Board of Education Meeting - 10/14/2021

001beyonce [Music] are we good thank you [Music] good morning it's the mission of big walnut local schools to inspire and guide each student to his or her maximum potential i'd like to call this meeting to order with the pledge of allegiance [Music] the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all jeremy would you mind calling the roll please mr crowl here mrs doris here mr fuji here mrs lee here mr schneider here and that brings us to item six and the superintendent's report thank you good morning good morning um i'd like to start this morning with just spending a little bit of time um continue to get questions on our sentaro mental health services and i know we even had

002a board member who had some concerns and asked that we have some tarot present so i brought in a few folks to speak today um first up we have out there she is dr allison fagan um alison's going to be sharing some information um from her professional expertise in terms of the importance of mental health and the availability of services and then after dr fagan we're going to hear from deanna brant from the delaware moral mental health recovery services board they're actually the employing agency of sentaro so she's going to talk through that contract how they hire and evaluate centero we have julie rinaldi who is the ceo of centero who can speak to their organization and then i've also asked mrs laura lawrence who is our former director of student services there's been a

003lot of comments about how we did vets and tarot so just kind of want to put that to rest with letting laura talk about her role with that as our former director and then at that point if the board has any additional questions we can answer those and i would hope then that we could um be done with this topic so with that i'd like to invite dr fagan to come forward please to share your podium [Music] um it's an honor to speak with you this morning my name is dr allison fagan many in the community know me as alison and i like it that way but let me tell you a little bit about the doctor part before i speak to the content of what i want to share with you i'm a psychologist

004i have a bachelor's degree from wesleyan university middletown connecticut 1982. i have a master's in educational policy and leadership from that little place called the ohio state university and then a phd in psychology from ohio state also i graduated from ohio state with that doctorate in 1996 and i've been licensed as a psychologist since 1998 i think i know something about mental health i work in the community i have a private practice now in westerville prior to that private practice i worked in college mental health in student counseling centers so the students we take and leave from here and who happen to go on to college would be in my office and i can tell you in the years from when i started in college mental health to my uh most recent position in the

005mate in the mid 2000s the severity of presenting concerns was astronomical and that wasn't just an ohio-based thing that's a national phenomenon um so that's my credentials let me talk for a second about the seriousness of the mental health crisis i am not going to flood you with statistics you can look them up yourself they're all over the place nationwide children's hospital has an incredible campaign called on their sleeves that if you haven't seen it it is heart-wrenching they're pictures of children who are struggling with mental health issues in ohio and nationally one in five children school-aged children one in five is struggling with a mental health diagnosis take a second and picture one of our classrooms five of those children whether it's depression anxiety adhd a behavioral disorder of some sort tourette's syndrome or

006all kinds of other mental health concerns that's what's going on in our classrooms the other statistic i want to share with you is an ohio-based statistic that is also true nationally the number one cause of death in young people ages 10 to 18. is accidents number two suicide i don't like those numbers i wish those things weren't true believe me but they are true that's what we're dealing with [Music] the other thing we're dealing with is the extraordinary lack of mental health services not just in delaware county not just in central ohio but throughout the state and nationally just this week me personally in my little practice have had to say i'm terribly sorry but i cannot start working with you to seven people who are reaching out to me in distress i reached out

007to colleagues albeit informally it's not a formal poll and said i'm looking to place hypothetically i'm looking to place um a child because child psychologists are a specialization does anybody have any openings regardless of health insurance status nada no one in central ohio could see that child this week that's pretty bad i've heard concerns in the community that well that's all understandable and bad but parents should just take care of it wear it that easy sometimes parents don't know what's going on because children don't always talk to their parents some children like myself talk to trusted teachers i'm here today because of fred brandt mr kennedy who was my band teacher and this is andrews who was i'm not sure if she was a guidance counselor or a therapeutic counselor those people rescued me my

008mom had no idea and i am not unique in this way and the reason my mom had no idea is because of the fact that she was going through so much and i didn't want to be another source of stress on her kids do that all the time another reason why parents can't just take care of it is sometimes parents are the problem whether we're talking about addiction or domestic violence or having a depressed parent sometimes parents are the problem another reason why parents can't take care of it is they may not have the ability to physically take their child out of school and transport them to a therapist's office some therapists some psychologists some counselors have some evening hours but many parents have to work and to pull a child out of school is

009a problem for the child for the parent for a one hour appointment that's a two hour chunk out of their work day when you add commuting time and now let's talk about the issue of access in terms of having health insurance someone's got to pay for this right it is required in ohio it's called parity that mental health services are covered but it doesn't mean you can find a provider and if you're a family that's taking that's taking advantage of services or needs to take needs to use services through medicaid no private therapists that i know i'm sure there are some accept those reimbursement rates it's 30 bucks on the hour we can't afford to the other thing that's true mental health impairments affect children's ability to learn how do you learn if you're sitting

010in a classroom and you're worried about your deployed father this is a true story from someone in our community i'm not going to share names or details to protect the family's privacy that i was talking to this mother yesterday the doc the children were school-aged children elementary aged children the father was being deployed the family was worried understandably about a lot of things how it would affect the family what was going to happen to dad where's dad going all of those things the parent attempted to find services in the community when it was unable to find satisfaction with community resources one of our teachers suggested to this parent that she take advantage of the sentaro services available within the school district the girls did great they learned tools to cope with the stress they had

011an outlet to discuss their feelings they learned how to manage their stress and they just had a person to talk to who wasn't mom about what was going on and these girls were able to talk to this counselor with the counselor understanding the student the girls school context the environment with within which they live and work because school is their work right i asked this mom what she thinks would have happened if the girls hadn't gotten services she said well you know it's hard to know that but i do know the girls had a very successful year that's one story there are others the other thing i've heard in the community that's a little off my getting a little out of my lane here but i'm going to address it is that specifically santero should

012not be given the contract because centero has a sex education curriculum and that would be like the fox guarding the head house well that's makes no sense to me for two reasons three actually the first is that sex education curriculum was never ever offered in big walnut nor any place in delaware county it was a franklin county curriculum only second centennial stopped offering that curriculum to focus its primary services on mental health services and third has to do with the metaphor itself any single prescriber be it a certified nurse practitioner or a physician can write a prescription for birth control pills does that mean you don't take your 14 year old daughter to see the doctor of course not professionals know their boundaries and know how to stay in their lane thank you all right

013it is and i acknowledge that openly it's quite an acronym tell me when i'm ready i can start talking all right thank you and thank you for having me and i'm actually here to talk about the administrative aspect of how we contract with providers as a board and i want to say a couple things first thanks for having me and secondly i'm not going to be nearly as interesting as that because i'm going to review our procedure for you i want to talk a little bit about something that's the most boring topic ever the ohio revised code so most of you probably know that boards were established in the higher buys code and part of our process for how we screen and allocate funds to providers is dictated in the ohio revised code our board

014has two initial thresholds when we consider providers for an allocation from our board first is that they be certified for the service for which they'd like funding from the ohio department of mental health and addiction services and believe it or not not all providers are certified by omas that gives us some statewide oversight of the quality of care their fiscal reporting their compliance from the ohio department of mental health and addiction services the second thing that we look at for treatment services specifically is a national accreditation shortage that we would have to look at for-profit entities i would never rule it out but right now our focus has been on solely for the 25-year history i can account for not-for-profit provider agreements the the the next thing we look at is local needs so the

015ohio advise code has a section 340.032 that dictates what the essential elements are of a behavioral health continuum of care in all communities in ohio every county has a board and so we have to look at how that application for services fits into that continuum of care do we have a gap in those services here do we need it and if we need it at what level the orc goes on to talk about what boards can look at in terms of factors for review cost effectiveness quality and i'm going to speak to quality separately in a moment because that's really dictated by each individual board and we have an entire program for how we assess the quality of services that are provided and then i said cost elements so one of the things that the

016orc says is that a board can have its own utilization review process for how we analyze the work of of a specific provider that we contract with and we have one it's and i think you know if you could ask any of our providers we have 12 major providers and then we have a number of smaller what we call community partnerships our utilization review is rigorous i'm going to use that word and i think that they would use it too we look at their board governance their board meeting schedule their board membership their board meeting minutes we look at their fiscal reports to ensure their fiscal stability over time and you when you think about what i said earlier about how we have to be sure that we can maintain continuity of care fiscal stability

017matters to that we have an outcomes reporting system that's partly software based that analyzes programs over time in four specific areas effectiveness does it work are people getting better are students getting better are families seeing the results they'd like to see efficiency are all of the folks who need help able to get it and i'm summarizing thumbnail sketch of what the words mean but there are all sorts of documents attached to this access do people have to wait for care because they shouldn't to um allison's point they shouldn't and so we measure how long children adults families wait for care in specific programs and then satisfaction were they happy with the outcome and it it doesn't mean that the person that they worked with necessarily told them what they wanted to hear how you measure

018satisfaction really isn't about that it's more about do you think this program will be beneficial would you refer your friends to it would you refer other family members in this specific program now board funded providers reapply every year we do not have auto renewals we don't have evergreen contracts they go through this process each and every year and and i will say the second piece of that is we are perpetually as a board looking for other providers around capacity around bandwidth around gaps in that continuum of care this is not a system where there are legacy providers who don't have to go through this process and are simply rolled over each year we we make them go through this application process starting in december of the year that starts july 1st of the following year

019so that that application it's comprehensive it looks at their strategic plan how it aligns with our strategic plan whether or not the services they provide are for one of our priority populations our first priority population and our strategic plan are children with behavioral health issues so of course that would be a focus for us we look at whether or not they use evidence-based practices has the science said in clinical research said these programs work and then of course we look comprehensively at the result of all of those outcomes measurements that we do so our board's allowed to consider all of those factors cost quality of care cost effectiveness continuity of care and last performance on prior contracts so we use that to dictate how we make these recommendations so all of this information all of

020it is given to the board staff to our board finance committee we also have a planning committee and then typically in late spring of the the end of the fiscal year goes to the full board for consideration for renewal for the following year so have we looked at other providers we have that's that's our job right to always have um options in place um couple things and ohio has some new child based initiatives coming out for which it made sense for us to look for additional support in providing some of those services if you haven't heard you know you probably have a high rise in some of the mrss some of those programs we have yet to find a provider for school-based services with this bandwidth who can provide services across both counties and all

021schools that were certified by homos for school-based services which is our first threshold that they have to meet that had outpatient capacity to accept any student or family who might need more support than what happens within the school system and last that um was paneled for private insurance and you probably ask yourself maybe you do why does that matter in a school-based setting it doesn't matter here but for families who are referred on who have private coverage it reduces local tax burden if that provider can then bill that that insurance and that's that's important to us now i'm going to speak briefly to those outcomes measures and how sentero has performed on those so in our system you know our we're not aspirational in the sense that we expect um success in all of these

022measures you know we're we're dealing with humans and human nature on both sides of the equation the provider and the recipient right so we set what we think are reasonable standards but with some stretch for the providers to always be improving the quality of the care they provide and centero on those measures has performed beautifully and i i will say this carf who is their national accreditation organization actually suggested to us considering this model of service for replication nationally so we will continue to do our due diligence as i've described and there's a lot more involved in this that we can certainly have conversation about if anyone would like to be happy to do that um but that's how our process works thank you sure good morning thank you all for inviting me and i

023want to thank dr fagan and deanna i've never met dr fagan before so thank you for your kind words and support um so i'm here i'm going to talk about our agency a little bit and then i'm going to address some of the concerns that we've heard that have been out in the community that have that i hope that i can address and put to rest i'm julie ronaldi i'm the ceo of sentaro i've been with the organization a little over 12 years i have been in the mental health field for 36 years this is the first time i've ever had to stand before anyone and have to defend our agency but i'm going to do it because what we do is so important our organizations zontaro has been in business we're a non-profit for

02443 years if you were wondering what centero means it's the greek word for support and it really we our board decided that that was a good way to really describe the services that we provide i think you know that we provide behavioral health care services along the spectrum so we work with little little people up to folks who are older adults so we have the full comprehensive span of agency services we are in good standing with all of our funders with all of our accreditation agencies deanda described how their board accredits us and certifies us and contracts with us i think that there's no doubt that our organization is well thought of we have a very good reputation and i'm here because there's been some concerns raised about our organization i do want to address

