Board of Education Meeting - 10/21/2021

001good it's a mission a big one at local schools to inspire and guide each student to his or her maximum potential and i'd like to invite our students of the month up to lead us in the pledge of allegiance please [Music] i pledge allegiance jeremy would you call the roll please mr crowl here mr fuji here mrs lee here mr schneider here mrs smith here miss smith i should say uh and for the record miss dorsch is not currently here thank you item six it's recommended the board approve the minutes for the september 9 2021 meeting and the september 16 2021 regular scheduled board meetings can have a motion please so moved thank you steve you have a second second thank you leanna any comments or discussion on the minutes mr fuji yes mrs lee

002yes mr crowl yes mr schneider yes miss smith yes all right that brings us to item seven and recognitions i think you're up first um i need to ask carly mcgann from gary to come up here with me please this is carly mcgann she is from gre and she's a fourth grader and you're in one sister that for the most part anyway um what's your favorite subject in school i like math and social studies and it says here that you do like math because you like to learn things that you haven't learned before and you like algebra um and you like social studies because you like to learn about land forms and the state of ohio and have you guys done your big ohio week yet this year or did that happen at the end

003of the school year it says that carly's favorite part about being at gre is she says i love all the teachers and i like to play with my friends and what do you want to be when you grow up and do you know an engineer or how did you decide you wanted to be an engineer so you're going to follow your mom's footsteps well i have some nice things that some of your teachers said about you and i'm going to read those and then we'll give you a reward and you can go sit back down with your family um carly is not only an amazing student but also an incredible leader she is hard-working helpful and kind to everyone who comes her way hartley mcgann is one of those students that brings a smile to

004your face she is a kind soul that is always willing to help her friends and teachers her smile and energy light up every room she enters harley is so deserving of student of the month she embodies everything it needs to be to be a bw eagle student and then another teacher said carly mcgann is the perfect student to represent the fourth graders from gre as the big walnut board of education student of the month for me the word that best describes carly is grace there is such a sense of calm about her when working through problems math tends to stump her at times but she is patient and learning the process asks the needed questions and continues working until she has mastered the skill then i'm going to read one more of these that will

005be done carly also uses grace with her friends she seems to be the go-to person and helping her peers when there is girl drama is there is there a way i can get you to swing my obama house later at apparently night schneider needs some help with the girl drama her friends often seek her out for advice and she is always patient and kind in helping them solve their problems so for those reasons and many more we would like to give you our big one board of education [Applause] so yeah if you all once you've kind of been honored if you want to kind of work your way over through the side doors over here we'll actually take your pictures for the eagle examiner and then you're welcome to come back and stick around for

006the rest of the meeting but if you want to make a graceful exit that's a good time to do that as well so mr fuji and mrs lee will be over there momentarily with you as soon as they wrap up their other recognitions so i'm learning as we go as well so i'll invite miss kennedy reed a sixth grader from big walnut intermediate up please again that's all right give it a round of applause so now i'm going to worry about feedback and reverb but we have a tech specialist back there hi how are you good good you feel comfortable up here you're better off than i am right now actually so i have with me kennedy reed she lives with her mom kristen who i waved at in the back here her dad mr

007reed and her little sister harper yeah and harper's in what grade second grade okay she loves playing sports especially softball and your favorite position playing softball is pitcher in third base got a strong arm yeah and how what's your batting average i don't know you don't know do you hit it more than you don't what do you hit it a lot all right then you're doing pretty good if you're hitting it a lot she loves making new friends and getting outside to play with them her favorites this is the second student her favorite subject in school is math holy smokes and believes very much in this motto treat others the way you want to be treated do you know what the name of that motto is no it's the golden rule and certainly i think

008that we can all learn a lot from people who follow or believe in the golden rule so i admire that tremendously i like mrs lee i'm going to read just a few statements from your teachers and then i'm going to give you a copy of that because your mom and dad will probably like it a lot too okay mrs holliday says that kennedy is kind and compatible look i had to highlight stuff mrs holliday said that kennedy is kind and compassionate she cares deeply for others that's kind of sweet mrs george said she always works hard and turns in her best work if it's not her best she works on it until it becomes her best is that true yeah all right is that your math teacher yeah well there you go i believe that

009now kennedy is kind and caring an exceptional role model she demonstrates empathy for others and collaborates well with her peers there's just two more because i think that there's a theme here that i'm sensing kennedy has a sweet personality she's a role model again responsible and empathetic positive and kind for all around her and then here's the next one mrs wadzinski right did i get it right okay don't tell her if i didn't kennedy is sweet good-hearted helpful and friendly this last statement right here she's passionate about learning she asks great questions that help to clarify topics not only for her but the whole class and here it is she's altruistic you know what that one means i think that's a three dollar word that you believe in yourself and that you care for others

010and i really really respect that and again i think there are some times when we can all take a lesson from that so on behalf of these guys and your school i want to say congratulations on being the big wanna intermediate student of the month [Applause] and i'm going to honor elliana hilton she's our gre art student of the month i'm glad you can take a break from my soccer to come so tell us about your artwork very nice now so colored pencils or what kind of what did you use to draw your um for being named art student of the month the big one at local schools hereby recognizes this outstanding achievement your hard work and dedication reflects great credit upon yourself the big walnut local school district and the entire big walnut community

011and you know what i just thought of something i know why you drew a dog because i am sure that my dad are probably going to get you a dog [Laughter] [Applause] oh this again from general rose cranes elementary is for dakota white's dakota oh right here look at that so and i'm going to ask maybe you to pick it up and model it because i definitely think you're going to do a better job modeling it than i will oh and i wouldn't have grabbed it like that either see i had been much more ginger with it and i recognized help me understand what we have here a dirt bike helmet a dirt bike helmet and the reason that we created this dirt bike helmet for our art project is because i like dirt bikes

012because sometimes we don't have to go very deep for the explanation do we and the side well first off the color motif why don't you explain to us why you chose the color motif because it's the american flag i'm a fan of this sagan i like the colors yeah me too i'm a fan as well and then on the side you have written a couple of things fast why do we have fast written on the side of our art project because i'm fast oh snap not lacking for confidence you got to be confident when you're under a bike right is this a two-wheel dirt bike or a like an atv four-wheel kind of thing two-wheel and you do the whole like jumps and coming down no not yet all right and you wear a helmet

013that's not made out of paper mache when doing that okay i'm glad to hear that as well the other the only other observation i made on this art project itself is on the back of the helmet what's that my hand print okay it's not like dad's hand print or something like that trying to stop you and pull you back okay well in a similar fashion just like our conversation earlier number one we'd like to be able to demonstrate and display your artwork here at the central office for the next month or until the next art student has mentioned is that okay with you and on behalf again of the board of education our superintendent and your school i want to congratulate you for being named the art student of the month big one at schools

014here by recognizes you for an outstanding achievement your hard work dedication reflects great credit upon yourself our school community and well that's what it says so congratulations [Applause] and again with all of our honorees if you'd like to head across the hallway there we'd love to snap a picture for you gidget and the eagle examiner and then as i said if you'd like to come back you're more than welcome but if you would like to make an exit that's a good time too this is all right i think then that can take us to the superintendent's um first report we're going to talk about academics and we'll start we have our first building presentation of the year as a reminder we like to go through every building throughout the year and give an update on

015a unique program or something that we'd like to share with the board and feature at that building and so our i don't know how this happened but our first year principal uh mrs crawford got the honors of going first but anyway we're happy to have her here tonight to share about general rose yes good evening everybody good evening good evening um gre is proud to share the theme for this year's building presentations for each board month each board meeting each building presentation will feature a characteristic from the eagle profile so we want to kind of bring it to life for you tonight our focus will be on communicator and so we're going to bring that to life and talk about our eagles nest that we do each month at gre so one friday afternoon each

016month for about 30 minutes gre breaks into what we call our eagles nests and each nest is made up about 15 students kindergarten through fourth grade the nests are led by all of our teachers and staff in the entire building the goal of each nest is to provide students with the collaborative leadership opportunities as well as creating community within our school each nest gives students an opportunity to meet and learn from another adult throughout the building that is not their own personal teacher nests remain similar each year meaning that they will likely have the same staff member from kindergarten through fourth grade as well as the same peers pending when they leave obviously after fourth grade um so what we like to have happen is then they can create that nice rapport that they have

017and build strong relationships beyond just their home room or on their grade level team eagles nests have been up and running at gre for the past four years i'm excited to invite you to see a sneak peek inside our october nest so we have a video that we're going to show where the life skill focus was on meeting new friends and having the opportunity to communicate with them so i'm going to show you a quick video providing a snapshot of their eagles nest at gre for the entire school year so once a month we are going to meet and have our eagles nets do you guys remember some of our friends that were here last year do you guys remember what people's nest is all about that's great so we're going to tell you all

018about it ethan can you tell us what eagle's nest is all about you're right we are going to learn some things ellie do you listen to books we listen to some books absolutely ellie do you remember all what eagles nest is all about absolutely from last year what do you remember from last year last being year we did learn about being responsible so part of eagle's nest is for us to be our own little community where we work on great things like kindness and responsibility and how to be a good friend so those are some of the things we're going to work on all right [Applause] we are now going to talk about how do we make friends because now that we are all part of rhone's nest we're all friends so if you see

019each other in the hall be like hey you're part of rome's nest right but how do we make friends how do we go about making friends cece what do you guys think is that a good way to make a friend yeah being nice to each other absolutely okay let's collaborate oh that's a big word what does collaborating mean together absolutely and we are collaborating in our nest and we're going to be working together army i love that go ahead friendly [Music] absolutely meeting new people seeing them out and about you're exactly right aubry absolutely hey do you want to be my friend do you want to play with me when you see them outside at recess right if you're in class together you guys can ask to work together [Music] all right it's your turn

020if you remember their names greet them if not say hi i'm mrs gregor what's your name [Music] by communicating with others how has it helped um [Music] how was eagerness to help you to be a better leader it took me um because i've gotten to meet so much more people and i've gotten experienced with it and that's helped me become a better leader [Music] and they were painting and not trying to get you know paint all over their hands and using permanent markers so that's why he had gloves on in that quick video um thank you so much for watching that with me are there any questions with those older kids with the younger kids since you guys have started doing this yes for sure we it's really cool to see when the fourth graders

021are coming you know inside from recess and the littles are going out they're like oh you're in my eagles nest hi and they it's fun to just see them interact with one another and even that interaction with the teachers as well that aren't their homeroom teachers yeah absolutely any other questions thank you so much [Applause] good evening everybody i don't know about you but my bucket is full from watching those kids it always makes me smile so um my update tonight is uh just to share with you that the school report cards the state report cards were released late last thursday and while we're always careful to remember that it's just one data point in time there are some things that we're happy to celebrate and some areas for us to take a closer look

022at so i wanted to point out just a couple things and then i'll be back next month with a more detailed report but i did want to say that the ohio law changed the release date this year for the state report cards from mid-september to mid-october so that's why you're getting an update a little later than normal they also got rid of letter grades if you remember the state report cards had letter grades a through f for performance and those were taken off for the 2020 um one school year so this report card and they're actually going away so they're going to move to a star rating system which i will report on next week or next month not next week next month i need a little more time and they also added an educational

023delivery model technology hardware hardware and internet connectivity obviously with kids being in different environments last year they felt like they wanted to report that on state report cards as well so if you were curious about which schools did virtual learning which ones were in person that's reported on the state report cards i do want to share that we were super excited that our district was in the top 10 districts in the greater columbus area based on the performance performance index rating which is a calculation that measures the performance of every student in the state that takes this ohio state test and the higher the achievement level the more points that are awarded so it really does wherever a kiddo starts you want to just make sure that they're growing so you don't so you watch

024that achievement other schools that were in the top ten i just i'm always curious i'm a little bit competitive by nature so i just like to know kind of the other schools as well some of the other schools were granville grandview new albany and upper arlington additionally we were able to yet again demonstrate our fiscal responsibility as our expenditure per pupil was around two thousand dollars less than the average of the other districts that were in that same top ten some areas that we're going to be looking at next are the sub scores within each assessment and then comparing those scores with some of our similar districts and really trying to get a handle on how we're doing based on this again just one data point in time but we do want to take a

025look at it overall like the state and other surrounding districts our scores were down from our last and i'm going to use air quotes normal school year of 2018-2019 so at first glance without that deep dive that we need to take we are kind of attributing that to like every other student who missed that entire spring when we think about especially our kindergartners and first graders the largest gains happen from january to may so that was unfortunately when we were in lockdown and couldn't get out into the school buildings so but we're going to take a close look and make sure that we are continuing to grow our students so i will be back next month with a more detailed all report annie thank you i'm really glad that kate clarified next month and not

026next week i am here tonight to give a update on panorama and just a few reminders the panorama panorama surveys are given to all students in the district these surveys are divided into specific grade bands the only information that is tied to a student is the building and the grade level this information is used to gather data on school culture effort teacher-student relationships sense of belonging school safety and supportive relationships the results of this of these surveys give us the opportunity to make improvements in all of those mentioned areas as you know our academic vision at big walnut is to personalize instruction engage students and grow minds one way that we do that in the academic world of things is we look for data trends once we identify an area of weakness within the classroom

027or even a group of students we are able to use data to drive our instruction an example of how we use data to drive our instruction when we look at that data we find a pocket of weakness we can add interventions and we can support our teachers in improving their tier one instruction we use the data from panorama surveys the exact same way we look for trends and we make adjustments accordingly last year we had the opportunity to pilot panorama we were only able to administer at one time with vlp and pandemic we kind of got up at a late start so we were able to do it one time and to provide you with a specific example of how we used last year's data i pulled a question that was asked it was the

028question was how excited are you to come to school so all students in fifth and sixth grade had the opportunity to answer that question the answer choices were excited somewhat excited and not excited our results showed that 30 percent of students were excited 54 percent of students were somewhat excited and 16 percent of our students were not excited this um so at bwi they were able to use that data have some really great brainstorming opportunities and they were able to implement engagement more engagement opportunities for students such as the rising together program they were able to implement student council and some more student-led initiatives such as our morning announcements that the students do i'm now going to connect it in the panorama surveys to ode for those of you who do not know the ohio

029department of education has a strategic plan for education called each child our future this plan puts the whole child at the center and each component of the plan works to support the whole child approach sorry i lost my place so some of the components of this um whole child approach they built a framework and some of the components of the framework are school climate school environment school culture and physical environment so as you can see the panorama data that we collect correlates directly to that strategic plan i also wanted to clarify a few a few miss sorry to provide you with some misinformation i just also wanted to share that the panorama was purchased last year using grant money the grant was through the delaware county moral board of mental health called the k-12 prevention

030program the same grant was used this year to purchase panorama the purpose of getting that grant was to have data to support our mental health initiatives within our district and then just as another reminder we did push out a video that kind of gave some more clarity to panorama as well as all of the panorama survey questions that we used and that can be found on our website good any questions no thank you all right uh that brings us to our pandemic response committee update i know we have a few uh committee members we're going to help with that if you want to kind of make your way forward i'll start with some of the introduction um the board during the september board meeting asked me to reconvene the pandemic response committee so we were

031able to do that i did want to give just a little background with the initial intention of that committee and kind of how it was formed because i know um some folks didn't have questions on that so kind of as a reminder to the board and i guess for the community's benefit when we were shut down by the state in spring of 2020. over the summer it was a very uncertain tumultuous time and our goal was to get our kids back to school and so explore going um full and as you all know we landed on being able to offer a five day a week option as part of the recommendation from that group as well as a virtual option for those who wanted that set so that's kind of um i just want to

