 9th right here and the last thing that i think
026is worth mentioning um is the rolling uh the re-entry that dates so everybody will be remote through labor day then we will start with a rolling re-entry if conditions you know allow for us to really bring kids in slowly and to get everybody used to the returning to school after being gone from school for five months allow us to operationalize all of the plans and safety measures that we've put in place assess our students and just get everybody back acclimated we'll start with our youngest learners transition then in special education more of our self-contained or more intensive programs our transitional bilingual programs and both fed and transitional bilinguals have legal requirements for us to you know to deliver those services the integration services and we just know that they're better delivered in person so we
027have really prioritized our youngest learners and then our specialty groups as the guidance suggests and then we've layered in two grade level bands at a time the guidance does say special ed el and children under the age of 13. so that does identify our whole population so we'll we will uh we'll see how how that works but that is our our plan at this time and that is my report in terms of my monthly update big one anybody have any questions or comments i think it goes without saying we all know there's a tremendous amount of activity happening and a lot of success out there and a really trying time so thank you all for what you're doing to uh to make it possible for us to move forward right now okay moving on um
028i will i will deliver some of this address and the members of the team that have been uh deeply involved in different portions of this work will will kind of will come on up and and deliver their portion and then we'll probably take questions a section at a time while they're here and then we'll transition to another staff member they'll deliver any updates or information ask questions that'll eliminate some of the back and forth does that sound good yes okay so in july you know we convened the board at a committee of the whole which was a meeting that was not uh previously scheduled uh when we set that board calendar a year ago but because of everything that was happening with covid we made sure the board came together and just a few weeks
029after we received guidance from the illinois state board of education and the illinois department of public health it was roughly two weeks we presented the board with a tentative plan and just like anything that's tentative you know we intended to be open and flexible and and willing to shift as either new information came our way we had more time to to to plan uh to read research or to respond to um feedback from staff or the community so a few of the things we'll talk about today are some of the shifts that we've made to that plan that was presented to the board in draft form in july so just to keep kind of going back to this these points have not changed since the end of june guidance that came up we are still
030in phase four of the guidance through restore illinois which will require use of personal protective ppe face coverings for all staff okay prohibiting more than 50 individuals from gathering in one space and as we we've done that here through physically distancing requiring social distancing be observed as much as possible so again if there's not a six foot requirement it's to the extent possible um when when we're working it in our offices we definitely try to find that six feet and again as i said we're working um to create as much distance in each of the classrooms as possible through the opt-out and through some of the work that we're doing with furniture and classroom design requiring that schools conduct symptom screening and temperature checks or or require that individuals self-certified that is a requirement and
031we'll talk about how we've changed our our plan there in just a few moments and requiring an increase in school-wide cleaning and disinfection that had already been uh was well underway prior to the school closures and we've only increased those protocols since the school started and all public and non-public schools in illinois serving pre-kindergarten through 12th grade students must follow these guidelines okay all right so pending questions so if you go to the next one great and i'll just read it because i know it's kind of hard for the camera to see i know it's a bit hard to hear with the mask but i'll i'll try to move my mic so all individuals in school buildings including all public and non-public schools that serve students in pre-kindergarten through grade 12 must wear face coverings
032at all times unless they are under younger than two years of age have trouble breathing or are unconscious incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the cover without assistance okay we have had our um the mandate reviewed by hodges and louise our firm we are updating a board policy and parent student handbook language to include the mandatory mandatory wearing of face coverings uh violations will be handled in a manner just the way all discipline is addressed it will be progressive but it is the expectation that everybody will wear their face coverings in the classroom and violations of policy may lead to expulsion to an expulsion hearing to remove students from in-person instruction we certainly hope we don't have to get to to that level but you know we we take the guidance seriously we intend to
033reinforce the guidance and we want our teachers want the guidance to be adhered to because that helps them to feel safe in in classrooms with children um we are really working we've had uh i think some of you have been copied on on a few letters from people that you know don't really believe that we should have to wear masks we are trying to reach out to those folks directly to see and i know anne scully you know can speak to this some of her families because our students with special education ieps or special needs you know are going to have a hard time wearing masks so they're doing it again on a case-by-case basis trying to figure out what modifications or accommodations we could put in place could we do a shield is there
034a certain kind of mask do we need to take more frequent mask breaks can the families help us work on mask stamina and really talk about why it's important so we're handling a lot of those cases um individually and hopefully people just understand that it's a requirement and and unless there's a special circumstance you know we're going to wear them especially when you know we can't physically distance ourselves from from one another this was a this was a hot topic with some um from the from the first meeting this notion of symptom screening and self-certification so we again you try to you know respond when you hear an overwhelming you know response and there were many parents and and some teachers that were concerned that we were going to allow parents to self-certify even though
035we feel strongly that um you know doing doing a check every day for 12 000 or now 8 000 students is going to be time consuming which will mean lots of instructional time and we have you know protocols and we're going to need to pull staff to help us we are going to do um two things differently so we still want parents to partner with us and they need to sign a self-certification card each day and julia if you could advance to the picture that i can read from my screen so we purchased lanyards and a number of our clerical assistants or office of administrative assistants today were busy assembling lanyards you know for 8 000 students families each week will get a card that they will mark a signature and a date that they
036have done the temperature check and they've done the symptom screening students will wear the lanyards when they enter the building so people can visually see that there's a signature and then we're going to do all students will be temperature checked at the doors this will be a coordinated effort through transportation and building principles to disperse where we're dropping children off to spread the students out as they come into the building because one of the things we're concerned about is if all the children um are getting off the bus and congregating and we have to do you know each child one at a time we're going to have a backup of kids outside or you know just congestion that will will be hard to keep the kids six feet apart for an extended period of time
037so we think this visual we're hoping that this visual uh signature will allow those kids to move through and just have a temperature screening for those that don't have the cards they'll go to a separate location that each principle is identified and then we'll run them through the check the symptom check as well as the temperature screen so before they uh are deep into the building and into their classrooms we know that their symptoms and you know temperature free so um just like everything you know this is our best thinking we're gonna now move to you know operationalize this at the end of august and again we're prepared to pivot if things don't work out or if we teachers get into the building and once we put these wheels in motion if we come up
038with a better solution you know we will continue to refine and adjust this is none of this is anything in a pandemic is written in stone i said it's written in sand and the tides coming in so we're just going to respond put our best thinking together forward try it and respond when we need to so i think that's important and i hope everybody you know that's listening in you know understands that positive covid19 case notification you know this and i don't know if karen would like to join me for just a moment this is something that i know you have been um you know busy with your network working through uh i would say that there's a level of frustration with cook county department of public health of those in lake county department of
039public health even the cdc guidance is changing it really just depends on who you talk to and when you'll hear it on a webinar one way and then you'll see it in writing in another way and then we have to deeply investigate you know which is it so that that has caused a real source of frustration um you know across local school districts at least in the area and i talked to superintendents in lake cook and dupage on a fairly regular basis but the cdc provides protocols district must follow for notification of contagious diseases and that's just standard prior you know prior to covet cdhd provides guidance guidelines for when a letter must be sent home who the letter must go to and what the letter must say so everything is very standardized as of
040august 6 procedures for when a letter must be sent home who the letter must go to and what the letter must say were provided to us or had not had not we had not received guidance from them in the way we had with other contagious diseases so we're still waiting in other words we're still waiting but although cd cchd guidance has not been released we are going to kind of shift from what the illinois department of public health was saying and we are going to communicate any positive case to an entire classroom and here you can you can pop up there where there's a microphone that would be great um with the understanding that no action or quarantine must be taken unless the student has been deemed a close contact which means within six feet
041of covet positive person for at least 15 consecutive minutes so you want to talk to initially it was only going to be those that were in close contact and we're going to go a step further because parents were concerned about the guidance correct so there was there was concern about not being notified when there was a positive case so we are going to notify and let people know that there has been a positive case identified our district nurses are contact traced certified at this point so they will contact trace all the positive cases that come in and they've been doing that already with our 12-month employees i think we've worked out all of our hiccups but what we're doing is we're letting everyone know when there's a positive case and it will say that we're
042letting you know unless you've been contacted by a contact tracer no further action needs to be taken we're hoping that that's going to make everyone feel a little bit more secure because we'd like to have transparency okay so while karen's sitting up here any anything in terms of safety safety protocols safety concerns karen um it leads the nurses group karen and sherry um i've been joining those calls wenda has been on all our most of those calls now would be a great time any questions anything you're hearing emails you've received out all your different friends circles within the community we have karen here you know what what burning questions are out there that we can answer um for you one question that i got was about the close contact and whether or not that's defined
043as 15 minutes with or without um face covering so sherry went to a webinar for cook county department of public health last week and at that webinar for all the schools in the area it was said by a physician from strogers that it was only without ppe for 15 minutes or greater so we followed up finally got hold of someone at the cdc yesterday who said they were redacting that remark because it wasn't written and it is officially according to the illinois department of public health 15 minutes closer than six feet the 15 minutes is cumulative throughout the school day and it was originally consecutive it was originally consecutive now it's cumulative and it's with or without ppe the only exception to that would be our nurses who will be wearing kn 95 masks so
044that they will not necessarily have to go into quarantine every time they deal with a student who potentially is positive so what we found out through extensive research it's 15 minutes cumulative throughout the school day with or without ppe for six feet or closer okay thank you so what are we saying with regard to quarantine keeping kids home for a certain period of time return on negative tests what are what is kind of our protocol for return to school for those that have chosen to go to school so for return to school it depends on if they're a close contact or they're actually a confirmed case and so it's going to be based on symptoms and it's also going to be based on whatever the cdc protocol is so currently and again this has been
045changing pretty much weekly currently it's 14 days quarantine at home if you are exposed unless you come up with symptoms and then we will extend your quarantine and turn it into an isolation if it's a positive case so that's why our contact tracing nurses are going to be pretty busy following up with all the kids that have coveted symptoms because they're so general there's no requirement that they test negative before they come back to school no one of the things they were saying was two negative covid tests more than 24 hours which is what i'd heard so at this point we're not because it takes so long to get a covid test back it it kind of doesn't make sense to have a positive or a negative cova test to send them back because they'd
046be waiting that that amount of time for the test to come back anyway okay two weeks yeah and again karen um i can um also state that i mean if you're waiting for a negative test sometimes that could take um up to two months and you could still test positive right so going back to the um those students who test positive and have no symptoms um because the whole family is positive and maybe the adults are have symptoms and the child doesn't again um clarify for me exactly when could that child um go back to school because of the fact that they don't have symptoms or how are we going to handle those cases we're going to handle those cases on a case-by-case basis we'll work with the families healthcare provider because we don't want
047to bring them home if they could potentially spread the virus so hoping that you know that isn't going to be a widespread event but we'll work with that case by case because we don't have guidance from the state at this point other than two positive tests more than 24 hours apart and then those students who are quarantined because they may be quarantined for an extended period of time what do we do about educating that student do they go into a virtual learning environment can we easily move them from in person to a virtual classroom or what can we do to help that student out so 14 days in long term wants to come up or a member of her team is here maybe you can come up in terms of what we're going to do
048with the length of time that kids are out we're certainly concerned for a two-week quarantine what we intend to do with children so they continue to receive an education and it's obviously going to depend on if they're if they're well you're right and they can engage but what are some of the things that we've talked about you can yeah it's really going to depend on the amount of time that they're going to be out if they're you know they're going to be out if they have a negative test then certainly we would want them back as soon as possible but we would be working depending on how many students this impacted our numbers and our virtual settings are very high we would like to be able to put those students temporarily into a virtual setting
049if they were able to to you know receive instruction and if that is not possible what we would be doing is what we would do with any other student who was ill which would be to make sure that there was contact with the teacher and send home homework so that they could keep up as best as possible so a couple options but a lot of that's going to depend on space and bandwidth of teachers to be able to address a lot of students needs like i said the numbers are very high all right right but i guess just just for clarification does that i mean is it possible that somebody because you have the virtual setting and their regular classroom i you know that somebody could easily go from you know in person to a
050virtual that's you know essentially a different class or maybe on a different schedule maybe completely just always that even possible to all of a sudden but i don't want to guarantee it because you have no idea how many students that might be at one time right and if you wipe out an entire classroom with quarantine i don't know that we can necessarily replicate that assuming that the teacher would be able to replicate it at home but it's the unknown we do have some subs in the sample and lisa will be talking about subs but that are willing to be virtual subs so if it were to be a case that a whole classroom were to need to quarantine and i don't know that how likely that would be you know we'll have to see um
051then there's a possibility if the teacher is is quarantined but well we could see if we can you know transition that whole class to remote if the teacher is sick enough that they can't teach then it might be we're going to train subs so they know how to train virtually you know and then they would be able to remote in and again using the the platform the way it was designed for short spurts right elearning they could potentially deliver that instruction if it were to be at a whole class level right we've talked about a lot of possibilities for a lot of numbers yeah i mean i would think that if like you know if you have a one-off student who is now quarantined for 14 days is it going to be easy for that
