001uh thank you and welcome everyone this evening um it to our august 23rd study session um just some updated changes um since i asked for updated changes last time with kind of capacity constraints in in the building and things like that we are going to continue live streaming both the study sessions and our board um regular board meetings so just for those of you um at home listening we are going to continue to do live so that everyone has a chance to hear it live also i'm going to make sure that just going forward that we do have silence during the board meetings it is a time for us to you know discern as a board and have board discussion and i'm going to make sure that the audience is completely silent so if i
002do hear of anyone making any noise i'm going to ask you to leave okay and then signs are absolutely fine just as long as they don't are not safety hazard to anyone and that they don't impede anyone's view so that's absolutely fine okay all right so um with that i'm going to turn it over to purpose and agenda with dr stahlo thank you good evening board members and our public it's always good to have a full room the purpose of study sessions is so that we can share information back and forth and make sure that board members have the information that they need to make wise and effective decisions at the board table this evening as we go through the agenda you can see that the first item of business is under the operations oversight
003of operations is our prior lake savage area schools back to school safe learning plan we'll also hear a little bit about an enrollment update to see where we are as well as a bond refinancing discussion from there we'll have a follow-up to the american indian parent advice and parent advisory group written response that was presented a few months ago we'll hear a little bit about the technology levy move into a lease shelter lease agreement there is no policy this evening so that is the end of the agenda for the evening and i know that that aligns with chairwell the working document that the board uses to guide their work okay all right so with that i think we are at the back to school safe learning plans excellent good thank you dr edwards for assisting
004with me again good evening everyone i'm here with a team who's going to be presenting portions of this and we're here on behalf of our entire admin team who has been working continue to work through evolutions and changes into our recommendations of our prior lake savage area schools back to learning plan we're excited for the return of students and staff and have really been planning for this for months long before the end of last year and our goal is to ensure that our students can be in school in person five days a week and we wanted to be sure that we included some of those faces right as educators teaching and learning is our expertise and we're really good at working with students and providing them the opportunities for high levels of learning and support
005during the covet 19 pandemic we've been challenged to do this very differently and in order for us to continue to remain agile with the changing landscapes we know that we've had to have a lot of intentional plans we always prioritize a safe and healthy learning environment for teaching and learning and this year we have been even more intentional about the planning for the beginning of the year because of the lessons that we learned through last year in preparation for the upcoming year so our outcomes this evening thanks dan our outcomes this evening at our last board meeting on august 9th we shared information about the district's health and safety protocols our safe learning plan as well as information about laker online we discussed our ongoing collaboration with scott county public health and our discussions with
006them and other school districts about using a decision-making matrix to guide safety protocol protocols especially those around masking requirements tonight we'll share that information we also have lisa brodsky from scott county public health joining us virtually on this meeting in addition to the health and safety we'll also be sharing information about the academic and social and emotional that has been in place as well and at the end of this meeting i will be asking board members for consideration of a board resolution around the health and safety measures as we opened up the school year much like we did last year so with that the presentation this evening as always is aligned to our strategic plan tonight we'll be talking specifically about the strategic directions that center around improving student achievement school safety and social emotional
007learning and the engagement of our students staff community members and parents to strengthen a culture of respect and inclusion the intentional planning with which we have to navigate the pandemic is aligned to those strategic directions it looks like they're going to fly in so you can go ahead and have them all fly in at one stand and we've got district administrators who really will be focusing on that priority work especially uh at the beginning here around strategic directions one and five are academic and social and emotional learning and then we will move later into the safe learning plan and strategic directions that align to that so with that i will go ahead and hand it over to dr dan edwards who is our teaching and learning director to begin the presentation then he'll be sharing
008this time with colleagues all right so i'm going to be the first of a few administrators who are going to speak to our work in strategic direction one and specifically the areas of instructional excellence mtss multi-teacher systems of support and educational equity and excellence and i'm going to jump in with the first one on instructional excellence just as a brief reminder why or what is instructional excellence here in prior lake savage area schools we definitely have had taken the lead we feel very strongly about our laker learning compass that guides our work and we feel that that compass has given us great direction to personalize the learning experience and we were to to recall or recap we were on that journey prior to covet but most definitely as dr stahlo pointed out in her opening
009comments we learned a lot during the last 18 plus months and our implementation of personalized learning looks very different and looked very different and will continue to look different as we move forward and what personalized learning has taught us during this time is the importance of being able to do that as we throughout these past 18 months during covet we had to as we know shift our approaches we had to get devices in the hands of students who didn't have devices to personalize their experience so they could learn interactively at home while we weren't able to be in person together and throughout that i think our focus here of teacher directed teacher-directed student-centered and student-driven came to reality that being said we learned a lot during covid about how to do that and do that
010better and we're looking forward to workshop week next week when we get all our staff back together and we can take those lessons that we've learned and build upon them for example just give you one concrete example one of the things we're going to do on tuesday morning is bring teachers together in a vertical conversation vertical conversations across grade levels to have the opportunity to benefit from first grade teachers teaching second grade teachers what they need to know about the incoming class to them for example and we're going to find we're building time into our staff development time on tuesday morning for that when teachers report back so just one example of of the work that we're going to do to lean into what we learned and move that forward for the benefit of all
011and obviously for the benefit of our students one of the other things that we've also learned through this time is the importance that once again the student voices project work that we did last year we that really came to fruition throughout the year as we learned so much from our students throughout the process and as we move forward we want to capitalize on that learning so again the point of emphasis here is that students and teachers have had a shared responsibility always have and always will uh that we work in partnership to achieve achieve that instructional excellence framework that we pride ourselves on and probably like savage area schools and use that compass to guide that work so we are going to continue that learning journey and again we had uh 23 new teachers in
012this morning who we along with 23 mentors to support that work and we had a great uh gathering with them uh today and took them on a bus tour and bringing them into prior lake savage area schools and helping them understand what this is all about to be a member of probably like savagery schools helping bring our great work forward i want to give you a brief while i have the floor here for a moment give you a brief update on laker online as you know two weeks ago i was here presenting to you uh that we had received approval to be a provisional online provider in early august we received that approval on august 9th we got uh we presented a staffing proposal to you to get us off the ground and running and