032remind folks we didn't form this committee to really look at mass but i was asked to get it back together just to get my foot to the board so we were able to do that on october 12th um and it was mentioned at the last four meeting appreciate so with that we have a few of our members who have given up their time this evening which i appreciate to come and just trying to give a summary of the meeting format um what was discussed and some of that feedback from the board so we have lisa house i can see i think we have some other ones around the corner that i can't um so i'm lisa house um i am a community member um and i have two kids in the district one at bwi

033and one at pre i was asked to be a part of the pandemic response team because i was a part of the academic advisory committee i was asked to be a part of the academic advisory committee because i expressed interest in my kids academics through um kim castiglione and she sent my name to the committee um so community member um and that's pretty much it with the district so the academic advisory committee turned into the pandemic response committee um because i think we've we all expressed like angie said we all had expressed you know what our interest in the academics and so we were brought together virtually and we were split up obviously because we were on lockdown at that point we were split up into groups and able to discuss you know getting back

034to school there was no discussion of mass it was just like we're out of school for now and how are we going to get these kids back into school so we discussed that um in more ways than one i originally lived i'm from this area but i originally lived in olin tangi school district and one thing that i shared with my small group and that academic advisor sorry and the pandemic response was i didn't think virtual or not virtual sorry excuse me i didn't think the hybrid schedule was great because my kindergarten my now sixth grader went to kindergarten on that hybrid schedule and i saw we never knew what day it was we never you know i saw the disassociation there and so that was one thing that i felt like i had a

035personal experience on and was able to share now whether the committee took that for what it was or not is not for me to say but it was just something that i personally had experienced and was able to share in that pandemic response committee meeting so um i feel like as a com as a community member that it's important to you know give the history of what this was so when we met to discuss mass it was you know already kind of an established committee that had spoken about just getting the kids back in school originally okay so my name's amanda stotler and i am a teacher in the district and we live in the district i have two kids in the district both that go to gre um and so i just kind of

036was going to go over our meeting structure last week when we met we started out with our welcome and introductions and angie was able to kind of let us take a minute at our tables we kind of divided up and sat around with different people that came from different areas and after we had the opportunity to kind of get to know each other a little bit since we never actually met in person the delaware county health commissioner got up and she gave a very extensive update to us so that we could have the opportunity to listen to what was going on in the county not just in big walnut and so it was a really great time for us to be able to take notes on what we were noticing with the information she was

037providing she did a really great job of making sure that we saw things from all of the districts that surround us not just us but also that we were able to have more accurate information on just our community and not just the schools then after that we were able to reflect on the information that we were given so we were kind of able to have time to pull our thoughts together about what we wanted to take away from the information that was provided for us and then we had the opportunity to discuss with the people at our table how we were feeling regarding what we had just heard and so we did have some questions and they were all very focused and i know paul is going to talk about the table group discussions but

038i felt that it was a great time for us to really be able to look at hey here's our 3-2-1 that we had that were our takeaways from the information and we were able to really have time to talk about how we felt about the information with the people that we were sitting with and so it was a great time for us to listen to each other and the one thing that i really liked when we did do the welcome introductions was we set a standard that we were all going to be able to talk about our opinions and our thoughts and feelings regarding the information without people passing judgment and i felt very much like that because my table was made up of teachers and people from the health the delaware county health commission

039and community members so it was a very good mix but i didn't feel like it was uncomfortable at all when we got to the opportunity to share and i felt like we did a great job listening to one another but i think probably the best part was after we had the opportunity to talk as a table we were able to have an individual private survey where we were anonymous and we were able to provide our actual like if we did not feel comfortable speaking in front of other people it was a really great time for us to then give the board um other feedback and input that maybe we might not have felt um we wanted to say in front of our table group so i really appreciated the opportunity at the end to provide

040some anonymous feedback as well and then after that we were free to go and it was great because there was also candy and water hi everybody my name is paul dillon um i was also part of the academic advisory council because i was very interested in helping to promote learning for my children and then when angie put together the pandemic response committee of course i stepped forward to to be involved with that because of course i'd like to have a say in in in how this affects my kids i've got a preschooler and a first grader and um i'm thrilled with the support we've had with big walnut school district with with everything we've done with our kids so um thanks for thanks to the board thanks to angie thanks to her staff for for

041doing a great job um hey i was really impressed with how well the discussions went um i know from experience in business that you when you get 29 people together that have different backgrounds different beliefs some people are introverts some people are extroverts it's really hard to get set a stage where you keep everybody on task as far as this is what we're going to talk about but also get everybody's input so i think the table discussions and then each of the tables doing their readouts lend itself to help the extroverts kind of say what they had to say but then people that could write down their thoughts and think about it and then do the do the individual survey i thought that when it well lent itself very well for introverts to be able

042to have their voice heard as well um i think the board did a great job defining the scope which is what we're going to go through here and i think the format was great with the health department educating us and then again as i said the brainstorming techniques that we've had to give everybody a voice and the one thing i want to highlight as well is that even though everybody maybe had different beliefs or backgrounds everybody was there because they had the best interest of their kids in mind and that's we may have different ways to get there but everybody had the best interest of the kids in mind so anyway with that so the first discussion question was in a section in black that you see up here that's basically the scope of what

043the board gave us to go over and it's the k through 6 mass mandate in effect until one of the following occurs vaccine availability for children's 5-11 current quarantined requirements change revisions due to consideration of pandemic response committee input so again this was the scope of what we discussed and then what we did was this was the table discussion so angie read the questions to us as a group discuss whether you believe the board of education should either continue to mask kids or eliminate the mask mandate and we were given time to um to go around the table and discuss and what we did at our table was we made sure that with each of these questions we started a different spot on the table so somebody else could go first because obviously you could

044get biased when you hear somebody else's input so getting everybody getting a chance to go first i think or at least go early in the discussion was helpful again the section in black was the scope of what we were covering the second question was and again we had time to discuss this as a group discuss if a vaccine became available to children ages 5 to 11 the board of education should continue to mask or eliminate masks question three if the quarantine procedures were changed to reduce the amount of time students are out of school the board of education should he continue to mask or b eliminate the mass mandate and for number four as a table discuss under which conditions the board should lift the k-6 mass mandate which was a nice way to kind

045of um maybe open it up to some other ideas that maybe the board hadn't already thought about okay so i get to share the findings on this so as um stated before by both amanda and paul um these questions were asked to us and we could discuss them at the table but then we could walk away and so even if you were in a situation where you were like oh i don't agree with that person there you were able to walk away and privately complete your own survey so like everyone got a chance i feel like to be heard because even if you were swayed you know and didn't want to necessarily speak up at that time you were able to kind of walk away and fill out your own survey so um just to

046put it out there i was very surprised when i received these survey results and the findings within the pandemic response um committee because i really didn't know where people stood like i knew where my small group stood but that was only like six people out of the full scope of people in the room so when i got these findings i was very surprised so just to kind of say that so the first one i believe the board of education should continue to mass students in grades kindergarten through sticks versus eliminate the mask mandate for um students and grades kindergarten through six now when all of this is being said we were never asked to vote on any of this we were never asked to you know like this this is putting a lot on our

047committee and we didn't we weren't asked to do this we were just asked to provide you guys as the board a you know a representation of what the community was feeling and the community being parents like me and healthcare officials and you know um administrative staff teachers across the board so when you look at these like i i don't know i was just very surprised myself by the findings of these um so this was our input if that really is all that matters we're not asking as a committee to like sway you guys one way or another this was just our input um so this is the next one if a vaccine became available um to ages for ages 5 to 11 should the board continue to mask or yes should the board continue to

048mask versus eliminate the mass mandate so that one was you know pretty split um the next one is if quarantine procedures were changed to reduce the amount of students out of school i believe the board should continue to mask versus eliminate the mass mandate um and then that is the last question so i hope you guys see this as our input um and i was very surprised when i received these results to kind of see how everybody was as a whole because i didn't know that until i received them so the last part of our our survey that we were able to do at the end kind of went to the last table discussion question which was under which condition should the board lift the k-6 mask mandate so we were all able to provide

049our independent feedback and so there are a lot of things here and i'm not going to read every single one but overall what i think this does a great job of doing is giving the board a lot of different viewpoints and information to consider from a very diverse group of people and that way when you are looking at you know how can we decide what to do these are different um suggestions and things that um our group came up with for you to consider um so there are a few slightly we we definitely gave our feedback on ideas that we had for how like what conditions you might consider good ones to lift the mask mandate and then the very last question we were asked after that was additional information thoughts or items you would

050like to share with the board of education and um as a committee member when i went and read through all of these i think you you can get a very good sense of how everybody there wants to keep our kids in school and we're just asking that going forward however we can do this we we really appreciated last year i know as a teacher it was the best thing for me ever to be in a classroom with my kids being in quarantine and trying to teach from my house with my own kids was a nightmare and so last year i was very thankful for it regardless of how difficult it was so i think this is just a lot of great information for you guys to consider moving forward so thanks for the opportunity for

051us to get together and share that with you all thank you board members do you have any questions for our committee [Music] i'd just like to say thank you to everybody who participated and i know that one of you said that initially when this committee was formed we weren't looking at weather masks it's always been how do we get our kids to school and those were the conversations i remember having a year and a half ago or whatever is what are we going to do to get our kids safely back in school and just i know i'm just as community members thank you all very much for your time i appreciate that our district i feel like our administration always does a really good job of trying to gather community input whenever we make decisions

052so thank you i was wondering if any of you could just talk about the conversations that occurred around the essential student concept that we heard about i think last week from the health director and then was part of your discussions and there's probably some people here that haven't been familiarized with that term so i was wondering if you could all just talk about what the committee discussion was like related to the concept of the essential student um i don't know if it's a protocol or whatever you want to call it that the health department has been debating i see amanda looking at me like um do you want me to explain what it is and then maybe you could share your discussion i mean i could quiz you and see if you remember so for

053those of you that watched last week our health commissioner sheila hiddleston talked about this so they are looking at and we're hoping to start this on monday um as megan truax our school nurse has kind of been working out the details of this but if you're familiar with the idea of an essential worker this would be and maybe you've been able to do this in some of your jobs that even if you're considered a quarantine you can put a mask on and still come to work and so um this is something we've been asking for for a while so i'm kind of excited is that we can do the same thing with kids so it doesn't mean they don't have to quarantine they're so considered and quarantined but the idea is that they can come

054to school with a mask on and then they're still supposed to be in quarantine the rest of the day to our goal of keeping kids in school i'm obviously in favor of anything that gets kids in school so that was the idea that was shared um and i know we had some discussion around it so if you want to share that that'd be great at different tables so yeah yeah um so our table really we tried because we had someone from the health commission there we were just trying to get clarification on the fact that we because we have a mask policy in place we're able to take part in the essential student which we really liked because it does you know if you have a kid at a lunch table which is what we

055experience who tests positive and then you quarantine an entire section of a lunch table that's really tough because a lot of times those kids are just at home and they're like what am i supposed to do now so the idea of the essential student our table really liked that because then it at least kept the five or six other kids around this kid in the classroom and they didn't have to be at home if they weren't symptomatic and join symptoms so our table was very much in favor of it and that's why we were trying to get clarification that night and i think she did a better job of clarifying it at the board meeting about how you qualify to be able to do essential assessment so our group was really excited because we felt

056like it would be a really good thing to reduce the number of kids in quarantine the key thing as amanda mentioned a lot of the four teens come from lunch tables so the idea is if those five kids at a lunch table are all contacts to the safe case they can still eat lunch together and then they wear their masks the rest of the day um our table was had a very real and raw conversation we had one staff member at our table um and we discussed the fact that like whose job is it to police this and especially if a kid is in quarantine like they've been exposed they have to understand like adults are better than you know my 11 year old i'll put my own kid on the spot that they have

057to understand that it's essential they've been exposed to a disease and so they have to understand that it's essential for them to keep the mask on and so our biggest concern and we put it on the teacher that was there we were watching we were playing mama bear to her we're like you can't have to police this like whose job is it to police this and especially with like after school sports and things like that when you're saying you can go to school but you can't go to football practice we were like whose job is it to police this i mean we were like panicked for the teachers and the staff because that's putting so much more on our staff that's not fair so you know from like the parent perspective at our table we

058were very concerned about the essential student just and you know like we didn't want to put any more on megan we didn't want to put any more on dawn or christina you know the the school nurse says we didn't want to put anything more on the teachers we were we were very fearful of the policing of the mass if that makes sense so that was our conversation otherwise you know in theory it looks great because and i think um this is kind of a crass way to say this but um bob keater lee was like adamant we need to keep butts in seats so if you're looking at the butts and seats mentality thank you bob keatorly for my quote um butts in seats mentality is you know you're going to use this essential student

059because it is going to keep butts in seats but you got to look at all and we were trying to look at the whole picture at least at our table and look at whose job is it to police this and our we don't want to have to you know always be like or set our teachers up to always be the bad guy if that makes sense yeah at our table we had um teachers and parents that spoke um teachers said it's it's just impossible to do the remote learning uh program you really need to have them have the kids in person and i can tell you firsthand experience my kids did remote learning and it didn't go very well so being in the classroom is super important and i think both parents and teachers agree

060to that that that's really critical so if this is something that helps us keep keep the schools open i think everybody was in favor of it and especially if if the medical experts are saying that this is this is a safe thing to do an appropriate way to do it there was one exception at our table there was one person who was very concerned about masks she showed us a binder that showed some research that she had done that talked about the dangers of masking but other than that like i said everybody was very enthusiastic about having this as an option and a way to keep the kids in class because you just just the remote thing from the parents perspective and the teacher's perspective is just really really difficult [Music] i just wanted to

061get a tenor of the discussion i guess the only the only follow-up that i have because we had i think the person with the binder here last week saying that maybe she didn't necessarily have the opportunity to express herself in a way she would appreciate um i guess from from being at that table i won't ask you to pass judgment on whether you thought she could or she couldn't but i guess what was i think i heard you say you had some medical professionals in your group is that correct we did we had an emergency room doctor and then uh sheila was there as well okay and there was one other person from from the hospital i don't remember what is what we had three medical experts at our table so i'm just kind of

062curious i mean i've heard everything about masks from the entire continuum you can imagine so i guess thinking back to i would say specifically to the er doctor because she's he or she has probably the best pulse of of what's going on what were some of her responses related to mask related can you share that from your discussion um one of the things she said is she never wants to go through september 2020 she said it was just it was absolute chaos in the emergency room there was they were just completely overwhelmed with the normal people that would come in with injuries and then you've got coveted cases and it's just just overwhelming and exhausting and just it's not safe for the community for for this to be spreading um sheila from the health department

063actually asked um asked her we went around the table a few times other people asked her to hey we understand you're against masking like do you want to expand on that i think maybe she felt maybe outnumbered and maybe a little overwhelmed but i i think we try to keep the tenor being very open and like hey we want to hear what you have to say and like i said i'm starting to say sheila actually called her out specifically and said hey i really want to understand like what are your thoughts on you know why masks are dangerous and she just for some just didn't feel comfortable i mean i really think we tried but obviously you know perception is reality but which i feel we tried so is the and again i don't want

064you to have to speak for those medical professionals in your group but i mean it was the general i guess what i'm taking from that discussion is that they felt like whatever that data may have said about masks the the risk or the concern that they were dealing with they felt like and those other areas of public health were greater i mean is that the general if i were to put a consensus on absolute discussion that was absolutely correct yep absolutely that's what i was going to clarify brad can i say we had no medical professionals on our table and we looked around and said oh my gosh if you look around this room the only people in a mask right now are the medical professionals and then you take a step back and you

