Blue Valley Board of Education Meeting 2-14-2022

001work with them also definitely on that mental health piece and that that's a big umbrella of ours is that social and mental stability a lot of times in the elementary school world they are very worried about friendships and am i going to get the best grade i have to meet all these expectations so i can also help them you know go through goals like let's take this assignment one step at a time let's break it into smaller pieces you don't have to do it all at once and we also work a lot on procrastination because you know we're all guilty of that sometimes we also spend a lot of time working with students individually just through all sorts of situations it can be i'm having a tough time with the person that i'm dating i'm

002having trouble in this class or my grade isn't great i mean we just kind of it's that's why they call us quick trip [Music] i love to see when the kiddos become successful and then they'll come back to you and they'll reach out to you and they search for you just to give the story or fill you in on like their own personal life or whatever but i love to see that success i think the part that i love the most is when i see kind of that that click that light bulb for kids when they realize like oh i can figure this out or i actually know how to do this or they just need a little bit of encouragement or they've been carrying something around that they have some pretty big feelings about

003and haven't been able to figure out what to do when i see that look of recognition where they realize i'm safe this dixon's here to help me that is a game changer for me and then of course when i get the emails like three years later oh i'm doing this now or i'm getting married or invitations or baby showers or all those things like it just makes me feel like i really had an impact and made a difference for somebody this is going to sound kind of silly it's when the kids don't need me anymore selfishly i want them to keep coming and seeing me because that's what i love about my job but when they are able to regulate in the classroom when they're able to be okay on their own that's the most

004rewarding thing is knowing that they can do it because i know they can do it it's just sometimes the kids take a while to get there so they need that extra help to know that they can do it and that's also when you know i call them the big kids when the middle schoolers are high schoolers come back and they say hi and they remember me and they're like oh my gosh you helped me it's like okay you know school counselors are important and you know our reach is out there we just may not know it [Music] hi my name is christy dixon hi i'm stephanie meek hi my name is jessica adair and i'm the school counselor at sunset ridge i am the middle school counselor here at pleasant ridge middle school i am

005one of the school counselors at blue valley southwest [Music] my job is to support students families and staff members i wear many different hats counselors wear many hats i had a student call us quick trip one time because we're kind of a one-stop shop we tend to be the starting place for a lot of families like i'm not really sure where to go with this question so i'm going to start with you and which i kind of love that because i definitely want families to see us as a resource for all types of support we work with students individually we work with parents and teachers to make sure that they're academically successful but we also work with students to career plan even at the middle school level and goal plan we work with them also

006definitely on that mental health piece and that that's a big umbrella of ours is that social and mental stability a lot of times in the elementary school world they are very worried about friendships and am i going to get the best grade i have to meet all these expectations so i can also help them you know go through goals like let's take this assignment one step at a time let's break it into smaller pieces you don't have to do it all at once and we also work a lot on procrastination because you know we're all guilty of that sometimes we also spend a lot of time working with students individually just through all sorts of situations it can be i'm having a tough time with the person that i'm dating i'm having trouble in this

007class or my grade isn't great i mean we just kind of it's that that's why they call us quick trip i love to see when the kiddos become successful and then they'll come back to you and they'll reach out to you and they search for you just to give the story or fill you in on like their own personal life or whatever but i love to see that success i think the part that i love the most is when i see kind of that that click that light bulb for kids when they realize like oh i can figure this out or i actually know how to do this or they just need a little bit of encouragement or they've been carrying something around that they have some pretty big feelings about and haven't been able

008to figure out what to do when i see that look of recognition where they realize i'm safe this dixon's here to help me that is a game changer for me and then of course when i get the emails like three years later oh i'm doing this now or i'm getting married or invitations or baby showers or all those things like it just makes me feel like i really had an impact and made a difference for somebody this is going to sound kind of silly it's when the kids don't need me anymore selfishly i want them to keep coming and seeing me because that's what i love about my job but when they are able to regulate in the classroom when they're able to be okay on their own that's the most rewarding thing is knowing

009that they can do it because i know they can do it it's just sometimes the kids take a while to get there so they need that extra help to know that they can do it and that's also when you know i call them the big kids when the middle schoolers are high schoolers come back and they say hi and they remember me and they're like oh my gosh you helped me it's like okay you know school counselors are important and you know our reach is out there we just may not know it [Music] hi my name is christy dixon hi i'm stephanie meek hi my name is jessica ader and i'm the school counselor at sunset ridge i am the middle school counselor here at pleasant ridge middle school i am one of the school

010counselors at blue valley southwest [Music] good evening everyone this evening we are joined by several members of our school community who are worthy of recognition um dr merrigan will get us started with a couple very special recognitions for us and up first which is amy teissling so amy we have a plaque here for you and here i'll let you hold it um this is one of those that if you it gives every color of our schools so as you can see as you move it around amy was board president um this past year uh during kind of a commercial year and so we just want to thank you for your service and for all that you have done for blue valley schools well thank you so much [Applause] congratulations we have one more uh sarah

011vaughan so some of you in the audience of sarah walks up here might not know who sarah is but sarah has been the behind the scenes person she is the board clerk for the past nine years and has done a tremendous job for blue valley and she got her dream job and so she's leaving us and we are going to miss her immensely she is so calm and is the one who sets up the board meetings the one who does minutes that does the one who does all of those things to make sure a lot of times that we're we're being legal and we're doing all the things correctly um but we just can't tell you how much we appreciate all that you have done and how much we are going to miss you so

012sarah thank you for all that you have done is that and sarah from the board we wanted to also appreciate and recognize your great contribution to us all these years and want to thank you and wish you well thank you so much appreciate it i'm just gonna take a picture oh we need a picture congratulations sarah next we're happy to recognize and celebrate a group that is vital to student success in our schools our amazing school counselors with scott jackson amber bassem and robbie polcini please come up to the front [Applause] scott amber and robbie are here representing their fellow school counselor colleagues last week february 7th through the 11th was recognized as national school counseling week blue valley has extraordinary school counselors in every school who provide a wealth of support and resources for

013students in short they support our students academic career and social and emotional developmental needs thank you three and all 60 of the school counselors throughout our district i think it's 60 plus maybe for your hard work and dedication towards student success you're absolutely amazing and i know dr merrigan also wanted to say a few words yeah so you all are near and dear to my heart i always say to my school counselor friends that you were my people because that's how i started in the district as a as a school counselor and you provide services for students you are i don't know if anybody watched the video earlier but they interviewed three school counselors and christy dixon who's a counselor at blue valley southwest talked about them being quick trip and those of you who

014know me know i love quick drip so you you are quick trip you're that one stop um where families can go and and get the resources that they need or get directed in that that spot so thank you to each of you for all that you do for our students we are so lucky in blue valley to have school counselors in every single building and i know there's some other school counselors in the back and we want to thank you as well and emily dima who helps coordinate those at the district level so thank you school counselors and um we're glad that you got to celebrate last week congratulations and we want to get a picture [Applause] all right congratulations thank you for your amazing work this evening we are also joined by a few

015staff members who have earned certification and state or national awards would sharon palmero please come to the front is it sharon or sharon sharon good that was my first guess tonight is a pleasure to recognize sharon's sixth grade teacher at leewood middle sharon has undergone an incredible professional learning journey has now been officially named as a national board certified teacher this is a challenging and esteemed accomplishment that we are proud to recognize as it is the most respected professional certification available in education congratulations that's amazing and i know i think chris legleiter your principal is here and i know sharing your family is watching virtually as well so let's get a picture and congratulate her for her fine efforts [Applause] congratulations next it is an honor to recognize a very special teacher in the district

016who has made a tremendous impact on the profession very early in his career would zach johnson please come to the front zak is now a second year interrelated resource teacher at blue valley west he believes that building relationships with his students is a key ingredient in the successful classroom earlier this year zack was named a horizon award recipient recipient the horizon award program sponsored by the kansas department of education recognizes 32 exemplary first-year teachers across the entire state and he was one of them let's give him a round of applause for his accomplishments early on in his [Applause] the principal getting a snap picture and i think you might have a girlfriend here too so she's here wave arts education is an important piece of the educational experience arts teach students innumerable lessons while sparking

017creativity here in blue valley we have an amazing group of art teachers tonight it is an honor to recognize one of those teachers who has gone above and beyond and is being awarded for it with so choi please come to the front so was recently awarded the national art association's western regional middle level art educator award this is a national award that will be presented to who are in new york in march congratulations and let's definitely get a picture of this fine accomplishment [Applause] i know we have chris legleider here also for this one and you have husband and your sons are here so wave because i know it takes a lot of support from the family to for you to be able to do what you do all right this evening's also an honor

018to recognize two staff members with a distinguished service and excellence in education awards these special people go above and beyond each day in our schools and across the district would linda rise and hoover please come forward with our principal eric rimble and you brought the fan club with you that's awesome we're excited to recognize linda one of our para educators with a distinguished service award linda has been with the district for 17 and a half years we know very well how important our peers are to the learning experience of many of our children tell us what's so special about linda eric well i think all of us who work in education there are days where we give more than we get in other days maybe it's in the reverse linda gives every day and i've

019never seen her have a bad day her personality is so calm she works with some of our most important students and she just doesn't have a bad day and she's been in so many classrooms we've got several staff members here in their classrooms supporting students and everybody everybody loves linda i mean there's no other way to say it she is the heart and soul of c pies you can't say it any better than that so we're super proud of linda and all that she does for our students i think the fact that you have a fan club here on valentine's day of all days uh says a lot about you linda and our para educators are so important for what we do for our students and we couldn't uh serve those students without them and

020so we thank you for all that you do to support our students and now did you want to say anything okay so let's shout out to the prairie star middle family that's here to support her as well i know bill your husband i don't know if he was able to make it or not but thank you bill for supporting her as well would becky imlay please come forward with her principal amy presley [Applause] we are excited to recognize becky with an excellence in education award this school year is her 15th year in the district we are proud that our nurses continue to improve and promote the health and safety of students so that quality education is achieved amy please tell us why becky is so deserving of this award how long do you have i

021remember nine years ago i think i got on my knees and begged you to stay because you were a sub um that was the best decision i ever made you are a rock star not in the last two years but the last few years you have been the glue that's held us together and it doesn't matter whether it's a kid in your office needing something needed an aspirin needing a band-aid needing a hug whatever you're there or if it's a staff member who's melting down you're just always there to pick up the pieces and um you just are our resident rock star and i can't thank you enough so becky you know our nurses have always i've said many times to tara i think over the last couple years i've been a high school principal

022before and i knew how important a nurse was if they happened to be gone and you didn't have a nurse while you really knew but the last two years have totally highlighted for us the need to have you in our buildings and we are so thankful for all that you do at blue valley northwest to support those students and staff so thank you do you want to say yes i do thank you for this award i'm very honored to receive it i do want to share it with all of my nurse colleagues they work extremely hard every day and we've all been on the front lines of a very emotionally charged issue for the last two years and we've done our very best to help students and staff and parents navigate through a pandemic and

023i can't be more proud to be a part of that group so i share this with them and you tara northwest rocks i mean they they're so good to me and i couldn't do what i do every day without them they're great companions and comrades and collaborators and they just make me feel so important there and so my thanks to northwest for supporting me um my parents are no longer with me but they certainly modeled an incredible work ethic as i grew up and that's the best gift that they ever gave me and i'm so appreciative of that my three kids maddie daniel ben my son-in-law nick ben's girlfriend alex and my little grandson they've brought me a lot of joy these last two years so i'm very grateful for them and their support and

024then my husband jeff who's put up with a lot of really bad moods out of me the last two years um he's my rock and he's my rational to my emotional and i couldn't have asked for a better husband especially on valentine's day and just a wonderful support to me so i love you and thank you so thank you very much [Applause] [Music] congratulations blue valley is known for having the very best educators and staff around and it was just an honor to highlight a few of them tonight so congratulations thank you to everyone who is recognized tonight you're the best and i am going to offer this opportunity for you to leave the meeting if you were not planning to stay for the whole meeting if you would like to stay you are certainly

025welcome to do so happy valentine's day thank you so now we're going to move on to our public comment section so welcome to those who are intend to address the board or listen during open forum open forum provides a time for individuals to address the board in an effort to ensure an orderly efficient effective and dignified meeting the open forum will be provided for up to 60 minutes in an effort to give as many individuals an opportunity to speak as possible during the 60-minute open forum the board will enforce a three-minute limit per speaker after 60 minutes the board will close open form and proceed with its agenda items for the evening whether you plan to speak or just listen we're glad you're here because we care about the opinions and concerns of our patrons

026if you do not have an opportunity to address the board during the meeting you may address the board by email communication i have a few reminders about open form that will help our speakers to have a constructive and positive experience when discussing items with the board when making remarks please be civil and respectful language please limit discussion to the relevant business of the board tonight discuss matters related to a specific student or employees not allowed instead comment should be submitted in writing to the superintendent please remember to limit your comments to three minutes and avoid repeating the concerns of a previous speaker if you have questions that require response someone will follow up with you at a later time on behalf of the board i welcome you and appreciate your interest in blue valley as

027we strive to provide the very best education possible to our students when your name is called introduce yourself before beginning your remarks as a reminder we ask that all remarks are limited three minutes and let's get started owen frederick is our first speaker hello my name is owen frederick first i want to thank my wife for allowing me to be here tonight so it's very understanding and supportive and i appreciate that so um right now i'm here tonight to address the slanderous remarks that were made last board meeting by freedom to learn and cinder blue valley directed at some of our new board members and the parents that support them so as one of those parents that support them i want to tell you that i worked very hard with hundreds of other parents we

