Mahomet-Seymour Board of Education Meeting 11-16-20

001good evening everyone we just took the feed live we've got board members uh present either present time webex we're present in the room and we'd like to welcome you all to the regular meeting of the mohamed seymour board of education i'd like to call that meeting to order it is 7 00 p.m on monday november 16th at this time i'd like to remind anyone attending the person to please sign in silence their cell phones remind our visitors that nordica still take an effective meeting anyone who wishes to make comments please read the visitor guidelines found on the table right outside the door complete the attacks probably participation form and get those to dawn um doc we have roll call please here hendrix here here larson here hennessy i pledge allegiance to the fire of the

002united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you everyone board members you've had a chance to look at the agenda for tonight there's been a suggestion that we moved under new business that we move items one and two to the consent agenda is there a motion to do that uh i'll i'll make that motion ken okay we've got a motion all right so can we make that to prove the agenda with the addition of one and two being on a percentage of it is that fine so we do this with one motion maybe sure okay is there a second for that second discussion anyone uncomfortable with that plan okay we have a roll call vote please carson yes parents

003yes yes hennessey yes he yeah nicole yes and we've approved the agenda with that change um so next up would be the consent agenda so tonight the consent agenda includes minutes or previous meetings bills treasures report some personnel changes a press update and now it includes adoption of the estimated 2020 tax levy and adoption of the renewals for health dental and vision for our group insurance plans is there a motion to approve the consent agenda is there a second so is there a discussion on the consent agenda roll call vote please hennessy no no he yes giles yes hendrix yes larson yes macomb yes okay um next up is donations dr hall uh there are no donations for november all right so we can skip right by that next is special recognition tonight dr hall

004yes it is um my honor to welcome ellen erickson to our meeting this evenings ellen on okay she was going to log in so okay she's trying oh i saw her let's could i could we move on to the next special sure move on to them all right ellen are you there ellen you need to unmute yourself please okay i'm here now hold on all let me start my video just having some area thank you for joining us good evening we are proud to honor you tonight ellen um and congratulate you on your award and recognize you as the recipient of the paul t griffith teacher of the year award given annually by the illinois council on the teaching of foreign languages so congratulations you were honored with this award at the annual conference of

005the ictfl in october so i just want to give a little bit of background information and some more more kudos to you for your outstanding teaching and leadership in our in our school district mrs erickson has been a spanish instructor in the muhammad seymour schools for both our junior high and high school students for 14 years she's been instrumental in establishing the seal of bioliteracy for our students as well as being a statewide leader in a professional organization and an outstanding leader here in our school district in so many ways i want to really um read a little bit from the nomination letter that mr chad benedict wrote our high school principal about mrs erickson she has many fine qualities that make her an outstanding candidate for teacher of the year award during her time

006at muhammad seymour high school mrs erickson has exhibited many fine qualities relationship building is one of these qualities she goes above and beyond to build relationships inside and outside of the classroom in the classroom her students have a voice mrs erickson was our first teacher to turn alternatives to turn to alternative seating in her classroom and removed all the desks her students loved the idea and showed improved growth in her classes outside of the classroom mrs erickson plays a key role in our drama department countless hours are spent with students who's devoted to helping them achieve their goals and drama she goes above and beyond in her job description and will often take on extra tasks to assist others she's currently mentoring a first year teacher during a normal year we would have a program

007in place to assist with this as we all know this is no normal year and she's doing a fantastic job in assisting our new staff member mrs erickson has taken the lead on technology in our building as we navigate the waters of remote learning she's willing to try new things problem solve and share her experiences with others she cares deeply about the education of all of our students in all subject areas and she's nev that's never been more evident in the start of the 2021 school year her classroom experiences are beneficial to so many of our staff her professionalism is second to none as mrs erickson is a trusted staff member that can be counted upon to serve our teachers and students with integrity each day i value her opinion on many things and i

008know i can rely on her to provide fair and honest feedback she plays a big role in striving to achieve our goals as a school community and these next comments come from jenna keller who's a colleague in the world languages department ellen has become a very essential part of our department school with her leadership and creativity in classroom she's an amazing colleague she shares not only her fun way of creating things to motivate us to teach but her direction and innovation on what is new and challenging in the field is amazing and that's from jenna keller it's truly an honor ellen to have a statewide teacher of the year on our staff in addition to the learning experiences that you afford to your students you are an outstanding team member peer and colleague so congratulations

009senora eriksen [Applause] it's um it's been a real humbling honor especially in the year 2020 um to represent not only our not only our district but also um the world language teachers of the state of illinois so um i hope i can continue to represent them at the central states council of teachers of foreign languages when um that'll be in march so there'll be another sort of interview process and a second part to this to this teacher process well that's just excellent ellen let me echo dr hall congratulating you on this if you were here we'd run you around the building or the room and shake your hand but well we wouldn't we're going to give you air high fives and it's just so indicative of your work and and much of our staff that

010just excels every day and we appreciate that so much absolutely thank you thank you thanks for joining us tonight and you're welcome to spend the rest of the night on wednesdays if you'd like or you can time it out nope i actually was planning on on staying so yes but muting myself for sure and probably not my video as well all right dr hall all right moving on to our next special recognition is recognizing our school board members annual annually november 15th is school board day school board member day in illinois this day is set aside to acknowledge the volunteer spirit dedication and commitment of one's own time and service to the public school district where all of you are elected mohamed seymour today's an opportunity to publicly thank you and recognize you for your

011service there has likely not been a more difficult time to provide service to a school district and none of you ran on a platform to make decisions during a worldwide pandemic i thank you for your time my personal thanks to each of you you're giving so much of your energy and passion first in serving our student staff and our families and community your efforts are appreciated and we just want to say thank you and just appreciate all that you do and i know that it is not an easy role to be in right now so thank you thank you [Applause] we appreciate the festive balloons tonight and the delicious cookies normally i would appreciate the delicious cookies to a greater extent since i'm trying to watch that kind of thing right now but that's more

012conceivable to share with the rest of the board i guess right so very good and thank you and we appreciate you taking a minute to do that uh it is now time for communication is there anyone from the pto um msea i believe is here [Applause] all right hi everyone i'm megan jones um co-president of the msca along with james heinold here last week as reported in the news gazette the champion county public health department recommended any schools conducting any form of in-person learning pivot to all remote vote as soon as possible given rising corona virus numbers and community spread as leaders of some area districts have taken pains to point out this is not a mandate from public health the decision remains in the hands of local school district leaders the fact is however

013that our public health experts have recommended that schools and the communities they serve will be best prepared for the coming increased virus risk by going fully remote in a recent message to staff dr hall said it was too early to decide what we should do beyond thanksgiving specifically she said today is not the day to make that determination this is an evolving situation and much could change between now and next week for the following week this is how 2020 has been all along as we have done since the beginning of the school year we will continue to monitor our cases and exposures respond accordingly and move ahead our first question about this response is where was this caution when you were asked about going back full in person in january if in the face of

014the county health district recommending full remote schooling you feel you still don't know enough to decide what to do next week how could you possibly have made an informed decision about next semester as dr hall has indicated her decision-making process in this context is reactive as i quoted earlier she wrote we will continue to monitor our cases and exposures and respond accordingly in other words we will wait to see if a lot more of our students and staff get sick and then respond unsurprisingly msca does not find this as an acceptable way to approach a pandemic especially since neither the board nor even district management faced the exposure risk your teachers and support staff face the county health board's recommendation is a proactive response it recognizes that if you wait for community spread to clearly

015be happening before you act you've waited too long pointing to our past low numbers is irrelevant in this context the state of illinois in the last two weeks has posted day after day a record number of new cases what was predicted by public health works experts has come to pass as cold weather is keeping folks inside more the virus spread is accelerating our district accepts itself has seen a 57 increase in cases in the last 10 days limiting exposure now before it becomes a problem in mohamed seymour should be our goal as adults charged with the education of this community's children we teach and expect our students to respect experts starting with us it's a strange and contrary example we set for our kids when in the midst of a crisis we disregard the very

016people with the expertise to get us through it msca's position is that we should go full remote as soon as possible as the county health board recommends we are happy to work with the district to make that transition as smooth as possible if the district chooses to ignore the recommendations of the county health board msca will consider the employer to be asking employees to work in hazardous working conditions and intends to file a grievance accordingly the msca is strong and united on the issue of school safety over 92 of mohamed seymour teachers are members and their voices need to be not only heard but strongly considered thank you can you repeat that last part you said 92 of what i'm sorry mohammed see more teachers our members okay next is foundation laurie i think in

017the foundation yes i spoke with timmy marsh just earlier today that the annual campaign letter is in the mail just went out she said today and that will serve as their fundraiser also for the year and if i can remind everybody the education foundation is the foundation that usually has the bulldog cash and all of that money goes back into our schools and our teachers in our community specifically our schools through grants that are awarded normally during the typical year we usually are actually meeting right now and awarding them at the end of december so please pay attention to that and know that those donations are 100 tax deductible and they go right back to our kids in our classrooms uh visitors do we have any in-person visitors with us to speak we have two

018visitors that have arranged previously tonight to speak via webex uh the first is lindsey kearns lindsay are you out there i am can you hear me we can okay i can't listen to five minutes if you need that if you go longer than before we will give you a one minute warning okay um so my name is lindsey kearns i am a parent of three children in the district one at the high school level one of the junior high and one in elementary school um i'm also an attorney in licensed practice in both the state of illinois and the state of colorado but most relevantly i practice in illinois now my children have been remote learning since the fall primarily because two of the three have significant lung conditions but that aside um i just

019have some real concerns about the district not heeding the warnings of and and recommendations of both isbe and the champagne urbana public health district you know i don't know the specifics legally speaking of of what the district's insurance looks like but i will say that the general liability insurance that most districts have does not it excludes communicable diseases which include covid um and i i will say that just from 15 years of experience of practicing law unfortunately in the face of death be it from a child especially or a staff member or an affected family member that has come home and been infected um the best way that i've seen people seek to soothe pain is through financial recourse and litigation and um i think it's especially important for the district to consider that the

020standard of care basically is that you're reasonably expected to take steps to ensure the health and safety of students and others that enter the school grounds are protected and i think you know further failure to ensure adherence to proper health protocols makes the district financially at risk um you know i hate to boil lives or covid down to finances but let's be realistic that's what happens and um you know as a as a tax payer um i'm concerned about what legal advice the district has gotten and what legal ramifications the taxpayers may be on the hook for her but more than that um you know again i we've made the decision as a family to keep our kids home um but i've been in contact and communication with members of the community educators that i

021have the utmost respect for i mean the reason that we have decided not once but twice to reside in muhammad is because of the educational system here but i but i fear that educators don't feel like they're being looked out for right now um and i think we owe it to all of them to um to keep them safe you know and and i guess like i don't quite understand why we are making our own rules and flying in the face of advice of scientific professionals and advice you know i think i think we owe it to the community to keep us all safe and and the same people that say we need to keep the schools open or the people that say that we need to keep our businesses afloat and honestly i think

022that um keeping kids home for this window of time which is so small in you know you're looking at the advices to keep the kids home through the christmas break well honestly you know i i've been involved with my kids in their school activities from november and december and if we're all being honest it's more fun than learning and and so it's such a small sacrifice to make but i would really encourage you once yep go from a financial standpoint a human um standpoint and and just a health and safety standpoint to heed the advice of the local public health officials and protect our teachers protect our staff protect our students and you know it's it's such a small sacrifice in the grand scope of things thank you um also eric potter asked to speak

023on webex eric are you out there i don't see you here we don't see her okay he's not here but i don't see him well i know eric thought he might have a hard time getting back from wherever he was at times to join us on webex and i know he did said that you've written the statement in so we do have that okay i'd like to thank everyone for their comments tonight next we're into board communication so let's start with uh mr keith thanks can you hear me cam yes we can ken okay um as everyone is well aware last thursday the champaign-urbana public health district our county's public health authority issued new guidance for private and public schools throughout champaign county the recommendation essentially stated that because community transmission of the coronavirus has

024reached such a widespread level that schools in champaign county should switch to educational models should switch educational models to a fully remote model as soon as possible as we have discussed many times in these meetings this is an eventuality that has been widely predicted since march of this year on multiple occasions we've asked dr hall and she's confirmed that the district has plans in place and is ready for this transition it has long been the expectation that we will see a surge in new coveted cases in late fall that will necessitate drastic changes in our daily lives to protect ourselves our neighbors our first responders and our medical workers that day is here we have heard and we will hear arguments for and against switching to a remote model that focus on the welfare of

025our children some argue that cobit is dangerous for children and has potentially unknown long lasting effects some argue that the damage to the academic preparation of students is greater than the statistical risk to life some argue that the mental health impacts for our students outweigh any other medical risks from the virus others understandably argue with concern for the adults who serve our students they worry that the retired elderly bus driver the teacher with diabetes the lunch staff member with a heart condition or the secretary with a medically fragile child at home will be the ones who paid dearly for our in-person education tonight i want to add one more argument to the list during the first world war citizens worked together to conserve much needed food for our troops by instituting wheatless wednesdays and meatless

026mondays during world war ii gender norms were temporarily set aside and women left the home to do their part for the war effort in factories across america in times of serious crisis americans have stepped up to do their part for their nation and for their neighbors we must recognize what our part is now during this crisis we must act not in fear or defiance but in duty to our fellow citizens we must act for the care of the older generations who made greater sacrifices for our benefit when history called upon them it is our duty to sacrifice the convenience of traditional in-person education for the welfare of our nation and our neighbors now the reality is that all these arguments are correct to some degree we the board must consider them prioritize and lead the

