Mukwonago Area School District Annual Board Meeting & Budget Hearing - 9/27/2021

001All right, everybody. Welcome here to the budget hearing for the 21-22 school year. My name is Tom Karthauser, and I'm the Director of Business Services for the McGuanagoe Area School District. And we're going to go through a few things here over the next 30 minutes and talk primarily about our proposed tax levy and our budget that we have in this current school year. As you came in, you'll see this packet, this booklet that's available for anybody to take that outlines and gives all the details of everything that we're going to talk about here tonight. There's also a condensed version up there if you want that. So we're going to go through, like I said, the tax levy and the proposed budget. At 7.30, then, we'll begin the annual meeting. And at the annual meeting, we'll

002take five. There will be five action items that the electors of the school district who register and live within our district boundaries are able to vote on. So we have two tax levies that we'll vote on. We'll also vote on board. Remember, salaries for the current school year. And we'll also ask for authorization to sell tangible property no longer needed and also the authority for the school board to establish the date of next year's annual meeting in 2022. So those are things that, in state statutes, we need to get permission from the electors of the district. At 8 o'clock, then, we will have our school board meeting. So up on the screen here, we have our fund summary for resolution. And Wisconsin School. We finance all school districts. Use standard accounting funds. And we have

00312 funds that we have on the screen here. Each fund has a beginning fund balance. That's a snapshot of that fund as of July 1, 2021. Next to that column, then, we have receipts that show up, the budgeted receipts that we anticipate collecting during the upcoming current school year, as well as the budgeted expenditures. Finally, then, we have an ending fund balance for those 12 funds. Just to quickly highlight, I think, for each of you, we have an annual fund balance. quickly highlight what those 12 funds are. We have fund 10 is our general fund. That's the fund that's our biggest fund. That's the fund we use to pay for most of all of our expenses in terms of providing education to pay for teacher salaries, to pay for school buses, to pay for the

004lights and utilities to go on. Fund 21 is a donation account where we receive certain monies from private individuals or from PTOs or PTG groups that work with our schools. Special education is fund 27. We track those expenses separately so that we can show proof of our commitment to students with IEPs or specialized needs. Funds in the 30s, fund 38 and fund 39 are funds where we place money in those accounts specifically to pay off either non-referendum debts or referendum debts. The school board can take out loans and repay those loans up to no more than $1 million in a calendar year without going to referendum for that purpose. Fund 39 is a donation account. Fund 40 and 49 is for referendums. We are in a facility right now that was supported by a referendum

005in April 2016. So we can't do that unless the voters of the district vote for that referendum. The funds in the 40s, fund 41 and 46 are funds that are dedicated for building funds. We use those funds specifically to maintain our roofs and all the equipment that goes on in our buildings, our HVAC units, our boilers, our chillers. So to make sure that our buildings are functioning well and we are protecting those assets of the community, we invest in our buildings with those two funds. Fund 50 is our food service fund. Those funds are segregated and the revenues are what we collect from students for student fees when they get the lunch and then the expenses there represent any food that we buy or the cost to make those food with the personnel in our

006food service department. Fund 60 is our student activity account. So we have a number of student activities. We also have a number of sports teams that do fundraising. And when students fundraise that money, they have that money and then it's up to them to spend how they see fit. So those are tracked in fund 60. Fund 72 and 73 are trust funds. We have monies that are earmarked and dedicated for scholarships in fund 72. And then we have a post-employment benefit that we offer to a select number of teachers in our school district. And we set money aside as we go to pre-fund that liability that will come up when teachers who earn that benefit are eligible for that. So we have a lot of funds that we use to fund that. And then we

007have a fund that we use to fund the retirement of a student who is unable to retire. Finally, the last fund is fund 80, our community service fund. That's a fund that we use to pay for the two school resource officers that we have here at McGuanagoe High School, one at Parkview Middle School, as well as our community education program. We'll talk about those more in just a minute here. But this is ultimately the school board will take action in October. Tonight we're talking about a preliminary budget. We're going to take a vote here to see if we have support from the community for what we're presenting here. And then in October, the school board, which is the one that has the responsibility to set the final tax levy and the final budget. We're going

008to spend most of our time here talking about fund 10 and 27, our general education fund and our special education fund, because as you can see, those are the two biggest funds in terms of receipts and expenditures. And those are the funds where we pay to have our kids educated, which is what we're here for today. So a timeline in terms of how we got to where we are today. We have a lot of funds. We started building this budget you're hearing about tonight back in January. And we worked on that through July. In August I presented this budget you're hearing to our school board and they gave me permission to bring it to you tonight. Per state statutes we published this budget twice in the Waukesha Freeman to give notice that this meeting is

009taking place, that the annual meeting will take place at 730. And that brings us to September 27th. So we're here now having our budget hearing. In October, on October 15th is the date that we will learn, that we will learn from Madison, from state government, how much money they're going to support our district's efforts, financially speaking, for the current school year. So it's not until October that we learn about state support. And that timing is a little funky. It's kind of we're launching, we start school on September 15th, excuse me, September 1st, but we don't find out how much money we're getting until a month and a half later. It's kind of like launching a plane on September 1st and then finding out how much gas you have in it. So it's a little funky.

010So we're going to have to wait a little bit longer after you already took off here. On October 25th, we're going to do our final budget adoption and our tax levy will be certified at that time. So tonight's presentation right now, I'll talk about two major things here. How we receive our revenue with a focus on equalization aid or state aid and also on property taxes. Those two sources of income are going to be 84% of our district's financial, of our financial resources. And then once we talk about how we receive those revenues, we'll talk about how we budget those resources there via the 21-22 budget. So it's a three-step process that we have here in terms of how we determine how much revenue we can receive. Okay? So we have state aid plus property

011taxes is equal to a revenue limit. In the 93-94 school year, state government created laws that says a school board's tax levying authority is going to be limited by a revenue limit. Prior to that, school districts and school boards could levy any amount of tax that they wanted to without restriction. But starting in the 93-94 school year, there was a limit that was put in place and I'll walk through that limit. All right, so but we, in step one, we will determine our equalization aid. Then we'll skip down to the end here and then calculate our revenue limit for step two. Knowing that state aid plus property taxes is going to equal the revenue limit, once we know step one and step two, we can back into what the property tax levy will be. All

012right, so equalization aid here. Last school year, we had $52.5 million in shared costs. Those are costs that state government is willing to share with our school district and reimburse us for one year later. So we had $52.5 million in shared costs and that's going to lead to 23, almost $.3 million in state equalization aid. On a per student basis, that's $11,243. That's $11,243 in shared costs per pupil. So that's our shared cost per pupil there now. State government is going to reimburse us those costs that we experienced last year in three tiers. The first tier is our primary tier. The second tier is our secondary tier. And the top tier is a tertiary tier. The first $1,000 in cost, we get 57% of those costs back one year later. That's the primary tier. At

013the secondary tier, we get $44,000. We get 36% of those costs back one year later. And at that tertiary tier, we get negative 16%. So in other words, for every dollar we spend that's in that tertiary tier, we lose 16 cents in aid. Every school district has a different set of percentage values there. And these are based on property values on a per student basis. So a very property rich school district is going to have very small state aid at the first two tiers and a very big negative percentage there. So if we look at the percentage at the tertiary tier, a property poor district is going to have a lot of state aid and all three tiers will be positively aided. Okay? But those are specific to us here in Maguanago. So as we

014apply that math at the primary level, we get $1,000 of cost per student and we get 57% of those costs back, multiplied by the 4,686 students that we have and that leads to 2.6 million in aid. We repeat that at the secondary level there and apply the math. And we get $21.2 million in aid. And at the tertiary level, we have negative $277,000 in aid. All total, it's $23,298,000 in state support. Okay? So again, our $52.5 million in shared costs will lead to $23.3 million in state aid for the current school year. There's a couple other sources of state support that we also receive for state aid for exempt computers and exempt personal property. And when we add those into it, we have $23.383 million of state support. So that's step one. That's what state

015government is going to support our school district with. Step two, we'll calculate our revenue limit. To calculate our revenue limit, we take a three-year FTE average or a full-time equivalent average of student counts. So we have 4K in our district and those students attend just part of the school day. So they count as .6 students each. Students that attend a full day of school will count as a full count, a 1.0 student. So we take our count on the third Friday and we have our three-year average of those. We multiply that by our local per-member revenue limit. And then we have a couple adjustments that we add to that. I'll do this math on the next page. Just a quick history lesson. That per-member revenue limit is the amount of money that a school district

016can raise on a per-student basis. This started in the 93-94 system. So in our school year, as I said earlier, school boards had a three-year lead into determining how much they want their per-member revenue limit to be. So school boards were free to influence that for a three-year window leading up to 93-94. Some school districts made a bigger revenue limit for themselves and spent more money and therefore have a bigger, larger amount. And then some school districts like ours were very fiscally conservative at that time. So those were the starting values. Each two years, the state government will have a biennial budget and they will make allowances to add $100 or add $200 or whatever it might be onto this amount. So fast forward here to the 2021 school year, the most recently completed school

017year, and we were at $10,000 in funding per student, which is lowest in Waukesha County. And by state statute, it's the lowest amount in the state that's allowable. So the reason that we generate our property taxes here, it's driven by the lowest amount possible. So when we do our math, we take our three-year average, we have 4,661 students. We multiply that by 10,000 in funding per student, and that's $46.61 million. Because that basic math there is, because that basic math is in that first row there, the basic revenue limit, that is $350,000 less than the basic revenue limit. So that's $350,000 less than the basic revenue limit. And so we have $350,000 less than what we had last year. So as a one-time funding source of money, our state statutes allow for us to have

018a hold harmless exemption, where for one year they'll give us $350,000, so that we can at least have the same amount of money that we had last year, but it's only coming to us in a one-time manner. In April 2016, when we had our referendum to add these additions built onto McGuanagoe High School, we asked a second question, where we asked the community if we could have $350,000 additional dollars to pay for a school year. And this was given to us by the state and I don't want to make you provide specific examples, but I do want to stress that our 50,000 population that's searching for another number of studentutos at this public college, we are trying to avoid, we are sometimes Cait suite students places where we don't get groups that much support. So

019our 15 different schools across Michigan, kids inizations american height,Menutia arch solidity, Flaora depleting. If you see that box at the very bottom, our three-year average, from last year to this year is gone down by 35 students. Okay? So our 3-year average has decreased. Those 35 students at $10,000 each represents $350,000. So we are given a declining enrollment exemption. $350,000. There's a one-time adjustment of $11,000 and then we also have a $806,000 addition to the revenue limit to pay for students that attend private schools on the public on the public tax dollar Those students are members of the Wisconsin parental choice program So those are examples of students that attend private schools and funded in a public way Altogether our revenue limit here is 48 Point four seven seven million dollars. So that's step two Now

020since we have that we know that state aid plus property tax is going to equal the revenue limit We can back into that number which is twenty five million ninety four thousand dollars So when we think about that ten thousand funding per students 48% of it will come from state sources 52% of it will come from local sources We take the state support the state equalization aid and we place that in our general fund and fund And then we take the property tax revenue and the school board has a decision to make if they want to take that money And place it in one of three buckets they can put that money in fund ten, which is the general education fund They can put the money in fund 38 in the event that the school

021board Takes on debt for if there's an emergency of sorts they can take on debt without voter approval But they can only repay no more than 1 million dollars in a given calendar year finally fund 41 is a way to take of that ten thousand And funding per student you can take some of that money Set it aside proactively at the beginning of the school year at this time and put that money aside for future building cost We have a ten-year capital plan where we go through all of our buildings And we and we monitor that ten-year plan annually to make sure that we walk our roofs to make sure that they're not leaking We look at all of our equipment to make sure that it's working that way that it's supposed to and then

022we have a timeline For when we anticipate that those things will need working Replacement but fund 41 is a way for us to set money aside to pay for those future building costs So in the budget booklet that you have on page 13, there's a summary here Okay of our tax levy what we're proposing to you tonight is to take eight hundred thousand dollars of that twenty five million $94,000 and to set that money aside into fund 41 to pay for building costs associated with our with our eight schools We'll take the remaining amount and put that in Fund ten to support the students and their learning Okay, those three items there those three funds are going to get tax levy Resources there and those are governed by revenue limits again. Those are governed by

023the ten thousand funding per student Which again is the lowest in the state? We have two other tax levies that we add on to this year We have a five point eight five four million dollar levy for fund 39, which is the payoff our referendum debt That is governed by district residents We can't levy that unless a referendum is passed and once that is passed and the school board has a Responsibility to make sure that we levy enough taxes so that we don't default on our debts That's just bad situation. We don't want to go there So we got a levy at least enough to pay off those debts here for the upcoming calendar year Finally, we have the fund 80 tax levy which is a hundred fifty thousand dollars to pay for our two

024school resource officers and 130 thousand of that will pay for the school resource officers and the other 3,000 will pay for our community education program that is governed by the school board the nine members on the school board can set that tax levy According to their wishes there when we add it all up the tax levy proposed here is 31 million ninety eight thousand two hundred eighteen Which represents a point two percent decrease from last year? So taxes are down the mill rate would be seven dollars and seventy one cents on the next slide here I have last year's mill rates for the most recently completed school year So the mill rate represents the rate of taxation of your house Per a thousand dollars of its value so throughout Waukesha County We had the lowest

025mill rate at eight dollars even throughout the the Greater Milwaukee area and the five counties that are around Milwaukee Area we have the second lowest mill rate of all school districts So this is a three point six percent decrease of the mill rate You can see historically for our mill rate at seven dollars and seventy one cents This is this is one of the lowest mill rates that we've had in the last twenty years So that's that's a wrap there on our tax levy. We'll move into those those are the major sources of revenue here We'll move into our budget and talk a little more specifically about our funds here over the next couple slides So again, I'm back to this slide here where we have our twelve funds here I'm going to quickly talk

026about those that are boxed in there. So I'll start with fund 21 our donation fund We we receive some dollars from private donors Or from parent-teacher organizations and those funds typically come in restricted where somebody will donate amount says I would like for you to spend It on this or on that and whatever their wishes are we live to those wishes and we spend that money as we're told to So we have a break-even budget there where we typically get about a hundred or a hundred fifteen thousand dollars in Donations a year and we will spend those according to the donors wishes One thirty eight non referendum debts. We don't have any debt there. So there's no need to even really discuss That at this point fund forty six is our long-term improvement fund Okay

027So what we can do annually is that at the end of a school year if we have some surplus funds available? We can set these surplus funds aside to pay for future building costs So fund forty one is a way to pay for your building proactively by setting money aside on the front end Fund forty six is a way to take any surplus you might have had and to set that money aside to pay for things in Your setting money aside on the back end But between those two funds were an excellent place to pay for what our buildings need without asking the public for more additional dollars When we need a new roof we can afford it when we need a new boiler we can afford it Fund fifty is our food service fund

028again. Those those are the the revenues there represent what we experience from student selling student lunches We have a slight deficit in that account this year. We are replacing the rooftop condenser here at the state Central kitchen in the guango high school, and that's about a hundred thousand dollars and we replace that once every thirty years So typically we always aim to have a break-even budget in most years We add a little bit of surplus to our food service account But this year we are going to take on a one-time project that's going to tip that a little bit But we still end up in a good place regarding our ending fund balance our student activity account again Those are accounts where students student organizations or student groups or student sports teams? Are going to

029fundraise dollars on their own through their own efforts They deposit those into district accounts and then when they decide what they want to spend it on they spend it Okay, so we hold those dollars for those student groups Fund 72 is our scholarship trust fund we take in about twenty thousand dollars in donations from various groups or entities and then They typically have a criteria of who they like to award that money to and we go ahead and we award those funds accordingly So that leaves us with these six funds I'll spend a little bit more time on these six funds in the coming slides here Okay, so just to wrap up our fund ten revenues We spent a lot of time talking about those first two revenue sources there are property taxes in our

030state equalization aid On top of that then we have our open enroll in tuition for students from another school district that live in another school district That attend ours we receive about five million dollars in revenue for accepting those open enroll students We also receive seven hundred and forty two dollars of state support Via per pupil categorical aids so that seven hundred forty two dollars is in addition to the ten thousand in funding Every school district in the state gets this aid at the same amount which generates three three point four million dollars for us then student fees common school funds or library aid and Transportation aid from the state our next three revenues and collectively what you see on the screen. This is 98 percent of our funding so the buy-in and Large, this

031is what we can't spend What we don't have so what we do gets is what we have on the screen here In terms of our operating revenue you can see that state government is the orange Excuse me the yellow slice man They are contributing forty nine percent of all of our fund ten and fund $27 so again fun ten and Enjoy seven are operating funds where we teach our students and have our greatest costs We get forty one percent from our local residents, which is the blue slice at the bottom there there's a dark blue piece that represents our federal government, who gives us about 2% of our budget, and that's primarily in the form of special education aids that support students with special needs. We have 8% of our budget, or our revenues, rather,

032come from open enrolled revenue, and that represents where our sources of income come from. In terms of our expenditures, our current budget that we're proposing to you tonight currently has a surplus of $1,080,000. Earlier, when I talked about our revenue limit, we have certain sources of revenues that may not materialize. The hold harmless exemption or the declining enrollment exemption. We took our third Friday count last Friday. We still have some work to do there because we have to count students that live in our district that may be open enrolled out. So we still are finalizing our third Friday count, so we don't know what our enrollment is, and our enrollments will determine our funding. There is chances that if our revenues go down, we'll be well positioned to deal with decreased revenues because we haven't

033spent every dollar that we've been given. We will decide how to allocate the surplus between now and the final school board meeting in October when we finalize the budget. When we compare last year's actual salaries district-wide for all of our personnel compared to what we're budgeting for this year, we'll see that we're not spending as much as we would have wanted to spend last year. We're not spending as much as we would have wanted to spend last year. We're not spending as much as we would have wanted to spend last year. In our general fund, it's almost virtually unchanged. It's a zero dollar increase. In Fund 27, we're increasing our investment that we're dedicating towards students with special needs. So what we've done is last year we had a virtual program that we offered for

034students who wanted to stay home, and we are not offering that this year. With the resources that we dedicated to our virtual teachers, we've reinvested those funds into our existing teachers so we can stay competitive and keep our teachers in the school. So we can keep our teachers here, and keep them from taking off in another school district. We decreased our employee benefits budget by $320,000. We went out to bid and we got a 13% decrease in our health insurance rates. When we take a look at what we're budgeting this year in our general fund compared to what we actually spent last year, we have a $90,000 decrease in expenses, so we have cut our costs. When we take a look at our operational expenses in Funds 10 and 27, you can see that 53%

035of our expenses are going to be in salaries and 21% in benefits. Typically what you want a school district to do is to be between 70% and 75% of your total expenditures in the form of salaries and benefits. Anything less is perhaps too light. Anything more than that could lead to long-term problems, so you want to be balanced in that. This budget has a 74% of its expenses towards salaries and benefits. 18% of our expenses are going to be in the form of purchase services. Purchase services come in a wide variety of ways. Some common examples include our relationship with Dousman Transport. They're our bus provider. We spend about $3 million annually to purchase the services that they deliver to pick up our students each day. We also have students that live in our school

036district but perhaps attend another school district that isn't McGuanagoe. That's a purchase service. Where the cost that we spend for that student... to attend another local school district is also a purchase service that totals about $3 million. We also have annual costs for substitute teachers that is about $500,000. So those are some examples of those purchase services there that you see in that gray slice. Non-capital objects represents 4% of our budget. That is any object that is less than $5,000 on an individual level. So it's basic common classroom supplies, textbooks, some light technology, equipment. 3% of our budget is in the form of capital objects. Those would be single pieces of equipment that cost more than $5,000 at the individual level. So a lot of our building components or things we do to support our

037buildings or some pieces of technology that we buy would be examples of what we're talking about there. 1% of our budget is dedicated towards insurance costs. So we buy property insurance, liability insurance, and workers comp insurance for our 700 employees. So that's our distribution of expenses by item. As we wrap this up here and talk about our other funds, our special education fund, there's a summary on page 20 in the booklet. The total expenses we anticipate to support our students with special ed needs is $10.1 million. Now we only receive about $3 million in support from federal and state sources. Because we have $10 million in cost and $3 million in support from state and federal sources, Fund 10 has to cover the difference. So we start with a $0 balance in Fund 27 and

038we end with a $0 balance in Fund 27. But Fund 10 has to make a $6.57 million transfer to create a break-even budget there. In Fund 38, non-referendum debt, in April of 2020 we had some remaining debts from a few years prior. We prepaid those debts in April of 2020 and avoided $90,000. We had to pay $50,000 in future interest costs by settling that debt early and prepaying three years' worth of debt. In Fund 39, our referendum debt, you can find a summary of the fund on page 20 and then a debt schedule on page 30. The debt schedule, when we took out the bonds to pay for the project here at the high school, it was a 20-year bond. Okay, we are six years into that right now. Last year we refinanced that debt

039and saved $2 million when we did that. And we shaved a year off, so we went from 20 years total down to 19. This year, our calendar year debt is going to total $3.2 million. And we're looking for a levy of $5.8 million. The additional levy amount will be used to prepaid debt. We'll continue to reduce the timeline of that debt. And in doing so, we could save $611,000 by making that prepayment. So the debt payoff would occur in spring of 2022. And we would require school board action at that time to make it happen. Fund 41 is our capital expansion fund. Again, this is the fund where we set some dollars aside at the beginning of the school year to support our building needs. We have revenues this year of $800,000 and expenditures of

040$1.53 million. Some years we put more money in. Some years we take more money out. We have in that $1.53 million, we have $650,000 of annual operating costs associated with maintenance. Okay. So we have $1.53 million of annual operating costs associated with maintaining our buildings. And then we had two major one-time projects. One is a new parking lot at Clarendon Elementary. And the other is projects on the interior of Rolling Hills. Rolling Hills is just about 20 years, just a little more than 20 years old now. So a lot of the elements on the inside of that building required updating. So we applied some upkeep to Rolling Hills. Fund 73 is our employee trust fund. Our employee trust fund, if a new teacher that's hired today, we set $1,000 aside for each year of service

041that they give us. And once they reach age 57 and have 20 years of experience with us and retire in good standing, that money that they accrue goes to them in the form of a post-employment benefit. So we have a trust fund set up to house those dollars. We are 91% funded, actually speaking, which is a great spot. I think most school districts would gladly trade positions with us to have our funded status there. We've increased our contributions since 1920. So we can get back to 100% funded status there. We're on our way. Finally, the last fund, Fund 80, is our community service fund. It's a $150,000 fund. $130,000 is dedicated to pay for the two school resource officers that are here at McGuanagoe High School and one at Parkview Middle School. And then $20,000