028weren't dark money we were grassroots we love our teachers we appreciate our teachers and we support our teachers i think that if our teachers are leaving blue valley our best teachers we should find out why i would ask the board conduct an anonymous open-ended survey to all of our teachers in the district as well as support staff to find out what might be driving them to either be unhappy in their current position or leaving blue valley i think it's important that the feedback be anonymous so that they feel comfortable giving their open and honest opinion i can tell you that the teachers that i know personally have said they don't like being mask police they want to focus on educating our students and not telling them to pull up their mask they also feel very

029uncomfortable being forced or coerced to push progressive ideologies or incorporate them into their classroom through the curriculum again that's anecdotal that's just the teachers that i know that have shared that with me personally but i can understand why stand up blue valley and freedom to learn want to frame us as anti-teacher it certainly advantages to them from a political standpoint but nothing could be further from the truth we love our teachers we love the support staff we're behind them 100 you know we support them with money we support them with our time and we support them with you know donations to the classroom anytime they need it so i think the issue is that stand-up blue valley and freedom to learn want sheep and we want to raise lions thank you [Applause] thank you lisa

030mcmahon so early yeah this time i'll remember to wear my glasses okay can you just give me a second oh you're not giving me a second okay all right i'm lisa i'm here to talk about crt i only have three minutes so i'm gonna do this fast um i suggest reading dr james lindsay though for more info but here's an analogy that most watching can relate to imagine john and jill are a married couple they have a loving marriage but feel that they can improve their communication skills so they go to marriage counseling this is an analogy on their first visit without knowing john and jill at all the counselor tells them that marriage is systemically wrong that husbands oppress their wives the counselor tells jill that she's inherently weak and an innocent victim to

031john's oppressiveness john must be brought down to her level the counselor advises jill to find fault in everything that john does and communicate it to him if john rebuts he's being abusive and is in denial if john does anything good jill is to remind him it's only because he feels guilty or it serves his selfish needs now i ask do you think this is an effective way to improve their relationship did it resolve their communication issues no it's designed to destroy their marriage if jill follows the advice who do you think is at fault here is it john his action his actual actions are irrelevant he's darned either way is it jill she is acting as the aggressor constantly attacking everything that john does or should it be the counselor the counselor intentionally gave them

032a poison pill to forever pit them against each other this is exactly what crt does it considers whites as the oppressors blacks as weak and victims it's insulting to both parties the equity not only brings the oppressor down but it brings everyone down in equal misery which is the more accurate phrase for socialism in this world full of inclusion crt is strikingly black and white very exclusive and non-fluid for instance where do i fit in i'm a biracial daughter of a middle east immigrant how about my kids how about their future kids while john can divorce jill crt is even more sinister because it's based on your skin color you cannot escape it the only exception is if you're black and you go against crt then you're no longer considered black you get labeled the

033black face of white supremacy the crt exists in blue valley even though the the board website and the state board website the blue valley and state say no i will say it does here's two examples one is the rema reimagining the blue valley strategic plan it's peppered with equity statements the other is an example here from north's newspaper it's got the blub fist in it and the principle talks about white fragility classes and implicit bias training and to summarize in his words we need to re-look at what we're structuring our year around and how we can make sure that diversity equity and inclusion are part of our dna in everything it's it's not its own month its own day or its own assembly it's just who we are thank you next speaker is cindy hulser

034next speaker is jeff nessl jeff nestle from lewis kansas tonight i gotta get a little personal and speak about my son elijah who will be to quote the song from fiddler on the roof wonders of wonder miracle miracles be graduating from north this spring and the journey we we have taken together he'll be accomplishing this due to his efforts along with those of teachers and administrators who have worked with him throughout the year supporting his learning both socially and emotionally during most of this time i've probably been a member of the blue valley special education advisory council beginning when joan robbins was in charge and continuing under the excellent leadership of park schmidt in fact i first met mark when elijah was at wood elementary school through the years both joan and mark have tolerated

035my endless rants on the council how state legislature was intent on destroying public education and therefore special needs programs and we as parents on the council had to do something about policies being fostered upon us by unknown names like london melcher as i continue my diatribes over the years two things became clear to me one most if not all the parents on the council were just trying to get through each day the struggles that raised a special needs child brings they were just trying to survive have their child thrive and have other parents and help other parents the same situation the other thing i learned was how much jonah mark loved these kids and were doing everything they could to make their lives better and more complete they showed an understanding and compassion whose empathy

036and genuine caring though i did not pretend to speak for all the past or present council members i can truly say that parents that may have had differences with a particular school or teacher never doubted the sincerity concern of either mark or joan that is why i've been proud to serve the council with them it's also the reason i was disillusioned disheartened and quite honestly disgusted when i reread publicly made comments made from the newest member of the council someone who comes from this board this is an exact quote from him quote schools need to quickly and forever exit social emotional learning which is the most self-absorbed and foolish trend in education unquote and here's another direct quote what builds a student's confidence is being able to accomplish advanced levels of mathematics and literacy social

037emotional learning elevates naval gazing the first of these comments as well as the naval gazing quota cannot be defended in any way any level or should it be the part of that last comment about math and literacy is fine for a neurotypical student trying to get a high sat score for college but is the antithesis of what special education especially special education in blue valley is all about i can only hope that this person when he's on the council will see how his views are not only incorrect but harmful he hopefully will also understand that the many achievements accomplished by these kids are because of social emotional learning not in spite of it and if you can eventually see that the parents of special needs kids will have an advocate not an advocacy on them

038from support thank you next speaker is jennifer robinson my name is jennifer robinson our children madison and dj graduated from bvnw in 2015. i was moved to speak here tonight because of a superhero she wore a t-shirt that read kindness matters diane o'brien a blue valley high school teacher of 27 years spoke recently at this meeting i held on to every word of her warning about a crisis in our public schools with a dedicated passion for education and pure emotional exhaustion she said the teaching teacher shortage is getting worse i came here tonight to speak to diane and all the teachers who are sounding the alarms they are ringing the collective bells in our town square i am the reason you're doing what you're doing every single day i was moved to participate last january

039i chose to stop working enroll in school full-time at 52 years young and i will graduate in may of 2023 with my teaching degree from k-state it's not lost on me that as a country not too long ago we view teaching as honorable and noble but for me it's personal because i come from a family of teachers in 2015 in blue valley i became a para educator in a beautiful classroom and because of a boy named sean i found my purpose in life nelson mandela said once education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world translation teachers make superheroes classrooms across the country are diverse in strategy to be successful they are representations of the students we collectively serve in the beginning of their educational journey the tiny humans come with

040an invisible backpack teachers help them uncover discover and apply lessons to create future goals that can go inside teachers give students wings through a language of joy kindness compassion openness and positive energy teachers teach students how to be a team for one another understanding that not all learning comes from books that what you choose to give life to and what you choose to let go of is a life skill that you will need as a grown up this will prevent you from standing up in a rant holding no foundation for your toxic political arguments perhaps so to all the teachers out there feeling exhausted and truly overwhelmed let me personally thank you for paving the way for keeping the lights bright and holding the line on what has become an unnecessary national battlefield to the

041teachers who taught me your handprints live on my soul to the thousands of students my parents taught i know that your futures were better because of the team involved in your educational journey diane o'brien thank you so much for your courage your kindness and your compassion matters i trust our educators i look for the helpers in the world because of people like you and i could not and would not imagine doing anything better in my future tomorrows than becoming a teacher [Applause] thank you emily yourski hi my name is emily uretzky and i'm the mother of two kids in the seventh and ninth grades in blue valley schools i'm here tonight to first and foremost thank teachers paris specialists staff and administrators for the incredible work they continue to do day in and day out

042if you pay attention to the news and our last speaker you'll know that their jobs are not easy right now and we're teetering on the edge of a mass teacher exodus i'd like to encourage the board and all blue valley patrons to watch what is happening in topeka closely and contact our state legislators there are some really bad bills in the works that will harm public education i'm just going to highlight two house bill 2550 will likely be voted on this week this bill diverts taxpayer dollars to private schools private schools that are not held to the same academic standards as public schools senate bill 393 requires school districts to annually publish a list of learning materials used for student instruction at each school in a district with a penalty for non-compliance this will just

043create cumbersome administrative burdens and add more duties to our teachers extremely busy schedules when they're already stretched then i urge you to email legislators and oppose these bills and the other anti-public education bills that have been proposed public schools don't work if we lose quality teachers that might be the point of these bills but if teachers leave our outstanding blue valley schools will fail please support teachers please contact your legislators thank you thank you julia denny hello my name is julia denny and i am a senior at blue valley high school the other day i was talking to one of my teachers and i was telling her that all throughout elementary and even middle school i wanted to be a teacher it was my dream job however at this point being a teacher is something

044i honestly don't think i could handle and don't really want to put myself through tonight i want to talk to you about the teacher shortage that is plaguing all public schools recently it seems that everyone has forgotten just how much teachers do to help their students from trying to meet each individual student's needs to staying up late the night before a test to bake cookies to surprise their students i wouldn't be the person i am today without my teachers they have pushed me to be the best student that i can be they have guided me through different ways to study in different ways to think through content they've helped me discover my passions and have empowered me to use my voice to advocate for what i believe in they have even been there to help

045me through difficult times freshman year i was bullied and i remember my teachers being a constant light in my life our one day our counselors asked us who our one person at school was that we feel we could go to in a difficult time and i had such a hard time narrowing it down to just one because i know that all my teachers would be there to support me if i needed them i'm leaving blue valley feeling prepared and excited for what's next but i'm also leaving with the concern and fear that many of my wonderful teachers won't be there much longer and i really don't blame them my little sister is in fourth grade and if the way teachers are being treated continues and the shortage continues to get worse i don't know how

046many teachers will be left in the blue valley school district by the time that she completes her education i am asking you to please start addressing the teacher shortage so that my sister and everyone in the blue valley school district can continue the legacy of greatness that stems from our teachers there needs to be a change thank you julia hannah rolling hi i'm hannah rowling i have two kids in the blue valley school district one in fourth grade one in sixth grade thank you for listening to me tonight i hope you really hear me um i'm a terrible public speaker this is crazy to me so i'm just going to read here i go um i'm not here to praise you guys tonight and everybody has had a hard time through this pandemic you guys

047have done above and beyond um but i want to spend my time talking about my concerns with where we're at now it's been two years since i've seen the inside of my kids elementary school it's been two years since i've had lunch on a birthday no school parties which parents help teachers a lot with that no music programs no walking through the hallways looking at projects and artwork no daddy daughter dance no dads and donuts no moms and muffins no book fairs no field day i've never really met the newest person who checks the kids in and out most importantly she's never she doesn't know me that's concerning we've been blessed with amazing teachers who take tons of videos and pictures and keep us in the loop but it'll never be the same as being

048there we've lost two years of memories with our kids we've lost two years of possible friendships with other parents and we're rapidly losing any confidence we've had sorry any sense of community we've had at our schools and starting to lose confidence in the school board honestly in my opinion we need to start looking at life through an endemic lens instead of a pandemic lens masks need to come off the children's faces parents need to be let back in the schools it's not the board's job to keep our kids from getting sick i know you're trying to keep kids in seats and teachers well we've all seen the numbers i think we're past that or we're getting there when in the history of edward we ask kids to protect adults allow them to be kids let

049us make memories in our schools and build back a sense of community let's move past the politics and make this about the kids what's best for them i've asked my kids how they felt about mass my daughter reminded me that at before the beginning of the school year masks were going to be optional we've never been more excited and then right before school started we started masking again they were devastated but we've done what we had to do and here we are at this point it's time to just stop be leaders keep your word and do what you know is right parents know their kids better than anyone trust parents to do what's right by their kids thank you arena weaver hello my name is irina weaver oh my gosh um and my son graduated

050last year so i'll read fast because we don't have enough time so first i would like to start with proposals and if i repeat something was happened before and people had the same proposals i apologize i didn't follow you for two years um and all these on my thoughts are based on 2020 2021 uh school years i encourage parents to demand that blue valley south south uh blue valley school district does not use the public platform paid by best taxpayers to express their political and ideological views via emails newsletters or on its website however all members of our administration are welcome to express their political views on their personal platforms social platforms um and again i don't know that but if this school board is a member of the national school boards association it should

051revoke its membership or shouldn't consider becoming a member in the future number three if again if applicable remove the minecraft education edition from the elementary school curriculum they teach about blm equity and how to become a global citizen number four consider changing your tagline imagining learning changing the world it's very confusing what are you imagining it's has a bad connotation in the light of the last years imagining police that's what they used number five extend the duration of comments at school boardings because through three minutes is not enough it looks like a race but not a meaningful conversation with you and remove restrictions from for people to participate in this discussion to allow their parents to into this room and i can take a touch i mean have some comments on your one of the

052newsletters we received as parents uh in 2021 uh i began starting um in january and not one many numerous times and that's um and i will touch on one aspect only um it is you said it is the district's priority to support legislation that is beneficial to blue valley uh students uh totally disagree with that but you eliminate tax credits and vouchers for private schools you oppose public school funding of private schools including offering public tax credits that decrease and i disagree with that because then obviously you want to eliminate um your competition because you show lately that you incompetent [Applause] thank you jennifer cox dr leanne lyanna nguyen on cnn agrees it's time to end these coveted mitigations i don't agree with much that she says about masking that has a time in place