052particular student to now just go into one of these virtual um or her to continue with the assignments and the future that they're familiar with or yeah yeah potentially it was going to be longer than we might want to talk about something quad linework but we're just going to look at all the options and the is it possible for if that would happen to you know one or two students that that teacher that teaches in person could actually have those students in the classroom virtually that's part of why we're uh making sure that the teachers all know how to through our institute day so that they're all ready to be able to teach virtually because they're going to be teaching virtually the first couple weeks of the school year as it is right so that's
053why i was thinking you know even if one or two kids need to be one to one so yeah [Music] little screeching there yeah is that me i don't think so okay so any other questions for karen or from a curriculum perspective in terms of you know linked to health and quarantine which is why meg came up because that's kind of her wheelhouse all right i guess one question just about i think people have mentioned the community about how much time will students be without like to have without math i know you're talking about some breaks and you know we'll kind of incorporate that as time goes on but i know there was maybe that re reiterating that might be helpful so um the initial the initial guidance was masks only when you couldn't socially
054physically distance right so that's changed to now you're wearing a mask no matter what even a teacher that's in an empty classroom so we're we're you know wrapping our heads around the fact that if you're uh if you're a teacher and you're so the first three weeks of school and there's no kids in the building and you're delivering virtual instruction you're doing so with the mascot which if you ask any educator we don't understand necessarily why that is and we certainly there's a level of concern with you know mast especially as you're meeting your as you're meeting your class but it's a requirement so so we're going to follow it um when kids come come into school live you're going to have your masks on at all times you'll take your masks off when you're
055eating which so again when the guidance was you only have to have you you can be unmasked um if you're physically distancing outside for pe or recess but not necessarily inside anymore so we were going to do the 50 50. half of the kids were going to eat in the classroom half the kids were going to eat in another space or go outside so your mask could be off and you could be six feet apart now that guidance has changed so to your questions your beer how long was the longest period of time kids will be without mass it'll be when they're eating and that's allowed so that's 20 minutes in most cases in terms of mass breaks it's different for our special education population that's going to be built into their iep and you'll
056hear ann talk about the virtual learning iep process and the vlp in a little bit um you know we have to see what that's going to look like if that's going to be you know one kid at a time getting up to go out and take a mask break if it's going to be during you know a small group instruction that is something we're going to need to figure out because it's it's different guidance and now that they're saying they have to keep their masks on we have to double check to make sure that we can even accommodate the brakes initially when we said mass breaks the guidance again was different we didn't change that it was changed on us so now it might just be when they're eating and when they're um when they're
057outside at pe as long as they can physically distance kind of piggybacking on that and meg maybe you can answer this question are we encouraging outdoor instruction while we can before winter hits us so and it'll be at the teacher's discretion on going outside or are we asking them to do it as often as possible kind of what what's the position we're taking one of the things that we looked into um was buying tents not like the kind with the sides like if you were going to a celebration but just to provide some sun coverage tailgating tons right harder tailgating times provide protection from the from the sunlight and um they're quite expensive just like the plexiglass business you'd wish you were in the tech rental business um and diana can you tell me was
058it around eight hundred thousand dollars to get to lease or rent for just a few months two to three months i think it was about half a million for 40 tenths which were about 30 by 60 to purchase tents was about a million wow if they even had them so we are going to encourage absolutely teachers have at any point covert or no cova they have the opportunity you know right to take their kids outside to learn and you know we will certainly encourage that we also will encourage them you know utilizing additional large spaces in the building that are available just to spread out and kind of mix it up because again in the elementary teachers students are going to say teachers are going to transition um and it's just a matter of you
059know do we want to spend between a half a million and a million dollars to have access to tents for a few months you know we thought that it would be a you know a wiser use of a half a million to a million dollars to buy uh to to use that money towards additional staff to reduce um you know class sizes and tool and to allow us to you know fully staff the virtual learning cohorts if it's anything like last year i mean we'd get six weeks out of it for a half a million dollars it just doesn't seem pretty i mean there was a blizzard on halloween so yeah right so um but yeah to you to answer your questions absolutely we'll encourage folks to go outside the pe teachers are going to
060be outside you know until the better end and i think you know some of our classroom teachers as well as well all right thank you both uh lisa and us can come up and talk to us about uh staffing i think we've is that what's next in the plan yes okay so i think i have a slightly older if you guys didn't notice there's a packet to your left and it's got an addendum to the uh it is at the back um the the staffing report like lisa just said has an additional probably three two sided pages because the amount of firing that we gotta do so just to give you an overview um in a typical year our staffing process starts in january um the initial process ends in march when we post and
061then we spend from march till about this time really tracking the numbers seeing if we have classes that we can either collapse or maybe some classes that need to be added and then staffing it with certified staff members so to give you an idea from march until about two weeks ago we had made about 350 360 staff changes that means either your building or your grade level and we knew it was going to be a high year for for new staff because we had so many retirees last year was a really high retirement year so in the last two weeks on top of those 350 changes we made an additional 250 more to accommodate for both the virtual classes and in-person classes so i do have to thank the administrative team it was quite a
062gargantuan lift to do that in the last two weeks but between district office administration building administration and uh i personally would like to thank my staff for all the help they did they were working day and night um but we are at a point i i'm very proud to say that we are set to open we have a last few hires that we're putting in place it did um increase our staffing allocations in in about the 40s 40 plus certified staff members because we want to make sure that our class sizes in person are small enough where the kids can socially distance so our virtual classes are a little larger um and what we had to do is an interesting process and it doesn't sound fun but it's like a big puzzle and what you
063have is the families who wish to be virtual and then we also took into consideration the teachers desires so some people had medical reasons some people had family reasons child care reasons so legally what we have to accommodate for personal medical issues that fall under ada however we do know that we want staff to feel safe and comfortable this is a scary time for everybody so we did take additional input on people other than their own personal medical decisions and then our medical um conditions so when we looked at these classes that we had to make from our parents who chose that we filled first with those who had their own medical conditions and then others were filled by their certification to make sure that we had staff that were in like teaching positions so
064for the most part we try to keep them with similar students we did have to group students together so they're not out from one building but we wanted to keep similar cohorts together starting end times and most often we wanted them in the exact same grade level that they had been teaching in the past every so often there are a few that that are not exactly what people taught last year but we did take a lot of time and energy to talk to individual people we know this is different for everyone it's different for parents it's different for students and it's different for staff so we've tried to make this process as painless as possible and make sure that people feel comfortable where they are i am i am proud that we're able to open
065i know another other districts have postponed their opening of school because they do not have the staff um i am concerned as we move forward because i have anticipated and sorry i wasn't even looking off the slides there it is there it is um typically our staff here our sub pool is approximately three 325 on any given year and you've heard from us that it's been difficult to supply enough subs to cover our buildings um unfortunately right now we only have who are confirmed to come back live so it will be um an effort on a daily basis to make sure that all our classes are staffed we have worked with espa we have a number of espa members who are also have some reasons for them not wanting to come in person whether it's
066medical or other reasons and we took our are people who have certifications to sub and we're training them as our virtual sub pool we do think that the subs for our virtual classes are going to be less than those for live classes but we wanted to have a pool that was trained into how to deliver that instruction so we can have some continuity of instruction when people are coming in and we were glad that we had a little cadre of our program assistance and then we also had 20 additional people from our sub pool that said we won't come back live but we'll come back if you could teach us how to do it virtually and so we're taking them up on that offer they're going to spend the first four days of next week
067training on that so we will continue to monitor it our principles are finishing up their last hires and we're on boarding them so as many can start as we can we this year i believe it was about 115 total hires before um our change to virtual and uh in-person instruction with that break we're about we've cleared the 150 mark at this point so that is does have some implications on the budget um and we didn't go excessively we we looked at classes after classes because we'd like to keep those classes under 20 and even with you know some of them hitting 20 we have added quite a number of staff so we're trying to keep that balance between how many people do we have to have and how much money we're spending on that so
068staffing related you know inquiries for lisa are questions with the um the positions on the addendum are do you have the certified positions filled at this point that we need to start or there are some that are still open we probably have a handful that we have to get confirmed contract signed but even if all of them fell through we have the capacity to fill all the classes so we are ready to open do we know the number of virtual classrooms i mean that we're feeling [Music] are they teachers that were already here or that we had to we had to hire new teachers for that for those classrooms it's a combination and we also had to make sure we met certification so you know you don't want to take a music teacher and put
069them in a bilingual class okay and most of the additional staffing that was required because of cova we were able to use care funds for right no no no okay no we use and we have a slide here that'll show you how we spent the 1.6 million and diana talked about it in terms of fun 10 and fun 20. she put up 1.5 million dollars in those two funds for additional staffing staffing needs so so the the 1.6 is spent and we did use some protected nurse space a few a few floater custodians okay and additional lunchroom supervisors that's probably what you're thinking about yeah but what lisa ness is talking about is the staffing the actual uh teachers certified staff yeah increases to man two different types of learning environments and keep our numbers
070down so let me ask a question about keeping numbers down i think when we had the early conversations about keeping numbers down it was about socially distancing in the classroom right so but i am i hearing that we're trying to keep numbers down in a virtual classroom also so that they're below 20 no no the virtual classrooms are higher okay they're yeah they're home so that's a little bit of a logic that i thought we talked about that those would be standard numbers virtual but the the 20 or less was driving you know driven into just base constraints on social media yeah the virtual ones are add more target or higher thank you all right thank you um so uh janet if you want to kind of make your way up i'll move through some
071of the slides we're trying to figure out we have a little bit of a disconnect in terms of our orders but um isb guidance changes as of july 23rd it said we strongly encourage prioritizing in-person learning again we talked briefly about this for students with ieps english learners and students under the age of 13. and then we received also at the end of july some guidance in terms of what it should look like in a virtual setting whether we choose to have virtual learning classrooms whether it's when we're starting remote or whether it's if we go in and out of in-person instruction at the end of july they set forth this guidance to us to school districts in illinois the students shall receive at least five o'clock hours of instruction per day in any learning
072setting uh recommended that at least 2.5 hours consists of synchronous or live learning which is a big shift from the emergency guidance where it says it's up to each individual uh you know union and and management group to kind of reach consensus on what that's going to look like so this is structured as a as a 2.5 live across the state uh with real-time instruction in our interaction between students and teachers um and asynchronistic which could be recorded paired group work or independent work but it's largely it's independent you know of a teacher directly delivering that instruction so there's different ways asynchronistic work can look a school district must provide remote learning services to any student upon request so we wouldn't necessarily have to offer a virtual learning cohort but if enough parents requested virtual
073whether it would be for a medical or otherwise even if we didn't want to do that as a district the state at the end of july said we must okay and then they strongly encourage that all students in any district learning environment continue to receive equitable access to extracurricular activities and that's certainly easier said than done because there are a lot of restrictions with these extracurricular organizations like the big ten has cancelled sports any other colleges cancelled sports the ie the illinois elementary athletic association has suspended all or most sports so even though they say equitable access a lot of those decisions have been taken out of our hands um okay so before i sorry janice before i called you a few minutes early but i got excited have you joined us so just you
074know cdc guidance again another change at the school level while opening schools like opening any building or facility does pose a risk for the spread of covid there are many reasons why opening schools in the fall of 2020 for in-person instruction is important we know that schools play a very critical role in the well-being of communities we've heard it time and time again from the spring throughout the summer you know kids need to be in school and you know we would love nothing more than you know to get the kids back to school but you know we we are in the midst of a pandemic schools provide critical instruction and academic support um and we believe part of our rolling re-entry will allow us you know to make sure that we're addressing these two significant
075bullets that the cdc said we should be uh schools play a critical role in supporting the whole child not just academic and that's why so many of our covet dollars were spent on sel because we know kids are going to need that social emotional connection and that learning even more so than before because of the force closure and the length of time that they've been away from their their classmates and their teachers um so that that social emotional health will be really enhanced this year you know as in terms of district 15. mental health of students can be fostered through school supports and services um teletherapies and and check-ins are good and we were highly committed to delivering on those requirements but it's nothing repeat nothing replaces having that time you know face-to-face with with
076those service providers continuity of other special services important for student success so when this guidance came out it was last updated august 1st it kind of reinforced our decision to although we were going to start remotely remotely and do the gradual reentry we felt this really spoke to some of the reasons in which we chose to put a plan in place that would allow us to slowly reopen the building for for some of these very reasons okay so here it is all students will learn virtually until tuesday september 8th this will allow us more time to resolve some of the staffing and sexually sectioning complexities before gradually re-entering people are still trying to shift between learning environments we're still receiving support of staff recommendations for accommodations doctor's notes are trickling in it's you know there's
077just no magic wand to make all of this happen as quickly and and you know linearly as we'd like so it's it's complex and as lisa said we're closing in on it but that little bit of extra time will allow us to make sure that we are fully staffed and ready to go allows district to monitor the club at 19 levels and hot spots we are working and renee can speak to this when she talks about el with our contact karen baker from northwest community hospital you know we are are watching um hospital data across different zip codes to see you know how are we looking across all of the seven municipalities that we support all are part of the rolling reentry reschedule again uh isb helped us prioritize who to bring in if we