027community i believe that the most prudent responsible choice for this board is to hear the pleading of our public health experts and switch to remote learning as soon as possible our administrative team has planned meticulously and they have prepared the staff that they lead let's make the right choice and let our staff get to work thank you good evening um you know these days it seems like we have a lot of things that people disagree about and a lot of things that um are very stressful for people to think and consider and those are all really important jobs for us and i think um doing the work of the board is what we're here for and we need to work on it before we start i just wanted to give a shout out to something

028else happening in our district that's not contentious and not sad it's really happy i and that's a shout out for our junior high cross country team and we have been reached out to from that coaching staff with some of the information about that team and i just think it's really um in these days we should celebrate um the things that are successful and great and this year they were the 2020 sectional champions both the boys and the girls team won that and they really according to everything we've heard they have had a really great experience there and we've had a lot of coaches lori clark and conan jorkowski and matt mills and andrew walmer and lisa martin who have worked with the team and given them a great experience and so i just want to

029say congratulations to them and just give them a little shout out so thanks i don't have too many comments tonight but i like colleen was also thinking of one of the small wins that we can celebrate and i just wanted to say first and foremost thank you to everyone who has taken the time to come and talk to the board to share their thoughts via email with the board uh to reach out and make phone calls and talk to us personally i do think it's important that we do understand how everyone's feeling so that we can best represent uh those those thoughts and feelings so i know that that is time consuming for people to do especially with everything else that you have going on so i just wanted to say thank you very much

030for all the time you're spending to keep us informed and aware of what you're feeling as a community and then if anyone is looking for anything uh safe to do another great thing is that the muhammad seymour high school's drama department is getting ready to release cauldron and bubble they've been extraordinarily inventive this year by i can't have a play and you can't have a theater full of audience and so they got inventive and they have filmed their play this year and so you can go and buy tickets to that and you will have access to sit with your family the 20th starting the 20th for about a week so i encourage people to look into supporting the drama department by buying access to that seeing some fun faces and i think they there was

031a lot of time and effort put into that so i just want to put a shout out to to everyone who in these times is still finding a way to spread some joy um have kids have access to some of the things that are important to them even in these trying times it's a little bit selfish my son is in the play but i was able to watch him practice and perform and film all with masks all very conscientious of distancing and i just thought they did a really great job so if we can in turn as a community support that by uh sitting down with the family and watching that that play i think it'll be entertaining and i think it'll be well worth your time very good thank you miami let's go to

032merle i just want to just really say thank you that the health department has one job and they do it rather well and to get the word out on on what they're supposed to do i i believe that what we're faced with as board members are things that often have multiple problems and that our duties are indeed broad including the social emotional health of students so i i would just like to say that i think we also do a pretty good job dealing with the broad duties that we have we are not a single issue board never have been we have multiple constituencies and and i just think that's what we do best when we do make those kinds of considerations thank you lori um i'd like to echo some of the things that were

033already said i usually try to highlight the positive myself too um great job with uh junior high cross country um i actually had a great niece who ran and asked me to come and watch her at her first meet this year in another town and so i've fallen across country so way to go but i'd also like to highlight the high school girls got 14th at state the boys got second at state we just have a legacy of runners in our community so i thank um neil garrison and gene mcgregor lucian for that um i was excited to see that we were able to pull off academic letters for our students to excel in the classroom and you know still get some fall sports in with tennis and golf um i'd like to close on

034my comments on i just attended the illinois school aboard association delegate assembly this last weekend it was remote but i want to close with something that kind of goes along the lines of what merle said everybody that's on the board and in the community have access to see the resolutions that were proposed but out of 258 members in the assembly there to vote on number seven which was the local control pandemic 89 of the people that were voting voted that the school boards historically maintained the local control within their community with the school board and again that goes along the lines of what merle said some people just have to worry about one thing and we have a large thing to worry about and i just want people in the community to know that it's

035not just us that have one way there's 230 other districts 89 of the ones that were represented that really want that control to stay within the district so um i just and it was i was very glad to get the opportunity to go to this so thank you for letting me um attend that conference jeremy i don't have anything bad i'll just add a couple things real quickly um appreciate the shout out for for school board appreciation um yesterday the official day actually was sunday i think we all celebrating today the school was formed in session on sunday the chicago tribune celebrated by publishing an article on sunday about the trials and tribulations that school boards have been through i don't know if you've not read that it's an interesting article one of the things

036one of the side benefits that's come out of this is a chance i've had to talk to a lot of other board leaders in other parts of the state and the tribune articles featured on the weekend featured the wheaton president of brad paulsen and i've had the opportunity to get to visit with brad a little better and hear his story and some of the things going on there as i've had the opportunity to talk to some other local uh board presidents and board presidents and districts kind of like our size and in our situation uh so that's kind of one of the positives that have come out of this is some networking chances opportunities i guess the ability to build some relationships um the other thing i'll hit on real quick we'll talk about doing

037things differently and trying to make the best of the situation we're in every year our schools do really a fantastic job of veteran's day and if you've not been to any of our veterans day presentations over the years you even really miss something and of course this year bringing the veterans into our buildings and honoring them in person uh was not a good idea and therefore we didn't do that but the district did produce a very a very nice video production and that was released on veterans day and i appreciate all those folks in our buildings that were involved in that all the coordinated effort i think between just about every building and putting that together and uh and bulldog tv produced that i think that's what i heard actually our music department was responsible

038for our music department tv uploaded okay very good well that was great and uh not what we would normally do but nonetheless a great job and we sure appreciate it okay um next financial update heather [Music] it's just going to be a little bit of a repeat of what i talked about in the finance committee meeting of just we are getting started to get more money in from our county uh treasurer you'll notice from the red flag report um we got a total of 7.9 million in october so that was a big chunk of it um and then we had another million in just in november now so we're at 90 i believe it was 97 so we still have a little bit more to get but we've gotten a large chunk of it so

039far and that is for last year's loving um the other thing is is that we have started um the percentage in sales tax this and i'm looking at what we received in october versus october yeah both years it was down 1.9 which kind of lowers our average for the calendar year to 6.2 percent so that's good we're still on the lower end um you know we had said worst case scenario was so we are getting that in too and you'll see our today's cash was up a little bit and that is because we are started seeing the money come in from our ca uh cares grant um sir grant and then also the technology grant that nicole and jared received so we've started being been able to claim some of that money and then started

040coming in as well so everything is on target as of right now i'm guessing the fact that the county sent more money didn't help didn't hurt our days of cash no it did not but compared to last year i mean we were i mean we had more money from them last year this time as well but some of us just the fact that we've been able to um offset some of our the expenses we already had planned with the cares grant so that didn't help a little bit so i'm just happy bronze we're on track for now just keep hoping for the best going forward heather does the county realize that we don't have all of our money yet you think yes i do because i look back to see because i worry about that

041just yeah yeah and i will stay on top of them but i look back to see and usually it is done right now we're on our we were on our fifth distribution and usually there's about eight distributions okay so um but of course if i don't see it coming through i will give them a call and and the uh the assistant treasurer and i met him personally i went there and he's he seems to be really good and on top of things so i'll just get his name with daniel so i just keep talking to him and make sure that we get the rest of our money and as i talked about before get on track get be able to talk to the new person coming in to see what their intentions are going forward

042so that we know how to budget and we know what to expect especially towards the end of this year when we expect to start getting our 2020 money good thank you for staying on top of them thank you any questions for tyler heather thank you um mr northrop are you with us i am can you hear me we can great so this month uh the board report is a quite condensed version based on what you got last month uh not much in there that really needs explanation but i do want to publicly thank three folks um those are our district trainers for our crisis prevention intervention training um it's the escalation training for students um who may be having difficulty of some sort at school and ways to help set that up to prevent it

043and uh what to do if it should happen so lauren pratt our district behavioral interventionist cynthia johnson the lincoln trail social worker and brian badger a special education teacher at the high school are our three trainers they spend a significant amount of time having to be trained themselves so they can come back and train all the necessary people in our district and that includes teachers um parent professionals other support staff administrators uh they did it this year in a much shortened timeline they did it with colbit in a really socially distant and safe way in a bit of a blended model so they really had to switch up and change what they were doing and then staff had to be really flexible to be able to partake in in that in that training so a

044special thank you to them and a thanks to all the staff who were willing to participate so we could get that done by the december timeline questions for me i am hearing none thank you for your reporting christine have a good night thanks dr romo um so i don't have anything new but i do want to point out the sat scores for this year i think when the students took those in the fall with school being remote somewhat this past spring we anticipated those scores to be a little bit lower but they were in fact a little bit higher so they're interested to see how that trend continues over the next few years as we are trying to play catch up from this past spring um and then the other thing i really wanted to

045point out was you know we've been talking a lot about the work that dr kevin tan has been supporting with us and so i just want to point out the grant that we received for 45 000 from him the healing illinois grant which is given to us by the department of human services we were the only school district to receive the grant and we received one of the largest uh awards in the state so very proud of that um kevin also received an award for forty thousand dollars for some work beyond our district that is more statewide so um so yeah so we're excited about the opportunity yeah good news very very good questions for dr rommel yeah nicole um what was the two of them i guess what was the feedback on indigenous people's

046day and then what are the curriculum changes that are occurring that i see written here in this paragraph just some random comments from parents just talking about how the switch from columbus state to indigenous people and really talking about um less of celebrations of columbus and more about the founding of the land um so there was some just some feedback that being maybe more true to the history and then with regards to more inclusive curriculum for students so some of those have been with regards to some of the choices and materials that have been purchased so materials um like here i know at middletown and even all the way through the high school books that maybe have characters that represent minorities um blacks hispanics latinos um and just trying to be very cautious and those

047materials select are not cautious but inclusive in the materials that we're selecting so all students find books in the library that represent themselves um and then some of the feedback um that we've received as kevin and i are meeting with different individuals of the vip community it's just this kind of idea that people notice um kind of what we do and where we emphasize things and that there seems to be a big emphasis on holidays um and different things throughout the year um but kind of black history month and some other kind of set aside time you know we may mention it but it's not as big a deal maybe as thanksgiving or christmas or other things that we put forth and so just really trying to make an effort to be inclusive when we

048uh when those periods come up so the principals are working with their diversity teams right now so that we can make sure when we celebrate black history month or we celebrate women's history that we're not repeating the same thing at each of the schools are in every grade level because there's a lot of history to be included and a lot of blacks to celebrate so we want to make sure that we're not just limiting ourselves to maybe harriet tubman and rosa parks and ruby ridges that we're celebrating a variety of individuals that have contributed over time any questions for dr rome okay dr hall all right um i just i'll provide a very quick overview um just wanted to point out some of the really great things that are happening um in our in our

049district uh there are you know things besides talking about the pandemic and it's nice to be able to focus on um some of the other positive and some of the other ways that um that kind of business continues here um i did want to point out that um we not only our school district but just across the state and i'm going to guest across the nation are feeling the effects of teacher shortage and um so the the some of the positives that are coming out of that are are an effort to really try to identify high school students and perhaps even earlier kids who want to go into education and so i'm part of a group through the education for employment system called the education pathways committee to start to put together some some really

050focused activities to try to identify and basically encourage and recruit students who want to go into education to get them started on that in high school and hopefully get them the interested ones on the pathway to becoming public educators or educators of any kind i mean everybody needs everybody needs teachers so um that's been a fun endeavor and um also we maybe this is um best saved for the covid update on our agenda um and we can talk about this later but we do have the opportunity to conduct some um coping 19 rapid testing here and um we'll have nita bachmann talk about that when we get to that on our agenda but that is a positive in moving ahead and no toilet requests this month we can write a comment i'm going to say

051this in the sun but for the teachers at the illinois association of school board conference we did pass a resolution for some certificates that they were looking at that was presented by the teaching association because of the shortages in the areas of pe foreign language and special ed their short-term approval they'll have some endorsements that can change and go and they will not be issued after june of 2023 but they're moving forward with changing things to make that so i was going to say that earlier but i have a copy of that language if you like it but specifically this past weekend which i thought was interesting too okay questions for dr hall okay now we're into regular business and uh we handled one and two already in the consent agenda and thank you ken

052for making that for sharing that thought with us earlier uh so we're item three under new business resolution concerning review of hazardous conditions i think nick is here in the room this is kind of an annual item you want to share anything with us i really don't have anything to share um since last year when when this building was built that was the last time we made changes and until any new roads or buildings are built we don't have any changes all right keep it simple superintendent recommends the board of education to prove the resolution concerning review of hazardous conditions as presented is there a motion to do that absolutely that's larson is there a second second hennessy [Music] yes yes nick thank you for keeping us up to date with the state okay next

053is item 4 class rank and proposed board policy 6 column 355 chad benedict and colleen's going to help some of this comment some hmm all right thanks for the patience um tonight i just kind of want to walk everybody through kind of the process we've been through since october when we spoke about an academic recognition plan um so just to review things quickly we currently use a top 10 system to recognize our students at graduation top 10 deter determined by cumulative gpa and we use we're still using a weighted gradient system um during the spring of 2019 um we started taking some measures to examine the social motion and health of our students and one of the things that we found um during this that we got when we got feedback from our students was

054stress levels around grades and peer comparison etc that's what our students were telling us an as administration team with our division heads we begin researching kind of just different ideas and options as related to the social emotional piece one of the pieces that we looked at was class rank and the weighting of grades mr lightbarger one of ours our school guys one of our school guidance counselors he's also the division head for support services um surveyed schools that are ranked higher than bahamas see more in the state of illinois and then surveyed some schools that are like us demographically he also has the the luxury of talking to a lot of college admissions reps as they came through our building to recruit our students and what he found in those surveys was that a lot

