001you've got the agenda okay if you're just joining us thank you for your patience we're working on some technical glitches and right now people are still connecting so we wait just a minute while that catches up okay website this doesn't seem to recognize me as a participant because it's like when i go to the website under like treating me like i'm just coming up okay i think it's stabilizer you guys okay so we'll call this meeting of the board of education city schools is decatur to order at 6 50 on um sort of december 8th and we have the uh all well four members of the board of education are here at the wilson center together and then we have janet johnson davis joining us from zoom the vulnerable present and let's begin our meeting
002with the moment of silence now if the members will all please rise and say the pledge of allegiance apparently to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay um just to let everybody know that i guess we should begin and just ask if anyone has any revisions to the agenda i'll explain what's in it other provisions to the agenda um do you need to pull the bond resolution from consent agenda james uh yeah okay so we'll pull that as a reverse action item okay all right another one other otherwise just with the folks who've joined us know we will be discussing the second semester planning this is the reopening discussion is the item that it's
003it's item five on the agenda but we'll get to it just right away and what we'll do is we'll have a presentation from either dr duty or dr dr fuhrman about the plan there'll be some board discussion of the plan and then the public comments period will follow them immediately if you'd like to sign up for public please go ahead and do so now and i'm going to have someone else explain how to do it thank you so there is a link in the agenda under the public comment link there's a hyperlink to the the google form where you sign up for public comment so so please go ahead and do that we'll we'll we'll be here until until everybody gets a chance to speak you'd like to speak um and if you have problems
004signing up send the board an email send us a text one learn how to get a hold of us and we'll make sure that you get your shot okay with that move to the minutes we have minutes that have been presented from the regular board meeting on november 10 from the special board meeting or work session on october and from the regular monthly meeting on october 13th does anyone have any revisions to the amendment prior to the minutes okay so those minutes will be entered as presented and next uh right before the opening discussion we first have our spotlight which is going to feature tally street upper elementary okay all right who is running the spotlight is there a video this time right yeah okay shayna is going to launch our video you might have
005to share a different window if that pops up in a different window shane there you go for supportive education spotlight this has been such an unprecedented time since opening the school in august hi i'm billy heaton principal of tally street of rail elementary school i'm excited to be here for tally street's first board of education spotlight this has been such an unprecedented time since opening the school in august of 2019 as csd's newest school and though we had to close the building in march to transition to virtual learning i'm proud of the equity work that we have started and work that continues this work began by forming the school's first equity committee this equity uh committee has done some truly amazing work including facilitating a book study last summer with our faculty and staff on
006the book stamped racism anti-racism and you by jason reynolds and ivan kindy the committee will begin facilitating another book study for our faculty and staff in january on the book how to be an anti-racist by ibran kindy the school continues to purchase new library books and level texts for our level book room to support and diversify our reading collection for our students and we held a pretty spectacular wax museum to celebrate black history month last february the pto and its diversity equity and inclusion committee have been very supportive of our work and have also sponsored many other offerings including the tally dream book club where our students read books featuring diverse characters and experiences and meet to discuss them the pto has offered the potluck dinner peace and pie the potluck dinner included conversations centered
007around topics such as social justice race and community the pto sponsored our black history month in celebration this included donating the book 28 days moments in black history that changed the world to every one of our teachers the celebration also included an evening event which featured music dance tally streets chorus and the winners of the school's spoken word competition finally our pto is currently sponsoring a series for parents and faculty entitled the myths of racism and beyond personal and community reflections this group meets once a month and will continue to meet throughout the school year to end our spotlight tonight i would like to present a video highlighting some of tally's events since we've opened the video was produced by one of talley's fifth grade students sasha twemlow who demonstrates the school's ivy learner traits
008of risk taker and communicator i hope you enjoy [Music] working hard to learn together remember teachers kids administrators staff and parents we love to cater [Music] tiger [Music] telling teachers they know their stuff they're not too easy and they're not too tough [Music] let me hear that tiger [Music] see [Music] i graduated from high school when i was 15 years old after graduating from morehouse college i went to seminary school up in boston there i was elected especially at my mostly white city class i am born and born in mobile alabama i grew up when i was 18. i quit high school to join the negro baseball league world series [Music] uh [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] hi tally tigers now it's time for this week's shout out hi telly tigers
009this is miss sanders and i am so excited to shout out a few kids from my homeroom mrs jett's home room so ellie from my homeroom and nia and max from mr debt's homeroom we spent some time together on wednesday wellness wednesday working on writing and we're able to crank out a bunch of writing and catch up to where we needed to be they worked really hard asked questions did research and i'm just really proud of them for stepping up and doing what they needed to do so one two three shout out hi tally tigers i want to give a shout out to my teacher miss irons for being just a great teacher and giving um me my level math problems and making them fun and making school fun especially because it's virtual learning um
010and i want to give a shout out to miss irons my teacher one two three shout out thank you tally tigers bye hey tally tigers this is miss irons here to give a shout out this week i'm going to shout out two friends these two friends displayed the habit of character of problem solving and perseverance we were working in a small group together and they were both having a difficult time with the concept neither one of them gave up they persevered they worked hard through it they tried to solve the problem on their own they asked me for help when they needed help but in the end i want to just say how much i appreciate the fact that they persevered and they did not give up my shoutouts go to audrey tulesma and sebastian
011moultrie one two three shout out awesome that was fun while reminiscing when we used to get back we used to be able to get together in social situations [Music] the good old days do they do their shout outs like every day yeah well that's so i think that's from the tally rally which i think they do once a week and all the schools are doing you know how we have all our different types of gatherings and stuff they have virtual versions of those now awesome yeah it's really cool well thank you mr heaton we we move on now to it's now the second semester planning discussion so take it away yeah so we're going to turn it over to dr fuhrman she is going to lead us through the presentation itself you'll find it's very
012similar to what we talked about thursday night we just tried to put it in a nicer form so people can kind of digest what the plan looks like i would ask if if possible to hold your questions to the end because i noticed as i went through the teacher advisory council there were things i knew were going to be answered coming up and so if you could maybe just jot down your questions there's a good chance it might get um answered in a future slide so she's going to walk us through that and then at the very end i'm going to take over because we have two kind of big topics to talk about at the end to kind of see where you are as a board and where we might go in what direction
013do we need to make you a co-host [Applause] so as she's pulling that up i would share we had a great meeting with the advisory council um just before this meeting um and we went through the presentation with them um i think they're pleased with it they um realize that it is a good compromise of a lot of different things and so we got very good feedback from them so um i felt they felt like we listened to their feedback and others feedback and tried to make the best plan we could so um that was i appreciated getting their feedback that they recognized they could see a lot of the things that we had tried to do in the plan that they had suggested so all right maggie you want to take it away i'm
014jaina can you give us a thumbs up if you can hear maggie hey dana can you hear me yeah okay all right well welcome everyone greetings board members dr duty i'm glad to be here tonight to present um information about what could possibly be our next speeches um for ways in learning for students so first i want to highlight the idea of competing priorities within our school district so we know that city school is a decatur we serve our students and we are responsible for their education but we also have to make sure we're prioritizing their physical and mental well-being but then we also have our staff and that have make sure that we provide a self-safe and secure learning environment not just for our students but for our staff as well and then in
015this new era of code 19 we're also dealing with the science mitigation and transmission and what does that look like and sometimes these things may seem like they compete with each other and you can't do in-person learning and keep yourself safe because the science but we understand that at the same time we've got to find a common ground to move forward for next step so we're hopeful that everyone will see through this presentation that the next steps we plan on taking when we eventually do take those steps is trying to find that common ground between all three of the different groups so this was the information that the student-focused subcommittee from the stakeholder planning group came up with and this is really helping us focus on how do we make decisions that keep students at
016the forefront of the decisions so these were some of the agreements due to our quality agreements that our students said that this committee came up with um and it basically explained that for csv we exist to provide education to our students that's the whole reason that we are here and that we want that to be the highest quality education possible we also understand that students learn best when they are safe engaged empowered to learn with a highly trained teacher who facilitates students to become leaders of their own learning and that really ties us into not just our el framework but our id framework about how we tell our students learn we also understand that one size doesn't fit all what works for one student in one classroom doesn't necessarily work for another student in another
017classroom we have to make sure okay again thank you so we have to make sure that all of our students needs are met through different in-person learning experiences but also understanding that most of our students this need is met by attending school in person with their teachers and peers we also want to make sure that whatever we do as a school system we're using a continuous quality improvement plan to monitor our goals and our achievements and make sure that we're meeting all those goals and then finally because of covid we have to understand that we are mitigating red to the greatest extent possible so that our students can make the best decisions for what worked for their family but like i said we also have our staff our staff is also very critic part of
018what we do to provide that education as i mentioned in the student-focused subcommittee agreement we have to have highly qualified staff to provide that service so in order to make sure we have highly qualified staff and are attracting and retaining very high highly qualified staff we want to make sure that we are mitigating risk to the greatest extent possible but also family students should recognize that one size does not fit all so we have an accommodation process in place we're enhancing that accommodation process we need more needs and more staff and that we can accomplish uh meeting the needs for all of our staff we are going to make sure we provide all pge equipment that's necessary for our staff um by dr duty menton um our future advisory council has reviewed the plans that
019we've been vetting and putting forth to the community and they are meeting with dr duty on a regular basis and they are really the way that the teacher voice becomes an equal partner and how we make decisions and then finally city schools indicator is committed to supporting our teachers by going above and beyond federal leave acts and state leave acts and what that means is we are we have to quarantine a teacher for a specific reason that we won't make them take their own lead we'll be kind of heating that cost to help support our teachers through the system the next stage we talked about is that in circles if you saw guiding principles for mitigation and transmission and this is a graphic that's been out there um starting to speculate about the cost model
020of mitigation in schools so one of the things that i'll mention later is we as a school district we can't control mitigation in our community but we can and can do it really well within our schools and within the four walls of our classroom so it's not about one mitigation strategy alone it is about multiple layers of mitigation strategy of which i'll explain um a little bit more detail as we get through the direction of this presentation but we do believe that we can control mitigation within our schools and as i mentioned not in the community but in our schools we can put things in place for now okay hopefully that's better thank you heather okay so as i mentioned um we cannot control mitigation in the community that's outside of our realm of influence
021but we can influence mitigation within our schools within our full four wells of our classroom um city schools of decatur also believes that schools are not actually a major transmission site of covid19 once effective mitigation is in place so we are going to continue to implement highly effective mitigation strategies of which cohorting which i'll talk about a little bit later is going to be a very important mitigation strategy as we look at bringing the possibility of moving into another phase of returning our k5 students to the classroom but also understanding that again our students we believe learn best in person along their with their teachers and their peers did want to give a shout out to our community stakeholder planning group that did put together a lot of work and a lot of time we
022do know that they provided a lot of talent and expertise i think one of the presenters at one point said that we probably have the most per capita scientists and epidemiologists within our school district and that's probably true and they provided a lot of best practices and recommendations for what we can do going forward and if you want to see the final report it is linked there so let's talk about learning options so where are we then so we started off full virtual in august we moved into a hybrid a schedule um for phase a which was bringing back our adapted special ed students we put pods in place we had in-school proposals for return to in-person and that has been started since october and we're still going through with the hybrid phase b a
023as we finish out this first semester so where are we going we have to make sure we've got a plan and a road map to help guide us for the next steps that we're going to take as a school system so we do want to do this gradually and under the under a very controlled way so we are recommending that we look at adding two new phases hybrid b phase would be a modified schedule for in-person learning of core academics for our preschool through 5th grade students date we don't know yet and hybrid c phase would be more bringing back our 612 students and possibly even extending that learning hours for our early learning students in elementary school let me give you an overview of hybrid b what that may look like so we are
024recommending that our pre-k schedule is a hybrid schedule where students are split in half one of the main concerns that came up as we discussed returning earlier was that right from the start has class size limits and we wanted to make sure that we're able to make that a manageable size for the priest for those pre-k teachers at college heights so we are recommending that and we do have different restrictions that come into play from the grants that fund the majority of this program and this is a hybrid schedule that they will allow us to do so then we're also looking for k5 students attending school in person just to attend their core academic classes our special classes intervention classes those would be offered virtually completed at home we also heard another main concern of
025our teachers as we went through the first phase of this process was the possibility of students taking their masks off and this was confirmed by our mitigation group when they said taking masks off is one of the most dangerous times for contracting and spreading the virus we wanted to figure out how can we eliminate that possibility so what's outside of the box thinking could we do so we said why don't we come in part day cohort our students and have grab-and-go meals so they can eat at home so but as we looked at this like i mentioned earlier 6 12 it's a little more difficult to move this into the upper grade band so our recommendation for hybrid b is that we still keep 612 students virtual in the hybrid b schedule the option we
026will have an in-person learning option and we are recommending a full virtual learning option as well the hybrid schedule for students for pre-k this is just for our pre-k would be two full days on site they have three days at home for learning and that all students receive on-stream instruction for two days they will take home kits that will be provided so that when they're home it's not necessarily sitting in front of the screen but more interactive type activities for those students there will be virtual learning for our pre-k students that they will follow some of that but it will be enhanced by those take-home supplemental instructional kits um it is a balance of synchronous and asynchronous instruction and our teachers will continue with their one-on-one family check-ins so they can make sure that those
027students are progressing as well through their academics in the pre-k setting okay so let's talk a little bit more about what pre-k or what k-5 hybrid and plan b would look like so again in person and virtual learning options so the in-person learning would strictly focus on our core academics reading writing and arithmetic we would have a modified schedule where students would attend about four hours each day would be in the morning across the district so this would be all of our k5 students coming in the morning afternoon we do have proposals for how students can continue their learning when they get home and we are very much limiting concurrent teaching at this point i don't know that we have any proposals for concurrent teaching in the k5 setting now we are also wanting to
028make sure that those parents and families and staff that are needing a full virtual model can have that opportunity if you are going to designate full virtual teachers we are going to continue to use our guidance that we created over the summer for how the virtual instruction will be run we do anticipate that all the hours for synchronous learning will remain consistent we heard loud and clear as we started talking with parents about options they wanted to make sure if we do in person that we keep our rigorous virtual learning option available and we feel like we can do that a big component of this is virtual specials and that was another part of the outside of the box thinking that came up when we were brainstorming how can we move forward for this virtual
029specials allow the concern with virtual with in-person specials was these special teachers bounced between so many groups of students so in one week they may teach you know 20 different classrooms of students and we wanted to make sure that we were limiting that exposure for those teachers we thought about offering virtual specials in the classroom but then our academic our core teachers don't get a planning time so shortening our school day number one allowed us to not have to do math free time at school students are not eating at school and also helped protect those special teachers so they didn't have to bounce around between so many classrooms and it helped protect our core teacher planning time so uh some more information about hybrid schedule b for k5 we know that because of how we're
