CMUFSD BOE Meeting 8-25-21

001that would be helpful for surveys of the forum public call to reporter please join me in the pleasure please apologies folks we uh this one again it was a last minute change to this location so we were uh playing that's taking place in the background they were working on the stage so it's a quick setup for this meeting [Music] to be sitting through and hearing about the first one is our reopening presentation in terms of superintendent's report but mr up [Music] um clearly this has been um you know one of those different summers yeah we went into the summer with um a tremendous amount of optimism um as we saw um things really open up in our society um and we all enjoyed vacations like we hadn't had a year and a half um and

002that felt really good it feels really good to be a part of a society and go out and enjoy dinners and enjoy some parties and things like that um and as you know most recently um with the delta variant coming about we've seen an uptick in professional moves throughout the nation the state attorney and so this year has been just such a strange year for us um and you know we have said one of the things that would be our highest priority is coming back that's normal and that absolutely 100 has been our goal um in terms of our plan unfortunately we didn't really have guidance we didn't have values until very late i'm going to share that with you but once we did get some guys once we did have some some information to

003share um we did we quickly engaged um our real-world teams at the district level and at the individual building and i want to thank those people that are here in the room that helped contribute to that we have members from all of our associations um the leadership um from our administrative association like reggio and winston thank you for being here some of our teachers and mr valentine's here representing senator speech association thank you also for being here and all the teachers mrs bish thank you for being here from our professional association um is here as well association um and i think it's a strong testament to say that you know as a district all of our unions as well as our you know administrative team district office and board of education really pulled together and

004got behind the open plan that we can support for that we believe is good so i'll begin by saying that um it's welcome back and we are so excited to welcome back our students on september 9th um you know this is this is an odd year because we've got a couple of holidays built into the labor day weekend um so what we chose to do is bring back our teachers on thursday uh wednesday and thursday prior to a long weekend and have a couple of conferences to prepare for the upcoming school year knowing that there might be some challenges we kind of put some front-end staff conference days on so we can prepare our workforce but our students will be back on september 9th um as you walk around you notice that there are some

005differences there are no more of those one directional hallways and things like that that uh you know seemed a little bit unnatural in the school setting um but we do anticipate a return to many of the normal components of what we consider a successful school all buildings are going to be in person fully for instruction for all students on a daily basis our hours of operation are 100 normal pre-pandemic so there are no curtailed arrows we do not have um the need for because all of our students are approaching in person we do not have the need to provide alternative times for our teachers um for remote construction our clubs our athletics transportation all of those things are going to resume field trips all those kinds of things that we really value and add so

006much to the school experience for our students and that's something to celebrate something that we can be very very happy about we also because of the infusion of some of the federal money that has come in um so a couple of different brands actually we are going to be providing additional remediation and enrichment opportunities um as we continue to navigate some of the effects some of the perhaps negative effects that the pandemic caused we can have some additional personnel and some of us support areas as well as mental health support uh additional social worker equity that's going to help us so some really good things that we are so excited to start devastating because as i mentioned guidance was not really forthcoming over the summer which made planning somewhat challenging um you saw in june

007and this slide i think is telling us it provides a lot of information um in june of 2021 that's when we got our last update and that that was some guidance that helped us for some planning for our summer program and especially for those summer school programs um and extended school year programs when we were getting some infusion of some federal money where we were actually able to increase our summer school offerings and our enrichment offers over the summer programs so that guidance came in june and in july we had updated guidance that only pertain to those programs like some camps um cdc updated their guidance for uh prevention on july 9th july 28th they um issued additional guidance from interim public health recognition for fully vaccinated people and they started to create different rules

008of access to those unvaccinated people june 20 july 29 our commissioner our new commissioner clearly was a little bit at the frustrated uh penned a letter to new york state education for uh two the uh new york state doh department of health that is uh demanding that they provide some kind of guidance forks on august 2 um former governor let's say former governor announced no further guidance um will be given by new york state eoh and they recommend the following ctc now to us that was extremely frustrating because we had the chief officer of new york state the chief executive in new york state saying you know what i'm out the door now and i'm going to take my lawyer home and notice your guns and that was really really frustrating for school officials um

009but on august 4th we did receive a letter from the american academy of pediatrics when this presentation is up all of these documents you see them in red those are highlighted they're accessible they're already on our website but you'll be able to click them and see what all of this uh this guidance and recommendation set um a day later our commissioner sent the letter to new york state department of health dr zucker and she she basically said you need to send us some guidance on this um the cdc updated their guidance for schools so you have to figure school ended at the end of june and we didn't receive guidance until august 5th telling us how we should open september so now begin a time where i brought my team together and the administration i

010need to start having those conversations reassembling already and doing our due diligence to see what is best improved for the opening of schools for the similar to students first and foremost our highest priority was to keep our school environment and i'm gonna go back for a second i think that one of the things we learned through the pandemic we learned a lot and one of the things we did not want to do was lose the lessons that we learned in the pandemic planning for becoming stupid and what i mean by that is hey education was an education and we all know that and you know we know that there were kids who suffered through learning loss because of the fact that we're going to promote a higher environment and we wanted to make sure we

011can do better and the way we need to do better is we need to come back stronger and more knowledgeable and more skilled as a school district and providing an education for our kids and what we can do by that is take what is trying true in the traditional setting of education and we can combine that with those lessons we've learned and how to leverage technology resources to accelerate learning and make those bring those two together so that we can provide a better product and so i think that was important and that was our priority that how can we come back providing the highest quality education we can for our senate students while again recognizing that there is a goal that we do need to place health and safety as a heartbeat i'm sorry um