055number of schools had transit had transitioned away from a traditional class ranking system and that college admissions were transitioning away from looking at as well as one of the criteria to get into college so in the fall during that summer then and then the fall of 2019 um at the division head retreat in the summer we developed the division heads and admin started working on an academic recognition plan that would address some of the concerns that we had the plan was given to the vision to take back to staff for review we made tweaks and changes and then after the first of the year the plan was to unroll it in campus conversation in the spring of 2020. of course then kobe came and we weren't able to do we did not do that um

056the academic recognition plan that we had come up with was to start with the class of 2025. so um during quote if you're well aware isbe recommended that we consider pass rate past failed grades which we did and then we got into august when our counselors came back um from summer break and we started seeing some scheduling concerns about um you know if the student took a certain class and they didn't they weren't able to get the ap points or the honors points um and how that impacted their class rank and then we saw some kids trying to maybe load up on schedules or asking questions about scheduling or taking classes wanting to take classes away from muhammad seymour to catch up on the on the points so to speak for class ranking shortly thereafter

057all within the same week we were scheduled to present the august board meeting about our academic recognition plan for the class of 2025 and then dr schultz also proposed a new board policy on academic recognition do you remember we went back to the drawing board and we started working on a plan that would incorporate some of the concerns that dr schultz had raised and some of the things that we have been seeing at school as well worked with dr hall and dr schultz and our division heads to make some revisions to the plan it's been revised several times um once we got it narrowed down we've bounced feet back off our principal's advisory committee which is a student-led group of about 50 or excuse me a student participation group that uh the the principals at

058the high school work with there's about 50 students in that group and then last um last week we held a campus conversation virtually on webex um and we invited all high school students and all staff to attend and we got feedback from that process one of the big questions that has come up throughout this is like how how has it impacted students and and why why the change and as you've seen in the information that we shared we're proposing two different systems um one for juniors current juniors and seniors and then one for the freshman and successive classes thereafter last year there were as ninth graders or current 10th graders there were 53 students who took one honors class and 46 students that took two honors classes those students did not receive their points for

059the weighted gpa the 10th graders is a little more telling our current 11th graders i won't go through all the numbers but you can see that there are a significant number of students we had 32 students alone who took three honors classes last year in the spring that did not receive their points uh in our weighted grading system so certainly there's a number of kids that lost out on those opportunities and that's the equity piece that we started looking at that we found to be challenging as to how we were going to address that which leads us to tonight um we developed a modified honor system um is a blend of a previous recognition and the proposed new one starting with the class 2024 we went with a three-tiered system and you can see the

060numbers that we propose in terms of gpa or places them in a certain percentile in their class um the truth is is we're not 100 sure um how or where our students are going to finish as they're impacted by you know what they went through in the spring we just know that they've been impacted and so um i think this our hope is that this plan will address some of the concerns that we have in regards to the students in the junior and sophomore class then as we move into the freshman class in all successive classes we transitioned to strictly a gpa class recognition system we'd still stick with it with the same three tiered system of honors high honors and highest honors but qualifying but students would qualify according to gpa um they'd be

061in competition essentially with themselves we like the idea of setting some goals so the student has you know a certain gpa um they can work towards another goal but there's towards another recognition if they like but it simply lets us it lets students compare themselves just to them um the other thing that i want to point out too that we've had a lot of discussion about is with with our with our our building leadership is um that we have a 3.9 in the honor system and that's to recognize we may have students who go through our programs um and say like say maybe they're on a cte track or they want to um maybe the military's attracting they don't take a lot of honors courses but maybe they take every class they're supposed to and

062do really well on that tr on in those courses this still gives them the recognition that i that we feel like they deserve um this is not different the the commencement speeches is not different from the last time that i presented um students would apply um we we looked to to give speak to give the commencement speech um and then there would be a panel of people that would that would screen those speeches we've talked to several schools that do it this way and they're they've had they really like it and they've been doing it for a number of years so um it's been it's been an interesting process to go through i appreciate the feedback when working with dr schultz on this and dr hall i've learned a lot um you know it's certainly

063been a year of adjustments in a lot of areas um and in the junior and senior or excuse me junior and sophomore class was was not something maybe we anticipated until like i said when we got into scheduling i also want to note that we decided um based on feedback from our students too um that the senior class was already really far into the process and so changing that that on them now would have been really really tough um for them so that's why they're not included in this plan and they would they would stay as is so i don't know if dr schultz wants to add anything or if there are any other questions you have be happy to try to answer colleen anything would you like to have well i just would like

064to say it has been a true pleasure to work with chad and that chad and his staff particularly tim liberger have done a fabulous job and really considered the students the board piece is simply the board policy that supports what chad and his staff have outlined um and pretty much follows the iasb guidelines for policy and so i'm just really pleased with um what great work they did and and i also i've i've mentioned this already to mr benedict but i would like to say too how much i appreciate um that he thought about students who were maybe not college bound or not on that track and wanted to go somewhere else but still achieving very high standards academically to figure out how to recognize them and so i really um that went along with

065his goals um that he presented last time and i just really appreciated that among all the other things so thank you chad thank you one last thing i want to add is the is the timing of this um now is our students will start signing up for classes in january um so we felt like it was important that um you know should we decide to do this this evening that our students know this as they sign up for classes in the future one question chad yes so the gpa bump for honors courses then we'll just become a one-year anomaly good question we're not changing how we if i'm understanding correctly uh the correction excuse me the question correctly is we're not changing how we calculate our grades that that part will stay the same it's

066just we're changing up what we recognize is that i was thinking one slide showed that there were honors classes that had the list of all the students that did not get the additional points on their gpas correct so those those students last year from spring they did not receive any points and that's why we've that's why the modified honors recognition system is a little bit different than what we'll transition to which is the current with the current freshman but that will include pretty much he's giving him a curve for the next two years okay right like if you know we might lower the standard a little bit if that covered problem decrease people a little bit we can bring it down i just want to say thank you to chad and his staff and the

067dr schultz for working on this it's um kind of interesting that it started in a different place prior to the pandemic and then had to evolve and ended up i think really um coming out to help help kids in a really positive way so thanks to both of you and thanks to the high school staff and to the kids who gave input too and the parents i knew last week i really appreciate the the work that you put into it and i certainly understand the thought process i guess i do have i struggle with it a little bit because um in some ways i think that excellency should be honored at the highest levels and that number two that even though we're trying to help with those stress levels that we miss out on an

068opportunity to learn how to cope with some adversity when you set goals and somehow you miss the mark and that you have that's part of life that we have to figure out how to deal with that and move on um and then also that um you know that achieving that highest gpa isn't the be all in all which i think this does but it it takes some of that learning process of our students out of trying to balance that out to try and figure that out so i feel like we're taking some opportunities away from our students to really learn and grow as young men and young women into adults where they won't necessarily be able to compare themselves or could just do a comparison with themselves when it comes to the job market or

069professionally that that there's going to be competition amongst peers and we're going to have to figure out how to deal with that and um if you haven't been exposed to that adversity along the way then we miss out on some of that i don't know that's why i struggle with it sure sure and i i think your comments are fair um those are conversations that we had with our staff and our division heads about that um i think in talking with um you know other schools that have transitioned to um i mean the nuts and bolts that are different for every school that have transitioned away from a you know a numerical class rank um you know some of the feedback that they that they shared with us is is that um they have the

070same concerns that we did and that's helped with that and then balancing that with um the overall mental health of the students um was was was something they set out to try to improve um and this did that um i'm not gonna lie to you i mean that's a conversation we have as far as um that's a real thing as far as teaching them to you know what life skills we want to teach them what they want what do we want them to leave high school with that's that's what i think we have to think about is are we really helping your mental health by removing a stressor where a stressor is an opportunity to learn everywhere else and why sure yeah i i i think i think for us and our team it was

071um because it was um we see it a lot and i mean you know we talked the last board meeting about um you know like our school improvement bills selling around social emotional health and things like that and we continue to see that i mean i think the feedback that we get from our staff and from our students is that's and certainly this year that hasn't helped us that that's that's the number one thing i think our our our teachers are going through right now with our students and starting clear back like i said this this this conversation started in 2018 long before finals were coded but it's something that's been on our our staff's minds and radar for a while trying to take you're aware of all the initiatives we've got in place to

072try to help with that other comments or questions okay um superintendent recommends the board of education approve war policies six colon and the changes in the academic recognition program for mohammed seymour high school as they have been presenting is there a motion to do that so move larson is there a second i can't kind i've heard from a lot of parents that they're very happy with these changes so most of the feedback that i've heard thus far has been positive and um if people had any concerns after they understood the program a little bit better some of those concerns kind of about all of the feedback that i've received so far has been really fun good anything else before we vote sorry i'm sorry schultz yes larson yes keith yes hennessy yes hendrix no macomb

073yes okay chad thank you appreciate all your work on this thanks number five settlement agreement actor hall uh i recommend that the board vote to approve the settlement agreement okay superintendent recommends the board of education approve groups approve the settlement agreement between dc and all versus the board of education out of some way three and all is there a motion to do that so move larson is every second second any discussion i do agree with the um general uh gist of the settlement i do believe one of the statements i believe to be false and so i can't um vote for that i just want to let you know why i'm going to be voting now i'll just comment i personally don't like this at all but our attorneys have recommended that it's a judicious

074thing to do and they're paying for this and so i will reluctantly support it because it appears to be the adult thing to do i will not be supporting this mainly because i had asked for some pieces of information so that i could better understand what we were being asked to decide on and i was never afforded the ability to look at that i have some concerns that even some of the previous board members who aren't on the board anymore have more information about this case than i do so i just don't feel like i'm in a position to be able to vote for something that i don't have all the pieces any other comments please don i abstain yes hennessy no hendrix yes schultz no giles yes macomb yes number six approval to go

075to bid for high school boilers after hall hey thank you uh might also just call on uh let the board know steve curtis is here to add any expert comment on boilers um back in august or september the board approved an amendment for health life safety money to approve the funds to pay for the replacement of boilers that amendment has been approved and after discussing the current situation with our boilers at the high school we feel the need to move ahead with replacing two of those immediately so approving this is only just to approve going out for bid it doesn't obligate us in any way but we will get to work on putting the necessary documents together in the next couple of weeks going out to bid and then the goal to bring back for

076review and approval um a bid at the december 14th board meeting so this is just a approving to go out for bid on replacement of two boilers superintendent recommends the board of education authorize the superintendent to let bids for the be taken or for the bids for one for one replacement of the two non-operational boilers at the high school bids will be taken with the intention to bring them to review and approval of december 14th for direct board of education meeting is there a motion to do that let's move to the second second discussion or questions my question we can get them that quickly have been spread boilers yes yes in place we currently have two operational boilers um both of them are not in great shape um there is real concern whether we'll make

077it through the year we're hoping so we're doing everything we can to keep it going but if we lose one of the existing two we probably won't be able to keep up with that was my recollection that we need to have two goals right in order to maintain consistency or contingency the boilers have been failing over the last four or five years um again we've done taking extra measures to try and keep the two the boilers going and we're confident that they're functioning right now but we are seeing a lot of problems with them and increasing problems um replacement of one boiler would be great two would be best scenario right now with the plan of replacing you know two more and sometimes in your distant future steve what's the rough age of the four

078boilers that are there i think they're 10 to 12 years old all four yes my understanding was that they replaced all four at one point about 10 to 12 years ago and i couldn't be off on that i'm not i have not gained in the history of it it doesn't seem that old it doesn't it doesn't so two kind of went the way they just did can we expect the other two doing the same thing soon it wouldn't surprise me [Music] um we lost heat exchangers on the first two uh they built once they filled those you know i think the cost of reflection one was somewhere around sixty thousand replacing the heat exchanger shuffles in the forty thousand dollar range so the four units are identical um yeah it's wooden surprises and we'll also

079heat exchanger the overall goal here is your place off four in the long run so if we've got bids back in december if we were to act on a bid or two to replace one or two of them in december what would how far out would we be attached the spring i think we'd have a little bit of the heating season left by the time that project so we kind of got to make sure the two keep going right and we already authorized this to be considered as health life safety is that yeah correct yes right and for the forward replacement talk with us having a that recommendation was based on replacing all four units uh we're looking at just as lindsay said replacing the two units and we can maintain we if we replace

080the to the the two dead units and we can maintain the building attribute and have some contingency in operation um until we replace the other two at that time can you lessen the burden on the other two and work the new ones harder we can balance that out yes just curious whether a staging have two that are newer than two more at any given time is actually smarter than having all four replaced ones so the goal is to again to replace the two dead units now and if we could do that then we would end up with four operating boilers again what the plans at an appropriate time down the road replacing the tools but again by doing this now in this manner we can maintain this assurance that we'll be able to heat the

081building yep i understand that would be important this the manufacturer that's in it now i'm told they didn't have a good reputation so we get a different manufacturer yeah and steve is there any economy of scale by replacing all four at one time any savings and doing it that way or is this the best approach um without seeing this coming in i don't i am not sure if i can answer that i think that it's gonna i think this is a very economical way of doing it and a wise way of doing it to do all four at one time would be a massive project um i think this is probably the best way to do it but i know i didn't answer your question but um we might save a little bit by doing