030going to have to have students come back we are going to have to have some class changes so let's say for example at oakhurst she has both likely for example four second grade teachers of her second grade students let's say 50 one to come back but let's say of her four second grade teachers only one because of accommodations can teach in person so we're going to have to figure out how to staff the other in-person classroom and the virtual classroom so there is going to have to probably be some shuffling and we are setting priorities to make sure that if we do have to do that we can and will mostly try to keep classrooms together if they have to move um so that students have familiar faces but we do want to be very
031upfront that hybrid hybrid option b does really is going to have to create some class roster changes to accommodate the need for staff that we want to keep them in the virtual setting like i said every effort is going to be made to minimize those changes but at the school we're definitely going to prioritize keeping students together we did want teachers to know that they may have to be reassigned so another option would be they have they only need let's say four virtual teachers at one school but they at school a but the other one a school b only needs one virtual teacher so we may have to send some of our virtual teachers from one school to help cover classes at another school okay so the other thing that as we go through this
032process is we need to see if we can offer the in-person learning five days a week or if we're going to have to split rosters so we are committed to not to succeed social distancing within our classrooms all of our principals have measured their classes they've got a list of their classrooms and how many kids they can put in the classroom and the most i've seen is at the high school it's a little higher but k5 i think the highest number is 15 and we're committed to meeting that number but some of them are as low as 10 just depending on the size of the classroom and the furniture in the room so in order to meet that we have to look at our numbers once the survey comes back and how many kids want
033to come back to in person and if we can fit all those kids that want to come back to in person within the classroom and keep that social distancing then our in-person students can attend all five days however the option is if they're not we can split the rosters and have half the class come two days and half the class come another two days um and we'll talk about we will have at-home learning opportunities for those students when they are not in the classroom okay so hybrid virtual school so if you are a parent or a teacher that you want to remain in the full virtual setting um we are going to continue with full virtual instruction um the students we're going to group them like i said to the greatest extent possible by class
034if not class by school but being very apparent that this is going to mean some students have to get reassigned but i also want to be clear if there is teacher a you know miss smith teaches at winona park and her parents say we love her so much we don't want to lose her we'll all say virtual that's not an option either you are virtual are you in person then we will figure out who based on as much as matching as possible what your teacher will look like but we cannot guarantee that if you're all of your students stay virtual and your teacher's virtual that you will still have that teacher we just can't make that promise um let's see synchronous learning as i mentioned before we are going to keep that consistent in our
035new virtual learning full virtual learning option we are adding instructional time to wellness wednesday we are going to commit to at least half day of instructional academics during wellness wednesdays and do more embedding of the social emotional learning in the daily practice with our teachers for 612 even though we are continuing as planned with full virtual for those grade levels we are definitely wanting to continue with that monday tuesday thursday friday but we do hear a parent and we do know that we need to start offering more instruction on wednesday so we are anticipating at least a half a day of instruction for our 612 students as well on wednesdays that lays us so well on its wednesday so grades k5 wellness wednesday will be an instructional day on for the in person and for
036virtual students teacher planning time in the modified schedule puts additional planning time in the teachers in person schedule more consistently throughout the week so we feel like we no longer need that full day of planning for the teachers 612 we're going to really target enrichment and remediation opportunities for our students that need those enrichment and remediation opportunities but at the same time providing every student some asynchronous learning on that wednesday as well and i've seen some really inventive and creative plans at the high school in middle school so i'm really excited for what they're offering and then all students the shortened holiday week of january 6 when they come back we're not going to have wellness wednesday on january 6th so that will be an instructional day and then we are anticipating our last and
037for our last wellness wednesday regardless of when we move back to more in person will be january 13th so learning choices we've mentioned this before at our four meetings and with parents we do need to re-survey our parents so our learning choice survey is going to go out tomorrow morning parents we're asking that a really quick turnaround on this i know this is a tight timeline for people to make a decision but we're really trying to get that number back so that we can make move in the next steps of planning if that's what we decide to do and follow up with parents next week on any parent that had it selected so the selections that they make we're asking parents that this selection you choose will stay in place unless csd makes another major
038change in our learning option so if we get to let's say mid-march and we're ready to bring everyone back the whole time because there's whatever happening in our community we will re-survey parents the other thing is that families we know have changes in their lifestyle or something happens with the job and there's a need to send a student back to in person even though they had previously selected virtual we will go ahead and let them communicate that with their school principal so the survey will ask parents to select one of these four options if they want to return in person that's their first desire they really need their child back in a classroom option two is yes i really want my kid back in the classroom but if you need the space i can stay
039virtual the third option is i prefer virtual learning but if you've got room and you want more kids to fill those seats i'll send my kid and the last option would be i really am still dedicated to full virtual learning i did want to just point out that we will continue to offer supports for our students in special programs like gifted 504s esol special ed all of our title programs we're going to be ramping up what those supports look like through our wednesday increased instructional time okay so let's talk about mitigation i did want to point out that our mitigation subcommittee did a thorough review of our csd coveted safety facilities and healthy schools manual they've vetted the strategies that we had already proposed to use in that but they also made recommendations for several
040enhancements and things that we could do above and beyond but i also want to point out that there was a quite a bit of recognition that what we're doing in city schools of decatur is way far above and beyond what other school districts are doing so the mitigation strategies and i'm going to talk more about these as we go through so i'm not going to talk about them so individually right here but i did want to comment on the very last one is we have a building checklist that our mitigation team is using and has created for us and what they've done is it is pretty much a rubric to measure the level of mitigation in our school and it's a tool we can use ongoing so that we can go back in every once
041a week and check the mitigation is this happening is this happening is this happening we definitely wanted a tool to help measure mitigation over time and make sure we are holding up our end of the bargain with our parents and our teachers of saying yes we have highly effective mitigation strategies in our buildings so i've mentioned before cohorting for hybrid option b is the biggest mitigate one of the biggest mitigation strategies that we're proposing for this schedule and it's basically once we know who wants to come back who doesn't we can create cohorts of students and as i mentioned the max would be 15 per student 15 students per group and we will not cross cohort so once you are in a cohort that is your group of people you attend school with and you
042attend school with only those people and that teacher so there is going to be some if there are opportunities where students would have to go to a pull-out class or a separate class we're looking at how that will happen in the virtual setting how it can happen during the async or the at-home learning time in the afternoon or on the wellness wednesday so we've got several really good options to continue um with all the interventions and supports while maintaining our cohorts at the k5 level it becomes a lot difficult at 6 12. foreign language our students how they move between different foreign language classes accelerated math all the different interventions and supports at the middle school and high school level make it much more difficult so it can be done but it creates cohorts of
043students that are much bigger than 15. and right now we feel strongly that 15 is about the largest cohort of students that we want to bring back in to ensure that level of mitigation is appropriate face coverings that is another big layer of keys that is in our mitigation plan and that layer of cheese is a non-negotiable it's 100 mandated mask wearing for students it is we are working on putting it as part of our dress code to make sure that it's a requirement and in any csd building you have to wear a mask and that's just what we need to ensure health and safety for our staff and students um and there is an opportunity or the way that we're going to have parents also sign off on a pledge when they send their
044students back about the mask we've already talked a lot about these facility improvements i really want to call out the hvac that has become one of the kind of hold up for um returning to school but our mitigation committee really praised our operations executive director sergio on his work he's already done with hvac they recommended some additional opportunities to enhance the hvac which he is really looking at considering and taking and putting into place but they felt really good with what we already have going in hvac the cleaning and sanitizing was another mitigation strategy that came up and was vetted by our subcommittee and they approved of what we had and offered some additional strategies for us to put in place which we are definitely going to do and these are additional sinks um frequent
045hand washing teaching our students how to do that and then all of the cleaning supplies being provided to teachers in their classroom more information on cleaning and sanitizing are those high-touch areas being cleaned at least four times a day flushing the bathroom drains because students aren't using those as frequently and even our bathroom drain up here got hot one day i was like what's happening so that is something that is definitely a need disinfecting classrooms when needed with the electrostatic foggers and then making sure we have trained and adequately supported our custodians with what they need for their daily responsibilities a really positive piece about bringing students back to in-person learning is that we can now provide students daily with food so every day when students that come into the building they would leave that
046day with a grab-and-go lunch and their breakfast for the next day and because school nutrition is still providing meals free of cost it will help us support our full our school and nutrition department by giving lunches making sure every student has a lunch and we will continue for students that do stay full in the full virtual setting those students will also be able to continue with their lunches pick up grab and go transportation this definitely is one of the mitigation places where mitigation sometimes can become a little bit more not as tight as we can do in our classroom but we do feel very confident that those people that need transportation will have a safe transportation to and from school the bus drivers will be cleaning and disaffecting their buses between every route we will
047be requiring face coverings while people ride the bus they'll be hand sanitizer um and the ventilation piece even though we may not be we'll open the windows when we can but we definitely will open that vent that is on the top of the bus but really social distancing is one of the main mitigation strategies on the bus in addition to face masks and ventilation i know we definitely want to encourage our parents because the k5 schools are pretty spread out if they can walk or ride to school or get a ride with a with their parent we are encouraging that they do that to get their own way to school instead of riding a bus health and safety so other this is continued with mitigation strategies actually but it is categorized under health and safety
048so there was some new recommendations from the cdc about decreasing the number of days in quarantine from uh to seven to ten from fourteen csd we feel that because the levels are so high and we are just now kind of having this idea of bringing students back in a very controlled way that we want to maintain that 14-day quarantine for people that may have been exposed to covid or we're showing symptoms and we can look at decreasing that as we know more about what this looks like in our school building and we do have very rigorous protocols for staff and students if they become ill during the school day and those are outlined very generally here but also very specifically in our coded manual we definitely rely on our school nurses to evaluate our students
049we'll be calling parents and isolating students if they are showing symptoms at school staff making sure they notify their supervisors having them leave as soon as possible contact their health care provider and obviously if a staff member is too ill to drive home we will make sure we can get them home some way or if they need to be if we need to call 9-1-1 please do that so a lot of questions about what happens if my teacher has to quarantine what happens if a student has to quarantine so this chart really explains when we would do full in-person learning how when students would just do their learning at home versus when we may have to say this whole class is in virtual learning so if our teacher is well and the students are well
050we're doing in-person learning then we go into the middle column where some students may need quarantine if it's if it's not a whole class of needing quarantine we are going to continue with in-person learning and that the quarantine students just like we do with kids that are out because they're sick they're going to be working with that teacher on asynchronous learning activities we are continuing to use google classroom even with our students that are coming in person even though that's not going to be how they learn during the school day we are going to continue to use that electronic learning platform to help manage learning materials for those students and then if student and teacher are quarantined we would revert to a virtual learning for all students and then there's just more specific details about
051what happens if the teacher is quarantined but can teach or the teacher is quarantined and can't teach contact tracing i attended a orientation today we're training a new round of staff members our administrative assistants at each school are also being trained to do contact tracing our nurses i've already completed the training our aaa's are in the process of doing that and we've also hired additional health aides for our larger schools to help support with contact tracing um our communication protocol this was developed when we worked on our manual and this has also been vetted by our communications subcommittee this just outlines the steps that we use as we communicate what and what what's happening in our schools and how we're doing it and you'll see that the end result is that we post all of
052our covid positives and or exposures on our dashboard so that is going to continue as well we are going to do staff and student screeners staff we already have a qr code that they check before they enter a building and students we've got a graphic that will share with parents and trained parents on how to screen their child each day before they come to school um so that brings us to our parent covid contact so we are asking any parent that wants to send students back to in-person learning to sign off on an agreement and this does help them understand the math the mandate mandatory math wearing as well as what possible consequences could come into play if their student is non-compliant wearing a math which would end up in hey if you can't comply
053over a certain period of time um that it does mean we have to send your child back to the full virtual setting there also is an agreement that they will check their child for daily symptoms and what they do if a child is showing symptoms as well as if their child becomes sick that they do need to make sure they can come and get their child within an hour okay accommodations for staff so we do we did hear our teachers loud and clear that there are some upon teachers requesting accommodations because of who they live within their living arrangement and i'll tell you having spoke with all the teachers going through this process there are teachers that i mean i would say no you should not be coming to school and want to make sure
054that we've done everything we can to help protect that staff and their family members so we are expanding it we have a process i would say 99.99 ironed out i just wanted to make sure we got approval tonight to move forward with that and we'll share that process with teachers tomorrow so we will have staff supervisors principals sharing this process out tomorrow with their staff about how they can request an accommodation that is not because of their own impairment but because someone they live with okay so we've got some supports for staff and students and families ready to go pods we've heard pods have been very effective been very great and we want to continue with pods as much as necessary the difference with k5 pods is we're going to limit those to afternoons only
055because we'll have in-person learning in the morning we'll have afternoon pods in the afternoon and the other great thing about continuing supporting with the pods is the pad facilitators can still continue to work for csd and come in the morning and if there's a teacher that's out we need coverage we can use them to help cover classes and in the afternoon they can help facilitate pod and we are going to cohort pods we'll have to once we see who wants to come in person and who needs a pod we'll be trying to group those to cohort those students as well and we are going to continue with secondary pods until we are ready to say let's phase back in our 6 12 students we do understand that this has been a very stressful time for
056staff and students and we do want to make sure that we are offering support for emotional well-being for our staff we've already been doing a training on community resilience trauma-informed approach to help increase mental well-being after stressful events of doing check-ins with our staff on increasing those and our student center at the high school is offering individual and group counseling services and then we've got some other tier one social emotional support groups getting ready to start particularly through our crew meetings and those different opportunities at each school so our next step is we've got to communicate all this information with our community and our staff we've got to launch our k5 survey we need to make sure we process all of our enhanced accommodation requests and what i can say is any staff member that
057has completed the accommodation packet the interactive packet we will let them know no later than friday if their accommodation has been approved to work to work remote then we need to make decisions on can we bring all the kids that want to come back back or do we have to look at that nuanced information about someone that wants to be in person but could stay virtual and figure that piece out and then we'll be communicating to the families how many days a week their child would attend and each school has been working with me to work on their schedules and what those look like so we would be having schools communicate those details out to their communities all right thanks maggie i appreciate it so um we can jump into some questions and then at