042is used to support our community education fund. And that's a wrap there, folks. Thanks for hanging with me. I know that's a lot of information there. Eye contact information is there. If you ever have any questions at any point in time, please drop me a line or stop by. Thank you. So we'll start the annual meeting here in just a couple of moments. If you are a resident of the school district and you didn't get one of these purple sheets when you came in, this is for your ability to vote. So if you don't have one and you would like one, you can step outside and grab one from the table quick. All right, I am going to call this meeting to order. This is the annual meeting of the McGuanagoe Area School District, Waukesha

043County, State of Wisconsin. The formal budget hearing is part of the annual meeting as required by Wisconsin Code 65.9. The annual meeting was announced in the official school district area newspaper, The Waukesha Freeman. Would you join me in the Pledge of Allegiance? I want to welcome everyone in attendance tonight for our annual meeting. I just want to announce the qualifications to vote in tonight's meeting for all McGuanagoe Area School District residents. You do need to register at the door. So you do need to be a citizen of the United States, 18 years of age or older, a resident of the district for at least 28 days. If a person is challenged as to his qualifications of vote, the chairperson will state the above qualifications necessary to vote for the challenged person. If such challenged person

044declares he is eligible to vote and the challenge is not withdrawn, the chairperson shall administer the following oath of affirmation to the challenged person. I'll drop down to number four. The school clerk acts as clerk if he or she is present. Otherwise, the chairperson calls for nominations for clerk. Do I have an election for clerk? Is our clerk present and willing? Yes, that is cheery. So now we will go into the election of a permanent chairperson for this meeting. We had a nomination for Bob Slane and a second. Any other nominations? Any other nominations? Any other nominations? Okay. Vote by a show of hands. All those in favor of Bob Slane? Bob is the lucky guy. Yes, right here please. Thank you. Over here. Okay. I'd like to mention, yes. I'd like to mention that

045the minutes of the 2020 Annual Meeting are in this booklet, pages 7 to 9. So anyone interested, refer to that. No action is required for that. We'd like to do reports. So if we could start off with the Treasurer's Report. Jill Werner. Jill Werner. The Senate page 10 in your booklet. All right. Are we good now? The accounting firm of Hawkins Ash CPA's LLP Manitowoc, Wisconsin is in the process of auditing the general purpose financial statements of the Mukwonago Area School District as of and for the year ended June 30th, 2021, including its various funds and account groups. Any adjustments required by the auditors for the purpose of forming an opinion on the general purpose financial statements taken as a whole have been or will be discussed with the Board of Trustees. Any adjustments required

046by the Auditors for the purpose of forming an opinion on the general purpose financial statements taken as a whole have been or will be discussed with the District, if necessary, recorded in the district's accounting records. The Audit was scheduled to be completed in September. A summary of the District's unaudited receipts and expenditures presented in the proposed 2021-2022 budget included in this document. The accounts are presented in an outline form. Additional details regarding the District's budget receipts and expenditures are available from the Director of Business Services. In addition, copies of the audit report will also be provided. copies of the audit report will be on file in the school district office and may be examined by any elector of the district respectfully submitted to warner treasurer okay thank you next we'd like to have the superintendent's

047report sean nothing yeah thanks bob i am going to be brief tonight i do understand that a lot of the people that are in attendance this evening are here for the regular board meeting and we do anticipate a lengthier board meeting at eight o'clock or so so i am going to keep this short there has certainly been a great deal of attention placed on covet mitigation measures and i just want to remind our board and our audience those in the pac tonight and also watching on live stream that we have several other areas of focus that we are going to be working on throughout this school year first a reminder and those of you who are in the audience you can see my presentation on the screen and for those of you who are up

048here it is the first few pages of the google slide document that i gave you at the start of the meeting so it says on the front annual meeting update so on the back of the first page just a reminder that even though we may differ on mitigation measures and there's been certainly a lot of discussion about that the mcwanagoe area school district is an outstanding school district things are going extremely well in our schools and they have for a long time our latest department of public construction accountability report card demonstrated that we are doing excellent in our schools the district and all six of our elementary schools were ranked as significantly exceeds expectations that's the highest ranking that you can get and then our high school and middle school had the second highest so

049we're going to be working on that as well so thank you for that and i hope that you can get this to you if you have any questions or comments for the public performance report as you can see on the slide the district has its own report card for this year and our high school is ranked as second in the city and high school is ranked last for standing strength experience ranking there was not a report card last year there was no accountability report card last year we do anticipate that there will be one this year consistency consistently excuse me U.S. news and world report and other organizations into our schools. So parents that live outside of our district are choosing to send their children to our schools because of our excellence. A reminder that

050last year, even though we were battling COVID, we were face-to-face for the entire 2021 school year. Very, very, very, very few school districts in the state of Wisconsin or even in Waukesha County can say that. If you recall, even school districts in our county last year, some started late, some started in a hybrid model. We were face-to-face right away, and we stayed that way the entire school year with the exception of that one week in November for the high school. In addition to our strong face-to-face education, we also had an outstanding virtual learning program for our students who were at home last year. So lots of good things last year. And then finally, we're doing all the great work with the lowest revenue cap, not only in the county, but in the state of Wisconsin

051at $10,000 per pupil. And so, Tom, if you want to switch, I guess if you, I'll come back to that next slide. You can go to the next slide, though. Other areas of focus, please remember that we do have a strategic plan. I know we didn't get to talk about the strategic plan and our progress last year a lot, but we will be coming to the board with a lot of information. So if you have any updates on the strategic plan, that plan was approved in September of 2019, two years ago now. So we'll be coming back with updates on the first two components, high levels of learning growth for all students and all students college and career ready in October. And then in November, we'll be coming with progress reports on recruiting and retaining

052high quality staff and ensuring best practices for mental health, those four major components. Just a couple of things. We'll be coming back with a lot of information about each of those at very high level, because we'll get into the details with the board reports in the next two months. Improving instruction and increasing student achievement. We obviously we have excelled at that, but please know that we did experience as all districts did some learning loss during COVID. So I do want to extend a thank you to our board again for agreeing to hire those interventionists using our ESSER funds. Those will be helpful. And we will be talking about how we're addressing that learning loss next month. College and career readiness. We've made a tremendous amount of progress in this area. The high school renovation, the

053schedule change that we implemented at the high school, and then also the improvements with our CTE program, college and technical or career technical education program improvements. That's made a dramatic improvement. We do need some help though. A number of our students, we are looking for partners to provide support for them. We do need some help though. A number of our students, we are looking for partners to provide authentic work experiences. As you know, we have a brand new academy, the Academy of Medical Professions, which we started last year. Our enrollment is booming in that academy. But we definitely want to make sure that those students get those authentic work experiences. And so we need some assistance in that and along with our other CTE areas. Recruiting and retaining high quality staff. This is one of

054our biggest concerns at this time. We have a wonderful staff, outstanding staff. But like a lot of organizations, like a lot of industries, we are really struggling to make sure that we fill all of our vacancies. Right now, we are in desperate need of substitute teachers. We are in desperate need of substitutes for instructional assistants. Very early in the school year, in September, and we are short in both those areas already. And that's a serious concern. But again, I understand all industries and organizations are experiencing that challenge. And then finally, best practice for mental health. I want to thank the school board for your significant investment in mental health professional positions the last few years. That has made a difference, but we do need to continue to focus on that and making sure our students

055and our staff improve their mental health. Next slide there, Tom. Last week, if you were at the Finance and Facilities Committee, Tom did a great job of setting our goals for our facility. We have a facility review. We will be making some decisions on that this spring. Look for that in February, March, and April. Tonight, later at the board meeting, we'll be looking for approval on that population study for the district. Within our 90 square miles, we have just over 29,000 people. And it's important to get a better idea of what the population is going to look like in 10, 15, 20 years, especially how many students, how many children are in that population. And then one other point of emphasis, next biennial budget, we are going to have to do a better job of

056engaging our legislators to make sure that we don't have a repeat of the revenue cap freeze that we experienced for this biennial budget. 21, 22, and 22, 23, our revenue caps are frozen. Our costs are going to increase this year. They're going to increase next year. And our revenues are going to stay the same. That's a concern. And so we're going to have to do that. We're going to have to engage our legislators and make sure that we don't have the same. And then, Tom, if you want to go to that last slide, which is a repeat of what Tom showed in his budget review, and those are the revenue caps, and you can see us on the far left. Again, we're doing an excellent job at $10,000 per student, but it's very hard, very

057difficult to compete with these other districts in Waukesha County for staff, support staff and teaching staff. Professional staff, when our revenue caps at $10,000 per student and our neighbors to the east, such as New Berlin, are at $11,659 per student. That's $8 million of additional revenue for 5,000 students. That's a significant difference. And so the state legislature needs to do a better job for public schools next time around. That's all I have. Okay. Thank you, Sean. Next, we have the board president's report. Erica Conner. So mine will actually be brief. Sorry, Sean. So we're in our fourth week of the 21-22 school year. Homecoming has come and gone. Students are well into their studies and activities and sports are underway, and I think everyone is relieved to just be back into this new fall season.

058We're here tonight in a very different as well as very similar state as we were here last year. We start this year still with a bit of uncertainty as to how this year is going to go, just like we did last year. But we move into this year also on the heels of a very successful year that Sean had pointed out. On all accounts, it was a wonderful year. We made it through. And we're also going to bring many lessons that we learned from last year into this year with us, too. I'm incredibly grateful. I think the whole board is incredibly grateful for our staff, for how hardworking they were and dedicated this past year as they navigated what many claimed was their hardest year of teaching ever. And I'm confident that they'll be able

059to. I'm also very grateful to have another wonderful and successful year with our hardworking staff. They are so dedicated and we are so grateful to them. I know that if we keep moving forward, if we all keep showing up, we're going to keep learning along the way. And I'm confident that our staff, our students, our family, our communities, our community, we're going to have another wonderful year just like we have in the past. Thank you. Next, we have our Post-Retirement Trust Fund 73 report. That's on pages 42 and 43 in your booklet. Tom Karthauser is going to report. Thanks, Bob. So, by state statute, if we have a trust fund set up that's funded by public dollars, then we have to report on that. So on pages 42 and 43 of the budget booklet, we

060have those funds outlined there with our beginning fund balance and our ending fund balance. We started the year with $6.2 million in Fund 73 and we ended the year with $5.6 million. We have a number of retirees that are coming off the plan. So, we ultimately... We did well there. Our rates of return for the investment there, the dollars are held at Citizens Bank here locally. You can see the rates of return are low, but we stayed positive and not negative. So, we hit our objective in our financial decision there to invest our funds at Citizens Bank. On page 43, then, we have a $500 match for our teachers just like you'll find in the private sector for those that have a 401 match. We have a 403 . We have a 403 match. If

061you put $500 in to a 403 , then the district will match at the end of the school year. We have and hold those dollars until the particular employee retires. But we have those dollars set aside and we pay it as we go. So, that's the report. Community Service is the next report that's funded. Page 27, Tom Cardin. Again, by state statutes. We report on what we do with these dollars here. So, the school board has the tax levy authority to set this amount. But we report it to you here tonight. So, in the 2021 school year, we had $157,000 in cost for our school resource officers. We typically make a payment to the Village of McGuagal Police Department four times a year, once each quarter. But we had a delay in one of the

062bills from the prior year. So, we actually had five payments in the 2021 year. So, there was $157,000 in cost for school resource officers. And then we had an additional $3,272 that supported our community education in 2021. And that's all I got. Okay. Thank you. We are now at the part of the meeting where we have action items. And this is where the community will provide input. On page 5 of the booklet is where the items that were provided. This is what we're talking about. Some discussion of different things. And we do ask that if anyone from the community is interested in talking, that they approach the microphone at the appropriate time. And state your name. And also the municipality that you're from. If you're interested. You can see the different items for the tax

063levy is what we're going to be looking at first. The first resolution of a discussion. These are not motions yet. But on page 5, you see the first resolution. It has to do with levying tax for the district's capital expansion fund. Be it resolved that a tax in the amount of $800,000 be leveled for the 2021-22 school year to be deposited in the capital expansion fund to be used solely for the purpose of maintaining the Guanago area school district facilities. And the second is resolution authorizing operational debt service and community service tax levy. Be it resolved that a tax in the amount of $31,098,230 be leveled for the 2021-22 school year. Be it resolved that a tax in the amount of $31,098,230 be levied for the 2021-22 school year. Be it resolved that a tax

064in the amount of $31,098,230 be levied for the 2021-22 school year. And the third is resolution that the budget for $7,098,211 million, $9,000,218 be levied on all property, real and personal, which is taxable under the state laws, within the Guanago Area School District. Counties of Waukesha and Walworth. State of Wisconsin. For the purpose of financing the operation of the public schools of the school district for the year of 2021 through 2022. Pursuant to the budget for this year as presented to the annual meeting. And those are the ones that we're talking about. motions that's what you're voting on first we do want to have an opportunity for discussion so if there's anyone that would like to have a comment please approach a microphone one last opportunity if anyone would like to present a comment please

065approach a microphone or anyone up here okay then does anybody look for a motion can we have a motion i would like to make motion i think one aren't we gonna do those one at a time the first one and then the second resolution so so let's start with the first one art is your your motion is as printed in the booklet on page five under the resolution levying attacks for the district's capital expansion fund as i read a moment ago correct okay do we have a second second over here joel okay so to vote for this using the paper we can use a hand vote we'll we'll do a hand vote and if everyone's okay with that but if anybody wants to do a ballot we can do that but we'll start with a

066hand vote if everyone can vote Everybody's okay with that. But you must be a resident. And so you've got the paper at the front, and you've indicated that you are a resident of the school district. If you're not a resident, you're not allowed to vote. And do we have someone that's going to tally the hand count? Okay. Tom's going to take care of that. The motion has been put forth and seconded. It's the motion that's listed on page 5, the first one, resolving levy of tax for the district's capital expansion fund. Tom's going to take care of that. Please raise your hand if you're a yes vote. And up here. Okay, 38 yeses. And as soon as Tom's ready, raise your hand if you have a no vote on that question. Is that right? Okay,

067the motion carries. Do we have someone who would like to move this second? I would like to make a motion for the resolution authorizing operational debt service and community service tax levy. Okay. Okay. Erica, move. Do we have a second? I'll second. Okay. Vito, is that it? Vito. Vito, second. Do we have anyone that would like to discuss? No discussion. We'll call the question. Raise your hand for a yes to resolution authorizing operational debt service and community service tax levy on page 5 of the booklet. 40 yes. And if your vote is no, please raise your hand. Okay. Vote carries. Next, on page 6, we're going to talk about board salaries. It's up to the citizens voting at the annual meeting to determine what board salaries will be for this 2021-22 school year. Currently, board

068salaries are $3,000, with the board president receiving an additional $500. There's a note that says this amount was established in 2016. You can see page 44 in this booklet. For a summary, a summary of Waukesha County School board salaries, if you'd like a comparison. Any discussion on board salaries? Please approach the microphone if you have any discussion on board salaries. Please state your name and municipality. My name is Andrea Cooper. I'm from the village of McGuanagoe. I think that's what I need to tell you. I don't know if I can say this, but after the past year, I think you all deserve a raise. So if that's at the table, I give you a raise. Okay, thank you for that comment. Any other comments? No other comments? Would anyone like to make a motion on

069this? I would like to make a motion. I would like to make a motion. Okay. Go ahead. Is the motion the one that's listed on page six? Is it the motion that's listed on page six? I would like to make a motion that board salaries be increased by $500 for all members except for the president. Okay. So the board salaries are intended to be increased to $4,500. Okay. So to understand this, what you're saying is that you would like to have the board salaries increased by $500 up from the 3,000 that it currently is, correct? Correct. Is there a second? I'll second. Okay. If you don't short-second it. Any discussion? Okay. So clarification of what we're voting on is that board salaries be increased to $3,500. Point of question is we continue to have the

070board president receive an additional $500. Is that correct? Or is that no? No. She's saying . . . Board president $4,500. The board president to go up to $4,500. Okay. Board president is $4,500. Okay. $3,500 for others, $4,500 for board president. That's what the motion is. And so if you are interested in making a motion, please do so. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So if you are in favor of that, raise your hand for a yes. Okay. 36 yes. If your vote is no, please raise your hand. Okay. No vote is 10. A yes vote carries. That motion carries. There is no unfinished business, but we do have some new

071business. The first is resolution to authorize the sale of tangible property. Be it resolved that the school board of the Wannago Area School District is hereby authorized during the current school year. to sell and dispose of any tangible personal property belonging to the school district that is determined by the school board to be no longer needed for school purposes. I would like to make that motion. Okay. Archnager would like to move. Okay. Joel, second. Any discussion on that? No discussion, so we'll put it to vote. If you're voting yes, raise your hand, please. 43 yes votes. If your vote is no, please raise your hand. Zero. Zero no's. So motion carries. The last one is setting the date for this annual meeting. The school board needs to have permission or a vote to be able

072to change the date. The date that's established generally has to do with this meeting has to occur by the fourth week in July. However, the meeting can occur at a later date, especially since there's more information available to people. But that has to be something that has to be put forth and approved by the community. So the last discussion item is to be it resolved that the school board of the McGuanagoe Area School District is granted the authority of the electorate to establish the date of the 2022 annual meeting. Do we have anyone who moves? I will make that motion. Okay. Erica and Sherry is second. Any discussion on that item? Okay. We'll put that to vote. If you agree, please raise your hand for a yes vote. 41 yes votes. If there are any

073no votes, please raise your hand. I would like to make a motion. We adjourn. Okay. So that vote carried. And there's a motion on the table to adjourn. Mark Schneider, can we get a second, please? I'll second. Okay. Vito, seconded. Thank you. We need a vote for that. So all in favor of voting to adjourn, raise your hand. Voice is fine. Say yes. Yes. Yes. Those opposed, say no. Thank you. Meeting adjourned. Thanks, Bob. You're welcome. I would like to call this full board meeting to order if you would join me in a moment of silence. If you would join me now in the Pledge of Allegiance. Do we need to do this again? Yeah. To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic under God, indivisible. If I could have

074a roll call vote. Roll call, please. Erica Conner. Here. Mary D. Moore. Here. Joel Frederick. Here. Andy Menke. Excused. Mark Schneider. Here. Vito Schwartz. Here. Craig Burt. Excused. Jill Warner. Here. Sherry Wanchowke. Here. Michael Kuzinski. Here. Good. And Kayla Williams. Here. This is an open meeting and has been noted as such. I want to take the opportunity to kind of, it's not really a board president report, but more of like, we're heading into citizens' comments. And I know that we have a lot of emailed ones. I don't have the list yet in person. But I want to thank everyone for coming. I will never, ever complain from hearing from our community. We've received a lot of emails and I think it's great. I try really hard to personally respond to each and every one of

075them. So thank you for sending them. If I did miss you, feel free to let me know. If I didn't respond, sometimes people slip through the cracks, but I do try my best to respond. So thank you for sending them to each of you. That being said, there seems to be a theme in the almost 200 emails that I indeed received. And that theme stemmed around what sounds like discussion in the community that we are voting on a mask mandate tonight. So I just wanted to go ahead and clarify a little, couple things before we move into our citizens' comments. Our citizens' comments are reserved for comments about things that are on our agenda. There is no action item tonight on our agenda. We are voting on a district-wide mask mandate. That has never been

076discussed. It has not come to or out of committee. So I do think there is maybe miscommunication that has happened. I appreciate everyone voicing their opinions. It is nice to see the community step in and send us so many emails. But I want to be clear that if you are here for a citizens' comment regarding a district-wide mask mandate, that is not something that is on the agenda. So I want to clarify that. We also want to make sure that in clear transparency, that you are all aware that what we are talking about tonight on the agenda, we are looking at mitigation measures in the event of increased numbers, percentages, an outbreak, whatever that definition may be. We'll discuss in classrooms and what that plan would look like, if any, of what we will do

077mitigation-wise. So if you are here to discuss classroom, like mitigation plans, forward thinking, rather than something that we are deciding right now to enact, district-wide today. We're not talking about a district-wide mandate in any way, but we are going to discuss a plan to move forward in case we have big increased numbers in classrooms. So I just want to make sure that you're aware of that. So if you would like to still make a citizen's comments regarding those mitigation members, we do have a two-minute time limit for our comments. I will call you up and then I will read an online one and we'll kind of go back and forth so I can we'll give you a heads up before you come. Mary will be our timer. Please be respectful of that time limit. We

078do have many people and I really want to let everyone that wants to speak, I want you to speak and we want to hear you. So if someone before you says something that you agree with, feel free to come up and state your name and say I agree with all of the things that have been said. If you don't feel like you need to reiterate the same things that have been said before, but if you would like to share you do indeed have your two minutes. So we are going to go ahead and get started. We do have many online citizens comments that we will all take turns reading up here and for some of those emails they are also rather long, some of them, and those will also be cut off at two minutes

079so we will do our best to get the gist and summarize from there. I will go ahead and start with a handful of the emails that are shorter. I'm gonna read them all together at once and then we will start with the first person on our list which is Danny and I'm really sorry if I can't get that. So your last names. You will be first after this email. Email from April O'Toole. Hello I am once again emailing to voice my concern over pending mask discussion. Are we prepared to offer immediate virtual learning for those who do not want to mask our kids at school? Kids are not getting gravely ill from this disease. Why are they the only ones paying for it? Thousands at a Brewer game, thousands at Summerfest, thousands at State Fair,

080but my six and seven year old in a class of twenty needs to be masked. Ridiculous. We need common sense. I have one from Monica Grossman. I'm not even sure why this is coming up again. I thought the community made it clear optional masks was the way we as a community wanted our schools to proceed. Do not subject our children to this ridiculous muzzling again. There is no science behind this nonsense. This is a parent's decision. I've had enough. If this mask mandate passes tonight I will be working to recall any board member that voted in favor of the mandate. Marilyn Meyer. I would like to show my support for a mask mandate in the elementary schools. Clarendon just had an outbreak of COVID. These kids cannot yet get vaccinated. An optional mask mandate is

081not working as few students are wearing masks. Please consider the health of our children. Lacey Meyer. Good afternoon. I'm emailing today concerning the rise of COVID cases at Clarendon Avenue. Grade school. Will masks, social distancing, and the plexiglass return between desks be mandatory again? What can I do to help this cause to ensure our children's safety within the McGuanagoe School District? I'm confused as to why social distancing became optional in the first place when no one under the age of 12 can be vaccinated and COVID is still a major concern in the U.S. Thank you for your time and review. And the last one I will read right now is Bill Lawler. Good evening. I would like to commend the group for the display of the American flag and the thoughts and compassionate concern given

082in that display. Sean, a shout out to you for I saw you out there when it was getting set up. It makes me happy to see the passionate and patriotic spirit that our high school and community displayed. This is what our schools, community, and county need is pride in our community. I also want to thank the teachers, teachers, and school administration that stand up for the desires of our community. I also want to thank those involved in making the dress code more modest and speaking up against those who tend to neglect it. I know because I hear from some of the students that complain. All in all, it's reassuring to know that the board listens and acts. Let's keep up the positive work and make this a great experience for our students this year. A