065go oh my gosh should we be and that was our discussion at our table was nobody has a mask on but medical professionals and we're like they're dealing with this every day and that was something that we like noticed and made that observation and was discussed at our table with no medical professionals so just another you know perspective on that thanks i suppose my initial thoughts are just sincere appreciation and gratitude to not only this house mr dylan but all of the members of that it's not like this idea of the response team was applied by night idea like as mr zamber had said that intent of these folks was present last year so it was really through their guidance that some of the courageous decisions this district made and i do need to turn

066courageous too that's not lightly stated the courageous decision of being the district that would attend in school uh full in-person conversations and not a hybrid or a virtual only kind of route we're largely on the heels of the same feedback so it's not as though that group is only convened to discuss the topic of masks now did masks obviously drive part of the compensation until one of these three things happened meaning guidance from the same team that provided us input to be in school last year like let's see what they have to say as well this is important to do in addition to that i think it's important to share that the pandemic response team is actually identified in board policy and it's important to say that that's not something that was taken rightly in

067terms of the chartering of that last year so while i recognize that there's probably some hesitation that i appreciate and forgive me i'm sorry i think it was mrs house who said you know this is just our feedback to you we i value that feedback tremendously and i recognize that that what's happening is not necessarily a position that's being taken where you say do this or do that trust me we get those conversations as well um you were really just trying to provide your insights and have frank and honest conversations so again uh my thought about a healthy community in a healthy school district and being attuned to the formal structures that are already in place for us to be responsive is really important so i appreciate the lift the burden and and i don't

068know this but i'm guessing maybe there was even some discomfort with coming here tonight and sharing some of the results and i just want to articulate my most sincere appreciation to you on that the essential student that's been approved by the health department correct buckeye valley went used that last night we're looking to start it on monday start what on monday central student which means what i shared earlier about if the student is in quarantine that they're able to come to school during school hours during their quarantine if they're masked and healthy and healthy right they have to have no symptoms so are we lifting the mask the mandatory mask you're asking me that's the question you're asking me well i guess the the question nested in there that kind of has me wondering so

069if i heard correctly buckeye valley eliminated their mask requirement so does that make them ineligible then for the essential student program i guess is the question that i've got that i don't know i just found out today from their superintendent that they voted on that because everything i have heard is that when you're asking i think a restarting essential student i think the answer what i'm hearing is that's the intent but i also believe from what i've heard from the health department that if there's not a mask requirement there's not a central student no that is what sheila told us yeah i asked that question i feel like i asked that question very specifically last last thursday so i don't know if that gets around where your question was coming from because i think there's

070there's if you're mandating masks for students then what's the need for the essential student yeah and so i can only i i don't know what i've been through and what i asked her was was that a consideration because of the fact that we had that mass mandate so to hear this now kind of surprises me well it's kind of redundant well i think when you're dealing with you don't have to quarantine at home so if you're a student you get like my my preschooler right now is in quarantine if a central student wasn't that's probably a bad example let's say my first grader was exposed because they're wearing masks if she was exposed to covid but had no symptoms she could continue to come to school as long as she wore a mask versus without

071the essential student she has to stay home for 10 days and i do know that they were looking at just doing that for school contacts because they're seeing a lot more family contacts typically what our school nurses have seen across the county is that family contacts typically within a household do turn into it that's usually where they see the spread they don't see it from like a lunch table for example and i feel like that's been pretty i feel like that's been pretty consistent in terms of the conversation even from last i'm not sure who which of you ladies mentioned this but from a lunch table standpoint it would have a difference or an impact at the elementary level if we were to have the essential student because they're all unmasked so with that even

072though we have a mass policy in place every one of those kids at that lunch table would have been con contact trace to have to stay home where if we go and proceed with the the essential student those students at the lunch table as long as they're wearing a mask which they are in class they would still be allowed to come to school has sheila reduced that written document um yes we do have some things i need to copy okay [Music] anything else not for me just express your thanks again and your willingness to to come back multiple times and probably perhaps again in the future as this doesn't seem to be going away so thank you all right that brings us to our construction update with our director of facilities mr doug schwartz saw

073him earlier but oh there he is you're i up want to use the word collaborate before i start because i was pretty impressed by that i'm doug sports director of facility so i'm going to go a little off script it's a topic i put in one or two of the last cabinet updates we talked about at the last evening board meeting and that is the steam boiler heat replacement at harrison street or the early learning center i am but this is good news so last month i came to the board and said unfortunately the new steam boiler all this fun we hear now on tv every night about delivery and kind of the whole process of getting things here um in terms of the whole infrastructure issue our boiler showed up so it showed about

074two weeks ago to the surprise of our contractor and the local distributor so we are now in full midst of putting the new one in we ceased putting reassembling the old one made the decision to assemble the new one it is on track to provide heat on or before november 15th as we stand here today again our contingency plan should we have cold evenings or cold mornings as we super heat the gym which has its own unit and fans to kind of spread that heat out of the gym down the hallways and then we also small room heaters if you will portable just like you would have at home but a little bit higher grade that we're putting in the classrooms just to take the chill off in the morning we'll come in at six

075o'clock turn those on should and if we need it so far we haven't needed again that building being masonry holds the heat especially of sunny days today was probably a little chillier but when i'm going on there each morning my office is usually colder here than harrison street has been so i wanted to share that in terms of where we're heading in terms of the boiler project so i'll stop there for a second again it's been the last two i think cabinet updates but just want to make sure we hadn't seen that on or before november 15th that's currently where we're tracking yes sir so see hearing no questions we'll go to the traditional construction again for the new school so we'll start with the three three uh images here on the monthly reports again

076we're here down on the uh we're on the uh five yard line if you will it's first down though we have four more yards to go or four more plays to go so site athletics just pointed out a couple things i highlighted in yellow for the board um again there's there's been folks that have uh heard about it or even seen it the multi-sport field so again football field but lacrosse soccer field actually the artificial turf is down you can see the uh tick marks the eagles huge eagle logo in the center the field goals are up etc visitor stands are up so that's really coming together again next month you'll see the final connections press box scoreboards going live things like that again contractually gilbane is contraction online at this time to still be

077done the end of november to hand the building to us site work end of november of november yes sorry what did i misspeak i apologize no thank you it's coming really fast i think it is coming really fast um again one thing you'll see today even you see they're spreading topsoil planting trees about to be seeding et cetera et cetera so in the next two weeks it's going to look night and day to it looks now final paving is going on so the site work it really makes a difference just aesthetically as people drive around or drive by can i make one quick comment on the site work in the athletics because i see he's got the picture of the stadium here so really glad that everybody's excited about that but please don't go back

078here and run bleachers correct out on the track yet because it's still a construction site so we've had a couple folks that have uh wanted to go back there and do that we obviously try to keep our facilities as open as possible and you're welcome to do that at the other stadiums but this one is the winner construction so if you can hold off appreciate the excitement they are really nice tall bleachers it should be a good workout to run them at some point but oh yeah is there fencing around it right now um no there's not complete fencing around it so uh it does all pay but again as as superintendent hamburg just said it is a construction zone so whether it's the high school the concession stand all the site except the elementary

079is still technically a construction site what that means is not technically our site it's our construction manager site but i have personally unfortunately had people walking or trying to run the new track which the actual final surface is not in yet but you can see in that photo the asphalt is again we do have some signage up and whatnot but it's not a completely secure environment but we encourage folks to stay off if at all possible because it's still construction well i think some of the sensitivity related to that is the fact that the current track is so what's the appropriate word that's not great that's an idea so the idea that the the final surface isn't down and people might be out there trying to run on it means what to me it's it's

080in the same condition as the walking trail that leads to the school so to the visual eye i could see why they'd be possibly see an opportunity but we're just encouraging them not to because it's still technical construction so the reason we did not put a fence around just to go kind of down that path is just the prohibitive cost of fencing that whole 100 acre site uh early on we opted not to do that for the project there's fencing up by the building but not out on all the athletics correct there's fencing to keep the students safe from the high school site but not the overall objective uh the high school again if you're going there to this this week actually they're starting up quick kitchen equipment i highlighted that just to show that

081probably the biggest thing or the last thing we're going to receive is furniture that's one of the last things to be ordered it's one of the last things to be shipped uh they're running into some challenges but at the stat as it stands now late november early december we should have all our furniture um the biggest thing being actually student chairs is the last thing we're going to receive so while originally they're all supposed to have it in by october right now it's standing at late november to early december so even when we received the building or occupied in early december there's still a slight chance on our report as that happens that we might not have all our furniture in when we first get the keys as i like to say but right now

082we're more on track and have confirmation from manufacturers we'll have it installed prior to the first day of school december 4th i'm sorry january 4th didn't want angie to fall over there so i'll stop there on the highlighted graphic and kind of that report any questions or anything about the okay this mr jados was here last month last month last week last week talking with us about the students move-in plan and some of the structures in place to help students kind of find their way navigate learn their first day of school all over again in a new school a new calendar year my question kind of falls in that dark medium between when students would be finishing at the old not i'm not going to i can't refer to it as the old facility it's

083going to be foreign and moving to the new high school my question is the uh what is it comfort level or tracking level that you have in terms of it will it will poof happen over here with the right amount of movement and the right amount of services correct we have the move all scheduled so we start the weekend before winter break with the district custodians moving boxed items we then roll into the saturday before christmas if you will with the second weekend district custodians moving the rest of the boxed items and then we have a third party private contractor that's moving everything bigger than a box um music instruments art kills in fact they do the art kills today just to share because we have to hook those up to some exhaust ducts so

084they're actually moving things but their main push will be i believe it's the 18th 19th 20th 21st could be off by a day there so starting that saturday or just as we finished the sorry just as we finished the winter quarter they're swooping in and starting to move things just as teachers are on their last two days slash students on their last two days before winter break and then will you create a colorful chart like this for january through june in terms of five five five south old three seasons yes we're working because now we've done a walk through our pre-bid with contractors and the intention is to come back to the next board meeting and kind of outline some initial objectives in terms of cost use of bond interest is what's going to fund

085the renovation of 555 or the current high school as well as laying out some allocations we're looking to reserve for possibly intermediate becoming in elementary and i'll get to it in a second but additional contingency reserve to finish out the new school or new campus if you will and you you have done a remarkable job kind of bird dogging this in fact i would say mr jados in your abs since last week again it seems like it was a month ago last week said the same thing that you know he appreciates the the kind of oversight that you've provided the reason that i'm bringing that up in this space is because the conversation of your comfort level with what has to happen in the current facility so the current facility and i'm not looking for

086what has to happen from an itemized list i'm looking for like what's your comfort level that this can be done given the supply chain things that we've seen with this actually the very discussion we're having with the contractors and that's why it'll be critical we want to start the conversation at the next board meeting leading into december's board meetings ideally we need to have them under contract by the end of this year to that very point in order to have delivery but again it's mostly for product lines but not paint which is having delivery issues product issues flooring carpet and lvt luxury vinyl tile it's called the same tile in the new prairie run in high school so instead of carpet most areas will be a vinyl product and then we've got an option to

087replace ceiling tiles if we can afford it so that's that's the bulk of the work as planned as well as creating a couple of extended learning areas and some locker areas so mostly finishes that's the exact discussion with the contractors and then as we because there will be a lot of excitement around the new facility and i actually share in that like it's exciting time which again you wouldn't necessarily always know in terms of of other topics but uh it's an exciting time for for this project and i think one of the important things from my standpoint is also the communication if i get one topic outside of kind of the range of what we discuss in board meetings addressed to me uh from community members it really is so walk me again through why

088we're moving students midway through a year and those types of things i'm wondering if you would speak to that just quickly since i think our audiences are growing with these meetings uh the biggest reason is if we want the opportunity to renovate summer's not long enough correct uh we need at least four or five months i'll share the intention is to come back on the plan has been for a couple years to replace a couple chillers at the current high school at the 555 building and those are also some of the objective we'll be presenting to the board over the next few weeks to get that that was eight weeks delivery time back in may it extended to 10 in august and two weeks ago it jumped to 22 weeks so as it stands now

089the chiller project will be if we order it in december or even late november will be a june install which blows my brain but that's where we're at so that's the other reason in hindsight thank goodness we did plan in a way we've got time to deliver these things and have time to put them in but all that has to kind of overflow each other and at 555 that's the that's by the media center behind the media center yes there's three of them the two are original and one was added with the addition so it's the two original chillers that need replaced because that's those large doors so that's where they would go in and come out no they're outside of the mechanical yard okay so those large units in a fenced in area um

090and so they make the the condition of water cold water if you will to condition the building and so your confidence level on the current timeline for five five five is reasonable based on all the dialogues i've had especially in the last even 30 days yes all the contractors understand the schedule i'll phrase it that way and will you provide something like this for that space yes we can thank you i think it's important to reiterate what doug just said that there are a lot of supply chain issues so we're going to be bringing things earlier than we normally would and we're not doing extensive things there but we do have original carpet from 1991 that we are looking to replace it's kind of gross so looking at asisa putting mostly tile in there that'll

091be similar to at the new high school so we do need to get moving on those so appreciate doug's attention to detail as always continuing again i'm bringing it even though it's there's nothing to really talk about per se again the one pager says at the top gilbane construction contingency law remember again this is our money their contingency they've spent it all under our approval so there's not much to say other than they're now negative it's kind of become a big number for them they're now negative 150 grand not our concern but i'm just sharing that number as they report it back that that's their kind of errors and omission if you will at this point um the last document is the larger one the more voluminous six pager again this is our contingency for

092i'll say owner cost that can have all kinds of reasons why you go to the last page that's usually where the latest and greatest information is where it stands now as of this report which is dated uh just last week um we had ten thousand dollars plus left this is a projection of encumbered or projected to be encumbered um against 2.4 million um so i i'm actually pleased where we're at but again we will spend we will go negative here in the very immediate future one thing i highlighted there in yellow it's actually in red as well there's a credit or a deduct change order forthcoming for just under fifty two thousand dollars so remember the board's policy fifty thousand one penny uh a deduct has to go to the board and it's recommended typically

093what's happened is when the president signs it um that is for a scoreboard credit i just want to thank again publicly our a.d brian shelton that's because of him i'll just share he he's worked out some negotiating with an advertising marketing company and they go ahead and find advertisers or marketing people that want advertisers should say that want to advertise on our video board advertise around our scoreboards so while the gmp you awarded had all those scoreboards new the football baseball softball and competition gym only there's some auxiliary pieces that we still have to buy we're all applied we're all purchased and paid for by this advertising company if you will so we got a credit back from the company we had hired so we're still paying to install them we just didn't have to

094pay for the school boards which are scoreboards which are actually on site right now just to share so that should be coming we're waiting for a little more backup in terms of justifying a couple numbers they had we thought were a little low just to share so we're waiting for a little more backup but i hope we have a reading at the first board meeting uh there in november and then for approval as we would recommend hopefully at the second board meeting for that deduct change order um so i'm going to stop there what questions if any just now i was just going to say thanks and now i have this image of doug running around waving people off our track left and right and i hope he is i hope he is i don't

095want to have a new facility but i would actually you mentioned it and i would echo at the appreciation of the athletic director for the fact that yes the legwork he did and last friday as the last regular season home game on that field i think is a moment in this community given the fact that that's been the field and i thought mr evans up in the box did a really nice job kind of presenting to the community who was still in attendance for the game at that point that based on community or based on donation with a partnership that current sod turf is going to be lifted up and there's going to be a quality surface placed down for athletes moving into the future for this district and kind of marketing or communicating that