013that was a three fte proposal two at the elementary level one at the secondary level we opened up the registration as we said we would august 10th through the 17th and i'm pleased to report we had a strong response demand if you will 148 registrants k-12 and that certainly our initial when we presented the staffing we we didn't know what to expect per se and so we are coming back tonight and requesting and this will be a part of our your school board meeting on wednesday uh in a formal sense uh requesting 2.0 additional classroom fte to allow us to align with our current class size targets across the district and what that would look like more specifically would be one additional one at the elementary level and one additional at the secondary level again
014as we spoke earlier as i spoke two weeks ago we'll be having some great banding going on um and this will allow us to do so again this is acknowledging the existing registrants that were within that time frame that original 10th through the 17th as well as a 0.5 fte to support we do have students who are coming to us and have iep needs and so we need additional support to support the needs of those enrolled students now later on this evening as we continue this presentation and look at safe learning plan we are prepared to make the adjustments necessary should there be adjustments around laker online we will be prepared to to do that according to the future of this agenda and work study session this evening so and i certainly will be available
015to help clarify what that means as we move forward so with that i'm going to turn it over to uh my co my multiple colleagues but first i'm going to turn it over to ms goodman thank you the area focus i'm talking about tonight is multi-tiered systems of support mtss at its core mtss is about finding out where students are and providing them what they need so that's represented here in the diamond all students receiving a differentiated rigorous curriculum some students needing intervention some needing enrichment to ensure that all of our students are appropriately challenged and engaged both academically and socially now more than ever it's important to know exactly where our kids are to meet them there and provide the supports they need to get them where they need to go next so mtss
016begins with assessments which give us information about individual individual students that drives the work teachers do making database decisions and we've already made some intentional changes to great start to kindergarten and assessment days at the elementary level to ensure that we understand students skills and provide opportunities for students to engage that multi-level instruction is what teachers are providing based on the information that they have about students and then part of the infrastructure and support are problem solving teams and that's another action that we're taking tomorrow all day is the first of a number of um problem solving team retraining so that all buildings and schools work to the same standards throughout and that's part of that fidelity and evaluation as well we looked at what was happening across the board and this is a way
017that we can ensure fidelity all right good evening superintendent stallow and members of the board tonight i have the privilege of explaining the priority work around educational equity and excellence educational equity involves meeting students where they're at and giving them what they need to succeed as a district that focuses on instructional excellence it is important for us to understand that our students come to us with different lived experiences different resources and different personal approaches towards learning all that was explained to us again through the lived experience of the pandemic so to put it simply what we do in educational equity is we want to make sure all students have what they need to be successful we want to ensure everyone feels a sense of belonging and we want everyone to be respected for who they
018are this ensures that this makes us have to celebrate and validate what our students are coming to us with and making sure that they feel safe and welcome in our school district regardless of their lived experiences now what we do we have committed a lot in terms of professional development around equity here one of the pieces that we were committed to is uh clr culturally and linguistically responsive teaching these are some of the strategies that are put in place here that helps us achieve our goals in equity and those goals are to be able to get engagement to deal with inequities we are committed to closing the achievement gaps and there are disparities here amongst our different subgroups in education ultimately and most importantly we want to give our students outrageous love like i said
019earlier we want to make our students feel welcome and safe in our school district now some of you have received emails and phone calls around crt critical race theory so those emails may have asked you do we teach crt in our classroom here to put it simply we do not teach crt in our classroom we do not crt has to do with a legal theory that was established 40 years ago what we do is not crt what we do is culturally and linguistically responsive teaching and basically what culturally and linguistically responsive teaching is is developing a knowledge base about cultural diversity and our school district is very diverse the last i looked we had over 40 different languages spoken in our schools here we make sure that our students feel represented in our curriculum and
020our instruction we want to be able to take their lived experiences and bring it in alive in our instruction here so students can feel like they are being appreciated in terms of our education and like i i think we've said before it's important to hear from our students because they have a lot to bring to the table in terms of educating knowing what's best to educate them we want to build caring and collaborative communities and we on to honor our diversity and respond to any concerns around our diversity here and that is culturally and linguistically responsive teaching it's clr not crt i will turn it over to them so the work of social emotional well-being is super important to us this school year especially as we're coming back we we had the good fortune of
021being able to prioritize this work with 160 plus staff members last week when we had our building instructional leadership teams in to kick off the school year we used the opportunity with those building instructional leadership teams to set the stage for this upcoming school year and we look forward to presenting this information to all staff next week oh i guess those just flew in didn't they all right this slide highlights some of the programs that we currently have in place in the district to address the student social emotional learning needs i'm just going to highlight a couple of them for you at each level at early childhood is the pyramid model which is very similar to pbis which is a k-12 initiative elementary is second step and responsive classroom middle school has ps growth produces
022success is what it stands for and the high school is in starting year two in the bar model which is building assets reducing risks so just as we have academic standards we also have social emotional learning standards and the standards are based off of castle and we are going to be focusing on these five competencies then throughout the school year so we'll just continue to dig deeper into the work we've already done as kate's coming up here i'll go ahead and uh and transition a little bit you just heard about the intentionality that our leaders and staff have been using in response to planning for our academic and social and emotional needs of our students strategic direction number five which kate is pulling up right now also calls us to maintain priority work around the
023physical health and safety of our students in consideration of the importance of ensuring success as we continue to navigate the coven 19 pandemic we we've continued to be intentional in our safe learning plan and the health and safety measures our goal like i said before is to keep students in school learning in person five days a week and in order to do that we must have students and staff who are safe and healthy we did communicate our prior lake savagery school back to school safe learning plans initially initially to our families on july 29th we presented here the safe learning plan on august 9th to all of you and then after that we put that information on our website uh where we invited input and feedback and we certainly got lots of feedback and input
024from our stakeholders we appreciate your experiences sharing your experiences your resources and your perspectives with us on august 9th we also discussed our continued work with scott county public health and shared that we were reviewing options to see what kind of a matrix we could use to use data for decision making we had been talking with scott county about that also talking and collaborating with other school districts about that as well to see if there would be something that we could use to determine when we would make changes in terms of safety protocols and mitigation strategies at this point i believe lisa brodsky from scott county public health is online with us so i'd like her to share a little information with us and then at that time i'll ask kate kyle our director of
025health our district health coordinator to share information about our matrix about the recommendations that have come from our incident command team hi lisa can you hear us hi i can hear you i can see you i can't see my slides yet but uh there we go there we go perfect now uh thank you very much uh for inviting me today to speak with you or this evening to speak with you a little bit about um covet and update my caveat is what i'm going to say today may not be true tomorrow uh this has been uh ongoing uh challenge to keep up with the very rapidly changing information uh next slide um i included this quote we declared victory too soon this is from commissioner jan malcolm a couple of weeks ago and it's so