058some point the topic you'll see the two big things that were not in those slides were about what role metrics are going to play and dates for when things are going to happen because there's an intersection between those two things that we need to talk about and um i kind of come come to some sort of consensus on hopefully so um that you know if your question is where are those that's because we need to talk about it so if you want to jump in and ask questions now or maggie maybe now we can do that and either of us can answer any questions about this and we have some post online as well if it's too specialized that we need to pull somebody in and then um if we can at some point then
059segway into that discussion of metrics intake that would be awesome so don't want to start the small stuff yeah let's do that um thank you for a very thorough presentation i appreciate it asked to answer a lot of questions i had and that i've received from parents so i'll be able to answer them so is the the reason why we haven't added six through 12 to this um plan yet because it's going to be a lot harder to to figure out you know how to how to operate because all about the pullman yeah okay and so um have we looked at what other potential high school and middle schools are doing and what have we seen that you know they're kind of like leaning towards life we have and um middle school and high school
060are either not cohorting at all or are doing much bigger cohorts so setting our cohort number to 15 very much limits grouping students at a high school and middle school setting high school is nearly impossible to cohort at 15 size middle school is doable um it would and i've been greg and his admin team have been amazing and we've been back and forth um for several days hey what about this idea what about this idea and without having 100 confidence of a 15 of a size of 15 students cohorting we just don't feel comfortable bringing them back just yet um so like i said we can cohort at middle definitely but it's a much bigger size than 15. it's probably closer to like 45 to 60 which is just we're just not comfortable with that
061high number of students intermixing at this point with the different teachers that they would have to be attending class with um so yeah cohorting as possible is just bigger sizes at the middle school level in high school even bigger and i would add as part of what we're hoping to do is like so for instance sixth grade may be easier to do cohorts at least smaller size than seven and eight because they start to specialize more in seventh and eighth so if we get to the point that we feel like we can have maybe not coverts of 15 but maybe some decent-sized cohorts and we feel like it's safe to do so we may then bring back sixth grade right and then at some future point when we feel like we can have maybe as
062long as we can keep them in their whole team or something right and they're not interacting with the whole school just within their team maybe we can bring back seventh in eighth grade you know so that's part of where that phasing comes in but we heard loud and clear how important cohorting is right mask and cohorting and social distancing are the top three things that people want to see and that they are supported for limiting transmission so as we can get those it's possible we may be able to address them at grade levels not the entire school all at once are there certain subjects that are causing that like is it because of like the the uh like the specials that are causing that and is there a way that we could eliminate some of
063those classes at school or do them virtually well so some of it we could do the way we're doing day five where like the special fight courses are offered virtually for that reason yeah some of it is we start to specialize more in the middle school so you may have a special math class everything else your together or now we have three different language options so you may go to you may have a german teacher who has to teach in three different teams or something like that it's because as you get more specialized it's harder to do the cohorting because of that can you have cohorts within uh this i'm probably not going to make this make sense but who works within classes so for instance the whole class has to be the cohort that's
064really very very restricted but if you could identify you know like well these six so a class might have six groups of or four groups of six people these six can hang together and they're pretty much cohort but they always sit together so they're really a cohort within the class and the excessive divisions even plexiglas i mean i'm wondering if there's a way that we can be i mean if we're gonna if if we're gonna insist on these cohorts we can't make it so restrictive that that it turns out that by insisting on strict cohorting we're just not going back well i think in a future phase we probably could i think if our concern is we feel like with those small cohorts that i call pure cohorts right there's no intermixing at all happening
065that you can do that safely at almost any virus transmission level probably right because it's very controlled but as soon as you start putting in things like that where you have groups of like the groups are intermixing even if the kids themselves are moving as a cohort i would want to see much lower transmission levels before we get to that point because you are introducing a whole nother variable of risk at that point so that's that's kind of what our discussion has been about it um but it also gets to the metrics part of the discussion too that we need to have at some point so some of that maybe we could talk about with that are there any is there any example that we're following behind there any exemplary system not for cohorting at
066the high school middle school level well i think for one thing we're just going so far above and beyond what everyone else is doing i i don't know of examples that look like that i've talked with several principals of middle schools in my old district and then we've had some parents who sent us some example schedules and they helped but if if we are setting this number at 15 for what we feel comfortable with with cohorting them it's not it's very hard to do with the middle school and high school and then it just once and we can create these cohorts within cohorts but then we start grouping students in very um interesting ways that it just kind of defeats that purpose so right now i just think not that we can't do it we
067just also need a little more time with sixth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade in high school to investigate what that looks like and if we want to try to say let's try to get our lower elementary students and our elementary students back to an in-person learning option sooner than later i think we can start with this and then still continue to work on the 612 model and then i also think with the enhanced learning on wednesdays really targeting students with additional instructional time as well as the interventions and enrichment activities that we can confidently help support those students that have been struggling i have a question about cohorts so when the students in the afternoon go to the pods we're breaking that cohort right we had a great discussion about that jaina it's
068a really good point so the way the discussion went at first we said so we can't do pods for that exact reason because we don't want to introduce differences in cohorts but then the discussion went to the parents who are using the pods are the parents who have to have an option for their kids and so would we rather have a controlled option where we know where the kids are and we can try to keep them as cohorted as possible in pods in a very controlled environment or would we rather say pods aren't safe therefore parents go take your kids somewhere else where we don't know where you're taking them and what they're doing and what strategies are in place and so we decided that we would err on the side of offering the pods
069because we can do that in a much more controlled environment than what would probably happen if the parent for those parents who had to have that as an option okay i have another question about the get well room if kids seem to be exhibiting symptoms but they've not been tested you could have having multiple multiple kids in in the get-well room one who may in fact have covered one who may just be exhibiting some sinus symptoms or allergy symptoms or something like that and i was just wondering about the safety of having multiple uh people in the get well room not knowing who has coped or not i mean at some point it's a balancing act right you could add additional get well rooms and take them out of circulation from other uses um we're
070just we're not anticipating that big of a demand for the get well rooms and we're hoping that we can make do with what we've got and they're putting extra precautions in place you may have seen in the healthy schools manual about the get well room um but part of it is again just that balancing right of trying to figure out every time we add another space for instance as a get well room we're taking a space away from some other use and so i guess it's a balancing act right there is a chance that could happen and there's a chance it wouldn't happen so we're just trying to balance between the two and then also that's another reason we're asking parents to pick up their child as soon as possible yeah on wellness wednesdays for
071the k through five others in are those being synchronous for the children are they they're in person i guess so that's one of the okay so if kids if we have numbers where kids can attend five days that'll be full in person they'll be in school on wednesday just like they were monday tuesday thursday friday okay if the numbers get to a point where we cannot um socially distance within our classrooms we are looking at what wednesday will look like and we are recommending that possibly that would be a remote learning day for all of the in-person students another reason being is one day you come on one week you come wednesday one week you don't does that get people confused do we need you know how does that operate um but if we also
072are doing a full virtual day we can still do in-person synchronous learning we can still do the asynchronous as well as targeting some of those interventions okay and if it is that you have to do a split schedule with that wednesday if it's not in person would would it or could it be synchronous as opposed to yeah and is that true for six to twelve as well okay because i i just noticed we talked about on that slide it says grade six who's grade six through twelve all students will have asynchronous learning assignments is that in addition to synchronous learning on wellness wednesday so the high school is looking i haven't seen the middle school what their final proposal is the high school is looking at doing lives of live action live synchronous learning activities
073for their students on wednesdays um and then advisement they've got tok and cass that they're trying to follow up with it it's abbreviated it's not the full day because we do want to provide those teachers with some planning time on wednesdays but it is definitely like hey how can we support our students with some synchronous learning maybe it's not direct instruction maybe it's more of a check-in how are you doing let's talk about this project but there's a couple different options out there but we do definitely and there is more of the targeted interventions in enrichment so hope gifted teachers plugging in more with their gifted students on wednesdays intervention teachers offering more of those services on wednesdays as well okay so just to clarify there is going to be synchronous learning on wednesdays 4
0746 through 12. okay um i had a question regarding um two questions regarding quarantining so the one uh page said that some students if some students are quarantined then in person learning would continue is the sum going to be clarified in the metrics conversation what what is what would somebody there are times that only a portion of the class was quarantined because their exposure was not in class for instance right so you may have three kids who are in a class that had an exposure at home and they happen to be in the same class and so now they have to quarantine so that's how you could end up with a portion of your class quarantine when the rest of the class is in okay if there was a i guess if it could be
075traced to well um if students um if we cannot trace it to where they where they got it from how they contracted it then the entire class would be quarantined there would be no in-person learning not quite so the way the contact tracing works is when you hear of a case you try to figure out who that person had contact with your we the contact tracing is not trying to figure out where they got it it's trying to figure out who they might have given it to and so that's what contact tracing is about and so when we learn of a case either because someone has reported it to us or through department of public health our nurses then track down where was that person in the days leading up to that where they might
076have been contagious and try to figure out who they had contact when they went in within our school so that we can quarantine those people okay but i was still just trying to figure out how would you determine when that class needed to be continue with some students in person learning and when the entire class would need to be quarantined so an entire class an entire class might be quarantined if like there is a student that came to school and then we find out that night that they have symptoms and they go take a test and it turns out they did have covet 19 that whole class would then be quarantined because they were probably exposed to the virus from that student okay okay and if a student tests um positive at one school and
077they have siblings at another school or or if one of their classmates that's positive at one school uh and they have siblings at a different school what happens then so let me i'll do my best to explain it it's laid out in more detail in the manual but um what the contact tracing and quarantine is about that first tier of contacts not the second and third and fourth here right and so um let's say that a a student um was diagnosed positive and they have siblings at another school and those siblings are showing no symptoms and maybe even tested negative that you do not need to then quarantine everyone the siblings had contact with but he would quarantine the siblings because they had contact with a covert 19 positive person if one of those siblings
078then either tested positive or developed symptoms you would then go quarantine people that person had contact with leading up to that so you don't go you go i can't remember if they call it tier two or tier three you don't go to that next tier of people for quarantining until you have a reason to do that because of someone who has symptoms or has a positive test okay and is there is there any way similar to how we require vaccinations is there a way to require that in any way for close adjusting before we go into in-person for either staff or so yeah so we are exploring the option one of the recommendations to consider from the virus testing subcommittee was consider offering tests to all of the staff right before they start in person
079so that you have time to get the results so you know um so we are investigating that like a kind of a startup test right like we're about to go back let's do kind of a blanket test so we have some certainty of what we're going into right off the bat so we are exploring that i don't know if it's going to be feasible or not but that is one of the considerations we have the other thing we're looking at is would it be valuable to try to set up testing so that like let's say every friday afternoon all the employees who are in person take a test so that way by monday we know whether they tested positive or not so that they can then have that the weekend to process the test um
080so we're looking at that we're looking at the costs involved in it but those are two possible recommendations from that committee so and then the in just the agreement with the parents will be more so how we how we keep that under control for students that potentially correct so the the parent compact the idea is like um that community social responsibility idea of it takes all of us to make this work and so in exchange for you sending your child in person you're agreeing to do these things like basically be responsible right like don't send your kid if you're sick if they're sick don't send your kid if they've had any kind of an exposure you know those kind of things that we're all agreeing to do this to make this thing work so that's
081what that one's about okay okay i have a couple questions not directly about the plan but kind of relevant one of them which is easy is what would be you know all masks aren't the same right and so in some cloth masks are good they're five layers it's a good thing and if they're not bandanas you might as well not have one so are we gonna mandate effective mass and will we be providing it's my understanding that these disposable surgeons things are supposed to be better than the cloth mask and they're also really cheap you know so we have a large we have a large supply of mass kind of like what uh bill has on over there so that if kids don't have mass or if they have massive they're just not effective we
082have maps like that that we'd be able to get and there'll be some policing it'll be expected if you come with a bandana and wearing it correctly yeah it's really detailed in the safety manual the second question is about the ventilation system and there's some emails today that actually resonated with me because i had been read something about using co2 monitors as a proxy to make sure that you've got adequate ventilation i don't know what the levels ought to be but the idea is that there's too much co2 you're not donating enough and it's a sign that you need to do better and i understand that there's because of some pre-existing issues over there at renfrow that there was something wrong but i guess it seemed to me like a reasonable request that we would
083supply these co2 monitors maybe not one for every room but maybe one for a wing and and actually listen to the results and if it you know whatever the right number is if there's an issue addresses because additionally so we do regular testing and we did bring in an engineer at least to look at renfro and maybe others i can't remember one of the things we're doing differently because that concern does come up from often from the same people at the same school is we are creating a website where we're posting all of those results so every time they're done a water test an air test an engineering report of the hvac system whatever it is we're going to post them all online so that anyone who wants to see what those look like they
084can keep up to date on it anytime they want so do we have a schedule kind of like you would have to check the bathrooms and make sure that it's clean so we're testing their schedules yes and um for the engineering one that was really special to this to say hey we put in this new system we want the system evaluated basically just going down the list the other is learning support options and and you know i'm i'm very concerned that we're not going to get the older kids back into school and we can talk about that more um but it's very clear and you know we've gotten hundreds of emails which i'll be honest i couldn't read them all this time because i've gotten so many many saying you know so many of these
085kids are thriving which i don't doubt i've seen it with my own eyes many are but those folks need to understand that many are not right and so none of us can speak universals here and but what we know is that a large fraction of kids are not doing well in virtual learning and we need to do better for them and i don't know what that's going to look like but right now we're not it's not through no fault i think of in the great efforts of the staff but it's just not working for many it is for many others part of that needs to be the safety net that we need to do i know that we are not doing a good job of identifying those kids who are falling through the cracks and
086reaching out to the kids and the parents and saying this isn't working what can we do to help it's not happening and it needs to and i guess my quest i hear that it's happening but i'm just telling you that it's not and so i mean it is happening but maybe not universally i think is your point right i i it is not happening enough um and so i mean what's what we need to if it's going to be this way then we need to do a much better job of identifying these kids that we are failing and reaching out to help them and so i guess you know where is the you know it's we're trying our best it's good enough so what you know what's the plan because we need a plan and
087it's not we don't have it now and i assume you're talking specifically like 6 12 right 12 yeah but they're the ones who are going to be home right if we're going to leave those kids at home um how are we going to identify the kids who need that help to make sure they're getting it have you had conversations yesterday uh the middle school's already started bringing students in person of the high needs group on wednesdays i think they've had like 35 or 40 students coming on wednesday are these pre-defined high-end kids no i have to ask greg for specifics on that but it is kind of a rolling high need of okay who is not logging in who's not doing their work who's failing at class who's not participating um the high school has