078were going to you know open our doors and we did just that our youngest learners who we know you know kindergartners are just really not able to engage in you know e-learning by themselves and not all of our kindergartners have parents at home that can help them so we wanted to get them kind of acclimated to school establish relationships routine rapport teach them how to use their devices so if we were to have to go back to remote instruction at any point due to a surge or us moving back in the phases they would have some time and then our bilingual kindergartners there are full-time students and they they need that for for mandate special education self-contained in our transitional bilinguals too again to speak to the guidance of the the most at-risk groups that
079we should get in early and then we're going to do a slow roll from youngest to oldest again because they want all kids under 13 in you know if conditions are such that we can be but prioritizing kind of youngest to oldest so that is why we created the schedule that we did now again with every with all of this you put a schedule together and a plan in place and this could work beautifully or you know we could find ourselves in phase three and none of this is going to work or we could find ourselves with a spike in cases the way they had in lake zurich um the high schools and and we could have to shuffle this plan but for planning purposes out in the community with our families who we know
080have child care issues and and work that they're trying to balance if all goes with as planned this is what our parents know that they can plan around and be ready for so that's why we did a rolling re-entry um i wanted to give you some preliminary enrollment numbers and again things are shifting a little but at the elementary level we had over 5000 students that wanted to come to school in person and just over 2 800 that selected virtual at the junior high we had just almost 2 000 students want to come to school in person and 920 go to go virtual and morgan's working and massaging the numbers um to to make sure that everybody's accounted for we still have some families that we haven't heard from so that's why the numbers aren't
081exactly uh they don't equal 12 000. if you add them up they're still parents that we're calling to make sure that you know we know where they where they'd like to go we sectioned them in in person but we're trying to confirm that that's where their placement is going to be so we'll continue to update this i'll bring numbers back to the board in september once the school year starts so you can see exactly how it all how it all shook out so elementary in person as we've said so they're small enough now to allow for sections between 13 and 19 because that's what we really we feel as though we can separate kids enough not only by these numbers but by taking out any furniture that is non-essential you know teachers have removed chairs
082and couches and you know other kind of fun stuff you know they have in their classrooms and it's just the essentials those desks in some cases our teachers have kept their teacher desks we've been able to to price some of them out of the classrooms some of our teachers have kept their kidney tables for guided reading reading others decided that they would do guided reading on the floor or in chairs so we really are our our directive was really to take everything that's not essential out of the classrooms uh and then the junior high numbers are not um we're not as small as you can see not as many of them opted out so you know in order to get the class sizes down to a level in which we were comfortable you know we
083went to could you advance police to a junior we went to the hybrid and um so we're going to run on an ab schedule we notified parents um i don't know if it was yesterday or when the letter actually went out we were working on it over the weekend and the end of last week but it'll be an ace a b schedule it'll alternate daily so one week it'll be a b a b a then the next week it'll start b a b a b a you know we're smart we all got that and that'll alternate daily again this is going to allow us to reduce class sizes and and allow for greater um physical distancing so 50 of students a b that's what that means and they will have when they're in school it
084will be that synchronistic learning and and janice will talk more about this with virtual learning but what that means is it's that live instruction you're there with your classmates with your teacher you're at school and your day will feel more typical than that okay um while the other half of the kids are home and they're engaged in self-paced or asynchronous learning from home and again that can be a teacher could create an advance a live lesson it could be a flipped lesson it could be um they have breakout groups you know in zooms i don't know if any of you have had that at work where you're all together and then you break out into different rooms they could have a breakout room for a writing assignment or for a guided reading lesson they could
085have different links where they could work with a partner or sometimes just like in school you work alone you know that's that's how a typical day flows teachers are not constructing five or six hours in a row and you know kids are just not just working so janice will talk again more about this but that's what asynchronous means um opportunities again for some in-person and some e-learning students will be evenly distributed and our our hope is to do the phase in our plan is to do the phase in on tuesday october um 19th or i'm sorry october 13th which is at the end of the first quarter which would be a natural time to break because you've had that whole first quarter under your belt so um a few parents really just a couple asked
086for more information than that so we added these slides today and we can continue to push more information out to parents as the as the principles once they open the year they're going to really dive deeply into what this is exactly going to look like and then we'll continue to update the junior high parents between now and that october 13th date we talk as a team about we're prioritizing what's right in front of us and then we're continuing our work so right now although the hybrid is important to develop it will be developed we have until that october 13th date date to fully bacon and we're going to use every single solitary minute to do it so when we do it we do it well so a few other things that we know that we
087talked about today we surveyed parents to see if they'd like a hybrid or virtual beginning on the 13th of october they'll start in august virtually as you know and that will go through the first quarter certain self-contained or low incident special ed classrooms may be combined and assigned to another school based on programming and that's going to be a numbers game some of our programs especially more of our where you have more of your medically fragile kids the parents really want to keep their kids home so there might only be one or two kids in a program at a school that are wanting to come live so we're not going to have a class of two or three kids so we may have to combine some programs that are similar that one or two teachers
088could deliver so that's that's what that bullet means on october 13th student schedules and staff schedules will be adjusted to reflect that hybrid or virtual selection so again everybody's together first quarter and then we'll splinter off into to address parent enrollment students may be given different teachers or schedules again obviously due to this change enrollment selection commitment will be through winter break so it's a two-month kind of period where another quarter will go by and then isb guidance requests that if people request a virtual classroom they can be granted out outside of that window one of the things i'd like to tell isb is scheduling is a huge puzzle and it's very staffing is a huge puzzle and it's very complicated and that seems like a simple little bullet but it could potentially send real
089ripples through our sectioning and our stamping so we're hoping that parents you know make a good decision and can stick with it for a quarter if we need to shuffle i would love to think about doing that at the quarter at the junior high so we don't have these wild swings in sizes especially if people are we've got to let them go virtual we have to decide if we're going to let them come back in person because we're being very careful about how many kids we put in those classrooms yeah so if too many want to come back it's going to throw off all of our hard work to distance kids consistently so we've got the opposite too laurie because if you've got if we set virtual classes up whether at the junior high level
090or elementary to have board recommended maximum numbers and then all kinds of families decide that they want their children to go virtual that we're going to be in person that drives up the virtual class numbers and your your board targets or your guidelines um you know we really try to adhere to but we have prior to covet we've gone over those targets you know some will some will say especially a little bit more at the junior high so in you know some of our virtual classrooms there will be we we will be above target but we're we're trying to be mindful of you know what seems like a reasonable size classroom you know a virtual classroom and that's why we're you know those those targets are are something that we're keeping our eye on it
091you know virtual they we we want them to be smaller for obvious or in person we want them to be smaller for obvious reasons virtual we want them they can get a little bit bigger but we don't want them to get so big that it just becomes you know too overwhelming for a teacher to manage so we're we're doing that great balancing act okay [Music] virtual instruction plans and protocols okay so um this is my first time presenting to all of you so i just thought i'd take a minute to introduce myself on janice mathis i am the new director of instructional tech and innovation i think i met you all briefly last november when we did my contract so i'm grateful to be back so thank you um so the uh document that um
092was mentioned hold on a little closer here okay with the mask yeah so the document that was released by isbee on july 23rd also included a lot of guidelines as it relates to learning and so that includes providing a structured flexible learning environment where that authentic and differentiated instruction is emphasized that we have some clear and concise communication and we really want to prioritize that home to school connection through our virtual learning so we're putting a lot of those pieces into place um and also we want to make sure that our kids are we're looking out for their well-being and their safety and everything that we do ongoing support dr heinz mentioned earlier our um our institute days where we're planning these additional institute days to focus on how do we effectively teach in a
093virtual learning environment so we want to ensure that we provide that as well as some ongoing support and then the other recommendation was that unlike last spring we will be providing their assessment in form of grades so the virtual learning schedule when we first started looking at this we really wanted to take a look at what is on best practice in terms of how kids learn effectively and what sort of timing they need in a virtual environment and we ended up coming up with we really do want this to follow the instructional day as it is normally again we keep talking about this is normal school this is this it's just looks a little bit different and so the instructional day will follow the same schedule the buckets of time or time allocations for each
094content area are still the same it's just the way in which we deliver the instruction that's going to look a little bit different so for example in the primary grades we have about 690 minutes a week allocated for literacy and that might include things like reading groups read alouds word work things like that and um that's the same in virtual we will still be delivering those same minutes of um literacy however it might look a little bit different so it will be through a live um virtual meeting it might be through an independent self-paced activity so there's a lot of different ways in which we're going to be delivering this instruction but again it follows just it's regular school so we've got those same allocations same schedules just some flexibility built in for what that
095looks like and there are several examples of schedules up here these are examples these are samples but we wanted to provide them to give everybody an opportunity to see what the day might look like so for most catch my breath under the under the mask right um so for most um use your microphone though if you move it closer then you don't have to then i don't have to you should keep your mask up okay but the it'll just help carry your voice yeah okay thank you so um every day we'll start with a live morning check-in and that's where we really try to focus on building that community but also providing our students with that structure in that information that they need to be successful throughout the day so we go over schedules what
096are the goals what are the expectations but we also want to build some fun into that as well just like we do in regular school um and it's important to know that we also built um some social emotional learning into this because as we mentioned we really do want to make sure that we're looking out for the well-being and the safety of our students so there was a several schedules that were sample schedules that are built into the presentation so we're just flipping through those so this is one through three yep four fifteen yeah four through six seven three so in in the junior high we we anticipate it will be it's the same sort of period schedule that they will follow it's important to note though that there with that flexibility built into the
097day that doesn't mean that every day is going to look a little bit different i just like in the regular classroom we're going to have a general schedule that we follow where we do this instructional content area at this time and we have a special but depending on whatever the learning objective is for that day that may shift a little bit just like it does in the regular classroom so here's just a few of our student expectations we really want to to the best of their abilities for them to find a place that's their where their place to learn is it's a quiet distraction-free place um we expect them to be on time there are go these live meetings are going to be scheduled so we're going to want them to be on time for
098those live meetings so they don't miss any important information or instruction um it's important that that that student teacher communication is strong and we in in another slide we're going to go over what some of those tools look like for communicating and we do want to we're going to embed a little bit of digital citizenship through this as well so that they really do understand how to interact with others online and use that respectful language and behaviors um and then we have a responsible use contract that's every year is signed and that just talks about how we use our technology responsibly and um we anticipate we expect them to follow the same expectations that are outlined in the student handbook because this is school so those are student expectations so our staff expectations we're really
099focusing on providing that meaningful viable learning experience for our kids so we want to make sure that they are working to meet the needs of all learners uh that when they begin a lesson that they clearly articulate what the learning outcomes are and another important thing is that the procedures we're using and the tools that we're using are consistent and predictable we don't want to change it up on them every day you know we want to have some regularity there and so in the case of all our teachers they're either going to be using seesaw or google classroom to sort of manage all of that school content and in some cases they may even use use both but they will have one as their main primary platform so that kids know what to expect every
100day and then we want to we're going to talk a little bit more with our teachers about that synchronous asynchronous balance and what that means so synchronous is live it's real time it is not a video recording of yourself so and then that asynchronous could be a range of different opportunities um just for an example class discussions right we could do a class discussion through a live meeting through a live chat we have um a tool that we use called parlay and that allows us to do live round table and struct um discussions but then there could also be maybe an asynchronous chat happening within the google classroom stream so these could look different ways but we want to make sure that we have that balance and most importantly that whatever whether it's synchronous or
101asynchronous that kids are engaging in a active manner they're not just passively watching a video if it's an asynchronous activity that there is some sort of added on or sidecar activity that they're doing that's creating that creating some um dynamic learning with that um with that lesson um classroom community again that'll be done in the morning meeting and throughout the day and we'll be providing them with ideas and strategies for how to do that we and um the communication tools we want to make sure there's that continuous stream of communication between the students and families so this is yours yeah so here's our communication tools we have um this the top one is new it's a d15 virtual learning page it is in the uh website the d15 website it currently you know how we
102are building the plane as we're flying it um it is not live yet uh because we still have a few really key piece important pieces of information that we want to put in there um we anticipate we'll make it live on friday but we want to have things in there like not only how do you support your child at home but those vital tutorials for like how do i log into classroom how do i get into seesaw so a lot of those things we want to make sure that they are there if they're ready and a link to that page is going home with every chromebook so they will know where to find it last spring we use blackboard teacher communications and they will continue to do that google classroom email summaries if a teacher
103apps activates it a a parent can sign up and receive email summaries of what's happening in the classroom seesaw for parents we've just upgraded seesaw to seesaw for schools so it gives us a lot more features and functionalities and so parents can either install an app on their phone or go to the website and they can see all of the work that their students have um um uploaded to the the string the class stream and then um google meet of course if they're you need to meet face to face not face face but virtually have a live meeting with the teacher um that would happen through google meet and then of course email and phone can't rule out using email and phone right so um we know that family support is essential to our students