096partnership i think is something we need to continue to do and articulate our appreciation for doing things a little bit differently or more uniquely to be cost effective yeah and just because you asked i'm more than happily um add that project while we're not funding it or contracting for it but the replacement of a natural with artificials turf if you will at the current high school we can add that to that same kind of calendar if you will okay and it was nice for the student athletes my concern when that project was brought to us would it be done you wanted this you wanted the kids to be able to play on the field right so given the fact that they've been undefeated on that field i think it's really correct it's it's kind of

097exciting so thank you anything else for doug thank you all right thank you that's all i have tonight thank you thank you jeremy treasurer's report time okay um so i'm probably sounding like a broken record it makes a pretty easy report when things are falling in line so happy that that is occurring not a whole lot happened on the revenue side this month in september is usually a little bit quieter for that uh we should be getting our the things that excite the finance guys when you get to watch trends and track it and see what's coming um one of the the big things that i will be watching at the end of october here is our income tax coming in our second quarterly income tax payment you may recall that and you can see

098the number here it was significantly higher in july than we normally see so kind of looking forward to seeing the second quarter to see if that kind of falls more in line with what we've we've generally seen um and and one other thing i wanted to bring up on the revenue side is i know we've been talking about the funding formula that has changed that was originally supposed to be rolled out and we were supposed to be getting those those new payments in october it became a heavier lift than it was anticipated so that has been rolled back until december so you may see some kind of differences in the estimated versus the actual coming in october and november but that is that's part of the reason for that we had anticipated october and has

099been pushed back otherwise the expenditure side is also pretty in line continue to see slightly under in our our wages i know we've had some challenges in filling some of the positions there are still positions outstanding so that that's part of what kind of feeds into being slightly under there another thing just of note that you'll see in next month is there is a provision with our insurance company that if we are under a certain cost ratio overall for their plan and i think it's their total book of business then the the contracts get a payment back so we will be getting a payment or we did get a payment back and then that will be being applied here in october so that'll be another kind of variance that you'll see on october's report otherwise

100things are are looking pretty good right now any questions when you're talking about the unfilled positions i know bus driver was near the top of the list is that still one we're efforting to fill pretty i believe i i don't know if i can speak to individual positions mark might be able to it's just curiosity if you just want to bring it up during the hr report that's fine too i'm just just kind of curious i know we're struggling in some spots to find people just kind of curious where so thank you that's all i had one of the data pieces i look at this with mr buskirk is you know i i think the enhancement of the the check checks at the bottom of where the expenditures go and the transparency of that that

101i appreciate and i think you were speaking to uh last week one of the data points that i continue to look at on this and monitor is what you report as our fte and then it just happens to be that with miss tomah and miss clark talking about the report card some numbers there seem a little bit off to me i i think they can be explained in terms of fte and students so the report card had 3813 or something like that in the data and and our current fte for fiscal year 22 or this school year shows slightly higher than that can you explain that so that if there's a misunderstanding of that sure yeah so there's a couple things going on there mr fuji uh one if you'll notice there's not to get

102too down into the detail of it but there's average daily membership which is generally what is is what enrollment is reported for report card data that's taking every single student percentage of time that they've been in the district and then that comes out in the end of the kind of average daily membership for the enrollment so that's one piece um that's also a number from last year where what i usually put in this report is a student count so more of a we'll call it the mr keiterley approach of bottoms mr the butt's in seats um so you've got the leg time between years you've got average daily membership as well as mine's a a count of students as of october 1st which was in this as people might see that i wanted to make

103sure that it's not as though there are two separate numbers yeah that's a that's a great point to make because it can there there are a lot of different ways that enrollment is reported um what we standardly do for this report and when we're reporting in like our comprehensive financial report we use the student count which has historically been the number so to kind of be consistent in what we're reporting with that thank you anything else for jeremy thank you sir that brings us to number 11 which is board members items of interest savannah you have the floor good evening everyone good evening the high school has some exciting updates to share as we have had quite the busy start to fall i'm going to begin with just some general updates that have affected the

104majority of our students homecoming was outside this year and it was very well received by the student body everyone had a lot of fun and thankfully the weather was perfect student council did a wonderful job planning and executing the event for all of our students grades 9 through 12. the powder puff game will be on october 25th national honor society has put in a lot of work to prepare for it and i know that girls from all grades are very excited to participate in this flag football tournament student council is currently working on a project to support a staff member fighting cancer and hopes to unite the whole school to support this individual moving on sports are a very important topic at the high school because our fall season is coming to a close girls

105cross country volleyball and tennis won their occ's this year girls soccer just won the first game of their tournament boys soccer won their first tournament game as well and they play gahanna tonight actually boys cross country placed fourth at occ's which is the team's highest placement in about 20 years varsity football is 9-0 and is looking great for playoffs they play away at canal winchester tomorrow the 22nd rage cage which is our student section is also doing a fantastic job supporting all of our fall sports but football games continue to have the most impressive turnout clubs and student organizations have been very busy with meetings parties and other projects spanish club is back in session this year and they had their first introductory meeting on october 13th they will be having their first party to

106celebrate dia de los muertos on october 26th our german students celebrated oktoberfest recently art honor society had their first meeting today the drama department is working hard to produce their latest play called puffs student council which is the high school student government wanted to host a discussion panel for board candidates to inform students especially seniors because many of them can vote about the upcoming election however due to conflicts in the schedules of some candidates they were unable to proceed with the event our students also continue to show diligence in their academics the first quarter ended last week so high school students were working hard to solidify their grades for the start of the school year the psat for juniors and sophomores was conducted last week for juniors this serves as the qualifying test for national

107merit which is a college board organization that gives recognition and scholarships to top performing students finally college application day is this friday the 22nd in the innovation center for seniors thank you thanks savannah doug you want to see if you can get a round of applause okay steve well real quick so the the three minutes that we often reserve for public participation is that is that a statement for us as well for you yes well the reason i and it's actually a partial serious question from the standpoint of you know from time to time we can be labeled different things or conversations come up and to mr crowl's point i think uh the last couple of board meetings in the call for civility i just want to make sure that i'm within kind of the

108expectation with that we don't really have a specific policy related to that or anything of that nature so i do well because i do maybe become a bit loquacious from time to time to your point i don't feel that way i just hear things yeah uh and and now uh miss smith i don't really want to be the person that follows you but i'll attempt to i can't believe that college application day is this friday like that to me is crazy how many applications do you intend to uh submit um i intend to submit eight applications um i am not a hundred percent set on that number because i haven't submitted anything yet the early action deadline for most colleges is november 1st so that's why this college application day comes on october 22nd to

109help students prepare for that well said thank you very much uh to the point then of of board operations i did want to also mention a few things um thankfully i had my opportunity to talk about the stakeholder engagement in the pandemic response committee and expressed my appreciation not once but twice now but as it relates to board operations the conversation of situations that come to the board that are concerning specifically in reference to centero recently a citizen brought to the board a very specific concern and when it was shared i too was greatly yeah greatly concerned in terms of what was what the topics were i think as we look at board operations not only has the pandemic response committee been something that's been in board policy but also complaints or concerns from citizens

110is in there as well so what i appreciate that occurred is that our superintendent allowed us to have some conversations around this topic we were able to kind of investigate what was going on and then most recently the ceo of sentara the delaware county board of health came and that's not the actual title i uh for the the director thank you came and allowed us to ask questions and then as did other community members so the opportunity to then investigate that uh brought a great deal of satisfaction to me and i would say that maybe the most vociferous board member against uh the organization as i would understand it i didn't have a question in that moment or a statement and so to me if i kind of presume positive intentions i'm going to take

111that as a good thing and say that's exactly how the board should operate in terms of when concerns are brought continuing on with good news in that conversation i i don't think that we should lightly brush off or underestimate what mrs toma uh and mrs clark brought to the board i i took a great deal of pride when i saw in the dispatch that big walnut was listed in the top ten of the columbus area and surrounding area uh and some might say well top ten so what right like that's we want to be number one not just within the top ten but i certainly take that pride and would say i'd rather be in the top ten than the bottom ten because they were listed as well and then to hear the uh kind

112of financial uh implications of that on the back side was powerful to me so i appreciated that to mrs smith to ms smith's points on athletics you know the other good news is girls tennis i want to say these names because i think that it's important keena ellers and molly mclean both uh in addition to the team being occ champs uh kind of competed in a first for big walnut which was to take a doubles team to sectionals coach bayless was the coach of the year and i congratulate him varsity as ms smith said varsity volleyball won the occ congratulations to coach layman girls cross country won the occ i didn't even realize that boys cross country had the highest finish in almost 20 years and then the football team being at 9-0 there's a

113lot of positive going on and i don't know that that message is always heard and i certainly want to be one of the people shouting it also let me say the band is in competition on saturday so anyone who wants to go out and support the pride of big walnut feel free and then on a personal level in addition to the academic conversation of the district and the athletic conversation of the district i also want to share with the board that unfortunately my daughter was sent home from bowling green because she had been exposed to covet and actually came down with some symptoms but so i'm saying good news that's not the good news part of it is she's an early childhood education major um and while she was at home i had the opportunity

114to i don't know if you've heard you know tiger mom or whatever that is i had the opportunity to be tiger dad in those spaces because i could certainly eavesdrop on her classes which i took full advantage of let's be real and in the service of that one of her methods classes for early childhood education had the teacher teaching virtually because my daughter was at home the rest of the class was in person and they were synchronously watching a video the video was featured the inclusive preschool classroom here at big walnut it was surprising to jillian in the moment and you know she like kind of let out a little bit of a noise i don't say squeal or giggle or anything like that but she said dad come here so i was already listening

115but here i come um and i was totally fascinated that the that the class at big or at bowling green was watching a 34-minute video of our educators talking about how to teach preschool to in an inclusive environment so i want to be able to also express my appreciation to miss aaron irasovich and mrs sagan okay so i did totally murder that miss aaron erjavic and miss anna quartus um anna cordis i'll try it again later uh they were marvelous like i really enjoyed the 30 minute 34 minute class myself watching it uh jillian was getting all kinds of kind of zoom sauna phone hey isn't big walnut where you go and then after jillian kind of poking on my own on the professor's website because i wanted to see how do they curate this

116the professor at bowling green actually curated it from the early childhood technical assistance center which is dedicated to improving systems practices and outcomes so to all of not only those educators but the entire system that kind of put that together for our preschool students i just want to say my sincere congratulations and appreciation and um i know that it's not just those teachers right like the the video also had a parent component of it where the parents were talking about what their students were were doing and seeing in the value of that early childhood practice and had a component of of working with a pair of professionals i thought it was really really well done and i just really wanted to say thank you to all of them i did send them an email but

117wanted to also recognize that work here my final statement is a note of apology to you miss lee um at our at our business meeting last month there was a moment and again i'm going to come back to you mr crowd and say you know you've been calling for civility and and i have appreciated that and i don't feel like i lived up to my personal standard as you were this i'll just say disrespected from my uh point of view and i don't think it was fair and i am disappointed in myself that i didn't join our board president in silencing that as quickly as possible because that's not what we should be doing or how we should be operating as a board so thank you and please accept my public apology that's all i

118have mr president thank you know i'd like to say thank you to you for that um but i also um like to say my courage rises with every attempt to intimidate me and um i appreciate those who come before us and will speak civilly to us as a board and because i feel that all of us up here we are public servants we are not politicians and that's the way i've always looked at this position and i just hope that people will remember that as as they're dealing with us as as members of this board so but thank you mr fuji i don't have anything this evening other than to say good luck to all of our band members our athletic teams as they go into tournament competition and good luck to those seniors getting

119those college applications done because my house has been crazy thank you thank you so were you last last or i'm last last okay good deal i may i may test the fuji three-minute limit so again that's not a thing so let's not name it i've um i don't think it's an understatement to say that the last couple of months of service on this board have been the most disappointing moments of service in my life in this community and it's not because people have questioned things because questioning things fine i will tell you the first i you know my wife would be hard-pressed to believe this but i have made mistakes right and um i'm not necessarily uh perfect in anything that i've done or decisions i've made or votes that i've made so i don't

120mind being criticized related to any of that i guess the most disconcerting thing to me is just the the divide and slice that's coming through our community right now and it's coming from all directions and it's coming from whatever side of whatever you're on um and so as i've kind of listened and kind of thought through that and kind of looked at things one of the things that has kind of kind of been interesting for me specifically related to the critical race theory piece is that i hear people saying i want you to announce crt i want you to deny it's critical race theory i don't want my kids indoctrinated and then i hear another group of people saying hey i want to have open discussions and i want to be able to have open

121discussions about difficult situations but i also don't want to have my kids indoctrinated and so i guess in the spirit of all of that i did some thinking today and i would just say to my fellow board members i would be open to putting a ban of the incorporation into our curriculum any topic content anything designed to indoctrinate influence or adjust the values of any student in our district related to critical race theory but i would also want to include white supremacism white nationalism anti-semitism any other promotion of hate based on religion the democratic party the republican party the libertarian party the green party or any political party registered within the state of ohio i would like to make sure that we don't have anything that is indoctrinating our students in one other form rather

122to conservative ideology or liberal ideology i would also like to make sure that we're not indoctrinating according to any other recognized and identified political ideology of any kind i would also like to have the similar consideration for any group or theory promoting the notion that any person is less valuable of a person based on their skin color gender sexual preference or any other characteristic that is irrelevant to their status as a human being i would also like to be able to ban the influence of any discussion of religion that is not consistent with the bill of rights or the u.s constitution's article of the of the u.s constitution or article one of the ohio state constitution and i'd also like to within that too acknowledge that in all of those difficult situations that occur in

123all those difficult topics that in those particular situations those are all things that are woven into our fabric as a community as well as a society and i believe that our staff members and our administration have the training and the professionalism to incorporate those things in an age-appropriate manner at the right time and the right place to acknowledge that those things exist without influencing without providing any sort of insight to trying to direct direct or change the values of any individual person i also believe that our staff members and administration to date have done this heroically and without question until the last couple months so i'd also like to acknowledge their efforts to do that i know staff members individually i know staff members collectively that if we ask them to indoctrinate somebody would just

124as soon burn the school down than go and indoctrinate anyone so what i guess what i would say is with all of that and then the addition to that is that the reality of it is however you may feel about mental health services i would argue that most of us in our community could use them right now because we have lost our collective minds the way we're behaving related to this and so i am also in favor of allowing our district and our administration to continue to make good decisions and effective decisions based on their training to support the mental health of any student in this community that feels like that they have been marginalized or disrespected in one form or another based on any of those groups there and that for me personally is

125my personal statement on that and if community members feel like that that's something they could agree to or if you feel like you can't trust your school district to do that then i'll happily turn this into a motion and go ahead and try to put it up for a vote here this evening and i guess i'll leave it to my board member friends to comment on that and i'll hand this to you as i kind of wrote up some notes and some thoughts for myself on my feelings on the topic so i know it's kind of wordy in a fuji kind of way easy but um i feel free i like steve because he can he's got some self-deprecating side to him so i always appreciate that but you know as a community member i

126hear you i hear you folks that want to make sure that we're not indoctrinating we're not teaching specific theories or influencing values i'm right there with you but me personally if we're going to do it for one theory or one value then we should be doing it for all of them that's just my own personal perspective i leave the door open for comments and thoughts i have many and i have them based on the the the parents who came up here passionately again last week should have been it feels like last month last week on this topic and handled it supremely well in terms of sharing um her perspective and it you could tell that it impacted her right like to come and talk to the board and share this it was it was a