012again you know it wasn't until august 9th that um and again i was a part of that conversation with the southern department of health services as the um past president of suffolk county school superintendents i have um well-established relationships that uh enable me to try to have those conversations and limits on those conversations um so that we can pressure our local department health to issue guidance that is very clear for schools new york state education department released a health and safety guide for schools in august uh 12 2021 um and then just yesterday the new governor um kathy wilker made the statement that she is directing state health officials to impose a universal mass community in public private schools we anticipate that that is coming in the next week but potentially as early as so

013what i would say about the this coming school year i want to look at this as a continuum because i don't think that we can look at anything in isolation i think we have to look at this as fake phase 5 if you will of a long road that began in mid-march of 2020. you know big zero was that d-day i remember coming back on one second from order and i was i was briefed by the new york state department health about this thing called the coronavirus we joked about how it was you know just you know to my knowledge just to be a coronavis um and and then all of a sudden a week later we were having actually on the third of launch we were having conversations internally about if we need to

014switch maybe flip the switch to remote learning what are we going to do inside lunches so starting those conversations early got us a leg up and got us a hip start on making things happen quickly here at separatists but by mid-march we shut down we had to go 100 percent the unspeakable average um and we you know thanks to the resilience of our kids the resilience of our families and especially thanks to the resilience of our teachers he did just that and as a community we didn't skip a beat we supported each other and we all came together and that's the kind of thing that is remarkable about our community our community is a community that absolutely looks at the big picture and i have to thank our community for the support that we have

015over the past year because the emails and comments that we've gotten have been that you know we appreciate the fact that you weighed everything you didn't make hasty decisions you have that slow methodic approach to reopening and it was done in a systematic way that ensured the lpc would people which some people would like to have seen us open a lot quicker a hundred percent yes would some people have liked to see this open a little bit slower absolutely but i think that overall what we tried to do was strike the balance between providing education we are 100 committed to balancing so phase one in september september excuse me that was that was the start of the new school year and that's all i was saying at k1200 model nobody liked it nobody liked them

016ultimately uniquely scheduled nobody liked children leaves nobody liked wednesday's offer remote learning and deep cleaning but that's what we did because that's what we knew and so we did it we did the best we could we learned more and we took feedback from the community and we in in october we during the middle of october we went and we realized that we could do some things a little bit differently barriers that we understood to be something that could be helpful uh we took all the furniture all the extra furniture at every elementary classroom to push kicked out to six feet um because that's what we knew at the time and guess what we were able to get the kids in four days a week which was a help good morning um and 6 12 or

017so come april again with a little bit more experience a little bit more knowledge with a little bit better guidance we started to look at what can we do for all students k-12 returned in person five years ago and that was something that we put as a priority our community actually wanted it and we got to that point and we were happy to do that in the summer of 2021 new guys came out and this was this was the point of complete optimism where we had this idea that we can if because of our reduced capacity we can actually take off the masks and invite kids into our sleeps that was something that we felt very very strongly about and we did and we did it and i have to say that that was something

018that looked like we were going in 100 direct direction unfortunately um there were situations um that we've seen around the island where the delta variant is something that's different than what we saw previously i could say during the 2020 2021 school year we didn't see schools right because we were doing all of those things we were sticking to the guidance and trying to adhere to it especially over the summer when somebody in one of our classes got voted unfortunately every single person that was in that classroom so we know that that was a that was a circumstance that we could attribute lightly to school spread and what was different there was a different barrier and there was one other factor that was different so now here we are in september of 2021 and we're gonna

019welcome back one thousand five hundred and two students for a new school year and we're playing and so we are in phase five and we are very optimistic that phase five will be the last um the code and safety guidelines and some things where we met up um that came out are all here the safety environment of course is our highest priority and our community and maintaining health and welfare so all the practices governing students and you know student and adult safety bar lines and these recommendations the cbc the subconscious american academy of pediatrics and the university department of education and so you will see that when you click on these you'll be able to look at what all the guidance says examine it and understand that everything we've done in our reopening plan is

020aligned to these dollars you know these are some recent comments actually within the last day that came up that governor kathy vogel came in on her first day and about five minutes of age of her press conference after she was morning at midnight and then a ceremonial swearing at 10 a.m at 3 o'clock at a press conference and by by 305 she made the comment that health officials aren't too imposed on universal mass community public privacy and so that was met with um a couple different comments the um andy perrotta the new york state irvine teachers president stated we support universal mass learning as a part as part of the mitigation strategy that also includes robust overtesting contact tracing proper ventilation and other strategies of chuck experts deidre from new york state council of school

021superintendents stated we welcome governor holden's decision to go forward with a statewide requirement for schools throughout the pandemic we have state officials give us clear rules on issues protecting the health of our students and our employees i think it's important to have good rules because without clear rules what i'm doing sound riches could look very different than what's happening and when we are asked to do what we're asked to do and then you know as a school leader i put my hand up and i take an oath to uphold the constitution of the state of new york and support the senate school district investment the rules help us because we know exactly where we said what we have to do so we are proposing again the following safety protocols for this movie again everything we

022are doing is to bring back as much as possible as far as the masked stuff is my recommendation and the recommendation of the reopening teams to have 100 masking inside all students and adults except when eating of course outdoors there will be no requirement for master that's an individual choice some people would want to rap against outdoors and on buses it is already a mandate right now like i said we anticipate the indoor mandate coming soon but for buses it isn't mandatory at this point for all transportation as far as barriers air moves and we learned that and we know that barriers were an impediment to learning last year and did not serve a useful purpose in curbing this credible so we are removing barriers we are not putting barriers in between um students and

023teachers we had temperature checks that was a mandate last year that everyone needed to be checked for temperatures and what we do i'm not a health expert i'm a doctor but i can restart books only but what we knew was that texture checks didn't seem to be aligned to anything we were seeing kids like kobe came in and you know even if they that's the positive that come to school they were not children that demonstrated temperatures so we did not feel that that was reliable we still don't overfeel a strong correlation there so they're not doing the temperature checks the health attestations well well it seemed like a good exercise also did not provide us good information as far as warranties go we believe that quarantines will be much less likely this year um and