083great big thanks from one of your favorite supporters, Bill Lawler. I will now ask Danny Hodgeski to come. I'm not here, but this is for my children, so here goes. I'm just a mom. Since the spring of 2020, I've done my best to balance the challenges and changes and protect my children's physical and mental health. I became their teacher as well when in the fall of 2021, we made the difficult decision to pull our children, I have five by the way, from your district and file the PI-1206 form for homeschooling. I was relieved and appreciative when you voted to end the district's mask mandate in the spring of 2021. Thank you for doing that. Masking and vaccination need to be respected as a personal choice and our parental rights are constitutionally protected. I can say

084no and my children can say no. We do not consent and we will not comply. So not even in the classroom. No, thank you. Thank you. Jill, if I could have you, Jill, if you could read Steven Broglie and then if Jeff Schmittinger can be prepared to come forward after this email. Which one again? Erica, you're hard to hear. First one. The very first one? Okay. Steven Broglie. Okay. Hello. I've emailed a few times already and I honestly don't know what else to say. The fact that we are still talking about COVID after one and a half years is crazy. I hate that the superintendent, the DHS and the news only ever talks about cases. Yeah, the cases are going up right now. In a little while, they will go back down. With the amount

085of positive cases in our county alone, there are virtually zero deaths average weekly and few hospitalizations due to COVID alone. We have lived with COVID for one and a half years and in our town and many others, everything is normal. The doctors know how to properly treat patients. The people who wanted the vaccine have it and currently a lot of people are being strong armed into getting it, which is ridiculous. Point is with a vaccine out there, I would think this is no good. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it's a good idea. It's no longer a pandemic. COVID-19 is a virus. It

086is going to come and go just like the other viruses out there. One thing is for sure, it is never going away. Some people don't seem to understand. They think if everyone just wears a mask or everyone gets the vaccine, then COVID will be gone. That is not how this works. It's time to move on. It's time to keep letting the kids be kids. No forced masks anywhere. No forced vaccines anywhere. No mitigations tracing of any kind. I'll leave it with this for those who want to see us go backwards. To what end? At what point this end for a virus that will be around forever now? Are we always going to contact trace? Are we always going to mask up when it's bad? Are we going to continue to force people and eventually kids

087to get the vaccine and boosters in order to do this? This has to stop. Thank you, Steve Broglie. Thank you, Jeff. How many of you actually got my email that I sent out? Erica is the only one that actually responded back to me. I have a daughter in Clarendon and I have a son at Parkview. My daughter so far this year, twice has been sent home for COVID. I get this nice little piece of paper every single time tells me what her symptoms are. So far they've been two, a headache and she's felt a little nauseous after she ate. I have to take her for a COVID test each time and on your little piece of paper, it even says it's also important to remember that many other illnesses cause these symptoms. The nurse sat

088there and was venting to me that she's got a virus that's causing her symptoms. We need to deal with us parents when we all know that not everything is COVID. We need to let the nurses and that staff do their job. Let them figure out what it is. My daughter hops in the car, five minutes later, she's fine. She now knows how to play the system to get out of the school. You guys and your policies are what letting her do it. I can't take her back until I get a COVID test. So we need to look at it. We need to look at this again and make sure that kids who really are not sick are not being forced to go get a COVID test. Anybody have a comment on it? I am sorry,

089but we are not allowed to comment during citizens comments. Sorry about that. We are here to listen. Fine. Then I'm gonna move on to the mask too because I work in healthcare. I actually worked for Advocate Aurora and this past weekend I went onto our little website and COVID is such a problem. It is such a pandemic that all of it, Advocate Aurora has 500 people in the hospital for COVID. That is from Green Bay to the middle of Illinois, 500 people. We're not filling the hospitals and everything else again. People aren't out there wearing masks all over. We don't need to have masks brought back into the schools. They did a test down in Florida. What did they find on the masks? Need to wrap it up. What did they find on the masks?

090They found bacteria. And other stuff. What did they find? Viruses. They could find them, but there was none there. 50% of them had pneumonia on it. So this cannot come back in. Thank you. I will have Vito read a letter from Tikla Fingland. And while he prepares to do that, Mark Summers, you'll be next. I apologize. She wrote in the smallest font possible. And my eyes must be going. Well, I can zoom. Apparently I'm older too. And I don't know how these things work. I was urged. Of course. I was urged to write to you today as a result of receiving my third call from the Wanda High School District Nursing staff, because one of my children had been exposed to a positive case of COVID at school. My children were exposed on September 1st,

091September 3rd, and September 9th. This already exceeds their exposure in the entirety of the 2020-2021 school year. I'm not familiar with each of you personally. So I'm unaware of your background. backgrounds. I would like to understand which of you has experience in the medical field or experience with infectious disease. If none of you have any experience, who is advising you on the current policies regarding COVID? What is the reason that you are choosing not to follow the current CDC guidelines that continue to require testing and quarantine when exposed to positive case? The CDC's purpose is to protect all of us from threats to our health. As such, they are advised by highly trained medical individuals, especially regarding infectious disease, which makes you, the school board, more qualified than the CDC. I understand that all of

092us are tired of this pandemic. We are all tired of masking and social distancing. But the reality is that the pandemic is not over. As a school board, your purpose is to provide a public education for our children. If children are not healthy and as a result they cannot be in school, you are failing in your purpose to educate them. Your job is not to promote your own personal beliefs or desires. Your job is not to be popular with those who shout the loudest. Your job is to make decisions that will result in the kids being educated. I've heard the best of you. I'm sure you've heard the best of me. I'm sure you've heard the best of me. I'm sure I'll cry that as an American, that we can choose what we want to

093do, choose to mask or not mask, choose to vaccinate or not vaccinate. I argue that as an American, we also have the privilege. Basically, she doesn't agree. She wants mask. Mark summaries. I can say that I honestly don't agree with anything she said. First, the COVID increase, the increase in cases is directly proportional to the increase in vaccines. Anybody question that? I don't think so. Second, a gentleman came up here talking about his daughter and the quarantine and the notification. I got that already with one of my kids. I got three in the school district. The COVID flow chart needs to be removed. Plain and simple, needs to be removed because there are other illnesses. What happened to the flu? We've got all of these numbers for this tiered mitigation proposal, all based on COVID,

094all based on numbers that have been brought to everybody's attention that we all know have been skewed. And the CDC, really? The CDC are paid liars. They don't do anything for us. And anybody that believes their guidelines, again, they're guidelines. They're not laws. Legislature makes laws. Back to our tiered mitigation proposal. This is based on incorrect data. Where's the data from previous problems, from previous illnesses over the last 10 years? How about the flu? Did we shut down classes for the flu? I remember when I was growing up, chickenpox was the big thing. What'd you do? You stayed home for a week. Did you quarantine the whole class? No. Back to the COVID flow chart. 20 seconds. And making sure that people... 20 seconds. And making sure that people are not forced into COVID testing.

095No more forced testing. It's up to the parent. It's parents' decisions, not anybody else's. With that, I want to say, we have done a good job over the last year. I want to keep it going, keep going forward, not going backward by trying to put more rules in place. So I thank you all for what we've done so far. Let's not go backwards. Thank you. Thank you. So I am going to read a question from the another email and then if Ken Minton wants to get prepared to come up after that. I have an email from Terry DeWalt. As the parents of two elementary age children, we are saddened, furious, and confused that the school board in McGuanagoe Area School District has chosen to ignore the experts and medical professionals by not requiring COVID-19 mitigation

096strategies in our schools. These actions risk the health and lives of our children and school personnel. In addition, it jeopardizes the ability to provide in-person instruction, which you say you are trying to prioritize. Our family absolutely believes that in-person learning is beneficial for our children, especially due to the fact in-person learning allows for social interactions with peers and stronger connection to their teachers. However, nearly all of the children in our elementary schools are under the age of 12, making them unable to get vaccinated at this time. Despite this fact, nearly 100% of the teachers, school personnel, and the principal at our children's school choose to knowingly risk their lives by not getting vaccinated. It is hard for me to put into words how disheartening this is. Prior to the decision to make masks optional for

097the last two weeks of school in May of 2021, I truly believed that my children attended a wonderful school. I naively thought that the school personnel cared about our children and would do anything they could to keep them safe. When the decision was made at that time to make masks optional, and then when all mitigation strategies were removed at the start of the fall 2021 semester, it became clear to me that this was not the school district that I thought it was. My husband and I deliberately moved to McGuanagoe from Racine because we thought that the school district would provide our children with a better education and would be an environment that would support their safety and well-being. Little did I know that the schools that we moved here for would make decisions on a

098daily basis that put our children's lives at risk. Epidemiologists have stated that one of the reasons we were able to continue in-person instruction last year was due to following best practices, including requiring masks to be worn. Without masks and distancing protocols in place, staff and students can and do carry and spread the virus unknowingly, especially if they are asymptomatic. This includes teachers and school personnel who are vaccinated. The district states that the federal mandate requiring all passengers on school buses to wear masks. However, it is clear that on many buses, mask wearing is not being enforced, and in fact, some bus drivers are not wearing masks at all without facing any consequences. I'm going to have Kim Minton come, while Cherry, if you would be willing to read Jane Kershasky's email next. I just want

099to say most of us came here tonight knowing that mask mandates weren't on the agenda, but it's concerning, knowing that a mitigation measure came out less than a business day before this meeting, so I'm kind of glad we're talking about it. We want to stay in front of you and let you know our opinions here. So this is a letter all of you received earlier last week, so we appreciate the work you do as Locked In officials and employees of the district. We are also exhausted over this topic and would like to put it behind us and focus on the education of our children, but we will, we do not want any more harmful masks. I do have a couple of words on mask mandates. Without the mandates ever again, by requiring children to wear

100a mask, you would be promoting the idea that the mask can prevent or treat a disease, which is an illegal, deceptive practice, according to the Federal Trade Commission. It is unlawful to advertise that a product or service can prevent disease unless you possess competent and reliable scientific evidence substantiating that these claims are true. On August 21 of this year, the director of the National Institute of Health, Frances Collins, has said that the mask mandates are illegal and for our better. There is no criminalization of masks. Yes, I'm sorry for that. Thank you. said during an interview, the reason kids are being forced to wear masks in school isn't because they're in danger of infection, but rather so that school districts don't shut down their classrooms. Collins also said young children getting COVID is rare. Children

101have been repeatedly shown not to be drivers of the contagion. It is well accepted that children have a statistically zero chance of dying from COVID, and the CDC even shows that K through 12 mortality rate from or with COVID is 0.00003. An email the district sent out on September 14th also supports the fact that children getting COVID is rare, whether the district realizes it or not. The email informed us that there were more than a dozen new confirmed students positive cases in COVID across the district, so more than doubling the active cases from September 10th. So we can figure out that in a district of 4,700 students, 12 positive cases is 0.26 percent of the student population. Four days prior, it was 0.0. The district also said that the number of new confirmed cases in

102COVID is 0.13 percent. In future emails, the district should consider presenting this type of data instead of fear-mongering. Also noted in the email was the comment that there were over 300 reports of ill students. It would be bold of the district to imply that these illnesses are COVID-related. This is simply propaganda that tries to influence parents. If you do not have positive tests, we don't want your speculation. And one more thing, a quote from Anthony Fauci was very clear that asymptomatic transmission is not a threat. He said, if you have a positive test, you don't want to be a threat to your family. He said, quote, in all history of respiratory-borne illnesses or viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person.

103The best advice you can give to us is to stop the spread of an illness. If a child is sick, they need to stay home. Thank you. Cherry will read it the next email, and Lisa Depey, you will be next. Board members, I am writing to urge you to reinstate mitigation measures to decrease the spread of COVID in the schools. We all wanted this year to be normal, but with the ongoing pandemic, this is not a normal school year. We are a mere 12 days into the school year, and already we have five students out with COVID or quarantined due to closed content. This is already 20% of my students. Many students and several staff are also out with related to COVID. Numbers continue to increase daily. This is not okay. Something needs to be

104done. Please consider the following. Bring back mask mandate until it is clear that the spread of infection in our schools is under control per CDC guidelines. Please reinstate routine deep cleaning of the classrooms and common areas in the schools. This was effective last year. With the increased number of students having to do live streaming, teachers need additional resources to support the live streaming. We do not have the same resources available that we had last year, i.e., dedicated prep time to coordinate digitalized learning. For example, I had more students doing live streaming this past week than I had all last year. I appreciate your considering these suggestions. Sincerely, Jane Kozalski. Thank you. Lisa Depp. Good evening everybody. I'm here. I want to say I and the Depp family are leading a regular life. I hope all

105of you are as well. Our community and this school board has led with common sense. Life is risk. As you guys are visiting this evening about continuing classroom mitigation, are my The overall evidence is clear, standard cloth and surgical masks offer next to no protection against virus-sized particles or small aerosols. The size of a virus particle is much too small to be stopped by a surgical mask, cloth, or bandana. A single variant of SARS-CoV-2 is about 60 to 140 nanometers or 0.1 microns. The pore size in a surgical mask is 200 to 1,000 microns. There has been one large randomized controlled trial that specifically examined whether masks protect their wearers from the coronavirus. The study found mask wearing did not reduce at conventional levels of statistical significance the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Keep in mind

106that these studies were in adults. With children, it is less likely to be even less effective considering kids are touching the mask, sneezing, coughing, touching their mask again, pulling it down, don't wash hands, go to the bathroom, forget to wear a mask. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread

107of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. The study found that the spread of the virus is much lower than the spread of the virus. There is

108a proper technique to donning and doffing a face mask to prevent limits contamination. Most adults do not follow the proper steps and can almost guarantee that children most definitely do not. There have been hundreds of mass studies related to influenza transmission done over several decades. It is a well-established fact that masks do not stop viruses. Part of that evidence shows that cloth face masks actually increase influenza-linked illness. Bacteria are 50x larger than virus particles. Virus particles can enter through the mask pores, yet bacteria remain trapped inside the mask, resulting in the mask wear continually exposed to the bacteria. Wrap it up. Is that it? Yep. Okay, next, Andrea Cooper. Okay, I wanted to bring forward my confusion, I guess, about the COVID communications. Since basically at the beginning, the year everything was there's no mitigation

109at all, there were also no guidelines given. And this has led to frustration and confusion of parents, staff. I get different answers when I ask questions to administration, to other parents, to teachers. There's just no consistency at all. And this is true from school to school. I can tell you from hearing other people, from my own school's experiences and also having my own child that had a COVID symptom, it was handled very differently from school to school. And so whatever the guidelines are, I really feel that we need to step up the communication and be very clear about what happens if there's a positive case in your child's classroom. Right now, you might not find out for three days. And as far as parental choice, it's important, I think, to those of us that are

110concerned, that we know about those things as soon as possible so that we can make that choice for our child, if they're going to quarantine or not. Since quarantines are completely optional at this point, I don't see any need for contact tracing. And so it should be a real fast thing. If someone calls and says, my kid has COVID, that class should be notified pretty quickly. What happens if my child does have COVID? If my child has COVID symptoms, my child did. I got my child tested, and then I was told I didn't have to do that. But I followed what was on the website. So I guess my point is, whatever the expectation is, if there could be some more clarification and communication so that parents, teachers, staff, everybody is on the same page

111and everybody's getting the same answer, that would be super helpful. Thank you. Before I have Jill read the next email, I have a question for Carolyn, Simon, Stephanie, Sir Niglia, and Monica Grossman. You have all signed up for citizens comments, but you also sent an email. So you get one. Would you rather me read your email or would you want to come up in person? All of you? Okay. So then we will go to Katie McGinnis. And then after you read Jill, David Hoffman will be next. Okay. Dear school board members, please continue to allow our students to keep masks optional. This is a parent's choice to make decisions for their children and not the school. My daughter is in kindergarten and it is critical that she be able to properly hear and communicate without

112a mask for max learning abilities. I respect anyone who chooses to wear a mask or send their children in a mask. So please allow the parents to continue to make that choice for their family. Respectfully, Katie McGinnis, BBES parent. Thank you. David. I just want to start off by saying thank you. I keep looking at that and I realize that. You're the most efficient district in Waukesha County and that's cool. So I wish we could talk more about that stuff. But we have allowed the anxious in our society drive the narrative. And instead of us being brave and teaching our children, you know, evaluate risk. Do what you think is best. We've allowed the people with the biggest voice and the biggest platform just to be able to communicate. You know, take the freedom from

113most of us. We have local school boards for a reason. You can, you know, pick the district you're in. You get, you know, you guys have incredible importance. You know, we don't send our kids to Madison. We don't send our kids to Washington. We don't send our kids to Milwaukee. We send our kids to . And I brag about that and I want to continue to brag about that. So thank you. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Okay. Next up after the email will be Karen . I'm sorry. We are coming up on two years of living in an inept COVID society with a lack of transparency for actual data, science and facts. With our communities divided, our most sacred of livelihoods continue to be polarized by unnecessary fears. Unfortunately, there is no uncomplicated one-size-fits-all solution

114for any of these concerns. That is why we appreciate the school board's commitment to the school board's commitment to the school board's acknowledging that us parents know what is truly best for the individual needs of our families and children with regards to COVID-19. Please continue to respect the basic understanding as we relate the same to others. The differences of how we each choose to live with COVID-19 as part of our society does not need to divide us. Fall is here and we are entering the transitional cold and flu season. We all know that this means, what this means for school as far as sick kids and staff. As we have all lived with the stresses that came with the pre-COVID-19. We hope that we can all continue to keep a respectful level of head and

115remember to continue to maintain proper hygiene, stay home when you're not feeling well, but most importantly, be kind and live. Sincerely, Mark and Jennifer Schroeder. Thank you. Karen? Sorry, can you hear me okay? All right. I'll just lean in a little bit. I just first want to thank each of you for your support. I appreciate it. Thank you for allowing me to speak tonight. I just have a few things I want to kind of say. I have been a nurse in the medical profession for 21 years. I worked in surgery. So I actually wore masks for 21 years. It has always been my practice at work to understand a lot of the details. About wearing masks. We have always been told in my past that we were only allowed to wear masks in surgical procedures

116for two hours. And then they had to be changed because they harbor bacteria. And they trap moisture. And I feel this has really been a very strange year. I have been a nurse for 21 years. I am also a 10-year certified pediatric nurse. Of which, yes, I did surgery on babies, too. So for me to say that masks are okay for children, I would say absolutely not. It's detrimental, affects psychological on them. It lowers IQ if they cannot see your face. Especially babies. That's all they get is recognition. I'm a pediatrician. I'm a pediatrician. I am also a nurse. So I would say to give them a mask. To get recognition from your face. And to cover their faces. At any age is bad. Just horrible. And I guess that's all I want to say

117about masks. The other thing I want to say is that the COVID testing when you are sticking nasal swabs in there, that has ethylene oxide in it. Ethylene oxide used in surgery. We wrap things. And I am appalled by sticking and swabbing so many kids and people. It actually causes cancer. All right. Thank you. An email from Lynn Olajink. I'm a concerned citizen and parent. The COVID Delta virus remains highly contagious. I do not understand why the district is not following all of the CDC, AAP, and DPI recommendations. Adequate spacing, washing hands, ventilation, cleaning, and universal masking are all needed to control the current situation, slow the spread, and keep our students and staff as healthy as possible. These are all proactive measures and are lacking and or are not happening at all. Contact tracing

118and testing are reactive. I have two children in the district that have a very rare autoimmune condition and are at high risk for complications from a COVID infection. They are both vaccinated and take precautions. Yet, they, like many others, have a right to be at school and learn. They should be allowed to learn in an environment that is as safe as possible. Not implementing all these safety mitigations, it's simply... Please put politics aside and look at the true facts to keep everyone as healthy as possible by aligning MASD protocols with the recommended CDC, AAP, and DPI recommendations. Thank you for your time, parent and educator, Lynn. Next, I will have Monica Grossman come down. No, Monica. Okay. If I could have Carolyn Simon. Hello, I'm Carolyn. You hear from me a lot. I've got three

119kids. Two are at Big Bend. And we almost didn't come back this year because of... masking. I kept them all virtual last year. And I was looking at taking them to a private school, and we opted to come back for another year. If masking or any additional COVID mitigation measures come back into play, I can tell you that our family isn't going to play ball or comply. So if it means that my kid's classroom would have to wear a mask because there's over 20% of COVID or whatever your mitigation policy is, we're going to have to come back. We won't play ball. My kids are coming without masks. They're not going to stay home. So that's just how we're going to play it. And I am going to do whatever I can to fight it.