127thing and to know or to have heard back from our superintendent that hey so that was addressed and and i don't know if you all could hear it at the front because remember i had to unfortunately leave in during our morning session right prior to that but i could hear her in the back of the room i assume again i don't know the camera doesn't give it all say oh my gosh if i hadn't known that i wouldn't have wouldn't have you know spoken it was a it was a moment for her um so i remember thinking about how passionate that was and the fact that this this noise is maybe you're saying is impacting the individual narrative of individual parents in our community so i respect the idea of wanting to make sure that

128we don't indoctrinate it and do these things my wonder though and i'm going to say this partly facetiously but also partly from a real perspective you know there isn't somewhere in the curriculum where this is mentioned in in our big walnut curriculum i've done the audit of 2073 pages or something like that that every member of this community has access to through the website of all pages of our curriculum and this topic isn't mentioned there i mean the types of theories that are are the pythagorean theorem theories related to uh uh circles parallelograms and triangles uh the big bang theory uh creationism uh as theories nowhere in there is this a theory so your statement right now or what you are saying you might turn into a motion is based on the the conversation of

129indoctrinate indoctrination and what community members are saying to us on that topic is that accurate yeah i mean i guess my perspective is i've had eight years of kind of a front row seat for all this so when people tell me that these things are happening that they're going on or the school district is pushing this or they're trying to push that i don't believe any of that i don't see any evidence of that i haven't personally been engaged or involved in anything i see the same curriculum information that you do but for a segment of this community that's not enough and so if it takes sitting here and stating this declaratively that we impassionately and passionately and partially do not project values on anyone even though i know that's not what happens in this

130district or in the example that we saw in our last meeting if it does those people don't work here very quickly very long and we deal with it abruptly yeah and and so do i feel a need to do this not for me personally but if this is what some people need to feel like they have trust and faith in the school district i'll say these things all day long because i personally believe them i personally believe our school district operates in this fashion today and has ever since that i moved here 13 years ago but if it takes this to say it and declare it and vote on it to give people confidence i'm willing to do it but i'm but one of four tonight i think it's interesting that we even have to

131have this discussion for something that as you look down through this that these are oh i think as mr fuji stated this is already what we're doing here and um and i guess i feel like if there's individuals who don't believe that um they need to probably ask more questions rather than throwing accusations yeah sure be curious yeah that's right don't be judgmental be curious well yeah i mean and i say that i'm interested in making this emotion knowing full well that there are people out there that if we make a motion right go out and do everything to circumvent the rules that they want to do anyway right i mean there are people that do that and no matter what rule or law or policy that this district creates there are going to be

132people that try to circumvent there's going to be employees that try to do it there's going to be members of the community that try to do it that is a fact of life so again i i feel like this is somewhat redundant but i can also tell you that there's a lot of members of our community that don't feel that way and so if they don't and we need to say it then i'll put it up for a vote and we'll say it well i would have hoped that we would have had this discussion sometime in the last five or six months i can remember in a meeting that i said we needed to have a discussion on crt not that night but sometime in the future that was followed up the next week at

133the next meeting by a statement about crt that wasn't even on the agenda this list that you've got here is pretty good list except it's the whole library you're burning all the books in the library for a couple of examples that should be in this motion can you help me understand how it's burning the library i don't understand that comment well you've included the green party libertarian party republican party democratic party uh conservative ideology liberal ideology so i guess i would take you to the paragraph right after that list that says we acknowledge the discussion of these topics related to race religion politics gender and moral issues are woven into the fabric of our history and a community and therefore can be discussed in the context of our learning standards we're relevant to the standard

134at hand and age appropriate we acknowledge these issues can be discussed without the projection of endorsement in any way by our trained and professional staff members so in my opinion that means any book any topic anything related to these things are all fair game for discussion but having our district endorse or having a faculty member of any sort staff member etc endorse a particular view or whatnot i think is what we're all saying we don't want to have happen in our community oh okay i was reading it wrong no no i mean there's a lot there and that's but i i just was pointing that out that that was that's my thought because i don't you know what we can talk about critical race theory and say it doesn't belong here but guess what people

135are talking about it and our kids are facing it my son's seeing it at bluffton is in terms of topics and discussions in universities i'm sure it's happening at bowling green and all of our kids are leaving this community in one form or another and whether they hear the topic here or they hear it somewhere else those things are happening and so again as i said i am happy to declare my faith in our staff and administration that we're not choosing to divide and provide value-based education to change people's values i believe it's happened ever since i've been here and it's been that way but if this makes our community feel more comfortable i'm i'm willing to do it i would just love to put the discussion away that implies that our staff is incapable

136of professionally teaching our students about controversial topics without indoctrinate and doctrinating them i would like to put that concept to rest this community has had staff that have done that year after year well before i moved here and long after i move away from here they will be able to do that so again if it gives the community more confidence to state that from a board level i'm here all day to do that if that's what it takes you wanted to have a conversation about crt we we made a statement our superintendent made a statement related to that that obviously wasn't enough for our community as i started this whole thing off i talked about making mistakes right so should we have should i have thought of this entire list of things right off the

137bat to lay out here and have to spell all these things out quite honestly no because at that time as i feel today this does not happen in our district but i also realize that i may not be thinking the same way everyone else does and some people want to have some sort of record some sort of something that they can point to to feel like that there's a guarantee related to that so i'm throwing it out there and i'm willing to do it but if we're going to ban ideologies and we're going to be in the indoctrination of things i think we should make the list comprehensive well the comprehensive nature of the list and the again board member item of interest but i appreciate when i read this then the thought you put

138into it in terms of empowering the administration and the staff to continue to monitor manage so the opportunity for if somebody or something takes a left turn for that to be adjudicated dealt with in with again within the scope and structure of what we kind of do and authorize as is i i appreciate i i think is appropriate i i don't know what the response is minus emotion or anything like that i i certainly don't see something on here i i'm not going to use the setting things on fire kind of analogy but i certainly don't see anything on here that's like so inflammatory that couldn't be supported i just i just wonder if it's if this is to some degree the expectation to begin with then is providing that level of comfort the right

139rationale or is it continuing to operate under under the standards that we would expect ourselves to operate under and i don't know that up until about a month ago i would have answered b fair point fair point how i see this community reacting right now it may be answer a that's why i brought it up tonight and that's why i wanted to have the four of us have this conversation fair point i'd like to make a motion from the floor that we resolve to ban the incorporation into our curriculum of any topic or content designed to indoctrinate influence or adjust the values of any student in our district related to the following theories and ideology critical race theory white supremacism white nationalism or any derivative of such thinking as one race is superior over another

140anti-semitism and any other promotion of hate based on religion the democratic republican libertarian green party or any political party registered within the state of ohio conservative liberal ideology and any other recognized identified political ideology of any kind any group or theory promoting the notion that any one person is less valuable of a person based on their skin color gender sexual preference or any other characteristics irrelevant to the status as a human being any discussion of religion that is not consistent with the bill of rights in the u.s constitution or article one of the ohio state constitution organizations established that are effect actively seeking to reinforce or change people's perspective on moral issues within our country we acknowledge within this resolution that the discussion to some of these topics related to race religion politics gender and

141moral issues are woven into the fabric of our history as a community and a nation and therefore can be discussed in the context of our learning standards where relevant to the standard at hand and age appropriate we acknowledge that these issues can be discussed without the projection of endorsement in any way by our trained professional staff members we further authorize the administration and its staff members to support any member of our student community with the appropriate support as they deem necessary to help any students who may have been subject to hate in any form from one in one of these groups or some group similar whether or not the hate occurs within our district we acknowledge that its hate and its associated mental health challenges must be addressed to help all of our students reach

142their maximum potential we also authorize and empower our administration to continue to monitor and manage the performance of our dedicated teachers and staff with whom we've come to rely upon and appreciate as they professionally refrain from projecting their personal views into either their teachings or into the curriculum standards as set forth by this district in this state that's my motion i hear a second discussion i moved the table until the next evening meeting i see it as a worthy thing but it's needs to be either refined or read and understood in less than 15 minutes i think that's a fair request [Applause] i'm i'm happy to do that i guess just off the surface what are some things that are concerning about this too i just need time to go through it it's it looks

143very good brad i will admit and you surprise me it might help the situation that is current and i guess that's why i don't want to wait because i you know i'm gonna put the political hat on here for a second right and everybody's got their different teams and whatnot right and i know you well enough to know that you're not supporting some of the things that maybe you're suggested be supported out in public and i know you and others that are writing also are in that same boat but i guess i struggle with anything on here that any of us knowing you knowing you knowing the other candidates that i do that we would hesitate to want to say um wow that you know we wouldn't want to support these things and we wouldn't

144want to um wouldn't want to encourage them inside of our district and and formalize it if there's people that are concerned about it but so you're making people with concern yeah no doubt the rapidness of it is my concern okay there's motion to table is there a second [Music] so how would you want to proceed i guess i want to understand how would you how do you want to proceed with this then you mean if it's table yeah i just want a table to the next evening meeting and we can pull it off the table and vote on it then after we've had some time to review it to see what the impact is both directions it looks on the surface very good like i said i suppose so and now i look at you

145jeremy here we are again robert's rules of orders conversation to table emotion does require a second give me just a second i believe that is correct so before before the motion either lives or dies you can't have additional conversation or can you have additional conversation on the initial motion but it needs a second to vote correct okay so then the the the one piece of that that i can certainly also support that's not being mentioned right now is the absence of one-fifth of the board for that conversation so you know from that perspective giving giving that due time uh does i can certainly see that but i'm needing to see first of all does the motion the table require a second it does you know what if you're uncomfortable with it i will i'll second

146the motion i just i just want to review it no no that's what i'm saying okay but what i'm saying uncomfortable just uncomfortable voting tonight just to clarify so i'll second the motion to table thank you then we'd have to call the vote jeremy when you're ready and the vote is to take two tables two tables correct got it to table this item until you're saying the next next meeting can we even talk about it in the morning well we can talk about it but yeah i was in the morning meeting not tomorrow morning no it has to be in the morning meeting because it's the next if it's table it has to be broken correct all right fair enough and maybe you can refine the wording and i'm up for input too like i

147started this off i'm not perfect so and and the refinement of input is really around uh an additional emotion that would need to be able to amend to to amend once it comes off the table you would need to make a motion to amend the current resolution or the current if there are changes correct so jeremy i think there's a vote on the table for uh yes that is correct i have a first from mr crowl and a second from mr schneider and uh mr crowl yes mr schneider yes mr fuji yes mrs lee yes miss smith yes so not only do i think i blew away the three minutes but i think i totally smoked your time steve so i appreciate that let's not keep track of that don't go ahead you asked to

148be last you have the table yeah and uh i might start by saying i apologize for any bad words that are going to come out and miss smith you could leave if you want since you're the only underage person in here i feel what you're talking about as far as the civility i've mentioned it at a couple of meetings the end result is that after the vote for the masks somebody in the public decided to send me what is i'm very uncomfortable talking about it but i got this in my mail at home and it's a bod which means it's a box of dicks and i'm sure none of my supporters sent it to me probably not probably a good guess the animosity the rank and just it needs fixed it's not i've said this

149before this is not the community i grew up in and i don't think it's the majority of the community either i think it's a few people [Music] and it's unfortunate there was a second part of this discussion that i'll have with you personally over uh i swear i didn't send it i swear i didn't send it i couldn't hear you i said i swear it's got your name on it i'm saying oh this doesn't but the other topic does so i won't i won't go into that all i'll say is you can support whoever you want to support but the vindictiveness the lies the misinformation is ridiculous period and as greg gutfield says and i think it's a small minority but that small minority apparently as somebody has pointed out keyboard warriors have some impact

150here and it's unfortunate i got called a marxist by one in an email today so certainly confer with that and i think we're all getting them and that's to brad's point the temperature needs to be reduced i'm sure it'll be reduced after the second man but we keep saying that we thought we thought covid for three weeks and then wait till the summer and then get through the school two weeks yeah and then and now it's wait till the other will be beyond the curve so mr crowley i should not be interrupting your no go ahead but but i also agree with you and would say to that end if that's happening to us it's happening at a fraction of the level that it's happening to our administrators on our staff like the amount of

151again the name calling and i didn't even know this story of being called a marxist so i in terms of the civility and the turning down of the heat we kind of are elected to to get some of that the administrators are not the teachers are not the students or not right and i can tell you that i i was raised there used to be a saying when i was young i don't know if you all ever heard it okay sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me the words that are coming out those go in and those go out that's a momentary thing but to invade my castle by sending me that i'll just say it here now whoever sent it if you want to come and man up

152face to face come on that's the most cowardly thing i've ever had done to me and the most vulgar for a job that everybody here would agree doesn't pay that well okay that's what i've bloviated enough well i as i mentioned i've i've noticed that and i am i'm sorry that that it got to that level for you as it has been for the marxists communist requests or comments and things of that nature as i said you know there's a group of our community that has temporarily lost its minds and yeah earlier when you said i'm right there with you earlier when you said that it it sunk in yeah so all right which is probably do you want to take a quick recess or i'll be right back okay all right so that's probably

153a good segue into public participation there you go so this is a meeting of the board of education in public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business and is not considered a public community meeting it's time for the public participation during the meeting as indicated in the agenda please reference the criteria for public participation which he attached to the agenda and just to refresh if you're if you're new with us and first time it's three minutes any of you that's watched at home knows that i don't cut you off at three minutes i look for you to try to find a natural ending point but i resp ask you respect as close to that three minutes the possible and then jeremy how many do we have requests and how requests we have tonight

154i'm just going to say you might not want to be prepared to extend the time period okay good enough so we are at 18. okay so the other piece too is part of our policy is public comments are normally limited to 30 minutes we've had extended that pretty much every time that's required and i wouldn't anticipate that changing tonight but jeremy will have to tell us around 30 minutes procedurally so we can do that in fact i would i would maybe mention i don't know if this is completely within policy could you possibly even make the motion now just so we can keep going or if you would like we can wait until the 30 minutes and just i'd make the motion that we extend and incorporate the 18 requests that you have should we

155wait until mrs lee gets back let's just recover have her come back and say yes or no and see what she said take a guess what she's voting on right i've forgotten she walked out i did too so otherwise i wouldn't have made that motion so or or maybe we just i saw mr fuji maybe mentioning through a head nod that we should maybe just get started and then we can we can do that as part of the all right or we can sing why don't you go to the first one and then when she gets back and sits down we can just revisit that and knock it out really quick all right uh so first speaker is jennifer nisit meadowchase drive and talking about appreciation for big walnut before you go jennifer just quick

156reminder i'll give you about a wave of 30 seconds and then the waves get bigger at three minutes and beyond i'm sorry can we wait for leona to come back in um i suppose yeah i don't would you want me to can we go next online all right next is okay let's just take four minute reset five minutes i need to stretch my legs all right sounds good we'll take a five minute recess come back 8 46 and we'll pick up with public participation thank you all right we're going to get back together now here my gosh i said 846 and it's actually 8 46 so wow um jennifer before you get going i was just catching up leanna but um let me go ahead and kind of restate the motion to extend public participation

157for the 18 requests that are in place and see if there's a second second doug second and then jeremy if we can vote on that when you have a second okay mr schneider yes mr crowl yes mr fuji no mrs lee yes all right jennifer you're on we tried to give you that whole vamp time and everything and i appreciate that but um if you've only watched the public participation sections of these meetings you might wonder why we aren't all homeschooling i have a few examples of the good stuff happening in our in the walls of our schools a student at bbe was reminded that her words have power use your words your words can be your superpower a sadder student who met a behavior goal was cheered on by a classmate saying good job