088a proposal ready to go they're very eager to start bringing students back on wednesdays in particular for more input for some in-person learning options i have the same question written down and it was from a different angle if i'm a parent and right now it seems like my recourse is to email the school board because my kid is is failing for mental health what would your two recommendation be because obviously that's not a solution i mean heather tells a wonderful real estate agent she is not a trained mental health expert middle school student to my knowledge um what's the gap there what should they do the first thing i would always say is reach out to your teacher right so especially at the elementary level reach out to your teacher because they're the best contact
089to get you in touch with the right people um the we have counselors at every single school for this exact reason right and so reach out to the counselor reach out to the principal reach out to somebody at the school level is probably your best bet to get the fastest results you can always like people email me and then shayna touches it and sends it off to the right person to say hey here's a need at your school whatever but the teacher is always the first best because they are the ones who can make the fastest connection for you for whatever it is not just with mental health and i think that's wonderful i i just think that we have an obligation to be to be proactive and to to be looking at attendance records
090and everything else and if there's a problem to reach out and try to fix it and not wait for the parents i do think they're getting those right like i've talked to enough teachers that they see a student not logging in or they see a kid still in bed it's in class i can tell you it's not good enough right i agree with you so i think um a strategy that i used as a principal was weekly kid chats so i would meet with my grade level ap and i went like i pulled the roster of kids um and i was like these kids are failing why what's happening this teacher has half of their classes failing why what are we doing and i think maybe implementing a different level of like some kind of
091a kid chat so that we are following up and then it was a running roster every week i would add the nate same life i was like this kid's been failing for three weeks why hasn't this moved so there is some of that yes so um greg did text me he said that they do um every week look at they have space for 40 kids and they're bringing they're identifying the kids that aren't engaging and learning and grabbing those kids to be invited in for the next week after they collect their data rachelle's got her plan in the work she said and um we'll be ready to go as soon as we come back in january so i had i'll ask my question along this line i had others but since we're talking about this
092i had similar concerns about the are the renfro and high school students who are not thriving i realize many are and i i commend our teachers for their work to make virtual learning enriching and engaging but recognizing that some students are not connecting well in that way i'm just wondering well we're not ready to to say let's go to the hybrid c model and bring every kid who would like to go back to high school or middle school back but what about as we develop this more robust process of identifying the children who are at risk and vulnerable that we bring them back more than just on wednesdays that we bring back and i'm talking you know a very small group of kids here relative to what we were talking about before but really identifying
093those kids that we identify as being at risk and long before we are ready for hybrid c start engaging with those kids more consistently more days not just one day a week because i and then hopefully we can bring them back to a point where maybe we can get them back to being able to be successful virtual like it doesn't even need to be a permanent thing but there might be kids who just need a boost or who need to reconnect somehow or need to get through a difficult subject or whatever it is um so i i would like to even if we're saying right now we're not ready for in-person learning at renfrew in high school i really would like to take a more surgical approach to this the proposal process is about two
094so don't forget we do have that option so that like let's say the high school sees this need and says hey we really want to jump start this and start bringing kids in you know every morning from 9 to 11 or something like that that's one of the reasons we put that process in place so we can be a little more nimble when we have the needs like that as well but we can certainly be more strategic about it i think is what you're saying is like don't don't wait for a proposal to actually go out and judge it yeah yes exactly and and proactively seek out these kids and not just wait for the parents to reach out because some parents might not be checking or might think well my kids on the computer
095all day so they must be learning that's not necessarily the case so just you know as long as it's going two ways obviously it's nice that parents do reach out to teachers and that should be you know escalated in the proper way but also that we are um actively speaking out the students and finding a way to bring them in however that needs to be my other question oh go ahead jaina sorry i forget you're on the speakerphone you say go ahead oh janice and go ahead okay my other question is unrelated but it's it's related to the survey and i i wonder if there's possibly a way to make it through spring break because i feel like asking parents right now to commit to not going back full-time might dissuade those parents who are
096willing to be flexible for the winter months and say you know what i i'm going to give you a chance to kind of ease in to reopening the high school and rent pro and i'm willing to be flexible for a few more months but those same parents might not be willing to say i'll be flexible until the end of the school year and so i'm thinking that maybe if we make it for just more of a fixed period of time it might actually benefit us because we might find that there's more flexibility there and i think also we are going to learn a lot between now and then as we open our lower elementary schools and as we hopefully start to open maybe the sixth grade and then if we can work out smaller cohorts
097somehow you know seventh and eighth grade and then as we start to bring out back small groups to the high school hopefully that i think the the landscape may have changed significantly and so for those reasons i just wonder if there's a way that we could possibly consider making that a shorter time yeah we certainly can i think our thinking was that um if the landscape has changed that much we're probably introducing a new plan anyway and part of our plan is when we introduce a new plan you can change your mind um so i guess we felt like we were kind of capturing that like for instance let's say that the vaccine rollout goes just tremendously well and it's rapid and it's available to students and staff and we suddenly realize hey there's no
098reason everyone can't be vaccinated who's in our school system we may then say all right you know uh two weeks after we feel like that was a reasonable time to be able to get it done we're gonna ramp up and change our mode of operation at that point that's when we're opening up that learning choice survey again that's kind of what we're picturing yeah but i mean we could set a time on it i think part of our worry was that if we just set an arbitrary date on it nothing may have changed but i get to your point too of maybe part of it is just the kind of the psychology of are you committing for a huge period or a small period yeah and and i feel like that's kind of a maybe
099a good not only is it sort of halfway but it's also as we have gotten through the winter months and many we would hopefully have lower transmission rates then but even so like um i'm also thinking it it may sound okay if you're in the driver's seat saying well i know we're probably going to have changes and so we're probably going to let people have another chance but if i'm reading this i'm thinking this might be my only chance to get my kid priority to go back for the rest of the whole school year and so i might be less likely to be flexible if i don't think or i'm not guaranteed at least another chance to re-evaluate things so i just thought that's a good question let us let us revisit it and we'll
100walk through it again tomorrow and see because i do hope that we will have families who are flexible and that because that will give us a better opportunity i think for you know to structure this in such a way that we can open sooner and more safely and all that so assume we're gonna have quite a number we also haven't had any discussion of the metrics and dates yeah so i'm just going to throw that out there where are we going with this conversation or maybe again do we have any other questions about the plan or should we move i think jaina was about to ask oh james it looks like i have a question go ahead but if everyone's ready with the metric they followed my questions except for the one which is i'd
101like just a little more of a discussion about the accommodation process i was glad to hear um the teachers are family members i mean we've just heard some stories and i think people who have lost a parent or an uncle or anything like that it's horrendous um so correct me if i'm wrong we've kind of gone through the process of providing accommodations you feel like for the ada accommodation for the ada accommodation new process is what we'll be telling staff about tomorrow and it's going to be defined as anyone who has a has a loved one or a family member or someone in close contact that they feel protecting so we're going to limit it to people that reside with people at high risk or have children that are categorized at high risk for severe
102illness from contracting coping okay so the one thing that came up in teacher advisory council is they felt like there are risks that are not part of the aea the ada accommodation process for a given individual but um would be serious enough that they would hope we'd include it in that next tier of accommodation so we're going to look at that to see rather than just limiting to exactly the people you live with um we're gonna we're gonna look at it to see if are there other things we would accommodate for the individual themselves that don't fall into ada but we would say yeah we get it you know like we can scoop you into this process so we're going to review that because i think we are all in agreement that it's such an
103important stakeholder for feeling comfortable getting back in the classroom that starts with making sure that they feel like they're being heard and their needs are being met and i appreciate all the mitigation stuff so yeah i want that combination process to be communicated well and thoroughly and just because someone doesn't request an accommodation doesn't mean that they're gung-ho to get back in the classroom either um all right you want to talk metrics and dates okay so as we were going through this we really felt like um we needed your input more on the metrics and base conversation so the one thing i can share is we don't feel like we can be ready to go back in person before january 19th which is the day after mlp day we feel like um given the timing
104of the decision the need to get the learning choices back from parents and then plan out whatever shuffling and then we feel like we need to have a a little bit of time to do that so january 19th is where we feel is the earliest we could implement this hybrid b plan that we showed you here i mentioned earlier that at most of the transmission levels that we have seen right now i would feel comfortable moving forward with this k5 plan because it is just so extreme in all of the different mitigation measures that we're doing um i do think there is some fear like i pulled up the data just a minute ago our cases in dekalb county right now today data report are higher than they were in july we have now reached
105a new maximum um and so one of the things we talk about in in teacher advisory council is while it does make sense that all these mitigation measures are very strong and do control things very well it also is a little scary to say but we're not going to define any maximum at all that's a little frightening right and so i think the feeling from the teachers would be yeah we get it but it's it's pretty safe and the transmission isn't critical but they'd feel better if there was a number right like whatever that number is but just knowing there's a number that if it is above this level we're not even doing this hybrid b thing um and so i think that's part of the conversation is where is that number right like if
106if we does the board feel like we can set a number and if so what it is what is it and or are we comfortable saying we don't think we need a number in this kind of a situation um and then the intersection of that with dates is um if we start setting numbers that makes dates variable if we're not setting numbers it makes date more certain right so for instance if we don't have a maximum number that we have to stay under we can say we're starting january 19th period if we say we are starting january 19th but only if cases per 100 000 are below this level or only if hospital utilization is below this percent or whatever that metric is then it makes we have to come up with that plan like
107we talked about before of making it predictable so people can see the data moving up to it and understand hey if this happens in the data this date gets postponed does that make sense and so i just need your feelings there because i don't feel like it's as much a scientific decision as like a comfort level position or a comfort level of where are we as a community and so that's what i would like to discuss that and then also and it came up quite a bit right about like the 612 and what is our comfort level in setting some metrics perhaps there or setting a goal date there of when we want to try to do that next phase um and is that going are we going to approach that the same way knowing
108we can't cover to the same level but we can do all those other mitigation strategies and maybe set a goal date and then i'll throw in this last one just because based on the some of the discussions happening in the world um i think we've all been surprised how quickly this vaccine process has gone and so one of the things that came up at teacher advisory council was knowing that vaccines are on the horizon but not knowing how quickly what role does that play and they agreed it should not necessarily play a role in this first phase right that this we can do it's not dependent on vaccines being available but we might want to consider saying before we go to this next phase we want to see vaccines widely available available or widely available
109maybe the teachers or something like that so i would be curious just because that's one of those topics that has just really come up very recently i'd also be curious in your thoughts on that so just to put in perspective right now if you look at the cab county on based off date of report we are at 365 cases per hundred thousand two for more perspective can you give us a sense um so i struggle with with being sort of um now we're one of ten systems in the state of georgia that are not currently in schools in states i know that new york city closed down schools and then decided reversed course and they're back in school i think you mentioned that too and so basically we had a lot of experience with schools
110being in as we said our mitigation strategies are sort of biotic right like we've got the best mitigation you're going to find we just heard that we haven't we don't have any example of a system that is imposed this strict of cohort strategy condition of attorney so we have schools all over the state and the nation all of whom have these very high levels of speeding spread i mean not all but a lot of them successfully return without seeing end school transmission and so i think we need when we talk about these numbers and even these mitigation strategies you keep that context that what we're doing is you know there's a balance between the student health mental health and well-being and staff safety we need to protect the staff we need to keep them safe
111evidence is we can keep them safe we've kind of pulled the dowel to say if there's any risk at all it's too much and instead we're going to risk the students to protect the staff and i guess i wonder if we can't find more balance so that we can actually do our jobs at school system and educate kids too and i feel like we're setting metrics that ensure that we don't go back and i don't feel good about that and i feel like i don't feel good about it so based on that would you be a proponent of saying yes this phase we're good move forward we don't need to worry about the maximum because we we kind of know where we are at this point and maybe move towards the 6-12 phases sooner rather
112than later right like make that follow fairly quickly after when you're asking me why position my and it's not sort of damned torpedoes we're going to do it no matter what it's it's let's do it let's get in class and then let's monitor very closely and see how it goes and the second the instance that there is a cluster of cases that you have in school transmission that's when you pull back immediately i mean so we do every mitigation that we can find and then we go back and get in school and it's not that we're going to do it no matter what or until some date we're going to see how it goes if there's a problem we're going to adjust it's just that we're going to make our decisions based on what we
113see and experience and how it goes instead of because there's a number and the problem is that we don't we can't correlate the number with the actual risk and therefore it's arbitrary inherently and i understand that it's important for that it gives comfort but i think the cost might be too high and i think that the alternative of just being very very on top of the situation and being very responsive i think should give an equal measure of protection and comfort i think if if we do it well and communicate the cases transparently and i would i think fun while i'm on it i think you know i just think that you know if we've got this cool i mean i feel like i wish i could give you in this chart it said go
114figure it out so let's cohort to the maximum extent that we can but let's not insist that first 15-person cohorts is the only way that we're going to get back into school you know the virus i mean the vaccine if we wait for a vaccine we've written all these beliefs because even teachers aren't very much in the front line i think they should be but they're not so if we wait for that we're just writing off the school year you know i mean is there not a way that we can get kids in school who want to be there and put a plexiglas wall with its own ventilation system i mean i i guess i'm saying you know don't so that teacher doesn't interact with the kids so that teacher and and put plexiglass walls
115in the school to separate those in i don't know and if you can't do it perfectly i still think we have to say it's kind of like we've got a menu of all these different protective measures this is one and the fact that we don't you know we still got six layers of cheese right and so uh is the cost of insisting on that seventh layer of cheese kids don't go back to school because if it is i think that might be too hot okay that's nice let's see hey i i want wanna push back a couple of places one it's very important for me to say that you said this and they're all doing it successfully was the second sentence out of your mouth and sat in the gsba conference last week and at
116one point he said how many of you have uh had calls for your superintendent to be fired this week uh and we were 42 for 42 for the people in the zoom call how many of you have shut down because of coping and thank you and it was 42 for 42. um and we i mean we don't hear about these other schools but and i've shared this publicly like you know they're out for the ninth week of the school year and he's a senior and thankfully he got into georgia tech congratulations aj um but like they're not doing it successfully i want to back up on that narrative very strongly um i think part of what is amazing and part of why we've been okay is that the virtual has failed from kids but our
117teachers and our staff and the approaches it has been has been good it hasn't been great and good for everybody that um second is it's the work within the analogy is that the swiss cheese model works unless it's a deluge pouring against the swiss cheese and i think even the analogy requires an upper level of risk because and i thought that metric a and the scientists in that group and the ones that followed back up with us were amazing that the only slight pushback louis because i want the kids in school too and i think it's absolutely amazing and and we are we know we are risking things and people think that i disagree with you i agree with you so many things um is that the notion of monitoring and see how it goes