026very true we um both the county and the state sunsetted the declaration of emergency we started putting our supplies away we pulled back on vaccinations and and now we have a resurgence of delta variant cases next slide please um this is what uh from the beginning of covert from 317 when scott county had our first case to today what we have seen um we started with very little cases which went up uh quite a substantial amount uh in the in november of last year and we did expect that second wave uh which you see here and what we didn't really expect was such a rapid uh rapidly escalating third wave this is how i'm defining this as of last week we've had 18 230 cases in scott county and unfortunately we've lost 134 of our
027residents to covet next slide please this isn't only in scott county it's not only in minnesota i've got i pulled the cdc as of just a couple hours ago what the entire united states looks like mostly we're red except for in a lot of places that um a couple places that have lower population you'll see the yellow red is a high transmission the orange represents substantial transmission in minnesota overall we're about in the 150s as a state we're doing a lot better than some of the southern parts of the country where for example florida is uh has 636 per 100 000 in the past seven days we're at about 150s and then you also see this the state map of minnesota here um scott county has been in the high range high transmission for the
028past week or so next slide so this is the seven day total rate for the past seven days per one hundred thousand um we're at the number's really tiny on my slide but i believe it says as i recall 155 this is um the per hundred thousand past seventy past uh seven days and that's a rolling average i wanna talk a little bit about how to interpret this number because last year we looked at something very different and i do have the that slide coming up here soon but this is a very different number than you looked at last year although this isn't a new number for the cdc this is how the cdc calculated it pretty much over the time of the pandemic and minnesota chose to use a different rate and i'll talk
029a little bit about that next next slide so what we've been used to for the 2021 safe learning plan was a rate over a population of a 10 000 rate uh where we took the total number of cases over the past 14 days and divided that by the county population over 10 000. so and i also actually included the learning parameters here but that gave us a 14 rate per 10 000 we had some big changes happening at about 30 where hybrid hybrid learning was for all elementary school and then we also set the secondary kids home at about 30. the community transmission rate of 155 per 100 000 is very in seven days is a lot closer to for 10 000. so what we have done next slide what we have done and what
030we continue to do for scott county school day even though minnesota department of education has retired that calculation we have continued scott county public health continues to calculate that rate for our school district so we can see kind of what what is the pattern where is this going to try and be able to compare apples to apples for our decision making so if you look at this slide here i have um right from last year until 8 1 8 14 and you can and that yellow bar across there is the 30 number so we're pretty much where we were at last year at this time i think as of today the 8 8 to 8 21 is is a little bit over 30 so we are over that 30 cut off and that again is
031past 14 days rate per 10 thousand next slide so another quote from the department of health everything has changed and nothing has changed um next slide and i say this um because when we look at the start of the school 2020 and 2021 you can see that graph this is broken out by age group we've got the blue is zero to four the green is five to eleven and then i believe it's black are the older kids um and we kind of identified a comparison uh from last year to this year we are in some cases right on almost exact for the older kids and a little bit higher um for the newer kids but it's pretty compe it's pretty close to where we were at this time last year so that hasn't changed uh
032next slide here are some things that are a little bit different and why we need to pay attention to this last year during the fall surge children under 10 roughly about five percent of the um were represented about five percent of the cases um and 10 to 19 were about 12 just in the past two months that doubled for those kids under 10. we're at about 9.6 um and 10 to 19 is just a little bit higher at 13 um a really um important statistic uh that i've added to the bottom here uh since 12 12 of 21 about 1.8 of the cases among were among children under 10 and 1.5 of the cases 10 to 19 were hospitalized this is more than double of what we saw between in the november and december of
033last year so it does appear that with the higher viral load kids are being more effective than they were last year next slide i just want to talk a little bit about what's the role of cdc mdh and local public health these are recommendations for from the cdc of what it's going to take to get kids back to school safely they are recommending universal indoor masks for all students to plus staff teachers anybody that comes to the school basically three foot social distancing a regular testing plan throughout the year for for those that aren't vaccinated and also just monitoring those outbreaks next slide please mgh's recommendations are very similar um when they talk about the best practices for covid uh they've got uh all their recommendations there vaccinations of course will be our number one
034and i will continue is continuing to be our number one uh remedy for this we're looking at i believe the breakthrough case rate is now at about point two four percent um so we do know that the vaccinations are are working and they are we'll be recommending some booster soon but consistent and correct use of mask use again mdh also strongly recommends masks in schools ventilation and hand washing and regular cleaning i know the school districts when we meet weekly their plans are very thorough and cover all of those things next line so what what is local public health role what we're doing we are the current recommendations for public health right now include a boosters for immuno-compromised individuals that should be finalized um for us at august 30th and we are hearing that eventually
035we will be doing the third round of shots for those that are about eight months out from their second dose uh vaccinations for children 5 to 11. we were hoping they would be here before the school before school started unfortunately that is not the case and they do keep pushing it back the last i heard was at the end of this year so but at the you know we the school districts are uh how we've talked to them as soon as we get those vaccinations we'll be out in the school districts offering those shots as quickly as we can sometime in the future we don't have any dates on this but again vaccines for children zero to four we will be recommending for local public health we'll recommend that those kids see their regular primary
036physician they are often at the physician for their regular vaccinations and we hope to that the primary care providers will be able to the pediatricians will be able to absorb those covered shots we continue to do case investigation and there are going to be some i understand there's contra case investigation requirements for the school districts as well and that will continue and then covet testing providing some of that cova testing we have been uh we'll be doing some more cover testing or at least provision of coping tests for some of our cities and local partners that are requiring that so regularly we meet with the superintendents once a week we've been meeting seems like a really long time almost 18 months it feels two years three years i don't know it's very ongoing we see
037no end in sight but they're great meetings they give us an opportunity to talk about what's going on in the schools the superintendents have a wonderful and particularly terry have wonderful finger on the pulse of what's going on in the schools how many cases what we're seeing we strategize we talk regularly i try and find data data data data this is a very data-driven uh decision-making process that we have when it comes to what are the recommendations that we are supporting um and next slide is just if anybody has any questions okay um any questions from the board anybody jonathan no i don't think so really okay a big thank you yes thank you for being here questions no no certainly was a lot of information yeah go ahead okay yeah i was just curious
038on the local public health recommendations that were provided at the end i was trying to take notes as quickly as i could so the recommendation is ages zero through four um get vaccinated through primary care providers five through eleven i hear that would be administered in schools do you hear that correctly or testing in schools no primary physician if i heard the question correctly our plan is to be in the schools um doing vaccinations for five to eleven as we were in the schools doing the 12 to 17 and when the zero to 14 vaccination comes likely at that time and that could change but the discussion around the at least the metro local public health jurisdictions is that we will are recommending that they go to their pediatrician or primary care providers for those