053but more her more important point is pretty clear so let's listen do you agree with the move i do there was a and is a time and place for pandemic restrictions but when they were put in it was always with the understanding that they would be removed as soon as we can and in this case circumstances have changed case counts are declining also the science has changed we know that vaccines protect very well against omicron which is the dominant variant everyone five and older have widespread access to vaccines and we also know about one way masking the idea that even if other people around you are not wearing masks if you wear a high quality mask that also protects you the wearer too and so in this case i'm not saying i don't think anyone

054really is saying that no one should ever wear masks but rather that the responsibility should shift from a government mandate imposed from the state or the local district of the school rather it should shift to an individual responsibility by the family who can still decide that their child can wear a mask if needed um you know take new jersey the case in new jersey for instance their new case average is just over 4 000. um is that an acceptable number to do this or or are they projecting out to march 7th at this point i don't think we should be looking at case counts at all at this point especially when we're dealing with a milder variant and when so many people were exposed to omicron and therefore have have at least some level of

055protection either through vaccination or immunity the key number that we should be looking at is hospitalizations if our icus and hospitals in that particular region are not overwhelmed if they're not over capacity we can set a number for example 75 or 80 percent full then we should be able to relax all restrictions and i actually believe that we should be starting to with the first restriction removed should actually be the restriction on children because while for adults you could say well what's the harm of adults basking when they go into a grocery store there actually is a harm that we should be discussing of children continuing to mask that doesn't mean that masking doesn't have its place for children when there are very high rates of hospitalization if we get a new variant in the

056future that children are particularly susceptible to we may want to bring masks back but we should also be intellectually honest and say that masking has had a cost especially for the youngest to learners in people with english as a second language children with learning disabilities there has been a cost to them so the risk benefit calculation has really changed this experimental power grab should never be repeated when we think so narrows to slap a percentage on a mandate and call it a day leaves kids and teens primed for vast and deep issues that percentages care nothing about parents email the school board demanding all restrictions are dropped thank you thank you bruce chakay chanka bruce chica stillwell grandparent taxpayer uh first i'd like to make a recognition uh you recognize so many people today i've

057got a shout out from blueberry west special needs kids and their staff i volunteer at a food pantry twice a week and they show up every tuesday and thursday with foodstuffs for the pantry it's like the mid uh widows might it's not a lot but i see those kids coming in and working at it and learning as they're going along and it really lifts our spirits down there so to those folks out there a big thank you it's greatly appreciated uh i love the pleasant allegiance to the flag that's my topic but a little history i think that we don't know and would be great if our students knew as well our original pledge of allegiance was penned in 1892 by rev francis bellamy a pastor minister he read i pledge allegiance to my flag

058and to the republic for which it stands one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all that was the initial version it was used by educators in chicago during a 400 year anniversary celebration of the columbus day landing in the new world then in 1923 1924 the phrase of the flag of the united states of america was added to replace bellamy's my flag the pledge then read i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all on february 7th 1954 president dwight eisenhower a local guy sitting on front row with other congressmen and senators in attendance were listening to a sermon again from george doherty who presided at a church only two blocks from the white

059house he began the morning message by reviewing the role of god the role of god that had played in american history he affirmed that american life and cultured god was essential to our core american identity as he was preparing his sermon he became aware that the phrase under god had not been included in the pledge of allegiance following the sermon president eisenhower went to pastor artery and said i think you got something the next day the next day a bill was introduced to add under god to the pledge credit was given to the pastor as the inspiration for the law only four months later it became law it's probably a record today all from a sermon given on february 7 68 years ago last week it's the history and meaning behind the pledge of allegiance

060that needs to be taught to the students at blue valley for something they say every day thank you melissa jenner nikki canzaro sloan heller efren taylor i guess i'd like to start off by saying critical race theory is not being taught in blue valley if you're opposing diversity equity inclusion you're just racist and you should be treated as such now i would have attended the last meeting but unfortunately i had covid and honestly i was scared i'd been in contact with my grandparents and they mean a lot to me i don't know what life would be like if i lost them i was missing school it wasn't mass that disrupted my learning process it was the lack of them i couldn't see my friends or have fun i had to force myself to drink force

061myself to eat all my body wanted to do was rest my illness prevented me from doing the things i loved to do but what i was able to do was watch the last open forum what i saw in this room was disgraceful some of the adults here are engaging in an absolute disregard for our community and some have the data of analysis that well i would not expect from adults there's a study that keeps getting brought up from georgia if you read the full study like any responsible that would do before fixing their mouth to speak on a public health issue the cdc did not conclude that mass don't work on children which should be obvious because of the hundreds of studies we have showing that they do the study which keeps getting misrepresented concludes

062and i quote findings in this report suggest universal and correct mass use is an important coven 19 prevention strategy shame on everyone that pulls all of this in danger by misrepresenting studies and spreading disinformation about kova 19. we saw hospital beds full we saw schools and other districts shut down teachers and students are overwhelmed and we contribute to this every time we choose to opt out of mask i know that it feels isolating sometimes like these but we do not live in a vacuum it's not just blue valley it's not just johnson county it's not just kansas this is a national emergency and we need to make the right moves locally to play a small part in solving a big problem and we do that by getting vaccinated and wearing our mask i'd hope that

063our leadership would encourage us to do the same because anybody that doesn't is not only anti-teacher not only anti-student but they are anti-blue valley anti-canton anti-american we need to reevaluate our masking policy to follow cdc guidelines to keep people safe there is freedom not in worrying about there is freedom and not having to worry about getting sick there is liberty and knowing your school won't shut down that our education is safe there's freedom in getting past this pandemic and one last note if i may add ultimately these decisions are ones that affect students so it makes sense that we should be the main ones up here i know many times student thinks that our voice doesn't matter or that these meetings don't affect us i'm here to tell you that your voice does matter if

064you've got something important to say get up here and share it we're the future it's about time we take control of our destiny thank you thank you everyone charlotte o'hara i'm on the board of county commissioners but i am here as an individual tonight this has been really interesting listening to this conversation first of all i want to let you know that i have a degree in education i did my student teaching in olathe did some substituting then i became a general contractor i have home schooled i had several aunts who were teachers my dad was on the school board my brother was a president of a community college so i have a lot of background in education anti-education is not something that i am at all my youngest daughter is biracial she's of korean

065and african descent i do not agree with crt and she is not a victim you need to understand that this community is doing a good job we do not need to be harassed with crt but the issue at hand masks how did we get here well let's see august 13 2020 there was a conversation between chairman eilert and commissioner clicka who at one time was on the school board who definitively said that bocc had no authority over this over school boards then in august of a public health order was considered in the first draft had an opt-out but because of pressure from superintendents that was taken out and while this was being discussed the chief legal counsel informed the board that the school districts really did have the right to opt out because their home

066rural authority gave them that right so then last week we had a court district court judge judge mason tell us that oh yeah schools have the right they have the authority over the bocc this is nothing but political dodgeball you are the ones responsible to make this decision i urge you to find the courage to unmask our kids i'm a grandmother of five in this district two of them are in elementary three are in secondary it is time to unmask our kids and according to the new york times this is no way for a child to grow up thank you thank you gary redfold thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight and thank you for your time and dedication to our district especially here on valentine's day i'm here as a parent of three

067blue valley students the main point i'd like to make is this i think all of us are tired of being pitted against one another blue valley shouldn't be parents versus teachers parents versus parents or masked versus unmasked all of us are in this together we're all blue valley and our overarching goal has to be what's best for kids all the kids i think for political reasons over the last two years we've all unfortunately been stereotyped into groups and put at odds with one another i recall many social media posts and political signage telling parents that if they advocated for in-person learning that they were hurtful and promoting the death of teachers and i truly don't think there's any parent in the district that would want that in reality i think parents know and appreciate that

068kids need the structure and growth that normal school brings and that they get from their teachers a lot of parents are also concerned about the academic developmental and social harms that mass can cause more and more data comes out every day supporting those concerns as parents our job is to advocate for our children it's really just that simple we have wonderful teachers and staff here in blue valley i think forcing the kids and teachers to wear a mask is harming many of them while many would like to continue wearing masks there's also a large group who feels like they can't speak up but they are tired of wearing masks themselves and they're tired of policing the masks on their students teaching is a very difficult and noble profession and in blue valley we are best

069we are blessed with amazing teachers and staff there are lots in our district who fall on both sides of the masking issue we need to be sure that those who want the choice to not mask aren't being ignored you may have heard charlotte just discussed this a judge ruled last week that the johnson county board of commissioners do not have the authority over school mass mandates the authority resides with the school board home rule authority this means the blue valley school board can remove its mass mandate tonight because blue valley does not have to follow the county mandate master optional for high schools and the district office our middle and elementary schools deserve the choice as well now is the time to start to stop forcing masks for all thank you [Applause] thank you axon

070taishlich good evening my name is aksana taishlak i am a mother of three kids one of them is currently in blue valley i'm here today to represent my husband kids and myself i actually want to thank my husband for being here today with me supporting me um and during this valentine's day and thank you for all of you listening to this is my third time speaking to this board on the topic of mask mandates i asked the board to make masks optional in all blue valley schools for several months at every blue valley school board meeting parents cited the evidence scientific research that shows close masks don't reduce the spread of covet cov19 or any other viruses same research was done pre-covered and there are multiple studies that talk about this too anyone who wants

071to look into the scientific research personally could go back and review public comments from previous forums and then find scientific papers and read them the scientific evidence from those meetings showed that the harms that mask mandates caused to our children what have our children lost already and what are they losing first intelligence in the study that was done with kids up to five years old it's brown university study iq dropped in by what else the ability to understand and learn new words a previously referenced study demonstrated that even adults understand and present fewer words spoken by a mask than an unmasked person what else the ability to properly understand emotions in adults the mask reduces ability by 30 percent think about children the right to have healthy cardiological systems when mask blocks the oxygen and

072retains co2 the body forces you to take more breaths to normalize oxygen levels in your blood think about kids who are forced to breathe elaborately for eight hours during every day i can go on and on about the price our children are paying for the been masked all day some of them will continue pay this price for many years ahead parents i encourage you to think shouldn't you be the ones to make decisions to pay this price or not to pay or do we trust this board to make those decisions more and more states cities and districts drop in this an inhumane and unhealthy measure do you know that nine stands banned mask universal masking do you know that even blue states like colorado in new jersey dropped mask mandates do we know that covet

073hospitalization and death numbers are no different than those states with with and without mandates do what about our own county do you know that spring hill allowed parents to write mask mandates exemptions for the entire school year since august so everyone concerned with the kids losing intelligence social and emotional development and health issues were able to send their children to school with no masks do you think they have different coveted numbers than we do no um do you know that gardner dropped recently mass mandates and alisa is dropping it four days from now um do you know that they did it for kids of all ages i encourage the board to grow up masculine today thank you sherry mccants good evening sherry mccants i have two kids one in the blue valley district i'm speaking

074on behalf of six parents including three teachers in the blue valley district the mass mandate was put into place for two full school years for k-8 to ward off the potential passing of the virus at that time we did not have any facts that we have now regarding the masks so quoting from the physician and cnn medical analyst dr liana wen who you just listened to on february 8th she went on to say and she and i quote circumstances have changed science has changed responsibility should shift from a government mandate imposed from the state or the local district of the school rather it should shift to an individual responsibility by the family there actually is a harm that we should be discussing of children continuing to mask masking has had a cost especially for the

075youngest learners people with english as a second language and children with learning disabilities there has been a cost to them so the risk benefit calculation has really changed a substitute teacher has shared with me that all the kids in kindergarten all they do all day is play with their masks she also told me that it was announced that gardner is no longer requiring masking they are backed in eating lunch in cafeteria with their friends back to recess there were kids crying with happy tears and screaming with so much joy another mom had told me that her son her son is back due to struggling with remote learning it's taken iep and seven extra teachers to help him get back on track he is repeating the first grade and an elementary teacher from blue valley told

076me that he or she feels the kids are three years behind where they should be last monday new jersey governor philip murphy announced that his state would require students and teachers to wear a mask starting the second week of march not to wear masks california oregon delaware and connecticut announced plans to lift masks within hours on wednesday rhode island and massachusetts said they would end school mass mandates that seven states yet for some reason kansas schools and specifically this school district refused to pay attention to facts if masks are effective at preventing the spread of covid then why were there so many students getting coveted in the months of december and january they were masked the whole time i have a friend that has tubes in her ears as many children do and didn't realize

077how much a person reads lips and observes facial expressions until mask mandates were imposed why aren't the schools concerned about the long-term impact on the psyche people claim they are following the science but if they were they would have had the mask mandates removed as soon as all the data came out stating the ineffectiveness of masks the only science i see being followed is political science i want to end this how many of you know that there are 50 000 truckers in canada fighting for freedom and soon usa will be joining this movement is bigger than the speakers asking to drop covet restrictions people want freedom god bless thank you this wraps up our open forum for tonight on behalf of the board of education i'd like to thank our participants we appreciate that each

078of you took the time to share your thoughts with us please know that the board and the district administration took notes during open forum and will follow up as needed we're going to take a five minute break for closed caption and next up is calling the meeting to order [Music] so we're going to uh start the meeting here real quick if everybody please take their seats we can get started we got a lot of things to do go over tonight appreciate it so we're going to call the meeting to order and we're going to start off with uh receiving uh comments from the board members um i'm going to start off by saying that uh it's been an honor to serve on this board with its six members i look forward to working with each