158i'm so proud of you the student loved the recognition and the teacher loved the kindness that was being shown a group of bwi students are organizing a school-wide quiz bowl and change war to provide a pizza party prize and a donation to a charity teachers and principals are cheering them on as they problem solve how to make this happen a high school aide has noticed much more inclusion this year at the as lunch at the lunch tables as typical peers are joining and chatting with students with needs another student saw a spider in the garage and immediately asked dad to send a picture of that spider to her teacher dad did teacher's night was made these connections are lasting long after the day ends our curriculum directors are in the schools where they were principals

159last year handing out hugs to their kids sports teams are cheering on their teammates getting better thanks to one another and their coaches the high school girls cross country volleyball and tennis teams won the occ titles our football team is looking to lock up a perfect regular season record tomorrow there's so much good happening it's been a tough year and a half for everybody these little moments are shaping our kids it's been a tough year tough year and a half for you guys as well mrs hamburg thank you for leading this district as an administrator a former principal a teacher a tax paying resident and a mother with children attending school here looking at problems and decisions through each of these lenses makes you a better superintendent thank you for making yourself available and answering

160emails long past quitting time knowing your next day will be just as full mr fuji thank you for your clarifying questions as a former principal you have a unique perspective on this board you've seen how decisions in this room impact the days of our kids and our teachers mrs lee thank you for never relenting in your goal to serve every child and make sure we meet the most basic needs so education can begin you've been serving our families and schools in this way long before you remember on this board mr schneider thank you for managing the board's message and meetings your efforts to see every side understand the process and convey a clear and concise man message to the community are to be applauded mr crowl thank you for continuing to have detail all the

161details of the schools the building of the school be something that's important to you it's a huge project just many moving pieces we're all excited to see it happen savannah i think you're everybody's favorite mr buskirk while you may be required by law to complete have complete and open financial reports you are not required to spend hours afterwards work answering questions about the reports and explaining explaining confusing finance details sometimes more than once to the same person millage still don't get it but you do it and always with a smile and eagerness to help people understand just need to wrap up here i know this is it how lucky are we to be raising children in an amazing district filled with caring wonderful people i'm grateful my children their classmates and their friends are being

162educated somewhere that from the top down is looking to inspire and guide each child and prepare them for the whatever path they choose for their life so thank you to everybody thank you [Applause] next is jamie osbourne 3181 miller paul road and talking about masks and crt first i want to say that i feel like what we have presented here has not been taken in consideration that anything that we say is not your mind's already made up before it's even presented i think that we are here so that we can inform parents that are here and the ones that are streaming we are doing it to educate them so that maybe they will join us take a stance and say enough is enough when you say masks are for the safety and health of our

163children that is not true it's all about appeasing the small majority of the people who seem to make the largest think about things i guarantee if you took a vote and asked how many parents really want their children in mask the majority would not those kids aren't wearing the mask properly so what good is it to wear them in the first place you are so concerned with mental health but when we mask them that is part of the problem and we have not taken that into consideration again it's about numbers you guys are hypocrites when you say you want masks but then you are all out in public large crowds without masks so that you could be the ones that are spreading it and giving it to the kids because you are not taking the

164proper precautions that you want everyone else to take so it could be spreading and not keeping the kids safe and healthy parents that send their children without masks know the risks they are taking by sending them to school without a mask and that is on them also i wanted to comment about last week's meeting i really think it was there were a lot of backhanded comments being made that were inappropriate we all see what is being said on social media the lies being spread the hate being spewed so we all need to take a look in the mirror and ask ourselves how are we contributing to this hate and lions being spread we need to stop it but we also need to not be naive to say that the ideology of ctr dei whatever you

165want to call it isn't on our school boards as brad has said before on facebook we are wrong i have heard it with many stories of parents telling their kids experiences in school no one has ever said that crt is directly being taught in our schools but the teachers are inside their feelings and opinions to these children last no one has said mental health is not important it is very important but not all the kids need to be exposed to what is coming with this mental health that is being taught we need to identify the ones that need it and work with them we don't need all this sel nonsense that is being put into our kids kids don't need to be constantly asked about questions about field scenarios or on the surveys which we

166conveniently told parents on friday when half of the schools already had that that panorama survey instead of letting us know ahead of time so we need to get a backbone and stand up for these kids in their education back to teachers kids the kids need boundaries and discipline not the ones creating the boundaries you are letting the kids and the parents create the narrative here when it should be the teachers they need to get the control back the kids need to have consequences for the behavior not a slap on the wrist that doesn't that does nothing teachers shouldn't be afraid of losing their jobs if they say something that is deemed wrong by a certain group teachers should have the support of the administrators and the school board members not feel like they have to

167walk on eggshells around these kids and parents when did the rules change when i was in school i respected the teachers and fear them at the same time i didn't want to get spanked or detention now kids can get away with whatever get back to the basics and teach these kids what they need to learn and that doesn't include feelings and opinions we want progress only fits for the bed of our kids not when it can harm our children stop creating hate and divide and said teach unity just need you to wrap up now okay that's okay no worries thank you that's okay i thought you were in the neighborhood i just was trying like to wait for a breath there so sorry i didn't mean to cut you off next is annette mcmurray 3690

168worthington road regarding masks so god moved me before i got up here today um i wanted to to talk a little bit about mask recently we've learned that mount vernon where my husband teaches has gone mask optional they also have a modified quarantine buckeye valley mask optional they are doing the essential student quarantine guidelines again mask optional northridge mask optional centerberg mask optional modified quarantine highland school mask optional stop masking our babies i sat here and watched that wonderful video about gre trust me i know that the services that are offered in our schools and programs like this taking place there at gre are important both my son and daughter have benefited from them but what i saw in that video made me sad what i see every morning when i put my daughter on

169the bus makes me sad why are we masking our babies so we got lucky i did get a medical waiver and i have a religious waiver for my daughter so she does not have to wear a mask because wearing a mask would have made it difficult for her to learn making wearing wearing masks for many of our children makes it difficult to learn we had 29 people show up to the pandemic for our pandemic meeting unfortunately i could not make it it was my son's last seventh grade football game we won i'm happy that i got to attend it and participate in that but something that a small group of us have been working on is an anti-mathematician for big one at schools 151 parents grandparents and other community members have signed that anti-mass petition

170i have those signatures here that i'd like to present with you guys with um we kindly and strongly request that big walnut school district adopt an optional mass policy for the 21 22 school year and immediately resend the case school mass requirement our schools must look to science facts reasons and data and managing our children's educational experience rather than the irrational mentality pushing towards zero risk in our communities we see this happening in other school districts right around the corner from us forcing children to wear masks all day has proven harmful to their physical and mental health as well as their development there is no proof that wearing masks is effective in preventing virus transmission but what it has done is is really dehumanize our children it has impacted their emotional and developmental growth we

171harp and harp and harp on mental health here but we're masking our babies please stop thank you thank you [Applause] next is tori blazer 7822 meadowchase on kids inspiring kindness well i actually just wanted to come up and maybe spread a little sunshine but we're actually getting ready to start our third year of kids inspiring kindness campaign at big walnut elementary so for those of you that may not have kids at bwe or haven't heard of this program we raises money through donations and t-shirt sales that go into a grant fund where classrooms can apply for money to complete or to perform acts of kindness in and around our community tomorrow we're actually going to be revealing this year's winning design for the shirts that the kids voted on and then we'll be taking orders

172in the community so i expect to see lots of shirts around but over the last two years we've been able to complete 13 projects including six last year even though everything looked different and the world was kind of crazy we were still able to do six different projects which included giving back to life care alliance my very own blanket being at walnut trail and bountiful backpacks just to name a few last year was the first year that we did a school-wide project for valentine's day where every single student at be we participated in preparing sensory boxes for the residents at the heinzerlin community and we were actually we came to the board last year to talk a little bit about that so it was really cool to see the whole staff and students come together

173and and the residents were just so grateful at that community so we already have several ideas and projects this year that are in the works and i feel like that just reinforces that kindness is definitely not cancelled at bwe or within our community so in closing i just want to say how thankful i am and proud i am to be a part of a district that recognizes the importance of promoting this in our kids annie clark and andrea cavallaros have been such a great champions of this initiative since we rolled it out and they continue along with the staff at bewe to be so supportive and i'm just really thankful to them and all the staff there in our community for everything they do for the kids [Applause] next is justin leach lane road and

174regarding masks good evening everybody um just going to read my something here to get to you guys at the very end with some more references and stuff like that um i am serving you this notice as a parent on behalf of my spouse myself and many other concerned parents and citizens within the big walnut local school district my findings raised significance concerns both medically and legally the current mass policy in place masks are medical devices covered by the health and safety code of the united states and combination of masks upon a person along with contact tracing health screens constitute medical experiments that require informed consent under the law further masks are ineffective for the purpose claimed by the mandate potentially harmful and only authorized by for use by the u.s food and drug administration for

175emergency use authorization or eua promoting use of a non-fda approved emergency youth authorization mask are unwarranted and illegal devices under such under emergency use authorization requires wares to be informed informed and the option through a fuse wearing of such a device under uh 21 us code section 360 triple b the reference is in here it goes on and on um furthermore misrepresenting the use of a mask as being intended for antimicrobial or antiviral protection and or misrepresenting masks for use as an infectious infection present prevention or reduction is a deceptive practice under a federal trade commission it is clear there is no waiver of liability under deceptive practices even under a state of emergency as such forcing a child to wear masks similarly forced in any other non-fda approved medical product without the child's or

176the child's parents consent is illegal and immoral this letter which um i'll ask to come up here and present it to you serves as an official notice to cease and desist the illegal mass decision by the big walnut local school district board of education as parents and advocates there's a lot of us right now we will not fail to take the maximum actionable permissible under law against you your organization and other individuals within the big walnut local school district personally accordingly i urge you to comply with federal and state law and advise children they have a right to refuse to wear a mask as a measure to prevent or reduce infection from covet 19. any other course of action is contrary to law please confirm no further pressure will be exerted on any student of

177the big walnut local school district to follow this illegal mass mandate and that they will not face any retaliatory disciplinary action also attached you will find a because one of the things as the coveted vaccination has to be available five and up there's a notice of liability on here too so may i please approach and give this guys to you sure okay um yeah i can next is mindy panky sage creek and pandemic response committee good evening um first i want to say what mrs hamburg has set up for our district for the pandemic response committee is a great idea there were quite a few important decisions to be made over the past year and a half and i appreciate the option to be included member of the community and helping making these hard decisions

178currently the prc i'm going to call it is it includes parents teachers and staff various health professionals two board members and i'm concerned because the prc does not adequately reflect our community for the upcoming decision that you're going to make for the masks being removed or not being removed during the meeting the first question asked was i believe the board should can one continue to mask students in grades k through 6 or eliminate the mask mandate for grades k through 6. the little sliver of red that's me so based on that first question the tone was set for the rest of the discussion which was that we don't want to eliminate the mask mandate now so let's discuss how we should if we were to ask all parents whether or not we should continue or

179discontinue a mass mandate for grades k-6 the results would not be 96 and 4 respectively that's asking all parents of the community further how can you have a good thorough discussion about mass mandates when you're asked not to get into the details of whether or not masks work or the health and learning risks that that are limiting sorry so basically you're being limited to a discussion of vaccine affiliate and quarantine procedure changes because i feel that the committee didn't fairly represent the community i would like to ask the board to immediately remove the mask mandate and let the parents decide whether or not their child should wear a mask and i am the binder girl i wanted to make a comment or two about what was said earlier first of all shirley did ask me

180what was in my binder and what i wanted to add to the to the meeting i did respond and i started to get into a discussion about bacteria and viral load going back into the lungs and so we started to have this discussion and the er doctor kind of started to debunked me a little bit and then we ran out of time so i didn't really get a chance to finish that conversation when the gentleman earlier said i kind of shrugged i did and that was because after the third question was asked as far as should we eliminate masks when the vaccine is available i did shrug and i'm like i want the masks removed now i don't want any of these other stipulations so yes i did say you know what's the point so

181i just wanted to add that thank you thank you [Applause] is greg armstrong 14913 east state route 37 on panorama and s-e-l hi uh recently we've learned that the ceo of panorama is the son-in-law of the attorney general merrick garland the same attorney general that instructed the department of justice and the fbi to investigate unapologetic appearance like myself as a domestic terrorist at the behest of the national school board association does this sound like a conflict of interest to you it certainly does to me you claim that data from the panorama survey is anonymous but yet names are collected and it will be and it may well be anonymous to the school district but is it anonymous to panorama you've given them access to student names ids grade levels etc what do they do with

182this data what safeguards are in place to ensure this company is not collecting survey data to be sold or used to digitally target or socially engineer our children a quick google search makes it clear that panorama education is yet another avenue to inject social emotional or sel into our schools seo proponents call for focusing less on academics and knowledge and more on mindsets and behaviors it is obvious this board agrees based on a recent quote in the eagle examiner which paraphrased states that as long as kids can google they don't need to learn just facts on the contrary that is exactly what we expect when we send our kids to school that they learn facts while every parent wants their children to be responsible empathetic and emotionally mature most of us would agree that teaching

183this is not the job of the public school district your job is to teach academics math reading history science parents are the primary moral educators of their kids these are values that we teach at home and through our faith it is especially concerning that sel and panorama violate our children's privacy seemingly without our consent to fulfill its objectives to mold our kids into the types of human beings that you want to see that is our job as parents it is my duty as a parent to make sure my child has a solid moral compass it's my duty and right to protect my children from being manipulated or exploited i always assumed that the school had the same goal prove me right and do not allow panorama and social emotional learning to corrupt the minds of

184our kids [Applause] [Music] [Applause] next is jen bauer 4403 wilson road on community mental health i'm here just to spread some sunshine to there's so many hot topics in society and um a lot of times it's easy to get thrown in and caught up in all the negativity and as a teacher myself my it's my 25th year as an english high school english teacher i kind of have a unique perspective because i'm in a building every single day and i see what kids go through and so i can see things from a teacher's standpoint but i also have two kids in this district fifth grade and seventh grade so i can see it from a parent's viewpoint as well and i am proud to be in this school district so i'd first like to comment

185on a couple of things i think big walnut does really well the first is technology our society is moving toward if it's not kind of already there a society that's completely dependent on technology and i find the efforts not only to provide our students with technology but to instruct them on its many valuable uses is going to help our students and my kids specifically as they prepare to enter whatever they choose to do after high school my fifth grader came home the other day all excited about a video program that one of his teachers used to make a video and present to the class and came home so excited and my kids are not academically excited they're more into the sports thing but um it was really cool to see him come home and ask

186me if we can buy that program so that he can use it at home and do the things that mr stone did at the intermediate school with it that's encouraging technology needs to continue to be a part of our school district another aspect of big walnut schools that never ceases to amaze me is the connected feeling that i feel like this town has we only moved here seven years ago but my husband silas and i both grew up in really small towns and although this town is growing rapidly i still feel like it has that connected feeling there's nothing like being uptown and having the buses after a football game go around and beep the horn around the square like that makes me proud makes me proud to go to football games where all the

187community members come you know you can see everyone there it's almost like the town shuts down for friday night football or friday night sports activities that's community and the the more we kind of get caught up in all of this negativity i feel like we're going to lose that and we've already started to lose that and we we have to get our minds back on what we want this community to be one more thing is the mental health piece i feel it has to be an important role and if you're in the schools every day you will see the need especially at the high school which was what i'm familiar with you will see the need for mental health services personally my kids have never had to use them but there are so many kids