039vaccinations but again that could change but we want to capture the best place to capture kids that we did this during h1n1 as well best place to capture kids is is at school during the school today okay thank you um lisa i do have can you just go the rate that you had for the past 14 days i think you had 26.85 i just wanted to reiterate what that was yeah and what you had seen for a trend in the last because i remember hearing i thought at the last board meeting i'm trying to do we have an answer sorry i can't i can't hear the question i'm just trying to remember what we had at the last what our last i think it was 14 or something two weeks ago yep so um we're
040seeing uh and then did you did i hear you say 30 or right after yeah we're a little bit over 30 we're at about 30 um and this is from calculating it two yesterday and it's calculated based on the date that the test was done uh so that number could go up so we're at the minimum we're at about 30.65 as a test that were done yesterday but it usually typically takes 48 hours so my guess is by the time all the testing comes in will probably close be closer to about 31.32 okay and um my records indicate at least i could be wrong on that but the week ending july 31st i have 12. i'd have to go back but looking at the chart i mean yeah it looks about half of that and
041you know when we talk about number of cases just over the past few weeks like it was about six weeks ago we were seeing under 10 cases per week and then it jumped right really quickly to 50 of us in 33 cases and then we had 86 cases and then it was almost doubling after that we were seeing 160 200 we had um about almost 300 cases in the past week and i know lisa again i don't we didn't ask you to have this ready but you were in our incident command team meeting on thursday and i know that well during the meeting there were some questions about the age the age span of those positive cases yeah do you have any of that information that you could share with us um i don't have
042it for this week calculated yet but um and that's another little bit of a difference so up until about um two months ago about 15 overall about 15.1 percent of the cases were 19 and under right now when we look at those cases it's been hovering between 22 and 25 each week have been 19 years old and under so it's the school aged care so we are seeing a lot more cases with the school age kids and the graph is very telling because we hardly have any cases with the 65 plus which really jives with our fact the fact that we vaccinated about 99 of our 65 plus in the county johnson lisa could you just say that one more time quiet down please just just i'm clear 65 plus uh people who are 65
043plus in scott county our vaccination rate amongst those of those that had at least one vaccination is 99 and we have which and conversely we are hardly getting any new cases of those that are over 65 plus and thank you lisa can i can i ask do you have the vacation rates of the youth i do um we're over all about at 43 percent at is that like zero to 18 or what i guess 12 13. that would be 12 plus because we can't vaccinate right right right 12 anybody after 12 yet it's 40. uh i don't know if kathy do you have that um green and pink slide i sent you because it was presented at the last board meeting i think so we could right yeah i remember i just wanted so they're
044typical i mean it's trickling in it is changing over time we uh we did go up substantially i think i have a more up-to-date slide that i could send you um after the meeting um it i think it went up eight percent since we last since we first did that slide and that to me is very positive that the kids are out there they're getting vaccinated a little bit at a time but quite a few of them you know sports related opportunities uh i mean they're they're they're getting there but um they're nowhere near where we need to be i believe um in order to get kind of that community of community we're gonna need to see at least you know 80 85 with levels of vaccinations before we um or hopefully before we stop
045seeing any of the of the variants 96 of the cases in minnesota right now are delta variant according to the department of health so okay and it's much more contagious whereas the original alpha variant um the r naught or how many people you give it to was about three for the for the first wave delta variant you're looking at at about seven so it's twice as contagious and the viral load is much higher so those are some of the differences right now okay any other questions all right thank you lisa thank you lisa thank you have a good night thank you thank you much before reviewing our kovit 19 decision decision making matrix i want to review covid19 testing opportunities at school at this time families will be provided resources to pursue testing in the
046community routine testing will not be conducted due to difficulties gaining legal consent the school's inability to hold multiple ill students quiet quiet the school's inability to hold multiple ill students and staff safely in the building and concerns regarding staff handling potential positive kovi kovid 19 test kits prior lake savage area schools will partner with local public health if needed to provide on-site testing in the school community as terry mentioned we want to ensure we have a plan in place based on the covid19 case data the recommendation from the covid19 incident command team is to use the following to make for mask to matrix for mask decision making the left corresponds to the same unit of data the minnesota department of education and the minnesota department of health used last year to make decisions on the
047learning model requirements and covid19 protocols the district will review school district and county case rate data as well as minnesota department of health and cdc guidance with our kovid 19 incident command team each thursday if the scott county case rate exceeds 20 per 10 000 in the last 14 days and the trend suggests that the rate increase is going to continue prior lake savage area schools would require masks for all children in the school setting including early learning through grade 8. eight adults working in these settings would also be required to wear a mask if working with or around students regardless of vaccination status if the scott county case rate suggests or exceeds 50 per 10 000 in the last 14 days and the trends suggest that the rate increase is going to continue prior
048lake savage area schools would require masks for all students staff and visitors regardless of vaccination status based on our most recent data from the week ending august 14th our current 14-day case rate is 26.85 covid19 case rate data ends each saturday but remains preliminary for 14 days our partners at scott county public health give us a calculated case rate five days after the week concludes to help us determine as soon as possible what's incurring in our community as far as covid case rates based on this matrix if board approved we would beginning the school year requiring masks for students and staff in the early learning through grade 8 buildings in addition to the covid19 case rates in scott county other decision-making factors would include our trend data influenza-like illness cases at each building positive covid19
049cases at each site and in each classroom and district staffing and operations in addition to using scott county case rates for decision making prior lake savage area schools will also utilize additional local data for decision making i will review influenza like illness data at each school daily influenza like illness is defined as a fever of 100 degrees or higher accompanied by a sore throat or cuff that is not related to any other diagnosis such as strep throat the covid19 incident command team will review ila data at each site weekly and utilize the matrix above for decision making if the ili rate exceeds 3 percent the incident command team will determine if additional mitigation strategies need to be implemented at the specific building level which could include requiring masking increased social distancing or another mitigation strategy
050absences due to illness without specific symptoms would be reported in that ili case rate each building will track covid19 cases and i will review this data daily the kovid19 incident command team will convene immediately if three or more covid cases occur in a classroom or specific building rates drastically increase the incident command team will determine additional mitigation strategies that will be implemented at the specific building and classroom level to include requiring masking and possible quarantines prior lakes schools will also be reviewing staffing as far as absences substitute fill rates and position openings to determine operational capabilities department and school level data will inform the covid19 incident command team to determine if additional mitigation strategies will be implemented at a building department or district-wide level questions we can just go into the resolution and then they'll
051be ready for questions i'm sure as you can see board members we have intentionally planned both the academic and the social emotional needs of our students we've intentionally planned for for preparing the year with those things in mind those lessons that we learned last year as we were in navigating the pandemic and we've also been really intentional with how we're looking at the safe and healthy protocols right now as well in terms of between the last meeting and the conversation we had into where we are tonight with our recommendation are happy to answer any questions again what i would i would be seeking from you is approval on the resolution the health and safety measures resolution that you have a draft of that would direct me to implement life learning plan and then to continue