120I literally have nothing but time and money to go to bat with McGuandigo School District, and I'm willing to do so. Also, for parents, one thing that we can all start doing is filing open record requests through the school district. So that's one thing that I've started to do. Anything that's out there, your area, anything that's out there you're able to see, so we can start going through all different things. So if anybody wants more information about that and people that I'm working with to start going through paperwork, reach out to me. Thank you. We'll have Vito read an email from Kelly Peoples, and then next I'll have Stephanie Cerniglia come up. Hang on a second. I've got to do my thing. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Last year the board

121made the decision to end all mitigation measures in regards to COVID. Now is the perfect opportunity to reflect on this decision. A couple of weeks ago we received an email stating that the district had an additional 300 ill students in just one week. I know that all of these illnesses were not reported as positive COVID cases. However, I asked the board to look at previous school years and see if there was ever a time when there was this many additional illnesses, no matter what the ailment was. If this had been the flu or lice outbreak, the district would have taken safety measures to prevent any further spread. What additional safety measures were taken in this instance? As a parent, data such as the daily percentage of students' absences is not available to me. I'm asking

122the board, what is your threshold of student and staff absence before safety mitigation measures are put back into place? The district continues to state it wants to keep learning as normal as possible. How is this possible when teachers are having to spend extra time creating sub-plans, virtual plans, re-teaching for absences, altering plans based on absences, etc.? How do these additional illnesses impact daily instruction, district assessments, and the ability to meet the rigorous academic demands our school district expects? Due to our nurses having enough time to spend on the health plans, acute care, immunization updates, IEPs, 504s, and their other duties, with all the additional time they are spending on increased student illnesses, 15 seconds. if the number of student and staff illnesses continue to increase, some type of change is warranted. Wouldn't you agree? Thank

123you. Okay, so I will have Stephanie come, and then if Jill, could you read the chat? We all received the email, 12 more students between September 10th and September 14th with COVID-19 positive PCR results. A district of 5,000 students, which equates to .0024%. How is this worthy of the email you sent on September 14th? Additionally, you mentioned 300 children being ill. Fear monger much? What happens when it's time for families who desire to get the seasonal flu vaccine to get the flu missed quadrivalent vaccine? The shedding studies of this are probably going to be most of your ill cases. Per the manufacturer insert, for ages 5 to 8 years old, of 102 subjects, 50% of them shed the virus through their nasal secretions for 23 days, and they can share that virus to others. This

124was never an issue before COVID. I can imagine a lot of parents with a typical vaccine schedule want to give their children the flu mist instead of the shot because it's one less poke for the children, and it's a lot less stress on the parent and child. Have those children quarantine at home until they're no longer shedding that inoculated virus. Not to mention that from receiving this vaccine, you have the same symptoms with the, um, same symptoms as you would without it, as well as the same exact symptoms as COVID-19. Runny nose, nasal congestion, irritability, lethargy, sore throat, headache, muscle aches, chills, fever. Let us not forget allergies. I would imagine that there are a lot of parents that suspect allergies but have not gone to an allergist for a proper diagnosis. I never thought

125that parents would have to have their children tested only so they could have documentation on file to prove that their symptoms are not COVID related. Guess what those symptoms are? Nasal congestion, sinus pressure, runny nose, itchy water, eyes, scratchy throat, cough, swollen, bluish colored skin beneath the eyes, decreased sense of taste or smell, increased asthmatic reaction. The fear of migraine needs to stop with all the children in the school district. There's bound to be many with health factors that give symptoms related to COVID, but not having the illness itself. That said, I disagree with mandates for mass COVID-19 vaccines and the ludicrous testing measures and quarantines for symptoms that are a part of daily life. For a lot of us, there is a distrust of the government, select members of the school board and the

126medical community. We need to be more careful about what we're doing. We need to be more careful about what we're doing. Some of us have had experiences with incompetent physicians resulting in numerous years of symptoms before a diagnosis. At that point, a prospective patient might have more trust in themselves. Who better than the parents who raised their children for their entire life to know what their child has going on than the physician who sees them once or twice a year, let alone some from the school board, which seem to be the newest physicians of them all. Thank you. I will have Jill read an email from Michelle Kutcher and then Jackie Wagner. You will follow that. Thank you. Thank you. I'm writing you to voice my support for the school year to continue as it

127is in regards to COVID protocol. I understand that there has been some positive test results among staff and students in the district. I was notified about two weeks ago that my daughter was a close contact to a student that tested positive in her class. My daughter did not show symptoms and was able to continue to go to school. I cannot express enough how much that helped our family in terms of a parent staying home with her had she been quarantined. While I would prefer that illness from COVID was something that we would be able to continue to experience, I think it is time for us to accept that we need to allow this virus to run its course. I believe implementation of any mitigation measures is unnecessary. Thank you for all that you do. Michelle

128Kutcher. Okay. And then Jackie. Hi there. I want math back in school. I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. I can tell you at least from my kids. What? Okay. What? Cool. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Yes. I have two kids in school and I can tell you, I know that all kids aren't the same, but for the most part, I don't think the kids even mind wearing masks. My kids wear, oh, okay. Please be quiet and allow her to speak. Thank you. I'm just baffled at the fact that COVID hasn't gotten any better. Things didn't get any better from last year. With the Delta variant, kids are more at risk and yet we're doing nothing. doing nothing we threw out everything we did last year and

129I just don't really understand that so I look forward to maybe getting some clarity and getting some you know rule rules across the board in place it was concerning to hear another parent expressed that they were told they did not have to test their child that we don't have the same things in place across the district is concerning somebody mentioned not doing deep cleaning and sanitizing anymore and I for the life of me can't figure out why we would have stopped that I can't see why anybody would have had any objection to that and I do really believe that the reason that masks and mitigation procedures have gone out the door is not because of facts but because of pressure from the louder voices in the community so I look forward to seeing what we

130decide next thank you thank you okay I will go ahead and read an email okay I will go ahead and read an email from Ashley Schurning cherry if you would read Jamie Zarpata after that Joel would you read Kristin Mirren after that Jeremy I can just read them though you guys so we can keep going hello I'm writing you as both a mom of children in the district Prairie View Elementary School and Parkview Middle School and a teacher in the district Big Bend Elementary School I would like to give you a few words of my opinions on masks I know they aren't an action item but I'm worried that they will be pushed again because of the minority so oh and other districts are following in there in the ridiculousness I feel the entire culture

131of our building is starting to finally return to normal kids are happy teachers are happy everyone is still doing their part to keep things clean and sanitized teachers are ready if kids are out sick any sickness not just COVID and more importantly it's a choice to wear a mask and you know what so some do most don't but no one cares or points it out I love that it's a choice we are making at this work I personally do not want masks back living having asthma myself last year was a nightmare oftentimes I have inner ear issues so when people wear masks I can't hear imagine having a teacher that can't hear you through a mask that is being forced on you it's not right my own children lulled them and it's a fight a

132fight I don't want to have I could go into studies, but I'm sure you are being bombarded with them. Masks don't work. To be honest, which 37 kids are sick? The one that wears the mask in my class is sick? And seriously, the number is out of 4,500 children. Why are we panicking? COVID is not anywhere. This is not anywhere. This will be our new flu. Excuse me. COVID is not going anywhere. This will be our new flu. We are going to have to have a mask discussion every year. How exhausting for everyone. I appreciate you all taking the time to read this and all the other emails. I know you are in a tough spot, so thank you. Good luck at the next meeting. Jamie. My daughter goes to Prairie View Elementary in the

133district. I want masks to be optional still. It has been proven masks do not do anything to help the spread of COVID-19. The boxes on the paper mask say right on it does not fight against COVID-19. Last year, my daughter was out sick. More due to wearing a mask all the time. She had more upper respiratory infections and sinus infections from wearing those masks. Plus, every time she stayed home sick, she had to go get a COVID test. I knew every time she didn't have COVID and she was sick from wearing her mask. I cleaned and sanitized all of her masks on a daily basis. It's not right to put something over our children's faces. I'm a first responder and I don't even wear a mask all day at my job, so why should kids

134have to? What it boils down to is the irresponsibility. I'm a responsible parent that sends their kids to school sick and irresponsible staff members going to work sick. Don't make others pay for irresponsible ones. Masks should be optional. Don't force my kids to do something she does not want. She very much enjoys having not wearing a mask. Plus, since masks have not been required, she has not been sick. I'm not the type of person to shame someone if they feel mask wearing protects them. That is their choice. But like I said, do not force others to wear a mask. Wear them. My husband and I went to Musconago-McWanago School District. As children and teenagers, we chose MASD because of the district's reputation and the education we received. We were so happy, along with our daughter,

135that she didn't have to wear a mask when the district made it optional. On another note, no COVID vaccine mandates, please. There has not been enough testing for me to feel comfortable for my child to have a vaccine. Plus, you can still get COVID and spread it even being fully vaccinated. If masks and vaccines are going to be required by the school district, my husband and I will consider homeschooling and pulling our child from the district. We are not the only parents thinking of doing this either. So please keep mask mandates optional and no COVID vaccine mandates. A letter from Ashley Shirning. Once again, we're having to voice our opinions on a topic that we should be done discussing. I have two children in the district, one in fourth grade and one in second. One

136of my children is on the spectrum. I believe that bringing up the mask debate once again is not only a misuse of the virus, but also a misuse of the vaccine. valuable board time, which you could be discussing more valuable school-related topics, but a discussion of a topic that is already a parental choice. The science of masks on children, and even adults for that matter, hasn't proven that masks work. Masking our children is doing more harm than good. If parents are worried about their children contracting the virus at school, then they can make the parental decision to keep them home. That is their right, and it's my right to keep my children in school when they're able to get the very important socialization and interaction with other students and adults that I can't provide to

137them at home. I spoke at one of the meetings last year about putting masks on my autistic son. It was very harmful to him mentally, I believe, but at that point, after a lot of nights of crying and screaming, we made it through. Now he goes to school every day without a mask on, and he is doing great. I don't believe that any one of you know how it would be to have to tell him that he would need to put a mask on for good. How to explain to him that once he leaves school, he can take it off and the virus is gone. How once he is not in school, he can resume normal life. How do you tell a child who doesn't understand like you and I do something like that? Just

138please, I could go on, but don't only think about the 99 percent of the population in the schools. Remember to think about the 1 percent who may be affected the most. If the parent thinks this is safe to send their children without a mask, let it leave it up to the parents to advocate for their child and make the decisions for them. Thank you for listening. Next, a letter from Laura Gassner. Good morning. Please leave the masking of children up to their parents. We as parents can decide what risk is appropriate for our family, and that's how it should stay. Thank you. I disagree with mandates for masks and COVID-19 vaccines for students, faculty, and our bus drivers. The mask should be used when your child is getting to school-age children. It should be up

139to the discretion of the parents, guardians, and their respective children. There is no valid scientific study to show it is effective for either masks or COVID-19 vaccines. Even my wife, whose immune system is subpar and is on medication for it, does not expect others to wear a mask for her as her health is her responsibility. Masks should remain optional, or my wife will be taking our children out of school to homeschool yet again like we did last year. We both prefer to keep our kids with their peers. I would also say that should make... I also say that should make... masks remain optional. I am against children being segregated if they aren't wearing a mask. Thank you, Matt. Letter from Pam Bolden to MASD board members. First and foremost, I want to thank you for

140serving as a member of the board. I can't imagine the amount of stress required when dealing with the decisions you have been tasked with. As a parent of two MSD students, I wish to express my concerns and opinions. I want to start by saying I am pro keep my kid in school. What does that mean? It means we have to do what we can to keep our kids healthy so that they can attend class, and I want to thank you for your support. I think that both sides to the issue can all agree with this. We want our kids at school. Last year we had a lot of strict mitigations for a virus that hardly affected children. This year we have hardly any mitigations for a virus that seems to be affecting more children and

141teachers at a much higher rate. Can we please meet in the middle? One, please require masks. They work. There are studies. It doesn't hurt anyone and can only help stop the spread so our kids can stay in session. If that offends too many people, fine. Whatever. Having masks be optional doesn't mean that we will stop our kids from going to school. Thank you. doesn't help a lot as mask wearing protects the spread of infection. It does not help someone avoid getting infected. Almost two years into this, we should understand this, right? So if my kid doesn't have the virus, attends with a mask and sits next to Billy who has the virus without a mask, my masked child can still get sick. Versus if my child and Billy both have the mask on, the chance

142of Billy spreading it reduces greatly. So for masks to work effectively, we need it to be a team effort. I know this is a sensitive issue for whatever reason. Number two, please go back to students having a water bottle. Turn the bubblers off. Thanks. Simple, doesn't offend anyone. Easy way to potentially lessen the chance of spreading germs. Something I would hope all parents could agree on. Three, please consider changing your exposure policy. This is my biggest concern. Currently when a student is exposed and is considered a close contact, parents receive an email with this nice flow chart titled, I'm ill. It is pictured. Please consider making a chart that is for children who are just ill and children who are ill after exposure. Those are two different student, two different situations and they should have

143two different responses. So I would encourage you to consider changing your flow chart. A sore throat should not require a student to be home for 10 to 14 days, of course. If you're exposed to COVID and develop a sore throat, please, please require that child to stay home and get tested. I personally feel a child who feels ill with one or more symptoms is a different situation from a child who has one or more symptoms who has not been exposed. Currently students are exposed and develop symptoms can still attend without a test. Okay. Erica, could we just interrupt real quickly? So our student reps, our patients, our staff, our staff, are patiently waiting to conduct, to share their report. Board members, the report is in your folders. So maybe they could do that and then

144head out when they have to do their homework. Sure. I think that's a great idea. We will take a break. We'll split these up. Why don't you guys share your student rep report with us? All right. Starting with Big Bend Elementary, the Save Club kicked off the 2021 and 2022 school year with some ice breaking activities and motivating inspirational ideas to share with students throughout the building. Thank you to Mary Johnson and Jenny Kimenow for leading the club again this year. The high number of participants is a reflection of their passion for putting students in leadership positions and promoting safe decisions in a fun atmosphere. Clarendon Elementary. At Clarendon, students are recognized for their positive behaviors by staff in the building. Students are awarded with a certificate and a picture for being respectful, responsible, and

145safe. Eagleville Elementary. This month, students celebrated their first ever Parent Creek Day. Parent Creek Day was proposed by a group of fourth graders during their persuasive writing until last year. Parents were invited to come and learn about Jericho Creek from the fourth graders, explore the creek with their kids, and have a picnic lunch. Eagleville also celebrated its 172nd birthday on September 23rd. They celebrated with their annual Heritage Day festivities. The original school bell from 1849 rang 17 times once for each decade. They learned what Eagleville used to be like from a former student and explored artifacts from the past during a history walk. In the Library Technology class, students practiced the design engineering process by designing fairy houses and then built them in the woods. Prairie View Elementary. Prairie View was excited to welcome the

146students back in September for the 2021-2022 school year. They began the year by having an assembly to introduce new staff members, review the PVES Pride Guidelines, and use the project as a platform for student engagement. Prairie View was the first school to be held for the 20th anniversary. The school was and welcome all new students to Prairie View. They have a great first week back in the building. It is fun to see the joy and excitement in kids' faces to be back in school. Prairie View students and staff gathered around the flagpole outside of the building on September 10th in remembrance of September 11th, 2001. They celebrated the 20th year anniversary with a thoughtful message delivered by Mrs. Voss, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and the playing of taps by Mrs. Clements. It was

147a beautiful ceremony to remember 9-11. Prairie View's fourth graders participated in a book tasting to kick off their first reading unit. Each student explored several different realistic fiction books and walked away with a new book to read for the upcoming unit. Rolling Hills Elementary. Rolling Hills is off to a great start. Teachers have been conducting assignments to determine levels, gaps, or holes in learning from last spring. Staff will be meeting on October 11th to review all of the data. Rolling Hills had their all-school Raptor Assembly to review behavior expectations as well as the Matrix Mix-Up, where students were taught expected behaviors. Fifth and sixth graders were also representing each homeroom and competed in the Kahoot about the Raptor way. Rolling Hills PTO is planning on hosting a Grandparent Lunch Week at Rolling Hills during the

148week of October 4th along with the Fall Book Fair. Grandparents will be able to pre-order lunch through the PTO who is overseeing this event. Section Elementary. PBIS Kickoff. After a year of Tier 1 training and a summer to build the program, the PTO will be able to host a lunch event at the PTO. The section PBIS team kicked off a new PBIS system to begin the 2021-2022 school year. On the first Friday of this year, the PBIS team, along with selected sixth graders, held an all-school assembly and a Hawks Habit Day. During Hawks Habit Day, students rotated 12 different sections to learn and review the expected behaviors throughout the school. New Student Lunch. The second week of the school year, Mrs. Bertinet, the school counselor, and Mrs. Crockford hosted a special lunch for the students

149who are new to Section. During this lunch, students get to eat in the conference room while they meet with other students in their grade who are also new to the school. Along with lunch, Mrs. Bertinet facilitates a Getting to Know You Dice Game that gets the students talking and learning about each other. This is also a time for new students to ask any questions they have about Section. Alright, for McWanagoe High School, classes and workshops opened again this September as the district's community education program resurfaced. From birth to retirement, community members can find suitable learning experiences in this year's programming. Parents and preschoolers from newborn to four bonded over music and movement experiences in the Mini Musicians classes. Yoga sessions began for both adults and youth. Participants used the Fork in the Road restaurant culinary

150lab for a Saturday morning canning class, and seniors learned how to navigate through Medicare filing. Learning experiences continue as we make activities and facilities available to the public. McWanagoe High School has been rewarded a substantial mental health grant and AODA grant this summer. The current programming they have, added thanks to the grant, is the MHS PVMS partnership with the Gals Institute of Delafield to provide in-house mental health support for students at no cost to the family. They are also using GALS support to provide parent presentations on a variety of mental health topics on evenings at Brooklife throughout the year. The first presentation will be on October 26th with a focus on building resilience in our youth. The MHS Counseling Department will be completing the senior class meeting next week and are in the process of

151meeting all new freshmen. Those freshmen meetings will be completed by the last week in October. At that time, they will be moving on to addressing student needs via a small group counseling based on the results of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that will be given to all students at MHS in November. In spring, counselors will be moving on to meeting with all juniors to plan the next steps in post-secondary planning. They have revamped the entire department programming and are very proud and excited with what they have already achieved. This year's Marching Band Competition season got off to an amazing start on Saturday, September 18th. The students were energized for the first competitive performance and they made the most of it with a fantastic run of their show, Into the Cosmos, at Franklin High School's Saber

152Invite. The night got even better during awards when they were recognized for Best Visual Presentation and First Place in Class Quade, as well as First Place overall. This was a monumental night for all of the students as we placed higher than a number of other bands for the first time in program history, including a six-time defending state champion, Oak Creek High School. I would also like to say, as a member of that marching band, I'd like to say a huge thanks to all of the staff that worked on it, and especially Mrs. Angeli, who puts in an extraordinary amount of work for that. For the MHS International Club, they attended the Marching Band Competition, and they were very excited. They attended a JV Boys soccer game to support two of the international students from Egypt.

153Wabwanago High School has international students from five different countries this year. Students and staff from MHS helped commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attacks on 9-11 by putting up a display with posters and 2,977 flags. Each flag had the name of a person who was killed on that day. The Social Studies Department gathered up over 250 first-hand accounts of what people remembered of that day, and this primary source information will be studied by future MHS students. And I believe that this was also on WISN, and Ms. Friend and Ms. Canfield both worked tirelessly for this, and there is a great deal of community support for it, too, that they wish to convey. On August 2nd, the Key Club volunteered four hours of their time to help organize, number, and deliver the new textbooks for each

154teacher in the Social Studies Department. This saved teachers hours of time and was greatly appreciated. And then from August 2nd to August 4th, the MHS Boys Girls and Soccer Team programs hosted its annual youth soccer camp after taking a break last summer due to COVID-19. Coaches and athletes coached children from kindergarten to eighth grade for three days of fun, and then they were able to participate in the MHS Boys Girls and Soccer Team program. This was a great experience. And the hope is to grow this camp more next summer. Thank you very much. We have roughly 15 more citizens' comments to move through. Everybody is still hanging in there and game. We'll finish these up real quick. Cherry, if I could have you start with Haley, Joel, Shelly. Ebel? No, Oppenheimer. Haley Oppenheimer for you,

155Cherry. Shelly, you don't have to do that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Shelly Oppenheimer for you. You don't have to do that. Haley? Okay. I thought you said Katie and I'm not finding it Katie. Sorry. Dear McGuanagoe Area School District Board members, I am reaching out to you to voice my concern over the mandatory masking of our students. I recently transferred my daughter to MASD. I recently pulled my daughter from attending a small private school in Racine and moved her to Parkview Middle School. I did this for a number of reasons. One of my

156main concerns was the mandatory masking. I chose between McGuanagoe and Oak Creek and I felt okay with it. I felt Oak Creek was heading against my beliefs and felt Parkview was a better place. Last year she, like many students, was forced to wear a mask for eight plus hours a day while attending school in person. I found that she suffered headaches from wearing a mask during school hours. She had difficulty breathing. This affected not only her school performance, but her mental and physical health. We have had to have extra counseling and psychiatric treatment to help with all of the extra anxiety that this unfair treatment has caused. I felt that by making this choice to transfer schools to MASD for this school year, we would not face these issues and my daughter could continue to

157function as a healthy, normal 12 year old. I believe the masks are harmful and do not let my child's immune system work as it is supposed to. I have heard a lot of talk among the McGuanagoe parents that the school board is moving back to mandating masks. This concerns me very much. I respect parents' choices that want their children to wear masks, but I will now allow my child to continue to be masked for another year and continue to watch her health and mental being decline. I respectfully ask MASD to continue to make wearing a mask optional for students. MASD mandates masks. I will have to reconsider my daughter's future enrollment in MASD. School Board. Hi, I'm sending this email to request that masks remain optional. If you look at the statistics of the COVID

158virus, the flu virus most definitely affected children more. And never did we wear masks to restrict the spread, because it wouldn't have been possible to wear masks if we had not been wearing masks. This virus is a virus. Therefore, we should not be mandating that people wear masks for this virus. They can be optional, and those that want to want the false security that they work, let them wear them. But it is child abuse to make them mandatory. I strongly feel that we as parents should be able to make the decision for our kids, not a school district. Clearly, those that were adamantly opposed to sending their kids to school without masks probably are enrolled in some type of virtual school or program. Those that have kids in school with mask optional rule, and I

159guarantee your in-person enrollment numbers are up compared to last year, clearly are fine with masks being optional. I also know many people personally who wore them religiously for months and now have respiratory issues ongoing as unhealthy bacteria developed in their lungs, and now have, and they are on meds to try to fix that. I do not and will not subject my children to that unnecessarily. Please look at the real stats, not the fake news stats that do what is best for our kids and staff. One last thing. The COVID vaccine needs to remain an option for teachers and students 12 and up. There should be no mandating it anywhere. We have always allowed people with the option to get the flu shot, so why mandate this? If those that wanted it got it, then they

160clearly got it because they felt they would be protected and should be. It is unconstitutional to mandate something for someone else's body. Thank you. Dear members of the McGonigal School Board, I have a daughter attending McGonigal High School. after a very difficult year last year the district voted to make the school's mask optional that was an excellent decision and provided my daughter with the last few weeks of school without it without the terrible side effects of mask wearing ask anyone who attended who attends or works at mcgonnell high school the mood and the psychological impact was when they were able to attend without masks the relief and the joy was obvious please keep the mask optional policy my daughter cannot go back to the headaches lightheadedness frequent trips to the health room to lie down

161so she didn't faint the depression due to being forced to cover up her face the inability to understand a teacher or fellow student while walking through or while talking through layers of fabric the inability to see each other's facial expressions trying to sing with a plastic mask that inhibits breathing masks are not the answer numerous scientific studies prove they make no difference and actually harbor deadly backdating and mental health risks and the need to be able to get back to school and be able to go back to school and be able to go back to school and be able to go back to school and be able to go back to school and be able to go back to school and be able to go back to school and be able to go back to

162school a recent study in india showed this along with several studies done in the u.s let's use common sense such as washing hands and staying home and ill as we do with other viruses or flu bugs that affect our youth even more seriously let's value the strong natural immunity 27 in quotations 27 times stronger than the vax than the vaccine immunity per the israel study published in the scientific american that so many students and families now have and stop the unnecessary fear-mongering masks do nothing and should not be forced on our kids thank you i'm reaching out to you today to voice my concern over the mandatory masking of our students my family is new to masd we recently pulled my stepdaughter from attending a small parochial school in racine and moved her to parkview

163we did this for a number of reasons but one of our main concerns was mandatory masking last year she like many students was forced to wear a mask for eight hours while attending school in person we found that she suffered headaches from wearing a mask during school hours and that she had difficulty breathing this affected not only her school performance but her mental and physical health we truly felt that if we moved my stepdaughter to masd this year we would not face these issues and she could go on functioning as a normal 12 year old there has been a lot of talk among parents that the school board is moving to mandate masks and this is concerning i respect those who wish to wear masks but i will not have my child masked up for