025those we did have a sexual health program in franklin county for about 17 years that was funded by the franklin county adam h board we've provided services in middle school and high schools about a year and a half ago we were alerted by a parent in the hillyard district that there was that's one of our i guess links to some information and resources that we had shared had been corrupted we were horrified we were completely horrified we took everything down immediately all of the links everything we took down we shut everything down we worked with the school district we worked with the parents and we decided that we were going to shut everything down because it was horrifying and we would never ever have taught anything that was that was like in those links so

026since then there was a group afterwards who created a video which some of you have probably seen that um uses our logo against never asked us to use our logo never ask permission to use our logo accuses us of teaching children middle school children how to be human go into human trafficking i mean that is egregiously false we would never ever ever do anything like that there's all kinds of false accusations out there there's videos that have been created nobody has ever ever come to me and asked me whether any of this is true it is blatantly false information and i'm sorry that so much energy and time has been placed in this again with this false information because it's blatantly false blatantly false we would never ever do anything like that we're professionals we

027care about children we would never ever do anything like that we were so horrified that we went to the ohio attorney general's office and met with their office of human trafficking because we wanted to make sure that they knew we would never do anything like that and they've been very supportive and very um and of us and and understood the situation so they've kind of shut some things down as well but we're horrified i'm horrified as a professional i'm a former educator i have my master's degree in in education this has been horrifying for our organization we haven't been able to protect ourselves or defend ourselves against these attacks but they're all lies all of them and i want to make sure this community and other communities know that nothing that has been stated has

028been is true so um you know people can make videos people can steal people's logos people can can can say false things again against you that are just untrue it's it's amazing we're here to protect children we do the exact opposite we teach children how not to get involved in human trafficking how how to be safe you know how to how to um use social media safely so we do the exact opposite so it's just been amazing to sit back and have to watch this these attacks it's just blatantly false you know that again the only thing that we can think of and thank you for mentioning it the only thing that we can think of is that was again you can take things out of context and for what i understand it was the

029the contents of the the cd again it was taken out of context the only thing we can think of is that is that it was a list of things that might be myths that like eighth grade boys think can they can use to for for uh you know safe sex or something like that i think it was taken out of context and again i'm not even sure if it was our staff or if it was our program so no i just want to make sure folks know that we would never do anything to hurt a child or hurt anybody of any age we're here to protect so thank you for your time and thank you for your support and we love working in this district in fact we've increased our staffing here and the referrals

030are going up exponentially so the need is there thank you laura good morning as the board knows i have retired after 42 years in education and i still call this my district and these are my kids and i'm pleased to be able to be here this morning to talk to you just a little bit about the history of where we are with mental health within our district of big walnut when i arrived nine years ago now we had one district mental health specialist working with all students within all of our buildings shortly after that within a couple years we have are starting to decide how to use our title one grant money this is historically used with our lower socioeconomic students and our buildings based on free and reduced lunch numbers basically academic reading and

031math materials that could be used to help those students be more successful in the classroom however we couldn't supplant or use materials that we were using in our other buildings within those the buildings and at that point it was souters and big walnut elementary school but we realized when we were doing our planning that we didn't need more academic materials we had students who were struggling in the classroom with learning due to mental health concerns their family situations social skill concerns we had no outlet way to help the students in those areas so we determined that some of our students needed mental support health during the school day in order for them to be successful in the classroom this had never been done through the federal grant funds before we reached out to them in

032our proposal and asked if this is a way that we could use the money they said we don't know we'll find out and we were very pleased to find out that we did receive approval that we could contract with ohio guidestone at that time for the use of that grant money again never been done they said yes it will impact learning go ahead and do that students at souters and bewe at that time received some small group services one-on-one services in that first year and then the second year harrison street also qualified for services so we had clinicians from ohio guidestone within those three elementary buildings so the next year the high school and middle school are saying hey we've got kids who have needs we want supports for them also is there something that

033we could do to bring some of those mental health services to the to our secondary students at that time justin plummer had been with ohio guidestone working with elementary students and we were able to bring him on board to work with our middle school and high school students and he shared his time between those two buildings we were able to still use grant money for the elementary buildings in order to provide services for those students however you've got two buildings who were left out of that picture then gre had no outside supports and big walnut intermediate school had no supports and at that time delaware moral mental health services or the board did have the grant for providing mental health services within the schools and we reached out to them and found out that they

034would place a mental health clinician free of charge within our district to help support student learning so we immediately placed them at our two buildings that had no supports gre and bwi and we had one clinician who worked between those two buildings two and a half days within each building it was at that time then that justin and i during the spring or summer i can't remember i think it was before the end of the school year we met directly with the personnel with centerro to talk about our specific needs in big walnut what we were looking for in our clinicians how we envisioned that working they worked very closely with us as we identified what kind of personnel we wanted working with our children and what we were hoping to get out of that

035out of there working with us and they were very accommodating at finding great people who had self-initiative a drive to reach out to students and had great rapport with our students this past year um justin did a great job coordinating and overseeing the services between ohio guidestone and centero since both of them were within our district at that time they had been in separate buildings though we wanted to make a change to that so that we were had prevention services which were being provided by sentaro and our early intervention focus that could be provided by ohio guidestone and we then looked at a model where we had clinicians from both of those um sentiro and ohio guide stone within all of our buildings based on student need so no longer was determined by what building

036you went to on who came who who worked with you if you were identified as a student needing help and support so the goal has been to assess a student's needs provide short-term supports in counseling either small group or individually both of these services refer our families to outside services if continued support or treatment is necessary we have so many students and families right now receiving the short-term and long-term care through the model that's been developed in big walnut justin sonya the social worker ohio guidestone and sentaro clinicians are all working so well together justin's coordinating the program and reporting to ross who then oversees the program but we have students now who are able to participate successfully learn every day in the classroom based on the services that we're providing them i'm so proud

037of this district for what they've done in stepping up and looking at the mental health needs of our kids and i certainly hope that that continues all right with that i'd like to open up if the board has any additional questions after hearing our four speakers that they can address i can have them come up if so any additional questions what we do i looked at the uh requirements that i think maybe mrs lawrence provided a while back i'm not really sure where del oro mental health recovery services um i'm not sure i'm sorry i'm having a hard time i was worried here we go third time's going to be a winner here i'm referring to a document that was provided to the members of the board in reference to services that centero provides to

038our district and our students and in that document it really talks about the types of services that we use them for now and i'm going to specifically read for school-based services areas of focus are worry sadness loss of family member emotional regulation which is absolutely an educational term executive functioning and social skills i don't see sex education in this true so in the conversations and the concerns again and i think dr fagan brought it up the fox and the henhouse conversations the topics that this organization utilizes for us has to do with that list absolutely that has never section has never been a part of conversations that i've had in my eight years that i was in the district thanks and then um the other question that i have and i think i heard this

039before but i just want to make sure that i totally understand it so as clear as i can be and centero doesn't work with our students in one-on-one situations or any situation without a parent consent or parent conversation prior to the dialogue absolutely there's a whole referral process that goes in from school personnel either principals teachers counselors and definitely there is a whole process where parents are notified give approval before the clinician ever works with a student again thank you i have a quick question i think we've this information has been shared but can somebody remind me how many students and families have taken advantage of the services we've offered within the district you know for the past year for example how many students are we serving i think this year we're just under 100

040right now with i think 10 referrals that are pending so typically picks up as the year continues that's pretty typical i think we've been up to as much as 140. i don't have an exact number i apologize i don't know that either he spoke a couple meetings ago and again just kind of get laura with more of the history however um there has always been a waiting list for students who want to see clinician and that's what we're trying to do look at those needs provide some short-term services for students refer them out for outside counseling so that can be continued so we can get other students in to work with our clinicians at school and then from what ms what dr fagan shared is that in most cases those individuals would not be able

041to find immediate services outside of the district that's not there and it's even hard for when we're referring those services but if that school-based service is there to start with it's easier to get in than for those outside services thank you any other questions i had a couple questions for deanna if she wouldn't mind coming back up please of course you would be about the process questions perhaps i'm guilty um so just quickly can you talk about which schools um in delaware and morrow county are using sentaro are you or that school districts do um because of you know both the fact that schools have other options such as guys sewn here and because of capacity issues they're not in every building but they're contracted through us for every single school district public school district

042for us and if if i may can i respond to it to your question earlier um we have never been asked to nor is funding for a sex education curriculum within our strategic priorities in terms of services we would fund in the whole history i could look at we have never funded a program such as that so um you know it was as julie described limited to franklin county and not something that has ever been under our purview nor is it in any future consideration not part of our strategic plan no thank you indiana's please understand the reason for that question is is looking at the 12 organizations that fall under the umbrella and having heard the concerns now from the community around the topic i just wanted to make sure that as it relates

043to the vetting process and the work that you do here that wasn't within that scope correct and that document you have was provided by me those services described are what we fund centero to provide across those eight school districts and it varies from district to district depending on what their needs are but it's within that scope thank you so i guess that's the last question that i had and as you talk through some of the measures that you do to evaluate providers i heard you mentioned a quality component as well as a if i'm miss characterizing let me know but like a customer satisfaction component if i heard you correctly so in either of those two measures that you have have you ever received a complaint from someone using sentero about their children or family

044members being indoctrinated or being coerced in some form or another in terms of their beliefs or values in the course of the care they've provided we have not and i i want to say no provider system is perfect that's why we have a client rights system in ohio so if there are issues like that we as the board are the client rights officer for behavioral health services within our board area there are other mechanisms too but we're the statutory one we have never received any information as a complaint a grievance a concern directly from a person in the community have you received any similar complaint of any topic of any other provider that's currently working with big walnut schools i'm not sure what you're asking me so basically the same question for anybody else that

045you've helped us with whether it's ohio guidestone or anyone else we have not okay thank you mr president well but the ohio guys not one of the i'm sorry i just met other providers that they may be contracting with us i misspoke on the name correct what i really just wanted to hear is that's the thing i hear is that centero's coercive zenterro is shaping the values of the students in our community i guess what i just heard from the board is that that's never been a complaint from anyone that's received those services and i'm also hearing not from any other provider that may have worked with the district that the board has coordinated i was confused thank you that's okay no i may not have may not have stated it very clearly are there

046any other questions no i don't have any questions i i just want to say i really appreciate um everybody coming out and and speaking today and providing all this information okay thank you all right thank you next we're going to move on to our health commissioner sheila hiddleston she's here today she's going to share um just kind of an update with where we are with things we and i'll kind of tie this is mark's getting her slides pulled up um apply this to the next item on here which is our pandemic response committee so we were asked by the board to reconvene that committee which we were able to do on tuesday night so a huge thank you to all the folks who came out for that um as well as our our two board

047members who represent on that committee mr fuji and mrs lee for shaking pending as well had some great conversations we've compiled the feedback that we got from that group sent it out last night to the group and looking for um a couple of folks to come in and share that with the board so it can also obviously be shared with the public as we stream the meeting so we are planning on putting that on the agenda for next week and in the meantime i asked sheila to come in and share so she's going to share the data she's actually updated a couple slides since she talked to the committee on tuesday night but this is very similar data to what she shared then with a couple of updates so again welcome to sheila i know

048we've talked a lot about working with the del republic health district over the last 20 months for you i think we started to get involved more in march but she's been working on uh since january so big thank you to sheila and her team um i've shared with the board before but just a reminder and i think this is amazing that we have met as a group with all the superintendents and school nurses weekly since this started in march with few exceptions we probably only canceled five maybe in that entire time at that so if that maybe two three so weekly meetings where we're able to work together get updates from them they're great at answering questions and you know certainly the the work that they've been able to do on this kind of like

049deanna mentioned that no one's perfect they've been very short staffed i know lately like everyone else with the employment shortage but have been very responsive working around the clock sheila is always available when we need her so just wanted to take a moment to publicly thank her for all of her work on this i know um i haven't met anyone that actually likes the pandemic or wants it to stick around any longer and it's easy to vilify the health department as if they created it but i think that for the situation that believe it or not she likes to remind us that you do handle other things in public health besides covet you're responsible for other things and there's not a pandemic going on so um certainly like all of us sheila would love for

050her team to get back to handling all the other public health areas a little bit more but has done a great job stepping up and handling what has become a very unpopular topic so with that thank you sheila and thank you for coming in today and giving us your time this morning thank you very much angie and thank you all for having me this morning yes angie and i have gotten to be very very close over the last bunch of months and i would have to say too that it's the great partnerships with the schools that we have you know there are 113 health commissioners in the state of ohio and so then you all have even more superintendents but myself and my peers we talk all the time about our relationships with our schools