024they will not be necessary and i have a slide to demonstrate this in a little while they will not be necessary if nasa's worn properly will be used at the middle school in high school um social distancing students and adults will maintain three feet of distance at all times in the school setting and that's matter we can do that students in the elementary school can still sit in groups and maintain creative distancing and do collaborative work that's back that's getting back to normal and that's what we want to see we want these kids interacting working together collaborating doing all those 24 skills that we know uh mean a lot to their institution um the mandate for distancing in music and that's projecting learning chorus and wind instruments is six feet um and eating in channel

025crews also distance as far as hygiene uh you know we are keeping lots of hand washing you know but you know all those extra turns around cleaning knobs rubbing sodium stuff and white cables all that kind of stuff will be things that are done proactively um and encouraging teaching appropriate hand and respiratory hygiene to our students that as well as the health robbery again if this is you know encouraging adults and students with any kind of symptoms that are consistent or any you know any illness really should stay home any person or household number of person can result in coping because again if there's a suspicion that there is then we really do want to be saying results um as far as playgrounds facilities we are open for business folks we want to see our

026fields being used we want to see our grounds being used um just following the normal district protocols for facility juice requests through our and you know so really when we look at this yes they're distancing and yes there are management but otherwise we are looking to be as normal as possible within our schools in the event there becomes a need our plan does also include some of those things that we would refer to as layer mitigation strategies so in the event there is an update for a cycle we see school spread well then we would have to go backwards i do want to touch on one thing um as many people here know i have a um a very strong advocate for schools i have a loud voice in the state um and connected um

027at the state level on the surviving council um and the house of delegates to the commission and i want you to know that as a group we are we are committed to trying to come up with very clear guidelines for when the mass mandate comes down which we know is happening when how can we have metrics in place that are going to determine where the masses can come so if there's infection in the community at a certain level we should be able to go backwards and say now comes the point where we haven't seen school spread we haven't seen the cases the community spreading like this and or backstage whatever those metrics are that are you know that new york state department helped their food that's what we're adding so we can have that kind

028of clear guidance to say all right we've hit all those benchmarks we cannot take our message so that is one thing that i can assure you that we are working on as far as the quarantines go um we have received updated guidance on the we foreign obligated to report students and staff from test positive recovery and have to perform contextuals um to identify close contacts both vaccinated and unvaccinated then we have the direct attendant quantities so it is still a 10-day quarantine if you recall usually 14 now is 10. um but it is this mandate put upon the schools to do the contact tips um i recommend dr soto uh dr soto last year was our program coordinator for the district and he did amazing work such as truly professional truly detailed um and really

029got it and had to have hard conversations with families and people the work he did was critical to having success as a school district last year um really great stuff um very difficult challenge but it is our mandate to do that again so guess what um you know but if universal investment is in place only those students and staff as that's positive so if we do this right other kids at school we will not have last year we were again when you know better you do that that's that's the thought last year when we had positive cases of classes you were basically told that everyone would have to quarantine you know especially an elementary setting where kids are interacting and you can't care about some of that for extended periods of time this year we're

030getting different guidance and if both students are openly asked they will not be able to volunteer um and vaccinated individuals will not need to part this is the slide i was telling you before slot on the left and the slider on the right it's best one class two the desks are three feet apart what you see is the purple desk in the middle on chart one has a child that has codes if masks are on all of those people in the green desks will not need to quarantine if they're three feet apart wearing masks in class two the class without masks now we would have a situation where all nine students would have the parts so it shows that for every individual case you have in your school eight additional students will be impacted i

031am sure you know i i could ask for a show advance that of how many people have wanted i'm sure [Music] you know using you know apps like instacart that i never knew existed to bring me groceries because my entire family was in quarantine it's so fun it is no fun and we don't want to be doing that and we don't want to be making those calls saying i'm sorry but your child sat next to somebody that tested the quarantine and now you've got to quarantine oh and by the way the child divorce the acting you don't want to do that and so by putting a mass mandate in place in our schools we eliminate the need to have to make those phone calls and disrupt families who i'm sure don't want that as far

032as the vaccinations done the cdc recommends as we know all persons eligible for protecting vaccines for 12 that's their recommendation people feel very differently about it and we have never as a district promoted um or said people must or should get vaccinated that is not my choice to tell people what they should surely should not do um i am reporting out 86 cents however we did make it available we held three vaccination credits in in this district to bring the vaccine in make it easier for people who wanted to do it um and so what we see in santa maria's is in the 101 934 zip code uh first those recipients there's 64.5 of eligible people of the eligible population have a first dose only 58.3 however have completed the series so you know as

033far as the overall population goes we are a what would be considered in the state or county or country i guess as a as a lower vaccination um so that doesn't mean anything other than the fact that when those metrics come out um that may impact the decisions that are made for us to you know with amazon people but just information for everyone to see that that because i don't you know this is readily accessible on the new york state website i'm not sure how many people really actually know that and have seen that um but clearly there is no um that you know this is a premise um this is an adult decision decision so for anybody that wants to get vaccinated you know you know where they are accessible um as far as

034our instructional model i talked a little bit before about taking everything we've learned from the pandemic and the delivery of construction and what works and combining that with our traditional model of instruction that we also have worked and pulling the best out of all and creating the best environment for students to learn well i think that clearly as part of one of the commission's groups i was tasked with with running a a group on what mobile construction might look like and one of the things we talked about we really need to place the emphasis on in-person instruction and it was great to see that subsequent to that meeting that came out with just that kind of recommendation that prioritizing the return to a classroom setting was the top priority for everyone daily instructions for all