104success so we really want to try to embrace those opportunities that exist from learning at home provide that access to information which i just talked about through the website we want to set some clear expectations for communication for everybody and then we just really need to be mindful in support of all the different backgrounds and then finally teacher support again we know teachers have one of the biggest effects on student success and one of the things that we're doing as a district this year is building collective efficacy and what that means is that we believe as a whole that we have the power to really create meaningful change in the uh in schools we're providing all types of different personalized professional learning opportunities and also requiring some new digital resources to help support virtual learning
105i think that's my last one that is all right all in six weeks has questions for uh janice and her the work that her team has been uh just so vigorously putting together so we're ready i'm smiling under here i know you can we can see it in terms of scheduling yes the um when it's synchronous learning will there be set class times yes yeah so that will be communicated and generally speaking they will always be very similar to the same unless the teacher has some other learning objective but i but they will yeah typically be the same times okay um one question was how will counselors and clinicians engage with students virtually i think ann is gonna well she okay yeah yeah and we'll talk about that yeah i'll hold on related services and
106if it's virtual there'll be zoom meetings and and whatnot but yeah i guess i had a question so you you have these uh the sample schedules that you put in there so it to the extent that you know there's a slot on the schedule that's asynchronous type of learning where maybe the teacher is not there um is that i mean is there a is there an enforcement mechanism for that because like this is like you know one o'clock science time this is the time to do this activity right you know i like the idea that you have a schedule i think that's a great that's a great idea but i'm wondering how that is that just the teacher telling them hey at this time you should do this yeah the the scheduling the activities and
107the expectations for each day will be built into either google classroom or seesaw so they will know what they need to do um in terms of um monitoring that one of the things that we're looking at is is an app called goguardian it's go guardian and that actually it works in the cloud and allows teachers to create what's called a scene and through um they can actually set time frames where kids are supposed to be on x y and z sites or you know one to as many sites as you want to allow them to access and then you get reports at the end of the day for all of your kids it says here's how their time was spent so that's going to really provide us with some great information about how students are
108engaging so for example if we have a student who's not engaging or they're engaging in things maybe they should not engage you know right they're on the other side that we don't want them right so we'll be able to then address that and and so you know if if his child doesn't have their camera on in a meet right we'll know whether it's because they they don't want their camera on which is which is okay or are they doing something they shouldn't be doing so i think it's going to be a great way for us to really help to build some of that student agency by giving them some structure and then we can actually then address some of those some of the things that are happening at home virtually so what are your pilot
109numbers i know when i checked in with you a couple days ago you had around 67 staff staff members that very quickly responded yes they would be willing to pilot has that moved beyond 67 at this point do you know um last i checked it was it well actually i had about three more emails right before i walked out the door of people asking to be on it so we're probably up around 70 now people that that wanted to be on and participate in the pilot and really our our primary purpose for that is is rather than trying to roll this out to the entire staff at one time we wanted to do it with some people that had some experience with these type of tools before so then we can really understand what their
110questions are going to be and where we need to provide support and training for them i guess another question i just had about taking taking into account the varying degree of you know knowledge of digital and from parents perspective i mean are they going to like from your perspective with all with all the different uh programs that we're putting in if you have parents who aren't who are not going out to see-saw and some of these uh you know apps that that that are very helpful are they going to be able to get the at least enough basic communication through email or even some through you know just the the paper form are they gonna be able to get enough for them to at least know the basics as to making sure their kids you
111know are learning yeah i think so i mean there's gonna have to be a little bit of of work on the parent parents part i think to to you know go in and look at some of these tutorials and some of these things that we're providing but we are sending home with all the chromebooks a paper packet that talks about a lot of these tools and how you use them so there is so at least the very least they have the information that they need to get started and get their kids logged into chromebooks and accessing these tools and then janice you have beth a new member of your department working on parent use or parent universities that will help teach them how to use these tools and how to engage with their children when
112they're home virtually as virtual learners uh so you want to talk a little bit about that work yeah yeah so um what we're going to be doing is putting together some of these parent universities that will focus on things like how do you use some of these different tools in google or how do you interact with with seesaw in order to see what your kids are doing and we're going to be providing those really almost in a in a newsletter format so that we can um so everything is really sort of simple to to access and see and we and be able to be able to translate everything into different languages for all of our parents so we have a list of probably about 30 different parent universities at the moment i don't know if
113we'll get to all of them but we're certainly going to try um to start the school year we've put we're putting several tutorials on that virtual learning webpage that i discussed on d15 which should be up on friday and then we will start rolling out our parent universities shortly thereafter i guess i'm pretending that i'm getting these questions from the public but that's just really my own concerns somebody on facebook is asking it right now yeah i'm glad you did it live so no one has to speculate janice what's the feedback from your pilot educators or the teachers that you're working with um how are they uh liking these new digital tools you know um is a lot of is it easy is it you know cumbersome you know what have you yeah well that
114we have not started the um goguardian pilot yet that's actually going to start on thursday we'll be having a meeting with those teachers that are participating we actually have the people from goguardian that are going to be presenting to them and giving them an overview of the tool and how to get started but the feedback that we've gotten there's very very excited about having this this tool junior high teachers are like oh yeah yeah ringing make sure you know what they're up to they're they're like all over this yeah and then um with seesaw which we just the seesaw a lot of teachers use the free version last year and just last june we upgraded the seesaw for schools and in the new teacher orientation i had the pleasure of giving the seesaw session and
115it was so well received they loved um the tools and the features and and i've gotten a lot of follow-up from them on what do i do next so it's been really really pretty fantastic so those of the four days we have coming up to institute combination of district and building with a little bit of tech and then you have two other days where it's going to be all e-learning so in september we'll really be able to deeply answer that question because we will have gone through those four days and teachers will really see the platforms and all the enhancements and whatnot and then they'll have a chance to start using them when school starts and then we can report back yeah but i think it's very exciting what they put together and it will
116just continue to build again this is six weeks and then another six weeks and imagine we'll be in another six weeks so yeah and and this is it's this is all great for where we are now but what i'm most excited about well i'm absolutely excited for kova to you know be in the rear view but then what are we going to be able to do with all of this tech in the future and what it's going to mean for like powerful learning and engagement and just you know how we're going to layer it across all of our content areas and grade levels it's very exciting to think about how we can apply this in a different educational environment has there been any thought this is another question that about um you know i mean
117just like we were talking about you know digital ethics that you're teaching the kids and stuff there's gonna be anything with to you know dress codes i'm just i'm just thinking a lot a lot of these kids i mean it's just you know like just straight in your nightstand you're starting in school and now that might be fine because why not but just to add to the idea that it is school still right yeah we've actually had some conversations around that and the expectation is is that they would follow the same things in the school handbook so if it's in the handbook that would be the expectation for what they're doing at home okay good question with regards to seesaw and google classroom um are those similar types of applications and are we standardizing as
118far as what what teachers are using for different classes i'm just wondering there's consistency between all the classes right yes so um they are similar but but not the same so seesaw is a um it works with all grade levels but typically our kindergarten first second um and possibly third grade teachers this isn't the idea tool for them because google classroom is maybe for a little bit older kids it can be to get used to younger grades but um seesaw is a far better sort of learning management tool for those younger grades in the older grades google classroom is is part of the whole g suite system all of those things work together the drive docs and all of that so so essentially it's not necessarily standardized but it kind of does it on its
119own just because of the nature of the tools so we're going to see our younger teach our teachers that are teaching the younger grades using seesaw and our teacher is teaching the older grades using google classroom however one of the things that the teachers using google classroom may do is if they want to layer on like a portfolio building piece into google classroom they can those the two things seamlessly work together it's really it's really quite nice how it how it happens we tried to say use seesaw if you are teaching primary and use google if you're intermediate or above and teachers ask for flexibility because some were more comfortable with one platform or the other so we kind of then took that feedback to say okay now that we're going to make this how
120we start the year we'll provide the two and give folks flexibility and when we looked at the bright bytes data which is actually another way that when we come back we'll be able to share some of that data as far as how these tools are being used what grade levels they're being used at but when we looked at the data we were really surprised to see so many of our junior high teachers were using seesaw in addition to classrooms so we didn't want to say only these grades can use this or only these grades can use that i mean they really do work together very nicely so i think giving them the option to use one the other or both um really um provides that that autonomy and allows them to really meet the needs
121of their kids in the way that they um envision many things thank you all again for approving what the first time ever a director of instructional i think one of the technology things that was today is you talking about getting your contract signed in november and us sitting here and thinking how fortuitous it was that you were already on the plan before coveted because it would be it'd be a different scramble oh i [Laughter] yes all right thank you so much thank you one quick note or we will be updating the packet that's attached so that this version of the presentation is up there right now we worked on this team today that's what i figured so yes i just want to make sure because i know the virtual stuff will be that's what julie
122and i were celebrating [Music] so yes we were sorry special education again you could come up please thank you hi everyone good evening can you hear me okay not really no use that recess voice okay i can be real loud can you hear me yeah you can okay good evening everyone i'm going to go over some of the um the rollout plan for special education programs so we're going to start with this slide that we have here our just by naturally our self-contained programs are smaller in nature they have isb guidelines that they cannot exceed in a classroom and so just naturally our classrooms are smaller allowing for the a greater opportunity for social distancing and as dr hines has indicated there's a priority language in the guidance of making sure that we as much
123as possible prioritize special education and el so on the 14th of september coming back district-wide so k-8 are our aim program our low incidence programs are aim sip and mile and those stand for the structure for independence program that's the sip program which is located the ec sip is at cla and we also have sip programs at mj and sun lane our aim program which stands for academic instruction for meaningful education special ed has a lot of acronyms so i just want to go through them so that well i'm learning them just in district language because i'm new but then yes but also just for for you all and if you have any questions um those that program is located at whiteley and then winston junior high and then our mile program which stands for
124modified instructional learning environment and uh those that program is housed at sanborn and sandberg those are our low incidents self-contained programs and then we those focus on functional academics our life skills functional communication socialization at times activities of daily living and some of these programs have curriculum based community trips when we are not in the middle of a pandemic so there are some different academic unique opportunities because of the unique learning styles of our students in those programs our high incidence programs are our seal program which is at tj and fc whiteley and then also our leap program oh sorry uh seal stands for social emotional academic learning and leap stands for learning environment for academic progress and leap is at t.j kimball hill and winston campus elementary so those are our programs that will
125be prioritizing the the roll out back k-8 grade levels on september 14th and then on the 21st our early childhood special education programs throughout the district will come back however eckdeck which is our grant program so early childhood is special education but our grant programs our preschool for all programs and our blended programs those will be coming back later and returning to our district on october 5th conyers learning academy has a staggered start that we're also hoping to bring bring to the district september 14th for our self-contained programs so the ec sip program that's housed there as well as the multiple needs program and the aces program that are typically upstairs at cla those will be half day for three weeks starting on the 14th of september and returning full day on the 5th of
126october and then again september 21st for our special education early childhood classrooms uh throughout the district and october 5th for eckdeck in our blended classrooms um so any questions about our special education self-contained program rollout can i just ask in terms of percentages um what percent of our students are coming back um for in person learning for our special okay so for um those that have for low incidence or high incidence or those that have selected in person versus remote yeah okay so um the july 20th data which is when families selected their in-person or their remote option we had just over 300 families of students with ieps and we have 12 that selected remote learning the virtual learning option and we have 1200 total students with ieps in district thank you sure and i'm
127going to go into that a little bit more too when we talk about how we'll plan for the students that are in virtual you said 12 out of 1200 no i'm sorry we have 1200 sorry we have 1200 students in district with ieps 300 of them their families elected for the virtual learning option for at least the first trimester if not the year okay so for our students whose families elected that they will be a part of the virtual learning academy we have worked with the district attorneys as well as our department and administrators in the building to create what's called the individualized virtual learning plans and that's for students that will be in the virtual learning setting and have an iep so what that means is the educational teams come together and they take
128the current iep of the student and they look at the goals and the services and the accommodations and the supports that the child requires that the student requires and then collectively with the parents they come to agreement and decisions about what that will look like in the virtual setting that janice has just described so our students will be participating in virtual learning so both asynchronous and synchronous learning and so the iep team comes together to determine when and where throughout that process the students will be receiving their special education supports so i just want to make sure i have everything so our principals and our assistant principals and our special education coordinators have spent the last couple weeks planning these meetings and creating these plans and the drafts for families and scheduling the meetings and
129conducting them so that we have a clear understanding of what the expectations of the special education services will be for our students who are virtual so our starting point is those 300 students that had uh elected the virtual as well as the recent decision of our junior high to go virtual for the first quarter so every student who elected to be in the virtual learning that has an iep as well as all junior high students for just that first quarter will have a virtual learning plan and if and when students return whether it be because we go to phase five or because at the trimester the families are electing to come back to in-person learning or that's when our junior high comes back to in-person learning it reverts back to the original iep and the