051and that we certainly could not do the work that we need to do related to any communicable disease but specifically with cobot if it weren't for those great partnerships so angie and megan they just they're just run circles around some of what i hear goes on in some of the other counties in ohio so just really um angie asked me to come and talk just a little bit about the specifics of the data kind of where we are today where we see we're going i always tell people i do actually have a crystal ball on my desk it was given to me when i became a health commissioner about 17 years ago and it doesn't work and so i tell my friend who's a health commissioner that he shouldn't have given it to me because

052it doesn't work and i'd like a refund on all of that i wish i knew where we were going with all of this for about six weeks now the association of ohio health commissioners we've been asking dr vanderhoff the medical director and now the director of the ohio department of health we need to know what is your end game i mean what are you looking for a number are you looking for a specific thing to happen what is the end game because i think all of us realize that at this point we have to be able to look forward and say what does come next i can tell you 20 months is a long time to be in an incident command and some of you who maybe know firefighters or policemen that's what we all

053use across the country is the incident command system in order to manage emergencies or things like this when they become more than what the team that would normally handle them handles so our normal communicable disease team is five people and we at one point at our high point we had 37 people working on this um as things we thought were getting a little bit better i was able to move some of our team back into their normal duties and now slowly over the last two months i've had to move some of them back into responding to this but we do need to know what that endgame is and what is it that we're looking for to kind of flip this to go from a class a reportable which means that every single solitary case has

054to be reported to the health district immediately within that day to more of a class b which we work with the schools on all of the time like a pertussis or a measles or a mumps or something like that that we would respond to but we don't respond to every single solitary case now some of those are class a reportables and we respond but certainly not to this extent so trying to figure out what is that balance and at what point for the united states does this move from being a pandemic to being an endemic to being endemic and we treat it as such and we move to that point we have not had a definitive answer from that i will tell you internally what we've tried to think about is at what point we

055would look at that and you all know that throughout all of this one of the goals has been to keep the hospitalizations down so that hospitals can react to not only the covet patients that are coming in but everything else that comes in and we were fortunate the other night at the pandemic meeting to have an emergency room physician there and at our table somebody asked her that well when do you think that we we will have beat this or we will have been at this level and she said when i don't have to keep patients in my emergency room for days because i have enough beds in the hospital to get them there and i think that you know so for the hospital situation that's kind of their goal what we look at and

056especially once the vaccines became available you know no vaccine is 100 perfect and i hear that all the time while we're still having disease we're still having disease is it not working and it is working the goal of any vaccine is to prevent death prevent severe illness prevent hospitalizations and let us all live through the illness but come out good on the other end and i'm going to show you a statistic that very much shows that it is working that delaware county is the highest vaccinated county in the state and if you look across the country one of the highest in the country but what we're what we said is okay so what are we going to look at to try to decide when we think we're there and one of the things that seems

057to make the most sense is if the cases are still going up but the hospitalizations and the deaths are not then maybe that is when we're there and i will tell you right now that looks pretty good our cases have gone up but the severity of the illness has gone down and we haven't seen as many hospitalizations we haven't seen as many deaths as we were seeing like earlier on now the delta variant and you know we'll continue to have other variants certainly has thrown a little bit of a loop into that because if we hadn't had this severe variant we may not even be having this conversation and we could all go back to doing all of the things that we all did before we had the pandemic but that's kind of where we

058are today and trying to figure out what is that end game and where i can tell you that even as we're speaking what time it is there's actually a committee of my peers working with the ohio department of health to figure out where do they see this end game because i think all of us across the state know that we have we cannot stay in an emergency mode for another year and a half um staffing as angie said you know we've lost several staff who just said i just can't do this anymore one of my peers up in morrow county just had a nurse just leave and she said i'm just not coming back i cannot do this anymore so that's kind of where we are but the partnership has just been wonderful so let

059me just share these little statistics with you and then i'd be happy to answer any questions so we're going to go from big walnut only then to the schools and then talk a little bit more so these are your cases actual case numbers for this school year and you can see that we did have a high and the high number there was 39 and that was the week of the 21st of september then they did start coming down a little bit we said that you all actually kind of not on purpose i'm sure but put your own little study in there for us to look at it when you decided to put masks on your k through 6 would we see some drops in numbers after that and we did start to see a little

060drop now you can see the last numbers higher again i can tell you across the um the sta those county we went three weeks with some downward numbers my epis tell me i can't call that a trend but it was three weeks where we were getting a little bit excited and then for some reason this week we went back up again what we do in public health when we see something like that is we we go back and we say well what happened two weeks ago so incubation period 14 days for covet what happened before that and so we did go back and we tried to look at what kinds of things were going on and not that any of these things might have caused it but if you think about there were festivals going

061on a few weeks ago that we had county fairs going on we had children that were maybe there were we've had more football games and more soccer games i mean more interactions maybe than we had been having you know early fall when my children were little i loved that part of the year because we got to go back out and see all of those people that we hadn't seen for a little bit so try to look at that none of that is anything that would say oh absolutely positively this is the reason why but last week we were at 16 cases and this week we're at 26 and so that's 10 now in your size school district and i should have that number member rise but i don't is it about with students 47 47

062i would say 45 so i was pretty close so you say well 10 cases that's not really that bad but it is an increase and so you know is there anything going on that would account for that it's probably just a fluke across the state um the numbers were all going down and then this week they've started go up a little bit again again nothing that we can say this is absolutely what happened but it is something just to look at your next number is your case rate per 100 000. we get lots of facebook uh feedback on the per 100 000 and people like well there aren't even a hundred thousand people why would you even care about this well this is one of the things that we do as epidemiologists to be able

063to normalize a number so that we can do some comparisons if we don't do that we couldn't look to big walnut and say okay with 4 700 how does that compare with say an ol and tangy with 20 000 25 000 how do we look at those so we can we change all of those things to rates so that we can look at that and again you can see it follows just exactly like your your other graph does as far as we had the little peak we went down and then we went back just up a little bit so that's that this is per the next slide is the school districts as a whole so one of the things that we know and we follow for years and years and years your schools have been

064giving us attendance data every single day and we always monitor this because we know if we're going to see something in a community a lot of times we see it in the schools first we have surveillance systems that tell us if the number of anti-diarrheal medicines is all of a sudden going up if we start to see a lot of the fever medicines if those start going up we have this surveillance system that follows that one of the things we use is also looking at the school attendance if all of the sudden we start seeing a lot of school absences then our effie step back and we start to say okay do any of these things relate to each other is there something going on that we need to be aware of and so when

065we decided that we were going to have a grade card and i should talk about that in just a moment we thought well one of the things we want to do is what is that early surveillance look like and so our four large school districts are what we decided to go and big walnut is the red line and you'll see that it's been a little bit higher but all of them have had their peaks and valleys and so we kind of keep an eye on those and see where we are and then the next slide really just talks about that again that's the rates so same thing just with looking at all of the schools added in there together so we started off low of course at the beginning of school we started to climb

066we did come back down and then we just went back up a little bit this week but hopefully that's just a little tiny bit and it'll go right back down what we do to get those numbers is every sunday um either one of my staff or myself we go through all of the exclusion lists for the previous week we get all of those cases we eliminate duplicates we try to figure out what one's our new cases and then those are where those numbers come from so just so you know that's where those numbers come from i know there's always a lot of questions about um the data lies the data lies the data lies and i can tell you 100 percent certain sin 100 certainty none of my staff are making up data i mean

067this is an onerous task to keep track of all of these cases and context on a line list and i promise you nobody's making up anything we did have a couple of glitches in our data late last year well would have been your late school year and when we discovered it we put right out there this is what happened this was the mistake when you're dealing with all of these various cells because each person's line has like 25 cells that are we're collecting data on and we did have a glitch in one of them where one of the drop down screens got broken and so when they put whatever they wanted to put in there instead of what was on the drop down those of you who use spreadsheets that just screw everything up so

068we have had a couple of those glitches in the data but i can promise you our data is sound these next couple of slides come from the ohio hospital association i would tell you they have a great website if people really are into data and they like to kind of see where we are as a community it's ohio hospital association backslash coven19 we are in region four angie i do think the other day i told your group too it's not where zone two in region four nobody well but if you click on the center of ohio you can look at our data and kind of see where we are with hospitalizations now again the reason that we care about covet hospitalizations is that speaks to the severity of the disease we keep track of the

069cases but knowing how many people are in the hospital talks a little bit more about that severity i can tell you yesterday morning there were 11 icu beds in our entire region out of 698. now not all of those people in those icu beds were coveted patients again looking at the severity of the illness but i don't know about all of you all but if my dad has a heart attack i want him to be able to get into an icu bed i don't care where that bed is i don't care what people are in those beds for but i want him to be able to get in there we had a low point last week of five five out of 698 that's pretty scary statistic if you think about it and all of those

070were in one hospital i'm on a call at nine o'clock every morning and the hospitals all get on there and they talk about all of their issues and they're actually bartering for who can take patients who can find an icu bed i think it's similar to what they talked about with mental health trying to find those providers it's the same in the hospital situation so that website if you're into data it's a great website you can click on our region and then as you scroll over things you can see the exact number of children that are in hospitals because i know that's always a big concern i hear a lot of people say well why are we doing anything in the schools because kids don't get coveted well they do kids don't die of covet

071well they do not necessarily in delaware county and i into my knowledge and i haven't looked at this this week right um but two people only two children even in the whole state of ohio but those babies were somebody's babies and i don't care if it was only two or not it's still children that did die but if you're into those numbers you can go on there you can scroll over the date and it tells you exactly how many kids were in the hospital so this data comes from this and i did talk to angie a little bit about this on monday and i said your district is kind of a unique district in that i can't just pick a zip code and look at it and tell you kind of what's going on in

072your whole district not the school because i can tell you the school data but this is kind of looking at your whole community so i picked sunbury galena and then the part of westerville that's in delaware this was the last seven day count so those are the actual numbers of patients and the la or cases in the last seven days and then i did break that down into the youth because again i know people are always wanting to know that so this was the last seven day count of that the next slide just kind of shows you again that trend and what's happened since school started we started going up and then we did start coming down the one thing we always want to talk about when we look at those very last numbers is

073it does take sometimes almost a week for those cases results to be reported to the ohio disease reporting system and so sometimes you have to take those last couple numbers with a little grain of salt because depending upon how those test results come in that could go up a little bit but this is the latest numbers there the other thing that we try to look at next slide oh you already changed it you're just good um is of course vaccination rates and so i said a little bit ago that we're very fortunate in delaware county that we do have a very high vaccination rate but the ohio hospital associate association webpage now this is the private web page that they've given us access to so you can't go on and see these exact numbers but

074this is what your vaccination rates are so if you look at all ages and then if you just look at youth and again right now that's just the 12 to 17 because we can't vaccinate any children younger although i understand that that may be coming within the next couple of weeks that the pfizer will be available for children 5 and up and we will work with the schools to do clinics again for the parents who choose to have their children immunized but this is kind of where you are i thought you might be interested to see that and then of course there's our statistics and you know what i can tell you that i have complete confidence in all of the that i have confidence in all the statistics that i've shared with you i

075would bet my life on these statistics these are the statistics that my team keeps every day and they are they scrub their data so much to make sure that it's all right that's actually how we found the one error that we had but this is where we are 38 average new cases per day per 100 000 so you have to double that because in delaware county there's 214 000 people right now and that's the new cases per day that we look at and that is up a little bit last week it was 34. [Music] yeah last week it was 34. so it just did go up just a little bit again eight cases you know people think well it's just eight cases well again maybe nothing but we want to keep an eye on it

076the next slide is our grade card and we've got a lot of flack about our grade card and um you know one of the things that we wanted to do was to help our community to know kind of where we were in the big scheme of things and whether we were having a ton of community spread whether we weren't and we could have just decided we'd go exactly with what the cdc calls their high medium low they call us high we've been high for forever it looks at just a couple of things and we said well what could we do to maybe make sure that we're looking at some more local data how does that fit in with what the goals should be these goals do come from the cdc so the one is our

077case rate it is still high i'm having a hard time seeing that i think it says 262 per 50 or per 100 000 and we want that to be less than 50 per 100 000 so we're still up there pretty high again that's gone up just a little bit this week we do really really well with our immunizations and our hospitalized patients even though those numbers are still high that number specifically looks at the number of covid patients number two factor and the cova patients are down a little bit even though the capacity of the hospital isn't there and then like i shared we look at the schools because we think that that's a way to kind of see what's going on at the community level with the surveillance this next one though is one