052to monitor work with our man team and all of you to make decisions um throughout the year as needed similar to what we did last year so with that i've got a team of folks who are ready to answer any questions that you might have yeah first of all i want to say thank you this is a lot of information i know you've been working long hours to gather data thank you to lisa as well for bringing it together i'm sure you're not getting a lot of sleep as you navigate all of this i also want to thank you because as i recall from our last meeting when we presented the safe learning plan the board provided some consensus that we would like to see some metrics so we know what we're looking for if
053we needed to adjust or change so i want to thank you for the time you put into doing that and i'll let my fellow board members comment on that so the question i have after listening to data here is um you know lisa was very clear in the trends she's seeing it's interesting to hear the data broken down by age groups and comparing it to last year and having accurate numbers how is this variant different we don't know what the fda's plan is when we will have access to a vaccine for those kids so the listening to that data and also you know we've all had several phone calls and emails since our last meeting and including talking to i've spoken to medical providers in our own community and pediatric icu staff so for the
054sake of discussion i love having the metrics and is it worth considering that we k-8 where we can't where nobody has a choice if they do or do not want a vaccine that we start with masks watch the data watch the trending and then and kind of go forward from there so in other words i understand by looking at the data now based on the metrics you've provided we would start in masks anyway i would push that we'd be just a little bit stronger and get into our school year and watch the data coming in does that make sense as opposed to strictly metrics now at the high school level people had the choice to get the vaccine or not so i understand that firm recommendation and that if things get out of control and
055it's a wildfire that we're going to have to implement safety measures for their sake so for the sake of discussion with fellow board members i'm i'm kind of feeling like not an open ended all year but until we kind of see where everything's going to settle after school starts and perhaps when vaccines are available do we want to tie it strictly to metrics which nobody state or federal wants to provide school boards right now right it's getting passed along or do we want to be a little more firm on that does that question make sense okay except for discussion anybody um i'll i'll hop in um you know what the guidance coming from all the public health folks is highly recommended highly recommended highly recommended which um last year i think the governor and the
056department of health here soda said i'm going to step in the breach and i'm going to be the person who calls it and says this is what we're going to do and they kind of took all of us local school boards off the hook because the decision was made for us now we have to and there certainly is a part of me that interprets what the cdc is saying and what the department of health are saying their their record which means that they want us to ask kids that aren't vaccinated and so there certainly is part of me that would feel comfortable and support the idea that we say we're starting with masks e to eight until a vaccine till sometime shortly after a vaccine is available for those students um i don't need it
057to be that but i i would i'd feel good about it i also feel good about i like that we're using a metric and we have something in place that is numbers that are guiding it so that's a wishy-washy uh comment i guess a little bit but i i would be willing to talk about it um open-ended and i am okay with older ages it being an optional um it being recommended highly recommended at the high school um we do have you know what did we say 43 of that that population have gotten vaccinated more continually getting there because they can feel better about that because that's a choice any other comments questions from anybody yeah i'll comment um yeah you're right jonathan uh mde mdh governor they took the hit for us last year
058this year we get the benefit and the bane of local control this is kind of what we get right now so it's up to us and i appreciate being in this position that we have that control to be able to look at the data that's before us for our community to look at what we have in our population and the data i am a data driven person i like to take the emotion out of the equation and just focus on what it is we're trying to accomplish and seeing that where we are what the trend is i'm not quite as wishy-washy to use your term as far as saying once the vaccine is available then we can revisit that the decision i like to focus on where exactly are we with the data do we
059see that the numbers are coming down do we see that we are consistent not just we hit the number great and then see things run amok again after we make a change we want to see at least two cycles where we hit that specific number so that we can move in the positive direction and don't go back that's the the biggest key for me would you mind just clarifying are you talking with those comments and thank you for those comments because i know eventually i'm going to need some direction so i just need some clarity um are you talking pk8 or p3 yes pk through eight yes okay thank you any other one i agree first of all with michael thank you for all your time and information it has changed rapidly since we were
060sitting here in back in july um i you did say one thing that i wanted to clarify you said that if there was flu-like symptoms or it was not reported as anything you would put it in the bucket of influenza like symptoms i would in my opinion looking at even just numbers in the high school i mean you can have a lot of students out of that building in one day so i don't know how you can hone in on that a little bit so if someone would call and say i have my child home sick that would be where we really want you to tell us why are they homesick so we can know if we have enough stop please otherwise we're clearing the room um we just want to be sure that we're
061looking at what's going on in the school and that's the best way for us to look at what is actually going on in the school by having that data if there is 80 kids out we just don't have the capability to call for a nurse to be calling the parent and asking what's going on at home is it an influenza-like symptom that's why we would do that and that's actually a minnesota department of health guideline that was established during flu season and it is not specific to covid okay okay thank you for that i of course wasn't here for the last trends but we went back and looked at all of that i really believe that kids need to be in those classrooms five days a week in person learning so first and foremost yes
062we need some matrix to guide us but whatever strategies we can put in place to keep our students in our buildings i want to see that put into place knowing that we can't socially distance i believe that if a mask has to go on a face for a couple weeks or a month or until they could get a vaccine i think that's crucial to keep them in our buildings that's the first part second part would be as parents try to plan ahead we had a lot of contact racing going on last year and you may be sitting next to somebody and then you had to get sent home i would say as we look at this and use our metrics as a guide i still would like to see us be able to not send
063nine students home because one student had covered so if a mask would prevent that for a period of time while the numbers are high i would be all for that because i think we are all it's a very polarizing conversation we've gotten lots and lots of emails and phone calls and very passionate but i think everybody would agree students need to be in-person learning so if it requires us i'm all for k-8 to have a mask if it allows us to let them be in buildings in classrooms next to their friends and learning in person and at the high school level i'm a little more flexible and saying let's see what that does there's been vaccinations in there they're allowed so i would be tending to put a little higher number on the high school
064number that's just me can i just jump on julie's point on the contract racing because i think we talked about this last time so we we wouldn't be doing or what do we do what do we require our plan was that we would just alert parents if there was a positive case in the classroom and allow them to decide if they wanted to quarantine if students are wearing masks they aren't considered to be a close contact anymore per the minnesota department of health guidelines so then would we we would still have to notify them i would still notify parents but they would not be considered a close contact anymore those students if they were masked so that would be kind of taken off the table so to speak as being a mitigation strategy okay okay