130plan that's in place for the student so in july you recall some people really wanting more information about um special education so again just like janice ann's been here since july 1 and over the last six weeks they've developed this whole process have reached out to the 300 virtual families to start those meetings and then we'll go now back to those inspect iep students in junior high to schedule these meetings so very individualized but that's also a very so very aggressive you guys have really checked with us and that's really our uh coordinators our assistant directors helping to develop it and then our assistant principals and our coordinators implementing it in the buildings so again staff members that we ask to help us just do the work when we're not in a pandemic have played
131an absolutely vital role again because covet has put a whole heaping layer of more on these staff members so thanks again for uh the increase in staff allocation for special education coordinators we would again be in a very different place if we didn't have those extra votes and i want to address sam your question specifically about clinicians so our our students the way that they were sectioned in the virtual learning academy were as much as possible kept together with students from their school and if possible like lisa had said a teacher from their school every every teacher is assigned a building that they're connected to and each of our students regardless of what classroom they're in they're receiving their related services from their home school because again students could be coming back at the trimester
132we're going to be phasing back at some point once we're phase 5 hopefully sooner than later and ideally if it's a student who's been in our district they have a relationship with those service providers so if they're a student that has a 504 or has an iep they will be connected with the clinicians from their school and so they will continue to receive those services as identified through that ivlp process that individualized virtual learning plan process if it is a student who is not currently identified with us each of our virtual classroom teachers are assigned to a school and so they then can connect with the clinicians so the social workers or the psychologists or the counselors at that school to say you know what something's um i need to talk with somebody about one
133of my students here's what's going on can we set up a problem-solving team meeting can you check in with the family to pop into my class set up time with the fam the student or the family and so there are resources that are available and if they're not directly connected to the child because of an identified plan that they have our teachers have that resource through the school that they're assigned to and then i think laura you said mass as well so i want to briefly touch on the mass so through the iep process so if our families are coming in person the standard way that we look at the mask exemptions would be through that iep or the 504 process for the team to consider the medical doctors the physician note that the doctors
134are providing we are asking families to consider granting consent for our school teams to speak with the doctor to see what those those alternatives were like dr heinz said looking at increasing stamina mass breaks if they can't tolerate a mass can they tolerate a different type of face covering we have also ordered in district a number of shields dr heinz ordered one for all staff members but additionally we have some some extra ones that may be appropriate for students that might require this type of support and for our staff members sorry for our staff members we also in student services and a couple of the other departments like el have purchased mass that are clear so that they they can have the opportunity to if needed so for example if you're in a speech therapy
135articulation lesson and it's really critical that the student can see your mouth and the production of the sounds that they have that mask available great were there any other questions or things that you'd like me to discuss i too i'm smiling i'm not sure [Laughter] thank you thank you and then renee your your next step closer is that right all right uh thank you everybody it's good to see you again it seems like it's been a long time so members of the board president shupai thank you this is a brief overview of some of the efforts we've had to maintain our gifted programming uh during this very unique time so prior to covet we had plans illustrated on the left to phase out a couple of classes actually a total of four over the next
136couple years that's of course related to enrollment trends and space needs at a couple of our schools of course with covid and the you know need to offer families the option of in-person or remote learning we put a hold on that plan to maintain those staff within the program so that we could offer the full array of services using those four priorities making sure that each of our students in the gifted program regardless of site still would be able to remain with a gifted teacher regardless of the option they chose so we were able to provide that type of arrangement where whether it was remote or in person each child was still assigned to a gifted teacher in the existing structure that we have currently we also are working with transportation to provide those families
137with transportation so for some they've indicated they do not need transportation or do not want to be on the bus some still require transportation because their children are moving to a site outside of their home school that's very very common of course for our gifted program and as we'll talk about in the next slide we had to do a little reorganization of some of the in-person classes to maintain the low class sizes yet still provide that gifted service for children so children will still need the bus service to you know get from their address to the new class classes they're attending and finally we want to make sure that within our in-person classes just like we are doing in general education the class sizes are such where social distancing can be promoted and maintained to
138enhance our safety the one final thing like i mentioned is you know we put a hold on some of the staffing changes we had anticipated so we had anticipated over the next several years phasing out classes as well as teachers for the teacher that we did phase out and then we were only going to have one class that only had one grade instead of the typical two we paused that so that we could use those staff to support the program changes that are illustrated actually on this slide here so instead of having the uh five sections of uh in person at three four and five sections actually six of five six in person we've reorganized to provide three sections of three four at the following schools frank whiteley mary and jordan and winston campus elementary
139and four sections of in person five six at central road whiteley hunting ridge in marion jordan so you can see that a couple classes were consolidated from our original spread so that we could make sure that we didn't have classes that just had one or two students and that those classes would still be under 20. so we changed our configuration a little bit and of course hence the need for continued transportation then underneath we have two sections for the three four class and three sections of physics that are taught by our gifted teachers for remote learning so we were able to provide that for our students as well we've had quite a bit of people coming to us some with some concern because of the reorganization some actually with praise that we're able to offer
140both sections and thankfully we've been able to use some of that input to adjust some of our original plans to better suit our families because of course these are families who you know establish relationships at their classes they're usually fairly stable but of course in the covet environment it's a little bit less stable than it has been so thankfully we've been able to take their feedback and incorporate it to the degree that we could so we're really appreciative that we were given that information and we're able to respond to it we're looking to maintain this for as long as we need to and you know of course if we return to phase five we'll look at reconfiguring back to the original configuration until our study of the program is finished and we can talk about
141what changes in the future we might want to institute is there any questions that anyone has about gifted programming no thank you you're welcome and i did like the tailgate tent comment by the way i thought that was pretty good thanks thank you renee we'll talk about uh developments with the multilingual program the logistics and and how we'll support our multilingual families sure thank you so as you can imagine learning english as a new language it presents an extra layer of challenge for some of our families through a remote learning platform right and for our students in particular it can be even more challenging for them to access grade level curriculum and for them to continue to grow their english language skills and so isb has prioritized learning and in person for our english learners
142in addition to that we know that it can be extra challenging for our parents of our english learners to support remote learning while they're at home in a language that's not familiar to them so aside from those reasons and the fact that it is legally required we know it truly is a best practice for our students to have the opportunity to be in person and to have the opportunity to interact with their peers and also to collaborate to be exposed to english learner role models and it also affords our teachers the opportunity to provide a great many more language supports in the classroom for our students in person so our plan for bringing our english learners back is to start with our students who are part of transitional bilingual education programs so those are our
143students who are in buildings where there are programs where we have 20 or more students who speak the same language at the same site so on september 8th our bilingual kindergarten students will return along with all of the their general education peers and then on september 14th we have 700 bilingual students that we will bring back to our classrooms our spanish self-contained classes in grades one through four will return for a full day of instruction at the buildings mentioned there and then we will also offer the opportunity for our students who are part of transitional bilingual education programs who speak japanese telugu polish korean bulgarian and tamil in grades one through six at whiteley pleasant hill and willow bend to also return for up to one hour of personal in-person instruction each day and then
144the remaining esl and bilingual resource students will return to school along with their grade level peers so that is our plan did you have any questions at all are you getting pushback from families for the one hour of in-person instruction i mean does that impact work schedules and so on so far we've had very positive response from our families that have opted and it's for our families who have opted for in-person learning so those who opted for virtual learning will continue to learn virtually okay thank thank you and lastly i don't know if it'll be tom or claire hi i'm back there with the fancy district 15 map we'll talk a little bit about transportation where i can come to you [Laughter] how do we get those masks if we want them i should have
145brought them we'll get you one i'll get you one i mean you know that's a good thing maybe for this one elder statesman we should have thought of that we're sorry we gave them to all the new teachers and they've been it's been pretty nice so we'll we'll get to we'll get each board member for the september meeting zubair's basically saying he's tired of the light of pen yeah go get your light up math instead of the blue lanyards we did find light up lanyards they were a little expensive though so we couldn't go that wrong okay so all these plans right and we've got to still transport our students so tom do you want to talk a little bit about all the hard work and where we've been and the opt-out we have over
146the summer we have gone in many different ways to try and get all the students that need transportation to uh laurie and myself talked before we put out the uh the questionnaire to the parents how many students do we need to move away from in learning to make the comfortable ride that was three and a half thousand we hit over four thousand so at the moment we're transporting about five and a half thousand kids this year uh we were given the mandate from the state and going back some weeks it was 12 to a bus then it was 23 to a bus they eventually said 50 to a bus i have not gone to 50. 50 on the 71 seat bus we would be forcing students to sit three to a seat so our number
147is 45 my staff has worked very hard to try and keep that 45 down to 39.40 so it gives us room for expansion that odd one or two kids so we have all the routes we have put in place 534 actually it's 535 individual routes we had one out of district added today so we're 535 individual routes on a two-tier system so it's two runs in the morning two runs in the afternoon plus the kindergartners and then of course the out of district schools we're using 120 of our 162 buses at the moment this year to do that um max is the maximum kids on a bus 45 except for a special ed and a lot of the special ed routes will be two three no more than about five students on the bus and
148tom those that capacity of your special education buses are about 15 typically um they are actually our special ed bosses depending if it's a wheelchair bus or a regular small bus the regular small bus is about 30 35 the um wheelchair buses differ from 18 to 50. but again you take seats away depending on how many uh wheelchairs we we put on them okay uh at this time of speaking we're only using savannah for 40 f-15 wheelchair buses this year but again we've seen this in previous years and then the wheelchairs tend to uh increase as the year goes on so we'll we'll have um the buses ready uh if the need arises for extra wheelchairs um for that drivers started today picking their routes we had the first 50 drivers through having their few
149minutes they're all very happy to be coming but they're all very happy to coming back to work which is very nice to see we have lost a few drivers during the summer in fact in the last week we've lost another three um i'm actually expecting that may increase a little over the next week but we have some drivers coming through and training when we will continue to replace them uh we currently have 133 drivers on in place we have seven drivers in training um my goal is to have 145 drivers so that if we do have any situations where we have to quarantine a driver we have somebody stepping to the routes as quick as we can any questions and because of the opt-outs we did not have to move to a three-tiered system we
150did not have to move a significant amount of time figuring out what that would look like an early amid and a late schedule so because of virtual learning plus parents that kind of answered our plea to not take transportation unless they really needed to it allows for that greater physical distancing as well as not to have to move to a three-tiered system i thought that would be just one one thing that would have been the straw that would have broken the camel's back but i i still kept it in the background that's like a future plan always ready always ready okay all right any questions around transportation and then we'll round out with two other slides and then we'll move on how does that 145 number compared to last year 140 145 number of drivers
151that we're trying to target uh our number last year we we struggled to get to 150 okay so we're still we were about 143 144 last year so we have lost a few we're still trying to stay close because if we have to quarantine based on you know a positive test or an exposure we want to make sure we have some sub drivers as well so keep it all thank you thanks tom i'll quickly move through these slides just because several people in the community have asked we did receive 1.6 million dollars of federal dollars uh linked to our title one allocation and as fast as we received it we've spent it and then some we purchased ppe so face masks and a variety of other protective personal protective equipment for staff as you've heard
152and say for students and we purchased 1300 just over 1300 grade 4 chromebooks the board approved grade 5 separate from covid prior to this was so we could then go one to one by doing fourth grade we could redistribute chromebooks everyone will have a device 315 hotspots that we're working together in the hands of our families as well as our many of our bilingual liaisons are trying to help our parents get the low cost internet so we don't have any connectivity trouble uh the seesaw platform licensure that janice talked about will pay for protected health space employees one for school so if a kid has coveted symptoms they'll go into a protected health space until they can be picked up separate from the nurse's office floater custodians because we'll have those increased increased cleaning needs
153sanitation supplies certainly more um more dollars being sent to spend to have additional cleaning supplies for custodians as well as to have in each classroom you know spray bottles and rags so teachers could can use it if they'd like the sel curriculum as was noted and additional lunchroom supervisors because we are going to try to spread kids are going to be eating in the classroom and other places in the building and we need more supervision both inside and outside because kids will need to be spread further apart other expenses uh for the fy21 final budget will be talked uh will be shared with the board in september that will largely be additional personnel as we talked about but we'll talk about that in fund 10 and 20 at our next meeting when they do the
154final budget adoption lastly you know the hybrid you know always a contrast who should we shouldn't we have done a hybrid one of the reasons we were reluctant to do a hybrid is because of this slide right we first and foremost wanted to educate every child every day in person with teachers and with the hybrids the synchronistic and asynchronistic so we don't have that every child every day with a teacher so that was one another one knowing that we have a family of of of people whether it's a dual income family or whether it's you know families that you know don't have any work flexibility we know it's a hardship it's become a hardship not only then too for our families but for our teachers because some districts are fully remote some districts are hybrid