118maybe someone dies maybe a kid die maybe this disease that we don't know is popping out and i just want to make sure that i'm more comfortable if we give more people choice so that's why the one question i want we to make sure that we have was the accommodations of teachers i don't want anyone to feel like they have to show up like the service industry can open up if they want to the ones i feel bad are the workers who have to go for their livelihood and so there's a teacher that has to go into a classroom full of first grade kids who are acting a fool and can't keep their mask on is putting his life at on the line so that we can monitor to figure it out i'm not comfortable
119with that but i'm also not comfortable with continuing to fail our kids and and it's not an if it's not two sides of the same thing we need to get over that like we're looking and and i love the dr permanent presentation began with the mission statement because that's it we exist to provide kids with high quality education and it needs to be multi-faceted we need to continue to focus on mental health because we know we're failing we need to continue to improve virtual because we know it's a component of it completely but part of me says to not say you know there was some pushback in the new york city school that was the other thing that i wrote down i wanted to say they were at three percent and then they started to
120go over and dr falchi went and said listen i don't i'm not sure that closing is good and they reverse course we we were we're at what like 7.8 7.9 on the positivity test rate and it's gone up for the fourth and fifth time that scared the hell out of me um having lost family members you know but that's emotional but then is are the teachers gonna be able to respond to that if choice is built in i'm more comfortable if we're combating mental health and giving people the opportunities and reaching out i'm more comfortable but even with them we've got a report from some of the most qualified doctors in the world putting their names and reputations on the line saying gets above here it's not that schools spread the risk it's that two
121we would expect about two teachers to be positive when they come into the building every week and then that creates the spread and the risk so maybe just put a cap on it here it also creates some predictability for families and that was the big problem with our plan is that this plan could have been put in place in june we should have been rolling with this we may have gotten six seven eight weeks of in-person already um but then the predictability is so people don't feel like you're flip-flopping but they feel like now i'm rambling metrics are arbitrary they also provide a safety net for people and planning particularly when the other side is life and monitoring hospital i mean one of the metrics we're considering is are there empty er in a hospital
122for our teachers to take advantage of if they come down to it holy crap i'm not qualified to make that decision i'm not comfortable making that decision and that's that's it that's the best way i'm going to say that i mean i don't disagree yeah i mean there might be a different synthesis um i mean metrics are not always arbitrary the best metrics are actually tied to actual risk we know how we derive them right and we can say that if this experience shows this is no longer safe when i say they're arbitrary what i'm saying is that that's not how these particular proposed metrics were derived i mean if we're at maximum capacity in hospital that's you know i'm with you there's a point which it's just not safe yeah that's about it i'm
123saying we don't tie ourselves to metrics as decision points then when they are arbitrary and aren't tied and when and this goes back to the other point how i'll keep talking but i mean granted i mean school's opening and closing i don't see that necessarily as a failure i mean we don't want to go no but what i'm saying is that the overwhelming experience as i'm as i understand that schools aren't super spreaders and so schools are in fact opening and operating and have not been if i'm wrong and i would i would like to know that i'd like to correct the course but but that's my understanding today and that's the understanding mainly what made the most impression on me is the abc science collaborative data looking at the actual experience of schools across
124the state of north carolina because that's where they are and finding that the very few schools that experienced clusters were those that had very poor mitigation shifts i mean they didn't have a decatur strategy they didn't have any they weren't even requiring math totally and so the experience what i'm saying is that we've got schools that are open all over the land with much worse mitigation than we have and yet they're doing it safely and again it's a balance we're gonna we're gonna we are risking and experimenting with the lives of these young people we're being subjected to this unprecedented we don't know i'll jump in um i think we need metrics um we're following cdc guidance in terms of reopening schools the cdc is saying that pre-k uh k through five or maybe pre-k
125through fifth grade can reopen um safely although i i question reopening now when the cases um in dekalb county are 365 cases per 100 000 and the cdc guidance their rubric says you know at 200 you're at the highest risk that's where their rubric ends at 200 and we're at 365 and so i just cannot rationalize um putting teachers and students back in the building when the numbers are this high and i think that you know we aren't ensuring failure we're trying to make sure that students are safe while you know making sure they get the best possible education considering this situation that we have no control over um you know we when i be district and so we our teachers have to use rubrics that's how teachers uh determine you know where students are
126at um and i don't know how then as a district we not use a rubric to determine when it's safe for us to go back um you know um james brought up you know the successfully common in terms of schools all over reopening but those schools are still having cases and so you know i don't know how we define successful but i mentioned during our work session that recently a teacher a nurse in paulden county died the school had not done has not ignite at the time had not acknowledged in doing any contact tracing so we don't know for sure but when i said that a parent emailed and said you know what she was 70. and as if that that justified her death and um i just don't want to be responsible um for
127anybody's major illness or extended complications um as a result of this virus and certainly not somebody's death and that it feels like you know that is what we are potentially taking responsibility for if we return now when the case's number of cases in the affection rate is so incredibly high um you know there was a pair in the email that said there's no shame in failing only shame and not trying but what would that failure potentially look like um and so uh you know the swiss cheese graphic made it seem like those mitigation um strategies are foolproof when they're not they just reduce risk they don't eliminate it and um so i i think that we need to take a uh take metrics and have numbers that indicate when it's safe to reopen and when
128it's too dangerous then we must uh close and remain closed dana where where would those numbers be for you so you know i will go with the cdc guidance um you know no higher than 200. i mean even the next session you mentioned that you thought that uh the metrics b report that those uh folks would be comfortable at 200 um 200 is still high i mean that's the what in the cdc's rubrics is 50 to 200 um per 100 000 so 200 is still high but i definitely though i couldn't go beyond 200 beyond what the cdc recommends thank you tasha do you want to go on time um i agree that i think there needs to be some kind of metric um i just think it would be irresponsible um for us to
129just say january 19th and what is the number 400 on january 19th um and i just i do i think trying to see if this hybrid will work at the height of this virus if you're responsible so um i don't know if there's maybe a number i'm looking for but maybe i'm looking for the numbers coming down you know like a trend the trend and you and you were using those those metrics back in october and when you gave that presentation then that spoke to me um because the trend is really i think what's very important i like the hybrid b model and you know i think we watch you know the first month and see how it goes and then i agree with heather in really getting to the core of some of those
130students in high school and middle school that need to get back sooner than later i am a little bit bothered by some of the emails that i see that said we reached out to our mental team we reached out to our principal we reached out to the board and dr duty and i heard nothing and um so i really would like us to be how parents can let us know right away and it's being addressed right away because that's that's the part for me that i i want to make sure that we you know we are a top school and that should be something that is top for us that our parents are heard listen to validated and addressed even if that means we say it'll be three weeks but at least they've heard from
131us and they know that we are actively trying to get their child in there i would love for that number of parents who feel like they've never used this response back to to be as close to zero as possible and i know that's hard um that's a big goal but i would love that to be a goal for for us um and my other oh man i can do this all the time i should have wrote it down it was something that james said don't need to jump in and it'll probably pop in your head oh there you're actually and just basically continuing to um the board and all of us continuing to stress to the community that we are more on the same page than not we are absolutely more on the same page
132then we're not and so um this is this is where we all we all want our kids to go back to school we all want our kids to go back to school and be safe where the where the perspectives differ is how to do that but we don't differ in what we want to provide for the children in our schools and i think that when we get emails that say well we don't want you as a board to be pressured by the minority voices we don't want you to be pressured by the small small few that think this way or the small few that are fearful or the small few that want to go back to school there is no small view i just i really want to make that like abundantly clear there is
133no small feel we if i could print up all the emails that we received and put one perspective here and one perspective here they would be the same i promise you that and so that just needs i just that just needs to be said over and over again so that you know that the decisions that we are making first and foremost with the students in mind is also bombarded with both sides having a very strong voice a very strong presence and we have to listen to all of that we have to take in all of that and there is no small minority voice in this in this argument and so everyone's position and perspective gets the same weight and is important no one voice is less important because there's only a few of them because
134there isn't only a few of them so um and it's the same for our voice here we are are very much on the same page in many things and working out the details on how to provide quality education to our students is the same exact goal that we on the board have and i believe that that david's team has and essentially that parents have we just have got to get to the point where we can somehow agree on how that looks and that we're not going to get everything that we want on our list if you have a list of five things that you really want you're not going to get all five but hopefully we can get to that point where we can come to an agreement on how that looks um and so
135i think we are i think we're there and we're just going to have to like you said we'll make a decision we'll stick with it we'll stand by it but we'll keep going can i ask you one more question do you with the downward trend thing are there still maximums that you feel like even with a downward trend you wouldn't feel comfortable saying we're going back or is it the trend that's most most critical um you know i would i would i would echo jana and saying that the cdc has given us some of those numbers yeah like the 200 for instance none of their things go beyond 200. exactly yeah thank you well um i will say like i think it's important to realize that there is a balance um and we are trying
136really hard all of us to strike that balance in this case i feel like we have very very heavily weighted and done extremely thorough i can't you know i can't think of any school system that may have done as thorough a job of analyzing the situation and what's proposed for the k-5 i'm going to talk about that first there's a very car cautious partial opening it's far from a full face-to-face opening it is a partial day we've eliminated the launch period we have all the mitigation strategies that are well thought through and small cohorts i think it's an extremely well thought out plan and i i feel like this is to say that this is an experiment it's wrong like we are not the first school to go back and i think we have seen
137that schools are able to do this and that the positivity rates in the schools have been shown to be significantly lower than the community spread and frankly it may be safer for these kids in this structured environment to be there so i i am concerned about setting a number because first of all i don't know how this board could just pick a number um we're less qualified than the committee who's been studying this for you know a month and and so um and i'm concerned that if we said 200 well we're above that now i don't know when we'll be below that i am concerned that would mean we're not going back to school and i would i feel like that's too far the other way and so i do think the metrics are important
138to watch so that we know and that instead of saying it's a back to school or not it's a when cases are above the numbers that are extremely high we must implement all of our implementations with fidelity including keeping the class sizes small and not go to any further larger opening and so we sort of maintain that very careful partial reopening that we have just discussed and in doing so i do feel comfortable saying that we can go back january 19th because that that plan is so extremely cautious and i also think that metrics that we have proposed and we have a dashboard will be very transparent and that we will react quickly to any situations we have in this school and because of the well thought out plan we will also have very small
139cohorts and we'll be able to be very thoughtful about how we um handle those situations and also to james's point to minimize um we don't want to have a lot of you know um interruption and the consistency in our learning so i think that the plans that have been presented and agreed to by the teacher advisory committee is is extremely conservative and and based on science and well thought through and i feel comfortable with it i feel comfortable that it can that it can do what we need to do to keep our school safe so i am comfortable with that and i'm not saying that i don't want to pay attention to the metrics because i do but i think they should serve as an indicator for how cautious and how um how whether we
140are implementing our mitigation strategies to do the 100 mark and then as those numbers go way down we can start to you know perhaps with the committee's recommendations you know maybe alleviate some of those stricter protocol maybe increase the cohort size or you know bring more kids back so for the k-5 i think that you know that's very i feel very comfortable with that plan and at this point we're not talking about bringing back rms uh rent row and dhs um but like i said i really i really would like for us to to do more for for the for the kids who um who are at risk and who are most vulnerable students and so i'm i'm thinking too there that we should move toward a very again it can be very cautious and
141start small but focus on those students first and start bringing them back i don't want to say tie anything to a vaccine because from what i'm hearing we're not going to have that's not going to be available to the mass population until mid-summer which to me sounds like that's august so you know i i i love that that's on the horizon but i don't want to tie anything directly to that um and again i think this is such a fluid situation i think we're going to know a whole lot more um in a very short period of time and so i i'm also hesitant to to pick a number which is somewhat arbitrary um to then be fixed with that number because i think it will reduce our ability to make uh logical decisions based
142upon what we're seeing and i hope that what we focus on the most is the metrics in our schools and how successful we are with this very well thought out plan that we have thank you james i think i forgot to ask you about a number if you had one in mind is fantastic i mean that group is incredibly qualified they did the math on what that means for the number of staff that would be in our system why that number of staff would make it impossible to operate um broke broke it down with the bullet i mean what was the number that they gave in in that report they said anything over 200 per 100 000 in dekalb county would just logistically it makes it difficult to not expect a teacher to come into
143the building and test positive and that it wasn't a question of whether schools i think schools do not necessarily spread but but that's where you have the event and then below that it's probably good thank you so there's only one point that i want to make which is to clarify for the sake of the cdc hasn't recommended and so there is no cdc recommendation the cdc has indicated and it's correct that the highest indicator i think tops out at 200. they just don't say what happens above they also don't say how to interpret their indicators and so yeah the way that i would interpret the indicators would be similar to what heather described i think which is if you look at these things this is your dashboard these things tell you that there is a
144high risk and so we need to be very very very careful which means all of your mitigations need to be in place if you read the cdc materials you're left scratching your head what do i do with these things and so i just want to make clear that there is no cdc recommendation that's what we're doing here just say at 52 100 250 to 200 you had the highest risk for transmission that's not just hybrid you quantify it by levels low risk lowest risk low risk high risk highest risk and so at 200 with the highest risk and we're at 346. that's correct it's what they leave open and the foreign is making is what you do with that information and so the response to highest risk could be to shut down or it could
145be to go to the next level of mitigation and so what the cdc doesn't do is to tell us with a given suite our menu of mitigations and plates is it safe to be in school at the highest risk right that's not that's not the cdc just simply hasn't spoken to that issue and and if anything from the leaders of the cdc have sent messages that having schools open is not spreading you know and when dr felicia himself had said that and metric b the group did good and they did valuable work i think there that says that in lots of places where schools have been open versus close the spread rate is the same so there's nothing to conclude beyond that but even even metric b i think i think we're all like opening
146and close and start to take care of that i think that there is all i'm suggesting is that there's an upper limit where we feel safe and and what i really wanted to reach out to dr fauci through the tv the other day is like he was talking to the city of new york who wanted to shut down and drop you know from from 1.8 to three i'm like we're in a community where we dropped six to seven and a half you know literally twice as likely um right i'm okay with airing towards opening given the safety measures giving the mitigation and that sort of stuff but i want to reiterate or just explain for people who don't know this is not a vote i wanted to clarify i want to make sure you're still
147in the position of you're comfortable with us taking what we just heard and and making that into a plan or have you have you changed the position and you do want to say hey we need to no i think we need to and for the sake of those listening one reason that i used to felt free to be pranked is that i think it's important for you to get a full dose of various perspectives you know i feel strongly about this but it's a cool decision and we're going to make a better decision collectively so delegated this decision all right i just want i just need clarification or something in terms of the plan we're saying we're okay with it without metrics what are we saying that we're okay with what i would say is