035students will take place in person and that i think is great there is not a remote construction model available for pre-k 2k 12 and 7 registers obviously students who because of a medical necessity cannot come to school there has always been a mechanism for them so if there is a reason and it may be overrelated but there needs to be clear medical documentation there will be obviously an but for anyone that just you know doesn't want to come to school we are all we are fully in person and we are in person um here to service every student [Music] related non-code related apps except treated justice during the pre-pandemic times um including standard absences we're operating just as we normally would um the students who are on the warranty that is something it's an ordered

036warranty well then that is incumbent upon us to put in a mechanism and our individual buildings because the models will differ between the elementary and middle school high school so since those models will differ the individual when those cases come up we will be addressing those circumstances and providing a very clear direction on what that looks like for students again on their ordered quarantine um and again i indicate that a full remote construction model um that is in development for anybody who's absolutely for whatever reason 100 percent needs that it is supported and then again the quantum construction as far as transportation must have been around full capacity um and we are in a full return to school um that is the universal masking mandate for buses um and there is going to be assigned

037seating attendance sharks those kinds of things because again we need to be contacted those are things we have to do um it is we are legally mandated to do that um loading you know we load the buses as kids get on the bus morning front to back back to front excuse me and then as the kids get to the school the front seats go off into action so it's just just a procedural thing we are doing to minimize um but we will have masks on buses um windows open you know but tolerable um you know you may have seen some of the challenges it's not actually 12 today about some of the um the driver services um so there are labor shortages that are impacting every industry in the country um in a particular process

038so we are struggling with some of that and clearly you know it's amazing to me how the supply chain has been impacted in a number of areas um my wife being fixed upon the day and it turned into one repair because of destruction so um you are seeing those kind of things on campus as well as far as the social emotional company you know we're we're here we are here for the kids um i think in person helps a lot their vote is hard we know that we see a higher incidence of depression anxiety amongst kids who are in remote um i'm openly very publicly i think people know that i'm an advocate for um mental health wellness um and i openly talked about my own struggles um and the panda that greatly impacted my

039own children i'm a father of four and i can tell you i've seen it firsthand and so i know it as a father i know it's a superintendent um and i noticed karen um we have um obviously our mental health resource center all staff this year to a grant i had put as a priority uh pre-pandemic i had um assembled a deal that committed to provide some money for us to get all staff training in mental health first aid and unfortunately the academic that fell by the wayside uh that was that that was a coded casualty unfortunately however i was contacted and told that from another grant and we'll be conducting three that's like first aid trainings approximately 120 staff members um i think that's huge when kids come in to school if we have

040everyone in our staff that can size up a kid and engage whether or not they're struggling that day and recognize how important it is to meet a child with a friendly grant of love um i think that that that will go a long way to support our students and make sure that every child feels supportive um that mental health screenings and check-ins periodically um we do repair assessments within the middle school that are social emotional screeners and that helpful in determining you know how kids feel and recognizing that you know when we see 25 percent of adolescents and that's what statistics does at diamond depression experience a severe depressive episode that's trouble and that's what's happening in our society we do need to start thinking about these things to address them and put it to

041the forefront outreach and resources targeted support groups for different things whether it be anxiety depression social skills all kinds of things that were put in person and with additional accounts and support we can do those things and then you know focusing on celebrating it doesn't matter your race your religion your gender identification none of that matters everyone's a human being as far as cafeteria and food services once again through grants and child nutrition grants um all students can receive breakfast and lunch at no charge so that means that everything and you're encouraging people take advantage of this every child no child can go hungry and savage school district because every single child can get breakfast and lunch here and i think that that's critical and and so because when a child's company classroom you cannot

042expect that they can learn but being able to provide breakfast that much to have a child is i think a game changer um we will be again utilizing our serving lines in all buildings and having grabbed no options so again bringing things back which is normal as normal as possible um including our food services we will meet you as a flexible locations again remember that unfortunately eating fast salt means heat um so we will be utilizing flexible locations so in summary and a quick recap you know the san francisco school district state education department and government's primary focus has been on the health and safety of our kids these documents are living documents um there's local data and metrics that we need to be considering when we're making these decisions um and we are following

043the guidance the cpc via which new york stage this requires continuous assessment from control patients on the ground and our capacities or we have different capabilities and we need to recognize what our capabilities are to provide the highest values but once again our goal is to open as close as normal as possible without compromising it's our social distance and drinking gasoline doors minimize our qualities you know that um again this is coordinated um we spoke about it and i asked the principals to have their presentations ready for tomorrow um so they prepare those and very specific more rather plans that apply to the middle school and the high school will be released so um with that folks i opened up to any questions or comments um normally what we would do is you know we

044might make educational presentations but then what we would do is we would move toward public comment and education presentations in like the fact that this is a reopening presentation and i've given you a lot of information um we would open it up to any questions people have pertaining to just the reorder um so people would like to ask questions we would be happy to take those questions thank you very much and again i thank the community um because it really is about me coming together um this community has shown tremendous support for the schools for me as a superintendent i can't thank you enough um privilege to be here and serving you all um because you know we all know what it's about it's about providing the best education so thank you and again i'll

045take questions i'll just go back over here to my uh [Music] much less i just want to make a statement i do have a question about something else but that the delta variant is extremely contagious that's what they know and many vaccinated people are spreading the delta variant it doesn't mean that all vaccinated people are spreading it but that is a sign and that kind of information is being censored and there's a lot of information out there that this makes sense i just want to make that statement i think you're going to have thank you yes we need more people to understand this i think you're really going to have an extreme spread of delta during school but we don't need to panic there's medications out there to help us and of course people are