079and every one of them i want to thank dr merrigan and the staff for every thing they do each day we have a lot to be proud of in the district our district website has a number of accomplishments on it please go out and take a look at that and despite these challenging times we've managed to continue some some significant accomplishments but the pandemic has made it harder to educate our kids and it's time to focus our energy on educating our kids each and every day our staff are our heroes and they're the k and their commitment to our kids is unending and many of you indicated that they deserve and need our support right now we know many are struggling and it's very hard over the past two years our community needs to work

080together and support each other we are asking our parents in the community to support the district staff and each other in the goal of being able to achieve the best education for each and every one of our kids we must work together for our kids staff and future each board member is united and committed to working together for this very purpose if we don't work together then we will not get the best education to our kids that we can deliver we ask everyone to rise above refocus and come together regardless of the issue and help us through this exceedingly challenging time therefore we've asked dr merrigan and staff to focus this year on the following core areas for our kids number one is literacy number two is mathematics number three mental health and number four

081is expanding the high school experience and partnership with johnson county community college i ask all parents to reach out to your school your child's school and thank the staff for all they do each day and every day during the pandemic additionally i ask send the district staff a note of appreciation and let them know that you understand and appreciate that there are great challenges that they have faced over the last two years and they've worked tirelessly endlessly to help make this as successful as possible and it has not been easy in advance i want to thank those of you who are ready to turn the corner and refocus on education i think the staff are showing up each and every day despite the significant challenges and tirelessly working to educate our kids please join me

082and the board tonight in taking the step forward for all our kids thank you jim [Applause] does that mean it's on your own okay um so i've had the opportunity in the last couple of weeks to visit a number of um schools mostly elementary schools uh with dr merrigan and a few of the other board members and so one of the one of the you know kind of core reasons that i ran for school board was my passion for literacy and which which was one of the first points that uh patrick just made and so i i wanted to just detail a few things that i think we should first of all all of our our parents and other community members should know about the great things going on in this district um which may

083not be necessarily uh you know readily visible but has gone on behind the scenes is being implemented as we speak and it relates directly to early early elementary reading instruction so i'm just going to read a number of these points so over several decades as many districts in the region and and our local colleges have done there was a trend to move away in the early years basically kindergarten through third grade from explicit instruction of phonics for reading instruction so something might have been called whole whole language or balance literacy um and so what what over a 20-year period or so um that the one of the the results of that was noticing not just blue valley but across the country reading gaps with a number of students not not all students but some students

084it just wasn't reaching and so last year blue valley modified its early reading curriculum to add phonics with a program called 95 percent group to accomplish this the district has undertaken a system systematic approach of training teachers in phonics instruction so many of whom may not have received that exact instruction when they were in in college so importantly the district has worked to have at least one person in each of the 21 elementary schools who is well trained in phonics instruction the result we as a district should see is better readers across the board in our district and earlier detection of those students who are dyslexic or or who need early intervention in visiting a number of elementary schools in the last few weeks i've seen this in action and and it really it um

085you know this is a tough time with every everybody all the little kids in mass but and the staff in mass and people you know focused on other things this has really been a to me a really good sign that that our staff and our administrators have powered through and have gotten it to the principles and then down to the teachers um in in each of those schools um and especially with a method of reading teaching reading that not all uh teachers at the kindergarten through third grade level have been trained in at the collegiate level so i think our principals teachers and administrators need to be applauded for embracing this and implementing it over the course of of uh 20 well 2021 and into 2022. um part of the district's agenda is to augment

086reading instruction for those at older ages who may have gaps in their reading skills this is ongoing and one of the challenges we have as a district is that just like a lot of industries do it's hard to find qualified people for every position so in our middle schools we have some open roles for reading specialists or somebody who might be an english teacher or some other discipline but but understands how to identify and teach in these methods phonics instruction or or missing steps in terms of a child's reading development so if you know people send them to dr merrigan and so but anyway i think we should be proud i think dr collier and her team has done a great job and and i think our principals have done a really from the ones

087i talked to every single one of them seems to have embraced this um under not super easy circumstances so i'm i'm enthused by what i've seen so since the last board meeting i attended the student activities committee meeting with mr mitchell over there and which is a really fun committee first of all because we discuss all the fun stuff that the kids get to do during the school day and afterwards one of the things we talked about that i thought was fantastic was a presentation that was done the prior month by tom herzog about first aid training for mental health and so we were discussing implementing that throughout the school year with coaches and administrators before each season or you know still just kind of spitballing how it's going to be exactly implemented but that's

088really exciting because it's a focus on mental health even on the activity side not just in that health and wellness committee so um follows those tenants that patrick was talking about we could see those are you know already working through so that was great i had the privilege of attending the special ed resource fair last week that was fantastic it was the first time they had held it for a couple of years because of covid um smaller than in the past is my understanding but lots of people there it was a great event so well run and so many parents who are running it are just love the community so much and so it was fantastic to get to meet them and talk to them and and um i know several other board members attended

089too which was fantastic so um that's all i have except for i just wanna i'm really excited about the shift in focus to the um four things that patrick listed um support dr barrigan and her staff and and all of these items and i'm excited to see how the next year goes thank you gina amy yes i would just read it reiterate the same thing that as a continuing board member i look forward to the partnership with the new board members and i'm excited about what patrick said as well to help our district be successful going forward thank you amy tom yeah real quick i'll do coffin grants and thank you so thank you to blue valley west northwest liquid middle oxford and liberty view for hosting myself dr american fellow board members like i

090went on tours with all board members i know amy you and i have several coming up so had a great time and appreciated that time um if you will thank you for your comments patrick and jim and others i look forward to you having time to do your your day job dr merrigan and your staff i know i've been saying that for months we got to get dr america back to dude we're doing what she just does best and i think we're getting very close to do that so i'm excited about that part and then you working with your administration and and the principals and the teachers on down and and um it's going to be great um i think we should thank our teachers every meeting so i'm going to thank them personally now

091love being in the classroom seeing them this week love chaperoning the blue valley northwest sweetheart dance with actually gina there too and and seeing our kids and then teachers as well so uh parent-teacher conferences this week just puts a smile on my face so with true appreciation just adore our teachers and what they're doing for our kids as well um i did find out uh tomorrow's national school resource officer day did you know that officer okay good good good yes thank you and thank you and i know there's a few more in the hallway but i know it's been a busy year and you guys do a great job of taking care of our kids at the end of the day so um uh patrick hurley's gonna take you to the bristol tomorrow night so

092but i will pitch in yes six will be good i'll go with you um blue valley north is a scholars bowl 6a state champs which is awesome um again national school counselor last week 60 plus our counselors want to make sure we acknowledge that we had five girls qualify for state wrestling um with state tournaments this weekend which is which is very very cool and then our blue valley ed foundation which is just you know raising record amount of dollars and doing some great things as their battle the bands on the 26th in martin city so i will be there looking forward to that so uh again appreciate the comments in the partnership and i'm looking forward to that what's happening over the next seven months and next several years thank you tom jody well

093um not to sound like a broken record but um just reiterate what everyone has said we're this is this is drawing a line in the sand we're going to refocus we're going to let dr merrigan do the brilliant things that dr mayor can do with her fantastic staff so we're excited um about really focusing on these you know primarily these four uh areas and really excited to see what we can do so that's going to be just a lot of fun to watch some great experiences the the school tours blue valley west lakewood both middle and elementary absolutely fantastic these kiddos just blow me away um the the exciting things that they're working on the excitement for learning it's it's absolutely uh wonderful um was able to attend blue valley west performance program mamma mia

094this weekend again brought tears to my eyes these kids are so talented it's absolutely amazing um the uh the special drumming concert from i believe it was fifth graders at heartland elementary oh my gosh it was it was wonderful absolutely wonderful so we have for those who don't believe we have great arts down here in south johnson county by gum we do and it's you know it's it's absolutely exciting to see so um i think that's oh i just wanted to to reiterate again i know we've mentioned this at other board meetings um that the board does not handle um uh the the uh visit the issues that that maybe parents may have um with visiting or or being able to uh volunteer in their schools that is done at the school level um that

095is something the control that the those the principal's in charge of they're in charge of their environment so um we just want to make for sure that you know if you have questions about that go to your principal first um because that is not a board decision but i think that's all i had thank you jody katie hey it's my second meeting and i'm still thrilled to be here um i just want to say blue valley holds a very special place in my heart when i moved here in 2009 i was 23 newly married and we had just combined our brood bringing the kid total count to four i remember walking into the meet the teacher days every year at overland trail elementary later to locker and picture day at o2ms and later into orientation

096of blue valley north these experiences were always heartwarming full of smiles and i left feeling grateful and amazed by the care and compassion shown to our kids by the teachers support staff and principals the same held true as we entered new programs and ventured into leawood valley park and wolf springs elementary schools so this school district is truly unparalleled here in our corner of johnson county we have opportunities and support systems here that other districts could only dream of at times of course my love for home district makes me a little biased but that doesn't diminish the truth our teachers support staff admin and dr merrigan genuinely care for our kids they need our support now more than ever we're here to listen to you and i read every email that you send as you've

097listened tonight to this portion i'm sure that you heard similar as well as different sentiments from each of the board members this is to be expected and indicative of our new board after all we're several different people seven different people with different viewpoints backgrounds and at times beliefs however at the end of the day our core goal aligns the education of our children as well as the support of our staff and parents this board as a collective is choosing to operate differently we remain focused on our common goals and not ourselves as individuals or our differences but rather using these unique perspectives to problem-solve in innovative ways we choose to support dr merrigan our admin teams and all district employees as we navigate how to propel blue valley further into excellence and picking ourselves up

098from the past two years and to proudly exclaim with certainty that blue valley is the best so i am very thankful to be here and i'm very thankful for everyone at these down here and over here and i am excited and i have seen great things in just the two months have been here so thank you katie dr merrigan hey dr american thank you oh for everything thank you we appreciate it so what i've heard tonight from our public speakers uh from the board itself is that there's been some disagreements on maybe some different things that we're doing but one common thread that i have heard from i think every single person is that they support our staff they support our teachers they support the people in the buildings and what i want our staff

099to know is that you are the best we see each and every day that this job is hard and that you are working tirelessly and you're doing it because you love our kids and you have the best interest of our students at heart and that that needs to be said and that's not said often enough and i love our staff i've been here for 23 years i would put our principles against principles in any district i put our teachers against teachers in any district i'd put our pairs against pairs in any district i could go on and on and on uh nurses against nurses in any district we have the best i absolutely believe that and i believe we as a community have to come together to support those people because i don't believe covet

100is is the issue right now i think the issue at hand for us is retaining and attracting qualified staff so that we can continue to educate the students we have in this district so i'm excited to work with our staff to work with our administrative team to do what we can to support our staff to work with the board to support our staff to let them continue to let them know but to show them how much we support them they are amazing you will not again you will not ever convince me that we have we don't have the best because i absolutely believe that we do i appreciate that the board has joined me on tours um of the buildings you know first semester i went out to every single building and it was the

101best 40 hours i had the whole first semester and so i chose to do that second semester and i just happened to mention to the board hey i'm doing these if any of you want to come along let me know and i think every single building i've been in i've had at least one of you now which is awesome and we do see great things in our buildings elementary kids are the best because they'll tell you whatever i mean they don't there's no filter with them they'll tell you exactly what you're doing we got to see really amazing things going on as jim mentioned we saw literacy 95 group in action in high schools we saw ap classes having rigorous discussions we were in an economics class we've been in music classes we we've just

102been through the gamut and each and every time our students are learning and are moving forward so when we say we're going to refocus on literacy math mental health and the high school experience we've been focusing on that we just need to be able to have these public conversations around that so that we can share the things that we are doing and if there are questions we need to hear those questions from our from our parents and we need to work together to ensure that we have great um schools for our students so blue valley has a special place in my heart as well katie um and i've been a part of this community for 23 years and no place else i would rather be [Applause] thank you dr merrigan thank you board members so

103we've got a lot of great things going on it's going to take a lot of work on all our parts but that's because we have great staff great students and great parents and now let's show everybody else that we are great so with that said we'll move on to receiving reports from board advisory committees as i said i think kyle's first step with finance and operations the finance and operations committee met on february 10th via zoom i along with board representatives patrick hurley and amy tyson provided a general district update adam wessel was there to as a director of career and ready programs to talk about our programs that are available to the blue valley schools our blue valley students through johnson county community college and also the fire science program through overland park fire

104department additionally information was shared around blue valley's work with the kauffman foundation in real world learning i presented the proposed district student fees for 2223 which is on the consent agenda tonight director of business operations jason gillam and director of facilities and operations jake slobodnick presented the bids and contracts also on consent agenda for tonight the next meeting is scheduled for march 3rd i'll go ahead and get student activities also the student activities committee met january 13th via zoom the primary purpose for the meeting was to continue the discussion on mental health which was mentioned earlier matt ortman recapped the hashtag be the difference campaign presentation from the last meeting that was in november the committee's goal is to start the training certification process at the beginning of this next school year blue valley rec

105and administration the high schools and middle schools also gave their regular reports the next meeting is scheduled for february 24th curriculum instruction with dr collier the curriculum and instruction board advisory committee met via zoom january 19th kelly up provided a presentation on board policies 4000 highlighting the cyclical process of highlighting the cyclical process of curriculum design also refining and writing the curriculum also policy 4600 highlighting processes associated with learning resource selection and finally 4730 highlighting operational guidelines for blue valley libraries a general district update was also provided and the next meeting will occur this week february 16th good evening the health and well-being committee met on january 26th and emily demo put together a panel of students to talk a little bit about the mental health supports that are provided within blue valley school district