148that what we need to do now is the administrative team needs to go back and re-discuss metrics and dates and things based on everything we just heard from the board in terms of your perspectives because i do want to communicate something with the when we put out communications tomorrow i want to communicate a position on metrics and dates to the community and i just wanted clarification of whether the board wanted to make that decision or we would interpret from what we heard and we'll make a decision like the last time we're going okay so public comment so my apologies for those waiting uh for the comments period it's nine o'clock we'll be here as long as it goes if you haven't yet signed up uh do so and i guess let's open it up the
149first person for public comment is just you should be able to speak now oh shannon can you hear me yes we can great thank you for the time um i have i have two sons at dhs a junior and a freshman um the junior's doing great virtually the freshman is struggling uh much of today's meeting had nothing to do with me um so i'll apologize if i i focus on something very personal um so we're gonna have to make a change my freshman is gonna have to go to school somewhere else because there's obviously nothing in the future where he's gonna be going back to in person um so i would just ask the board and dr duty my junior would like to finish his schooling later so likely we'll have to move to help
150my freshman if there could be a reinstitution of the tuition program maybe a reduced tuition program so that junior can finish out his schooling at csd um that would much appreciate it um this is heartbreaking to me my wife and i have lived in the city of decatur for 21 years and we're gonna have to move i i hate it so with my remaining time i heard dr duty talk about reaching out to teachers when your student is struggling and share a little real world situation what that's like for a student struggling my friend you know we reached out to his teacher well actually i asked him to reach out to his teacher in september about some missing assignments she didn't respond i told him to reach out to her again after a couple days
151she didn't respond i reached out to her she didn't respond so we had our tutor that we had to hire who used to teach with this teacher reach out to her she didn't respond i reached out to one vice principal at the high school he didn't respond i reached out to him again i ended up hearing from a different vice principal who told me the teacher would reach out to me and my son never heard from the teacher reach out to the vice principal again today apparently i'm supposed to hear from the teacher i haven't heard so if you think that our kids are getting educated that are struggling you're wrong there are real kids suffering out there and we have to make life-changing decisions to move because of it i'll i'll finish because i
152was frustrated i heard several board members say i didn't want i don't want to be responsible i don't want to be responsible for this the only response for that if you don't want to be responsible don't take a leadership position we need you to lead thank you for the time thank you mr dan next up is christy campbell hi there can everyone hear me i hope um christy campbell and we have three children 11th grader 9th grader and a third grader and much like chuck we are struggling we had to make the um unfortunate decision well our third grader from the city of schools due to um virtual school we had to put him in a private school he could get physical one-on-one personal attention in face-to-face environment he was dyslexic he has an iep
153you're talking about these students that are struggling and maybe supporting them we made that decision for him but my two high schoolers are stuck in a virtual environment that is not working for them and it's easy for you as board member to say that we just need to help those students that are struggling but us parents are reaching out to the school saying our students are struggling i have spoken to the school counselor multiple times but if the students aren't willing to bite there's nothing else you can do they're they're high school students and they want to be in school they miss the socialization not to mention the ib program for a junior is a rigorous course my 11th grader has seven college courses seven that is what the city schools of decatur are about
154we are an ib program we moved to decatur for the school system and now you are epically failing our children i work in healthcare i'm an essential worker i've been going to work in person and you know what it was scary at first but so you have to do your job the virus is not going to go away we have to figure out a way to live with it to work with it you can put all these metrics out there they're going to trend up they're going to trend down that's how it is it was a novel virus it will never go away so to say that we need certain numbers we may never see those numbers again it might be months it could be years time will tell but we still owe it to
155our children to get them in school those that want that choice should have that choice we've talked about choice over and over again it should be our choice if our children are struggling the only way you can give us that voice is to open up the schools for sixth or twelfth grade you're doing such an injustice for all of the city of decatur parents and families by keeping these kids at home even longer if they don't want to be i and i i just can't even imagine what we have been doing since march there are like you've all said thousands of students in person school if they wanted to be and it is working for them public schools private schools you name it it is absurd to be only one of school systems in the
156state and i love the teachers i love the teachers but they need to teach in person if our children want it and i guess with that i'll leave you with the next family that is going to talk thank you mrs campbell next up hi i am a parent of a glenwood anatoly student and i wanted to ask you how the pods are going to go ahead and still continue to increase i understood from last week that there are 45 new pod facilitators and dr duty was boasting how they would continue to ramp up i'd like to encourage you to compare the number of children that are currently in city supported pods the updated number of children that will be in city supported pods after the addition of 45 new pod facilitators i'd like you to
157think about that and compare it to the number of children that have worked would have returned virtually in early november and you'll probably have updated numbers very soon of those people want to return virtually if you may return in person and i'd like you to think about the numbers as they would as if all children were there in person running these numbers in a school-centric and then an aggregate would be ideal to look at it from a holistic point of view and i look forward to learning more about how these pods will continue to increase and serve those children and those families and how would it be if we just opened the schools and said thank you thank you next up is miss kanika sam miss sam came here yes i'm here can you hear
158me okay hi this is kanika sims i have two children in the city schools of decatur um i wanted to touch on i have a concern about the policy that was discussed regarding when families can choose to go between virtual and back in person versus in person back to virtual et cetera and that the selection will be valid through the end of the year um whatever selection is made and so i just want us to put on an equity lens and look at this if we were to do this policy that says once your selection is made it's valid through the end of the year this policy is demonstrating a complete lack of awareness of how covet is disproportionately devastating communities of color and how that devastation will impact our decision making as people of
159color black families are more likely to have comorbidities and intergenerational family structures that makes covet particularly deadly for black families i don't know if you guys are aware but the cdc put out a report and it showed that although 32 of the residents in atlanta are black of the patients hospitalized with covet in metro atlanta hospitals between march and april where there were 79 of those patients were black out of a population of 32 percent 13 of those patients were white and so when there's this consideration about whether or not schools are safe the consideration is very different whether you're a family of color and whether you're a white family and i would just say there's lots of data that shows that african-american families are less likely to return to school due to higher risk
160and so it's really disappointing from an equity perspective and also when you look at the increasing achievement gap that we'll have by limiting access if we say that once families choose that they cannot later decide that they want to also engage in face-to-face learning so i would just say that if csd is committed to meeting the needs of all of the children and families within the community and not a select few they will provide families with additional options to switch from virtual to in person at a six week mark nine week mark or mid semester mark they will definitely take into consideration that your families of color are this virus means different things your families of color the achievement the achievement gap all of those things we have to take in consideration very different things
161that we may not be the first ones to jump back into the schools when they do open but we should absolutely be given an opportunity to make that choice to return at a later date thank you next up is the anastasia diabolicity i'm not finding this safety of elevators so we're going to move on to bark by giant i see april april yes thank you you're welcome hi everyone thank you for your patience uh mark biagioni i have three kids in the city schools of decatur uh pre-k second and fifth grade and i'm also a public health planner and project manager by training and i've been watching this whole challenge unfold both from a professional and a parent standpoint and the the advice or the viewpoint i have that i want to offer tonight is
162looking at three things for the city schools of decatur that i feel are unique to us one is the modeling of the transmission that's going to continue to happen after the holidays and the fact that we're in dekalb county which is a high rate of transmission two the likelihood that a vaccine or vaccines will be available to adults in the spring and three is we're entering this in somewhat of a position of strength as a well-resourced and privileged community based on those three factors here are the two points i want to make one is city schools of decatur is an amazing organization and what i worry about is not only what happens in the spring but what our organ what the organization looks like when this is all over as you all know any organization's
163greatest assets are its staff its teachers and its administrators it's what builds the culture and delivers on what we want to see for our kids while the schools are here to serve our students if we don't listen to our teachers concerns along the way we'll have massive long-term issues in the years to come second i know many of the senior cdc scientists that worked on metrics 1a really believe what they put forward and i urge you guys to strongly consider that recommendation and make sure that your staff are a hundred percent on board before moving forward thank you thank you next up all right um first before i begin also mark give mark some love tonight can you hear me now before i begin i'd like to take 30 seconds of silence to acknowledge all
164the teachers bus drivers lunch workers school nurses and custodians across the country who have been sickened or died from covid19 okay i'm a parent of a csd student and a csd employee and a csd city resident we've all heard community members csd administrators and board members speak about the mental health of our students about their emotional well-being during virtual learning in his recent cnn interview dr duty mentioned that behavioral health has been the focus of our district before the pandemic he also commented that we need to invest in more resources after we return in person but why wait to until we return in person if the social emotional piece is such a concern why were the sea lessons stopped on october 28th after completing only two out of the seven units these concepts that have
165learned in these lessons i have referenced in my classes with my students and maggie fuhrman mentioned the emotional learning will be taught during morning meetings when we return but when will csd be proactive instead of reactive the social emotional learning should be intentional and purposeful not just incidental when will the additional units be taught who will is the person at um wilson center that will make this happen and make it a priority whether we return in person or not anytime soon and i want to close with first i was hired when i first hired in csd when i was buying ice cream on a saturday when i ran into the associate superintendent she proceeded to introduce me to her parents and then told which school i worked at and my position there i was re
166impressed and honored in recent public comments dr duty has stated that teachers want to return to the classroom but neither he nor my tac representative have asked for my opinion since august unfortunately we have lost that small town atmosphere thank you up is dan baskerville dan yes good evening um so i was uh after i heard the presentation by dr doody and maggie furman tonight i was like wow this seems to be a you know they've done a good job um on this plan really made it more concrete since i listened to the board session last week so maybe i don't really need to make any comments at all but after hearing uh some comments from a couple of the board members about not going back without you know metrics being a consideration i felt
167i still need to say something so um since i have a seventh grader renfro um i'm just really gonna speak from a perspective for six to eight and not comment on k to five or high school since you know that's you know not where my kid goes um you know i understand and to an extent agree with the metrics subcommittee report b regarding the difficulty with having specific metrics however they also specifically state they are not advocating for a full return to in-person schooling when risk levels are judged to be intolerably high can you not go back to the subcommittee and ask them to come up with a definition of what is intolerably high most importantly though whether you support report a or report b neither of them support going back to full-time face-to-face at
168these current levels so to go back without any metrics at any time to me would appear to ignore these experts who put all this time and would be at the very least irresponsible i mean why did we even ask them to do this if they're just their recommendations are going to totally be ignored which i believe a few several board members are not ignoring it all um it is very clear to me that currently and unfortunately probably for the next couple of months we will be dealing with risk levels that aren't horribly high so if you cannot comfortably cohort in six to eight and i trust staff's analysis on this that you really can't we should not be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole what is worth working on is what
169i've heard mentioned here by couple members is for face to face for students with the greatest need as the lesser number should also allow for acceptable cohorting so certainly let's try to help these students in a face-to-face setting also it's not just as simple as letting those who want face-to-face to go back no matter what the level of transmission and letting others have the option to stay virtual first they're the teachers who may not feel safe going back at these high levels that would if it was more moderate second if those who stay virtual would get new teachers in this scenario you are asking those families to choose between virtual with new teachers returning with a transmission rate and mitigation measures they are not comfortable with so while you may satisfy those who want face
170to face no matter what the metrics it will be to the detriment of many if not the majority of families who have to choose between safety and the significant disruption of having to change teachers in the middle of the year thank you for your time thank you next up is easy hi before i begin my comments i will take 30 seconds to honor the teachers custodians cafeteria workers bus drivers and education professionals who have sickened been sickened or died in covet 19 across our country now there's so much cow dung being flung right now by mr jones and miss tell it's simply impossible to pick a place to start miss tell i'm sure you're a wonderful real estate agent but despite your protestations you're not a scientist in real estate you can get away with
171feeling for a price you know see what the market will bear but with lives you have to pick a number mr jones you know the saying in law if the facts are on your side pound the facts if the law is on your side pound the law and if you don't have either pound the table well all i've heard you do in these last three meetings is pound the table and i believe the english put it best when they said that people like you can pound sand now according to the ces the csd cova dashboard there are two students at winona park who contracted covet in our community now i'm unclear is the number of students in pods at winona park i've heard it's 22 or 17. either way that means that somewhere between nine
172and eleven percent of the current pod students at that one sample school have been exposed to covet in the community not at school but in the community i get that but they brought that into the school which when during what is known as the mismatch period before testing positive for covet that's how high the community infection rate is as of three weeks ago so high that between nine and eleven percent of the students and that one sample school have been exposed to covet that you know of and it's much higher now in fact i've seen some estimates show that we could be as high as 500 cases per hundred thousand by early january now winona park is but one example and in fact many of the other schools in our system actually have a higher
173rate of coveted positive students you can cheerlead your mitigation plan all you want but you can't mitigate what you cannot see or the cases you do not know about thank you mr petey next up is jessica brown mrs brown can you hear it yes can you hear me yeah okay yes this is dr brown i'd like to commend dr duty and the cspc um as a member i can say that things aren't always easy particularly with a novel virus particularly when the data are widely differential in methodology and generalizability however there are some decisions that are clearly wrong and i'd like to point out some board comments um before i get to those mr herndon i take great offense that you called a greater acting a fool that's expensive and frankly shows your ignorance of
174both children and of the data that is available the only correct thing you said is i am rambling and that you're not qualified to make this decision mr jones and ms tell i you clearly read the literature and you have a grasp on the science as an infectious disease epidemiologist i commend you on that brown yes you need to refrain from insulting board members you're just not going to i would i'll continue given the 6 to 12 plan there are some significant gaps in this plan i certainly hope that you will survey the students to see how many will opt in because the time the need more time to plan line is no longer acceptable i have a child with multiple special needs an extensive iep and not only is the district non-compliant no one
175has reached out to me to tell me about high knee in-person options available i would ask that you quit waiting for schools to tell you and tell parents if you have an option that their kids may qualify for or need our 6 to 12 students are at the highest risk of mental health diagnosis as well as the most likely to be unsupervised particularly those of us who are not from economically privileged households this plan still leaves a gap for our iep students it has been grossly unaddressed by this board and i certainly hope that we're all reading up on faith i would strongly encourage you to commit to minimally providing pods for all families in need by january including specially facilitated pods for our students with ieps lastly i'd like to task you once our
176students are back to begin to plan how we as a district serve our iep students and make up for services that may have been missed or inconsistently implemented um i have my sixth grader here with me who's prepared a statement for us hi i'm a sixth grader and i would just like to say that i wish you would ask us the kids what we need because some of us are really struggling with virtual getting help from our school we need to go back to school because we need to feel um connected with our other friends and also we need help with our learning because we are not getting the help we need and i feel that you guys should know this this is affecting us too thank you for your comments before we proceed i'd