046afraid of that because it's been villainized um i had um nice to meet you i know we've been back and forth um i did i'm gonna make one more statement here i wrote it to dr um sorry and this is maxwell excuse me just christopher yes sorry um i saw i was looking at last month's agenda which i thought was for tonight and i thought oh my god there's no way i'm going to meeting but it gave me a real insight into what people do okay so you work very hard and i want to thank you very very much um i think we spoke about um a critical race theory kind of said there wouldn't be any of that in the school system and i did ask you about equity and you said there wouldn't

047be that in the school system either is there a way i can get a program on what you're doing with equity would that be available to the public we actually have a presentation that we'll be doing shortly thank you very much thank you so much for 45 years and at this point i have three grandchildren in high school well i'm a life special life department specialist i work at a great friend's care center i do advocate for women who want to keep their babies and help them with supplies to the next two years old thank you very much this way everyone can hear you especially those at home thank you hello everybody i'm chris and i just was just curious about some clubs that don't appear to be on the list and i just didn't

048know that was just like a technicality or they're just not all here um specifically you know middle school jazz band high school jazz band and i know between just curious if it's happening um or why they're not here yeah so the clubs are all basically they come right out of the buildings um often they're based on interest and whether or not we have something running it that kind of thing so honestly you know right now the club put on the agenda that doesn't mean that's all the clubs what that means is the club who are proving right now and then as you know teachers come back and have kids come back there is some flexibility in there that more folks could be added so it's really kind of uh directed at individual buildings um some

049of the clubs we asked about are actually online [Music] about making sure we included that well i don't think [Music] because [Music] so there's certainly it's quite big yeah thank you i kind of figured that's good when you sort of hear it from the people who are writing it and then it's not here you can be assured though that the music department is something that we any other questions about the realism uh um [Music] i'm just really here to set the tone for a larger presentation by dr soto um and one of our board members um you know i came in here as a superintendent and um when i got hired as a superintendent um one of the things the board asked me to do um and that actually brought me hard i guess um

050i was asked to uh to prepare our plane and um and so i actually had the plan that i wrote almost three years ago um and and the reason i had this plan is because um when i thought about what ricardo soto dr soto was going to present today i thought how did we get to this place where and and it's so in line with with where we started and where the first initial conversations we had as as a uh as a person who wanted to be the superintendent of seven merchants see as a superintendent i had worked for about ten years as a superintendent but something about southwesterly fields or i should say a lot about some security um and so when you you don't go into these jobs thinking you're just gonna walk

051in and smile and get a job you do your research and so i did that i did the research and what i saw was that 11 years ago the senate merchant school district had a population that had was 2 asian five percent black eight percent hispanic latino eighty percent white and four percent native american that was the makeup of the community and then when i looked at it i saw that the district that i was looking to get hired ten years later was one percent decision so drop by one percent not much 5.8 black 19.2 hispanic latino white and 4.72 percent so by 11 points our hispanic latino population had more than that in that 10 years and that's not decemberance that's most of the other and our english language learners went from five percent

052of our population to nine percent of our population our free and reduced price launches went from 20 to 29 percent and our students with disabilities went from 11 and a half to 19 so that's a pretty significant changing demographic in some ways interestingly our graduation rate went to 99 our region's diploma rate went from 87 to 97 and our advanced regions diploma week went from 32 to 61 so i remember thinking that's extraordinary progress given increasing challenges and i was intriguing and then i dug deeper and i thought you know what is it what are we doing right and what are the things that that are going to be important moving forward and i wrote this introduction and in the introduction i wrote about how our changing world the world's changing at such a rapid

053place and it's becoming progressively smaller needing technologies shrinking our world not in uncommon thought socially economically politically more influenced by the changes there's tremendous and this has had a tremendous influence over our educational legacy and then i kind of went on and i talked about preparing our students to be productive contributors in a more connected and globally interdependent world i said that we want our kids to cherish their small town roots [Music] but balance this with being intentional about assisting them to develop a greater sense of international mindedness that our goal is to inspire children to be inquisitive problem solvers who can process analyze and synthesize this enormous amount of information inside their fingertips and make evaluative decisions to create a better world by collaborating with others and so that was about the international baccalaureate

054and some of the things that it does and the kind of education provides for our kids in this international mindedness and i thought when i came in here i remember thinking one of the things i wanted to do was join groups like the one on consortium threatening excellence because it's it's not about any race it's not about any particular thing it's about celebrating the diversity of all kids we have children from all races as you see we've got children from all kinds of religious backgrounds we've got children that are gender non-conforming we've got gender we've got children that are any kind of diversity you can imagine in our schools and to not service each and every one of those kids to the best of our ability would be a failure on our part for any

055one of those kids and so we talked about that we talked about that support and so the diversity equity and inclusion committee is one that is focused on not critical based theory it's not about focus what our focus is is celebrating celebrating not tolerable tolerating people is an offensive word in so many ways celebrating diversity is something where the international backboard program can provide the most rigorous curriculum for every child in the sandwiches and give access to every child to opportunities that otherwise they might not have access to and that's right kids can get into the but we're also offering opportunities for every child to take all kinds of classes at every level they can pursue occupational education classes or they can pursue the highest academic possible and so for us it's about providing opportunities

056for all kids and that in mind um we went on this journey and part of the journey was developing an equity education plan so that the diversity of all students to celebrate and so i'm going to introduce dr soto and danielle thank you for that great introduction thank you for the framework um that you established based on the work that we did and this evening kind of takes me back to the conversation that i had with doctors uh about a year ago i remember last summer i was sitting in his office and he was sitting and talking about diversion was talking about some of the some of the highlights that we mentioned in terms of the change in the demographics that we've seen inside origin over the last 10 years and i distinctly before us