155some districts are in person so and and we have teachers that land and staff members that live in a variety of different communities so it's created a need for child care and although you know we have enough on our plate as you can see we do want to provide this as a as a service to both staff and the community so we began to look into ways in which we could alleviate some of that stress to see if we could bring some child care options here to staff and community so we're working with the palatine and rolling meadows park district as well as hoffman estates really to provide quality child care for families within our community we've had numerous meetings with them the issue is always space right where can we house these programs so
156the park districts are working on a variety of leads they're taking a look at some programs that they currently have in some of their spaces seeing if they can shift those and provide affordable child care for the community we're collaborating with a company called right at school to potentially provide child care for district 15 staff but again space remains a key issue so we've been inquiring about the use of sync less in rolling meadows as a child care site after weeks and weeks and weeks literally of email and calls and julie and morgan and i were all you know trying even somebody contacted frank that you know somebody that frank knows about sinklets um we we have been able to set up a tour of the space tomorrow so we will see if it meets
157our needs and then there you know there's a cost to that there's a a rental cost and it's a it's per square foot so we'll figure out all the details we'll see what that cost is and then we'll see how you know we can do it as a shared expense through right at school and a combination if they use a portion and the park districts use a portion you know we've got some some logistics to to work on but uh these are some um some child care leads that we have that we're looking into we are certainly aware that it's a tight turnaround you know we're doing our best and we really are doing this as a service to staff and community we are not in the daycare business um other essential workers have figured
158it out so we're just trying to help because we know that this this creates um you know a level of stress to our families so we're doing our best to see what we can provide as a service so i just wanted you to be aware of where we where we stand with the child care factor we did are you thinking just having just listened to tom talk about transportation not thinking about child care off-site or at park district facilities or st colette that creates complexity also with transportation right so if it was a a a child that was um it depends on where their where they live and where they go and we don't know if we would transport or if the parents would do the drop-off we have to work through the logistics on
159that but it could you're right it could have transportation implications apparent if it's for teachers or educators you know in our employees in the district they would drop them off and pick them up but for the families we would have to figure out if we would be able to provide transportation or if it would be incumbent upon the parents to do so or if parents don't have transportation maybe we could provide we would have to figure out what that would look like and we may or may not be able to to to make either you know may not be able to make this work but we are trying and we wanted you to know that we know it's a it's a it puts people in a tough spot and we're doing what we can to
160help so i know we've kind of done a q a as we've moved through are there any final uh questions for me or my the team from the board one thing i was kind of thinking about as we were going through there with regard to the virtual schedule will teachers say hey at 10 o'clock everybody be on um then you're going to go at 10 30 for some independent time and then at 1 30 i want you back we're going to do science is it going to be up to the teachers discretion are we saying those two and a half hours are all going to be in one block what is i think that we've been working very hard right now to set the special schedule and we've given them sample templates and there's minute
161allocations i think it's it's going to be a combination of some teacher but also they're going to have to work with other service providers to schedule to fill that schedule so because people are going to push in whether it's related service staff you know some of our counselors or for specials so i think it's going to be a little bit of milk mag would you agree we've been working for several days they are still going teachers are still going to have to develop their schedule once they get their special schedule i mean everybody laughs that the specials kind of dictate the the whole working of the school but it's kind of true because we have a lot of teachers who specialist teachers who travel from one building to the next to be as fiscally responsible
162as we possibly can so now that they have that special schedule or they will have it within the next 24 hours then they can work to establish their classroom schedule and they will still need to submit that to the office or to the the administrator who's overseeing the virtual so they're still going to have to do that so that we know where everybody is just like when we're in school we're going to know what period mrs so-and-so's class should be having reading or language arts or math or what have you so it could be something where school starts at 8 45 everybody's on at 8 45 we take attendance and then we go to reading right for a half hour and then the teacher says okay it's independent learning time we'll see you guys back
163here at 11 30. or probably more like you know what gives out an assignment and we you know we're going to come back and i'm going to check on everybody periodically but we would like to see this finished by 10 30 and then we're going to move on with our day okay okay uh lisa may i suggest that just because elizabeth i'm sure you're fascinated by our plan but um i'm going to propose if you're if the board is amenable that is that we pause momentarily for four point three four point four and four point five if it's okay yeah move to five and then go back yes is that okay with everybody yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah sure you finished questions so patient and i probably should have done that
164earlier but we were just it grew so i have found lori are we going to push off any board questions to to the return to learn we can come back if you're okay or if you want any questions now they can just get settled if you have more questions please you know please i think we'd better just consult kind of keep the questions together so everybody doesn't lose their training and then yes and then perfect questions so as we have this um rolling re-entry schedule um what would be um the factors that we would consider for um other than of course um moving to you know back to phase three here right that's the prime that will be the primary driver or if we were to see a spike in cases we are in close
165communication with again northwest community hospital uh karen is monitoring um you know by zip code and we would be looking to the the health providers in our area to see if there would be a reason in which we would close the problem we're having is that the metrics don't we don't know necessarily how reliable they are and that's what we're hearing from other uh for karen brown from northwest community hospital many of the families in in some of our zip codes don't necessarily always have a primary health care provider so we don't necessarily know how clean that data is so it's largely going to be based on the governor if we were to see a spike in cases in any particular area like some of the some communities like lake zurich have you know that
166might cause us to pause or if we were once we did the rolling reopen and we were to see a spike in a search or in a grade level you know that would certainly be you know a reason for us to determine if we were going to continue to onboard new grade level introduce new grade levels to the environment or if we were going to keep everybody virtual or send everybody back so that's it's not it's nothing you know clean we don't have any clean metrics across the state unfortunately despite i think a lot of these public health providers best efforts but that that is the plan that we are putting in place right now lori can you um i know you and i have had some conversations as to the why of having teachers
167teaching from their classrooms can you expand on that sure but for the public and the rest of the um as everyone knows last spring everybody was home and we were in an emergency you know situation uh where we were literally putting chromebooks and and in the hands of people and we were in emergency mode and people did the very best they could to find a spot in their house to teach from but it was a very it was a challenge for for teachers to say you know we're expecting a lot our families are home we have young children but we still have students that were responsible to teach and we did the best we could at that moment in time to be as supportive as we could while still delivering on you know our employment
168contract you know to educate our children now we're um in a time where this could be a short-term solution it could be an entire year or any any amount of time you know in between so um local districts in our area that feed 211 and feel strongly that we would like teachers to teach in the classroom where they have their resources they have their elmo's they have their our document cameras they have whiteboards they have all of their physical resources they have a dedicated space that's quiet that allows them to stay focused and they don't have the disruptions that are that our own children pets spouses significant others uh you know create when we're in a shared space so we're trying to be very intentional to say that unless you have a medical um accommodation
169we would like you to come to school and and and teach so we are offering though a level of like that said we are offering a level of flexibility to say if you have these medical reasons or you know another reason work with your principal and we can provide some level of flexibility that might be a day or two where you can work from home but if you do so you need to make sure that that's a dedicated space where you can actually deliver a robust experience for children because we're not in an emergency mode this is you know the start of the school year so that is that is why our team and certainly all the other elementary feeders that feed uh 211 and 214 and those are the ones i know of i
170know many other districts outside our feeders are doing the same thing in our union we've had a number of conversations and they have you know they've been um they understand what we're doing and they appreciate the level affects the flexibility that we're trying to offer so i think we've found a just right balance yeah i think it's important to be separate because there there's such a logical reason for it that's not about people it's not about trust it's about providing great educational experience for students that are already going to be in a tough situation um we have to have the benefit of tools we have resources we eliminate connectivity connectivity issues or bandwidth issues and the type of things that i know as a work from home employee for years and years and years on
171a day off of school it used to kill me because every child in my neighborhood would come home and try to stream whatever on the internet or play video games and i wouldn't be able to connect to my vpn from home so you know in what i do okay it's a hassle but if if i were a teacher and i had the education of 25 students on my plate that day that would be very distressing not only to the kids myself but their parents also sure so that that's an important one um i had one other um in general the idea of teachers wearing masks in empty classrooms can somebody give a give a little bit of the why or the the rationale it's the latest revision through the guidance from one of our our
172um is it see i believe it's cdc is karen still back there i believe at cdc i can look but it's guidance um that we you know we were told whether it's an empty class empty classroom or not and we don't understand the rhyme or reason but that's we're doing you know everything that they've told us and and more so you know might that change i don't know so much of it has but at this point we're just following the guidance any other questions i have one quick comment that is specific to average class size targets and um if you guys can anybody that knows more about this than i than i i'd appreciate if you popped in so when we talk about average class size targets here as a board and lori and the
173administration talks about that those are some just general guidelines that are put out by the board and by administration typically on an annual basis they're pretty consistent as far as from back in the board watching days to sitting on the board for me they've always been the same um those those guideline targets are basically kindergarten an average number of 20 primary grades which is that grades one to three that number the the average target is 24. intermediate grades four to six the average target number is 26 and junior high 7th and 8th that number is 28. so as we talk about numbers know that in-person numbers are driven by a need to social distance and try to maintain the safety of our children the at-home virtual numbers we'll try as best as we can to
174meet target numbers knowing that there may be some plus or minus on that i also know um that it's out there and i don't think anybody's hit it very directly but there is a significant amount of dollar expenditure that's in the budget right now for additional staff and i want to say that number is close to two million dollars which is a little bit of a an eye popper so for anybody out in the community that thinks that there's not an investment in doing the right thing whether in person or virtual to make sure that our staff is right there's a lot of investment there there's a lot of investment in doing the right thing to educate our children right now and i know that there's a lot of work to find those dollars and
175to make this a year that's a good year or even in the most trying of times which again is super appreciated by all of us and uh as a parent also that's uh something that i appreciate it's been a literal non-stop effort since march but certainly from the end of the school year in may non-stop nights weekends at the risk of our own health and families and lack of vacation look at the team we're all like yeah so thank you can i just ask them as you talked about um teachers being alone in the classroom um i'm just curious because we got a couple of emails about ventilation and so on is that one of the factors i mean parents are asking specifically about ventilation in the rooms um to ensure you know whether an
176air is recirculated whether air is going you know um can anyone speak to that in um do you want to come up we we have done a study with that we had co2 there are our engineers our hvac engineers come out sorry just when you got comfortable then if you don't mind just pop them back and jim can sit over there um we've worked with our construction company so nicholas and associates they've worked with co2 has come in and we've done a study jim did put a kind of a letter together about our hvac system and we looked we've researched tepa filters and you name it we've we've looked at it do you want to talk a little bit about that work that you did relative to our hvac systems and this work with co2
177so in regards to filtering for the district ashrae recommends you know the highest rated filter that you can do that keeps the airflow from being minimized so for us it's going to be sorry yeah so i don't have my reading glasses on me so it wasn't then go off the cuff i just thought i could help you with that or something i'll just go off of what we're doing um we're we're putting in the the um the highest rated merv filter that we can that goes along with the equipment that we have in the buildings and so we need that way we can keep the airflow up to the cubic feet per minute that ashrae requires as well as not damaging the equipment so ashrae just so you know is kind of the the organization
178that hvac just like aasa is my lead organization or iasbo is diana and josh's ashrae is is the hvac regulatory agency that uh oversees like airflow recommendations for that industry perfect just wanted to make sure was there any more is there any questions in regards to what i just said i think one of the things you can talk about that we've talked about is you know everybody here is hepa filters right and everyone's crazy about hepa filters right so the benefit and the downside to a hepa with our building systems i think is a big question well the hepa filters the the the head loss or the resistance that goes across that is too great for our equipment so a lot of the equipment will end up being the merv rating um 13 and under
179and again it will be based on the equipment that we have in the building the newer equipment air handlers can handle the merv the higher merv rating filters and then as we go down to the new vertical univents that we put in can handle the higher merv rating filters but then when you get into the horizontal unit vents that'll be a lower rated merv rating and then the heat pumps would be even a little bit lower yet because the equipment can only handle so much resistance head loss across the filter pressure difference that that's going to dictate what we can and put in to our equipment so these filters were put in place because of coppid or they they had to be put in any way yeah so the the district uh does a switch
180out um i'm new most districts do three times a year we'll we'll do three times a year would be a standard obviously we're going to up that and then i'm putting together right now the cost difference for that for diana to be presented there will be an increase in cost with the additional switchouts and the type of filtering that we're upping uh across the board to its maximum levels also have an increase so we're planning to change i'm so sorry i'm trying to follow you i'm sorry we're planning to change the filtering system too we're changing as we're speaking right now okay yeah okay so for the parents that are listening and and hearing you out um what would you recommend or what would you say to those parents in regards to the ventilation system
181once the once their students are in the building as far as as far as like safety like yeah the enhancements yeah i mean they'd be worried about the the ventilation system in our schools i think is what you're asking when yes correct um when you when you look at uh it's kind of a dangerous game to leave your lane of expertise yes we're doing the maximum we can with hvac equipment but there's other higher risk than the hvac equipment as far as as a parent as if i have two kids there i'd be more worried about some of the other things that have been talked about earlier this evening than the hvac equipment but we will do the maximum that we can with that hvac equipment and that does give a higher level of mitigation