082all four ones but well we actually don't have the health life safety money available at this time for all four so then we have to take it out of operating operating costs um and um yeah or do another bond issuance which i don't recommend with our future plans and where does this leave us with funds for health life safety and would we consider the boilers the most urgent uh facilities need that we have obviously 2020 in covid has called ventilation systems and air flow into question is this a more urgent need for us to assess and remedy something related to air flow our ventilation systems are functioning according to design um without the boilers if we were to lose at least one boiler right now we'd be shutting the high school down until we could

083come up with some sort of supplemental heat for the entire building during the winter which i don't know what that would be at the moment um the drastic manager they're trying to keep it going so and then heather i'm thank you that that answers my question um heather so does this deplete our health life safety funds do we have anything available for something if we were to assess the ventilation well first i have to see where the bids came in and then i can answer that i'll get that information together for you that's fair thank you any other questions board members right and yet get like a hold on it yeah yeah we're just we're just getting bids at this point and we'll then we'll know more all right we have a roll call vote

084please yes [Music] yes larson yes hennessy yes macomb yes number seven proposed revisions to board policies one colon ten three colon ten and six colon ten dr hall and dr roman great thank you and thank you for the support to move ahead with the boilers as well um these are just proposed revisions to three board policies that would add to language that would reflect the work that we've been doing in the district and will continue to do related to diversity equity and inclusion this is the first reading for these and just wanted to bring these forth for discussion it's a way to kind of solidify in board policy that there's a commitment to this work i don't know that it it simply kind of envelops and embraces the work that we're doing doesn't really change

085um the direction of it or anything like that but it does i guess in a sense shows the board's commitment to this work and continuing to move ahead with it by revising these three policies certainly open to any suggestions or questions okay this is not an action item this month i'm assuming those would come back in december okay any thoughts for dr hall and dr romero hearing none if you uh have come up with anything on that that you think needs to be considered please get that doctor hall and then we'll see those policies again uh i'm assuming next month so very good number eight approve full-time health eop positions for second semester dr hall hey i'm making a request to the board to increase um our three new part-time health eops to full-time um

086starting second semester um the reason for this is that we are seeing an increased need for their um their work and their services they're currently working five hours a day the the health eop in this building uh middletown prairie elementary is already full-time stacy fisher was hired to replace one of our other eops who who retired but in lincoln trail the junior high and the high school the the eops that were hired for the approval of the board this this summer were put in five hours a day we see a need moving forward especially with the implementation of the rapid testing that we foresee getting they're they're very involved working directly with nita bachmann on a daily basis working with contact tracing and also with communicating with our parents we do see more and more

087of this work coming onto our shoulders as the champagne urbana public health district finds themselves becoming busier as well so um just asking for approval to make those three people full-time starting second semester superintendent recommends the board of education to prove increasing the health eops at lincoln trail the junior high and the high school full-time semester is there a motion to do that second further discussion or questions i actually like to consider tabling this issue i think right now uh especially given guidelines from cu phd what we have uh the medical environment has told us with respect to the next three or four months the things that we have um in front of us i'd like to suggest we table this until january where we have a better idea of what our schooling will actually

088look like and make those hiring decisions if we are at a place where the model that we're employing for uh educating kids uh would still require this full-time move okay we've got a recommendation table was that a recommendation or emotion it was not i didn't amend the motion i can't if you need me to but um it's just my suggestion that we do that i think we have a lot in flux and so to make a decision tonight on something that's you know six day in a very volatile day-to-day day makes a big difference that it might be prudent for us to uh just wait until we have a better understanding of what january actually looks like before we make this move so you have to make a motion to table that before we can

089the tabling thank you colleen i moved to table this until january is there a second on the motion table i'll second it okay um dr hall or anita is here we don't like to speak to the timing on this and why we're looking at this now what the benefit or risk may be um i actually would like to have them tomorrow so if all that said i realize that we're looking at second semester but every day is busier and i have some of these ladies who are answering my emails well into the evening already so they're working far beyond the hours that we're paying them already um i they're doing things i haven't been able to do for years as as a single entity and covet has only exacerbated that so i um i am

090highly in favor of adding them um if and if we're going to have right now the plan that we have on the table is that we're going to have kids back if we have kids back and we don't vote on this until the end of january i can't guarantee how that's going to work because if we have all the kids in the building we add all the medical issues that we have along with all the coded things that we're doing on a day-to-day basis um i i think that that can quickly drop us and there are thoughts or comments on tabling this i i just want to say i really appreciate and value that thought in that and i i understand i i i get that um i feel like just a hallmark of covet

091is having to make these decisions with the information that we're kind of currently presented with um and that's that's why it's it's brought forth but um i i do appreciate i mean i completely understand making the recommendation to table it um i would agree with nita but i just wanted to um say that i i do understand that and i i was the second dad as well i mean i do understand can we at least put it off until the december board meeting if we're not thinking about it till the next semester i mean my my only concern is i don't want to um obligate us to have positions if for some reason we don't have in person school to have that obligation it seems like january's far away in the days of covet so

092maybe next month right as a middle ground i think part of this will come into the coving conversation um dr schultz i think that it's all kind of tied together so i don't know if you want to incorporate that but with some of the testing and some of the things we're talking about i i don't know i think that there are some things that we could we're busy it's not going to go whenever we're in person some of this work is not going to go away um so i guess that's that's a thing to consider as well but but obviously you guys have to make that decision i look at this through the eyes of an employer i don't think we should continue pushing people or expecting more from them than what we've agreed to

093pay i think to to move forward uh recognizing that the right thing to do other comments on tabling or discussion on table all right this is on the motion of the table because we have a roll call vote hennessy yes schultz yes no hendrix no larson no mccomb no so the motion is back on the floor on the recommendation is there further discussion on the recommendation um this is ken can you hear me yeah uh nita you mentioned that uh you and and i think maybe other uh staff members are working uh late into the night on these things can you help us understand what tasks you're performing outside of work hours sure i'm happy to do that i take phone calls as late as 10 o'clock at night right now because parents are calling

094needing to know what's going on i have i'm i'm updating the the website all the time depends on when i'm taking the calls actually as we're moving forward that it's only getting busier i have a couple days i started working at 5 30 in the morning and i ended my evening at 8 00 in the evening so it just depends on the day not all days are like that but in the last couple weeks as you can see the numbers are going up and all of that detail um involves communication with parents communication with public health um communication with our buildings with our administrators with dr hall um it's it's pretty much it's all the time um and you can't put it off to the next day because if you put it off until the

095next day then it's just compounded so i can't keep up so and the staff are phenomenal what they're doing and what they have added to this year and is amazing um and again we're updating spreadsheets we're talking with administrators i worked all weekend with one of the administrators on a case so we we are trying to do in district what public health is unable to do for us right now they they're taking care of every single school in the district and not every school is doing what we are in the county and in so they're taking care of all the schools in the county they have one person that's doing that and what i'm doing in our district a lot of other districts aren't doing as far as contact tracing as far as working on

096um what that needs to look like and then connecting with the parents i've heard from a lot of parents who aren't hearing from public health right now because there are thousands of calls behind so that's in a nutshell what i'm spending my life with these days okay and um can you can you tell us uh has public health um asked the district to take these responsibilities on or did we decide to do that we started this i started with a relationship back in august with the one school liaison with public health and i talked with her after everything blew up it had been a couple weeks since i've been able to talk with her i emailed her she called me the other day and she wanted to tell me how much she appreciates what we

097are doing that some districts aren't able to do she asked i actually put together a procedure and a protocol for how we are handling things in district with our administrators with steve and how we handle things and the verbiage that we use with parents and she actually took that and shared it with other districts to give them an idea of what to do because she too is working the kind of hours i am trying to keep up with with the rest of the county um so so nobody asked me specifically to do this but if i didn't do it then a lot of what we are seeing the reason that we're still open in november and the reason we've been so successful is because of the efforts that we're putting forth in-house if we weren't

098doing this families would not be notified of exposures or positive cases right for a lot longer of the time then they're currently getting notified right i'm getting people out of school within if i find out about a positive case parents have been phenomenal they're calling me if they turn positive if they have mom or dad or positive they're calling me i am able to within a day that same day get all of the affected people out of school and into quarantine easily four or five days before they would get contacted by public health and seeing public health has admitted that they are they can't keep up i know that with my husband at his work someone hasn't heard back from them since last tuesday and um asked if we could share our policy with them

099because we've got a really good policy going on so thank you for that sure i don't know how the rest of the board feels i mean let me just start by saying i'm extremely grateful for the the hard work that you're putting in uh please don't take this the wrong way but i would be more inclined to like merle said i i don't want to expect our workers to work more than they're being honestly paid for um i would be more inclined to have our district let public health handle their responsibilities and we focus on what our responsibilities are and it sounds like other districts are doing that very thing i'd be curious to know how the larger districts in our county are are handling these well they're another public health actually the lady that

100i spoke with public health thanked me for what we were doing and asked me to please continue we are not asking i am not asking these ladies to work more than their hours they're doing that on their own i i have we are not expecting that we are not asking that all that we're asking for now is to reward them and let them have full hours so that they can work within the hours and that it takes some of the burden off of me because they have the ability to do some of the things i cannot delegate to people who are here so i get that my point is the people at public health are funded federally state and locally to perform these responsibilities you know i'm sure the village would be extremely grateful to

101us if we had mr curtis out patching um potholes on the road in town but again that's not our realm of responsibility sorry sorry ken i didn't mean to go ahead can i think of the opposite i think we've got a duty to our own parents staff and students to do everything we can to keep them safe in this manner and that we should and i think the 20 grand here is is actually a relatively small investment but to be able to continue that i appreciate the leadership we have and i think it's a duty and i don't want to have to rely on the government if they'll never keep up okay i accept the possibility that i'm just in the minority here i do agree we have a duty to keep our parents and

102students and teachers safe you know can you just if we are in a situation where we are uh forced to go remote only what would the workload be do we still have work that would be able to be accomplished um by the by you and these folks i'm just trying to understand where the dollars you know what workload would would those transition over to if we're in a scenario where the kids aren't in the building sure um actually i think that the workload would stay very similar to what it is partially because as i said we're part of this conversation we'll morph into kind of our last um item but if we start doing testing then that would be for not only in person people but for our remote students and staff and all of

103our staff as well so once we start doing that it will be impossible to do it without extra hands because it's going to be in every building um and that's that's the thing that again i think we are looking at continuing to to do the interventions and run interference for our district only for for those people in our district that need questions answered that that the quarantines they don't they don't know what to expect and if we can keep if we can keep our districts safer if we can keep our students and staff safer then i think again i that's that's how i take that personally as my personal responsibility to try to manage that um so every single one of these people is going to be busier helping with all of that so and

104then if we have all students back then then that's exponential anyway we're we're going to be crazy busy but you know that's part of it that's just part of what we do but um if if we're all remote we still have those things to do as far as the mitigation as far as talking with parents as far as follow-up um and i i don't see that changing we're not going to stop working with our parents just because they're not in the building i would say that if we because we because of what you are doing we're not doing it um if if you're able we're able to notify parents and students and staff days sooner than what public health could i would submit that not only are we doing a much better job of protecting

105the people whose lives have been entrusted in the district our students and our staff but i would i would say we're also doing a service for our entire community because not only stopping spread in our buildings we're stopping spreading our community that's what i'm trying to assist and with i'm assuming if we were in a situation where we were uh remote for some period of time um whatever that period of time is there'd be an end to that period where we would want to come back and bring folks back in the building and coming back in we need to know who still needs to be in quarantine who's exactly used to whatever because just just because we were to open the doors back up doesn't mean that everybody would be invited back in there would

106be some people who would need to complete we have to keep all the bats and we have to keep our bodies any other comments or questions um yeah nina you mentioned putting the process down on paper could you please send that to the board i'd be interested to read those policies of that process if you could share that with us um and then i guess the last thing which probably seems like a flip-flop but i guess i didn't understand uh the scope and breadth of what people are doing um if we really have people who are working beyond their contract hours is january soon enough or should we be i don't feel good about asking people to work if we're not paying them and so should this be something that we should be doing more

107immediately than january um to start immediately can we make it start at the beginning of the next pay period that way we'll get it that's apparel will get it figured out in our neighboring district who's not been live they are their nurses are busier than they normally were and they're still doing contact tracing and all of that you don't just get coveted at school obviously because these kids are remote we live so i appreciate this coming forward now and i appreciate that people can open their minds and listen and maybe change where they started from the beginning because it is so important because i mean it's valid that what someone said earlier we are paying taxes for that but it's not getting done and we are the biggest employer now and we can take care

108of our community and it's an opportunity to miss out on if we don't do this okay so i'd like to second colleen's motion okay so we've got a motion that's that's where i was going i wasn't sure if we had a second or not so we've got a motion to amend this to make it effective immediately and that has been second right right can i make ask a question now that i've made a motion sure will these people do that i mean like we didn't ask them right like do you want to work full time tomorrow i mean yes i i actually have spoken with yes but the record reflect the board doesn't want to force any of them against their will if you know what i'm saying and the last question i actually have

109is for heather um is there money to pay them this um yeah yes there is so thanks i asked her to yeah they were passing the cam at the door tonight they okay so the amended motion is on the table we will vote on the amended motion if we pass the amended motion we will not need to vote on the original motion if the amended motion fails the original motion would still be on the table so this is uh amended motion to start um i believe you have to vote on the amendment and then vote on the main motion but there has to be two votes here you have to vote to accept the amendment and then you would have to vote on the amended motion okay so this is a vote to accept the