057talking about establishing a dei committee and i think before he established a sentence out of his mouth saying would you uh you know consider facilitating that conversation i just you see for me diversity is really who i am uh my background my global city and hispanic set my household in my house of english was a second language i didn't speak english until i entered elementary school my grandmother my brother was a people person in my home she lived with us and i still rapport as a child of welcoming people into all and our home just like a lot of cultures in society was a home that kind of celebrated people through food so i remember sitting at our dinner table having rice and beans um i was from boya which is chicken and rice and

058that meat which is most important in spanish very baking and one of the things that i loved about my grandma maria was how welcoming still she always accepted everything she she embraced everyone she made everyone feel welcomed in a home she made everyone feel included enough and that sort of impression stuck within my entire life not only that she uh actually came from spain so she helped me to appreciate travel different coaches different experiences art music so as an early youngster at i would say about 20 years old i started traveling to work so i traveled back back to new york many times i scared to break got i went to safari in africa i saw the pyramids and all of this was to sort of develop my own sense of culture my own sense

059of diversity within the global sort of arena outside of just me in the city and you can you can argue that the city is a melting pot i had friends of every different ethnicity every different sexual profits so it was something that i still want to branch out even beyond so when we started this journey it has been an amazing journey we started i want to say october 13th with our first meeting and we're going to get into that but the purpose of this evening's meeting or presentation is to kind of warm the committee or excuse me walk the board as well as the community to the process that we found why did we form the committee what would we do in the year that we work together as a committee and what do we

060plan to do in the future so i'm looking around the room i see quite a few of my committee members that are here so thank you for coming i really appreciate it and i want to say thank you for bearing with me i know that some of our meetings were somewhat difficult uh i think everyone knows that all of our communities last year were virtual so we utilize zoom which is a great platform but when you're trying to cover such dense material it can be a little challenging and i think um my wife wanted to kick me almost every meeting because i think every meeting must have got two hours and it wasn't just because of the depth of information that we covered during the meeting it's because of the conversation we have and because

061of the debates and going back and forth as committee members we had one of the largest committees in the district we had about 22 members the committees were comprised the committee was comprised of teachers administrators documents that opportunity had two board members mr badger and of course uh we have about seven secondary students we have parents eight boys an amazing committee it was an amazing experience so uh this evening we're going to like i said walk you through the process and i'm very fortunate to have ms stench with me uh vice president of the board of education who agreed a couple days ago to join me and we sat together to review the presentation and i'm sure she's going to do an amazing job so um the first thing we're going to look at is

062how how did we as a committee define dm so for that i'm going to have the stem kind of walk through that hello everyone i'm probably a good public speaker so bear with me okay so diversity is the presence of differences that made race gender religion sexual orientation ethnicity nationality socio-economic status language ability disability age religious commitment or political perspective equity is promoting joseph justice impartiality and fairness within the procedures processes and distribution of resources by institutions or systems tackling equity issues and understanding requires an understanding of the root causes of outcome disparities within our society equity is getting the resources that students need in order to be successful inclusivity is an outcome to ensure those underdiverse actually feel and or are welcome inclusion outcomes are met when you your institution and your program are

063truly inviting to all to the to the degree to which diverse individuals are able to participate fully in the decision-making process and developmental opportunities within the organization or group the next thing we're going to look at is as i mentioned initially how and why the di committee was done so i'm gonna i'm gonna ask your audience to kind of bear with me i think my committee members that are out there know that uh i can't go to a meeting without at least one video so this is the video that i'm going to show and actually this is the first video that i showed to the commission on october 15th so i think doctor you would appreciate this i think it really gives a good visual of island homeowners if you have a pseg meter like

064this inside of your house you can get paid to go solar for no money spent out of pocket it costs nothing to install [Music] so [Music] when there's an overwhelming need to fight prejudice and inequality when people decide to change [Applause] [Music] our world is changing faster than ever populations when there's an overwhelming need to fight prejudice and inequality when people decide to change [Applause] [Music] our world is changing faster than ever [Music] is a constant coming back is [Music] and open our minds to different ways of thinking we can do great things it's time to change and it's time to act every one of us can take responsibility to make a difference and lead the way i just want to mention something about that video too the reason i showed it because i really

065felt that that was a good visual representation of what diversity equity and inclusivity means to a system whether it's a system of adults system of children and what it means when you don't have that in place how it internally makes individuals feel and how it eliminates productivity and in turn can sort of truly truly affect individuals self-esteem and the way they perceive themselves and the way they interact with one another so that was one of the driving forces behind why we formed the committee the other one was the fulfillment of a board of education group which is the 2021 board of education goal number five to foster a positive school culture we pledge to operate within the school within the district's mission statement and to use this statement as well as our district policy to

066create policies and procedures that support equitable practices to ensure educational excellence for all students within the summer richard union free school district so that was part of the conversations that we had as a committee it was one of the driving forces and i apologize for classes [Music] and the third piece is something that dr masara touched upon which is the alignment to the international background program which we have uh which we are looking at over which we actually have in place at least in grade 6 and problem looking at it at the elementary level as we see and the ib supports diversity equity and inclusivity in the sense that that ib supports equity education for all students meaning education should be available to all students at all times education that is equitable meaning that it

067provides the necessary supports and resources to ensure that a student has every opportunity to reach success ib supports the teaching of diversity diversity is believed to be a tool to help a student to have a more well-rounded education a wider perspective of the world outside of celebrations whatever you know city or town you may reside in and you understand that there are different perspectives in different cultures and different uh different experiences that may enlighten you to a point that may help you to sort of change your framework or your way of thinking and finally ib supports inclusivity where an educational environment should include the voice of the world students its staff parents community members or stakeholders should be involved in that process this is something that iv supports this is something that our dei committee