078i did want to also talk about so this is specifically looking at cases related to their vaccination status and the first part of the little section is from january all the way through the second little bar is just from i believe it's june and august and we have started to see a little bit more vaccine breakthrough than we were seeing at the beginning of the year of course you have to take that with a grain of salt there also are more people vaccinated so of course you're going to have more vaccine breakthrough because in the beginning there wasn't any breakthrough to have and remember this is where people say well the vaccine doesn't work the vaccine doesn't work the vaccine doesn't work well 20 only 25 of our cases are vaccinated 75 of them are

079unvaccinated so the the vaccine is working to keep people from getting sick but remember the goal of this vaccine is to keep you out of the hospital and keep you from dying and that's what those next two bars are and while we have seen a little shift in those as well if we just look at the last couple of months we still are seeing more people that are unvaccinated in the hospital and more people that are unvaccinated that are dying but that little tiny graph at the bottom which i'm sorry it's so little i should have put it on its own slide this is what i want people to realize when you think about vaccination and whether you believe that it works or not those bar graphs at the bottom are our case numbers and

080that's comparing us with all of our surrounding counties compared to our vaccination rates so we are right now at about 75 percent of our eligible population is vaccinated around uh some of those numbers dropped down into the 40s and if you look at that graph our case number is lower than every single one of those other counties so we are seeing community spread but not to the extent that some of those other counties are seeing so that's why we know vaccination works because otherwise our case numbers would be as high as some of those other ones the highest one there and i can't even see that you all probably can't very well either it was knox county unfortunately and um they have a very low vaccination rate i think the last time i looked at

081that it was like 40 something i don't know if mark can actually tell us it's up there on the map it's the bottom one yeah it's yeah so they're much much higher based on that so the next slide these are some of the things that the cdc says that you know this is their report of us we are still at high transmission if you look at the state of ohio for all of the data points that they look at the whole state of ohio is still at high transmission i believe a couple of weeks ago one of our counties might have gone down to the orange level but when i looked this week they were all at high so then we kind of go into so what do we do about all of this and

082when we look at what we can do we can look at the community and what can we do as a community we can look at the vaccine obviously we still want people to be tested and then we try to monitor the outbreaks so with angie's uh team and i always say team and then she reminds me it's just megan um with me just megan just megan not so one of the things we've been looking at is are we having outbreaks within the school classrooms and we have had to shut down some sports teams and some classrooms not a big walnut because of that kind of an outbreak but we're not seeing those outbreaks within the classroom if we do have an outbreak and it involves students it usually has to do with extracurricular activities not

083what's going on in the classroom you all have put these things into place you're masking of your k through six you have a pandemic plan you're using the social distancing we're still reminding everybody to to um you know good respiratory etiquette let's wash our hands who would have thought it would have taken a pandemic to tell people to wash their hands um but to really monitor those outbreaks and then try to get on top of them now we have had some outbreaks in nursing homes and those kinds of things but not really very much in the school at all so again just a couple of slides with showing you the cdc data and again you can see that we kind of went up a little bit and then we went back down the next slide

084is some of the same and so is the next slide so just to kind of show you where we've been and i did go back just to the school year if you go on these pages they show you the entire pandemic but i mean i think it's more important at this point first to learn from what we know but let's move forward and see where we are today so that's kind of where we are with the data just as couple of reminders we do isolate the ill person people always try to use isolation quarantine interchangeable they are not interchangeable we isolate the sick person that doesn't change regardless of where they were whether they were masked whether they're vaccinated doesn't matter all cases have to isolate for 10 days and there's no way to get

085out of that and so that is the fact and people always say then we always go to the why are we keeping the well children home and that's kind of what i want to talk a little bit today so quarantine is what we do with those people who have been exposed so during the infectious period of the case these people were exposed and then for 14 days which is the incubation period we want to watch them closely to make sure that they don't become sick so then they don't expose more people to become sick and so that's why we quarantine and quarantine hasn't changed for covit since the beginning the incubation period is still 14 days and basic quarantine is 14 days what we've learned with covid though over the years over the year 20

086months is that most people if they're going to become sick with kova they start to see those symptoms between days three and five and so the cdc felt very comfortable i think it was at the beginning of the school year last year saying we could look at a 10-day quarantine period somebody actually had to stay out of activities for the 10 days but as long as they monitored themselves for day 11 12 13 and 14 they could go back to their normal activities so we did go there say we would do that and of course the schools still work with us and make sure that those kids stay well if they come back another option then that just came into play within this last few months is a seven day option so if no symptoms

087and between day five and seven the parent chooses to do a a test either a pcr or an antigen if they do an antigen it does have to be proctored which means you have to do it on the phone with somebody or on your computer with a medical professional and if that test comes back negative that child can return on day eight still has to monitor for symptoms from eight through fourteen because again you could have somebody that becomes symptomatic later on but they are allowed to return to school so that's kind of where we are right now one of the things we're looking at again because of what we know we're seeing in the schools is we know already that there are some children that do are not considered contacts because either there were

088two masks involved so the case and the contact both had a mask on the contact had a mask on they were socially distanced appropriate all those other things that we put into place those children are not considered they are considered contacts and they have to quarantine but they are allowed to stay in class and quarantine and we request that they put a mask on like even the vaccinated children we would like them to put a mask on for that 14 days it's not required that they do that but because we do know you can get the disease even if you're vaccinated we do ask them to put that on what we're looking at is so let me back up all those children then we're not tracking them as contacts because they had one of these

089things in place the school still monitor them for symptoms just like they would for any other illness but they're allowed to stay in school but right now any child who did not have a mask on wasn't able to socially distance participated in a strenuous activity with a case those children have to stay home and quarantine what we're looking at is what we're calling our essential student policies so back way up to the beginning of this we allow for essential workers so ems firefighters health care my staff if we can't do without that person and for some of our you know our smaller townships if they lose a ems worker it just decimates them so what they what we've done is said okay these essential workers can go to work they're on quarantine but they can

090go to work wear a mask consistently for that 14 days they have to then go home and stay home they can't go home and go out and do all their other things because they are quarantined but will allow for an essential worker exemption and most of us have been doing that across the state for probably over a year now what we're looking at then is what about if we consider the essential student so if going to school is a student's job which it is then what if they could remain in class as long as the parents would allow them to put on a mask they wouldn't have to stay home then those children could also stay in school get the learning that they so badly need and we know last year was very difficult with

091the kids not being in school but they could stay in school but they have to have a mask on and as long as they don't become symptomatic that could continue through their 14-day period now they still have to go home afterwards and stay home they can't participate in extracurricular activities or anything like that but they could stay in school which i know is one of your goals is to keep the children in school so that's what we're looking at we're working on that with angie and the other superintendents to see um how that would play out i'm a little bit nervous about going to this next week because we did in two of our school districts see a little upward turn so we may say let's wait one more week and see if we start

092headed back down you know we feel comfortable doing this because of the data because of what we know about the the potential outbreaks so that's kind of where we are today and then the last slide is just um the different quarantine options you know quarantined for 14 days quarantine hasn't changed i know that's one of your parameters is that quarantine changes it hasn't changed it's still 14 days but these are some of the things that we allow for in the school system only because we know that it's a controlled environment and you all have things in place to help to protect the kids that's really all i had to talk about i hope i could talk too long and i'd be happy to answer any questions thank you sheila any questions from the board i'd

093just like to say thank you we've seen you twice this week and appreciate you providing good solid information for us as we're trying to make the best decisions for students so thank you very much for your time you're welcome thank you i appreciated your um i don't know i don't want to put words in your mouth whether it's frustration or concern around how long do we do this um and so i guess can you just talk from your past experience what are some of those things that typically would turn something like this to more of an endemic model i know nobody wants to sign up for that today but just in maybe if you look back at n1h1 or maybe something in the past can you just refer to some of the things that have

094determined that to be more of an endemic model versus the one we're in yeah so that's real hard because i'm very happy to say i haven't lived through another pandemic we did have h1n1 although we did see cases it never came to the fruition that this one did i know it's real interesting because people the the perception was that public health overreacted because we didn't have all these cases and we want to say but what would have happened if we hadn't done what we did i mean you know it's one of those chicken and egg you don't really know what comes first i actually said to a group of first responders at the beginning of all of this that i hoped in the fall of last year that they would have said gosh public health

095overreacted again it didn't come to fruition but that was my hope is that they would have thought we all overreacted i think the thing that it's probably the easiest to compare this with would be the flu because it's also a respiratory illness that's spread by droplets we do see peaks and valleys of that we do have an annual vaccine for that we consider flu is kind of endemic and there are a lot of deaths from flu people don't really realize that i think sometimes i mean we share that data but i don't think it's big on people's radars maybe like this has been i think when i think about diseases you know especially in the school system we have always worked with the schools on diseases and probably two or three times a year we

096have a pertussis in one of the younger grades whooping cough some people call it whooping cough and what we do with that is the school lets us know because one case because this isn't normal is considered an outbreak one case in a classroom what we do then is that child gets isolated we work with the school nurses to identify any children in that classroom that are not vaccinated those children have to stay home for the incubation period sometimes two incubation periods because we don't consider the outbreak to be over until we go to incubation periods with no new cases and then we monitor the rest of the children the school and us we send a letter home to the rest of the parents and say there was a pertussis in the classroom these are the

097signs and symptoms this is when you should notify your doctor so that's kind of what we do with flu so flu is a reportable disease but for the schools it's reportable for an outbreak so again if your school nurses were to all of a sudden see you know six or seven flues in um in a classroom or in a building or in a grade then they would let us know and then we would do the same thing obviously you isolate those children now with flu we don't we don't make someone stay home because they're not vaccinated for flu but we send the letter home to the parents and say you know we've had this many cases of flu in this child's classroom these are the signs and symptoms you should be watching for these are

098the things you should go to the hospital for please keep your child home if they're ill all of those things so i would see that at some point when all of the people that are those powers to be could get their heads together and say let's treat this like that now we see community spread with the flu i mean we know we go in peaks and valleys we usually see our first flus in september we see some of our flu as late as april may we kind of watch that we put that graph out we didn't last year because i don't have anybody to do that graph but we put that graph out every year and report the number of cases every year the state tracks hospitalizations and deaths of flu right now we're tracking

099all cases that is not the case now all cases of flu get reported to the ohio disease reporting system but we're not calling every single person that has the flu or issuing orders to every single person that has the flu like we are with the pandemic so my hope would be that we could get to that point where we could say let's treat this more like we do this because if you think about it with most communicable diseases the whole reason we do all of this is because people don't know what they're looking for right i mean how many of you that have children would know what the signs and symptoms are pertussis you may you may not especially if you're a first-time mom or dad so we want to make sure we educate them

100on this is what you need to look for well honestly i'm not sure that there's anybody that lives in the united states that doesn't know this is what you're looking for with covid and this is when you ought to see your doctor or this is when you ought to go to the emergency room so i think we're there it's not my decision to make about when it becomes a class b as opposed to a class a that's something that the state has to decide no and i appreciate that and i just was looking for that perspective of what are some of those things or what does that look like and i felt like you did that with your answer so i appreciate that i don't know why you're waiting i'm just teasing you know try

101to get 130 i don't know how many superintendents do you all have across the state 680 yeah we can't even get 113 health commissioners to agree on anything there's only 113 of us i can't only i can only imagine but no i to echo leanna i appreciate the the efforts you've put in i feel like in my work i work with some different businesses and organizations around the state and i've always felt like from what i see the the employers that i work with around there i felt like delaware county has done the most sensible job and the most practical job of trying to deal with this and trying to to balance the the needs of public health with with what's going on in our community so i appreciate the the efforts of you and

102all of your staff in that trying to find the balance you know this did become very political public health should never be political right but it did become political so it has been a little bit of a different challenge nobody challenges me when i isolate somebody for pertussis well to that end i think uh mr president and sheila actually uh the opportunity for gratitude in terms of and i don't know if this bleeds into our next topic madam superintendent but the conversation of you know you showing up in our community the professionalism you bring the clear data that you share the opportunity to engage in civil conversation around it i personally found it very affirming not that the data was affirming something but just the opportunity for discourse was affirming it wasn't a situation where

103people even people who were disagreeing weren't able to articulate what they what they thought what they believed and i believe your demeanor in handling that was was admirable and i just wanted to articulate as one of five my sincere appreciation for that we've heard about your you know 20 months of weekly conversations with our superintendent largely through uh the paradigm of our superintendent to hear it from you also in terms of how you're engaging with the other uh districts and what the data is for us specifically uh was very powerful to me so thank you you're welcome i will say that it's the weekly big meetings but we probably text at least once or twice a week about something um i did talk to some first responders the other night i think everybody has my