182but it's not elimination it would be mitigation and i can add if you'd like to the website this is something that i had jim put together for me so i could i actually spent several weekends on the asher website as well to learn about hvac something i never thought i would need to know about as a superintendent jim did put something together for me and i can add it to the website so this information is out and then with our newer systems i know somebody did um deploy it the system at lincoln which is a newer system so that um potentially has a a different higher than a merv 13 right because it's a newer system yeah and it will open also because it's a lateral not a horizontal or a it's a vertical not
183a horizontal system so some of our newer systems are a little bit different which is also you know part of what we can put on the website try to elaborate on any of that with willow bender lincoln because i know you were part of that for you well merv 13 would be the highest before you'd end up into going to a hepa filter so hepa filter is higher rating or lower rating than this hepa filter is going to be a higher level of filtration okay but it's a capacity issue window motors can bear what level of suction the um how much particulate you know even air flow through a help the filter versus particulate through so if it puts strain or stress on the universe or on the the machinery then we potentially have failure
184of our ventilation systems that's correct which would which would be the exact opposite of what we'd ever want to do okay plus or plus you want a hot the highest turnover rate of of air anyway and that that's a safety factor in its own right thank you thank you all right any other any more questions nope nope okay all right number five great so tonight is the final board action to issue life safety bonds as you recall the board a few months ago approved the life safety approvals you had a public hearing last month a few weeks ago or maybe even last week i i have to grab one together yes i have to give huge credit to dr heinz diana and josh for putting together a fantastic reading presentation to moody's to reaffirm the
185district's bond rating which is double a two the very highest rating is triple a then comes double a1 then double a2 being in the double a category is very important in illinois where the rating is so much lower based on our state so the feedback from moody's was that the district is really at the top of the double a2 category very strong results maintaining fund balance and we endured probably an hour of questions then review their report back to us in great detail and i'm i'm sure you'll be able to to see that either on the website or we can send that out so you can review exactly what they said but really at the top of the double a2 category it was very strong the only thing that held you back from going to
186the next level is keeping more of your cash in the bank you have very strong fund balances you're above where the illinois state board of education would like fund balances to be and so that was well received but the next step requires saving more of your cash which at this time i'm sure is difficult so tonight we're at the parameters bond resolution step and this approves the issuance of the 14 million 567 000 life safety approvals they came back from the state friday night late so just in the nick of time there was about 730 000 that was not approved but because the district had a life safety approval of work that was done at frank whiteley and was able to approve a reimbursement resolution several years ago were able to recapture that 730 from
187that amendment so you will get all the money towards these life safety projects so that's that's the good news so the parameters resolution authorizes the sale of the bonds within certain parameters and those parameters are maximum repayment schedule of nine years maximum principal amount of 6 million not to exceed 6 million a year and a maximum coupon rate of 5 and i would just emphasize that 5 coupon rate is not the interest rate on the bonds right now we're estimating an all-in true interest cost on the bonds of around 1.85 percent we are in fact at historically low tax-exempt interest rates we have broken the record every week rates keep going lower and so we are now scheduled to sell the bonds next tuesday august 18th and the final sale will be subject to the
188approval of the superintendent diana as csbo and the board president and the final results of course must fit within the parameters set forth in the resolution and i'd be happy to entertain any questions you have and i know it's a big long document but i would be happy to answer any questions regarding that you got the easiest seat tonight i do and i just have to say i'm so impressed with your plans uh return to learn it's it's an amazing accomplishment in this environment i'm in total ah of all of you so anyway thank you all right thank you thank you all right so we're jumping back to four point three four three dr paul chuck do you want to come up so what what while claire's coming up um we will be doing a
189first and second read of two policies 4.180 pandemic preparedness management and recovery and seven 190 as they link to the return to learn plan and this upcoming school year take it away good evening everyone um so the the board policy for colon 180 though the changes to that policy um from the press was instead of earlier this spring they had a pandemic preparedness policy that came out now they've added the management and recovery portion to the title of that and then after speaking with our law firm hlerk we wanted to have explicit language in that policy about the the mandated face mask wearing in our school so the verb age that we added to that policy came directly from our law firm and then we in that in that language we also reference policy number
190seven colon 190 which is our student behavior board policy and then we wanted to add that same language into that policy so that if we had to take disciplinary action with a student for not for not following our mask wearing policy that we'd have that or our mass preparing practice is that we'd have that in board policy in both places this will also then be referenced both of these policies within um revisions that we're making to the student and parent handbook and then in our administrative procedures after the board approves our policies then we amend our administrative procedures so you on page 506 of four colon 180 you see in red what h look is recommending there's a real quick question on it um this is going to be general in nature so god forbid
191this ever happens again we can institute this policy right off the bat with regard to the masks right okay and typically is this many of you on the board know you keep your board language a little more vague or kind of piggybacking on that and taking a slightly different twist you would do something that wasn't quite as specific to a mask but for where we are right now and since we don't know the duration of time we wanted to put it to add a little teeth to it in terms of enforcement because it is a real strong point in terms of how our staff feels about kids wearing masks unless they have a medical exemption and the same with visitors and other members of of the building so we we felt strongly about we wanted
192to layer that in as uh almost to provide a little comfort and relief so we put it into policy i think it may and it makes a ton of sense to me to specifically call out masks at this point yeah because if not there are so many wiggle arounds and that our staff feels comfortable and then we say people are going to wear masks they're going to wear them right and there's something behind it because if they're not comfortable you know it's going to be very hard for them to deliver that quality education that we need for the kids correct so i'm sorry just really quickly reading through this do we and i know um h took a look at this already do we want to put students and anyone else in the building because
193i think the language that we're referencing here is strictly to students and maybe i'm missing something and reading it but i don't think it references anybody else no i think you're right michael i see what you're saying it might get that first paragraph this is this was going to go into the handbook so second sentence and then anywhere where it just says students it's a good grab it can be staff visitors help me think of who else it could be anybody that's working within the building so contractors i'm sorry having a word retrieval and i think you might you might be able to just leave it to including but not limited to those people even better yeah spoken like a lawyer i do know in the handbook already um we added the visitor portion like
194any visitor in the school school building is required to wear a mask so included but not limited to students must wear yes yes students students visitors staff yeah students staff visitors volunteers contractors third yeah third party contracts all right and then typically we do not as you know do a first and a second read in one board meeting but because we would like to have this approved by you if you're comfortable before school begins we're asking you to do that at the same time but we will not make that a habit you know if we can help it that's fine is that good any other any other comments about your contract or no no we had we had to have we didn't even ask the law firm like should we include it in um our
195like student appearance or any other places and the law firm was was very confident if we just put it if we added to this pandemic preparedness that we were fine but then we did wanted to reference it also in student behavior just so we had that cross reference all right thank you anything for 4 4 we put public comment in here because we knew it was around you know we had it at the beginning but then we we also spelled it out here if anybody had you know comment we don't have to people can always comment on a topic but we explicitly put it here if anybody were here and wanted to make a comment are we still make having a virtual option for public comment we have since we're back kind of in business
196we are not we're going back to our typical practice we did that while we were in an earlier stage and we had a smaller gathering number and when this was under construction um but we did not intend to know i think that it was driven by the number being 10 or less yeah that makes sense so it was and we have a we have this set up with socially distance 34 seats we had a overflow area in the auditorium that you know we could rotate people in and out of as you know this my staff was outside to allow maximum you know seating to the public so we had a plan to have more than 35 that could address the board we were just going to use two locations and move people in and out
197perfect i just want to make sure that we name that for people for next meeting if they do want to say something and then the last thing in this section 4.5 it you know is a resolution that some of our some of the school districts are using in terms of of having their boards of education you know sign on the dotted line if you will you know about the return to learn plans um and there's a number of things and piggybacked with the policy number to really talk through and and hit um section number four i'll start with if it's okay uh modification to policy policies and procedure the board hereby suspends any board policies and administrative procedures in conflict with the foregoing plan and delegation of authority delegates the to the superintendent the authority
198to suspend revised administrative procedures and district protocols in conflict with the plan we've called out the two big ones we updated the pandemic and student discipline but if there were any other um board policies that we didn't formally update to align with the plan the two that we did being the largest two um you would have we would be covered in terms of we would never want to be in violation of a written board policy so that's why section four is so critical and why we chose to bring the two most highly recommended policies forward that we made those changes to so then i'll go back if it's okay just to section one i'll kind of talk you through these they're fairly self-explanatory even though they're written in legalese i can look to michael and
199zubair if we need anything translated into non-lawyer english section 1 return to learn the board has reviewed the return to learn plan um and discussed its proposed content and we hope you know we'll adopt this plan at the end of you know this segment of the meeting section two schedule for implementation of the return to learn plan the board has reviewed the superintendent's proposed schedule uh which the 20 20 21 school year would commence and hereby approves that schedule so that's the rolling portion starting remote and the rolling portion of opening school section three delegation of authority the board delegates to the superintendent the discretion and then there's five areas authorized to approve implement interpret and interpret the foregoing plan and determine the means and method for operating the schools and delivering instruction pursuant to
200such plan and any subsequent revisions or amendments there too in accordance with applicable state federal law and regulations and in compliance with local state and federal guidance to the extent reasonably practical two periodically review and amend the plan and we've done that from the july to august meeting and i did share with the board that i would intend to bring any updates to subsequent meetings so we just have a you know a kind of a constant item on the agenda where we'll be talking about the plan and how things are going and any changes that we've made um and that's that's part of school code section 1030 of the school code implement the proposed schedule for implementation of the plan with the authority to revise such schedule as deemed appropriate prepare administrative procedures and we
201will do that as dr kalchik said to the two plans that we talked the two press policies that we brought forth today and delegate responsibility discretion and authority is needed to accomplish the same we've talked about four five is enforcement the board and superintendent are hereby authorized to enforce compliance for the forward plan and administrative procedures for student staff and visitors pursuant to the general and specific provisions and processes of all applicable board policies administrative procedures and law number six is something that i've talked a little bit with um you know what's hard number seven is uh the one i've talked with frank about or via email closure of buildings for educational purposes and to the public six and seven have to do with really limiting um outside use of the facility during this pandemic
202period so we just have two the extent that we think we should just our employees and students and we're going to limit visitors to the extent that we can so due to the possibility of proven 19 exposure and district facilities or resurgence of the pandemic during the 20-20-21 school year the superintendent is authorized after consultation with the board president and notification to the board to suspend in-person learning to close any school buildings or districts facilities or portions thereof or bus routes without further action by the board either pursuant to the plan approved in this resolution the directive of the governor or the state superintendent of education or the directive of recommendation of public health authorities or at the discretion of the superintendent in consultation with public health authority such closures shall continue under such time
203as the superintendent in consultation with appropriate local state and federal health and governmental authorities determines that it is the best interest of the district and its students to open school for in-person learning and or to open school buildings or district facilities upon making such determination the superintendent shall promptly notify the board and as soon as practicable thereafter she'll present the district's plan for reopening for approval by the board at a dually noticed board meeting which may be either a regular meeting or a special meeting seven has to do with community use in order to effectuate the order of the governor and other local state and federal guidance regarding social distancing gathering restrictions on all but essential activities the board hereby delegates to the superintendent the authority to restrict facility usage under policy eight colon 20
204community use of school facilities and to require third parties using school facilities to comply with applicable applicable public health guidances the board delegates to the superintendent the authority to allow use of district facilities as deemed necessary as appropriate to cooperate with the illinois emergency management agency and other local state and federal government entities community service agencies hospitals for community support or relief efforts related to coping 19. section 8 has to do with the duration the provision of this resolution will apply during the period of disaster proclamation currently in effect or any sublime subsequent public health disaster declarations related to covert or related or successor viruses that is effective for part or all of the school district and for a reasonable time thereafter as may be necessary to restore normal operations following the end of the
205disaster proclamation but in any event no later than june 30th except as that date may be extended by action of the board and lastly section 9 has to do with execution of this resolution this resolution may be signed in counterparts or on successive dates following its adoption any signature line in this resolution not signed manually by the board president board secretary may be signed electronically or deemed to be signed through email or other electronic communication with the same force in effect as the original execute signed document which this is the first uh to the illinois electronic commerce security act so we're going to do it live so i wanted to to just have a discussion about these sections do anything seem like we'd like to discuss that we need clarity that we have concerns about
206this was certainly you know recommended by hlerk just to make sure that that the board was aware and involved and received information about the plan and as we did in july took general consensus in terms of how to operationalize the plan which options we should move forward to you know further investigate and develop i mean just to understand the point of the whole thing a lot of the things that it's delegating for authority seems to already be with you is it this is just inc it almost seems like we've we've adopted we've decided to change a couple of board policies and h are the attorneys are basically telling us that well and just in case there aren't any other policies down the road that we're not thinking of right now instead of going through each
207policy and making the edits now that's number four section four enforcement closure of the educational i think number six is critical because should we need to close we wouldn't want to have to convene an emergency board meeting to do so i think that's why six is pretty significant enforcement it just it it authorizes us to do what we need to do relative to the administrative procedures um seven i think it just puts out there um an awareness that we're not going to to use um to allow folks to use the uh the board policy under 820 to use our facilities because we really want to restrict access to our buildings to only those people that have to be there so that you know the duration and um it just clarifies that this is in effect