188that depend on them and families that depend on them and the services are making a difference even saving lives um finally i can't get up here and not go a little bit about sports because that's what my family does so my boys love sports um jackson my oldest son just completed football season and i want to commend the coaches at big walnut and i think this happens in most of the sports programs as can be seen through the winning records it's not just the teaching about the fundamentals of the sport or putting the game plan together for the game day it's about all of the values that are taught and that those coaches work with those boys my i know eccleburger really coached a lot of the values so i am appreciative for the respect

189and the responsibility that he is trying to instill in these boys to help them to develop into wonderful young men so when people ask me where i live and where my kids go to school i'm proud to say we're big walnut eagles next is eric coe 14742 fancher road regarding quarantine crt and family good evening my name is eric and i have five children who will go through this district i'm here on behalf of my children last year many in this community applauded the board when you worked with parents allowing them to choose in-person or virtual education we were proud of you and thanks to mr crowl this board with the exception of mrs lee voted to have in-person graduation you started this year allowing the parents to decide if their children were masked you

190were working with the parents and we were proud of big one up as a side note i was down at my parents who live on the west virginia border and actually saw on the news big walnut is starting the year without mask and i was proud of you guys then you decided somewhere along the way that you knew what was best for our children mr schneider and mr fuji even acknowledge that you didn't like masks you were concerned about attendance numbers and so you voted in favor of masks it's the unlawful quarantine policy that's the problem and that's causing you to have to make these decisions this quarantine policy is in violation of senate bill 22 and house bill 244 which went into effect on october 13th even the updated policy which went into effect

191this week is in violation by creating four classes of students vast unvaxed masked and unmasked this policy discriminates against students based on personal health choices sincerely held religious beliefs and by age for students under 12. secondly it has been repeatedly said by mrs hamburg and certain members of the board with mr schneider accusing certain parents of creating division on facebook that crt is not being taught in big wanna we heard it again tonight it's true that the crt brigade isn't showing up in each classroom saying hi kids today we're going to learn about critical race theory however we continue to have examples where the tenets of crt are showing up we have powerpoint slides we have crt promoters being sent out on schoology and now we have the latest panorama surveys even today this day

192our u.s house of representatives questioned the attorney general who for some reason is now concerned about school board meetings on the conflict of interest with his son-in-law's company panorama as it turns out panorama is a direct facilitator of crt and even has a program for schools to gather information on their social justice score and the demands of the cultural marxist and crt as a side note i wasn't the one who called angie that but i did email you guys today this same panorama survey was given to our students this week with several questions seeding racial division and i can only conclude that either you are unprepared to deal with the current issues or you are not being forthcoming with facts the facts are that the foundations of crt are being built in our school as

193we speak and we continue to see pieces of it happening over and over again even if the finished product isn't completed now i was the one who emailed you and asked you to ban crt today i think what happened here was a little bit of grandstanding and i think what happened here was going a little bit far but i would like to see you guys vote on it lastly to the parents of this district we also bear responsibility this board has overstepped their bounds they've offered a solution that we didn't ask for for problems that we don't have but it's not the school's job to raise our children and many are asking for that yes the examples given our sowing seeds of division are our community but they are here because of a general breakdown

194in the family unit in this country we want these children to be emotionally healthy and keep the schools in their lane we must invest in our families if a family unit is restored in this community with active and engaged fathers and mothers the majority of these problems will disappear we can go back to teaching reading writing math and history we need to get off facebook we need to turn off the game when you get off the golf course stop for the day at work and spend some time with our kids coming up on four now thank you [Applause] next is kendra borer of 15067 woodtown road on curriculum hi my name is kendra bohr i graduated from big walnut in 1982. my family's been in this community for more years than i can even count

195i have worked through the ohio department of job and family services for over 23 years in the foster care and children's services division i am also an educational surrogate for big walnut school district for foster children with educational needs i am a mother of eight children six of which i adopted from foster care let me tell you about a little girl who was physically and sexually abused repeatedly for the first three years of her life by her biological family and then she entered foster care this little girl suffered from alopecia because she was pulling her own hair out bedwetting self-stimulating defecating smearing night terrors extreme fear of darkness and thunderstorms not to mention her lack of cognitive understanding of life and relationships because of this abuse she suffered this little girl went through secular and

196christian counseling for years time patience love nurturing anything and everything her new family could do to make her feel safe and learn that she had gone through was not normal it took 13 years it took a pandemic it took staying home with her new family for a year and a half 24 hours a day seven days a week for the night terrors the fear of the dark the fear of the thunderstorms to finally go away and for her to finally feel safe this was the last of her abuse induced ailments then back to in school learning she went where the curriculum from sentaro was a comprehensive sexuality program is being used don't tell me it's not because the kids brought the book the pamphlets home this was brought to my attention five years ago at

197a big wanted elementary school having surveys administered through panorama and google without giving the parents sufficient opportunity to opt out and then all of a sudden the night terrors the fear of the dark and the fear of the thunderstorms are back as far as these programs and curriculums go parents do get emails or packets sent home with their kids telling them that in the future this is what's going to happen at school unfortunately the email comes all too late because your child has already read the packet been a part of the surveys or is in the class why is everybody in such a big hurry to push our kids into this because of all of this the setbacks happen the parents are left picking up the pieces of somebody else's agenda again my point is

198it's in our schools our schools are inundated with racial social and sexual agendas that should be left to the families to address if and when and how they choose there is a class in the middle school called advisory on mondays the teachers instruct character strong with which addresses racial and sexual topics whether they admit it or not i was in these classes i've researched it i was curious i did my due diligence the high school has wellness class instead of health where they address the same type of topics once again i did my due diligence i've checked it out these are just two examples there are several other classes where subtle introductions are made it is not the school's place to teach our children about what our beliefs should be that is for each individual

199family to decide and teach whether the school agrees with those beliefs or not i know some of these programs huh just letting you know here in three minutes if you could just kind of wrap up okay initiated to stop bullying so children could feel safer at school this has not happened all it's done is redirected the bulletin to somebody else whether you're masked or not vast or not it's statistically big one at a highly rated school i understand this but in what areas i have a lot of problems with the fact that in elementary school teachers were giving children online you could wrap up please we're coming close to four now i'm just trying to give you a chance to finish but i was going to if you'd stop talking i had one more sentence

200elementary school gave resources to elementary children for pornography and s m material five years ago at sauders elementary i stopped it that's all i have to say [Applause] uh next is carol sherkey of 1045 fox creek road and uh a thank you to city north church as part of that i yeah i went to come here to give some public recognition and i realized i kind of left somebody out i took over as concession stand manager for that's why you smelled hot dogs over here doesn't ever go away and i also bring tidings that the girls won their sectional final tonight that's where we were so they're moving on but as i took over this role um i was not exactly told what this role was but i felt like um diana horsley did not

201get any public recognition for the years of service i believe some somewhere in the 20ish numbers of service and covid and everything that happened uh put an end to concession stands for a short period of time and she gracefully retired but i do want to recognize her for all of her years of service to the school but in the past four years since 2018 city north church has come and volunteered and staffed the friday night football games if anyone has ever had to work a concession stand on a friday night it's not for the faint of heart but they do it out of service to the community and to come in and let the parents sit and watch the games and they were recognized at the football game friday night publicly by brian shelton but

202only those who were at the football game heard that recognition and so i wanted to come here to recognize them as well and thank them very much for their service and their outreach thank you very much thank you next is jessica santorelli of 7621 presidium loop regarding masks and crt good evening so what i was going to say has i mean you know obviously there's a lot this is the the hot topic buttons here on all the social media platforms everywhere so the main thing i just want to kind of highlight with the mask again is so there was three things when the pandemic response team got together three criteria as far as making a change one of them being that the quarantine restrictions change so it changed on 1018 which buckeye valley quickly fell

203into place so i'm asking for that motion to also be here as it is around all other school districts predominantly around us as well mass shouldn't matter at this point if the quarantine guidelines are changed parents should have a choice on what is best for their family for their mental health regarding the mask for anxiety levels if we're so worried about the mental health they'll let the parents choose what is right for their children especially since the quarantine has changed now doesn't matter if my child is not wearing a mask they can go to school if they're under quarantine with a mask without showing symptoms and that is what we may choose to do or we may not that is our choice in regards to the pandemic response group as well so 29 in a

204group making a decision for our community there's roughly thirty nine hundred students so times that by a couple parents i think and the families are roughly eight thousand in this community and you have 29 people making a decision on a mask it doesn't really add up to me as far as common sense getting your community involved and making a pretty big decision some people may take it lightly but it is a big decision to a lot of us parents and also the far part as far as masking you know making the comment about doctors showing up and wearing their mask so we should follow suit there's many doctors that are on the opposite side of that and i think there's doctors that also know what's right and wrong as well so we can't just go

205off of what two doctors might show up in a mask and have an opinion there's many doctors and nurses as far as you know the skewed numbers with the hospitals being overwhelmed maybe it's not the virus maybe it's because staff are having to walk out because they have to choose between getting vaccinated in their job so the hospitals are reducing beds to accommodate for the less amount of staff that's showing up to work so there's a lot of different details there that need to be considered when we're talking about that um the last point i want to stand and just kind of voice a couple things you know a lot of things with the crt the ideologies you know great motion brad i think you know maybe there's some good intent there i don't know

206with all the details on it um so i think the main thing with that is just the fact that we cannot be naive that it is woven in to our kids day-to-day life it is out there it exists and let's look at one of the most recent things that i have two high schoolers brought to my attention was a stronger enough card that was literally enveloped and specifically handed to certain students walking down the hallway by teachers this is not an after school program this is not a support group that's happening outside of school hours this is happening coming up for their eagle time or advisory time in school and if anybody wants to see a copy of that card it specifically is pointing out all the different races if you're feeling like you're indigenous

207or ethnic i've got you a minute at 15 over now so if you could please write so if that isn't a great example of where crt is it was handed out to your children in high school if that fits the criteria okay i got you 90 seconds over now could you please wrap up i'm home i'm wrapping up with this final thought well i've asked you twice now and you said you were so are you really wrapping up or do i need to call somebody else she came in she's like well gosh mom they might as well print out pride stickers and hand it to everyone that they think is gay jeremy would you please call the next person the next person is beth stanley marcy luke and wanting to share about her experience in

208the community hi i want to apologize for the lack of eye contact i'm nervous and i'm going to read from what i prepared as i said my name's beth my husband joel and i recently moved to galena with our three daughters we've been making a point to attend these school board meetings since we've been in the district and i was hoping to share a bit from my heart about our experience in this community first though i want to acknowledge everyone who can hear me speaking right now whether or not you're in this room if you're streaming from home or if you're watching the recording later i want to appreciate you for taking time out of your busy schedules to take a vested interest in what's happening in our schools whether you have kids grandkids neighbors

209or friends in our schools it says a lot that you're here and it's a good thing we're sadly in a place of deep division as a nation so it doesn't come as a surprise that we see the divide in states cities schools churches and even families we have differing concerns and perspectives and might address whatever issue is at hand with a different approach but the one thing that we should all notice is that we're here and it's because we care i can absolutely understand and appreciate the angst over the growth in the area what we know becomes familiar and comfortable so when change occurs it can be challenging to adjust to those that grew up here and have been here for some time i assure you that a place that has been good does not

210need to become bad with growth but rather great that will happen with open minds and hearts as new people are welcomed and we all take the time to truly get to know one another as we work toward positive outcomes and truly live as a community if i may i just wanted to share a couple quick examples of how i've seen this in action in the short time that we lived here and this might lower the temperature a little bit you mentioned earlier i had the great pleasure of joining many other local families to help organize a coordinated effort to thank and appreciate our transportation staff our nurses and our central office staff there was an overwhelmingly positive response from so many that immediately recognized the hard work being put in by way more than i

211could ever be named across this district it was a joy to see love and action through tangible gifts of thanks and i hope that we can continue these types of efforts the neat thing about this example especially is that while appreciation for others is certainly already happening in all of the schools this was an effort accomplished by families made up of all of our schools coming together the other example i'd like to share is that we recently held a buddy walk at our home for those not familiar the buddy walk is an annual event that celebrates the down syndrome community and raises funds for the local down syndrome association we invited neighbors and friends to join us and we were overcome with gratitude by the turnout um even the big one at varsity cheerleaders came

212which you can imagine was a huge hit especially for my three young daughters to cheer and show support during our special event it was truly heartwarming the buddy walk is about celebrating diversity promoting inclusion and raising awareness and our family feels so fortunate to be in a place now where we get to do these very things in such a beautiful display of love and friendship i am still brought to tears by looking at our team photo from this year and mr cooper has graciously offered i gave him the pictures he's going to forward them to you all i'm so grateful that we have gotten the chance to meet and the people that we have and i'm excited about our blossoming friendships i'm sure we'll continue to make more connections during our time here and i

213look forward to getting to know more of you i truly truly believe it takes a village to raise our kids and i'm glad that i have all of you to be a part of my kids village i hope that you'll accept us to be a part of your village and we really are stronger together [Applause] next is nicole walker 6023 red bank and indicates multiple topics hi i do wish that we could have a whole meeting of sunshine and rainbows but unfortunately we do have to talk about some hard things um i do appreciate you being here and i appreciate the committee that was put together for our kids but i will say that 29 people just do not represent this community um there are 980 kids in the high school alone so i would

214like to say i have not even seen i've got an opportunity to be on a committee like that i would like to see a committee with many many more parents from each school not just you know one specific area let's see i have a few points i'd like to speak to as if we're not all really tired of beating that dead horse i feel especially compelled to speak today after the cdc announced that they are recommending that all kids 5 to 11 be vaccinated and that those kids remain masked i would like to know how long we're planning to treat our children as sick until proven healthy norovirus and rhinovirus are spreading like wildfire through our school right now kids are throwing up in the classrooms so i'm just wondering if the masks are working

215for covid why aren't they working for those viruses so just a couple weeks ago two of you and i won't name any names came into the school walked around the entire school mask free but as you left it was pick up time and you knew you'd be seen in the parking lot so you put your mask on to walk out of the building and i was just wondering what message you thought that that was sending i just um didn't appreciate hearing that so um let's see here i'm gonna try not to have you coming off brad our school you've got about 90 seconds you're doing fine our school is not even allowed to hold donuts with dad outside and i know this may sound like first world problems to a lot of you but this

216is to our kids this is their childhood this is it this is the only one that they've got and i kind of feel like mine is being robbed and it's it's not really you know the vaccine or the mask i take issue with at all you know to each their own it's it's the mandate here and um i will say my so my questions are how long how long do you know until we say it's enough you've had medical providers come in here and recommend against it you're not medical professionals and i think that you need to trust us for what's right for our kids and if you pulled the whole community would your mandates align with your voters wishes because based on previous meetings and even this one i think not and i kind

217of feel like my voice isn't really being heard because of that these people in this community are extremely smart i know they're doing their research beyond the mainstream media so all i can say is that i really hope that you are actually listening here today and actually reading those emails and not just you know being so deep into one side somebody said to me the truth is always somewhere in the middle and i kind of like to live like that so thank you thank you [Applause] next is renee bream of 3-7 let's avenue a follow-up regarding sentaro from last week's meeting thank you members of the board this is a follow-up from just uh last thursday morning um you invited julie ronalli rinaldi to speak she's the ceo of sentaro i'd like to comment on