106we kind of started off with the idea of if we want to know how to best to serve students we really ought to ask them and so we spent the next hour and a half just asking the students questions having a discussion with the students about what they see as the strengths and then also some areas of improvement for within the district the students mentioned specifically that the counselors social workers and school psychs were people that they really relied on although they also mentioned that they would certainly like more of them but understood that you know that there are limited resources but they they said that in as a way to get to that the way that they rely on each and every one of their teachers as mental health supports they said that we

107really get to know our teachers on an individual basis they are the ones that really support us and encourage us to continue the training of teachers in mental health support such as mental health first aid they didn't mention that curriculum but that is an example of that kind of curriculum they also mentioned that we could certainly update some of our materials for suicide prevention and we took note of that they did indicate there's there's one activity that they just love a hand on hands-on activity called lightbox and they encourage us to continue doing those hands-on activities moving forward uh summing up at the end one of the students uh said something that i wanted to share with the board we said you know what what is something that we can do or that we should

108encourage and they said find ways to validate students struggles it's okay not to be okay um and then also encourage this to be aware of the toxic positivity that sometimes we we as adults do with kids you know you'll be fine you'll be fine everything's great you just don't know what it's like to or what how great you have it at this point so anyway we thought that those very enlightening comments and some things that we'll be able to take forward as we plan improvements our next meeting is february 23rd in this room thank you and that concludes our committee reports for this month thank you dr morgan the next agenda item is approved the agenda for the february 14th regular board of education meeting has published do i have a motion i move that

109the board of education approved the agenda for the february 14 2022 regular board of education meeting as published second motion by tom second by amy any uh discussion see no discussion all in favor raise your right hand all opposed motion passes 7-0 the next agenda item is the consent agenda the approval of the consent agenda do i have a motion i move that the board of education approved the consent agenda for the february 14th 2020 regular board meet board of education meeting as published you have a second second any discussion see no discussion all in favor raise your right hand uh all opposed motion passes seven zero move on to new business which is uh starting with the first item it's calendar revisions for the 22-23 school year dr collier will make her way up

110and we have two agenda items this evening that we are asking for action on regarding our calendars for the next two school years good evening the first calendar i'll present to you the board has actually previously approved this is the calendar for 2223 administration is making the following recommendations one capturing in the month of january the observance of the new year holiday and ensuring that we have professional learning at the beginning of january pro instead of holding two days in the month of april building administration and district administrators feel as if that's very advantageous instead of waiting for those to occur in april as i shared last month we have received feedback from parents and staff regarding the week of thanksgiving and we're able to offer a full week of thanksgiving and still meet our

111requirements for state for the state regarding student attendance we're beginning to note in the month of february and we we i i say this here to you um a bit tentatively typically the last week of february or the first week of march but the pattern has been the last week of february we have high school test day and so we want to make sure that we're noting those on our calendars going forward building administration uh communicates with parents about alternate schedules on those days and just want to make sure that's noted and then historically we get out prior to the end of prior to memorial day and we continue to do so in this calendar as well so we would ask for your review and approval of this revised calendar and dr collier this has

112been up on the website for the last month and we have asked for feedback have you gotten any feedback so the 2223 calendar was reviewed with the calendar committee and then it's actually the 2324 calendar that is posted for the review these are minor administrative changes and we have reviewed this uh process with calendar committee and as a reminder on the calendar committee we have teachers and administrators but this calendar has previously received public input when it was first designed that is correct any questions okay no no i appreciate it yeah i know the calendar is is a lot of work and and so i don't know we've looked at this several times so i appreciate it i do have a motion i move that the board of education approves the revision to the 2022-2023

113district calendar as presented is there a second second a motion by tom second by jody any discussion on the calendar as presented no then uh all in favor raise your right hand all opposed same sign motion carry seven zero the next item on the agenda new business is calendar approval for the 23-24 school year yes i would just point out that board policy and corresponding or policy guideline really informs our practices and the values if you will around the calendar for 23 24. so when i spoke to you last month regarding the 2324 calendar it was suggested that it has been quite some time since we have done a broad gathering of input regarding what are those tenants that our community and our staff really hold true and are important when we design a school

114calendar and so we will be doing that next year prior to the design of any other future calendar just so you're aware this calendar has received input from the community that community feedback and staff feedback was reviewed by the calendar committee a few minor changes were made ultimately you'll receive here that that again on this calendar we meet at state expectations for student attendance the full week for thanksgiving remains conferences in the month of february that received quite a bit of feedback those conferences are a bit a week earlier than they typically are we know that week we hit ash wednesday occurs that week and valentine's day occurs that week we believe that both of those will impact attendance at parent teacher conference at family teacher conferences um also we continue to know testing day

115in february we conclude the school year prior to memorial day and we do have allowances within the school calendar for 23 24 allowing for any emergency snow days should they occur happy to answer any questions so can i um i i think it's great that we get a week off at thanksgiving um and but it's kind of close to christmas holiday i'm just wondering if there's ever been an examination of i don't know a week in the middle of february which is kind of you know or in the middle of october so um one thing that we looked at in uh trying to extend the break was looking at where where does the holiday fall that seems to be quite frankly that was the feedback we received from staff and parents was the the desired

116week to place it there um and then in the spring of course we hit that week of uh spring break there was concern to do something later in the year quite honestly april may can can be long months at times but felt that that would fall too close to the week of spring break as well and generally jim the feedback was the desire for that for that thanksgiving break any other questions thank you dr collier do i have a motion i moved to the board of education approved the 2023-2024 district calendar as presented second tom makes the motion to approve katie seconds any discussion all in favor raise your right hand all opposed same sign motion carry 7-0 the next item on the new business agenda is employee leave associated with the pandemic so dr

117pinswick our chief human race human resources officer is going to talk to you about a proposal we have to support our staff with covid potential coveted relief is that on okay perfect early in the pandemic the federal government expanded fmla to provide our employees with paid leave for covet 19 related reasons that program ceased in december of 2020 and since that time our employees that had to uh find themselves in need of taking leave for coven 19 reasons had to utilize their own leave balances if you look at the last year's time we know that we had quite a few employees that were impacted negatively because of coven 19 as it refers to their leave their leave balances just here in the last month in january we saw 2100 more absences for our faculty our

118employees than we've seen in any january in recent memory and when we start to see what the cost is associated with individuals being gone a lot of other employees were picking up the pieces making sure that we kept our buildings open for our kids and so for what we have for you today is an approval of adding five additional leave days for our employee groups classified certified not administrators that would be effective on the 15th of september 2022 for all of our returning employees that have been with us during these last these last months any questions so it would be for next year then correct five so the bottom line is we have between sicknesses and various things we have teachers that are out of days correct we have some uh employees and employees that

119are okay without without any time okay so this would give them the five extra days for pump for next year correct correct we had employees who um you know it could have been that they they themselves were ill it could have been that they their children had to stay home it could have been that they had day care right students or they had little ones in daycare in the daycare shutdown and we all know that if you don't have daycare you can't just leave your two year old at home you have to stay home and take those days so there are a variety of reasons that our staff have had to miss so this would alleviate the stress of that that i'll gosh i'm down to two days and here it is september and i've

120got two sick kids and i gotta be out for four days or i'm sick and we have this would alleviate that right and we have pushed staff to just like we have with with parents with kids if you're sick you have to stay home you know you no more um you know i have my mom's voice in my ear all the time you just power through it power through it you can do it that wasn't the case this year we told you if you don't feel good you have to stay home awesome thank you tom uh dr brunswick's so this is for all existing employees that are employed on september 15 2022 correct uh currently the ones that are employed here on may 15th if they're with us on may 15 they will and they're

121returning and we will apply it at the first paycheck of the new academic calendar which is 9 15 of 2022. yeah it really fits into the retention piece that we're looking at with exemplary educators making sure that we are making sure that those individuals that have been with us and coming back they have some restoration to those leave balances okay thank you any other questions so what's the financial implications so when we look at this there is not an immediate cost with this because it's as it's utilized over time we feel that we have escrow phones to be able to support this to provide those leave days to our employees as they would utilize them in the future those are is there actually a financial cost there is a financial cost in terms of those

122individuals that would be utilizing it and needing a substitute during that time but not all employees would need a substitute for that time that they take it just depends off when they take it well what's the alternative if they don't have the lead days they get they go unpaid correct any other questions okay do you have a motion i move that the board of the board approves the addition of five temporary leave days on september 15 2022 for certified and classified employees who were active as of may 15 2022 and who are returning for the 2022 2023 academic school you have a second okay any discussion see no discussion uh all in favor raise your right hand all opposed same sign motion carries i'm on the first what all the other okay next item is

123policy 311 review and dr panzook is again going to we have potential policy revision before you as with all policies this is just being presented tonight it will be up on our website for 30 days for input from anybody who wants to give input and we'll bring it back to you next time for action absolutely so this is a first read of a policy that we utilize uh currently right now um it dates back to the 1980s and we right now in our district we have approximately 180 students that are here because their parents work in the district they don't they don't live in district but this policy allows them to bring their children to our school district following our transfer policy in the past we've only utilized this for employees who live in the

124state of kansas but we do have some flexibility because of the state the state allows us to accept students outside of the state if their parents are working in the district and if you look at a metropolitan area of kansas city we have many employees on both sides of the state line so it's only natural for us to look at this policy and expand it not just for our employees who live in kansas outside of blue valley but our employees who live outside of the state of kansas and outside the district so before you is a simple revision to the language that allows our employees who live in the state of missouri outside of of course this district to bring their students to the district through our transfer policy any questions can you reiterate can

125you reiterate again um so if an employee then decides to leave our district and go somewhere else then what happened yes their student would no longer be able to attend our schools because of the transfer policy and this policy they have to be actively employed with us any other questions so this morning at the at the board workshop gina asked whether this applied to bus drivers has that been talked about or considered they would have to become our employee for that to be applicable to bus drivers because they're a contracted employee they are not on our roles as a direct employee so that's by by law correct because they wouldn't be considered a district employee there'd be a contracted service so under this policy they wouldn't fit so we would have to have other conversations

126about that not not opposed to it i mean i do think it's worth conversation any other questions see none thank you dr buncord you bet we'll bring that back to you next month for approval uh the next uh agenda item is the legislative update dr i'll merrigan over here um so we're in the middle of legislative session so i think kyle is over there is going to pull up there we go a legislative update um of what's going on in topeka first of all we want to thank our legislators in topeka because we know that they have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time and and they put in a lot of hours during this time so i'm just going to present you with some facts about what's going on

127up there one is a legislative calendar they have they are meeting now february 24th is the last day so it's coming up pretty quick for non-exempt bills in their house of origin either the house or the senate march 23rd to 23rd is the last day for non-exempt bills in either chamber april 1st is the first adjournment so they have to get most of their work done by april 1st and then the legislatures take a break from april 2nd to the 24th and then they come back for a veto session so that gives you an idea it's kind of fast and furious right now lots going on lots of committee hearings happening each day so the board in december adopted their priority positions and there were four of them the first one is that we believe

128that we should be funded special education should be funded at the statutory amounts statutorily i believe it's 92 percent we're supposed to be funded at and we are somewhere in the 60s that we were funded at last year apply at-risk funding to define student measures at-risk funding in kansas is based mainly on free not mainly it's on free and reduced the number of students on free and reduced and blue valley for several years along with other districts has really asked about other measures to define at-risk whether that be assessment scores whether that be english as a second language what are some other measures that we could look at enhanced student mental health both in our schools and but also in our communities um you know the community resources for mental health are are not almost

129non-existent in some cases and then finally the last one is the tax credits and vouchers for private schools um to eliminate those so those were the priority positions there were other positions that the board adopted but those four were really at the top of the list we have provided testimony for three different uh bills the first one is we were a proponent so we tested fight in favor of this dan carney went to topeka last week and testified in person and this senate bill 435 would expand a law enforcement officer's jurisdiction to include situations where they could intervene if somebody's life was in in jeopardy so the way dan described it to me is if one of our officers is driving in front or driving from one school to another and they see an accident

130they can't stop and intervene and our campus officers are trained police officers have as much training and would like to assist and to be of support so he was asked to come and testify and he did testify in support of this the second one we testified we were not a proponent of we were an opponent of it and this is the house bill 2550 the student empowerment act um this is the uh voucher system and so we testified in writing uh for that one and in a minute i'm going to show you where these testimonies are if anybody wants to go and look at actually what we said that hearing was held in the house k-12 budget committee on february 1st and then the other one house bill 2553 would allow students to transfer to

131any school district in the state we did testify as an opponent of that one mainly because that is a logistical nightmare in a district the size of blue valley if you think about it we have students move in throughout the year so we start in august and we may have students leave and come throughout the year and if we fill our classrooms and then somebody shows up moves into our district a month into the school year we can't tell them sorry we're full we have to take that person as we should because they are a student within our district we just believe that the resources in our district should be used for the taxpayers within our district so that's why we testified we testified on this one with olathe had some common points there so

132we have on our district website a page around legislation and all of the testimony that we have is placed on that website additionally any updates we give during the board meeting or any other presentations we would give around this will be on that website as well so that's just a brief update of kind of some happenings in topeka right now and again they have lots of legislation going on right now bills being worked on hearings on a daily basis for lots of different things dr american can you back up a couple slides so our legislative priorities if we can just remind everyone the very first point funds special education at statutory amounts um our kids don't go without correct correct just just remind us so um statutorily is it 95 92 okay so we are