110amendment that we move this to an immediate as soon as he's a bolster don hendricks yes hennessy yes schultz yes larson yes giles yes he yes yes all right now the motion the original motion that we approve this and of course that would now include the amended part that we're starting it seems practical any further questions or comments [Music] i just want to see it's really important that we protect our students staff and community larson yes hendricks yes yes hennessy yes no yes all right we are we're closing in on two hours in we've not had a comfort break yet we are we've got a couple items left we're going to take about a five minute comfort break and then we'll come back with that as nine and 10. jared if you pause us for

111five minutes we'll be back okay i understand we're back up and why so thank you for that little break we are at agenda item nine diversity equity inclusion this was the discussion that megan wanted to have on a board level committee you guys there here now okay i'm here nope i think i don't see colleen this is a discussion i think colleen is here i don't see colleen here yet i it looks like she is there well she's her computer is still up she's still in the meeting that doesn't mean she's there so i think we need to make sure when we come back from these breaks we do a roll call to make sure everybody's back calling you with us inclusion committee this is regarding the board level committee that meegan had requested you

112want to share anything on that uh yeah i move that to the muhammad seymour board of education creates inclusion and diversity committee focused on inclusion and diversity in our schools motions on the table is there a second second step okay we've got a motion and a second on the table okay discussion yeah if i could have a minute or two since this was something that i brought to the board um i just want to reiterate that i think it's really important to have board level attention to something like this that goes on into our schools i think the community and came and asked us for this i think it's not just the board needing to provide good leadership on this i feel like this was something that the community came and the students came in

113back and asked us to take a look at this level i feel like doing the implementation of this committee shows leadership and commitment to these values that we have in our district and i think it provides a venue for exploration and discussion of topics that are difficult to discuss sometimes but would allow the community to participate in a way that it hasn't before and that ultimately the input that we get from that is going to be valuable uh not just within the district but for the community at large like this committee is in line with the other board committees that we have we have finance committees we have facilities committees we have a policy committee we have a parent-teacher advisory committee um one of the things that i just have to say um is that

114these committees are you know the parent-to-teacher advisory committee is supposed to work with the board is suppose the board is supposed to work with that committee to talk about guidelines and discipline things like bullying part of that committee can also include working with law enforcement to develop policy and guidelines regarding reporting and student discipline issues part of the parent teacher committee is can be to discuss busing and transportation and safety procedures um having said all of that i'm pretty disappointed uh when i looked at the packet and saw that the superintendent intends to not recommend this committee um i think the community came to us and asked us for help and i'm very concerned because they see a pattern of behavior of things that the board is supposed to do that for one reason or

115another and i can't quite figure it out myself members of this board and the majority don't want to do the work of the board um the parent teacher advisory committee is not a board-led committee the board has not met with that committee that's something that we have had the superintendent do uh the facilities finance and policy committees are all committees that don't meet independently as board level committees even when we talk to our lawyers we've offloaded lots of discussions with our law firms and our attorneys to the superintendent uh just last meeting we took our committee that the board work of looking at a facility's plan and planning for the future and created a separate committee that is going to do that work um i just feel like i don't understand why it is that

116this board or the members of this board don't seem to want to do the work of the board and to see that the superintendent recommends that we don't implement this committee i don't understand why clearly had community members and students come and tell us that what we are currently doing is not sufficient it's not sufficient to support to support what's going on in the schools it's not sufficient to support what they are asking us to do to create a safe environment this would be a board-run committee that i would lead i've had input and offers from people in the community with areas of expertise to help me with this committee and yet the last board meeting we created a committee that we're going to set ben 70 plus thousand dollars with not much more direction

117than we have for this committee and then the objections that i heard to forming this committee is we just don't know enough so for me i don't know that i'll belabor this because uh although i think this is important and vital work i don't hold a lot of hope that this is going to be voted through tonight and i'm disappointed but i made the motion with the hope that i'll be proven wrong for me this is a matter of people in our district students parents community members teachers have come and asked us for their for our health to tackle some really hard discussions to dive into where we can make improvements around some of these issues where we can build up support where we can encourage dialogue and find ways to better support and educate

118people within our district around these important matters these are steps that other school boards have taken these are steps that corporations have taken and put statements out there about the importance of inclusion and diversity and so i sit here yet again tonight and say that what we are currently doing uh is a good first step i think it would be bolstered by board level commitment to this endeavor and um don't want to have to look the people who have come and asked us for help in the eye and say that it appears that the leadership on this board is not interested in having the conversation with you about what it is that you're asking for what it is that's hurting and how we might help you i don't want to offload this one i think

119this is one that we need to lead and provide leadership on and so i'm asking that this motion be voted through and that this committee be created at a board level that's all i have to say other comments i think with our other committees we've actually got some duties or responsibilities written and i'm not sure i've seen that here but i'm curious why you mentioned finance and policy and facilities and i think i heard you say these committees should work independently i i don't understand that view independently of what with without the administration involved with without with that law how how should they be independent tomorrow that's not i was making an example of this board not doing board work i that was not the point of my discussion my discussion is is that there

120are things that this board should be doing and should be responsible for that we tend to offload and give away to other people i don't want this particular item to be one of those things i guess i'm sorry i look at what you're saying is totally different than what we said we went in our last board meeting at november 2nd where all of the administrators shared their goals with us they all had something about diversity inclusion and equity we had a proposal tonight on board packet page 160 where we talked about the same kind of information that we have going on we've partnered with u of i to work on this we are calling the experts in to do something so that might not be your policy nine that you're recommending for your committee but

121we are doing those things those came about from people listening we're going to have community engagement we're all to put names we've we've gone to these things i think every one of us attended a forum so to say that we're not doing that is a difference between half full and half empty it may not be the same liquid that you want but we're all engaged in doing this we're talking about it we're working at it so i just don't agree with that and i think that once again we are taking away responsibility that we've given staff to take ownership of something and saying look let's do it for you and that is not our job so i don't agree with it i'm sorry i am not suggesting that what the staff is doing and what

122the administration is doing in the buildings would change in any way i'm suggesting that board level commitment and and input on this topic would simply provide additional input additional voices and would signal to the community a level of commitment of this board to this work and that's a different opinion because i feel like that's what we have done that's what dr rummel and dr tan and all the people from the university and the administrators that work with their staff to put these goals together that's a district-wide commitment i just don't see how that isn't that's just a difference of opinion apparently we just approved the committee for the community engagement and so forth with the list of charges from the board and so forth and i again don't see any duties no recommendations for a

123charge for the committee here at all as far as people that have come to us and asked us to do things one one thing that i know we ask is we ask those people get involved to get involved in what we're doing right and it's my understanding that they all not all of them did but many of them have come and tried to get involved in the process is that correct you've been reaching out yes to individuals and i think one of the things that we're working with specifically we're talking about the mypop community is reaching out to individuals of that community and trying to get more of a grassroots for those individuals are letting us know what they need in particular instead of us telling them kind of what they need but we also

124are looking for ways to engage other communities other than just the bypass or low-income families as well um it's i mean it's slow work when you're meeting one-on-one with people and scheduling appointment meetings but i feel like honestly negan if there's something that you wanted us to do that we're not doing i would be open to that feedback and happy to incorporate other ideas um the things that we're doing have all come from from ideas from staff or from parents there i i don't have a predetermined list i can just say that we're just continuing to try to move the gauge and to move it forward but it's so important that we have staff involved and that they have input every step of the way for the changes that are going to impact their classrooms

125i i want to be very clear here this is not a critique on what you are doing and this is not uh i don't want to imply in any way shape or form that what you aren't doing isn't is you're doing a great job of that i think what a board level commitment does is adds additional help uh additional bodies to do some of the work additional opportunities for conversation that don't have to be driven by you who this is not your only job the board is here to support in many different ways and so the formation of board committees is a way that the board members and the board can provide additional time input and support in ways that employees may not be able to spend all of their time on so i want

126to be very clear here this is not a critique or because i think that in any way shape or form what's being done is lacking i see an opportunity here for the board to play an active role in helping to facilitate discussions and helping to understand what it is that we are doing as a board with policy and do that better and better support and until we get in and have these conversations i can't tell you specifically what that's going to be all i know is that there was a significant number of the community that came and told us that they would like to see the board take this step that they think that this is worthy of board level attention that they have gone some of them had gone through the school and feel

127like what's being done needs to be additionally supported and i think until we sit down and have those conversations and get people in the community in forums that doesn't have to just be led by the district that's the reason for board committees that's the reason that the law suggests that boards have different sets of committees because there's more work to be done that can be just done by people in the administrative building of course i would include staff i would have come quite honestly i would have come with a bigger outline and i had done that work but when i opened the packet and saw that the superintendent doesn't intend to support this endeavor and i've been around this board long enough to know that the four people sitting in the room right now very

128rarely vote in a way contrary to what the superintendent recommends i didn't want to spend a bunch of time for something that it doesn't appear as the support necessary to go there is work that could be done but if we aren't interested in actually opening ourselves to having those discussions and we continue to put roblox up like i just don't know enough or if only you had mapped out what this committee was supposed to be doing this is a committee that will ebb and flow with what we hear from the community and we've had community members even reach out who were on the facilitation team and offer to help with that endeavor so i don't think it's a lack of community desire to have a board level committee for some reason this board in their

129majority does not want to have that committee i don't understand it i don't agree with it i'm hopeful that that will change but i don't want this to be a critique on what you're doing dr rummel in no way shape or form is that the reason that i am suggesting the creation of this opinion let me just explain my thought on this then my thought is this is a difference i guess of opinion and approach equity and inclusion for that to be successful we need to build that from the ground up and we need to bring in the support of the people who are going to be who are going to be presenting that in our district and we need to bring in the support of those in the community um that feel they've got

130voices that need to be heard and i think that's what the present program has has been been attempting to do um and you know board level seems to indicate edicts from the board and frankly if if the folks in leadership in our country could have legislated equity and inclusion in the place we'd be done talking about it by now because there's been lots lots of that done in the united states and it's not gotten us the result that that many think we should have and and we've so it really comes down to increasing people's awareness and changing behavior at an individual level and and you build that from the bottom up not from the top down which is i think what we've been trying to do so that's my thought um and that's why i've

131been supportive of our current plan and have not been supportive of this particular plan uh dr hall you've been mentioned a couple times do you want to say anything on this or not i think um that there's a lot of discussion that this board could have and there's been ample opportunity to have that discussion about what exactly the role of board members are and um what are the things that board members you know the what what is the role what should they be involved in what shouldn't they be involved in and i think that um there's there's a clear difference of opinion on that and that's fine um there's there's diversity of opinion on this board um my recommendation to not approve this has nothing absolutely nothing to do with the work itself it has

132to just do with more the definition of what is board work and we might just need to agree to disagree on that i think one part of being a board member is communicating regularly with the superintendent and other members of the administration as well and um i think that there's you know work that could be done in that area as well and so um that is my recommendation i stand by it again it has nothing to do with the work i think the work is going um very well but it's it's it's slow work and um and it's about building relationships and it's about reaching out and having conversations and we'll just continue to to move ahead with the plan that we have i think i understand that there's some folks that wish it would

133move faster or differently i respect that well i fully reject the notion that you think the four of us sitting in this room don't think the topic deserves discussion to even have a procedural structure brought to the board to consider the motion at the school board conference that i got to go to for the forum this past saturday i was proud because it has an equity belief statement and we are already doing that it says the illinois association of school board urges its districts and the leadership of members of districts to integrate principles of equity and inclusion in curriculum programs and operations ensuring that students are welcomed and we're we're working on this we heard all of this so i was like okay so we are doing that so again you know i'm trying to

134let the surrounding people give us positive influences and to me we are doing we're headed in the right direction we're doing our board work and that's what we're supposed to do so i look at this through the lens of what we already do with our our committees um we i i hope we would all agree that there are some responsibilities that are on the board and there are some responsibilities that are on our staff and just like the board is responsible for approving budgets and the board is responsible for developing and approving facilities plans and evaluating facilities needs that's also the sort of work i envisioned that this committee would do would be board level study board level discussion of these issues that act in parallel to the work that dr rummel and our staff

135are doing um honestly if if we can't envision how this committee would work i don't understand how we can envision the other committee's work and and perhaps we should just dissolve those committees i i'm kind of a loss as to you know what do we have to lose here um let's let's see where we can go with this committee and let's see where um where we can work together to do the board level work um with this committee well i think one thing we have to lose is the cooperation of the university of illinois why do you think that why do i think that because i they we have them working in a partnership with us right once again when we try to put something out there and we and we ask the experts which

136is what we're told to do now we're doing that and we're not doing that and i i don't know have all of you been trained in activity education and facilitating things like that because we're talking about laws and regulations and rules that you need to know what you're talking about and we're gathering that information and we're moving on from there and i mean i'm just i'm ready to call the motion did the staff from the university of illinois have they explicitly told us that we should not have a board level committee i think there's some confusion as to the role or what the board level committee would do different than what we're already doing um and again open to feedback and suggestions um for doing that for partnering together i think there is definitely some

137concern about a top-down approach when it's the teachers that have to do the work and that are doing the work but so could you make that same argument about our facilities committee that the teachers do the work with the facility is that what you say no no that our custodial staff and mr curtis does the work with the facilities and our facility committee is instituting a top-down approach should we abolish that committee yes the board well i mean the board does not have to have those committees i mean that's not a requirement that's that's an option so i mean i wouldn't recommend abolishing them but if there's a place i think this situation is different we're partnering with an outside agency that's providing expertise and guidance and resources with us i feel like i feel