164another year only to watch her health decline once again i respectfully ask masd to continue to make mask wearing a choice not a requirement if masd mandates masks i will have to reconsider my stepdaughter's enrollment and my son's future enrollment with masd we will attend the meeting on monday september 27th to christine continue to voice our concerns sincerely christine oppenheimer dear school board members as a parent with a second grader at rolling hills a freshman and junior at mhf and two recent graduates i'm requesting that you continue to remain masked optional for all students in the district working for the regional hospital in this country i see the daily count of covid positive patients i can tell you firsthand that the numbers being published are not an accurate depiction of reality any patient who comes

165in and has had a cough congestion sore throat or feeling tired at any point in the previous 14 days is automatically tested and put on a rule out status as you can imagine in the midst of allergy season the majority of people can answer yes to at least one of these questions the actual number of positive patients positive patients is decreasing while we can debate the issue of mask redness and mask wearing we will also continue to work to address the issue of mask wearing and mask wearing in the future as well as social distancing and also if you are unvaccinated students please wear a mask wearing mask right now mask wearing we would need to consider the larger statement we are making to all the children in the district every day we strive to

166teach our children to make informed choices we offer healthy lunch choices to encourage proper nutrition we ensure our students have physical education to encourage them to maintain a healthy lifestyle we teach them that their bodies are their own and that they have the choice as to how to treat their bodies our students deserve the same choice with mass they deserve the right to choose what they want with their parents guiding that choice and the school supporting the parents and children masks should not be mandatory i urge you to uphold masks simple mask wearing mask wearing can be a great tip to documenting your recovery during COVID-19 and allow for masks to be optional. Our children are thriving and enjoying their classmates and teachers in an unmasked environment. Masks are just a start, and as informed

167parents, we are aware that this is just one battle in a war against our liberty. Let's end the mask issue and gather together to tackle issues of critical race theory, sexually explicit books, and vaccine mandates that are sure to come to our district if they haven't already. Jill Marin I am writing to voice my support to bring masks back to McGuanagall Area School District. I am voicing my concern especially for students who are not currently eligible to receive a COVID vaccine. My family has continued to wear masks when we are out in public because we feel it is our duty to protect ourselves and the community. This effort would be a much bigger impact if all students and staff were required to wear masks. I am a teacher in another school district, and I am

168witnessing firsthand the impact of the lack of COVID mitigation methods, including a lack of mask policy. The number of students who are testing positive is beginning to skyrocket, and we also have vaccinated staff members who are falling ill. If we want to keep students safe, we need to protect our students. If we want to keep schools open, we must wear masks. We all know that masks aren't fun to wear and that they are inconvenient, but it's worth it. Please keep our students and staff safe. Sincerely, Kristen Kaminar I am writing to express my incredible concern regarding the proposed mask requirement at MESD schools. It's a hard no for masks for us. Having lost my father last October to COVID, one would think we are pro-masks and mandates. However, as a family, we are open-minded and

169fact-based thinkers. He was highly vulnerable and in a high-risk category before vaccines were available. Our research is readily available. It simply does not support such requirements. No matter the spin you put on it, masks don't work. This begs a bigger question. The vaccines are widely available, and we, as a country, were told once that happened, life would go back to normal. Those who chose to be vaccinated have done so, and it's a personal choice. We are neither pro- or anti-vax. We believe in individuals making the best decisions for themselves. But three major pharmas have vaccines on the market, and we are told that they will protect you from COVID. Whether you believe that or not, it's what we are told would maintain it normally. So why, when they're available everywhere, are we still pushing mask

170requirements on children? It's nonsensical. You and I both know that as soon as they leave school, the masks come off, the football games are packed, Quick Trip is a hangout, sleepovers recur, and life continues. I will not bore you with statistics. You've seen them all. The ones about how wearing masks can cause more harm, physically and mentally. The ones about how only masks that are N95s work. The ones that show depression in children at Skyrocket. The ones that prove transmission amongst and between children is lower than the flu. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is

171the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe

172cases of COVID. The one I'm going to bore you with is the one that shows the most severe cases of COVID. 0.0024% statistic is worthy of laying groundwork on changes to a normal education. This is insanity. Masks don't work. Amanda Janik. Rick Stoll, to whom it concerns, there are tens of thousands of people at NFL college and MLB games without masks. Our children do not need to be masked. There are NFL college and MLB going on with tens of thousands of people on top of each other without masks. What's the point in masking our children? Betsy Stoll. Jody Dietl writes, I'm writing to once again voice my opinion in keeping masks optional in our school district. I have three students in the district, two at Clarendon and one at YMCA for 4K. I have to

173say I'm getting very angry and frustrated that the topic is even coming up again. I do not want my kids masked. I do not understand what is wrong with it. Being an option, I have a very, I've been very clear with my kids that some people feel more comfortable wearing masks and that's okay. As I watch everyone going to stores, concerts, sporting events, all the people for the Bucks championships, all know masks, but people want my four, five and seven year old to wear one for eight to nine hours a day. Enough. The virus is not going away. We need to learn to adapt. There is no mask mandate in the state of Wisconsin. The district offered up an option of sending your child virtual for the year if you didn't feel safe. And look

174how many signed up for that. It is showing how most of our parents in our district want our schools to remain mask optional. Jody Dietl. Did we have an issue or concern? No. No. First off, I want to say. Thank you. Since the end of last year, allowing the parents to do the parenting. As a parent of the Waterloo School District student, I feel it is important that we continue to keep masks optional and leave the parenting to the parents. As a McGuanagoe taxpayer, you work for us. I do not co-parent with the government. That was in bold. The school district or any other family. It is mine and my husband's choice whether to vaccinate our child, mask our child, COVID test our child, etc. I realize what. is right for my family may not

175be right for the next, but that is why mass are optional. My child wearing a mask does not protect another child. Just like vaccinated. My child will not protect another child is our choice and we want our child to continue to go to school where we don't live in fear of a virus that has a 90 has a 97 and 99% recovery rate. This time last year was a complete and utter struggle to get my child out of the door for school. He would continually say how he hates school. I can't breathe in the. mask. I can't see out of my glasses with the mask on. I just want to be normal again. It was a battle every single day. The tone did not change until the masks were made optional in May. This year

176has been completely different. He gets up on his own and he is ready for school day. He may not always like it, but it's not the struggle we had last year. I feel it is much healthier for my child. Please continue to allow the parents to parent. Thank you. First, I'd like to start by saying thank you to the board for allowing us as parents to make a decision about our kids wearing masks. Our son has mentioned daily how much he likes things being back to normal while he is at school and it shows at home that he has been having a better time so far. That being said, I would like to ask that you allow us, the parents, to continue making this choice for our students. The parents slash students that feel the

177need to wear a mask, still have that right and should continue to do so if it makes them feel comfortable slash safe. There is no reason every child should be forced into this. Last year, you guys talked in one of the board meetings about there being consequences for those who decide to bully or pick on kids that have made the choice to wear a mask or vice versa. I hope this would continue to be the case. Please let us continue this year as a normal school year and let us parent our kids as we decide. Thank you. Nick Jayek. Hello. I'm writing in once again to voice my opinion on the mask. I'm a student and I'm a parent. I'm a parent. I'm a parent. I'm a parent. I have three students in the district,

178two at Clarendon and one at the YMCA for 4K. I have to say I'm getting pretty angry and frustrated that this topic is even coming up again. I do not want my kids masked. I do not understand what is wrong with being optional. I have been very clear with my kids that some people feel more comfortable wearing masks and that's okay. As I watch everyone going to the stores, concerts, sporting events, all the people for the Bucks Championship all know masks, but people want my 4, 5, and 7-year-old. I'm not going to be the wear once eight nine days hours a day enough the virus is not going away and we need to learn to adapt there are no math mandates in the state of wisconsin either the district offered up an option of sending

179your child virtual for this year if you did not feel safe and look how many signed up for that it is showing how most of the parents in the district want kids in school with math optional thank you for your time good evening i'm emailing in regards to the growing support to mandate mask in schools again i would like to voice my opinion that mass should be kept as optional in schools with three kids currently in the district they have all expressed how much better this year has been so far without having to wear a mask also i would like i would just like to state that myself i would assume most parents are not anti-mass for all students but pro-choice for masking our own children please leave it up to individual families to decide

180their children's best interest when it comes to their health thank you kevin hill thank you for all your time and efforts when making decisions for our youth and school district my family and i do not support any mask mandate there's no science that supports the improved health of our students only drawbacks if there is no science that supports a mask mandate then why consider one who is behind the national push for masks teachers union this has become a political issue and our kids are the pawn brad minton good afternoon i will not be able to attend the school board meeting this evening but i've been made aware that there could be a potential for mass mandate to be reinforced i'm very much against this there have been numerous studies that show masks are ineffective in

181stopping the spread of the virus it is inhumane to make our kids wear masks while on the bus and in school for my kids that is an that is nine hours a day masks dehumanize us and serve as a concert minor to be afraid please do not bring back the mask mandate continue to make it optional for those of us who want to protect our children from the government's agendas please do not mandate it thank you jennifer a letter from louisa watt my husband and i wanted to send the school board an email regarding the potential coveted restrictions and mask requirements we strongly do not believe in masking our children first of all there is no scientific proof that suggests this is super beneficial to children in the prevention of the transmission of disease secondly

182we have had viruses our entire lives this is not the first nor will it be the last respiratory virus that will circulate in our schools children need to be exposed to germs in order to build their immune systems this virus has a 99.97 percent survival rate to the population of children with a high risk of transmission of the virus and it is a very important virus to the population and has not been shown to severely impact children at all in fact it has proven that children who do contract the virus and are not actively spreading that they are not actively spreading it to their kids or adults is it out there yes of course has it killed people yes so do a lot of other viruses mainly the flu virus every year which has somehow

183been forgotten about there's always a risk with everything in life and this virus is no different masking our children has actually been shown to be more harmful as kids are adjusting their masks all day thus touching other objects and touching their faces more and this virus has been proven to be a very harmful virus and it has been proven to be harmful to their health physically and mentally please consider the links below louisa watt there you go superintendent mcnulty and members of the masd school board i recognize that our school administrators and our school board find themselves in an unenviable position of trying to be sensitive to the views and preferences of two sides on opposite ends of the spectrum i want to start by saying that i believe our community and in particular our

184school district have done an absolutely incredible job navigating these difficult times our hybrid model last year was first class and offered a quality option for families that wanted to return to in-person instruction and also a quality alternative for families that did not during that time you were transparent about the need for direction and consistencies so that policy reversals were not being made abruptly or on a whim which allowed parents to make decisions accordingly at the beginning of the school year our district took the stance that mass will be optional that gave both sides of the mass debate options that reflect their personal beliefs and allowed for choice a community there is no right or wrong answer it is left to each parent and child to decide for him or herself during a time of great

185division i continue to believe this is the most reasonable and logical approach if you have any questions or would like to just discuss further i'm happy to do so thank you brian peters so that does conclude our citizens comments and we will go ahead and move on with the rest of our agenda we're going to jump into our consent agenda line agenda i'm looking for the approval of board minutes from august 16 2021 approval of minutes from our board working session on september 20th 2021 as well as the approve approval of voucher numbers 13411 to 134631 in the amount of 2.3 million in change and receipts for august 2021 totaling 7.6 million in change do i have any questions or concern hearing none this is approved by consent we are going to move in into

186our committee updates and we'll start with stern student learning erica i'm being asked by some folks here if they can still make public comments at this time do you want to weigh in on that then um is it just do we just have one i don't know how many do we have here were you guys here at the beginning to sign in no you weren't um we we went an hour and a half we might as well finish yeah why don't you come on up state your name sorry stephanie okay my name My name is Steven Prozen. I live in the village of McGuanagoe. I would just like to say thank you for this opportunity. I was here. I feel more moved and compelled to speak now hearing some of these comments. First of all,

187I'd like to say that this virus, like many have stated, isn't going anywhere. And with that being said, like many other viruses, maybe we need to focus on real mitigation efforts, such as hand washing, that may work, actually do work against almost every other disease. My wife has taught in MPS in charter schools. My son is going to clarity. My big concern question is that if she, in her case, if she's going to go to charter schools, what is she going to do? In her school districts, they talked about the fact, or naturally did this often, hand washing was built into the daily routine, helping kids take them to the bathroom. It's a five minute procedure. If they can get kids on the north side of Milwaukee to walk to the bathroom, wash their hands

188before they eat lunch, I'm sure that we could accomplish that in McGuanagoe. I mean, we have pretty good kids. Let's all be honest about it. And then the last thing I'd like to say is there was an earthquake. And then the last thing I'd like to say is that we have pretty good kids. Let's all be honest about it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, go ahead. Come on up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Jeff Mutchler. I'm a taxpayer of McGuanago. I've lived in McGuanago for almost 30 years. Kids went to the school system here. My concern is that we have a mandate that's in, or a lack of a mandate that's in place where masks are optional,

189and the school system has chosen to have an optional mask mandate in play. But when I leave for work and I'm right by the bus stop, the bus system needs to be told that they are contracted by our school system and paid for by our taxes, and they can't be telling the kids as they're boarding the bus that they all need to put their mask on or they cannot ride the bus, and if they refuse to wear their mask the next day, they won't be allowed to ride the bus because our school system has an optional mask mandate. Their employees may be held to a mask mandate, and the bus driver would need to wear a mask because that's what their employer requires. But the system of the McGuanago School District should speak out to

190the bus company and let them know that our students' masks are optional. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we are going to jump back into student learning committee report. Thank you, Stephanie. Sorry about that. At student learning this month, we talked about the 4K update on the survey we took, and... Colleen came in and went over the surveys, and overall the survey showed that parents were satisfied with the 4K offerings, and in addition, she presented on the curriculum work with the 4K staff that they completed this summer. They created a theme-based center with kits that will rotate through all of the different locations. We also discussed the 7th through 12th grade social studies curriculum adoption, and we were pretty... we presented with the social studies curriculum documents for the first four units. The committee did not

191have any concerns moving forward with the curriculum for the newly adopted resources. We talked about the summer curriculum work that was done, and there were many, many hours of curriculum work this summer with our staff, and... as well as professional development on October... excuse me, August 25th. MHS summer curriculum revisions, the unified music curriculum documents were reviewed. In addition, the committee... the committee agreed to change the drawing and painting three from a full year course to a semester course, allowing for more students to take the higher level art classes. Finally, a new curriculum sequence and pacing guide for biology was presented to the committee. The need for this work came out of... of making sure all the biology standards that are taught... are taught in the classroom, the state standards. We reviewed policies that are

192in your packets, and there were no... there were... no changes to the curriculum. And then Stephanie had her report. Do you want to do that piece? Yeah, I just gave an update on K-6 social studies adoption and where we're at, which is looking at pilot materials for this year, in addition to giving an update on the virtual numbers for the students who had originally signed up in last May, interest in virtual and the help that we did to lead them to Wisconsin Virtual School. That's left with me. And then we also had a lively discussion on the dress code at MHS. It was reviewed with student advice, and we talked about some different ways that the students could be made aware of these codes and how they could be addressed by administration. Okay, thank you.

193We will have personnel committee update. All right, at personnel, we discussed support staff vacancy report, and that we're having a hard time finding people for food service and... for coaching. We then discussed the MHS 2022 graduation. We're not making any changes. We're planning on heading back to... well, it's the AMFAB? American Family Field. American Family Field for the 2022 graduation. We did employee hiring process. We looked over policies 4121 and 4160, and we don't have any... We're coming back with some changes next month. Right. And then we did the... We did the college family dealership partnership. I don't remember. I'm sorry. We're moving forward with that. Sorry. Thank you. And then the Southern Wisconsin School Alliance membership. Sorry. We were discussing whether or not we wanted to be a part of that, and we're still

194deciding that. And the director will be coming to the next month's personnel committee meeting or the following one to discuss the advantages of being a part of that program. Did you have anything, Deb? Certainly. I would just like to add a little bit. We're looking for a support staff vacancies. Currently, we're looking for two student supervisors at the high school. We're looking for a paraprofessional special education aide for the high school and the middle school, an aide for our Prairie View Elementary, food service assistant, MHS cafeteria assistant cook, food service assistant. We're looking for two of those at the middle school. We're looking for a van driver district food server, custodial eight hours at the high school. We're looking for a professional six-hour custodial at the high school as well, custodial at the middle school,

195custodian at Big Bend. We need lots of substitutes, and we are looking for one recess monitor. And in conclusion, we're hiring. Thank you. Finance and facility committee update. First of all, we had our meeting at Eagleville, and we are making an effort. We have a schedule as board members to visit all of our schools this year, and we have various meetings at each of these schools. We take a tour to understand the facility as we look at our long-range planning. So this year was at Eagleville, and it was a very informative indoor and outdoor experience. Facility plan update led to a presentation from Tom about employing an outside firm to do a population study. This will tie to achieving some of our goals as we look to accomplish our strategic plan that Sean has referenced.

196And then we have a meeting at the high school, and we are looking for a professional six-hour custodial at the middle school, and we are making an effort to do some of our facilities as well as constantly revising and looking at what we're doing with our facilities. So that is an action item tonight that we'll have further discussion and presentation by Tom. Andy gave us an update on buildings and grounds items. We had some emergency repairs. At Parkview, we had an HVAC repair for $76,000. At Big Bend, we had some structural items for another $9,000. So we're looking at that. We're also looking at managing requests from parents to re-look at issues with a couple of bus stops. So the process is that Tom reviews that. He meets and discusses with the parent, meets with

197the dowsman, and then makes presentation to us as a committee. And sometimes it requires further review, and the parents may or may not choose to appeal that further. So we have a couple of those that we're looking at. And it's an ongoing process. So we're looking at that. And then we're looking at the next month's meeting. And then our final item was the budget and tax levy update, which I don't need to go into those details. It was part of Tom's in-depth presentation to this morning or this evening at the beginning of this meeting. It feels like we've been here all day. Sorry. Great. We're going to go ahead and move into our action items. First, we have appointments, resignations, and retirements. For resignations, we have got Christine Skagg, a half-time interventionist at the high

198school. And for appointments, we have Rebecca Heidenthal. It's my wife. Speech pathologist at Section. Sydney Hotz, grade one, elementary. That is at Big Bend. Laurie Nedesheim. That is a full-time position at Clarendon. Diane Pollack, Title I position at Prairie View in Eagleville. Sue Sterner, 50% at Big Bend for sixth grade. Rebecca Taddy. That is a full-time position at Clarendon. That's a kindergarten teacher. Jennifer Wollerman, Title I, Big Bend. That's a part-time position. And we have Michelle Ziegler who's being brought to the board for the elementary school. And she's the elementary education coordinator. I'd like to make a motion we approve these. Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion or questions? Okay. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. And now we will move to the COVID update and

199tiered mitigation proposal. Sure. So if you take a look at the packet that I gave you, I have a Google Slides presentation. That Google Slides presentation, which will be up on the screen as well, basically a summary of my memo. So the same information, a lot of the same information that's in the memo is on the Google Slides presentation. And I think Tom's going to move the slides forward for me. Thanks. Yep. It's just right after the annual meeting update. It's on the same slide presentation. Oh, okay. Got it. Cool. So active COVID cases in the district. So first and foremost, I think one piece of good news is that we all share the same goal. And that goal is to make sure that we keep our schools open. So I think that's pretty clear

200from all the comments tonight and the comments that we've had since the start of the school year. That's our goal. We know that our students do better when they're, most of our students do better when they're in face-to-face instruction. So an update on our active COVID cases in the district. We have two graphs on this first page. On the left-hand side is our COVID cases. And on the right-hand side is our COVID update, which we do on Tuesdays and Fridays. And that is from last week, Friday to the 24th of September. And you can see the active student cases. Active student cases in this case means that they are positive. Asterisks, of course, mean that there are less than five. And you can see last Friday, we had nine positives at Clarendon, seven at Parkview,

20111 at the high school for a total of 37. And as far as staff, on Friday, we had five active staff members that were out. Of course, we also want to keep in mind that in addition to those five staff members that were out, we also have a number of staff that are home with symptoms and others that are home with children who might be positive or identified as close contacts and have to quarantine from other districts. Then on the right-hand side, we have some good news. And you can see. Last Friday, when we had 37 total positives in the district, we're actually down to 32 for our students. So today, Monday, the 27th, we have 32 positives. So that is a reduction. So that's some good news. The breakdown there, I don't have the

202breakdown per school. I'll give you a real quick update. We have 12 at the high school, 10 at Parkview. And then we still have a number at Clarendon. We have seven at Clarendon. We have seven at the high school. So that's a reduction on those two. And then we have 21 at the high school. And then we have a new number at the high school. We have a new number at the high school. And then we have a new number at the high school. So this was a request from a board member. I added this. And the request was, can we get the number of positive students per month last school year? We don't have that. But we do have the number of positives that we had throughout the school year last year. So you

203can see. This is 2021 school year. september september 18th i guess is when the first date that we have recorded on this graph and we had under five uh got up to eight uh seven throughout the month of september our big spike during the school year was in mid-november um in as i said earlier tonight that's when we ended up closing the high school for about a week and went virtual one concern that we may have at this time is the comparing our numbers of active or positives in september of this school year compared to september of last year we do have significantly more students that are positive in september of this school year the next slide this is our student absent rate for 21 22. i i just do need to make sure that

204i make this clear and this is for last week uh september 20th and then also today september 20th 27th so september 20 through the 24th last week for each of our schools the number of students that were absent or percentage of students excuse me for any reason so this could be covet related it could be the flu it could be for family vacation it could be for a truancy we don't have too many of those college visits i could have wisdom teeth your appendix out whatever it might have been this is the percentage of students that were absent for any reason and so you can see at the high school today in far right hand corner bottom right hand corner ten and a half percent of our students we have about sixteen hundred plus students

205at mhs ten and a half percent were out for some reason parkview had 7.6 section same 7.6 rowan hills seven percent etc then the next graph shows where we were not last year because last year obviously we had covid and we had a lot of students not only outside but also outside of the school district so we had a lot of students not sick but we were also quarantining students if you recall that i'm sure you do so we had i would say some skewed data so we went back to 2019-20 to compare the absences roughly for the same week so this is the fourth week in september from 1920 and you can see the absent rates for our schools at that time and you will see an example of that in the next slide

206again remember we're not mandating any quarantines at this time in our schools you can see roughly roughly that there are about two times as many students absent this this year than there were two years ago when we didn't have covid but again this is for any reason not just covid related then the next graph tom if you want to advance that slide again the next graph shows our student absent rate for last week and today we're going to look at the number of students who tested positive and this is for covid related and what we are saying for covid related at this time are these are students who tested positive who are homeless symptoms and who are in a voluntary quarantine so these numbers are important because later when we talk about my proposed plan

207for for the tiered mitigation proposal with one exception that would be the quarantine so it may actually be fewer but this is where we're at today percentage of students absent for each school you can see mcgonigal high school five percent parkview four percent section point six rolling hills 2.5 prairie view elementary 1.9 eagleville didn't have any today and then clarendon was at four percent and big bend was two point nine percent any questions about that that data so far okay then i provide some updates uh for waukesha county and as you know or i think i've told you that the waukesha county superintendents are meeting with the waukesha county health department each week and we meet on wednesdays so the data that i'm sharing right now is of last wednesday so the 22nd so the