104cell phone now and i get all hours of the day i will say thankfully that has calmed down but there was a period of time where i think all of us we had so many questions which is one of the reasons we implemented the once a week especially for the nurses because it seems like no matter how clear we try to be with the flow charts or how clear we try to do this there's always a question well yeah but what about this and we're like why didn't we think about that one so poking holes in each other's thoughts also is very beneficial and again i don't know if this bleeds into the next conversation or not but i i guess i do have a question in reference to what you mentioned for the essential

105students consideration i think i heard one monday tuesday night that that was a realm of possibility for you as a consideration for the county based on an action in this district i was wondering if you could help clarify that and i won't lead a hor i won't lead the question so i'll attempt to just see if i can check my understanding can you talk a bit more about your decision-making calculus around that topic so because we can look at the data and we know if we do see a lot of spread from student to student it does not appear to be related directly to the classroom now even saying that it seems to be more related to extracurricular activities because the community spread is so high we can't pin that down and say this is

106exact but when we start to see the case the case cases kind of jump from one to the next to the next within that incubation period it makes a lot of sense that that's where it's occurring we're not seeing that in the classroom we do tend to see that with families for example when i did the data sunday night for each of the school districts and we go back and we look at last week's list versus this week's list and we try to eliminate lots of times the same last name would come up because within a household obviously there's a little bit more chance of spread people are not wearing masks in home they share items they share similar spaces so what we're looking at is let's look at the data let's see what makes

107sense what could we do to keep those children in school the quarantine's the same they still can't do extra extracurricular activities if they didn't have that mask on beforehand because they're a little bit more apt now to get something than the person that did have the mask on beforehand but let's let them stay in school with the mask on as long as they don't become symptomatic and then they can continue with their education but we still feel like because of the data we're able to look at that as a possibility now if we do this and we start seeing something change then all bets are off and you know we'd have to go back to to the more strict we would have to do the same thing though even with the the children that are

108vaccinated that technically don't are able to stay in classroom we started seeing something odd within a classroom we would we would have to stop that we have like i said not at big walnut we have had to shut down a classroom we also have had a couple of classrooms where it was mandated that everybody wore a mask for two weeks everybody thinks that we can't do that anymore because of senate bill 22 we can't do that blanketly i can't say to angie your entire school has to wear a mask without an unrelate without a diagnosis that ties all that but if we start seeing an outbreak in a classroom that is tied to a medically diagnosed case we can do that we can also close the entire school we haven't had to do that we

109did do that last school year with a particular um school we had to close the whole school for at least an incubation period because we had too many cases thank you and again that just for uh the recordings are not at big wanted i guess my i am going to be a little bit more precise with my question than or attempt to be um as you i had not heard this idea of an essential student before certainly appreciate it i think i've been very vocal in terms of my belief about keeping healthy children in the place of being educated as well as healthy staff in classrooms to do that job my question around the essential student then as i think i heard it tuesday night is that your willingness to consider it now at a

110county level is based on the idea that big walnut made a change in our last board meeting partly not not completely of course but there was a partial variable there that you're willing to consider it at a county level based on the fact that we had made a change is that accurate i think one of the the first foundations is what kind of a mask mandate if anything do you have in there so we're already protecting children what are the rest of your pandemic plans what are your social distancing protocols how closely are we able to work with the staff and how quickly are we able to get the sick children out of the class and you know our parents have been just wonderful i mean they call you all a lot of times and

111let you know the child's positive before we even get the report in the ohio system so that has been such a good thing we do have some some schools not our larger districts but that are not so forthcoming with some of the data that we would definitely not be or not be even considering to do this but you do have to keep those other things in place and then this kind of builds on that and again i think just for sequencing no i appreciate that i hadn't heard of that term before tuesday and i think the opportunity just to talk about that here was very powerful to me again i will tell you adam howard who's my director of preventative health he's actually on the paternity we just had twins on saturday he actually coined

112that that thing because we've had a central worker your school teachers have fallen under essential worker so we were trying to think well what would be the most like some of our my peers have started doing some of this with some of their schools and they're calling it critical response or i don't know we just thought it makes sense it's the same thing put a mask on stay in school stay at work do what you need to do so yeah and so i mean this partially in a humorous manner but if we can stay away from critical response is what will happen that will become abbreviated to cr and people will not do that i like essential student yes thank you so much i really appreciate all the information that you brought to us today

113and i appreciate um to the information just on the hospital icu availability and and kind of the mentions of um like hospital staff availability and just you know availability of or stashing staffing issues across the healthcare industry just i think it's important that we all remember that it's it's not just about covid it's i think we all have a responsibility to our community to keep communicable diseases you know low stop stop spread because health emergencies still happen you know strokes heart attacks happen accidents happen i've i've heard recently a few stories even of falls from tree stands and you know things like that happen and we want to make sure that you know those community members get the high level of care that that we all deserve so absolutely yeah that's been i think that's

114been probably the hardest thing on the hospitals is you know i'm a nurse by training and worked in hospitals for years i can't imagine not being able to get a patient into a bed if they needed that there's rules that say how long a patient can stay in an emergency room but right now they have to stay there because there's no place else for them to go and i did tell the emergency room physician that was at our table the other night it's very gratifying to me i know how well we work with our partners and how appreciative we are of all of our partners but on this call that's our entire region they are like bartering for beds they're like i have an emergency room patient who's been here for four days and i

115need this kind of a bed or i need a ventilation it's you know what we can all work together we really are all on the same page here there is passion on both sides and you know unfortunately some of that has come to being expressed maybe not as positively as it could be but we really are all on the same side here we want your kids to stay in school just as just as much as you do and i'll say something that the president um nobody wants to be over any more than our team wants that to be over one of the city council meetings i was at recently the city councilman said kovitz sucks and i said yes 100 i mean it's not a good thing we want it to all go away and

116you know i know in my lifetime i'll never see this again i hope that we've learned enough from this that um maybe if this does happen again and they do tend to happen about every 100 years or so that we've learned a lot of things that will make the next one better because are you going to have your next coverage oh and that's next thursday i think i kind of tied them in with just letting the board know that we did meet and we'll plan on doing um a presentation from the committee a week from today or all right um kind of on a i guess more positive note not that we didn't appreciate sheila's conversation we have an update on our purple star committee and we have mr matt cox our principal sauders who

117oversees that for the district as well as miss kobe donahue who works at our middle school and who has coordinated the tailgate that we've done the last few years so we're here to give you a quick update on that on the heels of our annual tailgate i like the purple thank you [Music] matt actually has purple pants that we all were hoping to wear we asked another day he kind of let us down a little bit there i uh yeah those are especially not that this isn't a special occasion you get to present to the school board but uh yeah i kind of held those back for our purple up week last year i thank you first of all good morning and thank you superintendent hamburg and president schneider and the entire board for the

118opportunity to talk this morning and i'll let er kobe will join in or share here in a little bit but just a little background on purple star ohio was the first in the nation to have purple star and purple star specifically tries to support families that have active military parents and their or family members i should say it's not just parents so because in going back to something that dr fagan said those those families do experience different things than other families experience and we had a parent come home last year that had been deployed for about a year and a half he's a helicopter pilot and he had been overseas and and those that even coming back when a parent comes back that can throw things off in a family so anyways uh it's it's

119definitely brought awareness to us and to our building and to our district so ohio was the first to do this in 2016-17 and our middle school was our first building uh to be purple star recognized there's a process that you have to go through and you do have to be renewed every three years so you have to continue to do things to continue to keep that status we are one of just a handful of districts in the entire state that have all of our buildings that have been recognized uh as purple star and a couple of our buildings have had to renew and and have care and are still current with that status we have about 80 students in our district that have that connection with a military family member and i do want to

120mention that those that's about 80 students that want us to recognize them and want to be part because there are some military members that don't necessarily want to to be part of the events or don't want for whatever reason and we certainly respect that so um and one of the things i want to go back to is as a teacher i was a teacher here for 11 years i don't know that i ever knew if any of my kids had a military connection and again thinking about what they may go through that may be different than any other kid i think is is very important so as a district we have a couple district events a year and and we have and we just have one of those events last week and so i want

121kobe to jump in and talk a little bit about our district event we had a tailgate we had about 100 people attend that event last friday night and she's going to talk a little bit about that and also we have a purple up week in in april so let you go ahead and jump down so last friday we had our purple up tailgate if you will think and thank you to those of you on the board who came it always means a lot to have your support every year we kind of sit down and we think about how we want to do it and i kind of bounced some ideas off of matt and he so graciously kind of just lets me roll with it this year we decided to honor colonel jon stewart who

122actually has a family in the district and he was overseas i believe he got home last year after one of his students actually graduated from big wanna he missed a lot of stuff previously to be overseas and the reasons why we decided to ask him because we thought it was important for the community to recognize one of our own he was a little humbled at first and i don't think you really knew what to say but he agreed to it because sometimes i tend to be convincing and i kind of told him whether he wanted to believe it or not he's kind of a big deal so he came all dressed up and and we were able to honor him and if you were there you got to see how cool it was for the

123entire home side to stand up and recognize him it was pretty cool during that event we kind of invite all of our families who have active members each one of our schools has eliasen who kind of connects with those families and invite them to come we kind of have a relationship with them so they just come they mingle a lot of them actually know each other they work together they they know of each other so it's cool to see them kind of all get together and actually kind of have some common ground with their kids this year we were lucky enough to have our entire meal donated by the firehouse tavern jodie thiel and carol womper wampler so graciously put that together which was super awesome so it it went really well we always have

124extra people come i always kind of meet up with some people and convince them to arrive with their jeeps and trucks and and it turns out to be a great event so similar to that we do a winter event which is a little more fancier it's inside it's kind of like a more not more like a tailgate but like a dinner sit down dinner so we do that inside in the winter and then throughout the year every school has their own separate events at the middle school we do multiple things for our purple up students and i am lucky enough to have a principal who kind of lets me roll with that also and sometimes he he he yes he lets me roll with that he lets me do whatever for our military students and

125and i'm lucky enough for that as well purple up week is kind of a special event for our community also we have many local businesses who have started to back us in our military efforts as well so yes last friday went off very well and i already have a mad list for next year so super excited about that you just don't tell kobe no that's that's the way it works i mean that's the moral story so i it was it was a huge event and we try to find a balance between doing some district events and again as kobe mentioned to connect those families to one another because it can be isolating when we have over 4 000 students and 80 of our students are connected we also try to do some district events as

126well for instance veterans day looks we all recognize veterans day and do an event for veterans day but that's more school specific and what meets the needs of the the kids in in that specific school community as a result of our purple star week last week last year we were able to provide two one thousand dollar scholarships to graduating big walnut seniors that had a military connection we also donated uh fifteen hundred dollars over fifteen hundred dollars to buckeye military moms and they send care packages overseas and last year it's always i think it's fun for our kids to collect things to be able to send over last year with the pandemic we decided to because one of the non-glamorous things about sending those care packages is paying for the postage and so that's something

127that we did last year was help them out with that postage so the the couple other things again just our reputation big walnuts reputation in this area in the state and then and then the state continues to grow and um i just have a quote and it's from pete lupita he is the ohio mc3 commissioner so he works across states that's the uh military interstate children's compact commission so it works state to state on educating uh students and he's a big he reaches out to us for ideas and how are you doing this but he just said your local big walnut team is a template model framework which we recommend to others in the state and that says something about big walnut it says something about our committee and kobe is one piece of just

128an awesome committee we have across the district so again it's it's been able we feel like we're able to better connect and better serve our military connected students through purple star so i appreciate the opportunity to present this morning and certainly if you had any questions we'd be happy to answer those i'd just like to make a comment that kobe indicated the other night at the at the event on friday that she gets calls from other schools asking to share information about this model program that we have here at big walnut and she was talking about the number of schools she's actually spoken to who are reaching out to us as kind of that guy for how you implement this program and i think that just speaks to the great things that you guys as

129part of this team are doing and thank you for that thank you anything else yeah i mean i would echo all those appreciations and i remember going to the first one a few years back and just seeing how much bigger kobe continues to make this in every good way um but one of the things that hit me i was actually driving back into town the other day and i was going through delaware and there was a sign up on one of their um city mark signs that said that they were a purple heart community and it got me thinking about what we were doing here is there anything similar to this purple star program that's for like villages and townships and if there is is there an opportunity i mean you guys have done a