065um amy did you have questions comments um yeah i mean the priority is in person learning and that's the priority for us as we sit here and it's not where we want to be right we want to be where we were in july where numbers were lower and they're just not which is hugely disappointing um because like i said we don't want to be making kids mask nobody here wants to be doing that the problem is with the e8 population they cannot be vaccinated they have no line of defense and with the high school they do and i i have a hard time putting numbers around any of this because i feel like that backs all of us into a corner and and if we know one thing the one thing we know is it's
066going to change tomorrow and so the numbers we have today are probably going to look different tomorrow so i mean if if the administration wants to use numbers to to guide i think that's fine i i just don't think it's something that we can hold on to i think it needs to be fluid and you know if i don't agree that we keep e8 and masks if our community transmission rates rates go down and we're and we're in a valley then i think we can take them off regardless of vaccination status but um right now that's not the case so okay um so i i mean i think what i'm hearing is in person learning is important i mean obviously for everyone um and we have and you know we have for mitigation strategies you
067know six foot distancing we're not in cohorts everybody's sitting by whoever they want at lunch i mean everything for all intents and purposes is back to what it was before march of 2020 um and i think the concern is what we're seeing trends for the rates i mean since we've sat here at the table it's doubled basically um and i think it's a huge risk to go into having you know eight thousand kids jump into buildings and not at least have some type of mitigation and i do agree i i think it's hard to say you know what do these numbers mean i i i agree with that um and so i think what was important to remember is last year last year we had regular updates brought to the board table every two weeks
068really and then it was fair you know and when there was changes to be made we made them we were always to be honest one of the first ones pushing to get kids back in school and i would continue that that you know in this case would probably be what we're trying to do as well so we want to keep kids in school and to do that you know if it's putting on a mask for a few weeks it's putting on a mask for a few weeks i also think for me kids having the access to a vaccine up to age 12 is important for me personally i um you know i think families that have reached out to us have asked for that i know it's not every family but for those people that
069are waiting for that that is important thing for them and you know i think it's something that it needs to be considered so any other comments are we go ahead keep going i just want to make one more too um if i'm reading between lines listening to everybody too there's um we know what our state and federal health organizations are telling us to do but by saying recommending you know they're saying we should do it but but it's easy for our district to say we're just going to recommend it we did to be fair we came back to you kate and dr stahlo and staff and said give us metrics and at the same point our state and federal health organizations that are passing along this recommendation aren't giving us metrics so let let's be
070fair we can watch data but when we create metrics we are not doctors sitting around the table correct so our really what we have to lean on is the data we're getting from the local county and i feel much more comfortable that we have multiple ways of looking at that data for the secondary schools and to be honest i feel even though we ask for those numbers i feel a little squishy about implementing those for the younger grades because we're doing our best to read between lines and read the data and talk to doctors the people above us who are asking us to put masks on are not giving us numbers to follow so while i appreciate all of that effort i feel a little uncomfortable with those lower grades saying okay here we are
071we're doing our best and we're going to use these numbers right so i think it comes back a little bit to what you were saying julie too is that um and maybe you too amy just like let's let's protect them let's see what happens and let's watch those trends but i don't know how confident i feel about saying and this is what our school board came up with you will use these numbers for those younger grades does that make sense um and so i guess my comfort level is not with using those with the younger grades but saying um we are here to protect the health and safety and if we don't have them in person learning we we've seen what those outcomes can be it's not true for every student but most of our
072students do so much better in person social emotional academic achievement and if you talk to some teachers and principals they want their kids in the building not at home so i guess i i just thinking more about those metrics the powers that be that are medically trained are not giving us those metrics so we got to use the data we have so you're proposing pre-k to eighth grade not have to have a metric to start so start with math and then ninth through twelfth would have the fifth i'm comfortable with what our approach is the multi-level approach to watching if it's starting to be crazy at the secondary level yeah so what drove the 50 number for the high school how did we decide that was the number we kind of based it off last
073year we wanted to use data that the public was used to and some of those benchmarks were based on what was used last year as far as when kids went into hybrid learning and when we went to all distance learning and we also wanted to keep in mind that secondary students were eligible for vaccination so we could go a little bit higher knowing that they were eligible so the other indicator the other reason and again you know we're using a scale that was set up for something you heard lisa say that the scale was set up for the transition of learning models where we looked at that and studied that and set it up for this um the other the other indicator and again it's different now because the vaccines have become available but when
074we saw 50 cases per 10 000 for 14 day from a staffing perspective that's when we really started um being in trouble in terms of operation operating and and that's one of the indicators that we have to look at we knew last year if we had five bus drivers out we were going to be in trouble so we were tracking not just student and teaching staff data but we're tracking the absences of our child nutrition services staff our bus drivers others again that could change we're anticipating it will because of the vaccine being available but that was another one of the indicators at 50 was when we really started seeing some concerns with operationally being able to continue to keep our schools open i get that i think the difference is you know what you
075touched on is the vaccine eligibility and and again i would remove the number and say let's manage it as it comes that's just and and [Music] it could go either way meaning 50 could be a number that matters and it can be a number that doesn't matter in terms of affecting our staffing our schools we don't know turning 50 into a if i'm hearing you right it's sort of like turning 50 instead of into a red light where it's it's it's going to change it's a yellow light that's flashing that says hey should we be looking around and considering a different direction it could be but but it could be other things that are happening like spread like it could we could have other problems at the high school that start before that because it's
076very we may need in one area we may need mitigation at 35 or 40. and it could be a hundred and it could be 100. and that's again i'm not a medical expert but that's one of the reasons we used both the pot the scott county public health case state data as well as the ili as well as number of cases per um classroom to get after that so the promise i'll make and and again by the end of this i need some direction because i need to come back to you with a resolution and a safe learning plan and i just lost my train of thoughts and i'm sure i'll bring it back you need direction you think that's weird yeah we're not exactly being clear at this moment well i i hear some
077clarity i hear some clarity around pre-k eight i hear clarity around thank you for the metric we are more comfortable requiring pre-k-8 and we'll continue to watch that i remember now what i was going to say our flow of communication and this will continue i meet and you heard lisa say this kate and i meet every thursday with scott county public health we get the most up-to-date data at that time we have reinstated a weekly covit 19 incident command team meeting i did not think we were going to have to do that this year i thought maybe we could meet from time to time we restated that when we met last week we restated that that will be a weekly meeting directly following so at three o'clock on thursdays that's when we'll meet and we'll
078be looking at this data as well as a whole host of other data so what i want you to be assured of is that we will continue to monitor data i think you saw last year we didn't hesitate i didn't hesitate to make changes i didn't hesitate to contact you to inform you based on the data based on recommendations from an incident command team and we made changes um again i want to hear a little bit more and get a little bit more information direction especially around 9th through 12th grade but i think i have a clear understanding of of where you are with pre-k eight i'm i'm not you might be more clear than i am about pre-k so i i i feel like a couple of us were fairly clear about we'd be