208seven day average in the county for new cases and this is for all ages is 163 per day covid is increasing in the county since june and of course that mainly due to the delta variant in july in june there are very few cases and i'm sorry i don't have the number on on this slide but uh it was quite minimal but july we had 821 active cases or positives in walkershaw county and and just to give you an idea how many people we have in waukesha county 400 over 400 000 so 404 000 as a matter of fact but still there are about 620 cases in two to one four hundred thousand of cases and we have about 80% of the cases across the state in waukesha county and a lot of cases in

209the county of copley but early on last year we had about five four more cases and we're talking about twenty five six cases so that's over one and a half days and we're just talking about you know it's always a large number of cases for that but the increase is as a matter of fact. So July 821, August 3,266, and then September from September 1st to the 20th, we had about 2,400, a little more than 2,400, 2,417. So if you project that forward, if you take a look at that was roughly two-thirds, you add another third, maybe 3,600 for the month of August. We don't know that for sure. I'll get a better, I'll get an update on Wednesday of this week. They have seen a large increase in positive cases under the age of

21019. That's not a surprise since our students are back in school. And so you can look from September 1st of 2021 to September 20th of 21, there were 790 positive cases under the age of 19 in the county. Taking a look at, and this is a concern, last year in September of 20, there were 65 positive cases in that 0 to 9 age group for the entire month of September. But this year, we already had 63 in that 0 to 9 age group in the first three days. Moving on to the next slide, continuing on with Waukesha County, more data for our home county, the vaccine rate. Good news, 69.5% of those who are eligible for the vaccine rate are eligible for the vaccine rate. So that's a good news. And again, we have over

211400,000 people in the county, 69.5% of those who are eligible, so that's 12 and up, have received at least one dose. 50% of the students who are ages 12 to 17 have received at least one dose. And I say that's good news. I'm just going with what the county health department said. They seem pleased with those numbers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We're experiencing that ourselves, so we're familiar with that. And as of 920, there were three children from the county that were hospitalized, ages 0 to 19. So I'll repeat that. The number of children hospitalized in Waukesha County, as of September 20th, there

212were three for 0 to 19, and that was two in the first age category, 0 to 9, and 1 to 9. and one in 10 to 19. and and this is something that we have talked about before as far as deaths in waukesha county under the age of 40. so under the age of 40 during the pandemic during the entire time of covid in waukesha county there have been no deaths under the age of 40. any questions or concerns on that all right then some general covid data there's general consensus that the delta variant is more contagious but it's really difficult to determine determine if it's more dangerous for students that's definitely a challenge one recent study from the children's hospital of philadelphia i have shared some data here there are 1200 to 1400 children

213hospitalized across the country in the last few weeks the current rate of hospitalization for positive cases is less than one percent so 0.8 to 0.9 percent of one percent of positive cases so that rate has not increased so the rate of hospitalization for children with the delta variant has not increased according to the children's hospital philadelphia studies however total cases have increased so the number of positives amongst children have increased so using that same rate of positive cases resulting in hospitalizations of course results in more hospitalizations one one piece of information to try to put this in perspective this is from the new york times since the pandemic has started fewer than 500 americans have died from cobit that are under the age of 17. so i'll say that again since covid started fewer than

214500 americans have died from covet under the age of 17 and approximately 3,000 Americans under the age of 17 each year die from vehicle crashes. The next slide, please, Tom. So I include this slide because it's important for all of us to understand that superintendents, generally, other administrators in the district generally are not medical experts. And I completely understand that several people have been frustrated with the guidance that we have received from the CDC or DHS, federal organizations or statewide organizations, and some people are even frustrated with the WCHD, the Waukesha County Health Department guidance. There's certainly, with some people, there's a lack of trust in governmental organizations. And I get it. There's been some changing guidance, changing recommendations, and that's been frustrating to people. So people like me who are charged with running the

215district, who do we rely on? And I can tell you where I look. I look for organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics for advice on how to handle mitigations in schools, UW Health, and Children's Hospital, Children's of Wisconsin. And I'm sharing some information from Dr. Michael Gutzite. He is the chief medical officer for Children's of Wisconsin. As a matter of fact, he has a weekly blog on the Children's of Wisconsin Children's Hospital website. And I have the link there. Anybody can check that out. And then some key points from that blog from September 22nd. Positive COVID-19 results in Wisconsin kids remains high. Severe illness, however, from COVID-19 in kids still remains rare. The number of kids at Children's Wisconsin is steady. The acuity, the seriousness of those children that are coming to the

216hospital at Children's has increased slightly. And as some people have mentioned, other respiratory viruses continue to be high. Important to point out that Children's and American Academy of Pediatrics and UW Health all are on the same page with mitigation measures. And I'll read that. COVID-19 activity in Wisconsin kids continues to be high, with twice the number of kids testing positive for the virus than one month ago. Children's of Wisconsin continues to have the capacity to care for Wisconsin kids. So there's still room in the hospital. But Dr. Gutzite's encouraging families and school districts to reinforce the use of masks to decrease the spread of the virus. Next page. Now we're going to get into more of our mitigation measures. So I really like this quote, and I shared this with the personnel committee a couple

217of weeks ago. As far as the risk for COVID, the risk of COVID is low enough to live life, but high enough to be careful. And in my opinion, as the superintendent of this district, our normal start has not been careful enough. We all share the same goal, and that goal is to keep students and staff safe. That's always, always, COVID or not, always one of our main goals. And after the shutdown that we had, not last year, but the previous spring, we all know that we want to keep our schools open. So my recommendation is that we establish a tiered approach to mitigation. We established metrics that would trigger more safety measures. And then, if we see a reduction in cases, then those safety measures would go away. We're going to base those metrics

218on the spread of COVID within our schools. And we have had spread. As I shared with you last week, we did have to close down a classroom at Clarendon Elementary, a third-grade classroom because of a large spread of COVID. And if a факitiy should be low in a third-grade classroom, that's going to be a little bit more of a risk for our kids in the future. So I just want to get to that. I like to cherish those things and I pray that they stay close for as long as possible. So I want to take away some of that. So it's important for the school district. So thank you. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a note. large number of positives and students home with symptoms. Another area of agreement with

219a lot of people that spoke tonight and we heard on or we read the emails, symptomatic students. One of the keys, if we want to avoid having to wear masks, one of the keys is that students who are symptomatic, students who are sick, have to stay home. Not just students, staff as well. Symptomatic students have to stay home. And I'm also recommending, as you know, quarantines are optional. But when I talk to most other districts in Waukesha County, not all, not all, but most, students who are close contacts with an in-home positive should also be quarantining. So again, if you have a positive at home, positive at home, students who live in that household should be staying home. Now there is an exception and that exception is that students who are symptomatic should stay home.

220And if you have a negative鳳, that's going to be something that the district responsible would worry about the most. Also an exception would be for those students that are vaccinated. So obviously that's not an option for kids under 12 at this time. And if you really felt strongly about it, if you adopt these plans or parts of these plans, you could add exception, could add an exception as well, that students who test negative could stay out of the quarantine. Continuing on. The next slide, Tom. This, these next five, I think there are four please. five slides show the plan for the tiered mitigation so the first couple of slides first three slides show the plan for individual classrooms or individual grade levels at the elementary so these are the different tiers for elementary classrooms and

221grade levels so at zero to twenty percent of the students who are positive or probable and so probable would be a student that's home with COVID symptoms we've continued with masks recommended for students and staff we're like I said we're gonna require that quarantine I'm recommending that we require that quarantine for close contacts with in-home positives optional quarantine for close contacts for in-school positives that remains no cafeteria concert assembly etc modifications you and visitors and volunteers are still welcome to come to school but they should self screen and if they have symptoms they should not come to school so zero to twenty percent now some of our classrooms might have twenty students in them so if you get to twenty percent that's for kids so I just want to make sure that everybody's on the

222same page right so then we go to the next slide please yeah and then after we get to twenty percent that's a take that's that's a quick and that's a more long time still if you're practice you have to be klaseесь klausright the pandemic pandemic sort of tells you what stopped students doing some arrive at sandwich so if you're know someone's class moving that's a good answer so there's someumba and so in that sense over youuben the next level mitigation measures next here twenty one to thirty two percent in a classroom or a grade level are positive or probable hope they're almost symptoms now this is where there's a choice but of course you had to choice you don't have to do any of this but but i'm gonna say at that point we should

223be requiring masks for students if you're not comfortable with that you could use different languages and會用相 pinky use different language such as masks would be highly recommended. I'm saying that we should at this point in that classroom or at that grade level, masks should be required for staff members. Quarantines should remain optional for close contacts for in school. Obviously, we still have the mandatory quarantines for in-home positives. That's at all the levels. We start to socially distance in the classroom. If a grade level, if we're seeing COVID spread within a classroom, we would have that classroom eat lunch in their classroom. Those kids eat lunch in the classroom. They modify the lunch schedule. Visitors or volunteers must self-screen as long as they don't have symptoms. They can still come to the classroom. They can still

224come to the grade level, but they have to wear masks. Then we're going to take a look at field trips, concerts, and assemblies. They might have to be rescheduled. Then finally, the final mitigation tier, which we're trying to avoid, and that's putting that classroom in a classroom. We're going to have to have a classroom in a classroom. We're going to have to have a classroom in a classroom. We're going to have to have a classroom in a classroom. We're going to have to have a classroom in a classroom. We're going to have to have a classroom or that grade level into virtual instruction like we had to do with the classroom at Clarendon third grade classroom. We had four positives and four other kids home with symptoms. We counted that as eight and eight out

225of 24. That was about 33%. That's why we went virtual with that group. That's my proposal for an elementary classroom and a grade level. Any questions on that? Then the next two pages, if there are no questions, we're going to have to have a classroom. The next two pages would be for entire schools. These are going to be a little different percentages because obviously, I don't think it would be a very good idea to wait until we had 33% of the 1,600 students at McGowan to go high school to be sick or to be positive with COVID. Zero to 9% of the students are absent and absent due to positive test or homeless symptoms. We're going to require quarantine for COVID. Close contact with in-home positive. Again, that's always and that's it, normal operations. 10

226to 19% of the students in the school are absent for an absent again is due to a positive test or probable for three consecutive days. We have to maintain that absent rate for three consecutive days. At that point, I'm going to say that masks should be required. An option for the board would be to say they're highly recommended. I'm going to say that masks should be required. I'm going to say they're highly recommended. Masks would be required for staff members. We have social distancing in the classroom. Modify the lunch schedule. Visitors and volunteers must self-screen and be masked. And then we're going to look at modifying or restructuring or rescheduling those assemblies, concerts, field trips. And then the last page, when you have 20%, and in general, prior to COVID, prior to COVID at 20%,

227that is when the health department would be getting involved. If it was 20% of grade level, 20% of a classroom, 20% of an entire school, that's when the health department would be getting involved. When I was principal at Rolling Hills many years ago, for example, it was the swine flu that was highly contagious. Lots of kids were really sick. They were home. Health department got involved and we looked at closing the school and we reached the 20% threshold. So if we have for three consecutive days, we're going to have to make sure that we're not going to be 20% of our students in a school absent due to a positive test or their home with COVID symptoms. Health department's going to be engaged. Masks would be required for students and staff. Social distancing in the

228classroom, we're going to be needing to do those mitigation measures. No visitors or volunteers. Field trips, concerts, assemblies are going to be rescheduled. And I'm recommending, unless you want to give me the power, that the school board will meet with the school board to review the possible temporary move to virtual. So that's the plan. Okay, so I think we back up and look at these one at a time. As a board, is there discussion on the 0-20% of students that are positive or probable? So this is for elementary class or whole grade school level or grade level in a school building. Right. So proposing is what we're currently at is what I'm hearing. To continue with masks recommended for students and staff, required quarantine for, well, so this would be the change. Required quarantine for

229close contact with in-home positive unless the student is vaccinated or if we wanted to say negative test. So this is 0-20% of a classroom or a grade level. What are thoughts? I disagree completely with the probable part of it. I mean, anybody with a sim. With anything symptom, they're going to be counted as part of the number. So it doesn't make any, anybody can be probable. Anybody with any symptom whatsoever that decided to stay home because they have allergies, excuse me, or anything is considered probable, which means it's inevitable we're going to hit these things with anybody that wants us to hit them. If there's anybody that is in charge, not, and I'm not saying you, Sean, if there's anybody that decides, you know, we got, we got five kids. And they all got watery

230eyes. Well, that's probable. Count it. So that, that's just going to, that's going to stir up so much stuff or allergies or the flu or anything. Anything that we would not normally do this for. So what a define of probable, like, is it a definition problem of what probable is? Well, I'll be honest. I pretty much disagree with the majority of it. So I looked up, I just, on a whim, I looked up the number of deaths and I appreciate all the information shown. That's awesome. I looked up the number of deaths in 2018 from the CDC from the flu and there was 480 deaths of kids from the flu in 2018. We did nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was no masks. There's no nothing that we ever did throughout the country, throughout the district. If

231we had a complete outbreak of something and things were going haywire in a school, maybe something happened. But now it's an issue. Good point. I'm pointing out that we haven't had one single case. We have one single kid die in this, in, in, in Wapshia County. Not one. Why are we doing this? Why are we, why are we considering putting, I don't know how many emails I got to get from parents about how distraught they are and how horrible their kids feel. I dealt with it. My kid is, she is not happy with masks and the, the proposal or the idea of putting her in a mask, I'm, I can't disagree with the people that say I'll take my kid out of the district. I just, so. If we put something in place that makes

232it almost likely that we're going to end up sticking them in masks, it, I'm, I just, I don't agree with it. So, so Noel Mengie, our district nurse, is here and she can probably provide a little clarification on how students are identified as probables. Certainly better than I can. And, and so if a student has allergies, they're not going to be identified as a probable. So when, when parents call in their children and provide the symptoms, I think that's probably how we're getting that done. Noel, do you want to go to the microphone and explain that a little bit? Hi everyone. I'm just giving guidelines. I did not make these guidelines. So everyone who wants to like talk while I'm talking, they're not my guidelines. Okay. I'm doing what the board has asked me to

233do. So, question. Questions. The question was probable. When we, so he had mentioned earlier that there was eight kids, we had four kids out that were confirmed with COVID and four kids that had symptoms. How do we know what those symptoms are and how do we know what probable equates to whose? So, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. So probable, we use the illness flow sheet that was created. So if you have two symptoms. Can you talk closer to the mic? Sure. If you have two symptoms and you're going to get tested, we count that as a probable. If you have one symptom of the cough, loss of taste and smell, difficulty breathing, we count that as a probable. We have never counted itchy eyes as a probable. Allergies, we have options for parents. So

234I don't count itchy eyes. We count itchy eyes ever as a symptom. I'm sorry if that happened. I think the problem that a lot of parents have is the overwhelming majority of those symptoms are, can be attributed to almost like a ton of different things. So, and I understand you guys are just doing, you guys are doing what you're, what, it's on the list. It's on the list and it could be and it seems like it could be. You're not going to risk somebody's health. It's just safer for you guys to do what you, what you, what you're told is with the list that you're given. So I'm not saying that you guys are doing anything inappropriate or anything like that. But we're going to have a whole lot of parents that are very, very

235unhappy because their kids get counted as probable when they don't think that they are. Which is why I have a problem with it. So if a child does have allergies and what steps can the parents take? What steps can the parents take to avoid being close contact at that point and be off of our probable list here? Is there anything they can do? Allergies? I'm sorry, with the close contact and allergies? Well, what's happening when the allergy, is it a close contact and then they have allergy symptoms or what's causing them to have to go home again? And have to get a test? We have an illness flow sheet that describes all the symptoms. And it goes through. Okay. So it goes through if you have two, excuse me, if you have two of these.

236The next steps then if you have one of, there's a whole process to it. So if you're wondering what allergies is considered, it's essentially considered base by base. A lot of kids do have allergies. We get notes from physicians that say this child has allergies. These are his normal symptoms. He's back in school. Or they give us the symptoms prior to school. Or they say this is what he's experiencing. He can stay in school. We get notes from physicians with children who have allergies. Okay. But then you accept them and then if they are a close contact then they don't have to go get tested for COVID because they know it's allergies? Or are you still requiring them to go get tested even though the allergist has said these are allergies? Sorry, we're not having

237close contacts get tested. If you're a close contact, we are still following. We are following the normal illness protocol. We are not counting a close contact as a symptom or situation. Okay. So everyone is treated the same whether you're a close contact or not. So when it says probable here, I guess what it's getting at is so kids start getting the flu. Now we have five kids with the flu and they're at home and it's the flu. So now that's going to count as our probable? If they get a flu diagnosis. If they're at the hospital. If they get a flu diagnosis, if they're at the physician and it says flu, if it's an alternate diagnosis, they're not counted in the COVID numbers. They're allowed back in school when they've been fever-free for 24 hours.

238And you don't count them before they've had the COVID or before it's confirmed flu or before, like, we're not going to get these inflated numbers and two days later, well, these three kids have the flu. Right. Yeah. I don't know if it's COVID. So if they have the symptoms, yeah, we have to count them as they are ill and they can't be in school. So I think what I hear you asking, Mary, is if a student comes down with flu-like symptoms and their parent calls them in and describes their symptoms, could they be counted as a probable prior to going to the doctor and getting a flu diagnosis? And that probably could happen. Right. Yeah. Yes. So if someone is symptomatic, they are considered probable until it's ruled out is essentially what we're seeing. I

239think what has happened over the last year, 18 months, is I do think we've probably, this is a personal opinion, been a disservice to ourselves at times. And if it's wearing masks or being isolated, I think our immune systems have definitely taken too long of a break. And now. Everybody seems to be getting sick right now. Like, everybody seems sick. So there's a lot going on. There's a lot that isn't COVID. The problem is, and what makes the probable thing tricky and what people aren't liking, is that parents are still sending their kids to school sick. And this is a problem because it does make things difficult to judge because, well, now it is very probable that you have COVID because you are here sniffing. Running nose, sneezing, coughing. Do you know what I mean?

240Like, that is a big problem. We do have families. And I understand the difficulty at times if you have a two-income home and everybody needs to get to work. I mean, it's been the American way for a long time. Take some Tylenol and go to work anyway. Or take some ibuprofen or cough syrup and send them to school. Like, I get that. We've all done it. And nobody can say they haven't. The problem is that it's making it too tricky right now. And we have to keep sick kids. So we're putting our nurses in a very difficult place when we keep sending sick kids to school. I do understand there's an argument of people saying, yeah, but my kid's not actually sick. That's not what I'm referencing. I'm not talking about your GIs or your

241allergies. I am talking about the fact that we do have kids with flu in our schools being sent. And it is making these numbers difficult to judge. I'd like to point out that's always been a problem. That has never not been an issue. That's my point, Vito. That is my point. I'm saying. That in the world of COVID, that being always a problem makes this new problem even more challenging. But it's challenging because we're making it challenging. If it's always been a problem and 480 kids died and less than that died from this virus, why at some point somebody has to stand up and go, why are we doing this? We watched Waukesha take the lead in the federal funding and then back down. We watched other places. We watched other places take the lead

242about getting rid of the masks and then we followed suit. At some point, somebody has to stand up and go, this doesn't make sense. If you look at what we did before for 100 years and then now we're doing it different. Why are we doing it different? It doesn't make sense. We're doing it different and the numbers don't support it. If there was twice as many deaths, if we had a thousand deaths of kids, then we can have a disagreement. We can have a discussion. We can have a discussion about it. But when there's less than the flu, and this is just with kids, why are we considering anything? Why aren't we just going, if it becomes a problem, we'll deal with it. We'll have a special session. We'll hammer down. Within days, we can

243make changes if we have sweeping problems in the school like we would if the flu did something. Well, is that not what we're doing right now? No, we're actually talking about setting up something that they can just decide. So we're being proactive. One, this is recommendation. We can change this all night long. We can do what we want with this. But I think what's important is that we're having a discussion to make plans that if what you just said does potentially happen, then we can act real quick. So I don't see a problem with having this discussion. And if we want to adjust or change any of these, these are recommendations. These are ideas. That's what we're doing here. We're having a discussion. So you're summarizing. What's your stance on this page? My recommendation would

244be that the only time we make any changes to anything if it's drastic. Define drastic. We're talking 40% of the students. 40%? 40% of the students got COVID. Okay. Confirmed. Not probable. Confirmed. Okay. Thoughts? Anybody else? Okay. Yeah, Sherry. So I'm looking at these numbers that you gave us. And... In the microphone. Sherry? In the microphone. And on today at the high school, there was 10%, 10%. So we're in our numbers we're looking at are like zero to nine or whatever. But the 10.5% says student attendance rate. When we were looking at these numbers, you stated when we talk about this tier, we need to look at the student COVID rate only. Is that is that correct? Yep. And which was was 5%. Which was 5%. So. Okay. So. And this was school wide. This

245was not any one given classroom, correct? This 5%? This was students who tested positive, voluntary quarantine. Yep. That's the whole district. Yes. Okay. So when we're looking at it from a teaching a staff perspective, and our goal that everyone's in agreement with and that is to keep the schools open, it doesn't matter if they're homesick with the flu or if they're homesick with, I mean, now they have COVID, they're going to be home sick with COVID. But they're going to be home sick with COVID. So we're looking at the numbers. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think

246that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point. We're not going to have whooping cough out there that they're trying to get people to get revaccinated for whatever. So it really doesn't matter from a teaching perspective if 25% of your class is out. If they're out from COVID or they're out from the flu, the teaching environment is the same. So that being said, why do we maybe a possibility and I'm just thinking that this now it hasn't been thought through well is if there was a higher percentage of students gone from the classroom. but would be for everything. Because that's what some of the discussion

247was. And that's what you're saying, Vito. You're saying, well, we didn't do this for the flu. We didn't do this for this. We never reached those thresholds. So maybe what we're doing right now, we're looking at what threshold in our educational process is a need for something more. Whether that be masks for flus, colds, whatever, it doesn't matter. We're looking at illnesses in our schools. Because from what everyone's saying is, this isn't going away. I agree. It's not going away. It's going to be here and it's going to keep going around. So now we're looking at it. We've never lived through a pandemic before, which that I know of. I have never lived through it and I'm pretty old. So we now have a new thing to look at. We need to think about it

248and think about what this meant. So that's just my, like I said, that's just a thought. It's not a decision on anything. It's just how are we looking at it? Sean, just a question for the, that absence rate for COVID related where we're at 5%, is that, that's just positive. That's not probable. That's all. So those are positive students who are also home with symptoms. So that, that would be our definition of probable. And then also the voluntary quarantine, which actually we would not count. So that 5% today at MHS would probably shrink a little bit, but maybe 4.5% because we would take out those voluntary quarantine numbers. So can you refresh my memory in pre COVID world? You said at 20% of a building, like let's say 20% of the school had the flu

249or whooping cough or whatever. Would that close a school for a few days? What was that? What happened? But it was at 20% is kind of how we functioned. Prior to COVID. What was the, was there a specific number before, or was it just kind of by whatever we thought? I think what would happen would we would be in constant communication with the health department and they would provide a recommendation on, on closure. And it would be the severity of the illness, you know, how, how contagious it was. And I probably should come back with this information instead of, just trying to remember. Um, so, um, um, a little, because when you did ask before we go, well, what has changed? It's not so much what has changed. It's just a reminder that we have

250done this in the past. Like if there has been a flu outbreak, we have had to send kids in a classroom for like three days, the whole class sanitize and wipe everything down. I mean, that's, this is not brand new. Like that has happened. I think the point is, how are we going to define it? And what is that threshold going to be? And is that something we want to continue? I think our big problem is the extent you're right. It was three days. Now it's 14. That's tough to get people to swallow tough to get. I mean, you got, you got a bunch of kids that have mild symptoms that are considered something now, now go home for 14 days, deal with it. We're not, you're be tough to get support for that. I

251do think our quarantine procedure is 10 days just to be clear. And then like, for instance, with Clarence, we had to go to London, our third grade classroom. They had to go virtual for how many days? Well, five school days, five school days. Right. Okay. So I don't know if we've gotten anywhere on this first level of zero to 20%. Do we like the proposal that is here that we continue with masks are simply recommended. We require quarantine for close contacts with in-home positives. So close contacts in the school building is still optional. But if brother is, if he's not, if he's home and sister is positive, like brother now has to quarantine because there's a positive case at home. Nope. You do not agree with in-home quarantine. There's, there's tons of studies coming out

252that saying that if you have natural, if you've gotten it before and you have natural, natural antibodies, you're, you have better protection. So now we're going to, we don't take that into account. We only take vaccination into account. So if, which we could change, I mean, that's the discussion, right? Like I agree with you. I would love to be able to say, get, go get your antibodies tested. Like show us. Yes. Look, I'm naturally inoculated versus vaccinated. Like in my mind, those are equivalent, if not a little bit better, or we can make the option of like, or go get tested negative and you don't have to quarantine. Like this is a discussion. And I do expect the whole board to weigh in. Can we meet you tonight? Because this is a full board decision.