068supports and finally our last meeting was on october 15 and the next piece that we are going to look at is actually the work of the committee that we engaged in doing the 20 20 and 21 students so if i could just make a comment um every item electricity in red is a hyperlink to the actual document or to the actual website that supports that particular topic that we're discussing the entire presentation will be available on the website tomorrow the links will be live you can just link onto it it will take that particular document that this bench reference is about 64 pages and it will take a tremendous amount of time to cover the committee looked at that document alone for about two months okay so as a with the dei committee we met

069monthly um via zoom from october to june um like like uh dr said we did look at some cultural responsive sustained sustaining educational framework we looked at different school districts policies that they had and reviewed this uh cultural responsive sustaining education framework like you said for a couple of months we did some book studies and then as a group we developed some committee initiatives one of them that we did was the new place working and just a little background or what the new place for hate initiative is is it was established by the anti-defamation league it's a four-phased approach which is creating a theme based on the needs of the district it implements three activities to reach students and staff and to become more effective to become more effective allies the theme and activities are

070carried out at all building levels there's also a pledge that everyone signs the elementary school already received their destination last year and this year we're hoping with working with the committee to carry out the designation district wide into the middle school and into the high school it's collaborative student driven and customizable teachers get support and difficulty in addressing difficult and challenging topics and students feel heard and understood we also have a board of education equity policy that's based on the new york state school board association's framework and we tailor it to our district and we also have a district equity and education plan thank you so now this is going to transition right into the front so once again these links will be available and i will actually um [Music] make this title red i

071i apologize but so i'm going to look at i'm going to walk the community and the board through the plan in two different ways the plan itself is pretty expensive it's about 11 pages and let me just talk about sort of how the plan was formed we as mr indicated we spent numerous months looking at uh i think the committee members wanted to kill me because every every month i would send them documents about documents and things that i wanted them to look at in preparation to the next week so we looked at different equity plans that were developed by different districts we looked at supplemental materials we looked at resource materials and we took all the materials that we looked at and of course the conversations we had we looked at the demographics of

072the district as documents ever mentioned and we came up with what is called an equity and education plan so the equity and education plan it took us about eight months to create after we got the initial conversation going in terms of getting some common language established within the committee members we begin building a draft i want to say sometime in march we developed a first draft in april i phoned in the draft in the committee we reviewed it and in i would say in may june you finalized it and that's what we are presenting this evening so i'm going to walk the committee the student i'm going to walk the audience through the initial plan and then i'm going to kind of go back to the presentation because i think the plan might be a

073little overwhelming to take in at least visually so this is the plan it's based on uh what we define as priority areas and it is adopted from as ms mentioned the um crsd framework for new york state department of education and that framework is divided into four principles that new york state department of education created and this particular priority area is adopted based on principle three and four of that framework and we identify two goals that align with the priority area and then the plan itself is divided by a goal the goal is designed to sort of meet the priority area and then the steps implementation and then the stakeholders groups involved in the plan the timeline the resources then our budget implications and finally the evaluation checklist check so as you can see it

074is pretty involved there is a lot of hyperlinks and this also would be available on the website for anyone who is interested in looking at it and then taking sort of a deep dive into it so it goes and it goes on and on so it's the fire in the area too so i'm going to go back now to the presentation because i think it's just for visual purposes i think it's easier for the audience to kind of adjust it so as i mentioned a moment ago we established two priority areas as a human the first one is based on principles three and four of the crisc framework and if we implement inclusive curriculum instruction and assessments caterpillar that's appreciated but goal number one is to conduct k-12 inclusive and assessment audits to ensure that

075diverse representations are included in the curriculum and provides students with multiple opportunities to have experiences with people from racist cultures and backgrounds different from their own goal number two we provide our stakeholders with ongoing learning opportunities on how to develop awareness regarding explicit implicit bias prejudice and all his forms and culturally responsive pedagogy and inclusive practices that support the diverse experiences and identity of our students foreign number two we create a safe and welcoming environment of dignity respect empowerment and inclusivity and that was adopted from the crs framework principle number the only one that we did uh sort of leave out in terms of our perspective is number two and a course for developing a rigorous curriculum which i we thought as a committee is kind of covered within our internal curriculum that we have

076catered for so the goal number one so that priority area is recognize how prejudiced and explicit implicit buyers manifest in the classrooms by uncovering underlying problems and developing strategies to address them number two is recommend to the board of education the adoption of the equity inclusivity and diversity in education policy which uh miss bench talked about a moment ago now i'm going to kind of walk the committee through what a typical goal would look like and how and some of the steps that we wrote up to to meet that girl so this particular goal is goal number two which applies to priority number one and if we provide our stakeholders with ongoing learning opportunities on how to develop awareness regarding explicit implicit bias prejudice and noise forms and culturally responsive pedagogy and increased practices that

077support the diverse experiences and identities of our students so with that we created in each particular goal and this is why i kind of walked away from looking at the plan as a whole we created anywhere from from three to six implementation steps so i'm just going the easiest to kind of digest the the goal number three of that particular job is incorporating a crsp agenda items at all faculty meetings the stakeholders involved with that will be principled and building administration the timeline will be september 2021 and ongoing throughout the school year and the district developed timeline of topics and the evaluation is faculty meetings against the steps of implementation number four is developed complete your servers focus on cisd and tdi at each building principles building administration of the individual stakeholders involved in the

078implementation of those steps a lot of different stuff and the timeline is the same as the previous timeline and the resources districts develop timeline of topics and the way to look at that in terms of the evaluation check-in is looking at the legislative judge's immigrants finally is the consideration of appointing a ddi liaison in each building the individuals involved in that will be district building administration district administration uh timeline is december 2021 district support is stiping is the resources uh provide training opportunities to the dai liaison and liaison reports that will be quarterly in nature which we're going to talk about in a moment i just want to talk about number five for a minute because mrs bench and i had an interesting conversation about this this morning where we thought should we take out