130great job of reaching out and getting more folks involved i just didn't know if there was something similar to that that local governments participate in and if there's a way maybe we can even draw in more participation from from that aspect of things so yes we we are considered a purple star community in general just because of all of the schools being purple star recognized as far as they kind of deemed some very already like the purple star community so we're already kind of up on that recognition list chip merkel actually who we work with and i forget his title he works for ode he is in charge of purple stars and so he is actually working on working with us for exactly that to make sure that the entire community with the schools gets

131recognized as well so that's something that's already actually a work in progress so it's pretty exciting thank you thanks again to both of you [Applause] all right i have one more item for my superintendent's report um like our high school principal and strangers to come up and he just want to give an update um it's hard to believe but we are already about halfway through october which means our move to the new building is coming fast and furious and so obviously andy and his team have been dedicating a lot of time to that and just wanted him to give a quick update to the board well i'm sorry i was waiting for wayne i thought i was going to get walk up music i didn't do that anymore he didn't adjust microphone in a quick

132side note they mentioned working with uh chip merkel from ode he was actually my eighth grade shop teacher and i received a c minus in that class so don't ask me to put anything together but i have been able to put together a great segue presentation for today on how we're transitioning to the new high school so we we started out a lot with staff our thought was if we could get snap to buy i'm excited about the new building then all their interactions with students would be positive and the students would feel better about this transition since it's mid-year just real quick we do surveys all the time probably since i've been here i've done at least 50 if not more in seven years and the highest rate survey we've ever done was when

133we had our tour last week on thursday we had 57 staff members that were able to tour the building and out of five they gave the building a 4.65 and you need to understand too some of them have taught the same room for almost 30 years so having that move is going to be a big deal for them in mid-year and they still see all the possibilities for students and improving instruction in that building so even with all that extremely excited about moving in so as far as the student transition um and our admin team has been working really hard on this we're having on december 1st we have eagle time every wednesday which is a flexible period where students can go where they need to to get assistance right before lunch every wednesday and

134during that time on december 1st we're going to show them a 12 to 15 minute video that our video team that melissa maxim works with our news team is going to film hopefully november 10th november 11th is what we're looking at and i'll go over with them and they're going to put together this video of everything they possibly would want to know about that new building we've got a driveway 101 we're actually going to film students going into the driveway and where they park how they enter the building where they go if they're late uh navigating breakfast navigating lunch safety 101 in case there's an emergency so i believe there's 11 different ones and then once again we're trying to keep it to 12 to 15 minutes but then what we're going to do our

135team then will segmate it into all these different smaller videos so that way over break if they're like oh my gosh i didn't remember how to this or i wonder about this they can then go back from our website and on schoology they'll be able to look and see okay i just want to look at this specific one or maybe it's you know tuesday january 4th and i just woke up at 7 00 am and i'm going to be late click what do i do if i'm late so we'll have those there as well so we hope that's a good tool we're really excited about that um and then we're also uh goal is over break we do have some students obviously to the prior presentation that deal with anxiety and so uh those students

136that specifically we've worked with through the year we'll have the building open over break working with the you know obviously the construction team but have that open so if students have a have a need they can walk the building we'll have staff there just to once again make them feel better about that move and then we're going to train our eagles first flight mentors which is our freshmen and new student orientation leaders they already have you know experience leading uh with obviously with the students that are new to our school so they've kind of already been through that a little bit so i'm going to bring them in over break once again we'll train them they'll know all the building they'll have maps frequently asked questions all that type of information they'll have and then

137that way they'll be there when the new students are when students come in over break and they're also going to help us for that first day of school on tuesday january 4th they'll be stationed throughout the school they'll be wearing their shirts everybody every student will know they can go to them if they have a question and they'll be there between every period while i'm stationed throughout so then the big piece of this is what does that first day of school in the new building look like so january 4th we're going to have a completely different schedule i've got a great team of teachers four teachers that are working on that uh working on that schedule they are communicating with their pac our teacher leadership group that meets monthly and so this is continuing to

138but we're going to have a larger orientation period right before lunch that the reason why we picked that time a so that way they'll know how to get food and then b that is the time of the day when the majority of our students are all in the building so that's kind of our sweet spot where their schedule if students have late start and that type of thing so we'll have that longer period we have nine academic wing academic pods we're using seven of them um for the first semester so each pod will have kind of a different schedule that they were tour of the entire building so the groups will be together and then they won't be all in the same place so we've got a whole entire kind of orientation thing that will

139occur and so they might even though they've been there two or three periods they might not have been the cafeteria they might not know where the auditorium is yet they might you know maybe they sell the video but it's a whole different deal when you can actually walk it so those teachers will take them around and they'll walk that during this extended time period right before lunch we're also playing some other activities throughout the day as well we've talked to our teachers about this being kind of a softer day as far as a as an academic focus also students have been you know out for two weeks and sometimes things happen during that two weeks so just making sure that that we do everything possible to ease that anxiety um to the new building so

140once again that day is still kind of con consider still being formed but we've already got a schedule um where the teachers will go and like i said we've already that committee's met two or three times and then shared out to uh pac last week and i know one of the ideas that we considered was trying to get the kids over in december and i think doug schwartz about how to heart attack our director facilities um just due to the tightness of getting things moved in so ask dandy to kind of brainstorm what are some ways we can do that have an option available over break but then really make sure that first day so we're down to the wire on that and um it's going to be tight but we're going to be ready

141i think so too and i was just over there yesterday i've been over there three times in the last week and every couple days something new happens and it's amazing how much you know because you look and you get oh my gosh this isn't going to be ready you know well it's going to be each it's not going to be ready tomorrow and so uh they're working uh working very hard doug schwartz is doing i think an amazing job i mean i'm in a lot of meetings he's in every single meeting and i think really doing a good job of coordinating this huge process is there a consideration about an open house night for the community or families in this space so that folks can see you know this is on this is the exciting

142part is we're there but it's also on the shoulders or the tail end of a lot of other things that have kind of built up to this at this point mr jados is there or maybe miss hamburg i'm sorry we've already met on it okay so it's it's going to be the following day it'll be uh january 5th so we're going to open up on tuesday and then we have our first wrestling athletic event is going to be on the 6th which is wrestling first basketball game is on the 7th so this will be really the first day that the community really could be in there and we kind of caught the third the first day there's a lot of things going on and sure you know doing that so it's going to be uh

143six o'clock on uh january 5th in open house ribbon cutting type of type of event and uh and just yeah very excited about that and allow the community and i think also pre is is going to be available as well and obviously we'll get more information out to the community we've just had some initial um meetings on that and i believe i sent a save the date to the board so that you have that date available so as we kind of get those details finalized we'll get some information out because obviously it's a really exciting time and we didn't get to do anything really with pre last year so it was actually kim castiglione the principal's idea about having that building open as well so if people want to tour that they can so more

144info to come [Music] anything else randy thank you thank you thank you unless you have any questions for me i am done with my report is that all you've got jerry for the treasurer's report so i don't have too much but i just wanted to make sure that the board as well as the community know that information is available so there are often times where terms get thrown out and while i realize it's maybe not an attack specifically on me it i think angie and i do try to run things efficiently and transparently and just make sure that that we're providing things to the community as well as the board so people know what's going on i'll give an example as mr cooper did a very detailed dive and does every september of staffing that's

145one of our largest costs is is staffing i think i've tried over the years to keep everybody very up-to-date on our insurance situation which has been a huge challenge for us over the years and and being able to do that so i just wanted to make sure that that people know that there is information available on where to find it so financial report is available online probably a big picture and this will be next month is uh the five-year forecast um a lot of information goes into that and i hear whispering from prior board members um a lot of work goes into that and it's really statutorily it's a a requirement but we've really tried to use it as a planning tool um so and and quite honestly some of the ways that we have

146tried to work towards doing um like insurance changes have been because of that looking at that piece so i just wanted to make sure that the board as well as the community knows that five year forecast is available as a big picture we've got a financial report that we put out every month which has a lot of detail and if there are questions i'm always happy to take them because the last thing i want people to do is to jump to conclusions to assume of what's going on in the district i think both angie and i do take it to heart oh i've been in school finance for uh this is my 15th year um and i've said to a lot of people i realize that i'm dealing with two probably your most precious possessions

147in some way shape or form your money and your kids and and that's not a that's not a charge that i take lightly so i just wanted to take an opportunity to say that and make sure that people see that there is information available and i'm always open for questions jeremy could you also just include um maybe a comment on the notes that go with the five-year forecast because sometimes people look at that document they're like this doesn't really tell me anything but i think your notes are really helpful and those are online as well yeah so as part of the finding the five-year forecast document there's the five-year forecast which is the numbers um that shows the previous three years of actual information and it's and it is just taking the general fund but

148the general fund is the main operating funds of what we do as a school district sometimes you can skip them the the heavy reading but what the notes try to do is break down and do a fine detail of what has gone into not only the thinking but as well as what are what are behind those numbers staffing increases or decreases if there might have been something i mentioned the insurance changes trying to put a number behind how that is impacting things and describing the trend that we've seen in insurance just using that as an example we provide some services as we've talked about through our esc for different different positions trying to provide some detail so all of those types of things and some commentary on really the what has gone into those numbers

149is is part of that and again i i always appreciate the board giving feedback and and telling me i'm doing a good job and in all those pieces but again sometimes i just don't want terms to be lost on the hard work that that i do and angie does and just want to make sure that people know that we're we're trying to provide relevant and current information and and want to continue that in the space of conversations around transparency and responsibility around finances have you received any phone calls about like hey where can i find this or has anyone in your office to your knowledge most recently i did have a conversation with somebody that was asking for something actually different and we talked through uh where where that information could be found so from

150time to time yeah i do get a call of where things are i'm glad to hear that thank you as a cpa for over 20 years i just want to say that i've obviously seen tons of budgets tons of financial information jeremy provides amazing detail and insight in what he provides to the board and what is available to the community and you've always always shown that you are you know willing to answer questions willing to explain things that people don't understand so thank you very much for that um i know it's something that you take very seriously and i you know i think you do a great job so thanks for all that i appreciate that but and and i'm i'm just part of a team with this too i mean there are a lot

151of conversations that go on with angie and i and how things are done so um again just i just wanted to make sure that that community members know that that's available while we're on the subject jeremy could you speak to kind of how our spending and financial process budgeting appropriations my role your role the board's role and if that's typical for a school district obviously you've worked as an auditor with other school districts and then also as an assistant treasurer in another district so our i think what you're asking is so our budgeting process um there are there are various ways that budgeting can be done we we here at big walnut do a needs-based type of a budgeting where the buildings are providing what they believe is needed and other districts that i've worked

152with or been in sometimes do more of a per-pupil allocation type of a method and it's just there do with do with it as you please that's a fairly common and it's kind of a an allocation method if you want to say what coming into this i uh this job i hadn't done a needs base necessarily but um i mean it is a it is a comprehensive method of every building every department comes and is presenting hey here's what i believe we need and it varies every year sometimes there are different needs or initiatives our new prairie run there were new needs in in that building for startup supplies and things like that so a lot of detail goes into that and then just kind of our process on how the budget gets put into

153appropriations and the board approves and then how you and i approve daily expenditures sure that's typical for sure yeah so yeah i mean it's the all of those inputs the budget process then does go into the different appropriations and i mean we're not just appropriating for the general fund we're appropriating on our debt service our capital improvements and state and federal funds state and federal funds as part of that um they they basically were being told what those funds can be used within certain parameters and then i think the the title one example was given earlier where it may not have checked all the boxes but there was a purpose behind that fit into the rules of title one federal funding so all of all of those do go into the appropriation level and then

154um i believe the statute says that a board at the minimum appropriates those funds at the the fund level and so for the community that means that you are putting in we're spending this much money on personnel this much money on corrections of this bill correct all the those pieces go into at a there's a lower a more detailed level that we actually are looking at and tracking in the accounting system um and then angie's correct on a daily basis we requisitions against those appropriation lines that we're tracking are are put into our our accounting system and then an approval chain going through to make sure that there are some of the big terms it's it's fresh for me right now because we're going through a financial a state audit financial audit so always making

155sure that those controls are in place of is it budgeted for is it a segregation of duties in the the approval chains so can you give an example if a principal has a teacher who needs a projector and they want to put an order for a projector what would that look like to get approved before it could get purchased yeah one we would have to make sure that the there is money appropriated in that budget line which by at the fun level at a higher level um then the requisition would be put in then that would go to a supervisor the principal to make sure that it's fitting within actual need for the building as well as a scope of what's our what's our mission our mission is to educate students and provide a quality