208until we're in phase four or until the end of june so you know i think a lot of this is just some some level of legal protection um tort indemnification is certainly built in there you know for the administrators operationalizing this plan for the board for the district i think that that's important um and i think the other thing that it does is it kind of unites us in terms of our efforts around this return to learn plan you know on behalf of the communities elected officials as well as the superintendent you know in which you've hired in my team you know that i've hired so that's kind of the long and short of when i talked with heather brookman at h fleur you know as to why many districts were doing a resolution and
209that kind of came my way from in between the july meeting and this meeting i mean is it is it your understanding i honestly don't know the answer to this is of you know like when we had closed the the the schools in the spring it didn't really require the the the board to to have a vote on it it was an emergency that had to be done the governor you know shut us down yeah i mean that's when we were planning to do it already weren't well i made the decision to shut down because he didn't and then the next day he did because so many districts made the decision so i think zubair's point is that we didn't we weren't planning to take a vote to act to close schools that you were
210able to do that on your own so this is just formalizing the fact that you've been able to do that on your own this whole time is how i'm under okay and because we're not in an emergency right okay i mean there are still many elements of you know an emergency with with cohen but we're not closing you know sure sure and then and i think the other part of it is approving like in section six saying that you know when we're when we're are we formally approving these plans like the plan that you presented today um a return to school is that something that requires the board to no i don't know that's it's something that we've done as a measure of consultation and compensation with the public which is a good idea but
211it's not really i think required no other than the tort you know immunity component that so that that would be you know i think important coverage for the district that the resolution provides yeah i don't know i mean me personally i don't i don't have a problem with it i don't have a problem with the person i just don't understand its purpose so my question was on section four if we are suspending any board policies that we could be notified that the board in the same way that you did with the others but i just want to make sure that if there are changes to policies that we are at least informed i don't know that we will i don't intend to yeah but i haven't combed through all of them to know that there
212weren't any others that we would need to the two that we brought forth were those recommended by hlerk obviously the pandemic makes sense and then the discipline because of the requirement of face coverings yeah we're the two and then we'll do another tier we'll link those revised policies to the handbook that we're actually just doing an overhaul on right now but not not as part of copen and then it would be lisa and sam that would sign off on this as the president and there's the secretary all right we're on the school campaign is still here okay let's see what's next so it looks like the school calendar hold on we're at 5.2 school calendar uh-huh just looking for it here so what is that eight or four rather that may help me there's five
213two i just need to find it's probably in this one here it is okay so all right so what you have before you is there are two um state e-learning days that replace due to tuesday student attendance days and the addition of the teacher plan day so i talked with you about those days but that is what's reflected in this calendar the state just like when we went into an emergency closure in the spring they gave teachers five days to plan if they needed to use up to the five e-learning days we're taking two so we've adjusted the start of the school year as i shared with you earlier and then we did the swap out for the november 3rd teacher plan because we're not allowed to have anybody in school and i think it's
214it just wound up being just perfect that we had to get rid of it because i really do think that teachers two institute days t two days of rich e-learning professional development and then they're gonna have a day to just plan and do whatever they need to do to feel ready to open the school year so it kind of those those five days are are nicely aligned now and that riff that is why you have a proposed calendar change here in the packet to reflect those days and then and the june 4th end date is inclusive of five snow days or weather days right we don't have to make up those days with the e-learning days so this should and who knows if we'll ever use the snow day again because now that we're getting
215so good at e-learning we may never have to take another snow day or cold weather day oh let's go we'll see we'll see i said maybe [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] yeah okay so that that is what uh by two is any questions no okay perfect all right um we have a motion for the reading and accepting of minutes please following meetings in the board of education june 10 2020 regular board of education meeting and executive session and july 7th 2020 special committee of the whole meeting as presented second any discussion all those in favor all right and the opposed ocean carries um item 7.1 and red frank okay so seems to be the the hottest topic is uh the tour community um which has to do with the fact that most insurance uh general liability insurance
216for illinois schools exclude pandemic and viruses so that's a i guess that'd be a big concern that we we have i don't know how much you've talked to the our legal team about that but um there has been discussion with the state legislature to see if they can do something to kind of close that that hole because what would happen is that the schools could be liable for the defending any claims and paying any any awards that made come come out of those uh court cases and the insurance companies would not cover any of that so the one possible you know fix is that they would extend uh the immunity for kobit 19 related claims and then the other thing would be if they were to pass legislation it would actually make the insurance companies
217uh required to remove that that virus exclusion so those are two possible fixes theoretically the the illinois tort reform act should cover the schools uh as long as the schools don't do anything that is egregious and neglectful with regards to protecting the students um but you could still get get you know get sued and then go through this long process which could take you know years and could drain resources only to find out then that you know you're not really liable because of illinois tart reform act but again that would that would still cost money and time and effort so there are some districts across the state that are wondering you know they're so concerned that they don't know if they should even open right you're right you know so that's that's something that they're
218pushing to have the illinois legislature take a look at and see if they can plug that hole so that schools are more inclined to to be able to open as opposed to just being closed because they're afraid to open yeah so currently under the tort reform act administrators and school personnel unless they have egregious mistakes or agree just have conduct are you know are immune from lawsuits right is it right the current state of it pandemic component is a different element which is why resolutions are being suggested it's an added layer of protection yeah and even though you're right that that would help defend them against the cases they still could have the cases brought against them and still would have to go through all the cost of the lawyers and the time and the
219effort yeah there's no duty to defend they could still yeah they'd still win because of the illinois reform act but they could still have to go through all the expenditure and time and resources i think that's the big one too yeah that's that's all i wanted to say thank you very much good mic one five foundation no report at this time not that great um anthony may i quickly just say something about the one you missed um they adopted gms you know it was going to be the first school that we were going to do like a combined um flexible learning space so that's kind of like the cadillac where the the that space has a variety of different little uh virtual learning or flexible learning vignettes if you will that the one five will
220continue to do fundraising around for the next three to five years until hopefully all of our schools have those spaces and gms looks great carpet has been painted the furniture's starting to come in you know sadly no one's going to be there right at the beginning of the year but at some point everyone the kids the teachers um and staff will really enjoy that space so i just wanted to to let you know that we're closing in on having gms done we'll take some pictures and we'll show you some pictures of the next board meeting okay sorry mike no we're good no worries uh finance committee yeah we have not met but one thought that i have um in between now and the final budget in september would you like us to schedule i would
221recommend and yes i would recommend that we have a meeting with the board finance committee and move through that um final development okay so i'll reach out or julie if you could reach out with the three of us find a date see uh when anthony and then we'll get some on the books between now and before the meeting next meeting equity committee to bear sam um we do need to schedule a meeting that was gonna be my point too um i am also gonna join tom and his team that's re um envisioning our gifted program and so that's a piece of thinking about as we were looking at the opportunity gaps that exist across the district which feels like that was that presentation was five years ago now um was just a few months ago
222uh and making sure that our gifted program is actually representative of um the student population that we have meeting and then if i would also like to suggest that you and i have a meeting with the consultant that we're using laura belchenko um so we'll try to schedule two meetings okay really cool so you could let julie know when you're some days and times that are best for you we'll i'll work i'll reach out to laura and we'll schedule two meetings great and i think they've i've been in on some of the meetings on the curriculum social studies concur you know i'm dealing with uh the um equality and uh how how we're teaching african-american history and civil rights history uh that's something that i've been i've sat on i have to kind of um
223join in with where they are at right now in terms of those actions and i think also the sel component that you know is it's ro it's a lot more seo going on a lot of some of that is also going to have a focus on some of these equity issues and and things like that that's going to be incorporated into the sel component of what's out there so that there was also committees that were in on that as well so i think social studies meeting the sel i think what's happening in 211 in terms of students um that student activism i think we can kind of layer some of their work in into the work that we're doing yep okay so we'll kind of yeah so maybe it just makes it logan set up
224a meeting i would love that that sounds like fun we can put these things on the agenda and then take it from there okay yeah because i know the other piece that we had talked about starting sort of pre covid was developing an equity statement for the district as well and getting that process started once we are in the swing of school all right um um yeah item 8.1 a motion please make a motion to approve the august 11 2020 personnel report as presented second discussion can you hold after one second as amended the [Music] um discussion i make a motion to approve the resolution of the board of education of community consolidated school district 15 approving the fall 2020 21 revised school return to learning plan has presented second discussion welcome hunt hi hi
225everyone's i make a motion to approve the resolution of the board of education of ccsd 15 cook county illinois authorizing an inter-fund transfer as presented second discussion all right hi eder [Music] 8.4 motion please i'll make a motion to approve the resolution providing for the issue not to exceed 14 million 565 000 dollars in general obligation limited tax school bonds of the district for the purpose of altering and reconstructing school buildings and purchasing and installing equipment therein for fire prevention safety energy compensate conservation and school security purposes providing for the levy of a direct annual tax to pay the principal and interest on said bonds and authorizing the proposed sale of said bonds to purchaser thereof as presented second discussion 8.5 motion please make a motion to ratify the bid award and execution of a
226trade contract with ams mechanical systems woodridge illinois the amount of one million seven hundred and ninety nine thousand dollars for the 2020 boiler replacement work and assignment of the contract to nicholas and associates inc as construction manager pursuant to an assignment of contractor agreement as set forth in the board's contract with nicholas associates inc further motion to ratify and approve project authorization exhibit number three with nicholas and associates inc to provide construction management services for the 2020 boiler replacement work as presented second discussion motion carries item 8.6 i make a motion to award the contract for non-commodity food products 21-001 to cole wholesale of quincy illinois in the amount of 547 891 dollars and eight cents gordon food service of grand rapids michigan in the amount of 179 321 dollars and two cents and performance
227food service of montgomery illinois in the amount of 39 188 and 25 cents for a total bid award of seven hundred and sixty six thousand four hundred dollars and thirty five cents as presented second discussion aye ayder i annarino aye hunt aye khan aye sloka aye aye motion carries item 8.7 motion please i make a motion to award the contract for usda commodity food products 21-002 to jtm food group harrison ohio in the amount of 13 842.90 landa lakes arden hill minnesota in the amount of forty two thousand two hundred and forty seven dollars and eleven cents performance food service montgomery illinois in the amount of thirty three thousand four hundred and seven thousand um four hundred and seven dollars and ninety cents coal wholesale quincy illinois in the amount of four hundred and six
228thousand four hundred and ninety five dollars and cents and gordon food service grand rapids michigan in the amount of seventy six thousand eight hundred and fifty eight dollars and ten cents for a total bid award of five hundred and seventy two thousand eight hundred and fifty one dollars and twenty six cents as presented motion carries item 8.8 motion please make a motion to approve the purchase of second step social emotional learning sel kits and licenses for grades k through 6 at a total cost of 145 thousand and nine dollars and 80 cents as recommended second discussion anna reno hi hunt hi khan 8.9 make a motion to approve the purchase of american reading company 100 book challenge spanish book baskets at the total cost of the curriculum and materials of eighty six thousand eight hundred
229and eighty dollars as presented second discussion motion carries item 8.10 i make a motion to approve the purchase of the alex math program fourth and fifth grade add-on at a total cost of resources for the five-year term of the contract of 121 490 dollars as presented second discussion hi hi wong hi aider i'm iannarino hi hunt aye motion carries item 8.11. may i ask you to pause on that for a minute colleen mullins who is uh who oversees reading or literacy and district has been texting with me um can i step up for just a moment you can proceed with these others all right moving on eight point eleven motion please i make a motion all right i'll take that one gloria would have been in for a nice surprise make a motion approve the
2302020-2021 revised official school calendar as presented second discussion roll call motion carries item 8.13. i make a motion to approve the purchase of the goguardian suite content filtering remote classroom management and school mental health tools at a total cost of 38 920 as recommended second discussion wong hi aider aye and reno hi khan hi hunt hi smoka hi hi motion carries item 8.11 okay so um so the motion that you have before you is to making a motion to buy additional fontes and panel readers notebooks that we need that we use on a regular basis for 60 not to exceed 60 thousand dollars colleen was texting to say she had written something but she doesn't see it in here and we just finished sectioning everything today and doing special area sectionings and getting everybody where
231we need to go we have additional sections that we have to open at each grade level because we have lower numbers in um lower class sizes in person and then we have the virtual classrooms so she would like either to do a combined 8.11 or maybe we separate them out and do 811 and then we can do a new 814 to say and not to exceed mount not to exceed amount of eighty thousand dollars to buy additional um fontis and pinella materials to support our increased sections that we've had to create because of you know where we are with okay so we're adding the motion at eight point fourteen you can combine eight eleven or you can have 814. it's up to you do tell us and 8.14 is going are we not excited you
232know an additional 80 000 or it's adding 20 to that it's an additional 80. good question so the readers notebooks were a budget we're an expense that we know we needed to have for the reader's notebooks so we're either changing that one to not not to exceed 140 000 right and instead of saying readers notebooks that could say fantastic panel reading materials okay that's that's actually clean makes it easier so reading materials and then adjust the number from not to exceed 60 000 to not to exceed 140 000 okay perfect that's great i apologize buddy i'm glad we caught it to approve the request to purchase spontaneous fontans and pinell reading materials not to exceed 140 000 as recommended second further discussion hi hi wang hi aider aye iannarino all right motion carries uh consent
233calendar would anyone like to remove anything from the consent calendar if not emotion please yeah i make a motion to approve the consent calendar as presented second roll call ater i annarino hi motion carries dr hans correspondents i have to even see it don't recall i know we have some we had four four through four i was gonna say remember the number um freedom of information act requests we've given you copies of them do you have any questions so moved second all right