253This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. This is a discussion. We have to, we have to get tested. I've been in the situation where two people, if I can't get tested. It could be a lot. Or two people, not a couple of people, a little bit. As long as it's not a couple of people, a little bit. For something that, doesn't kill kids. I don't see a reason to force people to go out and get tested. Go out, go out and get an antibody test. Just so your kid can go to school. Well, you

254get a COVID test. Wouldn't have to be an antibody test. No it'd have to be an antibody test to prove that. To prove that you had. Already gotten it. for COVID, they had like a three-month window where they were not close contacted anymore. Is that correct? Does that still stand? Yes, it's a 90-day window. So they wouldn't have to quarantine, but they also don't need a test again either. So when they're sick, they have a fever, they just have to be out 24 hours. If they have two symptoms, just if they're sick and they're at home, that's great. If they can't function at school, they don't need a COVID test. And there are no, not that you would know this, but any new test studies out that the antibodies last so many months? So like

255you mean longer than 90 days? Yeah. So we do the 90 days based off of what they had said from you can test positive for up to 90 days. So from your first test that you become positive, you could test positive. Not everyone does, but you could test positive for 90 days. So that's good. That's kind of where they got the 90-day window. And I think that question is tricky because that's why the test is valuable. I use it to help my family make decisions because it is different for everybody. I mean, we have antibodies in our home pushing eight months. So it is, I find value in an antibody test and would be willing to use that as a, no, look, I already know I have antibodies. Like if we felt like in-home quarantines

256were reasonable, I would have to say, no, I don't have antibodies. I don't have antibodies. I don't have antibodies. I don't have antibodies. So if I didn't have a bacteria, I don't have antibodies, I don't have a virus, I wouldn't have brought them. I think that's really important. And then just to kind of play anecdotally and talking to people in the community, there was a friend that had both parents sick at home with COVID and still sent their kids to school. So it is happening that we have families with COVID in the house and are sending children to school. Is that something that we're okay with? Not for nothing, but isn't it a HIPAA violation to require somebody to prove that they were sick? So schools actually have FERPA, FERPA. FERPA. It's a different set

257of guidelines for schools because we are dealing with minors, but we don't share that information. That's HIPAA, but FERPA can allow for that. Am I correct? I want to know if any teachers have any communicable diseases that they could give to my child. Okay, so I just want to remind everyone in the room, I know that this is tough and this is emotional. This is not, unfortunately, a two-way dialogue between us and you guys. Please do email us with your questions and we will address them as we go. I want to go back and I'll ask again. So mitigation tiers for elementary classes and grade levels, 0 to 20%. This proposal, Vito has shared that he is not for it. What say the rest of you? Do you like it as is? Do you want

258to make a change? I'm not going to sit here all night with no action like this is our job. What's up? I will tell you where I'm at. Seeing that Vito has shared, I will share, and the rest of you need to speak up. I would say yes, we continue with masks recommended. I mean, that's where we're at. I think that is fair. Optional quarantine for close contacts and school positives. Yes, I would say continue that. That's where we're at. No modifications to cafeteria, concert, assembly, visitors. Like you guys, this is where we currently stand. The only change of this proposal is asking, do we want students that have positive, positive COVID in the home to be required to quarantine? Let's start with that. Mary? Yes, I think the highly, it's like when kids got

259chickenpox. You threw your kids in bed together and made sure they both got it at the same time. They're going to get it. They're in the same house. They're in the same environment. If there is a child that's at home that's been quarantined, they should probably be quarantined as well. It's not like they're going to stay away from each other. Joel? Yeah, I'm okay with the way this one's written. Cherry? You're okay with it the best way? Art? In the microphone. So that's the thing is that currently optional quarantine, if you've been close contacted at school, this is saying it would not, this proposal is saying it would not be optional if you were close contacted at home. If there's a positive case at home, because your likelihood of getting it then would be higher.

260You could test negative. I mean, if we want to make that exception, or you could have an antibody if we want to make that exception. Or be vaccinated. Or if you're vaccinated, it doesn't apply to you. I'm fine the way it is. Define the way that it is written right here. Jill? I would like some clarity to the close contact. Like we had talked about a couple conversations about, you know, is it a negative test? Is it the antibody? I just think there should be some definition to that to give the parent the option not to have their kids at home for five, ten days, whatever rule you have to follow, the day. And I think that this happens. I too have an issue with probable. I wish, I think we put our nurses and

261our health room staffs in a difficult position to have to make these on the spot decisions for, you know, allergy symptoms that come down the pike. And I know you tried to explain that to us and how you manage that. But are we not further enough along in this process to be able to maybe re-look? At the symptom checker? And is that something, you know, we could ask you to give us a proposal going forward? Not that it's tonight. You know, do we take a look at that list? Is that list too extensive that causes us to send children home? I mean, yeah, I agree. I mean, it's kind of simple. I agree with Vito. It's a broad term. Yes, I agree as well. Does it make more sense? Does it make more sense for

262us to have a working board meeting where we sit down and we actually go over this stuff? And give her a chance to give us some more feedback? And my point is, we're only in the fourth week of school. We don't even have the full board here. That's it, the fourth week of school. And we're not anywhere near 20%, thankfully. So, and I agree, this is to be proactive. And I think Sean's done a commendable job of putting these details together. I was one of, I think one of the first people that when we started to get all these emails that went to Erica and said, you know, what, I don't remember, where was our threshold? Where was our threshold last year on positivity before we took another step? Was it 20%? Was it 10%?

263And maybe last year's irrelevant because we're now dealing with a different set of. Yeah, last year, it's hard, it's like comparing apples to oranges because last year we had so many students that were in quarantine. So, close contacts were quarantined. That was not optional. And so, when you take a look at when we went virtual at the high school for that one week, roughly one week, there were large numbers of students who were ill, but also large numbers that were in quarantine. And so that probably put us over that 20% threshold. Now, if you're asking for what was the threshold, 20%. But at the same time, we had a serious staffing issue at the high school as well. Okay. So, we did have a combination of factors, but we didn't have any written threshold. Okay.

264Last year, as we do this year, or we don't this year, but as proposed. So, I'm hearing if there are concerns about the symptom chart and the probable definition, then I need to go back and really work with the staff on that. I don't think we can hash that out tonight. I mean, I, this is a great time to do this. That is a key thing. There's too much gray. I understand. If you hear a cough or a runny nose, it's like, you know, there's just too many different causes, and it's too questionable. We need more work on that. Mary? And is there a way to, and this probably just becomes a matter of judgment, and then again we're putting our health care staff in a tough position. Is there a way to vet out

265that child who has learned how to play the system and then comes in with a headache or whatever and it's on the thing? Oh, yeah, I get to go home. I mean, it's just not fair. Well, the health assistants do a good job in each school because they know these kids, so that's how we kind of vet that out. So. That is a helpful thing. But I think with the symptom list, that's coming from DHS and CDC, and you really do see that gamut of symptoms. Well, I know, but that list is like, it's got 20 items on it. Well, I 100% agree with you, and it makes our job super difficult. But do you have to follow that? Well, because we sometimes see it. It can be a kid with just nausea and vomiting

266or a kid with just diarrhea and nausea. Like, we have seen it all. I know. So it's not, you know, we wish we could. We wish we would know. Right. But it's all over the board. Don't you agree? I agree. All right. Yes, I definitely would like to eliminate probable. That was the first thing I eliminated. But I know, like, at the elementary schools, it's usually one nurse and maybe someone in the office. So they generally have a good idea of who the frequent flyers are. We're at the high school and at Parkview, I'm guessing they trade off a lot. There's a lot of part-time. Do we have staff switching out? No, we have a full-time at the middle school. One full-time at the high school. Sorry. Full-time at the middle school, full-time at the

267high school, and a part-time at the high school. Okay. So the high school is in transition right now with their health assistance. So, but that's the staffing that we have. A full-time and a part-time at the high school. But your frequent flyers there, they're flagged. So if somebody's filling in, somebody's checking, they know. And the parents aren't getting a phone call because our frequent flyer's back and, hey. Well, it is still. It's still the beginning of the school year. Yeah. But those health assistants do know some of those kids. But if they come in and say, I just threw up in the bathroom and I have a really bad headache, we can't say, no, you don't. Or, no, you didn't. Let me see it. Like, I don't know what you want me to do with

268that, but maybe we do have a work group and you tell me what you want us to weed out. I understand that. I don't know. I understand. I understand. You know the kids. You know who they are. And if they know how to play the system, they know how to play the system. But that's something they have to work out with their parents. And their parents have to step up and say, you do this again, you're in trouble. And that's it. And it's got to be to the parent's decision. My kid knew. He faked an allergy attack once. And so he went to the health room and they gave him Benadryl and called me. And he's got to go home. And I walked in. And this was before COVID. And I said. Get your butt

269back to class. And they said. Well, he could have. You know, he took Benadryl. Anything could happen. That's his problem. He shouldn't have played the allergy card. He had severe allergies. He knew. Oh, I ate this cracker. And I probably shouldn't have. And I told him to get his little butt back to class in a hurry. And when he got home, he got in more trouble. So at some point, the parents have to start talking to their kids and saying, this crap doesn't happen here. We've taken that away from them. That's the point. They don't. They don't. They don't have that. Do you guys have that option? Yes. So if his kid, if he gets a call and his kid has the problem. And I understand you're saying it's his problem. But they don't have

270the option of him coming in and saying, go back to class now. Do they? They do in certain situations. So we do have either frequent fliers or people who do come into the health room and they say, you know, oh, my my tummy hurts. Right. And the kid says that, well, your tummy hurts every day at math class. So I know you come in every day at math class because your tummy hurts. It could be anxiety. Right. But his tummy hurts. Let's try class again. Lay down for a couple of minutes. Go back to class. We call the parents, say, hey, he was in for his tummy ache. What do you want me to send him home? Are you fine that I sent him to class? We do make that call. So parents do have

271a choice in some of that. If a kid's coming down and say, I have a tummy ache and I feel like I'm going to throw up, we could call the parents. Usually call that parent and say they do need to pick them up. But if. So is that kind of, is that, do all the, does everybody know that? Because we're getting, we're getting information from parents that they don't have that option, that they have to, they then have to go get a test and they believe if their kid gets sent home that they cannot bring their kid back until they have a negative test. So if, if we've, I mean, I've got a number of emails from people that, and he keeps showing us his paperwork. Yeah. And he's got his kid get sent home

272for multiple times and it's happened multiple times that he has to then follow the rules, come back and he can't bring his kid back. He wasn't given that option apparently. Does everybody know, does the entire staff of all the medical people know that that's what they should be doing? Because it doesn't seem like that's what they're doing. Most could be, some might not be. Well, it's a bit of a judgment. It's a judgment call, right? From the staff. So, you know, we're doing the best we can. And the best thing is if parents would communicate with us. Yeah. Because a lot of times we don't get the communication back, at least at the older levels. So, I mean, does the staff all know? They're aware, but again, it's that judgment that, that HealthAid is making

273at that time when they see that child. But they do have, to be clear, you guys do have the latitude to say, here's the two symptoms. No, the parent can decide whether or not the kid goes. You guys have that ability to say, no, we are not going to send this kid home. But based on what the parent says. Well, I mean, that is dependent on what the child is also presenting with. So, if the child is presenting and they're coughing in the health room and they're sick, and the parent says, oh, they weren't sick this morning, send them back to class. We see that your child is coughing and there's snot dripping out of his nose. He needs to go home. He came to the health room. He was sick. He doesn't feel good.

274I know you want him to go home or perhaps not. He doesn't feel like he needs to go home or back to class. But he has to go home because we're following the protocol that you guys gave us to follow. Go ahead. Joel. Maybe one of the things that would help, Sean, if we're looking at this definition of probable, if it's maybe not a one-day count, if we look at maybe the duration, you know, so that if they get home one day, that doesn't count as probable because of the various things we've already heard tonight. Okay. We can take a look at that. Okay. So I guess what I'm hearing is that as a board, it doesn't sound like we feel comfortable making a decision on the proposal before us until we have a better

275definition of what we're going to call probable. I second that. Well, is it an accurate summary from what you're all hearing? Yes. We need further definition of what probable is. I also think, Erica, that after this discussion, that the administration probably has a better idea of maybe what probable is. I also think that the administration probably has a better idea of maybe what probable is. I also think that the administration probably has a better idea of maybe what probable is. I also think that the administration probably has a better idea of maybe we need to tie down some of the other loose ends as well because obviously you took a poll, and most of us were okay with the in-home positive with someone, but then it would have to include the antibodies or, you know,

276there would be the other options that are in there. They're not in this proposal, so it kind of has to be redefined with a few more things added. Do you understand what I'm saying? Required quarantine for close contacts with in-home positive. Exception would be close contact is vaccinated. We've said tonight vaccinated, had its own immunities, or you had discussed the antibody test. Well, that's just me. I understand. What I'm saying is some of those discussions are in addition to the probable. Correct. We need a new something submitted again. So what you're saying is we could make a decision based on the at-home close contact. Or are you saying you think. I'm saying in addition to defining probable and having them talk about it some more, we have to add some of those other things as

277well. Yes, thank you. I was just doing first things first. I was saying we need the definition of probable is what it sounds like. And then, well, I think it's a board discussion on the whole. I don't think we need Sean or the administration to come back to us, in my opinion, on this required quarantine for close contacts with in-home positive. I think that's a matter of discussion for the board. Is that something? That's something that we here want. This has nothing to do with the probable. This is if there's COVID in your house, should the kids stay home? Until what? Till for how long? Define that. Well, then a close contact quarantine, I believe, is 10 days unless day six or seven. There's still no symptoms. They can get a negative test and come

278back early. Is that. They have to wait the 10 days before they can test? No. No. The quarantine. Well, the quarantine we've been having for the last, like, at least since last April, I think. I think it shrunk down to a 10-day quarantine. However, if you're still no symptoms by day six or seven, stop me if I'm wrong, you can then get tested. And if you're negative, you can come back early. If you choose not to get tested, you stay. You do the whole 10 days. And what tests are we accepting after this day six? Are we still wanting the PCR, not the rapid? No. No. If no symptoms, you can do a rapid. You can do a rapid. With no symptoms, you can do a rapid test. Yeah. Yeah. So that would be like

279your in-home tests are the rapid tests. So no symptoms, the minimum on a close contact in-home COVID is six days plus a test. Eight days. Gets you back in school. Yeah. So you return on day eight. You get tested on day six or seven. Yeah, but the rapid test is an immediate? Yes. So why is it two more days? That's just the guidelines. I didn't make those. Okay. Well, I'm just saying maybe we can we ask to change those to those. Do we have to follow those guidelines? I don't think we're following any guidelines. So yes, we can change them. I put it all on the table. We're here 11 o'clock night. So let's I would add that decide if I mean, then you're at ten days. I thought we weren't deciding on anything. We

280are revisiting this. Okay. So that's my clarifying question is what it sounds like is we are revisiting the probable definition. However, a close contact in home COVID thing has nothing to do with probable. That is a quarantine to a close contact. So are we willing to have that discussion and decide on that part tonight? Because we can't keep you guys. I'm a little disappointed. I mean, it's 11 o'clock at night. We're sitting here and everyone's staring at their microphone, not contributing. Like, I'm not playing. Not you, Vito. Not you. We hear you and you see you. Erica, you had to ask each of us and we each said what we felt about that. I understand. We're not exactly having any robust dialogue right now to help us make any decisions. So either we are doing

281nothing right now or we are doing something. I think the nothing that we're going to wait on is the definition of probable. We're tabling that until further discussion this month. Are we doing the same with in-home close contacts? I mean, I'm not pushing one way or another. I am looking for guidance and feedback. I would like to table the whole thing until we can get proper clarification on the entire thing. Voting on or making a doing anything, having Sean do anything on just one little parts of it. We can have a working meeting. We can Sean can kind of revisit and talk to talk to us all individually. There's a bunch of different ways we can go and he can pull in a bunch of information, see where we all stand and kind of go

282from there. There's a bunch of different ways to do this. Coming up with a resolution to one part of one of the six different things doesn't seem like it makes much sense. Are we going to go through each one and all of them? Let's just let's just hammer through it. If we get if we got to have a working meeting, we have a working meeting. Well, that's sort of what we're doing right now. If we if we want to have a working meeting at six o'clock in the afternoon, we have a working meeting at six o'clock in the afternoon and evening. I think all these people came here to find out what we're going to decide and for you to table it for another night when you're the one who pushed it is kind of

283disrespectful. No. And I think they came here to make sure that I'm going to say, let's say mass, how many of us would look at the mass? How many of us really would ever want to go back to mandating mass under any circumstance? I don't know. I think the ship has sailed. We're not doing mass. Great. I mean, so we can check that one off the back. It sounds like one less thing they have to come back to us with. And one less thing they all have to worry about. Anybody want to do masks over there? No. OK, that's mass are off the table. Done. All right. Like we had that. OK. I will say and I'm going to only come back to this one more time. I don't know that we need to keep

284kicking the can down the road because we like to throw these little lines out there like we need to be leaders. And yet we're not willing to have a discussion and make this decision. If you feel strongly that we do not have the like the data or information available, we're going to have to go back to the to discuss what a quarantine for a close contact of an in-home positive is, which I don't know what data is necessary for this part. So if there is some that you need, I don't want to know. I don't think we should have quarantine for. OK, so there you go. So you don't think there should be quarantine for in a home? OK. Too many variables there. There's too many what ifs. What if they what if this what

285if what if that and then we're going to you got to think about this, are we this is forever like this. Not these people are right. None of this stuff is going away. So whether it be COVID. Whether it be the flu. Don't don't roll your eyes. It's not forever. Yes, it is forever. This is forever. This we're setting we're setting a precedent right now. I've been happening since the beginning of time. Exactly. OK. OK, so let's just stop, though. As a board, we can revisit anything at any time and change it. So no, there's a there's a whole bunch of bad things that have been put into place that won't be taken out because people are too afraid to do it. Like what? Look at look at 90 percent of the laws out there.

286My entire. We're talking McGuanagoe area school district every single time. School district. So if we say, OK, we're going to do this quarantine thing and this happens as soon as we try to take that off, we're killing kids. We're killing kids. We're doing this. The hyperbole to come out and everybody's going to. We took the guy falling. That's what happens every time. So we do it now or we do it later. Walkshut just dealt with this when they tried to make rich people pay for lunch. That's insane. Why are we that? That just happened. And they backed down. They didn't have the spine to say, no, it's not OK for rich people to go get free lunch. That that just happened weeks ago. And we don't think it's going to happen with the health. That's

287insane. OK, so can I ask you a question? Absolutely. So do you think it is OK for two people, two kids that live in the same house for one to have covered and the other one to go to school without. Any proof that they don't have it like. Was it OK for the kids for those same two kids when they didn't have when they had the flu? Well, see, that's that's the thing. That's what we were talking about before. Like from the beginning of time, everybody sends their kids to school sick. And we're still here. We're still here functioning, living life, doing our thing. You, of all people, have to understand that we have got to build our immune systems. We have to be OK getting sick. We have to be OK getting cut. We

288have to be OK with bacteria and viruses. And all these. Things that are in our world that we've been living with forever. The it's it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to hyper clean our entire environment to make us less less. Victor, we weaken our bodies by doing it. I don't understand why the science, the settled science isn't. People aren't talking about this. Nurses, do we need to get sick to build our immune systems? Everybody I learned that in like fourth grade. Well, you can actually take a lot of vitamins and eat really. And you're healthy to build your immune system. That helps. OK, cherry. So you're what you're saying. Am I hearing you say that you and you feel it's OK to send your kids to school sick? No. Why would you think

289I'd say it's OK to send your kids to school sick? I don't think we should be sending our kids to school sick. But if I'm sick and she's my sister and she's not sick, I don't think she should have to stay home. She's not sick. Does that make any sense? Yes, I think that makes complete sense. Don't say not sick. Don't force not sick kids to not go to school. I think what we've seen, though, is that with families that have a positive at home and the sibling comes to school, they do get sick a couple of days later. And by that time they've infected other kids. So one of the reasons why we have quarantines is to prevent the spread. Has it worked? We're not doing it. Yeah, it did last year. We're great.