138like we're getting off point here i mean uh this is either about we do we want a diversity equity inclusion committee or not um we already spend hours on professional development with this we're incorporating it into the classroom you know i i think i i'm not in agreement with with any of it anyway i mean i feel like our job as a school district as a school board is to educate our students and we tend to spend a lot of time on a lot of time all those other peripheral stuff that just why are we here to educate our students and we're spending a lot of time talking about this other stuff that really i don't even think is the job of the school board i mean it's more politics this is for our state

139legislature this is for you know some other people who are about education and we have fewer conversations about education and curriculum we have about this stuff i don't understand we're school we're open come to school if you want if you don't want stay home it can't i i don't agree with the statement that board committees act in parallel i believe we act jointly with administration we on the finance committee work with the key finance person in the district we as a board do approve budgets we don't make the budget same with facilities we work jointly on what would happen with facilities but we don't make that happen it's a joint so i i don't think parallel is is the right description and what i don't see here on the for a motion tonight is any

140structural uh procedures again to uh as to how such a committee would work i don't i don't agree that it should do the work i do agree with jeremy that education is our primary goal and that we need to um focus on that i actually wish we would spend a little more time talking about curriculum and education but i do believe that boards have our board has a lot of other responsibilities like the things we've been talking about finance and policy and facility and and i feel as though in my mind the role of the committees is supposed to be that our full board can't address everything all the time because these meetings already go way longer than they should and so i guess i've always envisioned that committees would be people on the board

141who want to work in a particular area addressing those issues you might work with the administration you might work with the teachers you might work with the parents you might work with the other board members you um and and that that is the way that more work can be done to help students and teachers in the community and um so if people want to take some of that work on to be able to have us collectively get more done then i think we should let them i think we should address these things more things can be done we all know that everyone has more on their plate than they have space for students teachers administrators board members parents everyone is so um taxed to the end and so i feel like if we would stop

142having a uh us versus them you versus me power who should have the power who should have the control who should do this and we would work together and we would all work on things then we would collectively do better and so i just feel as though when there are things to talk about and this is why you know back the first month that i was on the board i proposed that we have a curriculum committee on the board because curriculum is one of our major components according to the law and we should spend some time talking about it and as we see jeremy just said we don't spend enough time talking about it which is probably true um but if there are people who are interested in it we should let them do it

143and that doesn't mean they're gonna go from the top down or take over things or or make any decisions for them right it's just a place to do some of the work and come back to the board so that the board um discussions in the board can be more efficient um and this seems to be something that is a major component of what's going on these days and so i just don't i don't see what the objection is i guess that's my i'm confused about that this is the second time i ask is it not okay to call the vote um i don't have anything new to add if not i would suggest we go ahead and vote gloria has asked a couple times a week i think everyone's had a chance to chime in

144and share their thoughts is there anything else is some of the skills they need to get in on this okay let's have a look yes giles no larson no key yes hennessy yes hendrix no mccomb no item 10 coconut update dr hall well when um when actually i worked on the scored bar it was prior to a lot of things that happened in the last couple of days and so those are just some suggested topics for discussion i will just quickly address the issue with basketball there's another meeting this thursday with the ihsa um and i'm not i can't obviously predict what the outcome of that is going to be i know that the ihsa wanted the governor and the illinois department of public health to be represented in that meeting in the governor's press

145conference today he said he would not be there and his opinion has not changed um so i assume that that means that idph's opinion has not changed on playing basketball um and it it's unfortunate but i that is not a direction that i think that um we should go based upon the language that's been used surrounding basketball idph did upgrade it to a high risk activity a couple weeks ago and you know that that change that's not where it sat for months over the summer and up through the fall and so that's where we stand with that there are some other winter sports that that are medium to low risk and that our kids can participate in and we'll proceed ahead with those it is possible to still have non-contact practices with basketball and with

146wrestling and we are proceeding ahead with those at this time so as with everything else this is kind of a fluid in an ongoing situation there's a during one of the areas in the gates are gonna play basketball by viruses no not i don't know of anybody in the area so even if we um in terms of of the rapid testing we mentioned this um earlier in in the evening tonight we do i'm just going to hand it over to nita actually to explain what about getting and this is another um situation where i'm not sure other school districts are going to be doing this so i'm proud of us leading the way in this way so hand it out to your anita all right well so far um we started um dr paul and

147i had a conversation several weeks ago with um the deputy director of public health always they um because in some of the things i was reading it was talking about the antigen testing being available to schools but they're they've opened up some free testing so we spoke with them we were able to apply for and receive an emergency clear waiver that is open to schools right now just for testing just because of coven what that entails is the 15 minute point of care rapid antigen testing so you get a result back in 15 minutes what that would mean for us is that we would um test only students that are symptomatic and those students if they're symptomatic if they're positive we would be able to know immediately be able to quarantine those students and identify

148in our buildings who would have been exposed and get those kids out of school right then our plan is to open this up to all students in the district along with all staff in the district um again symptomatic if they are if they are symptomatic and negative then that necessitates a follow-up test a pcr test which is the more the gold standard if you will um according to the idph guidelines and champagne public health um that is that's still a standard so if somebody's negative and symptomatic then we would send them off dr hall and i have a meeting with carl tomorrow uh to talk about facilitating uh that second step um and so we'll see what that entails and if that's a possibility um so they i spoke with um their director of operations

149their vice president of operations last week and then we have a they had an internal meeting today and then we will have a meeting with them tomorrow to determine um what is going to be the next step with that we have a physician at christie clinic that has agreed to underwrite us and he will that's given us the authorization so we have a physician order to do so the testing is not too invasive maybe heather may be tapped for a few more things as far as um biohazard you know things that we need to to do that what our plan right now is that we would be able to do it in all four buildings so each building would have a supply of those tests the health eop would be responsible for doing that every

150test that we take negative or positive will be reported to idph every day so you you anytime you do a test you report it so um so yeah i i it's a little um overwhelming to think about as as as we move into that but i think that it will benefit us a lot i think that um i i've had several other schools reach out to me asking me um if we're doing it they're interested in what that plan looks like um and there aren't a lot of other schools in our area that are doing it um at least in my contacts so um so yeah so that's that's coming right now we've got we've had the attorneys have looked at our consent form so we have a consent ready to go that we'll send

151out to the staff and to the community and to our families as soon as we determine the actual start date um we kind of were targeting um the return in january just as as you come back into school if we do decide to come back and we have four four day kids then that would give us a way to perhaps maintain where we're at now to have a little better handle on what's going on in our buildings um and and i didn't want to get the cart before the horse i want to make sure that we have all the ducks in a row before we undertake this endeavor so that's that's on the horizon for us he answered one of my questions was do we need consent which i assumed we did yes we would

152have consent forms and we also have paper forms so if there's a parent that determines that they want to do that but they didn't fill out the google form but they want us to do testing for their child we would have a paper consent they would be able to fill out on the spot where do we get the test and what is there a cost to us for this there's not that's the beauty of it which is the reason that we started i'm all out free if we can get it um so um the tests are actually being provided through the idph and so we'll work with public health um brandon moline over at cu phd actually is the liaison for that so as soon as we determine our dates and the number of testing

153kits that we want then i'll submit the paperwork to him and we will get test kits in-house how many tests do we have or will we get as many as i asked for right now the cleo waiver when i did the cleo waiver we did an estimate of how many kids that we typically would have symptomatic that we send home um in any given month um and we looked at like september to may if you will or september to april because that's usually when we have the most kids that are symptomatic so when i did the waiver i asked for ten thousand so um and it's not i like i could go up a little from that but i wanted to make sure that we have enough but i didn't want to have so many

154that we have have them sitting around forever as well um and the test is it's a great tool but it's not the accuracy for asymptomatic kids isn't enough to be able to just do it a couple times a week like at the u of i they can test twice a week one the the sheer volume of that would be enormous to even try to keep up and report all of that does that mean that we'll catch every kid no because we all know there are asymptomatic kids walking around now that we that we may not know about but at least for those children that are symptomatic um we can know right away if it's positive if it's positive covet test so to be clear um the test is not accurate on symptomatic positive persons um

155so i'm just backing up a little bit more um even i kind of began the conversations about testing late august actually with um ron watkins at the university of illinois just to like see if it was even possible to get the rapid saliva test out here and um we we really appreciated uh his willingness to talk with us we met with him via zoom one day and um unfortunately those tests are just going to be cost prohibitive for for school districts right now maybe there's a there's a future there um and so this was this is um a good option it's not testing everybody certainly and but it's it's a it's a start and um so we're happy about that yeah questions where does the liability for this testing set you said that we have

156a doctor that's underwriting the but where where's the liability and then how does this actually um change our policy i think what you said was that if it's a negative result that they have to go and have a follow-up test anyway so i guess i'm trying to understand is the benefit just that the symptomatic folded we know it's immediate and how i don't see how it changes our policy or protocol for people who are symptomatic who test negative onsite and what's the liability with us being wrong about that the the thing would be the way that the test works if we have a person who's symptomatic and they test negative then our then we would send them immediately for the pcr testing as a confirmation if they're symptomatic we would need to send them home

157anyway so this would just allow them to if they have symptoms they would go get an additional pcr test and then if they are positive then they would be identified if they are positive and they are ace and they are symptomatic then we can take that positive and we treat it as a presumptive positive and we quarantine based on that and that that's according to idph and the idph guidelines talk about that specifically as far as doing an antigen test and then it talks about doing the follow up with the pcr so what happens along with that is that's why we have the attorneys look at the consent form to make sure that we're covering our bases with that so that we're doing that it doesn't it's not doing anything different than we would do

158other than it allows us to to offer our our students and our staff our family our families the opportunity to know right away right now today i have had a number i've talked to no less than 10 people today who have waited for five or six days now to hear if they've got to get their test results so they don't know what they're doing so there's they're out of school for a week waiting for test results um i had a person in the last week that actually tested positive but didn't get that positive result for six days so thankfully that person wasn't at school for that whole time but if you think about somebody coming to school because a lot of people aren't necessarily staying home while they wait for a test result um and

159so so basically what we would be doing is not really different than what some of the other entities in champaign are doing um they're doing some of those rapid testings and this is something that has gone through idph that the mandate now is that they've offered this clio waiver you have to have the waiver you have to do the reporting um so that they know what testing that you're doing um and that and that is a requirement i mean there are fines and penalties if you don't follow the state requirements for this because this comes through the cdc to the idph and then we're just taking advantage of that it's basically an emergency um measure for coding for schools in an effort to try to make sure that schools can stay open the goal so

160i'm sorry did you say that if somebody is waiting on a covid test that they're coming to school isn't that against our policy doesn't our policy say that if you are waiting on a test you have to be quarantined uh our policy does say well and we're telling everybody we tell everybody that but i have no control over people that don't tell us they're getting tested because a lot of times what happens i'm at the mercy of what people tell me to be able to work on that so if i have somebody who says oh by the way i got tested last friday and i just turned positive today then i have to go back that's part of like the conversation earlier then i have to go back which public health can't do i have

161to go back and determine if those people were in school on the days that they may have been symptomatic or they may have been tested and then determine who they might have been exposed to in the classrooms which if it's a student those students have no idea who sits around them in class half the time in a whole day so so we spend a fair amount of time trying to just follow up and make sure that um that people are are being identified so this will allow us to identify obviously it won't be a perfect tool but it will allow us to identify positive cases more quickly than what they're what they're being allowed to do and parents even remote parents if their kids are symptomatic they can come in right now i'm seeing people

162the trend right now is that people are having congestion or a runny nose or something that they think is allergies and um i i spoke to a person just a couple days ago well i just have a few allergies i said okay we'll go get a test and they're positive so the the symptoms right now the only thing that doesn't fall under coded symptoms are breathing and sneezing pretty much so but the scenario that you gave before that you said the student likely wasn't at school yes right okay i just want to make sure i heard that right correct yeah i was able to go back and determine um where that was so thankfully they weren't at school for the whole week while they were waiting for a test so are we having all symptomatic

163students for any of these symptoms go home and and stay home for the 14 days well if there's if they are symptomatic it's 10 days but right now what we've been doing up to now is that we're we're kind of we're using we're using our triage skills because i have some kids that have had a runny nose for three months because of their allergies they take claritin every single day and they have no other symptoms so some of that comes into knowing the child talking to the parent right now there's an increase of basic symptoms that in kids that don't have those types of things so we are sending those students help um we are asking the parents we're calling the parents asking the students to go home we are asking them to contact their

164physician and in a lot of cases their physician or their pediatrician will say oh i want to see you other times they'll say no i want you to go get tested if they place an order then the um then the people can go to carl's drive-thru clinic and get a pcr test but they have to have an order to go through there um so so this this is where we have a meeting tomorrow to talk about if i do have somebody that has some kind of a symptom that we'd be able to collaborate with carl to to get that pcr test then more quickly um so yeah i mean we are trying to send people home colleen in answer to your question um and sometimes they choose to get a test sometimes they don't choose

165to get a test we have had some some people that we've asked them to stay home we ask them to stay home until their symptoms are gone for sure and we have had some that we asked to stay home for 10 days depending on the conversation that we have with the parent and if if the health eop has any questions if the parent has any questions then the call comes to me so i'm running interference on both ends for that and how many symptomatic kids do we have in school and teachers and staff on any given day it's it's hard to tell i mean i we only know i mean like two or four hundred i mean i just give me a ballpark between two and four hundred i i mean so i i guess