177like to remind the uh our commenters that under our rules uh comments during this comment period need to be addressed to the board as a body and not to individual members and so we've let some of this pass but i won't anymore and so if if you can't respect that rule we will shut it off so please just try to keep it to the board of the body i understand that everyone's passionate and that's fine and frankly i can take it but it's just not appropriate so let's continue and dr brown's sense i don't think she was calling me a fool i think she was quoting me earlier when i said that first graders will sometimes act before she says that was a santos i did not understand that that's what i gathered she said
178because having having taught my i did my teaching in a first grade classroom so i did have very vivid memories of what i've described as first graders acting a fool in the classroom i'll stand by that probably not a public forum i understand and then i'll apologize to mr britney brown from this understanding however the power [Music] yes i'm here can you hear me yeah okay uh well first i want to thank the board for all of their hard work and going back and reconsidering all of the the teachers wishes and the parents wishes and i understand that's a lot to juggle um i i can tell that uh at least somebody to see some of the concerns that the teachers are are trying to be met here and some of the concerns that the
179parents are trying to be met um and i can appreciate that so i just wanted to say thank you for that in regards to the metrics that's really what i wanted to comment on um i think that if we don't have metrics we're going to find ourselves in a situation like we did when the board initially said that everybody was going to be coming back face to face and there were a lot of parents upset and i one of the reasons my parents were upset was because there wasn't a lot of clarity as to how you all were reaching that decision and i really think that metrics not only personally but i think that they're needed um but it adds clarity to why you're deciding what you're deciding um and i think just want to
180say that without that i can just see a similar situation as to when um they the board first determined there was face to face so i i appreciate your efforts and i urge you all to continue to talk with your our experts and keep that in mind um and just uh that i do think mentors are important and that they are needed thank you [Music] up next is mr robert jim okay i'm not finding this debate so we'll move on um andrew brock andrew yes this is andrew brock can you hear me your name yes we can hear you sorry thanks very much for your time today i wanted uh before i begin just a level set bit on where we are within this process we are now nine months since the last day of
181roughly since the last day of school and this week will be the last day of school for this year so it might as well be about 10 months since this since we started this process we are 10 months in and i found tonight's conversation both very encouraging and both very frustrating at the other side i'm very encouraged because we're exploring realistic possibilities of how we get our students back face to face since they last sat in a classroom around march 15th however it's incredibly frustrating listening to conversations about metrics and what is contact tracing in december when it feels like those conversations should have been happening concurrently from from the day after school closed all the way through the summer and into the fall and yet we're still having those same conversations today with no
182real clarity on decision making process in sight we still don't have a real sense of when we can reopen schools and cannot that is exceptionally frustrating 10 months on [Music] furthermore i think what the board members captured uh really concisely one of my biggest frustrations is we talk about we have the best metrics and we the best mitigations we've gone above and beyond yet the best we can offer for our students sitting at home is half a day for pre-k through five and nothing no in person learning for six through twelve it's really hard for me to square that circle the logic doesn't seem to make sense if we have gone that far above and beyond then we should be able to join all of the other schools and districts not only in our state
183but across the southeast and going full on face to face back in person so it leads me to ask this question why are we still stuck in neutral why can't we make decisions we need to at some point when this is all over step back and re-examine how our leadership and as a community we make effective decisions on a going forward basis in times of crisis this has been mostly a catastrophic failure for all and lots of families are suffering and lots of folks are frustrated with both the process and the output finally i'll close with this and this is one of the greatest frustrations i have tomorrow morning at 8 30 in the morning two things are going to happen st thomas moore is going to teach all of their students in person face
184to face and my children are going to log into a computer in the same neighborhood thanks so much for your time this evening we have six more public comments the next up is this megan ferguson yes you all hear me okay my name is megan ferguson i am a csd resident parent and community member i did not plan to speak tonight but as i was listening i was more than moved to sign up for public comment i spoke to the board in support of virtual learning back in july at that time i expressed the need for the safety of all our community members especially considering our proportion of african-american staff and those with additional risk factors i have used platforms available to me including communication with my school leadership colleagues and dr duty and the
185school board i volunteered as a part of the faith team to help figure out concurrent models including having my two children participate in the demos for the benefit of the community at large i volunteered hours and hours of my time to be a part of the community stakeholding committee including missing my son's ninth birthday dinner in my own house i'm saying all this to say that i'm highly offended by some of the comments of some board members and the implications of some community members today to listen to multiple board members and committee members imply that teachers are falling down on their job that somehow they are not doing all that they can is inexcusable to hear my colleagues share the unkind downright mean nasty mean-spirited emails from parents is equally shameful could it be true
186that some teachers can do more sure is it also possible that some parents can do more yes is it possible that the community could do better so we are all safe absolutely this situation is hard we'll stop it is important at this time that as a community we first pick up the mirror before picking up a magnifying glass in march teachers were lotted and now we're back to the bottom of the barrel i've accepted that i've exercised all that i can to contribute to making this a safe and productive return while honoring and amplifying the voices of all staff members and i'm speaking on behalf of the people who helped to make this community what it is the people whose expertise is used to justify the purchase of million dollar homes to say that this
187community and this board cannot continue to disparage our efforts while everyone's struggles are their reality it is not everyone's reality and thusly does not excuse the scapegoating and blaming i will reiterate the points that i share in the community with friends with neighbors with colleagues with dr fuhrman with dr duty with christy bean with the stakeholder committee and with my principal ms newton scott and with anyone else who was listening teachers and staff did not create this pandemic teachers are not mental health professionals and despite the sheer disrespect we have endured we still show up for the kids even when sometimes their parents won't don't or can't we are professionals and we demand your respect thank you thank you mr ferguson next up is shayla hayner hmm sorry about that um i hadn't planned to
188speak this evening and quite frankly come january we may or may not have a csa student in the system i am currently a parent of a first grader at winona park elementary i also have a fourth grader at st thomas more i have a three-year-old in person at decatur first press or decatur first preschool like i said i hadn't planned on speaking but um i felt as if it was important to address um the decision regarding metrics um i agree with a lot of the previous speakers this evening that it's disappointing that um it's now december we do not have a lot of clarification regarding dates to return how to return metrics to return we're still discussing things that are critical to make this happen and that's one of the reasons why we may not
189have a child at csd for a long time coming with that we are still csd parents and csd community members my main question is i know we've heard a lot about the fact that the max spread of you know intolerably high community spread would be 200 per 100 000 in the community um i don't i agree i don't think that's i think it's an arbitrary number i think we need to ask ourselves i think the board and dr duty needs to ask themselves what is the difference between 200 cases per 100 000 or where we're at today of 365 cases per 100 000. um is there a huge difference in that especially when it comes to returning to school with proper mitigations in place this may be irrelevant this may be irrelevant and we're hung
190up on it we're in december and we still don't know if we're returning to school um it's just disheartening it's just it's concerning and one of the reasons we may or may not have children in the csd community coming in 2021. um i think we need to compare that risk of community spread of 200 versus 365 per 100 000 people to the risk of what's happening by keeping all of our csd children virtual for school uh what are the mental health implications what are the other implications what are the other risks happening in this community compared to the relative risk of contracting covet 19. the families that choose the teachers that choose and want to be back in school for many many many good reasons should have that choice thank you for your time [Music]
191next up is mr robert bibb okay i'm not saying mr bibb i'm gonna move on with gabe gabrielle richardson hey there can you guys hear me so um i'd like to thank everyone for their time and i'd like to thank everyone for their comments so far i'm a student educator high school and i suffer from several um learning disabilities and issues that i face every day and i can say that online has been very very difficult for me but i still am very very against the many people who are saying that we have to neglect metrics and that there are other things that we need to take more into consideration i think the neglect for the cdc guidelines are it's completely um irrational and although they can say that there are anecdotal accounts of other
192schools that are doing fine i think as a country we can tell that we aren't doing fine we're worse than anywhere else and look at europe look at all the other nations where they are back in school and it's working for them the difference with them is that they have communities that have shut down the bars that have shut down the restaurants and it's obvious that we aren't mature enough to make that decision you can go on downtown decatur and continue to see people out and about it's clear that we're not taking responsibility for this thing as as much as we have to and i think for somebody to say that we can neglect metrics because we have mitigation strategies it's completely um it's frankly scary i think also if you look at mr fauci
193dr fauci's um comments about going back to school i think he does say that he said several times that going back to school something that's very important and i think that's something that we should really it's something that we really do need to work on i hate to see all the stories of everyone else like me who's been struggling with online but his comment can't be taken out of context that we should close down other things that are causing spread in order to open schools just because schools aren't the epicenter for spread it doesn't mean that we can just ignore the real risk that it was still posed just because other things are causing more spread doesn't mean that we should just ignore that honestly i think that um if we could all really agree
194on a metric by a certain date or we could look at the change we could look at how it's decreasing or increasing anything like that would be better than just throwing out of the picture metrics and just saying that mitigation is all we need thank you next up is can you hear me yeah thank you um good evening thank you for your time i'm a csd parent we have four children we have one child at winona park two at talley and we have a three-year-old that's home with us this year while i'm happy that this plan would get my kids back in school they're all k through five i feel for the other older children as they also deserve a chance for face-to-face education a board member noted earlier that we're top school districts and
195i agree that's why we moved here and that's why a lot of people choose to live here most of our peers in size and performance like city of beaufort and oconee county went back to school in august with face-to-face all of our peers and performance levels have been back for months all private schools in the area have been open for months or since august as of november we were one of 10 districts out of 175 in georgia that wasn't offering in person the other districts that remain closed rank among the worst in the state why isn't decatur back and why are we acting like a failing school district why wasn't all the planning and discussion that we're still hung up on done this summer like everyone else it is mid-december all the other superintendents put
196plans in place and figured out how to reopen to some degree everyone else seems like they've found a way i judge our district's leaders against how their peers are performing and on that objective measure you have all failed our children deserve better i see it very simply everyone else is open and we aren't we need to reopen like everyone else we need to stop making excuses and doing endless planning all while our kids fall behind every day they don't even have school on wednesdays which is 20 of their week i'm sure the board senses it from the email volume but our community is incredibly divided the lack of leadership is pitting neighbors against neighbors neighbors against teachers it's toxic i'm tired of talking to friends and neighbors to hear that they're considering moving or unenrolling
197their children to homeschool them or unenrolling their children to send them to private school we are personally struggling with the decision if we need to move for our kid's sake to get what they deserve even though we don't want to move we won't be the first district back we'll be one of the last it's time to put the children first you need not ask is it 100 safe but is it safe enough i've heard from staff and in the meeting tonight that our mitigation plan is among the best in any area district yet we remain closed why is that do you have a plan for catching kids up once we reopen is there a plan at this point it seems like we're still digging the hole how did we get here our leadership failed to
198make and implement a plan we've been stuck for months in the development phase endlessly debating safe metrics i have completely lost faith in the ability of the leadership particularly the superintendent i know many other families feel the same way and i don't know how you can restore trust without a major leadership change thank you for your time thank you john next up and should be our final person lana batra hi can you help me is it johnny but right here hi um so i i signed up at the very last minute at the end of a board discussion to after my comments uh some things so that i haven't prepared really i'm just reacting to what i've been hearing uh so forgive my extempore nature of talking one of the things is all the boom
199members thank you when you signed up and took on this job this is not what you were signing up for then with our teachers they are not signing up to be on the battleground yes they came in each but not at the risk of their lives um all the healthcare professionals who have spoken up and have to go in as essential worker my thanks to you but you come in contact with most of your patients under a lot of protection and very few at a time these teachers who have to handle these young kids who um try if everybody has been to a birthday party with young kids those parents feel exhausted after that one these teachers will have to do it for eight hours every single day saying they should just shut up and
200come in is not fair but at the same time all those kids were struggling and are not are having a tough time there has to be a way to mitigate that that is something that one needs to focus on is how do we meet the kids where they are um as far as i know like one of the things that we've discussed in the past is all these huge conference rooms around are open cinema hotels so many other places maybe those can be areas under supervision with those kids can do some virtual schooling right there not in front of the teacher but under supervision and with some help that's a larger part not a smaller part maybe that is a possibility at the same same time saying that just open the school it's simple it's
201not it is complex it's people lives and it's not just death statistics there are 50 percent of the people who have long done it people who are dying six months after getting mass symptoms people who are isolated suddenly kind of heart attacks what are you trying to risk in here this is the thing that's why we're still figuring everything out and that's part of the reason i feel that the woman is struggling if these metrics and these decisions were in their hand they would every time they try to come rear down with something they must increase incredibly it is in our hands how many of the families that have spoken up do you have thanksgiving have you been going to some parties the only even small groups that's where the spread is happening what are
202your christmas plans what are your holiday plans look into it it's all of us together as a community have to make the sacrifice so that our kids can go back to school we are not doing that we as a community are failing our kids not the board members not the superintendent definitely not the teachers thank you so much mr bibb are you out there so if anybody would like to comment typically we don't if you don't like to i don't um i i would like to just clarify because i i feel like maybe some of my comments were misunderstood just based on some of the comments i just heard i wanted to be clear that that i am not anti-metric i am very much pro-metric my challenge is that if there is a number i
203don't know what it is and i find it hard to pick one so yes i i do agree and we have said let's go back to our committee and have them help us but i do also feel that the metrics serve very much as a guide and not necessarily as a full stop full go and we are not saying if metrics are below a certain number that we will we are not at all discussing fully opening the school quite the contrary um we're talking about very cautious partial opening with with you know every possible consideration we can make both for teachers with the accommodation process and the secondary accommodation process for family members and for families to have a choice and i do think that we should rely on metrics and we should watch them
204and they should guide us in how carefully we implement all of our mitigation strategies i'm simply saying that you know as a board member if there is a number out there i don't know what it is and to what lewis said i don't believe the cdc has told us what that what you know how to exactly define highest risk and um so yeah if it's above a certain number we know it's very very high and that we need to take every precaution we possibly can but then we also have to weigh and balance the pros and cons of getting a small or you know carefully selected group of students back who really need it and so you know i just urge community members to to really try to try to see that there is a
205balance here that we are carefully measuring and that i think every board member has made good points i think that's a really difficult decision for us to make um and and that's why we have delegated that decision to dr duty and his his staff who have the committee of teachers who also have a very knowledgeable committee of community members and so i just wanted to clarify that because i felt like my comments were somewhat taken from this you know somewhat misinterpreted by some i um not really a comment but it's just a question that i wanted to give to maggie and ask if she could get back to us on it was did the tac give up um if there could be some follow-up i know that dr duty met with the tac um prior
206to the school board meeting tonight and i was curious as to if the tac gave a number that's it no they did not they um asked that we consider a number um particularly a secondary number for the next gradual level of return so just a clarification they weren't looking for a number for this first phase or were they asking no they weren't looking for a number for this first phase they wanted a number when we start doing the next stage and i feel like that point was completely missed it was completely missed by me i feel like it was completely missed by the everyone who just commented so do you mind repeating that and clarifying that because are we saying then that i guess i just need you guys [Music] i jumped in at the