133supposed to be funded at 92 percent for special education which means that we are supposed to recoup 92 percent of our costs uh that is not happening um we are at 60. it's in the 60s 64. about 64 percent no our students don't go without what that means is that we have to go to the general fund um to pay for those things because if uh we have a student on with an iep um we are required by law to provide those resources for that student good question thank you that 64 is is statewide or is that specific to blue valley it's specific to blue valley but the 92 percent statewide right correct is anybody funded at 92 do we know i'm looking at my friends no i don't think so okay and are we

134way below or above or kind of close to our peer districts i'm not sure i'm not sure how it compares exactly i would guess we're a little bit below that's what i was going to say too just because we tend to have a little higher ratio of high needed students than maybe some of our neighbors dr martin i got a hypothetical about 25-53 okay so if i have a child that's amazing at pick any sport and i live in olathe can i play for the blue valley teams under that bill well um what that bill says i i think it depends on what ends up coming out of that and also the rules that we put in place because it does say that the local boards of education would put rules in place in order

135to accept or deny someone so we would have to identify what some of those reasons are but hypothetically could that happen yes and hypothetically somebody could some favorite booster could contact me and say gee we need your favorite child to come play for the sport right hypothetically hypothetically that could happen yes okay and what kind of impact would that have on our programs well again i think it would depend on what rules we put in place uh in order but for me the issue is we have students within our blue valley boundary that our parents are paying taxes uh et cetera and i believe they should be serviced first okay thank you if i can just sitting in on some kansas school board meetings there's plenty of school board members across the state that are

136concerned about this because of the the uh losing of students um from from you know their for for whatever reason basketball let's say right and so maybe you know one certain district or school gets loaded up with their basketball players um that come from pretty far away so there's there's there's a lot of issues that the scenarios that could happen plus as you recall we buttoned up our transfer policy years ago and like a lot of regards to athletics and activities and then in the way you could transfer if you will in my opinion worked out great and really balanced a lot of things here and there i think your question would be a nightmare especially monitoring it us coming up certain policies to offset it and then also dealing with the rules of acacia

137in regards to those type of things so this would be a tough one so so it would essentially have some sort of version of recruiting right could it could okay would it if it passed would we and we got would say 100 extra students will we get full funding on 100 extra students yes yes that yes we would so my concern with this would be around special ed because we have such great special ed programming and it's so it's so much more expensive than the money we get for the kids we're already being funded at so i assume we would anticipate an influx of special ed kids as well which would cause that 64 to even be lower right it could um and again we can set some parameters and some policies but i'm guessing

138our legal counsel would tell us that one of them should not necessarily be do they have an iep right i mean we wouldn't ever want that to be a factor for our students any other questions see none thank you thank you okay let's move on to our final agenda item and that's a covet update so we have no formal presentation we talked about this with with the board all of our data is up on our website um around our coveted numbers around our illness we we do that daily um it is put up there um and we're open for discussion and and dr schmidt dr pinswick dr collier myself any of us would be happy to answer questions if you have them tom do you have questions you want to start with no i think

139i think the decision tonight is it was you know obviously there's a meeting with the county on thursday with the candidly a high probability that they'll rescind the mass mandates i think we have decisions tonight on whether we you know i think the options are you could immediately in the mass mandate tonight and starting tomorrow for mass optionals from k-12 you could wait on the county and like we've been talking about and as soon as that falls off our policies that we've made before are rescinded as well automatically per the policies that we have in place which so that would take place because kids are out friday monday right so that take place next tuesday and then other variations of that whether you want to keep that policy with percentages and backstops or extend or

140whatever so i mean that's the conversation that probably needs to take place from one end of the spectrum to the other in my opinion so just my thoughts to get some conversation going then we can take it from there jordy um well you know we're just coming off of a spike right so what three weeks two and a half weeks ago you know you were covering and your your administrative staff were we're out in the the schools we had last i recall uh a couple weeks ago we had a third of our um cafeteria workers uh were out busing is still an issue now bus drivers we've had a shortage issue for a while but that was exacerbated and and because of sickness so i mean we're coming off of that so i do have

141concerns about about too soon because i want these kids to be able to finish out their year so those are some of the things i'm thinking about the johnson county health department still has us in a high bracket so um those are those are some things like i said concerned about looking towards thank you jody katie yes and first i do want to say that i understand and i empathize with the fear that everyone is feeling i do understand that we were just in a peak and that we are coming down out of that i understand i have someone near and dear to me that has an autoimmune disease and um it's very rare so i do understand i do not want anything that i say to ever come across is that i do not

142understand because i do i am personally in favor of um allowing for people to choose whether or not they would like to wear a mask i'm sure that surprises no one and i also respect everyone else's opinions on this matter i'm just going to state why i feel that way but i do um understand jodi's point and to tom's point as well there's a lot of different scenarios that i'm sure we're going to discuss so i just want to leave that open um these are this is my points broken down as simple as i can so that i don't take it forever so looking at the cdc on surgical masks they are not considered respiratory protection why does this matter because we were told last year that sars covent ii is aerosolized so if it's

143airborne dr areola stated during the january 6 22 board of county commissioners meeting that infections in schools does not drive community spread of the virus he also stated that cloth masks are not effective against the highly infectious omicron and that n95 masks are not appropriate unless professionally fit tested nor are they for children he did state that niosh is the agency who will address mask issues when i went to niosh they specifically state they do not approve of any type of respiratory protection for children i.e in 95s and you could also deduce from that kn-95s and the korean mask as well the acgih states the following statistics if one person's person is infected in a room if you have no mask to another unmasked there's a 15 minute transmission time you have a cloth mask

144to another cloth mask 27 minutes transmission time the surgical mask to another surgical mask is a one hour transmission time our kids are in school for seven hours at least five days a week i do not think that that we are preventing transmission we do not have any studies available on the act of double masking children which is usually what people bring up next we have no studies on that what it what it can do how it can affect them socially emotionally education wise that concerns me we're getting to the point where it's now accepted in a nonpartisan and scientific way that the psychological and physiological effects of masking our children may be far more damaging than the marginal benefits of masking talking about speech development learning loss social emotional lags and mental health which

145we know right now we are in a severe crisis um a few of our speakers also mentioned too we have several other states removing them we have you know we have non-partisan people speaking out a couple people mentioned cnn that kind of stuff i think is important to note that i do think we're coming down off of this um our private schools most of them are unmasked all of our athletics are unmasked i have a very difficult time explaining to my nine-year-old why i went with her to a basketball game where no one was masked in a school and they have masks at their school it's at the end of the day we're gonna have to look back and we're gonna have to answer to our kids and i understand and i know why we

146did what we did and in 2020 and 2020 one we absolutely did the best we could with the best we knew how i do understand i know why we did what we did we didn't have the data but i don't want to look my kids in the eye in five years and have them ask me why did you continue to do this to me when you knew better so that's all i have thank you katie amy [Applause] i don't think i have much more to add other than to say i would just piggyback on what tom said a little bit that as a continuing board member we've talked about wanting to stay aligned with the county so with the decisions being made this week or future meetings um if if this week is not the

147week they decide to do something that i i believe at least from what we've said as a board that that's something to consider thank you gina so i maintain my stance that we have to go along with what our medical community recommends to us we've seen the heads of all the doc hospitals systems in the area urges to continue in masks and we've had 200 doctors write us a letter saying that we need to be in masks so i just want to reiterate that our medical community who are the experts on this issue are telling us to stay masked i think we're close but we're not there yet we are a week or two like jody said out of this spike and i think we need to give it a little bit more time thank

148you gina jim uh the main point that i have brought up a number of times is that in our county our county commission which has a which which put their order in place at the beginning of the school year also has direct they have indirect authority over the schools but they have direct authority over the courthouse uh the libraries so you can walk out of cedar hills elementary school where you've been masked all day you can drive down your parent can drive you down to blue valley library at 151st and or even better you can go you can walk out of sunrise point you can walk across the parking lot and walk into to a johnson county government-controlled facility and the sign on the door says if you're vaccinated then you know we you you

149you can you should you should follow cdc i mean i don't know their guidance on their door is like six months old i don't even think it's cdc guidance anymore but the point is is that they don't require it in their in the buildings that they control but they they've advised to to do it in buildings they don't control so if if our community was ultimately behind masking and other mitigation um device uh you know measures they would close all the bars first where where generally overweight and unhealthy people are hanging out really close to each other and infecting each other and they'd allow our children in schools to be unmasked that's been my consistent theme frustration with the whole thing and i and i i don't believe that we're doing any good by masking

150little children i just i think it does no good particularly when it's like no cova doesn't exist except in our elementary schools that frustrates me and so i i i could get behind it if our community was like we're closing down everything and uh but we don't we're not behind that's we're nowhere close to that it is like a free-for-all everywhere you go except in our elementary schools so that's those are my points thank you jim any thing you'd like to add additionally dr morgan no the only thing i wouldn't i just want to double check with dr penswick um last week were we 100 every day for subs um so was it just last week or did we start the week before i can't remember okay and we're not using district staff currently district

151staff is back to doing their normal jobs at this point so we're those are just truly subs that we're filling because sometimes i think it's misleading when we say we filled everybody but we use the whole district office to go do it so so i just wanted to to reiterate that our our sub situation has improved it has been it hasn't been a long time jody you are correct but we're going on a week and a half now that we've been in really good shape and thank you to our subs who are listening because we need you thank you dr merrigan uh i'd like to thank our subs also um and everybody that's participated in this conversation this is a difficult and challenging issue for um everybody i don't think it's it's quite so simple

152for for anybody um i will say that um you know based on on the information that i've seen and read um you know we do have our local doctors at ku they still say you know we're covered good and i'm not sure i got the quilt right but we're not covered clear i believe that many of our local health providers still say that we need to follow the science you know we have many in our district that may be auto immune compromised may provo govern may provo propose a number of challenges you know we we do have significant number of kids in in our special education program they in particular may have uh a number of challenges and um you know for that reason i i would i believe we still need to follow the

153science that our local community is recommending um but i do realize it's a difficult issue and there are many elements that um go to this particular issue that have to be considered anybody have any other comments i appreciate all my board members professional and collegial approach tonight to this conversation i know we're not all on the same page but i know that we all are very passionate about the school and the kids and how we feel what our obligation responsibility is real quick mr president so counsel melissa and dr morgan again i'm because i'm just talking out loud because i want everybody understand if we did nothing tonight this meeting didn't exist no motions pass and the county rescinded their mask mandate thursday our masked mandate completely falls off k-12 correct or becomes optional am

154i correct uh that is our understanding or that is my understanding as well yes that is what you're not in your head okay so that that okay i'm just playing out different scenarios here okay okay which would go in effect whatever they decide immediately or friday it could be friday but we're out of school so okay and just to confirm then there would be no threshold or fallback if if things spiked again we would have nothing um to correct if you if you do nothing and end the county rescinded their order um we would be back to square zero or ground zero whatever you call it dr american can you talk a little bit about i mean pre-covid the days of flu or colds and all that good stuff what what kind of maybe not

155formal thresholds are in place but what do we do and what's the the percentage absentee rate where we do do some different things so when we hit 10 i'm looking at mark just for confirmation when we hit 10 percent um we work with the health department um the there is no threshold that says oh but 10 you're closing a building at 10 or 11 percent you're closing a building because there are different scenarios for example um i even hate to say this but in high school it might be a senior skip day and you hit 10 percent well you certainly wouldn't you would want to have those anecdotal you know pieces of information but we we would work with the health department we would continue to monitor it our nurses we hit 10 percent early

156on in one of our elementaries and our nurse at that building was immediately on the phone with tara our district nurse and mark and the health department to identify what was going on in that building so just to expand on that a little bit if there to jody's point if there isn't a formal threshold there's action in place with the administration building administration that would kick in as certain levels were reached if needed absolutely okay like we've done pre-cobit right i mean trust the administration and nurses and the head of nursing just to make great rational decisions based off that i think on that too even living through coveted we're all going to be more aware and so even as we're inching up towards 10 i'm sure we're going to have a pretty good head

157start count even before we get there would be my guess too correct i'd like to think so but yeah i guess from what i'm i'm hearing in the community though is is there's a certain comfort level with having at least some type of threshold that that helps the decision making when we hit that if we hit that you know hopefully we don't get anywhere near right hopefully the spike is is going down and and we can finish out the year um so i'm i'm i'm i'm not comfortable with leaving it completely wide open without at least some some type of threshold is that ten percent number total absenteeism then ten percent we start looking cleaning procedures as well and at 10 is when we are asked to contact the health department so that they're aware

158that we have something brewing and we give them the breakdown of how many of these were illness or how many of these were anything else quite honestly if if we say we're at ten percent absence and five percent illness they're they're not that concerned uh but if we tell them ten percent are out with similar stomach issues or something like that then they give us some direction on things that we should be telling our community about prevention and staying home etcetera so the 10 is when you contact the health department is total absenteeism so total absenteeism is when we contact them but then we keep them updated on that and anytime we have five five percent increase in absenteeism they also want to have that update as well gotcha do we do have the authority