166that's the thing on any and i i'm not trying to be funny but on any given day it depends on a lot of there are a lot of factors that go into that if a teacher sends a student to the office for example that they're symptomatic then we know that students symptomatic if there are kids walking around with their masks on that have the sniffles we may not know that if a teacher doesn't let us know in any given classroom or a teacher i mean i have a lot of teachers that unless i were to interview and see every single person every single day there's no way to really have a handle on that and that's that's kind of the challenge back to to jeremy's question about how many tests we have it's it's kind

167of a guessing game um what we what we looked at is i spoke with the eops who have been here for a long time about what is our average number of kids that we send home or have out on a given day in the winter for example um during flu season we have as many as 90 kids a day out in some of our buildings now and i anticipate we'll still have that even with coping we still have stroke we still have the flu we still have colds ear infections all the different things so so it really is it's hard to say how many symptomatic people we have i think it seems like everybody has symptoms in allergy season you know i mean during harvest and things like that so it's really difficult um it

168really is kind of a balancing act to try to figure out um who needs to go home and who gets to stay and who has symptoms but i i so far i think our staff have done a phenomenal job i've given them the flow charts that have been provided since august we've provided that for all of them to follow and our staff are doing their their dead level best to to keep things safe in our districts in the buildings the custodial staff is cleaning non-stop um so i so i think that we've done a phenomenal job getting to this point i anticipate as the winter comes along and we come inside that the symptoms will increase i think that's just a given if we have 400 symptomatic kids in one day then how how is

169our highest day of quarantine 30 kids i mean that's a lot of people you'd have to send home to quarantine if 400 kids had symptoms all in one day well if you think about that you've got four buildings so you've got you know if all of our kids are here you've got 3 200 kids here so if a kid's walking around with the sniffles and nobody knows that i mean who knows how many i mean i'm looking at the teachers in this room i'm thinking how many of your kids do you know if you have a runny nose or an earring today right so so symptomatic we can only treat and deal with what we know about um on any given day and i think that that's that's the thing i guess the the point

170is that there's really no good estimate of how much how many that would be today i could say i had five kids in each building in january first it could be 30 or 40 or 50. and if you do that times the district if i have 30 kids in a building with a runny nose times four that's 120 kids it doesn't take very long to add up when you've got a district as big as ours well and you continue to say do the covet screener if your kid doesn't feel well right stay home we've done that for the time all the time i've ever been in education and people still think okay so and we have a lot of parents keeping their kids home this year right i mean i get emails every day that

171my kid doesn't feel well so i'm keeping him home for a couple days that's great and we encourage that and we're trying to affirm them to in continuing to do that which helps us thank you okay other thoughts questions under coping yeah i'd like to move that we immediately follow the idph and cu phd recommendations and move to full-time remote learning okay that's not on the agenda for a vote it's on the agenda in its general terms and is available for emotion according to isb um if it's not on the agenda uh looking at page 18 of coming to order um then they recommend because of court rulings that we not take action on any matter not listed on the agenda but this is a result of covid being listed on the agenda our board

172policy does say that each board meeting agenda shall contain the general subject matter of any item that will be the subject of a final action in a meeting and the board will take final action only on items contained in the posted agenda not on the agenda may still be discussed [Music] i think it's a disservice to the community to try to put an action on something that clearly was in the agenda as an update and a discussion it's been the practice happening we've talked about this before it's unfair we've made it all in point of fact that you have been at that we will have a discussion and an action at the next month we've talked about that in fact i did ask seven days ago for this to be on the agenda as an

173action item and i asked in may and april that the cove would be an action item on every agenda moving forward as a result of our need to perhaps pivot and make decisions and not be hindered by the rules of the agenda merle asked the same thing colleen and ken both emailed even for this agenda that same request you know it's not fair to the community to put general topics on the agenda and then pull specific votes on things that have not been made clear that was never my intent i think the discussion was worthy but we asked for it to be an action item so here's the problem if you don't want to take action on something you just keep it off of the agenda clearly covid is the single biggest thing that we

174have to deal with right now we have had recommendations from the idph and the cuphd the msea came tonight and asked us to take action on this we were asked in enough time for you to put this on the agenda and you simply chose to not do it perhaps to avoid having to take a vote on this however our board policy does state that we are within our policy to have a vote and take action on something whose general topic is on the agenda so i guess my frustration is is that we keep having these discussions about procedural things and what we do and don't do on this board that gets in the way of us actually taking action on things that need to be done and you can say you disagree but our board

175policy is very clear about the fact that anything whose general topic is on our agenda is available for action that is the acting policy that we have in place well you know we talked about possibilities of bringing in keeping an attorney at the meeting table with us every month maybe when you do seriously i would love for the attorneys to be here and weigh in on this i've asked several times for their expertise on whether or not we should be in fact ignoring the recommendations of the public health departments and in fact our attorneys that we use on their websites make it very clear that they have said that they strongly recommend that we follow the public health guidelines of the experts but we had an attorney on tonight who suggested that we are taking

176on liability by not addressing and following the guidelines of the cu phd and the last idphone i did speak with forensic last week and after after the guidelines came out yeah so my conversation with shelly anderson at forensic was rooted around whether the cupdh is pronouncement on thursday was a mandate or whether it was guidance and in the conversation with julie pride on friday she made it clear that it is guidance and she made it clear that it's up to individual districts to decide and she made it clear that we do not have to follow that guidance those are quotes from her and i understand that's why i'm making the motion so that this board can decide so in letting shelley know that this is guidance from the cupdh she said that our local data

177and continuing to look at our local data is a suitable way to proceed it's a defensible position to be in in terms of at this point not going fully remote so they did not ask for full remote the illinois association of school boards had to leave it up for local control prairie view of nintendo muhammad which are off fisher they're all doing at least what we're doing and more so we're not the only people on the dance floor here i am actually making the motions so that this board can take that local control and actually make that local decision and just so we're clear uh when you go see a doctor and they recommend you do things those are guidelines those are recommendations there are very few things in this country of the us of

178a that we mandate people do there is some decision making that has to be done about who experts are and what you do with their guidelines i'm sure people come to jeremy and jeremy gives them guidelines he's recommending that they do things for their health he's not mandating that they do that you go to the hospital and they recommend that you take the course of action and you choose not to do that sometimes you have to sign something that says you are discharging yourself against medical recommendations so that doesn't mean that recommendations that come from experts who have all of the data and the expertise required to make those recommendations should be ignored so just because it's not a mandate really shouldn't surprise us because this is the united states and we still live in

179a free country but i think when we talk about guidelines that are excuse me i said i don't feel too free right now i have people telling me that i can't have my kid be at school but they can go to target and they can go to costco and they can go wherever they want but they can't go to school where they're entitled to a free and appropriate public education so don't tell me i live in a free country anyway i'm just saying that i would like this board to actually make a decision tonight which is why i brought the motion forward this board cannot make a decision if we don't go through a motion and voting process i think it's important that we actually go through the process that we have before us to

180actually make a decision on what we are doing and whether or not we are following the guidelines the guidelines changed they made recommendations i think it's the duty of this board to weigh in on whether or not we're going to follow those recommendations hence my motion i think we already voted on this in the past and i don't know that another vote is necessary and and i i i'm a little offended that that somehow you know you're manipulating this to make it look like we're trying to ignore certain things and trying to set you know a bar for experts when there's clearly experts that disagree on this topic so there's disagreement there's not unity in agreement in this topic at all so i feel like you're manipulating the question to make us look bad on

181one hand so i just i don't i don't think it's an honest thing that you're doing you know this is i do give recommendations in to my patients but do they follow them many times no you know in fact a lot of times they don't and that's their choice so i think here's like i said earlier tonight we're a school we're open if you want to come to school come to school if you don't want to come to school stay home that's fine if you have an illness or a health issue or a condition that puts you at risk and you shouldn't be at work then you shouldn't be at work uh you know everybody else makes these choices so we're you talked about we're still america that's that's the point of being an american

182that that we can make a choice individually at what is acceptable level of risk for us uh so i i just think the bottom line is we're a school we're here to educate our doors are open if you want to come come if you don't find and what about the teachers that don't want to come well they have that option they can they can uh apply for uh some sort of waiver from their doctor they get a note from their doctor if they can't make it what about what about the other people who are employed in this county that their employers are asking them to come to work do they get a choice to stay home no they probably lose their job if they said you know i'm just not going to come to work

183unless i have a valid reason so i'm just asking i'm sorry i think it's a false question that's what that's what i'm concerned i feel like you're you're painting this motion to manipulate us into making a decision and it's just trying to make us look bad that's it i apologize that's not my intent i think that the cu phd made recommendations last week that i got an email that said our new recommendations that took some people by surprise and i think based on those new recommendations the role of this board is to decide whether or not we're going to follow those recommendations and the only way that we can do that is through a vote and i think it's important that we make that motion and take that vote so i've made a motion if

184it doesn't want to be seconded then we don't have to go through the through with this but i believe the proper procedure for this board to make decisions is to go through emotions and based on the fact that i got an email that said circumstances have changed and the iu idph and the cu phd have given different guidelines that we need to decide whether or not we're following those this is not coming from idpa no not idph and in fact two other health departments in adjoining counties said wait a minute we think schools are the safest place for our kids to be and and those are counties with higher positivity rates than we have in champaign so there's a lot of conflict on this dr hall would you can you confirm what jeremy just said

185actually um is it currently our policy that any in-person student is able to switch to fully remote at this time we have done our best to accommodate every single request and at the junior high high school um it's it's very easy i mean it's seamless um we handle those requests on an individual basis k5 and to be honest i don't know any that we've that we've turned down we talk with parents individually on a case-by-case basis just to find out what's going on um it it creates a little bit different situation with k5 because we have teachers who are dedicated solely to remote teaching and we have asked parents to only ask for a switch if there's um a medical issue that that warrants that and so our principles work work through that i don't

186know i have no idea how many switches have taken place but it starts with a conversation um and we work through those i think that we've been incredibly accommodating um just our teachers have been amazing with that because at the k5 level it means you change teachers was there a second on the motion i would like to second it thank you yeah i've been pretty clear for several months now that we're not going to vote on stuff that's not on the agenda as an accident in this case i feel like i'm going to continue to be bullied until i do so we'll take a vote is there any further discussion before we vote uh i'm sorry i have another question from nita nita as our lead medical professional hired by the district do you think

187we should listen to cu phd's recommendations i always think that we should listen to what's given here's here's what i also think i think that we have to also listen to the whole context of the statement it was on the zoom i i saw that you all were there i was not involved in the conversation with the superintendents however i did have a conversation and cu phd again reiterated to me as well is this statement verbatim that i was told as well we hope that some schools will follow the request that that was that's what was said is that they hope that some schools will do this and the reason for this is because they are overwhelmed right right now public health is overwhelmed they can't get all their phone calls made they can't do

188what they need to do they've got ads out for contact tracers and all that the difference and that was the same conversation when i was also told thank you so much for what you were doing the schools are doing a great job and we are able to be where we are as bill as big as our district is the reason that we haven't had outbreaks in our buildings and in our district is because of what we're doing internally and because of the mitigation risks the mitigation measures that we are taking in the buildings as far as our distancing our hybrid um and everything that we're doing right now is is keeping us moving forward um so i guess you know none of us know what's going to come in a week or two weeks after

189thanksgiving we don't know what that's going to look like there may come a time that that's not an option i'm not sure that right now for our district that we're at that space i you know again we don't know what will happen in two or three weeks it may get to a point where it's like oh my gosh this is blown up to the point that we can't contain it and that may be a different conversation i i feel like even though the numbers are rising i feel like we're still in really good shape in our district so we have a lot of people in this county that are getting ready to leave and go out of town for two months to students that will not be here to be tested they'll be bond so

190i appreciate cep that phd has to work with the entire county but isn't also true that we're actually one of the best school for records on this in the county right they they should my they took my standards to give you sources yeah so you're not the average we're not above the average in fact we're an anomaly right we seem to be we've already announced publicly that we're going to be in school through the end of this week is the motion that we like call off school effect can go remote effective in the morning or are we finishing this week in this motion or what are we doing emotion says that we go immediately my guess is that the administrators have a better understanding of what immediate means what is our i mean i i

191heard the response to the to ken's question about um students being able to go remote right my question is is there any consideration that we might discuss that we would allow say one time change in the very near future at the end of the week whenever after thanksgiving something for parents who feel as though the recommendation from the public health department changes their perspective on whether or not they want their students in school so that we might accommodate them so that so we're only going to allow one more change so i think what colleen i think it's a fair question and what we've what what the principals have done is the parents really aren't sure but they're not 100 sure they want to send their kids back is we're treating them as if they're quarantined

192so they're getting the lessons and materials k5 from their current teacher um and they're still getting graded they're still getting the instruction um but we're just treating it more as a quarantine for k5 for the next couple of weeks until the parents feel like they have a better handle and are better able to make the decision so i'm i'm really concerned that if we have a lot of people in that position that that puts a really undue burden on the teachers if your teacher who has 28 kids in their class now has 12 kids who are going to stay home six kids k5 when i met with the principals today so that's one per grade level on an average how do we know that because i talked to the for parents i contacted the principals

193and said we're not sure what if we had six kids i mean i guess that are you saying that there are six kids who the parents have already contacted the principal yes yes following the guidelines that came out friday thursday they're emailing saying that you're gonna choose that we we're deciding so when the guidelines came out and we released and said we're saying in school there were six parents that contacted us six kids that were contacted right and you you anticipate that would be the complete number i i i'm guessing maybe there would be a couple of a couple more i do not anticipate there being 12 kids per class okay i think um i mean i i feel as though there might be a lot of parents who are going to say who haven't