207end so my when i was listening to text so they felt very comfortable with moving forward with hybrid plan b starting in january with then looking at what the metrics would look like for next phase hybrid c okay is does that seem like what you guys understood previously because that's that's i just i'm sorry that i missed that but i'm glad that to know that that's the clarification i think that's very very important to clarify now that um unfortunately most people have probably left a call i don't know if i don't because i thought the conversation was about all of it i think i think when the question was introduced david asked a question about all of it i think he also said that he and i assumed tac felt comfortable moving forward with yeah
208private plan b but asked their opinions about all that yes i think that i think accountable okay well that's good i mean i i think that's good um that we have that solid recommendation from them i just think we need to make sure we communicate that because i feel like based on the comments i feel like that might have been missed okay yeah we'll make sure we put that out in our staff and communications without tomorrow so if the date for plan for hybrid b set as january 19th that is the recommendation the recommendation okay yeah i have written down that he says they wanted a metric for uh to move into hybrid plan c okay he's got a text from the ac member that he said that they wanted metrics uh for phase one
209okay well we i guess are giving it back things sure i'll obviously leave that a little further okay so i i won't i don't i feel like i've expressed myself and i even did it clearly but not clearly not clearly enough now i think that the way that heather expressed it the way that i see it metrics are important indicators the question is how you use them whether they're the sole basis for making a decision and that's a question and i would like to have it when you want decision making process than that but i won't say any more about that the one thing that that disturbs me in the comments as a suggestion and this is not what it was calling names so i don't know who the target was but that somebody had
210expressed disrespect for teachers or had suggested that the teachers weren't giving their all i don't think anybody uh i don't i didn't hear it and i don't think anybody feels it and um i think that we all understand and appreciate i'm grateful for all the efforts our teachers and staff and i mean this isn't easy for anybody and it's absolutely understood that everybody is doing their level best to do right by all the kids when i've expressed that i believe that the level best isn't good enough for some of them it's not because of any failure on the part of our teachers and their efforts and the attention that they're giving to virtual learning because this platform just doesn't work for some kids so it's not a criticism of people it's a it's a it's
211a sort of despair of the situation and i would like to be an honest recognition that it does not work for everybody and it's not again criticism i just think it's real i think that we can hold teachers in very high esteem which i do and at the same time say this virtual platform is going to leave a lot of our kids behind so with that i think we probably need to move on unless there's okay let me find uh the agenda so maggie are you prepared with the superintendent we should say that that dr duty has had to have had to leave to address an emergency during the meeting so he's not currently with us and as a result i think we're going to have to skip the superintendent um uh so let's see
212so next we have the sheriff's report which which i'll do my best to to do is uh the number of folks in our community in our school that need to be recognized and the first is our home hometown heroes this is the decatur business association award ever here that's all the great community volunteers who contribute to make decatur what it is this year we have three of our 20 20 hometown heroes our dhs students zach pettis genesis radix and lauren williams congrats to these three incredible yes dhs students and as soon as this is for their role in getting the monuments removed from the square anyway congratulations i think that's great and it is a great you know if we can um sort of bask in their glory right this means that we can take
213some credit that we're doing right by these kids that they're they're contributing to our community already in that way we have another hometown hero who is our very own johnson davis and her husband molly along with i think the other founders does recognition go to the entire executive board and founders of the beacon hill black alliance for human rights jaina yes that's correct that is wonderful and again this is an organization that is making a giant positive great difference in decatur and uh congratulations janet as well congratulations thank you to the rest of the organization uh the last one is is decatur parent network jennifer walcott the informer csd employee who continues to make contributions to the city so thank you to all of you and all that you do next we wanted to recognize
214our reach scholars these are the scholars who are selected i think in eighth grade and have been guaranteed admission to i should be careful are they guaranteed to admission into the flagship schools or are they this can help last year it's a they get a scholarship okay so we have five new reach georgia scholars for the 2021 school year um let's see reach is a mentoring program established by the georgia student finance commission and supported by our def theater education foundation the five outstanding renfrow 8th grade students this year are hawa abshiro jada ponder javonte previously this we only had three eighth graders who received this scholarship and now it's five and i think that's thanks in large part or maybe entirely two generous contributions and support so thank you to all and congratulations to
215our reach scholars uh the next is um i don't know it's kind of the most fun at least in some ways which is that our dhs football team made it to the state playoffs for the first time in 17 years it is a tragedy that this occurred when we weren't all going to the football games every friday night excuse me one day a game that i was able to attend was terrific and the atmosphere was just different and it was really wonderful to see a winning team you know out on the field they made it through the first round of the playoffs they did lose to blessed trinity in the second round and so their season is over but this is a tremendous accomplishment for the team and so they deserve congratulations we are all
216looking for a great thing finally we also wanted to recognize one of our staff members natalie bunchu who um for the last 12 years has been one of the most dedicated champions of the girls on the run program during her time as a csp teacher at both claremont and talley the girls on their own program is a community program but this bunch who volunteers her time after school she started as a volunteer coach while teaching at claremont where she was always attuned to her students needs needs and always ensuring that all of her girls could equally access the program so our local girls on the run representatives sent this message to city commissioner kelly walsh about ms bunch's dedication to girl on the run she said we deeply appreciate the optimism determination and tireless effort
217that natalie brings to her leadership and the obvious joy that she has coaching her girl she knows girls need the social emotional and physical benefits of girls on the run not to mention fun she truly makes magic happen to give girls access to our program so we're we're lucky to have uh employees like the funchu and it is especially wonderful when we start getting requests from our city commissioners who notice the impact that our teachers are making in the community with their volunteer efforts after hours and asking that they be recognized so thank you so much to miss bunch you and for all that you do these kids and keep it up so that's my two more oh there's two more thanks together you have them though i know but i'm not going to find
218it um yeah i don't have it in front of me but i uh just two more i think positive things to mention um dr huston mccraney is having her second optional outdoor socially distant run for orchestra practice tomorrow and i i think it's commendable that she's taken this initiative and has shown some ingenuity into how to do that in these circumstances and tomorrow they're going to be playing some chamber music in pairs and so she's able to then give them some instruction and so just recently they got to meet her for the first time in person so that's pretty spectacular and i know it energized the kids um also another announcement that the decatur high school swim team is having their first meet against woodward academy following all coveted procedures and doctor or our coach
219[Music] kim sorry i'm blanking see this is why i need my notes louis can you sleep um sorry can you flip to your people that i sent you um i want to make sure to say her name yeah thank you kim buckley coach kim buckley has also taken the initiative to um get a proposal approved for the swim team to be able to practice and commute compete and they're following all all sorts of strict coveted protocols so just kudos to her for that extra initiative and good luck to the swimmers and go bulldogs thank you okay is that any other kudos okay okay that wraps up the chairs report and uh we'll next move on and try to mark down the agenda first we have our consent items the exception of ruminant of the bond
220resolution which was moved to an action item so we have a motion to approve the first three consent items the personnel report the nutrition report and the financial report let's now move to the bond resolution uh maggie are you able to introduce i will um good evening everyone at the november 10th board meeting the board approved an authorizing resolution allowing the district to pursue the potential refinancing opportunity for the 2010 series bond a request for proposal was issued to over 25 local regional and national lending institutions and five proposals were received proposed interest rates from the five linden institutes range from 1.79 percent to 2.28 this resolution is recommended that the proposal from truest bank be accepted based primarily on truest bank proposal of the lowest interest rate through its proposal entry proposed interest rate
221results in 18 savings which is six times more than the industry standard of three percent and equates to approximately 1.6 million net budgetary savings over the life of the debt thank you to the superintendent and the board for taking advantage of this opportunity and being good stewards of the taxpayers fund thank you and just to be clear james is refusing from this vote and it was on a consensus agenda because we've discussed it in the past but that's the only reason this is poll do we have a motion to approve the bond resolution to approve the bond resolution second all in favor hi hi all right thank you lanita this is very good work looking after our money thank you thank you all right this moves us to the other action items we should start
222with the senior homestead exemption committee report which is there anybody here having enough in their head to introduce the report did you see the uh email that came through concerning the committee yeah i did not it just came through not too long ago i'm happy to kind of read it i got it a little earlier because unfortunately the acronym for it has been very similar to the csv so and i was on both but um paula collins who again took the lead as the chair of that senate sent this report to us there was that we we got a final study back from georgia state asking them to you know run the numbers for us uh given that we had discussed the tax exemption and the difference that went out in our newsletter that was
223what we were considering they came back and the committee has just said that there should be two exemptions in their opinion number one that homeowners age 65 to 69 who have a federally adjusted income of less than 52 000 which is 80 percent of the adjusted median income for the greater atlanta metro area should qualify for the exemption the exemption is going to be the same for both um which is 400 000 of value of their house or 200 000 of assessed value of their recommendation um georgia state said that that was well within the parameters that we gave them assuming a growth rate that we'd asked them to come back exemption number two said that all homeowners at age 70 and above would qualify for that same exemption uh four hundred thousand assessed value
224so if your home value is less than four hundred thousand no taxes um if your home has a value greater than four hundred thousand and you are currently taking the s3 exemption that's one of the exemptions that's on the book it was a huge part of the senior homestead committee's time then you would be required to pay taxes on the remaining value of your home which with f3 would be above about 500 and homes with values greater than 400 who don't qualify for s3 you would only pay the property taxes above above 400 000 in assessed value um and and you may and and the committee also has to work with the city because there are a number of senior homestead versions of the exemption that are currently on the books that are going to
225remain on the books for for seniors to see if they qualify for um they also provided a great flowchart as an advice for us as we begin our communication process with the committee and i mentioned that you which is why i should have realized when you didn't know it that it was not sent to csd but the fhc right it's the wrong thing i want to clarify okay are we talking about 200 000 assessed value which equates to four hundred thousand appraised guys correct correct the exemption would be for the the first two hundred thousand dollars in assessed value across the two categories correct correct and and that is the you know that's something that we've realized as we you know talk about is that the average senior doesn't so you have to be careful
226when you talk about it your tax assessed value is usually divided in half when they do it it's how the millage rate works you divide it in half multiply times a thousand multiplied by your mills that's going to be your annual tax rate um so you often will see it that way we're talking about 200 000 which is actually 400 000 if you look at your tax scale and so we basically have consensus on this committee has given us as we said every time we talked about it i think a really cleverly and well-structured exemption that achieves the objectives to a large degree that we set up to achieve and we now have the numbers because we've gone back to gsu which has been very gracious in accommodating our repeated questions for information and finally
227i think we're ready to vote on an exemption like this we don't have a resolution it occurred to me before the meeting that we should have had one um so i don't even know the motion should be but i think what needs to happen is we do need to vote and i think that we then need to present a request or recommendation to the city which has an upcoming city commission meeting and we should ask if they would lend their support to our proposed homestead exemption and then we need to get active with our delegation to seek their help to get it passed to the comfort is anyone clever enough to draft a or make a motion here on the fly motion to accept the proposal from the homestead exemption committee and through to the
228next phase of approaching the city with our class oh man second all right all in favor all right all right we might want to follow up and have some kind of a resolution it's a little bit more formal and maybe maybe after the meeting but we're all in agreement thank you we can pass around so good thanks once again to our committee um can't thank you enough it's been a long hard process really have folks while all these other things have been going on these members of our committee have devoted quite a bit of time to getting this right and i think they did we did a good place for it i thank them for all their okay um board newsletter discussion um come on i mean i think we continue with the topics that
229we've had um and if anyone has any new ones i did notice there was an error in one of the newsletters and i think we need to just be very very careful i think generally i think we all need to have read it carefully well in advance and i would like actually to ask our communications staff to please give it one final read before it goes out because i think i noticed in one of the newsletters that said our millage rate was 22.25 or 22.25 and it's 20.25 and that's a pretty significant error so i just want to like i know we got most of it right but that's one little thing that's kind of significant so maybe you just need a little more help to proofread it but i think it's great i mean
230i think it's some succinct and hits the points and i think it's good that we're doing the outreach we're doing proactively to our elected officials and i'm i'm getting some good response well yeah you say to me i wish i tried to say and the committee has been very helpful as well i mean i tried to say it creatively and ended up not saying it correctly and heather corrected me so we do need to type them yeah so my case it in was interest of the newsletters like the content of the newsletter i did want to mention that we had a positive meeting with the dekalb county school board and the dekalb county legislative delegation earlier this month frankly i can't remember when it was but it was sometime in the recent past and i
231think since the last meeting and um working excuse me towards a resolution of the long-standing concern about the impact of city of dictator annexations on uh school finances we have a proposal that we've been offering that i think makes you know basically the way we've said it is that it keeps decatur together while it keeps the county school system whole we're trying to do right by everybody and i think there's a interest in pursuing this and so we'll see where that goes but i wanted to mention that we're making progress along this line um let's see the next big question is whether we're going to uh on the on the agendas for the discussion is the enrollment projections of reports there's no discussion for that it was just shared with you for your information okay
232that's what i wanted to hear yes fyi all right so uh that brings us to future days uh it's never clear if there is a future anymore we don't have any future dates on the list do you have a need to know i think there is a work session that needs scheduled for january particularly the uh for the board to work on the accreditation items that are yours to we have a date for that i think you do okay don't we don't have a work session right there um thursday january 7th is when we have the board work session okay that was the only one and then of course our next board meeting will be january 12th we do have an executive session on the book for now um see if we need it i
233wonder if we might consider one of the things that's happened with all that's going on is that we've gotten off your schedule and what we have been trying to do is to have a work session basically every month to pick up the various things that need to be picked up we haven't scheduled one for december but one thing what's that we just had one on thursday that was december all right never mind january yeah we have it already on seven and so i guess what we can do to hopefully get back on schedule the way we used to have it where we have board meetings on the second tuesday and then work sessions on the fourth tuesday because the way our sessions are running right now the work session is like a few days before
234board and that's kind of a lot so maybe we get back to just going ahead and putting a placeholder for february 23rd to be our next work session and actually go back to that schedule i should have asked instead of making a joke i should have asked why is there something that you think is pressing that we need to talk about before the new year no i was really trying to fill a slot and i think that there's plenty that we need to do and so i think we should take the opportunity to have these meetings because we need to talk about our monitoring reports we need we need to return to the discussion about the board more yeah um there's there's a number where that i think addressing it so i think we need
235to not pass up those meetings i also think that it's one a month or not so i just forgot soon i think we'll be talking about next year in budget several emails um asking for clarification from the tac asking for clarification from maggie about the um [Music] metrics the tac warning uh metrics for phase one yeah so um thank you jana so um i did email attack and i asked them to clarify um their information so um first of all i want to make sure that people know tech did not create this plan this was definitely worked on at the district level and then we reviewed it with tax prior to this meeting and that tac is saying that they would like to see metrics for any steps moving forward okay thank you for that
236thank you if there's no other business is there i don't think so okay then we are adjourned thank you for everyone joining us see you next time good night yeah i mean