079the work he said because this is something that we've had support of education the board of education supported robotically we actually already have it in place so we did appoint individuals for this position which is which is great um but i wanted to keep in consideration because when we developed a plan we developed it with the entire dei community so i didn't really want to play around too much the language because it's something that the committee put a lot of time and effort and energy into it and i didn't want to necessarily change it too much so it is something that is accomplished already in terms of that particular goal and at this time i'm going to turn it back over to the sketch to look at the future work that we have so this

080is our future work we're always looking for new members so join whenever you get um we are part of the eastern topic focuses tbi server and what that entails as we have professional develop available professional development available to us it's customizable to our district we're able to access the database and the materials and resources to provide to our teachers and staff um we can correspond with outside consultants and um like i said we can get support and resources from the hdbi process dr did mention that we do have a building level ti liaisons in place they're going to be working with dr soto and the committee they're going to be participating in professional development and actually doing a turnkey and coming back and training our teachers and staff a quarterly review of equity education plans

081so that we can view our goals um see assess what what's working and what's not working and adjust it as we go uh no place for that eighth designation district wide that's our goal as well or like i said before we have uh been designated in the elementary school but we're trying to go to the middle school and to the high school and lastly we have the board of education equity policy which was based on the new york state school board association's framework and we are tailoring and customizing it to the needs [Music] there's just there's just one other thing that i would like to mention support if you can and you can develop scores in my contract that whenever i give any future presentations that mrs my co-presenter [Music] well thank you and thank

082you to committee thank you ms pence for all the hard work to put into something that is certainly going to be impactful every [Music] if anybody has any questions comments just regarding this thinking about it sorry mark i'd like to just comment sure so i was actually i sat on the committee participated um the board i would have to say is committed to receiving community input involved as much as you can it's great to see people here tonight i think one of the best forms of community input that there is for me is participation on the board so um i would urge anyone that would like to learn more provide more input there's always more people on this community more voices more perspectives committee is really all about i enjoyed it very much i have

083to say ricardo was an eagle taskmaster he had a lot to do it was all manageable nobody was shamed that they didn't do an assignment um and he actually did keep one or two meetings with me but i have to say i learned a lot it really was engaging discussion it really pushes you to think what's your own perspective where does your perspective come from um what are the limitations you perspective how do you feel why do you feel the way you do it so it was really interesting and so again a little shameless self motion please come and join the communities and hey [Music] we'll also do uh public participation for anything on the agenda speak specifically about that if you have any questions regarding the rest of the agenda or comments now we'll

084go through the agenda and then there'll be a public section again at the end okay that brings us [Music] board of education is asked to accept minutes of following meetings as prepared by the district clerk and into the meeting of the reorder board event on july 7 2021 administer the meeting of the regular quarterback on july 7. second fall in favor yes motion terror be resolved [Music] yes second fall in favor yes motion carry commander sleep separating the conversation [Music] members of the public who desire to address or question the board on any topic related to boardwork are welcome to do so at this time speakers are requested to limit their remarks to appoint a spokesperson concern and to do some verbal presentations [Music] there are some um tactical issues with the lockers in terms

085of providing supervision for kids and things like that to ensure um so locker rooms are a little bit more challenging than the regular lockers um so it's certainly some consideration [Music] good [Music] thank you very much um [Music] thank you because i'm really not i'm not speaking to the board but i am speaking to the community um school board members and dr sarah thank you for your time paper and core but why you had asked about my credentials i do a lot of study of uh reports and studies that are censored uh paper and cloth masks are only three percent effective when the virus is aerosolized let's not forget the science the virus is over a 99 survival rate mandating which is not lawful is violation of parental bill of rights which states parents have

086the sole authority to govern the child's medical protocol there are studies brown university professor emily austin watched the kobe dashboard project august 2020 to they go for the lack of a coordinated federal effort to track covenant remember that a lot coordinated federal effort to track herbert districts and schools opted in 12 million students 20 of all school enrollment including new york texas massachusetts and florida there was a clear shift vast school students saw a case rate 30 percent higher than non-masked staff numbers were higher but they were better than the non-masked gainesville florida six masks worn from six to eight hours were sent to a lab let's not forget the science the control remember when you have a study you need a control the control was a t-shirt of one of the students and unborn

087mass findings on the control or only protein protein is not a pathogenic to humans what was found on those six mass were bacteria parasites fungi pneumonia causing bacteria no virus was detected tv meningitis food poisoning diphtheria and staff and others that i cannot even pronounce intelligently were found these cause fever ulcers acne yeast infection strep throat and more let's not forget the science masks provide a nice warm moist environment masks do not live on or in a controlled environment they live on or in services bathrooms pockets and floors our children have an incredible immune system last year 4.2 million children tested positive for coving unfortunately point zero zero eight percent died the flu the flu season which is a six month season from 2018 to 2019 480 children died that was more than one and

088a half year of coded mass dehumanize us serve as a constant reminder to be fearful and free the center for evidence-based medicine at oxford university conducted six international studies mind you all these studies i'm talking about are censored why are they censored who's covering the cdc from basic studies simply no significant effect let's not forget the science masks harm i ask you to look under front line [Music] uh critical critical care alliance and american frontline doctors there is a six hour summit on masks and vaccines it's very important that we start opening up our eyes and look beyond the cdc because the fox is in the head house thank you very much thank you very much so that was the only name on our cheat that it signed up to speak like we have somebody

089this video [Music] um and that might um say go it should be in the school mailboxes by school and there'll be something to look at online by next time thank you anyone else [Music] second the next board of education meeting will be september 22nd um executive six next meeting approximately seven we thank you so much for everybody a good time have a great day