218two of her quotes the first quote from the ceo said about a year and a half ago we were notified that one of our links had been corrupted we were horrified we took everything down we shut everything down we would never have taught anything that was in those links she lied to us the video investigation was not in response to any link from sentaro.org it was regarding their online and reliable sex ed resources contained in their printed middle school parent packet right here i gave you guys copies of it in this packet and in their classroom slides this is the cute little classroom slide that was on the whiteboard looks really cute doesn't it you should all take a picture of this and you should go to scarlettine and you should go to bedsider and

219you will be disgusted by what they are teaching or they're pushing our kids to i don't know how many times i have to talk about this go there i'll post it on my facebook tonight go there we talk about mental health mental health we're causing mental health we're causing it i love the school district my kids have gone through big one three of my kids have graduated this school district served my kids well but when this organization centero and when i find out that they've been in our schools four years counseling our kids how do any of us know that those counselors in intermediate middle or high school aren't sharing this kind of information with our kids we don't know you know why and all you parents who love the schools and i do too

220all you elementary parents should be super excited about what's going on in schools with exception to what you had shared because you stopped it there but the contract with guidestone says by law these counselors can speak with our kids multiple times without your parental consent 14 years old and up it's in the contract that i got from the school so all's well in the elementary schools but it's not here and my biggest problem with this board right here is the fact that i've showed you the seven years ago i brought you this and every one of you brad you had a good example with center i'm sure many people have but the reality is this organization centero counseling is at our school counseling our kids and it's a disgrace we the teachers can't control the

221stuff but you board members should know exactly who is coming into our schools guiding and counseling our kids these kids deserve more i understand it's free but if we had a free coach who was giving this kind of information out i think that coach would be fired centero counseling services has no room in this district we are too good of a district thank you renee thank you very much [Applause] next is steve mazzy of 2132 common bent drive and wanted to discuss topics that have been going on tonight i think for full disclosure probably more than tonight so uh president snyder superintendent hamburg treasurer buskirk members of the board i appreciate the uh the time this evening um the good news is i have no math comments so everybody everybody can relax about that um

222but i i will be curious to see how many students dress up uh this halloween so it's kind of a timing thing whether it's a mask or maybe a crt outfit or a survey maybe i don't know so much going on and you guys said it so well tonight um you guys have a tough job with all the decisions that are going on uh i appreciate the due diligence that you're all taking uh in light of every decision you have to make and uh i certainly don't envy your position i can tell you that so our political times are different you know it started probably a few years ago arguably leading up to the election and frankly it probably hasn't got much better than since then just with the number of topics that can come

223up or that have come up and the politics behind it all so uh getting to some of the points the conspiracy theories on crt surveys um i watched some previous board meetings frankly i haven't come to a lot of board meetings since i retired uh purposely uh but uh some of the things that have come up um that i've either seen or uh watched uh are the crt the surveys the pledge of allegiance how much or how little we do it etc those are the topics people said it right tonight this is a great school district and i hate the picture being painted it's anything other than that i mean just look what an annie clark shared tonight it's it's a it's a gem i can tell you is the envy of not only central

224ohio delaware county the state last year when you stayed in person was a part of many meetings where a lot of folks were i guess i guess kova just hasn't gone north of county line yet it was a great thing to experience crt uh guys kind of stole my thunder a little bit on that and i understand what people are are saying about it um i i agree with mr fuji who so eloquently put it uh i too was part of the curriculum here although i've been gone for a few years that it's nowhere in our curriculum surveys i came here in the mid 90s as middle school principal and student surveys were being used so it was a current even before that probably some people sitting in this room took a survey on time

225at that point it was being done by the delaware health district to gain student feelings on issues including sex ed i have yet to see any longitudinal data or research that anyone was psychologically or negligibly damaged from that the pledge is one of the few veterans in this room this evening i know mr fuji is a veteran appreciate his service i served 20 over 20 years in ohio national guard for three deployments i applaud the district for everything it's doing with the pledge to honor our veterans and uh being a designated purple star district uh part of purple star district includes uh education and social emotional support i've got you over three now if you could kind of wrap up please listen this is the same great school district that many in this room went

226to and graduated from it certainly did not do you any harm it's only gotten better i would put it up against any district in the state again look what annie looker reviewed tonight so let's not get sidetracked by stories of crt surveys mass the pledge bond issues growth and so much more that you'll have so much fun with so thank you for the time and appreciate your work next is andy wecker 4191 patrick road and regarding big walnut beating olin tangy panorama and the whole student that's a lot for three minutes i'll try to keep it in three minutes uh i find i often have to work a lot harder than i would like to live in the moment and be thankful it's often not my first response and it has it's a choice i

227often have to work at and been the last couple of weeks i've been thinking about some things i've learned about this district and most recent one was last night i was at kilbourn market catching up with an old buddy and he works with school districts all across the state and he's got unique insights into the delaware county school districts and he said hey did you hear and i go what do you mean he's like well big walnut beat old and tangy first time i ever heard it i'm like we've been before different sports he's like no in the state department of education rankings i'm like what do you mean he's like um uh they're a top 10 district in central ohio and olin tangi was not in that top 10 list and he looked at

228me he said the single biggest thing you guys did right last year you kept your doors open that made a big difference for your kids and you should feel proud about that and you know moving on you know one of the other things i have i have some good catholic friends in this community and sometimes it's working on 4-h animal projects other times it's volunteering an 8th grade football game if you happen to catch one of those this year and one of them told me she's like you know i know there's a lot of us are upset about panorama but that is something that the catholic diocese apparently uses and you know one thing i really respect about my friends in the catholic church is that community creates an option to public education along with

229the homeschoolers and i think education is like anything else choice and competition make it better for everybody and i can't speak to panorama but maybe the catholic diocese could learn something from us or maybe we could learn something from them and then last but not least everybody's understandably excited about our football program right now and for me everybody's wrapped up with the way we're with uh with the wins i think what means a lot to me is the way we're winning and what i mean by that is my senior was a well he was in my uh my son cole was a starting tackle in last year's team and coach coach page last year in his first year went around to every single senior's house individually and met with that boy and that boy's parents

230and a lot of the talk at least in our case wasn't about football that's where you're doing in school and where you plan to do after this and you know it's it's the way that we're winning right now that means a lot to me and there's some colorful coach page quotes that are pretty good uh with covid with empty stands you can hear in some time shouting i hope you're around you might get my own act together my favorite coach page quote is from the delaware gazette article and it's he said it's a blessing to play eight games some teams in the state haven't gotten to do that i love how this team responds the ultimate goal is to teach this team how to be men thank you next is leah hall 15344 hartford road

231regarding quarantines and masking and the essential child thank you um i wanted to speak tonight because i have concern about the quarantine policy at big walnut schools i'm excited to hear about the essential child i want to know how that affects the high schoolers my concern is that our kids that come into into contact with coveted positive individuals are being forced to stay at home and it doesn't make any sense to me that you would make unvaccinated kids stay home for two weeks but allow vaccinated kids to come to school so maybe this essential child would change that i don't know how that affects the high school kids but what really concerns me is with kids being home for two weeks that big walnut school has no measures in place to make sure that the

232kids are still getting the education that they need now i worked in a private school i'm a pediatric occupational therapist and in that school they gave the kids two options they allowed the kids to either attend school or if they chose to stay home they were allowed to still attend school by using google classroom or zoom and you mr fuji made the comment that your that your daughter stayed home and was still able to attend class and how you enjoyed being able to participate last year my daughter was in westerville city schools and she had hybrid and during some of that time she was able to participate in schools through zoom and i appreciated being able to hear some of the lessons as well so i think that i would like to know why we

233don't have something like that in place we have the technology available i know that there's privacy concerns but i'm not concerned whose privacy we're protecting in the pub in the private school that we that i was at they placed the child in the front of the classroom facing the teacher and the and the smart boards so she was able to while the kids were able to participate just as the other kids in the classroom were so [Music] i also know that there is a high schooler that has just been out for three weeks because he blew his knees out from a football injury so this kind of program would also allow these kids for whatever reason that they have to be out of school that they could still accept access the curriculum i've also been

234in seminars that taught us how to adapt the equipment so that kids that were disabled and couldn't attend the classroom could be able to do so so that is um what i would like to know more about and why we couldn't institute a program like that thank you thank you okay the last speaker for tonight is melissa in androlonis of a 7590 loudoun street try follow-up from last week i'll have to keep talking so you can keep practicing um i just had a quick follow-up from last week i was the parent that spoke last week that you referenced and mr fiji are correct it was really emotional for me to speak about that i love big walnut i love our schools i love our teachers i love our community and i agree with what jen

235said at the beginning there's so much good here you know we're all here at 10 o'clock at night because we love the kids and we want what's best for them but when something does happen like what we experienced last year you know somebody has to speak up so it can be addressed and that's that's what i was trying to do um and just for the record my daughter did still have that tutor for the remainder of the school year so i just wanted to clear that up um but i spoke because i kept seeing mostly on social media that you know the crts never happened here and i mean just felt like i was being called a liar and i'm not a liar i'm a mom who loves her kids i love this community and

236i want to see us all of us united and not divided and that's you know that's why i spoke and that's it thank you thank you all right thanks again everybody for keeping it civil i appreciate it um item 13-1 it's recommended the board approved the education service center district service plan for the 21-22 excuse me 21 and 22 school year can i have a motion please thank you for a second second thank you steve angie do you want to speak to this one this is just our standard service contract um we usually approve it a little bit earlier but we had some details that we cut some errors on it thank you to ross for that on most of those so those are just our services we get every year from the esc okay

237any questions for angie on this the only question that i have is in relationship today they provide our bci fbi background searches or not searches fbi bci background checks um are we getting those are they able to provide those in the time fashion that we need them any other questions on thirteen one okay um mrs lee yes mr fuji yes mr crowl yes mr schneider yes miss smith yes adam thirteen two it's recommended board proof of the agreement for the deposit of public funds is made as december 1st 2021 and between first commonwealth bank and a big wallet local school district could have a motion please so moved thank you steve is there a second well second thank you angie or leanna well he's looking at that wrong name i was trying to say jeremy

238so that really tells you how tired i am would you like to speak to this one jeremy um so first commonwealth has been our depository for many years and recommending to continue that relationship at this point in time so any questions on 13 too okay mr fuji yes mrs lee yes mr crowl yes mr schneider yes miss smith yes adam 13 3 is recommended the board approved the following donations one 106. i had something on my screen it looked like a four for a second i was like that's not what i remember reading sorry 106 500 donated by sunbury meadows community development association 100 of the big will on a middle school soar program um anonymously 95.80 to big walnut high school from david anthony 50 to big walnut high school athletic department by larry

239and kathy summers 370 to big wallet middle school by tanger outlet and then a canon powershot digital camera cameras i should say um by barbie newman have a motion please so moved thank you is there a second second thank you and thank you to everyone who contributed and helped make our district a little bit better mr fuji yes mrs lee yes mr crowl yes mr schneider yes ms smith yes that brings us to item 14 in the human resources report hey good evening good evening i just wanted to comment first of all on your question earlier related to the positions outstanding at this time we have an intervention specialist position still for prairie run elementary school that was recently added due to some student needs so that position has been posted now for several weeks

240we just simply don't have candidates at this time this is a difficult time to be able to fill a position but again that's part of what as a district we when we are constantly looking at our finances and ensuring that when we add a position is truly needed we don't add positions when they're not needed and therefore when students move into the district we are in positions sometimes where we are at our caseload limits and so we have to add a position into the year this is a case where that is the situation and it's very difficult to find any candidates out there and when we do get those candidates we're interviewing them and we also still have a specific level of quality that we expect of our candidates so with that we do expect

241with the december graduates to potentially have some more candidates there we're still waiting hopefully we get some more between between now and then but certainly looking to that as a possibility we have an aide as well an educational assistant for prairie run elementary school actually is on the board agenda for this evening that you'll see down below at the middle school we still have a math position that is being filled at this time with a long-term sub that person is on the agenda again this evening for going past the 60 days and being approved to the bachelor zero pay as required in statute and then also we have two um instructional tutors at bwi that are also outstanding at this time so those are all the positions that are outstanding you also know those are

242in the fte report that was shared with you last month you'll see the word new for each of those positions so they are accounted for with the budgeting process and as jeremy pointed out a little while ago we're a little bit under our expenditures in those cases because we don't have people so good and bad to that as far as the items tonight under 13 uh under i'm sorry the sections under 14 they're pretty self-explanatory certainly i'm here to answer any questions that you have but i know it's been a long evening so i won't go through each of those one by one but certainly take any questions you may have the only question i had mark and i apologize i didn't get to you before now the supplemental chart for winter athletics and coaching

243yes this is this this is the same uh quantity as previously uh approved last year and and so on and so forth we had made some adjustments or concerns based on coveted coaching seasons and we had made some thoughts like that i can't recall where we landed is this the same number that we would have approved last year position wise yeah let me pull that up just to be certain but i believe our winter sports um i'm looking at the recommended right here we had swimming last year there is a head diving position for this year that's not on this list okay so that that one still is coming in to you so that's the only position that is added for the winter sports um i believe from what i'm seeing here for um from

244what was from last year to this year actual ads and supplementals so that person may not be on the list because he is still getting that person hired at this point now for dive i think i think we already approved it seems like that we may have approved that previously okay it may have been improved into last year and we're showing it on for this year as the first full year so i can check into that to verify though and i'll send you a quick reminder or a quick update on that well and just to be clear the the reason that i asked that question is because i thought i remembered an adjustment and i wanted to make sure this is back to what was the previous standard the number sure thank you yeah i

245can definitely get that for you as far as the i guess related to covid from last year just to add a little bit more there we if the season occurred we had the positions approved for if they occurred so there were no positions reduced from last year unless the season didn't occur which i think we were i think we were pretty um everything occurred at that point anything else for mark thank you thank you item 14 1. it's recognizing president i move consent agenda on items fourteen one to fourteen eight inclusive seven we don't have a fourteen eight fourteen eight ninety day classified contract pending receipt of background checks for i needed to refresh so i refreshed my screen and now that it's 14-7 apologies 14-1-14-7 inclusive that's all right there's a motion for fourteen

246one for fourteen seven inclusive for consent is there a second second thank you leanna jeremy when you're ready mr fuji yes mrs lee yes mr crowl yes mr schneider yes miss smith yes item 15 schedule the next president yes sorry to interrupt i move to uh let's see here hold an executive session based on the appointment employment dismissal discipline promotion demotion or compensation of employee or official investigation of all of the things under sunshine or rule one okay native state orc statute orc and statutes one two one point yeah one two one point two two so you're going to call for an executive session related to one point two two percent right for personnel all right is there a second a second all right thank you mr fuji yes miss lee yes mr crowl yes

247mr schneider yes miss smith yes so item 15 next schedule board meeting regularly scheduled here november 11th 7 30 a.m and then november 18th back here at 6 30 p.m we're going to head to executive session now i don't anticipate making any public motion or action coming out of executive sessions so if you joined us online yes i did have a further question okay before we adjourn the i did get the information from true on the health department i didn't see anything in there that if if i'm not understanding this correctly are you saying that if we have a mask mandate that we can participate in the essential that is what sheila told us i have not read i asked megan to send it while i was sitting there so i had a chance to

248read what she said i did i didn't read it that way well sheila when sheila was here last week as well speaking to the board i think she went to the pandemic committee i just want to reiterate those are their quarantine rules their policies so i'm just trying to pass along information i didn't understand it that way when she said it last week that's my understanding in our meetings but right yeah i understand with her though for you pardon i said i can clarify with her yeah okay i will check turn around and send you an email and we are headed to executive session not planning to take any public action so thank you very much