290Then we're still good work. Our kids are higher than they've ever been. Right. And we've been we quarantine. We're going to be forever and we're vaccinated now. And but it's higher if you look like you make any sense. Look at last year's higher. They are they are lower than this year's statistics. So, yes, it's higher this year. It's higher this year without the mask than it was last year and with the quarantine. So it's higher without. So there is there is some some credence to. And so the thing that we're saying is we want to expose our kids more. So we're going to not have mandatory. And we've done that. And many people haven't done that, but we have paid the price. The numbers are up. So there are those people that we have listened

291to tonight. We sat for hours listening. There are people who feel the other way. We cannot ignore the fact that we represent everyone and that there are some people in this district that would appreciate if someone is at home sick, that those kids would stay home so that they didn't spread it. And it's not just the kids. It's not the chicken pox where you jumped in the bathtub. I did that so that your whole family got it and you chose your friends. This is not the same. Does it make sense that we have more cases now after 60 percent of the population is vaccinated? OK, I really don't know if we need to get into like a Delta versus Alpha like debate. I think we need to look at what our district is looking at,

292like what our numbers look like and what do we want to do if the numbers increase? Like we could go all day about. Now there's more vaccinated, but now we've got more. But that could be Delta. Hey, Lambda and Mu are coming in the one out of Japan. Like we need to deal with what's before us now. I don't think preemptive decisions of things that we don't know are going to help us. I think we need to make a plan for what's in front of us right now. Because last year we did not go above this threshold that they're talking the 20 percent. We didn't. And so maybe this year we won't go over the 20 percent either. But we can put in our we can put our stops in so that hopefully we never

293get there. That's what we're trying to do here is put something in place so that we don't have to get into a problem. And I'm OK with the in-home thing because I've watched it in my own family, especially with the Delta variant, if someone gets it, they get it. Mary, you got it at your house. Yep. My husband brought it home and we all shared it. Yep. It was one person coming in. Everybody got it. And everything. You're in a close contact environment. You're hanging out. You're watching TV. You're eating dinner. You're you're close to that. Both people. That's what family is. We're trying to make a logical decision. The average person doesn't have doesn't show any symptoms for what, three days. So so now for three days, every person that you've been in contact

294with that you were in your home, we're talking about families and crazy families in the home, home, school class, lunch room, work, wherever you. Go if you are if you are contagious for three days prior to showing any symptoms. That's why we quarantine everybody. You're not leaving the house too late while there's already a quarantine. It's too late. Not continuing to spread it. It is too late. So I have to accept it. We have to accept people are going to get sick. Yes, people are going to get sick. OK, let's go about life to let the sister come to the school and get 20 more kids sick in the meantime. So I think the problem is that it is very. No, they didn't get. Three days before because they were they were they were contagious

295three days before. Throw your pen. Don't don't agree. But were they not contagious the three days before they were there? They showed they were sick. Did they not spread it those three days? Only the day that you started running. That's the day that you started spreading. No, I don't think anybody is saying I don't think that's exactly what everybody's saying. They're saying if you're sick or then nobody in your house can do anything because you were because you might give somebody something too late. Logically speaking, everything that you've done for the days prior that you were contagious, the people got it. So now when you OK, fine, you're showing you're sick. Don't do it anymore. Don't don't don't don't go to school. Sucks anyways. I get it. I understand what you're saying, but you're thinking

296of it as a from patient from the first person that got it. OK, yes, they went out, they contaminated. They were gone for three days. But once they had it, we keep the brothers and the sisters home. So they don't continue. To spread it to other students, leading us to the point where we got to shut down the school and now everybody. That's what we want to avoid. So I think that I understand that. Yes, it does. No, it doesn't. Because then that first person got it, patient A, and they had it for the and they were contagious for three days before they knew they were sick. They already gave it to their people in their families who also then went to school and gave it gave it to everybody already. If it's going to

297happen, it's going to happen. We can't stop these things. Why do we think that we can stop? We're not showing up. We never we might have done it once or twice. Why do we think we can stop this? We cannot stop it. I don't think we think we can stop a virus. I think we all know that we can't stop a virus. Why are we talking about this? Because logically, our job here is to try to keep our kids in schools because our business is education. So that's what we need to go about doing. We need to keep educating our students. We need to educate as many as possible. The best way that we can. So are the question really is, are we going to do anything to try to help keep as many kids

298in school as possible? I mean, if your answer is no, that's fine. Your answer is no. But I think we have said over and over. We all agree that we want our kids in school. So some people might want to try and I'm speak up if I'm mischaracterizing anything. I think some people might want to try to prevent us. I think some people might want to try and I'm speaking up if I'm mischaracterizing anything to the point where we now have like ridiculous, ridiculous numbers to the point where, oh, my gosh, everybody needs to go home virtual because it's everywhere now, would that help or veto is 40 percent. So we are getting not really anywhere outside of veto. You don't want to do anything. I'd like to go back to normal. That's how we're

299operating right now. No, I mean, like normal, normal, like before all this fun stuff started happening. I mean, dude, who doesn't want to go back to a pre covid world like like everybody? Let's do it. Let's be the people. Can we acknowledge, though, the way things were before? Can we acknowledge that we are in like a covid world, though? Like things have actually turned off the change. We're in a covid world. I don't watch the news and this is not a two way dialog. So I would appreciate. Hang on. OK. We we could entertain everybody. We could entertain a motion to adjourn if we can't get anywhere. I'll make a motion to adjourn. It was facetious. You are on the hook to get some work done, my friend. So we do have to get a

300couple of things. We have many other things on our agenda. Completed tonight. So if anyone has a motion that they would like to bring before the board regarding this, did you hire? Is that what you're looking for? Well, I want to know what. Yes. Does somebody have something? I will. What the only thing is, is if we make a motion to approve this, that it would be an in-home quarantine, mandatory in-home quarantine, it would only solve one little piece on this paper. That is what you're if that is what you're looking for, then we can do that. But if you're looking to accomplish the entire task, I don't see that happening here tonight. I don't either. And I'm not looking for. Anything I am looking for people to participate. So, like, if we want to

301do something about the in-home thing, then somebody can make a motion for it. If we're not going to do that and there isn't a motion for it, that's fine. We're moving on. Make a motion to move on. OK, so we are it sounds like we are moving on and not touching this proposal right now until we have more information specifically regarding what probable means. And if we feel like we need to adjust what probable means, which I think everybody kind of agrees with that and we're not it looks like we're not touching it. I also know that you said, you know, about the mask. I heard you, Mary, and I but I believe that we should put we should give our families the option because that is what our families have been looking for. So

302is what Sean had said was instead of he said what he would recommend. I'm sorry, I've lost the page. He would recommend required for the mask. I think we should. Like we had talked about for our informing our families in their classrooms, we should put because of the quantity, the level of COVID spread in our building, let's say at twenty one to thirty two percent, we should put because they do this in other establishments that we would put highly recommended instead of you don't have to put it on, but notice that we went from yellow to red. Their spread in our building has went from yellow to red instead of being. Whatever casual words we were using, it would be highly recommended instead of saying that way there, like Sean had mentioned in the beginning

303of this whole thing. It's not OK required, but we want you people to know and have the choice that possibly you want to mask your kids up. I actually the way you just said we went from yellow to red. I actually think that'd be a very easy way to communicate kind of where we're at in our numbers, because I don't know that everybody follows the charts all the time. Or reads all the emails. So if it's just like, hey, we're in yellow, just, you know, like the 20 to 20, 30 percent like this is yellow, like there's a bunch or hey, FYI, we're in red. There's like a lot like you might want to use that information to make those choices. I think clear communication of where we're at would be helpful. I think for

304the people that are concerned with masking, I think it makes a lot of sense to let them know that we're at a heightened state for them. If I mean, Sean's doing the work anyways to get us. He's doing the math. He's running the numbers. So it doesn't make any sense not to let people know because there are people that are concerned. Absolutely. And I if we're changing the wording from recommend to highly recommend, strongly recommend not require, but let them know, hey, this is it's getting things that things are ramping up by all means. That makes sense to let people know and have a different classification or something at a different level. And another thing is we heard here tonight was there are some of the things that we were doing and I believe one

305of our people in the audience came up and said that we had been doing for and I did hear this from a staff member in one of the emails that I received that the intense cleaning has discontinued. And I also heard about the plexiglass where some of our teachers, we had the plexiglass in our rooms, the kids enjoyed them, the teachers enjoyed them. They had their little spot. But because we as a board said, absolutely. There's no mitigations in there. We take all these things out. I think we could in our schools, there are things we could do instead of going to absolutely nothing we could put into some of the things we learned. The hand washing, which was the one that was brought up here. The extra cleaning on Friday or Wednesday or whatever

306day we do it. Because that is true. I mean, has anybody seen the commercials for the Clorox wipes? They, you know, are good for 24 hours. Anyways, that's we could do things like that instead of doing nothing like opening the classrooms at the high school for lunch and spreading the and just look at it as having a healthier district like we did with them with in the ventilation of the buildings, there were things we changed just overall so that our rooms were healthier, the air quality was healthier instead of and I had and I would like to comment on the emails that I've got, the ones that were most impactful to me were the people who said we need. There are obviously opinions on both sides, so we need to come to a compromise. There

307we're going to divide our community. And that is not what we're about. We stand and we pledge that flag. One nation under God, indivisible. And here we are dividing the thing. Yes. OK, there are certain times when we have to stand up for what we have. But we can also listen to one another, be respectful and come up with something that is even if it's verbiage instead of saying absolutely no more. I say highly recommended so that people know we're at a new level. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I know, Erica, you're frustrated because you think people aren't speaking. I know what Joel thinks. I know what Mary thinks, even though they said a few words. Jill, I don't know where she stands. And I don't know. But I'm just saying

308I think we are talking. Maybe we maybe it doesn't sound like that. Well, and I. Not so much about what I just needed to say. Yeah. And I think those are great. And I want to clarify, it's not so much that I need to know what Joe thinks or you need to, but we have community here that deserves to know how this board operates, what they say, what they contribute, what we think. Like, I mean, I know the vote is usually enough, right. To kind of know where people are. But if this is a working dialog, a working meeting, an opportunity to come together to a board to maybe find a compromise, it does involve all of us. So I think it would probably be best moving forward this month and committees to be hashing

309through this proposed plan and try to come back with something that we feel like we can vote on next month. And hopefully our numbers stay the way they are because they're good right now. How is that? Is that okay with everybody? Yes. Okay. So let's move on. Population study survey. Okay. So as part of our long range facility planning process, we I have brought forward some information to the Finance Committee, which is recommending that we that we consider a population study that would go district wide MD offers consulting is the company that's offering the service. I've attached information there about their proposal here. There's about eight tasks that they would perform on our behalf. They've worked with a number of school districts, Muskego, Waterford, West Dallas, West Milwaukee, Burlington and some others here. But those

310are the recent ones. That they worked with here to perform this study to talk about what our potential is and likelihood is for long range growth. So as a part of the facility study that we're doing, I think that's something that we should at least consider. So I guess the question is in front of the full board right now. If we want to move forward with purchasing this study, I make a motion. We move ahead because there's nothing we can do. There's nothing we can do without it. I second. Oh, yeah. Second, I have a motion. A second. Any discussion? Yeah, I think it's really necessary for a strategic plan as we keep looking at these buildings. It's so hard to know how do we even make any informed decisions without it. OK, any other

311discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? OK, motion carries. Eagleville outdoor classroom proposal. OK, so last week at the Finance and Facility Committee, we were at Eagleville. Part of that tour we took brought us outside. There's a proposal to build an outdoor pavilion similar to the one that's behind Parkview. Middle School. So we currently have a total cost for the project at eighty one thousand dollars. There is eighty five hundred dollar donation that's coming from a family. And Eagleville has set aside four thousand dollars from their budget over the past year to have some of this money already kind of set aside and geared towards this project. But obviously they need a commitment from the school board here to help fund the rest of the cost here altogether here. So the district

312commitment would be sixty eight thousand nine hundred fifty five dollars. And if you chose to do that, I would recommend that you take it from fund forty six. There's three point four million in fund forty six. So you certainly could afford it if you felt it was a priority. One question that the committee had was the need to bring electrical out to the pavilion that would drop the price tag by twenty one thousand dollars if the electrical was removed, but then there's also consideration about bringing solar instead. Rather than electrical. But that's where it's at right now. So we're looking for direction from you if you have an opinion. Mary, it's an outdoor classroom that they that they had the. So it would be used as an outdoor classroom. There would be walls that would

313be on each side so that they could extend the use of that into the fall months or early spring months as well. You know, with the building and it's it's constraints on what they have in terms of the specials, you know, art, music, etc. This gives them another option to to go outside and to use that. So it would also be open for the public. And would also be open for the public to use. I would make a motion that we move ahead with this with with which part of it without the electrical in this moment, I would only only because they could do the solar. So I would I don't know how I know what the right procedure is here. I would make a motion to go with the electrical just because if we're

314going it would it serves the public better if you're going to have a little family or you know, if you're going to have a get together. I know when I do things with the company and stuff like that, we have food, food requires, Nesco's, things like that. Electrical is very handy. So I don't know exactly how handy the electrical would be for the school because everything's got batteries, maybe they can put fans up, maybe they could do stuff. I think it's more beneficial for the general public when they use it to have electrical there. I would like to change my motion. OK, I didn't hear the first one. I would like to make a motion that we move ahead with this with including the electrical. I'll second. So we have a motion and a second.

315I think that we need to because I was at the meeting and I listened to whatever. But we are doing the strategic planning and we are getting all these different things that the schools need. And I believe spending $81,000 for something when we're just in the process of trying to figure out what everybody needs, if we would keep doing that, our funds that we had said, I know, Tom, you had said we had these funds to take out of 43. But we also had talked about, oh, well, if we want to do something at Parkview, we'll have these extra funds and some of these things can be done in-house. And so in looking at this, I can understand we're trying to use some of our high school kids to you to do some of the

316work there and we're trying to have it so that the kids can extend their time outside, but that is all during the day. And so I know there was a question asked at that meeting, and I don't believe the question was answered is if we built the building without the electric, spent the last amount of money and then used it for a year or two and then decided, yes, this building is getting utilized for as much as we thought it would, because one of the comparisons that were on it where we put these outside classrooms as tents and we're spending that money and we did spend a lot of money on tents. I will be that is for sure. But I don't know that we should just throw another eighty one thousand dollars into something

317when we're still trying to analyze what we want to do, because one of the conversations that was at the same at the building and grounds meeting. Right. It was building grounds, right? Is that the right one? Finance and facilities. OK, so I'm sorry. Old name and was that each of the schools want would like one of these. Well, maybe then after we. Look at all of our buildings, Mary, I'm looking at you because I think your brain. If we look at all of our buildings and think we'd like each of our buildings to have one of these, so then fine, but I don't know that we need to put the entire everything in there. Like I said, the answer was not given. If we put the electric in later, is it going to cost us

318more? The only answer that was given was inflation. So, yes, it might cost you more because it would cost you more to have an electrician, but it wasn't. It would cost you more. I can I can tell you being in instruction, nothing ever goes wrong and it's always easier to do it while you're there. Right. So, I mean, that that number would go up. But I'm talking about logistically. You know what I'm saying? And my initial amendment was because I was going to try to cheap out on it. But it's going to get more use and be more useful with the electrical involved. And it's never going to go down in price. Keep in mind, it's a budget. So it's the top number right now. But we're working to get it to be less. And

319I say we do need the electric because if we and I am looking at solar, but solar doesn't work in the evening, daytime, we are going to be possibly in a darker area inside the trees and such. That's why I could be using lighting at times to get Wi-Fi out there. I know we talked about it's a nature area. We're trying to. Learn more from the nature outside. But this day and age, they're learning from iPads and Chromebooks. So being able to get the Wi-Fi out there, that's another reason to have electric out there. So I see a positive in having it. And we are looking at other green ways of helping it be sustainable. I can appreciate the solar thing, but the reality is if we if we wanted to work without fail, hardwiring,

320it's the way to go. Correct. Erica. Yeah. The this investment is at a school that has an enrollment of 105. Approximately. Okay. So are we prepared as a board? Because this is this is something we discussed at the meeting that this is a popular item and there are other elementary schools, probably not high school. Is that a fair statement that are going to be coming to Sean? I'm going to ask you to come to request that they also do this. So are we prepared as a board to follow through when our other elementary schools come with a presentation that I'm sure will be justified just in their eyes as this one is justified an act and not say, oh, we just we approved Eagle. We're not doing another one for another two or three years.

321I personally would say yes. It's a healthier way of schooling. It is it's kind of the popular thing to do right now. Sure. And it's yeah, I mean, I can see where I mean, you're telling me that they would all want to do it. Yeah. And so we should just say no, because they all want to. I'm just saying, I think that. Yeah, I agree. Yes, I would be prepared. And are we prepared? Just like the middle school. They've made. Great use of it. The community has benefited from it with the balloons over in McGuanagoe. You know, it's really paid off. Wait, Joel's been waiting. Okay. So I guess really just echoing what Sherry said. One of the things we discussed was how this aligns with everything else that we're trying to do. I think

322it's a great idea. But until we weighed in with everything else we're trying to do, is it the right thing to do now? I mean, do. Yeah. I mean, maybe that's a thought. Do we put them all on the table at once? Well, let's let's be clear. If I understood correctly, the other elementary schools have not come and asked for it. And Andy, when he was telling us about it, did say this is a good idea. I could see the other schools benefiting from something like this. So I don't think it's wrong to start somewhere. Right. And then address each possibility as it continues to come forward. There's a benefit. And I'm and I'm assuming I just have one more question for Andy. And I'm assuming that it's premature, Andy, for to ask you, is

323this cost probably rank at the top compared to other schools? Or is that comparing apples to oranges to even make that assumption at this point in time? The cost of the project? Question. It's a high budget number. So everything is built to be right. And just to be clear, section elementary is asked at the same time for one of these as well. As far as doing all at the same time, I'd say it makes more sense to do one so that you can figure out what makes what as long as we're prepared to be proactive with the rest of the schools and be fair, a great way to get the vitamin D. OK, so we have a motion and a second on the table. Is there any other discussion? I believe. Correct me if I'm

324wrong. Do we need five votes? We do need five. No. It's it's just out of the quorum. So just the four for any other discussion. OK, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? I am. We have to have as the motion is. I'm not opposed to the idea, but as the motion is, I see. So I see five yeses. Two noes. Yeah. OK, motion carries. OK, seclusion and restraint report. I'm just going to wrap up this night with just the annual board update. So state of Wisconsin Act 118 requires that school district update the school board on any reports of seclusion restraint done in the school district. So I want you to know that this is the last step in a pretty extensive intervention plan that's been developed by a team of

325teachers, people services staff, and then an administrator that's involved in the building. So I'm going to turn it over to the board. Really? I'm still too far. Every time you hear me now. Do I need to start over? No, thank you. All right. So as noted in the data, if you look at the form I gave you in the 1920 school year, we had forty six incidents. K-12 in the 19. See, so in the 1920 we had forty six and the twenty twenty one. We had twenty two incidents. So I believe that the reduction in the number of incidents can largely be attributed to the to the number of staff that we have put through training. It's called nonviolent crisis intervention training. It's really based on de-escalating challenging behavioral situations. And so we have two

326people in our district. One, Chris Agin, who is a elementary program support person. And then M. Weber, who is our secondary program support person, who put in a lot of time and professional development in training staff. So at the end of last school year, we had ninety five staff trained at the start of this school year. Already we have one hundred and fifteen. So I just wanted to share that piece of information with you. Do you guys have any questions for me? Do you think that any of these numbers can be attributed at all to less? Did we have less students in the building last year because of COVID that were virtual, that may be artificially dropped these numbers? Does I guess I would have to look. I would have to pull the actual names

327or incidents from the year before. I can look into it if you'd like. I just didn't know if you had a gut feeling to it, but no, I don't think so. I mean, my gut instinct is a lot of our students were back for the most part. So does anybody else have any questions for Christine? I do not. So are you going to continue with that training and expand it so that so in regular classrooms and is that part? So right now it's offered to our special education paraprofessionals, our general education paraprofessionals, administrators, people, services, staff, every really anybody who interacts with kids. So is it required or is it just optional? You can sign up or how are you doing? I know what a different place that I had worked. It was a requirement

328for the all of them for all employees to have that training. It's not required here, but it is any staff member who works with a lot like a large part of their day. So I think that's what we're trying to do with a student who might need some deescalation strategies does get trained. So I've never had I've never had a staff member say no. So I think everybody wants to do what's best for kids. And so I've never had that. I've never had that happen. So, yeah. So I think I mean, this is under action items. Is it simply because we need to acknowledge that you made the report? Yeah, we do have to get it approved. We do this every year. I think we need to get it approved. And then we'll get it

329back to them. We'll get a motion to approve the report. All right. So we have cherry and then a fight for second over here between veto and Joe. All right. All those in favor said aye, aye, aye. Any opposed? Okay. Motion carries. Superintendent report on unfinished business. It will be real quick. So as far as the enrollment update, we will get more information to you this month. We are still waiting on that district open enrollment. Right now, our best guess is that as far as resident students, we'll be up 10. So stay tuned on that. And then, Tom, food service update? Yeah, I just, I gave a memo there to you. Nationwide, and we're no exception to it, nationwide, there's school districts that are experiencing food supply shortages. And we have those issues here. Historically,

330we've never had to alter menus, and we've had to alter menus several times so far at schools because of not having enough food on hand to move forward with the menu that we've posted here. So there's times when we're looking for substitutions on things that we can use, and those substitutions come from a wide variety of vendors. The quality across vendors can change. It's a great stress on our food service. We're in the food service program right now, so why are the food shortages happening? Some of it's chalked up to transportation. There's not enough truck drivers to get the food from the manufacturer to the distributors. So Pam Harrison, I guess the point here is that Pam Harrison and her team are doing the best that they can to communicate with families when there are

331changes. But there's some legitimate issues that they're facing that we've never faced before. So just bring it to your attention now. You might hear rumblings or people that you talk to say the food service is changing or the quality isn't what it has been. That's happening right now. We're doing our best to manage that. So just bring that to your attention right now. Okay. So now we have executive session. I'm sorry, Erica. What? There's a. Oh, I'm sorry. Legislation correspondence. I was getting too anxious. Legislation and correspondence. Okay. So real quickly, and there are some important documents in there as far as contributions to our district. So I hope you take the time to read them. The first was a thank you to Theresa and Paul Hennessy and Fork in the Road for their donation

332of $3,400 to the Summer Buddies program. And then also the Department of Public Instruction notification that we earned a grant. And the student reps did a real nice job tonight highlighting a bunch of things. And one of the things that they talked about was this grant. And first we want to thank Christine Bowden and her staff for all the work that they did to earn this $75,000. It's a mental health services grant. And we're using that, as the student rep said, to help fund our program with gals. And then we have two different pieces of correspondence regarding the 9-11 commemoration that we had here at MHS. And one is a real nice parent email. That parent, Amy Hebein, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but she was being very thankful to Maura Friend,

333one of our social studies teachers, who helped along with Margie Canfield to do the 9-11 commemoration. And so you can read that. There's a thank you also to the Kiwanis Club for hosting our new teacher and new administrator dinner, which they have been doing for many, many years. So a lot of good stuff in there. Did I miss one? Okay. Executive session. So we really need to talk about that support staff issue. Yeah. Then I will make a motion that we move into executive session. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second.