159then to remove the mask may nathan correct tonight if we if we voted and had a majority vote yes any other comments okay well i mean so are you ready for a motion if you want to make a motion okay so and we'll start with for discussion i suppose i moved the board of education in the event the johnson county board of commissioners removes the current elementary school mass mandate on february 17th adopt a mask mandate until april 4th which is two weeks after spring break we know that's um gets us through that next big event that we have coming up for all staff and students in grades early childhood through 8th grade and mask optional for grades 9 through 12 and the 18 to 21 program except when total absenteeism of staff and students

160in any of the six high schools at any time is eight percent or over then math will be mandatory for two weeks from the last date absenteeism is eight percent are over for grades 9 through 12 and 18 to 21 program for a second so quick question so um by seconding then we can have discussion on that yeah right and possibly modification to that sure okay i'll second that then motion regina second uh by jody uh discussion on the motion outside of what we've already discussed no discussion all in favor of the motion raise your right hand all opposed same sign [Applause] motion fails three to four any other um conversation or motions for this evening um i'll make a motion okay um i'll read it um i move that the blue valley board of

161education rescind its current board policy regarding face masks thereby allowing face masks to be optional in all blue valley facilities effective immediately [Applause] any discussion jody um any thought to modification to the the threshold of maybe an eight percent such as what olathe does uh shawnee mission probably will go to an eight percent or or you know what we've talked about with ten percent on a building by building level or the district level building by building which is how we've handled things in the past right since the second semester we had right so it would be localized to any outbreaks that occurred within that local area and so then what dr american what do you have to do to track that at the building is it just is that an easy you know click a

162button each morning well it's currently we are tracking it um it's on our district website right now we because that's what we've been doing for high school it's it's there for elementary and middle school as well so that we figured out a way to do that to track it um we would have to figure out a way to communicate it effectively on a building by building basis with 37 attendance centers but it couldn't be done of course we could figure out a way to do that but it it would have to be individually tracked at each building and the communication would be building by building because it would be different from mission trail for example than it would be at leeward elementary don't you are already track that to report to the health department though

163how do you report to the health department if you don't have that information so the nurse at the building if the nurse at the building hits those thresholds they track it and communicate to mark and tara go ahead no i i just gonna say exactly what you said so yeah they they know uh it's just a higher stake um communication with the mass when massacre relying on it yes we have procedures in place we could do that dr merrigan is correct it communicating out to 37 different buildings is is a challenge but it's a challenge we we can certainly accomplish i'm assuming if it's localized though you're not communicating to 37 different buildings you're communicating with the buildings that only reach that issue or am i reading this wrong it'd only be like morse right

164or correct okay um yes it would just be the morris community but it would be for morris it might be this two weeks and for well springs it might be this two weeks and so it would be different from building the the big the biggest challenge i'm sorry interrupting is actually when we end the two weeks and we have you know trying to keep track of when or each when's each building coming off of their two-week time where we reassess the mask masking that that was the more challenging aspect of it with the high schools again not insurmountable um just telling you how we would go about doing that any other uh well let me just jody you're asking i guess it's the procedure here is i made the motion if i if if we

165have discussion and i want to modify the motion then i have to make the modification that that base the parliamentary procedure here so uh jody uh this motion might get your vote if we had some modification to this to add a perce a percentage um threshold that is correct and the the thing that i've tried to avoid in in in some um or that i think that would be good to avoid would be adding administrative burden to to track and then um implement you know two week duration of masking or i guess it's masking until the numbers have fallen below a certain number so we're going to be in the middle of a spike it's going to be you know this is what's going to have to happen right because what's our absentee right now

166it's got to be down to three four three percent four percent in that range three to five that's under five and what's it normally in a in 2019 and before what was our normal absentee rate in the middle of february i mean i don't have these percentages make i think you know to me i i i'm just be throwing stuff i'd set it as high as possible to you know as i possibly could to get your vote so um and to make it like but you know the difference is being practical yeah you have to do what you have to do i'm just so i'm but i'm but i appreciate what your perspective is which is if we're in the middle of a spike then the only thing that that triggers it is either the

167district going to the health department or i'll have calling a special meeting yes i mean i can appreciate your perspective so our current currently our elementaries as of february 11th which was last friday because today's not up there yet obviously um all are under three percent one building is at four point five six percent for illness and and remember this isn't total absentee rate this is just the illness rate because that's what the last motion had was for us to track covet percentage and percentage of those who are ill okay what if instead of installing a uh top percentage rate that we would say because we do know when we're going to hit 10 percent if we trigger a special meeting with the board to discuss it because it's so hard it's so hard to

168make emotion with that because i understand where you're coming from it does add that level of comfort um we may never hit that again we you know which would be great um but we may end up with like stomach bugs or there's no way to predict the future so i think a smarter thing would be saying if we reach that level of absenteeism let's trigger a special board meeting so we discuss it and come to a decision right then and there instead of saying automatically mass because you know what if the next illness is stomach related and not or have the administration make those decisions as well yes let's let them do their job yep all right so tom what would that what would the language change be to to let them do their job

169i don't want to coach you here but maybe you run your motion i need to see what happens coaching maybe you run your motion and see what happens then we can do a couple different scenarios here to see what we can get here it's like a mind twist any other uh comments uh from the board members on the motion uh then let's go to vote all those in favor of jim's motion would you restate your motion jim just one more time please make sure i'm reading the right one i move that the blue valley board of education rescinded current board policy regarding face masks thereby allowing face masks to be optional in all blue valley facilities effective immediately okay all those in uh favor of the motion raise your right hand i need a second

170katie second chance um so all those in favor where's your right hand all those opposed uh motion fails 4-3 tom any other comments okay so um so gina's motion failed with all the parameters right loaded up with parameters and distant dates failed four to three and we just had that one fail four to three as well yeah uh gina's motion essentially kept the current practice in place through april basically correct okay and that failed and that failed and then this one failed motion immediately immediately that failed so i think the two options maybe still left on the table are kind of what jody was alluding to which is optional with a percentage or we do nothing and assuming when the county makes a decision to repeal the mass mandate then as we stated then it's

171optional at that point i think those are probably the two options left without getting horribly complicated i think that's a fair characterization amy is either do nothing or come up with some motion in the middle of the two hey tanya would you mind reminding me what olathe has done my understanding is that beginning friday of this week that it is optional and that they are going to check total absenteeism not illness but just total absenteeism and if it hits eight percent uh i can't remember if it's seven or eight percent but i think it might be eight um eight percent then it would trigger the two weeks in each building so no math and their stop gap if it hits eight percent with total absenteeism total absenteeism that's including everything every everything personal visits college

172visits um not that anybody right right it it it was in total absences and the motion that we had or the policy we currently are under is those we're looking at illness coven or other illnesses good no no i'm saying so your options could be we we could um make the motion to rescind the order immediately following the recision from the johnson county uh vote on thursday so which would automatically happen anyway that we can make a motion of that with no parameters no seven percent snope 10 is an option you could go back to jim's motion and add on the 10 type of rule if we wanted to do that or that would trigger some sort of the board getting back together or something like that if we wanted to do this immediately but

173your first example i don't know that we need to do that i mean if if we land in a spot where we we've voted on everything we can vote on and there's nothing left to vote on yeah i'm just trying to come up with a so our people know that the mask ordinances it would clarify it would clarify that it's going away when their kids return from school next tuesday uh but if that doesn't pass then true what do you do then yeah so um true i know i just i just asked the same question dr america but if you're if it seems unlikely but who the heck knows that absentee rates are going to you know exceed 10 percent or what any of these percent percentage thresholds but um again the tracking of that

174is in the absence of it staying down in this three percent four percent range is no no real burden the burden is if it if it gets up above that and then every school is going into a a two-week mask period which would probably mean that we as a board need to reconsider something that's a little easier to implement but i don't have a solution for you know be nice to have not something that's going to be difficult to implement but um that's my otherwise i make the motion and that i made and add a percentage threshold that is relatively easy to to monitor so maybe jim it sounds like you're saying if there's also a district absenteeism that gets up to a certain amount you do a district-wide masking policy i mean you guys

175know what you're saying or may i i don't know the the what's your what do you what would be your suggestion there i mean that's that would be my suggestion if if we have a widespread breakout right so they don't have to have this administrative burden of tracking if the district's at eight percent that district-wide everybody goes to mosques illness absentee yeah that's why it's that's why it's up high abs total absentees and that's why it's up so high at eight percent i mean that's what i'm hearing yeah that might be frankly to me it's better than rolling the dyson and hoping that johnson county makes a decision um you know i don't know they're politicians too so well the other thing to me is they're plus it's our decision the administrative burden would be

176the same if we wait for the health department and we have 37 elementary schools that hit the 10 and we're working with the health department with 37 elementary schools that seems like a greater burden to me than the the you know implementing the mask um because what we're what i'm hearing is either way there would be something happening but one way we're working with the health department in a large breakout large scale breakout situation and otherwise we have a masking by elementary school can i take a stab at one sorry it's the tent and try to find a compromise here but i don't know if we'll get there but i think it gives us more discussion to what you guys are talking about now i moved that the blue valley board of education rescind its

177current board policy regarding face masks thereby allowing face masks to be optional in all blue valley facilities effective immediately except that in the event the superintendent determines that infection or absenteeism rates require an individual building to return to a temporary mass requirement she may impose such a temporary requirement second discussion so there's no threshold there's just like arbitrary so i found the balance between some folks and rescinding this effective immediately and then i've given our superintendent the authority and her team to to make rational smart decisions and at the same time not have to continuously monitor a lot of these things which is a concern of a few i personally hate to put that on dr merrigan jim did you have another comment you're going to ask dr american do you want that to think

178that really is invites more problems in it well i'm not naive after two years to think that no matter what we do tonight it's not going to create some angst for somebody um again i would say that i can live with this if if that's what the board chooses um the board would have to live with our decision however if if we have a outbreak in a school and um you know that that will be the the challenge is that people will second guess what we've decided to do well that's why i'm wondering if setting a a threshold would would help everyone understand plus it makes maybe we make better choices if rates are getting a little higher we know we're getting closer to a threshold and it's something to try to maintain you know

179a number underneath that i guess it could create stability when we have a number in mind that's and i would just add that this to me feels like kind of back to normal a little bit i mean back in the day when it was you know flu stomach flu whatever it may be you were making you it would have been dr white at the time but we're making those kind of decisions as needed with your administration any other comments okay should we add a minimum because my concern with that is i i don't want um dr merrigan to start getting emails as soon as they hit five six seven eight percent and demanding a reconsideration at every percentage point we creep because that creates more work so there would have to be a minimum yeah

180i don't i don't want dr merrigan as everybody knows to be any more burden i want her to be able to do her job i'm just trying to get some conversation and some well whether it be quote unquote our administrative authority to do certain things yeah whether it be a minimum or maximum i mean making clear expectations i think is important here um i i would love yeah i mean i think dr merrigan and her staff make you know great decisions but but i think everybody needs to understand what that threshold is to make it very clear for our community yeah i think a certain amount of clarity and communication would be absolutely necessary and important here because like so many of you have said there will be challenges regardless of what we do in

181terms of the community's understanding and perspective and interest in the motion that we're considering or ultimately end up doing yeah i mean i seconded that motion but i you know i do think it's better for us to if we're going to have some limit some fail-safe basically that it'd be some objective standard and easy to implement so we so what we currently are tracking is the coveted numbers covered percentage and illness numbers and illness percentage so that's what we've been tracking since you all made that motion earlier or actually since december yeah since since december so that's what we've been tracking so if you're going to ask us to track something different we might need a little time to well to get that in place here's what i'm wondering i mean we we know that

182that it's almost obsolete the covet tracking we don't have that tool anymore um correct i mean the health department well contact tracing no we are not contact tracing you're correct we what we have are true covet positive numbers at this point we also have total absenteeism right we have total well sure we have total epstein's but we have not been tracking that what we've been tracking is illness do you track um i guess you gotta do this but building my building you don't do it over the district it's not i mean again this isn't there's no there's no uh you know run the uh absentee report today for the whole district well so we've we've programmed it to mark and his team have worked with our it team and so we have a daily report

183that gives us again those two things you asked us for which is covid and illness those are the two things that we report every day on the website so every day somebody runs that report every day somebody puts it up on the website and we review it on a daily basis i i would i would only caution about using total total absenteeism because i heard somebody mention senior skip day or if a choir choir trip is taking place and the kids are still listed as absent on that date and so we could get well above 10 percent just on approved activities if they're on a school activity they wouldn't show up though on that report but senior skip day would be uh we need to quit saying that we're we're encouraging it i know um

184but college visits uh a personal day uh if you so i would if we put this into place the friday or the thursday before spring break likely would have a bunch of absences because many people have to leave early or come back late you know those kinds of things so what about rescinding the order and then triggering a special board meeting when we reach a district illness rate of 10 percent we would have to convene make a plan and go from there illness rate not absenteeism because we don't want to penalize for vacation days um skip days and anything else going on um injury bereavement etc is that enough of a metric no so if i might it seems to me we've we've got um some some belief that we need to remove the mass

185mandate but there needs to be some metric like eight percent of absolutism that seems to be where uh the positions are resonating um and so so i appreciate your comment katie um but just listening to everybody's comments it seems to me that's kind of where everybody's at right now and the question is um is is that part of something that the board wants to entertain uh going forward and you'd have to make an amendment obviously but that seems to be where the positions are you want me to try an amendment i don't think i don't know if i've got the words right here we may have to tweak further we can tweak it i move the blue board of education rescind its current board policy regarding face masks thereby allowing face masks to be optional