156education if something did not fit in that check box then it has been i've seen and should be rejected if it makes it to that level then angie is also looking at every po that comes through to approve or deny um and again there are times where she asks some clarifying questions is this what's going on with this um and if that makes it through all that process then it becomes a purchase order and it's allowable to be spent um what happens in your office to make it a purchase order though um outside of those other those approval chains um then it's there are times where i'm reviewing some of those pieces um but then that is converted into a purchase order that gets sent out then to not only the individual but it also

157gets sent out to the vendor in in many situations either through the mail or electronically we've tried to do a lot more electronically because it's quicker more efficient and more timely and thank you for your patience with explaining that i have one last question is this typical for most school districts that this is how things are purchased i would say yes okay thank you that's that's all i had unless there are other questions or comments there's nothing else for jeremy we'll go to board member items of interest and sherry um i just i just really appreciate everyone who came in to speak today he got a lot of information i think it was really valuable uh information and um you know i know it takes a lot of time and effort to put that together

158and so thanks to everyone for their ability availability and you know cooperation and doing that um to make sure that our community members you know understand all of all of the work that goes into this and some of the things behind the scene and thank you to um kobe and everyone on the committee for putting together the the uh tailgate last week it was it had this kind of family picnic vibe it was it was really cool to see everybody there so absolutely doug anything for you i'll reserve all right leanna how about for you a couple things um just i'd like to thank all the community members and staff members who outside of normal work hours attended and participated in the academic advisory committee meeting and the pandemic response committee meeting over the last

159week i participated in both of those and i guess i feel like both of those meetings we were discussing um controversial topics um sex education and pandemic and in both of those cases all of the individuals who attended were kind of given norms at the beginning that all of us are coming to this with good intentions and that all of us ultimately have the best interests of our students at heart and in those conversations i did not hear one raised voice i did not hear anyone shouting at someone that you're not doing this it was all in a sense of community of what are we gonna do that's best for our kids and i just really appreciated that um knowing that you know what what we see what we hear what we read just that

160still a group of adults can come together and be kind to one another be respectful of differing opinions and that was just very refreshing and part of the success of that i think goes to the staff and the way in which they structured these meetings and just angie kudos to you i received an email last night from mr fuji and i i don't know whether you were copied on that but um i i wish he'd been here today to share with you just our overall impressions of just how well our district staff coordinated those meetings to ultimately have successful outcomes and i just really appreciate that because at no point in time of those two two and a half hour meetings did i ever think wow this is a big waste of my time and

161just felt like we were kept on task we were provided with good information and i feel like in the end we are going to come out with results that we can present to this community that are community-based responses to issues we're dealing with in our within our school district so thank you um the other thing is i'd like to thank all of the volunteers who made this year's big nut strut a success i was there sunday afternoon and um as usual that was a very nice event so i think that's all this morning thank you could i just say thank because she thanked me and the team but specifically i'd love to give a shout out to annie and kate because they put together um a lot of the uh activities that we did to

162make that flow so well so appreciate their leadership with both of those meetings as well and the rest of our team so thank you thanks and i have a thank you that i want to share to our for our teachers and all of our staff but i'll hold on to that so some of them can actually see it because hopefully they're busy right now so i'll save that for next thursday we'll go to public participation on item nine this is a meeting of the board of education and public for the purpose of conducting school districts business and is not considered a public community meeting it's a time for public participation during the meeting as indicated in the agenda please reference criteria for public participation which is attached to the agenda and jeremy how many do

163we have this after this morning almost that afternoon we have seven we've got seven good deal all right so if you are returning or if you haven't joined us before just a quick run through the process uh jeremy will call you up you'll have three minutes to make a comment to the board um i'll just kind of keep the time here give you kind of a high sign if you're at 30 seconds and then kind of give you another one around three minutes and appreciate everybody keeping it right at around that three minutes and jeremy when you're ready we can get going okay our first speaker is lad dill guard of 3923 shake bark trail and speaking regarding masks thanks yesterday we learned that one in six kids in the u.s was obese here we

164are talking about juvenile cases of covid since 78 uh 78 of coba deaths are in obese patients maybe we should discuss that a little bit more um our last meeting we discussed the estimated 80 to 90 cumulative cases in our district and associated quarantines the board is very concerned that although the cases make up less than two percent of all students we were outpacing last year and other school districts one board member said although masks admittedly don't work we needed to do something another board member said he wasn't qualified to understand various studies regarding masks another asked how many quarantine children end up falling ill which we couldn't tell them a member said she was very worried and concerned but of what we are not sure was it children falling ill and dying or teachers

165we're not sure but despite this lack of depth and data we slapped harmful and worthless masks on kids with zero risk we didn't vote on masking k through six teachers or explain why we're masking just k through six kids we didn't specify how we determine if this action was successful the types of masks allowed or how teachers would manage compliance we just did it tuesday's covet dashboard showed 150 cumulative cases or three and a half percent of students 21 active cases what if tomorrow every single child in our district suddenly had the virus 4 700 cases overnight to many that sounds horrifying but here's how it play out 3 800 or over 80 percent would have no symptoms most in fact 99.9 percent would have mild cold like symptoms and unless there was a severe

166underlying health issue very few would need medical attention that's the facts zero would die zero would need a ventilator but because of panic conditioning some still believe a positive test case means a greater than 50 percent chance of being hospitalized and a 40 chance of dying in fact chances of dying are like getting struck by lightning if you're under 75 and for children it's infinitesimal about 500 people under 19 have died with covet in 18 months versus 3 300 who die each and every year in car accidents sheila mentioned that there was two in ohio who've died since the beginning that's one more than the number of kids who died getting stuck in chimneys because their school was closed and he was out fooling around our solution has been to mask little kids which is

167analogous to this there's a small rash of students in car accidents the accidents weren't deadly and no one got hurt but in theory they could have been in response we make all elementary students wear bicycle helmets around school and on the playground but these aren't protective helmets these are shower caps and hair nets because actual bike helmets would be expensive we do it and we feel good there's no science but we do something masks in schools offer the same protection as wearing a shower cap all day in florida in september the case has dropped 79 percent in mass optional school district and 77 percent in those with mass mandates 79 to 77 no difference we're all for keeping little kids safe but let's do it works what works like teaching them to wash their hands

168and eat right and get fresh air and exercise thank you [Applause] and just before you call the next one up i just want to remind everyone that all of our meetings are streamed so if they want to see all those board comments they can see them in their full and complete context go ahead jeremy um next is annette mcmurray isn't that okay um next will be mindy panky of 7094 for sage creek regarding pandemic response results good morning i decided to speak at the last minute so when i received a c minus as well but in public scheme so i will do my best to be as articulate as i can here first i want to say that i was at the pandemic response committee meeting and i walked out very frustrated because i was

169probably one of only two people that didn't want to continue to master k-6 kids the first question that we were asked was should we and i'm quote me just you know please thank you you're welcome um the first question we were asked was basically should we continue or not continue to keep masks on our k-6 kids at my table i was the only one who said no um we were told to keep the discussion simple to not get into things like whether maths work or don't work so efficacy whether they're a health hazard just basically just keep it simple let's not go down a rabbit hole basically um since the majority vote at my table was no there was really not a whole lot of room for discussion i spent hours researching efficacy health hazards

170learning difficulties when people are wearing masks in the classroom we were then given some statistics um about cases and when i broke down i think it's kind of deceiving when you see these graphs and you see all these numbers but when you really break them down into percentages and you really analyze them the numbers seem high but actually only 1.8 percent of our cases were as of that day she had given us those numbers um we're children the majority being ages 10 through 9 and i think kindergarteners and through sixth grade is what five through nine so most of our cases are 10 through 19. um in addition there's very it was reiterated and and i think sheila did a good job with that today that there's no spread there's hardly any spread in schools

171at all the district does a great job of making sure that the kids who are in class together they go to lunch together so there's not a whole lot of spread in the community most of it's outside of the classroom um i want to respectfully disagree with mrs lee um i don't feel like the committees represent the community if i am one of the only ones in there um who's saying no we need to take these masks off these kids then i don't feel like these this committee represented the community that's all i have to say thank you [Applause] next is melissa andre lonis did i get it 7590 lawton street thank you it's andrew llanos so you did you did pretty well good morning my name is melissa andrelanis i'm speaking for the first

172time here today because of the ongoing discussion in our community regarding critical race theory i keep hearing from our board that there's no examples of this having occurred in big walnut schools but after the experience i had with our daughter last year in the 5th grade virtual learning program i disagree last year excuse me our 10 year old was led through a very divisive lesson regarding race i stopped in my tracks as i walked past her on her chromebook and heard the teacher explaining that parents of black children must teach their children differently about police officers than parents of white children do she explained that police officers sometimes treat black people differently than white people she's singled sorry she singled out the black students in the class called on them by name and asked if

173their parents had had the talk with them when one student brought a black black lives matter protest the teacher praised him for protesting and told the students she would also be going to these protests too she told the students we still have a lot of work to do whether the teachers specifically label this as crt or not the ideas presented are some of the very ideas contained within critical race theory my daughter absolutely loves this teacher so her words carried a lot of weight with her she was very confused by this lesson we've taught our children to judge people by their character not by what they look like we sorry my daughter had never considered that these classmates were different from her until it was specifically pointed out after i tried to explain this to

174her she said but mom doesn't my teacher know that made us feel more different and separate from each other everyone felt so awkward when she was asking them those questions my husband called the administrative office to report this and he was transferred to jen young who was the curriculum director at the time she told my husband he was not the only parent sharing these types of concerns and that it would be addressed so we can call it crt we can call it dei whatever we call it that's not appropriate for school and this happened to my child in big walnut it's not a teacher's job to instruct our children on how to believe what to support what to protest especially on such a controversial and political issue i think what we all need to understand

175is just because the school district doesn't explicitly say they're teaching crt okay i'll try thank you it's not in the state standards or it's not in the curriculum that doesn't mean the poisonous ideology of crt is not creeping into individual classes and lessons this thinking is so divisive and it pits our children against each other based on their race this is not what's best for our students or our community it's not easy to stand up here and say negative things about a school district we've loved so much but continuing to pretend it's not happening isn't the answer acknowledging that it is happening even if in isolated events and correcting it for the sake of all our children is thank you so since we're kind of topical if i could address that first of all thank

176you and i am aware of that situation because mrs young let's see where he went over here i'm here um mrs young did fill our team in on that um was not a teacher it was actually a tutor who was no longer with us we did address that situation i think that you make a really important point though when we talk about that the district isn't endorsing crt certainly we have hundreds of staff members and sometimes things get said um with an intent or without an intent i will tell you we've had a handful of situations like that and when we've been made aware of them we have addressed them and i think that's a really important distinction because just like in in your jobs when you're dealing with lots and lots of employees certainly

177we don't have 100 control over our employees all the time and with the virtual piece it did give us an opportunity to get some of that feedback from parents and again i can tell you that specific situation was addressed that person no longer works here can i respond i appreciate that very much and i think if we had been informed of that then well i would well i understand that's fair and sometimes with hr issues we're not able to do that um especially at the time it's occurring but i just want you to know that um when we're made aware of things now um and and yes i was appalled by what i was told was said during that lesson i know exactly what we're talking about there are other times when we get a

178variety of versions of things and so um things get legs that maybe are not the only version of the story so we do investigate those and um i'll tell you mark cooper sitting back there our assistant superintendent who handles hr um does a lot of that and whether it's a case where we have students who are harassing other students with racial slurs and we do have that happen in our schools that's something that mark looks into um whether it's a teacher making an inappropriate comment whether with a malicious intent or not that's something that often will make its way to mark and that we look into so it's not something that we're going to put out a big announcement on especially if it's a disciplinary issue with a staff member or another student because of

179privacy but i i want you to know we're not saying that things don't happen i know everybody wants to keep putting up the picture from a student middle school project last year during advisory and just to add a little to that because that keeps getting put out there is why we're teaching crt um that was an activity that some students who were um in the minority race who were being harassed by peers wanted to do something to try to make people understand how they were feeling and to have some dialogue around that so that was the intent behind that certainly once we saw that that term was used we had a conversation mark actually put out an email to the entire staff and said hey even with good intentions we can't throw out terms like

180privilege with no context because people are very sensitive to that and kids don't understand what the intent is there so i guess i just want to reiterate that yes things do happen like they do everywhere in society in any school district what i continue to stand by is we are not promoting that and when things are brought to our attention we address them and that's i guess what i would like to i appreciate what you had to say i i think you're right and we did address it so thank you and i appreciate that too and if i knew that i wouldn't have given that whole thing yeah it's so important you know when you have thousands of kids and hundreds of staff members and you have privacy you can't just put all that out