079okay with they're not really with it being more about the vaccine than about metrics than about numbers but i don't know if that was i don't know if that was a clear direction by any means i don't know and i don't know i don't really need it right now and i i don't know if i i i don't know that you need to say tonight we are going to start in pre-k 8 masks and we're gonna come out of them on september 25th like i don't think you have to say that what i was trying to say before is what you can be assured of is that i will have a team weekly around me looking at data and we will come immediately forward as things change one direction or the other i was one
080of the people who specifically asked for metrics and as we discuss this tonight i'm feeling like i want the metrics to be guidance and not to be hard and fast we have a number we have to take an action um i i i i'm i feel like empowering you can we can we separate because i'm hearing very clearly so i want to be sure that i'm hearing clearly i'm not hearing an interest in using the metric and the matrix at the element at the pre-k 8 level that's correct i'm not hearing and i'm also hearing some we're not sure about what the off-ramp or end date looks like and you know what that's okay i think that's okay right now we didn't know the delta variant was coming where we were june 1st of last
081year and how i thought and we all thought and probably everyone in this room thought we were going to be opening the year looks different where's that end of the table on the elementary part pre-k pre-k i just yeah i mean i'm i think we have to be nimble and fluid and open to new information and not be tied to a matrix but i also like i said i mean i don't think we're holding out for a vaccine for that age group if we if we see we're peaking as people are predicting in the next few days and we come back down and have low rates of transmission there's a lot of opportunity there to take the masks off potentially in my opinion but we may not all agree that's okay mm-hmm we don't have
082to but i actually i have a question about you know oh i think if we're agreeing that we don't want a hard and fast e8 right we just are going to start that way and watch the data and the trends and we are know that incident command will meet every week and will keep us updated second part secondary i hear your concerns about that number here's what i recall from last year and correct me if i'm wrong but we would have board meetings where we would have updates weekly you know updates from our team who was on incident command with you so as i recall there were times we had jim quorum come and tell how many teachers are out sick and do we have enough subs and jim or marine would come up and
083say here's we're struggling in transportation or in custodial department and we would get reports on how many students are out if we aren't comfortable setting that number for that means mask would we consider being comfortable saying yellow light means is going to address this look at that data and make a recommendation we look at that happens regardless of anything you see at the table tonight that that to you is that happens weekly and i have a team that does that weekly so that happens yeah i'm sorry so you're right i know that happens and is does that address the concern do we want to instead of saying and at 50 mass go on in high school do we say incident command will let us know that we are missing students missing staff whatever because you're
084telling me at around 50 last year we had trouble with staffing and everything else i'm comfortable with the metric between the ili and or the 50 together and that incident command is like kind of got their fingers on every area of the district so when we got those reports you know maybe the students are doing okay but we don't have enough teachers right now um and so is that a i'm just putting that out there is is do you does that make sense so the other part of the resolution because this is where i really this is a little too wishy-washy for me right now quite frankly because the resolution that i'm going to be asking you to approve on wednesday will say that you are directing me to implement the safe learning plan yep
085right now i'm not exactly sure what we're saying in the safe learning plan other than we're starting the year requiring masking pre-k 8 and we're going to continue to monitor data if we're not using the matrix for 9 12. so i don't have clarity around that the second piece of the resolution though says that you are expecting and allowing me to constantly monitor data in the changing landscape of the pandemic it's a resolution but you know that the way we do that is through incident command and that something doesn't have to come back to the board table for a vote that the recommendation can happen i consult with the board chair i inform the board and then a decision is made so right now what i'm struggling with is i need to know that if
086you're giving me that authority if you're going to pass the resolution with that that we've got some consensus around using numbers not using numbers you know do you understand what okay so so i just just keep talking because i'm trying to flush it out and i know that christy's sitting there thinking we got to write something up by wednesday morning so that all makes sense to me but the problem is what we know today is different from what we're going to know tomorrow and the numbers are going to look different the information the numbers provided is going to look different in my opinion and that is the challenge i mean i think what i think we feel at least i felt two weeks ago metrics are going to feel like if we if we're basing
087something on numbers we've been saying for a year and a half follow the data follow the data doing anything where we say follow the data but we're not going to have any hard and fast rules around how you're going to respond to the data seems uncomfortable i think it might seem uncomfortable to our parents i keep coming back to the one thing that i don't want the only reason i want us to use the phrase distance learning in the coming school year is because we have a blizzard i don't want to go there again first hour for my now senior who used to be a straight a student cannot happen in bed again and so my priority is what how do we keep kids in the buildings just plain and simple and and if we
088can if empowering you and your team in consultation with us to make the decisions you that you believe will keep our students in school um i will give you a wide birth that's i mean i well i appreciate that jonathan and i hope what our team this isn't about me i hope what our team has has proven to you and our community over the last two years is the seriousness which we do look at every ounce of data and then respond accordingly or to the best of where where our decisions are at this time and you can expect the same thing um moving forward again none of us know what's going to happen it's it's far easier to lead and make decisions when the crystal ball is clear and that simply has not been the
089case and that's why we're all struggling we're struggling with living through a pandemic we're struggling with leading through a pandemic we're struggling with parenting through a pandemic yet this is where we are um i just i i look at this and i you know we we sort of have one advantage in minnesota and that's that we're not going first i mean georgia florida texas mississippi kansas they've gone first they don't have masks on and every day i read something about another school district closing up i mean i i that's what i don't want to have happen so let's give some clear direction could could i ask a question of katie and dr stallow oh kate i'm sorry you can sit over there get yourselves in is it easier for you at the high school level
090to navigate this if we do agree on a metric at that level where the vaccine is available i i'm asking you how much clarity do you want from us and as i understand it you're presenting we'll use that case count and influenza-like illness does that make your navigation easier or not that helps me say if i'm gonna want to support a specific approach i would say the tracking of absences is significantly more difficult at the high school level and reporting looks very differently at the high school level than it does at the elementary level so but having a line of some sort of metric based on case count in the county be helpful to you as leaders well we wouldn't have brought it forward if we didn't think we needed something that i i think
091i think the other line that i don't know that it showed up on here was and kate i don't know that i have it right in front of me but we we said that it you read it actually i think you said if the if the trend continues yeah so lisa always gives us a projection of what's going on in the county and so you know that's something we talked about if we're going to stay at a plateau maybe we wouldn't shift but if next week it's projected to double that looks very differently okay and we would be using [Music] if we had a guide post and and i'm not i'm not saying 50 is that's what we brought forward to you but if we had a guide post that at least gives us the