186in all blue valley facilities effective immediately unless any single building exceeds eight percent illness absenteeism rate or cobit 19 infection rate at which time the superintendent may issue a temporary requirement that students staff and visitors in that building return to wearing face masks all right i i'm um i guess you have to second that motion right or can we discuss it before that oh yes similar second guess i'll second it but then i'll make a comment to suggest a revision the the um i'm not i'm obviously i want face masks removed what i what i i think is somewhat of a silly exercise is when i i get that there are spikes in one place and not in other places but generally i mean we saw this last month and we've seen it in prior

187you know if it's spiking and i don't know if it's spiking it at cedar hills it's probably spiking at you know uh every other elementary school so within the degrees it's in our community so it seemed to me that if we were going to have some percentage threshold say 8 illness absenteeism that it would it would trigger something it could be a mask you know a district-wide mask um i mean i might i don't want to suggest that we ought to put kids in mass all across the district but one it seems unlikely two it would take effect immediately and three it it it might have support from a majority of the board what do you think about instead of doing all these tracking mechanisms we just use county numbers and say when county numbers

188hit a certain threshold then we go back to masking that'd make it more simple for everybody and what i don't even know what the county numbers would be what would we track i don't even have a suggestion i would ask i would vote no on that i'm sorry i and i know i don't get to vote so i guess i'm just giving you my opinion so yeah well i was just thinking i don't get to vote i know that right but uh wouldn't be anything that's what we did last year and it was a mess it was not fun no it was a mess from what i recall um last year so i i would i do like the aspect of keeping things local and and our district you know keeping it as close to

189to the local level as possible so i i appreciate what you've said but it from experience it didn't work out like a person would think it would yeah i mean if if you take it from the perspective that we have home rule authority we can use any metrics we want but certainly it would be in line to use our own metrics particularly i think jody was saying that some of the county numbers were somewhat difficult to appreciate if i i'm correct but please correct me if i misstated what you're saying that is my example um jim did you have something you wanted to amend or well it's not mine to amend but or don't the only the only suggestion would be um to make it a district-wide policy as opposed to requiring the administration to

190track every single yeah the wild the thing in here and listening is the tonya factor because i so i softened it and said superintendent may issue a temporary requirement and so um we can try again i can amend and and make it a district thing make it a will but that would be the total percentage for the district had to be eight percent or greater is not a single bill no i would still we would want to do a single building so that would be to you is it easy to get the single district to higher get all that number and put it together to get a district i'm sure i'm sure we could get that so the individual building numbers are easier than the district it's just i'm sure we could right now we

191have a report that just generates every day that gives us this so we just i mean you just add it up yeah we could get the district average i don't love the idea of using a single building to determine what we're doing i know the tracking piece i get that but because there are you know could be unique events or something that caused an outbreak so i pulled up just i was curious back to the early january when we first came back and and numbers were high our elementaries i pulled up one particular day ranged from 12 of illness rate um all the way down to uh two percent so there was quite a bit of variance on that particular day and some the other thing i would say is some of our elementaries are

192really small and so when you're a smaller elementary and you maybe don't have that many it just it's a higher percentage but it did vary on this particular day again from 2 to 11 to 12 actually tom did you actually well i just i can't tell if we want to go single building or if we want to go just i don't understand the district-wide one how that would make trying to simplify the process of tracking you know again the point is is that if if one school gets above eight percent the likelihood of there being like 17 schools that are above eight percent is high and so or whatever the percentage is in which case then you have 17 different spreadsheets people have you know you got to call up xyz principle and say no

193you're off on this date etc which is um when in reality if we were you know for if we think that masks are a necessary component of the mitigation strategy then we should just put it across the board but again not that i'm supported but but i'm trying to also you know strike a compromise here i think what jim is suggesting is is that if if one school is above whatever the threshold is it's likely that many or all the others are probably also based on our experience and then administratively it seems to be a whole lot easier to manage if i'm hearing you correctly yeah um is that true that administratively easier well logistically again 37 is somebody identifying when do you start when do you stop if you do it district-wide it's the

194whole thing so yes it would be but i'm not advocating one way or the other for that but yes in answer to your question i can't tell district-wide is is a better formula or people think at ten percent or per building at eight percent and then if it's per building like at eight percent and we mask for two weeks does it have to be below eight percent for a couple weeks or is it immediately when it falls after two weeks like we've been doing that would be up to wasn't the motion well no i'm just trying to find another compromise to pull dr merrigan there's another element there that would create some administrative um uncertainty as to how long and and what's the threshold to go back to the apparent normal right that's what you're

195concerned about time correct yeah yeah yeah so if we did until absentee resumes are below eight percent for two full weeks you can read that you know seven different ways um i don't know again it's like a lightning strike in a ballgame though right tom like you'd wait you'd go from the last time it was not from the first what we've been doing well i think that was just misinterpreted i don't deem it misinterpreted i mean i i we followed it like i thought we were supposed to call it and and ended when that the two weeks was over and if we were below it we did that so what was the highest coveted spike we had in the high schools percentage do we know at what percentage it was under four percent is somewhere

196right right over three was the highest covenant it never went above four okay the highest absence of t rhythm absenteeism rate was what i know we added everything in there 10. well tony just said on one day it was anywhere from that was elementary okay in which they have a smaller population based we got up to high school got up to nine uh close to ten and then started to come back down yeah based on my previous comments it is manageable to do it on an individual basis it's just it's a little more complicated but we can do it it it'll be simple in comparison to some of the other things that we've done as a district let me try again so i can go ahead and try again can i throw a suggestion out

197yeah please um would would be to only track the high schools and if and if the rates exceeded x percent at any two high schools then it triggered a district-wide mass mandate and stopped tracking it at the junior at the junior high school in the middle schools and the elementary schools and the high schools are a reflection of the rest of the community anyway is that generally consistent with what you're seeing mark and dr merrigan just to throw that i mean being a parent of a middle school kid there's plenty of families that only have elementary and middle school kids so to say that that my son's middle school is reflective of the high school is probably not a great correlation no i but it seemed that when you had to spike it in a

198certain area blue valley you had a spike in all three of the feeders yeah okay that was that was the only point is it's a it's a reflection of different geographic areas yeah the only thing i would say here is i um i watched a uh shawnee mission board meeting and just as a point of reference i don't know if that was one month or two months ago but they basically got to a point where they said we're making this way too completed and i'm worried we're getting to that point here when we're talking about two buildings in this building and that building and it look i just want to make sure we're going back to the core of what the majority of us think we should do and that we're not making this so

199complicated because it it's just getting pretty intertwined at this point right so so what we have on the table is removing the mass mandate and then putting in a stop gap and that's the conversation about what the stab stop gap is in the event that it rises either by building or by district wide a certain percentage like eight percent sure why not 10. okay don't try again tom sure i moved to the blue valley board of education rescind its current board policy regarding face master by allowing face masks to be optional in all blue valley facilities effective immediately unless any single building exceeds 10 percent absenteeism rate at which time students staff and visitors in that building would be required to wear face masks until absenteeism rates are below 10 percent for two full weeks

200so when you say after illness yeah you need to can you use sorry that before we second ever i don't think i'm on the same page as katie let's clarify the absenteeism right is it illness or total i i would absolutely would want illness as well then yes i'm just winging it this so duet just illness or total absenteeism i think those are the two clarifiers um i just have a i have 10 absenteeism right here is what i have for the sake of what we had happened two months ago i think we need to clarify what absenteeism means there okay but you're the motion guy so you have to clarify okay try again i move that the blue valley board of education rescind its current board policy regarding face masks thereby allowing face masks

201to be optional in all blue valley facilities effective immediately unless any single building exceeds eight percent illness absenteeism rate at which time student staff and visitors in that building would be required to wear face mask until illness absenteeism rates are below ten percent for two full weeks he said eight percent oh did i say in ten that's right you said eight do you want eight or ten i want ten and we'll read it again yep okay hang in there i move that the blue valley board of education rescind its current board policy regarding face masks thereby allowing face masks to be optional in all blue valley facilities effective immediately unless any single building exceeds 10 percent illness absenteeism rate at which time students staff and visitors in that building would be required to wear face

202masks until illness absenteeism rates are below 10 percent for two full weeks there's your gray area okay i i think i think the staff would appreciate it so what's the clarity that you're thinking about well i would is is the word rolling if that's what you want is that clear enough yes if that's what you want if you want rolling so you want it to be today was the first day we were under eight percent and you want it to be two weeks every day that way um that's rolling to me two weeks after the last over ridge over ten percentage two weeks after the last time it went over that's really that's like when you're at the ball field and there's lightning that's what that is that's not what we've been doing that's not

203what we've been doing and that will that is true could go on but but if it's over that threat i mean we're trying to keep kids and and teachers in the classroom so if it if it's that bad it's bad for my i would miss becoming tired brains state what we're doing right now so right now if um two weeks ago on what's today the 14th so on january 30th i think that was the monday uh you hit the threshold so that's the day you start and so then two weeks from now today we would look at the threshold if today you were below that number then you met the the requirement and you could unmask if you were above that number we you had to do it for another two weeks so we did

204not go and look every single day to make sure every single day had been below so they could have been over every single day until today in theory yeah yeah i i think i think one of the issues here is we're changing the context of when the mask is utilized um it seems to me that now we're at rolling and somewhere between eight or ten percent uh you know realistically um it looks like it's it's rare that we've reached 10 percent um and we still have pretty high levels um so i guess those would be the two pieces that the percent and whether it's rolling or not top yeah counselor do you have any advice for my brain now and how to button up that last part so it's more clear is rolling lightning strikes

205yes i would want to keep it the way we're doing it now and i don't know what the exact wording is the building does not exceed if you wanted to be rolling then say two weeks below that the threshold or two weeks below ten percent that would be the rolling if you want it to be just two weeks and then reassess then then i would just say there's a two week two week masking and and reassess at that point i mean that that's what we've been doing the ease of communication so we don't end up sending out an email every every day about the new two week so part of the reason that this has become an issue is that we used to track this data weekly and then we were pushed to do it

206daily and so that's that's the issue when it was weekly it was easier um to understand when it's daily uh that's that has become the issue between the rolling or not rolling and how you wanted to do so if you go back to assessing weekly and we do a rolling that would be a lot easier now we've had it set up now to do it daily we can do it daily we don't want to go back sorry we're going to keep doing it the way we're doing it please and to pick back off of patrick that that is such a high threshold too that it would look like let's do the two week and then reassess like no rolling so the week or the day two weeks to the day that you said it we

207reassessed the data at that point we reassessed the data to see no no no no no no that's it's yeah so just for my own clarification you're saying 10 of illness but we will be reporting to the health department prior to that because that's 10 of absenteeism correct so this is really not a measurement now again we would we would report to the health department around ten percent of total absolute total absenteeism but then they might say well what is your and we might say well five percent of them are personal days bereavement college visits and they might say okay fine thank you right but so we would be reporting to the health department likely before this we would hit this metric even right we would have a conversation with them just so that they're

208aware yeah so this isn't really anything more than the health department thing it's less who knows what the health department would do right the health department doesn't um we don't we don't know right all we would be doing is talking to them uh in the time mark and i have been here they've never closed down a building um for flu uh or other illness they've had they've you know given us suggestions on cleaning and that kind of stuff but they've never closed down a building or put mitigation in place yeah it it it seems seems that the the threshold being for do we have a second did we have did you second a gym i don't think we did patrick because we were clarifying the eight and a ten um so yeah tom may need

209to read it for the seventh time and then we could um i've modified it you want to try it go for it right give a shot tom i move that the blue valley board of education rescind its current board policy regarding face masks thereby allowing face masks to be optional in all blue valley facilities effective immediately unless any single building exceeds 10 illness absenteeism rate at which time students staff and visitors in that building would be required to wear a face mask for two full weeks and at the end of those two weeks the illness absenteeism data will be reassessed is there a second second okay any second any discussion further on the terms so there's no it's not rolling and it's at ten percent right dr american is any gray areas in there that

210cause concern no mark no i think he's good too my main concern here is it's so different from what other districts like us are doing which olathe olathe and likely shawnee mission tonight they're both talking eight percent total absenteeism and this is basically neither i just hate to be totally way off from what they do i know we like to try to stay consistent with them as much as possible if we take a vote or i mean at some point we gotta call a vote and just see where we're at yeah um you're interested in changing the total absenteeism eight percent no i went i'm going off ten percent because i know that's been a standard purse amy asking earlier that pre-coveted that was our general rule right the 10 whether it was a flu

211well that was total absenteeism they're not illness that wasn't all illness right it was total absenteeism when we started talking to the health department so any other comments you wouldn't modify it to total absenteeism i'll keep this motion here but we'll see how it goes is that is that okay you guys could and just a conv dr merrigan you said if we do this way of measuring you guys are set you've got what you need if we were to go to total there would be some adjustment to the reporting right doable doable but we would need a little bit of time to get it in place but yes just setting that expectation okay okay any other comments from anybody on the board okay so all in favor of the motion raise your right hand all

212in favor against motion passes four through okay our next item is adjournment um we do have a birthday coming up from gene on so happy birthday to gina um but do i have a motion to adjourn somebody else make a motion okay do i have a motion to adjourn i move we adjourn if i uh motioned by amy second by katie um let's uh all in favor raise your right hand all opposed same sign motion passes 7-0 thank you very much for those in the audience that stayed with us thank you for the staff for being here um thank you for all the work that you've done over covid and thank you for the board members for a good conversation thank you you