181i mean i wish it were that simple sometimes believe me it would be nice thank you mr president parliamentary inquiry normally during public participation yes the audience is instructed not to address the board for questions well i don't know how we changed the rule i don't know that she addressed the board for questions i think she brought up an issue or a concern and considering the intensity of this topic and the issue i thought it was important for the record to be set completely on that and so i made the choice to make that decision there to allow the superintendent to address that it was a perfectly legitimate concern um it's something that could be clarified right now so yeah i made the choice to do that jeremy next is sheila rechner of one two

182four chambers road and speaking on house bill 244 um i wanted to start off by saying thank you and i appreciate all of you that came here this morning to share your professional opinions i have been following some discussions of this community um and this is especially important to me because i have been verbally attacked and called a white supremacist a leader of the kkk and anybody that knows me knows this is simply not true recent meetings of concerned parents hearing stories of divisive racial political ideologies equity inclusion that are or have been happening in our schools like for instance a group of students meeting at the high school that excludes specific races i support minorities i think these are great things i do not think this should be happening on eagle time i also

183have heard of board members being elected or of certain board members if they get elected they will cut mental health specialists specials aids remove ieps and that is simply not true i believe anyone that anyone that's running for school board cares about our students that there are only different agendas to make such assumptions spreading rumors and false accusations is embarrassing to our community i am also looking forward to hearing more about the information that comes from our pandemic planning committee as these as the results of this committee i'm sure will heavily impact our students teachers and community um in closing i wanted to touch on a comment that dr feyden made that professionals know their boundaries and know to stay in their lanes i would disagree with that i have a recent personal experience with

184this and a lifetime experience you know as a professional and as a parent i do not stand up here opposing or disrespecting anybody that thinks differently than i do but as parents i think it is our responsibility to ask hard questions and questions what in question is what is going on in our schools um and making sure that there are not um one certain agenda being pushed by rehearsed information um i would like to touch on the house bill 244 that was set into law yesterday i'm going to recite a takeaway from bricker and eckler which is our legal counsel for our school board if house bill 244 is approved into law ohio public schools and universities will not be permitted to mandate students and employees to receive any of the currently available covet 19

185vaccines furthermore public schools and universities would not be permitted to require those who are unvaccinated to take infection control measures including masking testing quarantine which are different than those measures required of persons who are vaccinated schools and universities subject to the law will have to reconsider their plans for vaccination mandates and differential infection control policies encouraged by public health agencies including the cdc they should consider whether it's necessary to put back in place general infection control measures previously set a hot side when it was permissible to require those who are unvaccinated to follow different roles the law does not affect the ability of schools and universities to request voluntary disclosure of vaccination status or implement one-size-fits-all control measures thank you for your time thank you [Applause] next is karen ambrose of 5021 plantation mind was

186on curriculum but again listening to everything i feel like i'm going to be all over the place like i was at one of the meetings curriculum i would like to know if i can have every copy of any survey that's being taken in the classroom either written or verbally i think as a taxpayer i should be able to have those survey questions that's been being asked to my grandchildren okay also the principal's gone but i don't know how i ever got through going to two to three schools a year from the time i started school until i was a sophomore in high school raised in a home that was not perfect but has had faith since a small child given to me by the prayers of my grandma okay there's some missing link is dr

187pagan still here okay i'd like to know the percentage of mental health people or people that get counseled that have faith in their home as a missing link there's no way the church or the schools can teach faith because of separation of church and faith or church and there's a missing link angela in your lap angie in your you know the paper i can't think of the name of it right now that you put out it was so sad to me because i know you're frustrated the teachers are frustrated you're doing things that you weren't taught to do you didn't become teachers to counsel to physical do everything that you're doing every child is fed now by the state the government is too much in your job i don't know what you can do i'm

188wondering if you really really giving us what you're giving us from your heart or what you're mandated to do i don't know you know when the principal talked about now they're going to have to teach the kids where the cafeteria is where to park where i'm like my biggest worry was can i remember my combination to this new locker simple it's so emotional to me because the government i don't know we're in a spiritual battle okay i don't know what you can do in your homes i don't know it's faith it's a busy link there's lots of links that's all i have to say thank you i'm missing link and you're not going to be able to fix it with all this talk you're not thank you [Applause] just just as a clarifier on that

189if you could actually make a request for that um i i can get you a form thank you yeah absolutely um next we have more forms than one cause we've got a standard form that they can be used yes next is miss gretchen hofer of 14037 center bird road and this is on saint sentero i'm here i'm here this morning can you guys hear me i'm here to address the board again and i appreciate the the ceo who's come from sentaro um i also appreciate the people here from the health district um i appreciate the board putting together uh the people to support where you're at i do appreciate that however when i listen to the you know people when people have to say that lies are being said you know regarding centero i personally

190know the family whose son recorded that in the westerville schools as the ceo of the organization to say that that's a lie is a very offensive because this person's not lying okay so when we talk about lies if somebody's saying that there's lies going on and you're justifying uh what is said under your watch brad the board under your watch humble yourselves people are bringing this to your attention because we're concerned just like when the district calls me with concerns regarding my non-perfect children i as a parent need to take that to my children and i need to find out what the deal is i need to ask questions we're not attacking you we're not attacking the board we're asking you guys questions i know that mindy myers is here i know that angie's angie

191hamburg is here this was this ontario organization your organization was brought to you mindy and it was brought to the district it was brought by my sister years ago but it came into our district so the comment that dr fagan highly educated dr fagan i appreciate it i agree i appreciate all the degrees that we have in the room but where is our common sense where is our concern for children i don't know what we mean by inspire and guide what are we trying to inspire and guide our children my mom just asked for the surveys your organizations that are being being brought into our schools into our children's minds the health department four years ago the 200 question survey given to my children dark questions 200 of them i've been involved in these board

192meetings in my time with five kids in the district two times i showed up when my oldest who's now 20 was in the fifth grade when the auditorium at the high school was filled because our board and our district was trying to figure out what to do with cell phones and guess what it was a waste of time because the board had their they had their mission you guys it wasn't you guys but the board surrendered to the fact that we could not control cell phones in the school district so we surrendered it and here we are i remember being the last person to speak at that board meeting and i said why are we going to surrender to something that is not good for our children when the data in china shows the kids

193in china have struggled from technology and i asked the board then please do not surrender cell phones in the classroom to our children and guess what the board had already made their decision you guys have stated a great claim bringing all of the executives the ceo the health department in here to support your claim to support the pandemic relief committee you guys have brought all your people in but you haven't surveyed me the parent i haven't gotten one i haven't ever gotten to opt my kids out you could please wrap up okay so i have asked the principals of my schools i should not be calling the school having to figure out what you are going to put in the minds of my children my freshman who just filled out who just was sat in

194a suicide class he came home disturbed sad you identify who those students are and you help those students do not corrupt the minds of my children thank you do not corrupt the minds of my children with your health department in this district you're well over four minutes now i appreciate your comments okay thank you so i would so i would like to know i and i i've asked about it i've sent emails to this board i've got no response back what are we paying for sentaro we're we're not paying anything for sentara okay so it's a grant so the survey that was given by the health department you guys are allowing these surveys to come into our students classrooms we're coming up on five minutes now to create your who's everybody else everyone in public

195comments to teach us we only get three minutes and they get because they're part of the business items of this meeting the time for public participation within our policy is three minutes i'm sorry you feel that way but it's the same it's the same guy okay okay brad i will leave the podium now it's been asked i've asked the principals i've asked the district i spoke to the mental health director of our district asking for the board to stop the panorama survey the ties are deep and nobody knew about it none of you knew what affiliates the panorama survey i looked at the questions okay they're not happy thank you we've heard your feedback okay so why don't i get why do i not get it from the district why am i not getting this

196why am i not being told beforehand what you're going to put in front of my kids from a mental health perspective the next person is okay my last question to the district is this if my children are not 18 years and older everyone else has kindly followed the procedure and process can you please follow the same process everyone else has followed i've given you ample latitude well beyond your three minutes okay could you please respect the time of everyone else my last question is if i if the children in this district of mine are not 18 years and older how does the mental health organizations in this district have access to my children without my permission written permission i will look forward to that information the next the next person is renee breen of three

197seven let's avenue thank you members of the board i would like to speak on sentero also i was the the person seven years ago who came to our school board and showed the true light of what centero is all about it is disheartening to me that mrs rinaldi came here today and said that what centero has gone through over the last i don't know year and and how this is not true it is true when i heard about this seven years ago i called westerville school i asked the principal who was in mary colfer's class on april 25th and the person at the school said that speaking to the class was betsy liska who works for a company named sentero 1560 fishinger road i will at the end of this meeting i would love to

198talk to you about that um mrs fagan said that centero is no longer doing their comprehensive sex ad if this is true it's an answer to prayer and thanks be to god i would like to know from sentaro directly i did not hear mrs renaldi say that that program is no longer with centero my whole point in bringing up centero from the beginning i saw it in the july eagle examiner i was shocked to see santero is in our schools sentara's been in our schools at least for four years now counseling kids i'm not standing here saying that kids don't need help they don't need counseled but an organization that stands for what i listened to seven years ago i wouldn't put my kids in front of that company i feel that we owe our

199kids more than that i would like to talk about parental rights transparency and involvement we keep talking about all this mental health it's important i don't know that there's any kid in our school or any person in this room right here that doesn't have mental health issues after what we've gone through depression anxiety all of it we keep talking about treating it but we're not talking about the root my mother's karen ambrose who was just up here and spoke full disclosure my sister was the last one that was up here we need transparency we need the parental involvement when when you guys are so excited about all these surveys the panorama survey the survey that just went out in the health class but yet you don't come out you don't send a survey to us

200parents asking us about mass with today's technology and knowing the suicide rates and all the rest of the stuff these kids are suffering through how about taking the time to get to the root come to the parents send us the survey and say would you mind talking to your kids about this stuff my sister's point of these kids are under 18. i feel like our school district just went into the minds of every single child from a counselor's standpoint albeit it was on a computer but we just asked all of our kids in the school district a bunch of very serious questions feelings questions it said that in the survey that the kids are going to remain anonymous but when we just open the minds of these kids to all these issues and there's nobody

201that's guiding them or counseling them including their parents because we don't know what the questions are quickly yeah thank you um but us parents have rights and we we deserve the right to know what our kids are seeing i have been paying attention to my kids health class there was nothing in the health class on schoology it talked about how the health or the um helpline was coming in had not it said nothing about the fact that our kids were going to be surveyed i asked for the survey of my child and i was told yesterday that that has been shredded thank you and then that was our last one okay can i take her it will literally be two minutes jackie burton jackie burton would you be willing to fill out a form yep

202i'll fill it just be perfect yeah so jackie burton three two four nine broke you drive so i just wanted to bring up real quick um about masking these kids so we talk about mental health my kid when i i didn't tell him he was gonna have to be masked until the friday before he was so upset and we talk about mental health i hate wearing masks every single day but i do because it's part of my job sorry these kids don't want to be wearing them and they're being taught that this is normal they can't see our smiles they can't see our expressions our little kids can't read people's faces so they can't form these emotional bonds and connections it is i believe covet trust me i believe covet but we're not thinking suicide

203is so high right now the fact that my little kid who's seven years old has to find out about suicide and i have to have conversations with my ten-year-old because it's serious and i we need to be talking this is constricting we can't form these emotional bonds and this is causing people to be depressed anxiety my ten-year-old i got you know i got an exemption but he walked out of the principal's office and took it off he's like i can't do this anymore but my seven-year-old cried he hated it and every day until i got that exemption he was so upset every time he came home he hates it he chews the inside of his masks he has holes in them he spits in them well it's not good for his health i told him

204he's going to be like the cats but no furballs but it's going to be a cloth ball but these are the things that these little kids are experiencing and they are not experiencing life they are experiencing restrictions and shelterness and no emotion we can read people's faces because we know when the eyes raise somebody's probably smiling on her there they can't and that scares me developmentally everything is going to be delayed because we are restricting them thank you i'll give you this to you thank you [Music] [Applause] okay it brings them to item number 10 to schedule the next board meeting our next schedule board meetings october 21st right here at 6 30 pm and that will be streamed as well and finally it brings us to item 11 to adjourn have a motion please

205thank you leanne is there a second i'll second it thank you sherry jeremy when you're ready mrs lee yes mrs dorsch yes mr schneider yes thank you all for attending have a good day