092opportunity then to come back and to say okay we're at 52 the predictability of the trend is that it does continue for the next multiple weeks in addition to that here's where our ili rate is here's the number of absences we've had so i mean we will we will be making decisions with not just one data point right it's a multi-faceted it is and i do like the consistency with what we used last year our families are familiar with it we're familiar with it that guidance did come from people who know more than us do you know what i mean medically that was bad but but the truth of the yes and the truth of the matter is we used it for different reasons this is true you know it was really about learning models
093we equated then the learning models to at what point was the state saying this was the time to make a change right so that's why we leaned into that as well as we knew what from an operational standpoint once that 50 came so i would be comfortable saying use the 50 know the 50 is there and you also have all those other you know all those other numbers all those other things that you're paying attention to i don't think it needs to be an automatic trigger pre-k 8 is masked pre-k 8 um i i've said masked we if it's if it makes it more manageable for incident command and for you to have numbers to have those metrics then let's use those metrics i'm hearing that that's not what i heard from pk8 yeah i
094mandatory mask i'm good with them i want to keep them in school and we're continuing to share data with you to see when the off-ramp of that is yes okay it also helps parents and families plan for um you know for those that might have medical conditions or are uncomfortable or just not able to learn in in a masked environment or might succeed a little bit better in the distance environment it provides some additional guidance for them on what does that on-ramp or that off-ramp look like it doesn't give a date but it gives you some indication of what direction are we headed yeah and just like this conversation isn't perfect and it's hard you know i think that's that's just what we're going to continue to deal with and we i can promise you
095on behalf of my team we will be all in on ensuring that we really are making my strategic decisions and using data to help guide that okay are you clear did we decide on a high school situation i think we're saying 50 and the multiple faceted points and other factors not a trigger okay not a trigger not a must mask and you know that's kind of what happened last year as well it was a trend so i mean it was a trend like it was like going up like it hit 30 and it was trending up i this population can be vaccinated right and i'm finding that but it might be that we have enough people that are immune and vaccinated that we aren't having a huge staffing problem or a big problem in the
096high school but our community numbers are above 50. that's not you're saying you're telling me that's not a trigger then to mask yeah for not having a problem i think our i think our experience in the building should be far more important than what the community number is at the high school level i mean 50 50 makes you say where are we but if it's 50 in the community but absences aren't or we're seeing at the county that the case rates aren't in 19 and under like lisa shared with us yeah we will be looking at all of that you did hear kate saying it is hardest to collect data at the high school level absolutely but at the end of the day if they're absent and sick or our teachers are and we can't
097staff our buildings yeah right and the number 30 you know we're right or the number 70 right right yeah i just want are we clear enough on that fire are we clearing up on that or not i think so there you see we clear enough okay okay we're difficult okay all right uh that concludes that let's go to enrollment update not sure if you want to go there thanks evening board members dr stahlo um just want to talk a little bit about our enrollment for this upcoming school year um we had talked about and budgeted for an additional 188 students for this year and we are above that number currently uh mainly at the high school that is typical of this time of year we're about 40 students i should say we're about 70 students
098above our number at the high school the hard part is we just don't know which students aren't coming back from last year and so we typically see a drop during the month of september for those students that aren't coming back we are doing fairly well at the elementary in the middle levels i think our fifth and sixth grade are where we're short on our projected number of students overall for the district we're about 40 students above our projected number so it looks pretty good at this point in the game and that can change hopefully we continue to see parents enroll their students in our district and we will see that number increase as we get closer to school starting so that's where we are in enrollment any questions kindergarten we're really close we're about six
099students from our budgeted number 601 right now short six we budgeted 607 we're at 601. i'll go look for a few more that'd be great okay thank you um bond refinance so i just wanted to quickly uh let you know that we do have the ability to refinance two bonds this fall they're from the 2013 there's a capital facilities bond and an alternative facilities bond one has four years left on it and one has six we can save um about nine hundred thousand dollars over the four to six years for our taxpayers and so i think it's worth it for the board to look at that we would have ehlers come at the board meeting in september bring a resolution for a discussion on that refinancing and we've done this before many times in the
100past if there's an opportunity to save some money the board has looked at those opportunities good news thanks for coming forward with the good news thank you so he'll be coming september to give us all the numbers and it will come to the september board meeting on the 8th wednesday the 8th of september any other questions you have of me julie i know jim's not here tonight but as we think about the enrollment piece then staffing wise i know sometimes at this point part of the year we have to come forward requesting some staffing but we still are shy those numbers and where kids are landing we're still okay other than i know dan requested on the laker online right that is having an impact on some of our grade levels obviously some students are
101coming out of our regular classrooms and going into the online but it it's um it looks fairly good right now as far as i know i haven't seen any outliers but there could be but as far as i know i think we're doing fairly well on that um on that front on that topic and maybe dan you can address this as well um what we're you know what we're doing with with online right now obviously will be fluid it's entirely possible based on what happens on wednesday and our this conversation tonight i would assume that we may be seeing families going in and out of that option or making changes to what they want to do what's best for them um so obvi how prepared are we for that to be flexible number one and
102the second thing i guess that i thought when i saw the request for additional staff is it is those students are already our students it is the majority of them yes the bulk of them are already our students so in a sense i feel like just from a budget standpoint should we be shifting existing staff to cover that or i mean we can't we're adding how does that work we've looked at that and that's what i think dr stella was alluding to is do we have that ability and we don't they're coming at two here at this grade level three at this grade level we have about 75 elementary students and about 75 secondary students so it's split pretty evenly point and so we don't have that ability right now to say well we had
10320 kids come out of fourth grade at jeffers pond and they are all going to you know so we have a fourth grade teacher available now that could go to distance learning that just isn't how it's working it's two here two there this school that school and so um it really is only reducing class sizes within the physical buildings and we need the additional staffing to be able to provide for those distance learners okay i'll answer that question i believe it did answer that question and i'll speak to the other side yeah yes yeah i'll step in uh speak to the other piece of the potential flexibility uh given the resolution that uh will be brought forward on wednesday we could be prepared and are prepared that we could reopen uh registration i say this
104very cautiously with a very tight window pending board action on wednesday afternoon we've had conversations when i say we i'm speaking of uh both melissa connetl who's overseeing the elementary portion dave brown who's overseeing the secondary portion that we could send a follow-up email out to our parents and uh asking them to state their intentions once again with the assumption that there may be some that want to transition who said they wanted a laker online in that august 10th to 17th uh window of time and want to come back or vice versa want to who were planning that they would remain in person and won't now want to go to laker online so we could be prepared for that should be that should that be the desire of the board i think the important piece
105there and i just want to be sure that that i state a second time what dan said it's going to be a really tight timeline you know i want to be sure that families have that opportunity especially given a potential change that the board will approve in terms of especially the masking requirement wednesday afternoon but in order for us to be able to staff and get prepared it's going to have to be