194called yet but between thanksgiving and christmas will want to keep their kids home and so i just i'm really concerned that that's going to be a a big burden on the teachers and a struggle for the students if they travel i really do hope they keep their heads another issue here is our uh ability to staff our buildings my understanding is we've had principles subbing in the classrooms on a semi-regular basis lately at what point are we how many subs are we going to not be able to fill um before we call it and say okay we've got to shut this building down uh that question's for dr hall what's what are you thinking is the plan for that we definitely had days where we've had principles in classrooms there's there's no doubt i don't

195have the exact data on that um i mean i the shortage of subs actually was very real prior to the pandemic and so we've expected that it would get worse with this but we've not approached a level where i thought we needed to shut down a building we haven't even we have nothing close so i don't have a number um i think that we continue to move ahead and handle these things as they come up and i i understand fully deeply that everybody wants a plan everybody i say everybody i'm putting myself in that i want a plan i want the lack of certainty lack of certainty and to go away but this whole pandemic has been about needing to make decisions in the moment with the information that you have at the time and

196so harkening back to the statements made earlier this evening by the msca co-president when i supported the recommendation to go back for four full days a week starting january second semester that was based on information that we had at the time and this has been an evolving and changing situation since march 13th and eight months later it's no different and it's not going to be any different going forward and i wish that were different um but the email that i sent out to our staff and parents on friday was based on the information that i have and had at the time and so i i'm diverting a little bit ken from your question about subs but that kind of falls into the same category that we make decisions based on the information that we have

197at the time and that has been that has been how the relationship with cu phd has been characterized throughout this entire school year this year as we've worked with them on an almost daily basis nita in particular mostly nita and and there has not been a time in those conversations where the health department has suggested that we close down a building or that our district go remote we haven't even been close so therein does lie some of the surprise that occurred from pretty much most of the county superintendents on thursday when this pronouncement was made without warning by cu phd that we should suddenly go remote immediately so it so you take that you absorb it listen to the press conference thursday afternoon did some research on friday and actually talked then on friday with

198uh julie pride and got more information there so that's been how the last 72 hours have gone in terms of school days and that's probably how it's going to be moving forward so um i wish i could say like this is the time when we close building because we don't have enough subs but so far we've been able to to cover it um we've been very very flexible in accommodating with parents that want to switch their kids and um i can't say enough about our our teachers understanding that need and we we trust and we appreciate that those requests coming from parents are based upon a real genuine need um to switch and um we made some of those um switches and changes today so um that's that's where i stand at this point with

199the current situation and just have to take information as it comes and make the best decision that we can so with the information you have now would that cause you to reassess uh your recommendation for what we do in january it might and so would you keep going i also the analogy i would use right now is i don't want to call a snow day in january now and so do you think it might do you think there's any appropriateness in the district acknowledging to the parents that that decision is not set so that the parents don't have a an expectation that it is four days a week and then it is changed again i think that change is very difficult without you know if we go and then all of a sudden we say

200well we said it was gonna be four days but now it's not that that would be more difficult that way yeah but we're suggesting we we're just suggesting going fully remote tomorrow yeah so i i respect what you're saying colleen and again i just go back to i've been i would love to remove the change and uncertainty that we have lived for eight months um but what's what stands right now is a plan to go four days a week and um i think as we move ahead yes that could need to be reassessed i mean i don't know what that's been that has been true all along i'm gonna throw one here absolutely i just was going to say again that if we're worried about a massive change then you know going remote tomorrow is

201significant for all involved our employees our families and uh most importantly our students and to remind everyone sorry go ahead max i think the community needs to know two things they need to know where where the ship is headed hopefully under the best case scenario and what the plan is and then they need to know exactly what dr hall said in her email last week that you know what we're evaluating everything every day and things could change i think if they've been paying attention to what's been sent out they should get that um if they can't if they don't understand that i hope they're listening tonight and understand that we've got a plan for second semester we hope that's the plan that we're going to implement but we this is a constantly changing situation you

202know there was a school in our area that that had an outbreak in one department and shut em down but the department was transportation you can't run you know you can't make 3500 kids all walk to school that are spread out all over the count and they didn't plan that that wasn't their plan well they had to make a call and they had to sit down for a while i think it i think it would help at least me i don't know if it would help anyone else on the board um if we would have a better understanding of the data that we have i understand the confidentiality nature that you can't you're not going to say the names of the people that have covet or are quarantining but i think if we had a

203better understanding of the scope of what was going on as board members you know to know how many people are positive in what building they are are they staff or students those kind of things would help us to have a better understanding of the situation because we i just keep hearing the data show this and the data show that but i don't actually have any data we sent we sent a letter out dr hall sent a letter out last week that had that very detail in it to all the families in the district we went through and we broke it all down by building how many staff how many students were quarantined and how many were positive as of that moment it of course has changed since then it changes it was on friday the

20413th are you talking cumulative calling over the semester or just i mean i guess i guess what it is is that i don't have a sense of how the covid disease or illness or whatever is progressing through our district i feel as though the information is disjointed and so i don't have a big view of it i feel as though it comes in little pieces in different ways i feel different people hear different things that makes people talk about everything um and i just feel as though i would benefit from a more complete set of data i guess i'm wondering what more data do i want colleen the the dashboard shows every single day how many positives and how many exposures we have the end line is the total for our whole school year starts

205august 19th at the very top of the dashboard at the top of that graph it says every single day what our current numbers are so it says currently this is our enrollment this is our current number of people that are exposed this is our current number of people that are positive and that changes every single day and then that that's that's the data i mean it's updated as i make calls as i get calls i that's that's what's on the data so if i were to parks out every single column that doesn't have a name in it and give it to you that's exactly what you would see you would see exactly what's on the dashboard you'd see what every single day looks like as far as exposures as far as positivities i don't i

206don't know how else to i don't know what other data i can give you other than we did do the cumulative last friday as laurie said the date that we went through and because the numbers were rising we did give a total of what was happening in each building on that day at that time so as a board member i used to get an email that said today we have a student that tested positive from mpe today we have a staff member at lincoln trail testing positive today i just look at the dashboard there's four positive cases i have no idea if they're students if they're teachers what building they're at how many quarantines resulted from that what's been happening lately because also our principles were um and in some cases still do but would

207send out a letter to parents and then email the staff every time um there was a positive case but what's what's been happening lately is that our positive cases have often the majority of them lately and i don't i don't want to put a time stamp on that because i'm not sure but have been kids who've already been home on quarantine because family members are positive right and so it doesn't when a kid's already been out of school right doesn't seem to make much sense to just send out another letter which you know it's not to withhold any information it's just the kids already been on quarantine and has not been um in school when we [Music] that is in school that results in um a lot of exposures or quarantines then i do send

208that information to dr hall so she can send it on to you guys but as she said recently many many of our cases have been people who are already in quarantine and were in school i guess they think i was just gonna say last week i totally could have missed getting an email out to the board about it so i if i drop that ball i apologize i guess i'm saying i would appreciate getting the emails i i would appreciate hearing about cases even i mean i understand what you're saying about sending letters out to all the parents i'm asking as board members if you can let us know when there are cases where they are you could even say this kid's already been quarantined or whatever it's at this school but it's really hard

209to feel as though the dashboard isn't a reflection of what you hear other places in the community and doesn't match up and just just the idea that in the past 48 hours we've gotten emails from two staff members who say they got coveted at school they didn't did you hear that we've had one since the beginning of the school year i mean i know that i i know that some of those things are coming through but i will tell you that i am tracking that and i can tell you that the the vast vast majority and i have said over and over to people what we're seeing right now is not the result of in school what we're seeing right now are for parents from halloween from parties outside of school people are having cookouts

210so what we're seeing right now is everything external not here what happened back in september is off the shingle at this point and yes we had one contained issue at that time that has not been the case since then i just try to you know why do we work with this community and i'm just staying focused here that's all i can handle and i can just tell you that's my strategy i care what happens at bahamas seymour what happens with our teachers and our kids and and i can't look at the global picture because it's it's it's destructive so just keep your eyes focused on this what's going on here and what we can do and like i feel like we i flip the flip of that i mean i only get an email for

211a kid but i only have one kid at the high school but i look at that dashboard every day she puts it out for us every day so i feel like it's inconsiderate to ask for one more tool of information but i'm not in charge of getting it to you so that's fine when it's there she puts the dashboard up she told us on friday in a newsletter we're having we're talking about it on a regular basis i just feel like it's just there's one more thing like i feel like we're trying to be so responsible and we're putting so much more on our plates than we need to could we please call the boat we've been talking about this for a long time i'm going to motion a second on the floor to go

212total remote effective immediately for an undefined amount of time is there any further discussion on that i just would like to quickly remind the board that this is what the teachers union asked for at the start of this meeting i feel like i would like to say lori i i am asking about what's happening right in front of us in muhammad that's what i'm trying to understand i'm trying to reconcile the information i'm getting from a variety of places and quite frankly i'm asking the superintendent to be the one that provides the information to us so that we know that we're getting it from the source or the i don't know what's the word i appreciate that colleen and again um i i felt like i had been consistently doing that and if the wheels

213came off the wagon on thursday and friday i apologize for that um i think that the source for data is needa and i will convey that to um the board there's a ton of misinformation out there i would just say that nita is the source and so is our dashboard it's it's i guess it's hard for me to take plenty of information it's hard for me to understand why we would have multiple staff members claiming they got coveted at school and if they didn't i mean i it seems like they would know more than anyone where they got that well i don't know i mean community is it's so widespread in the community i'm not sure you know where you got it anyway well in that i mean in that regard we don't know if

214everyone's getting it at school right i mean we can't say it is or is not spread at school because we don't actually have that data at all but if a kid hasn't been in school for 10 days and they turn positive because their parents are positive at home then we know that that kid got it from their parents at home right now we've had teachers in school since september again early at the beginning of the school year we had one circumstance we have not had any since then we have had no staff members in-house turned positive because of a student in-house since early september and i would say if there is a teacher out there that feels he is wrong about that they need to address that with anita so she knows and can correct

215it because i've known her for long enough that if she is an heir about that she will want that to be correct i just want to say that one more one sorry sorry me again i'm not trying to be difficult i'm trying to understand the situation that's all to make a decision i need to understand part of what the cu phd's lead was is that we have widespread community spread and that impacts more than just muhammad we don't have a hospital in muhammad we don't have just doctors that serve just muhammad we have a health care system that we have been told is on the verge of being over taxed and so i believe it is our responsibility to do what we can not just for muhammad but for our community at large it's my

216understanding that carl is very close to having no more beds at all we are in the middle of a surge in cases that we know is very typically seven to ten days followed by a surge in admissions and that surge only started about three days ago so which is why cu phd did what they did on thursday and friday so we can assume that in the next five days or so that system which is already very over taxed is going to be even more taxed so i i would be remiss if i didn't say i believe that part of this decision has got to be outside of what is just going on inside of our buildings because the decisions that we make affect the community spread the tax the health care system and the health

217care workers carl i believe is out of beds and i understand that they went from one covent team and they currently have four cova teams and i just think we have to understand that at some point that system will topple which is why the plea came from the health department to say the whole system is requesting that everyone do everything possible to ensure that we can keep this system afloat if you want to know what's in the hospital are they kids that are in the hospital from schools are they older people i mean if the hospital's full of who i mean they're full of coven patients i i mean i don't work in the hospital and you couldn't get that data anyway because of hipaa i'm just suggesting that i know that we went from

218one coveting to four covet teams and that carl and people that i know in carl who are healthcare providers are indicating that their that system is in real trouble and i think that is the plea that we heard from the cu phd and the reason that they asked us to take the action that they asked us to take is because we are not in a bubble and that it that the decisions that we make have a wider spread and so part of our decision should be what can we do that also helps the rest of the system at large i understand that you're tired of talking about it i just needed to make that point for the record can we let carl speak for carl and could write because that's sure well you're not the

219spokesperson for carl i haven't heard them say that yes they're busy but they haven't come out said that they're over taxed and there's no more beds that's not true well i'm hearing from people in other departments that that is what's being discussed so i guess we'll have to agree to disagree and that's how we often i've heard people that want to go to school too listen how how many of our cases are contributing to that we're not we're not getting a lot of cases in our schools how are we over taxing the hospital system okay there's a motion on the floor there's been a second there's been lots of discussion are we ready to vote on this yes we vote my gosh all right so again this is a vote i'm immediately going to remote

220learn yes larson no hennessey yes hendrix no yes giles no macomb no okay is there anything else under cover update this time a closed session is necessary for one collective negotiating matters between the public body and its employees or the representatives or deliberate case or deliberations concerning salary schedule for one or more classes of employees to litigation or interaction against affecting her on behalf of a particular public body filed and is pending before a court or administer a tribunal or when a public body finds that an action is probable or imminent in which case the basis for finding shall be recorded and entered into the minutes of the closed meeting three the setting of a price for sale or lease of property owned by the public body for the discussion of minutes of being lawfully

221closed in the open meetings act whether for purposes of approval by the board but by the body of minutes or something in a review of the minutes is mandated in section 2 colon 0 6 is there a motion to go into closed session for those reasons so move the second second larson roll call vote please yes i vote yes hendricks yes schultz yes larson yes hennessy yes macomb yes we'll recess long enough for folks to take a comfort break and to switch over to the secure links for the flow session public we anticipate no action at the end of closed session thanks for hanging with us tonight thank you