001and it shows up okay testing testing one two three all right the clock has uh struck six so we're ready to go uh we're going to start with the pledge of allegiance and officer rydel is going to leave us through that all right well our first item on the agenda tonight after the pledge of allegiance is administering the oath to our newly elected board members so sarah is going to help facilitate this that i will support the constitution [Applause] i think we have some family members here so gina do you want to introduce your family that's here yes thank you my husband's sitting over here stand up babe and my son lyndon he goes to northwest recent state football champions [Music] my daughter amelia goes to harmony middle and my son alaric also goes to
002harmony middle [Applause] so i'm here with my husband dave and my youngest everly my oldest keaton my second oldest son colton and my third oldest daughter of angeline that's fun to see everybody thank you the first or the next thing we need to do is um a board of education our election for board of education president so we do that on the calendar year and so that's our first item up tonight um sarah can you please read the list of nominees received for the role of board of education president oh good okay so amy tysling and patrick hurley are the two nominations that we have received are there any additions or deletions to this list okay if not at your seat there is a ballot if you would please fill out your name on the
003first line labeled board voter's name and then on the second line labeled board of education president nomination please write the name of your nomination for the role of board of education president then i will collect your ballots when you're done and i will read them out loud and we'll tally them so okay gina knapp nominated patrick curly patrick hurley nominated patrick early jim mcmullen nominated patrick hurley amy tyson nominated patrick hurley i'm sorry amy tyson nominated amy tysling my apologies jodie dietz nominated amy tysling katie bowers nominated patrick hurley and tom mitchell nominated amy tysling so it looks like four for patrick and three for amy patrick congratulations [Applause] so do we're going to move on to the next agenda item that would be the election of the board vice president sarah would you please
004read the list of nominees received for the role of vice president of the board of education yes those those persons are jodie dietz katie bowers and jim mcmullin will there be any additions or deletions to this list if no then in similar fashion please write your name on the top line and your nominee on the second line okay tom mitchell has nominated jodie dietz amy tysling has nominated jodie dietz gina knapp has nominated jim mcmullen jim mcmullen has nominated jim mcmullen patrick hurley has nominated jim mcmullen katie bowers has nominated jim mcmullen and jodie dietz has nominated jodie dietz congratulations jim [Applause] the next agenda item we'll be moving on to is the awards and recognition and we have a special recognition for good evening so this is usually what i would say is most
005people's favorite part of the board meeting because it gives us an opportunity to recognize some wonderful staff members today we have mikey paulie and clint ryder would you guys please come to the front now if you see that smile on their face it might be because these two pulled off a along with their team and the rest of the coach is a 6a championship in football at northwest this year so congratulations but you're here for even more than that um you know your state championship which is the beginning of you know the kinds of things and opportunities that happen through athletics and activities um it's valuable to the overall high school experience you know when there's team success individual success is soon to follow mikey paulie was awarded the simoni award and this is an
006award presented to the most outstanding high school foot player football player in the greater kansas city area he became just the fourth in blue valley's history to win the award congratulations to you and also your head coach clint ryder was also awarded the erie driscoll coach of the year award this award recognizes and rewards one kansas city area coach for superior performance while also shaping today's youth and tomorrow's leaders oh and a free trip to the super bowl 56 i think was in the cards too so let's give these two people a wonderful human beings a round of applause and once once again i think that goes to just speak the kinds of of humans that these um coaches develop in their their students so congratulations i think we're going to take a picture congratulations
007we're so proud of you now traditionally at our board of education meetings we also recognize a distinguished service and excellence in education award winner these special people go above beyond each day in our schools and across the district so would casey chambers please come forward with your supervisor jake slobodnick [Applause] casey chambers is one of our maintenance coordinators with um and he is being presented the distinguished service award casey has been with the district for five years we know that our maintenance coordinators play an important role in maintaining and supporting our schools and jake tell us why he's so outstanding i'm sure you're all wondering why i have a bunch of pink flowers for casey but i know he hates the attention so i'll keep this short and sweet casey you've been in the district
008for five years and you've managed over 50 000 work orders district wide across 60 buildings and 5 million square feet and while we all know that you're casey the maintenance guy i think your more important title is casey a dad and so i want to say thank you to lisa and kelby at kelby these flowers are for you but thank you for all of your hours that you put in both during the school day and after hours casey we couldn't uh function our schools without our maintenance staff because they may keep our schools clean and safe and um it's been just such a phenomenal thing to see our maintenance folks do that and what you do is phenomenal so we want to thank you for all that you do and thank your family as well
009because i agree it is a family effort so do you want to say anything thank you okay i love it short and sweet so many of the great outstanding things behind the scenes that are done for us we appreciate you all right would sandy ernst please come forward with fellow educator esl instructor from cottonwood point leslie hayden [Applause] do you have some flowers for her would you like to go give them to her oh that is so sweet we are excited to recognize sandy ernst kindergarten teacher at cottonwood point elementary school with an excellence in education award this school year is her 16th year in the district we're proud that our educators continue to provide all students with a solid foundation to achieve academic excellence leslie please tell us why sandy is so deserving of
010this award well i have a lot of things that i could say about sandy because she is an excellent educator i've worked with her for many years now and she's usually the one that bails me out of all of my the things that i need technology wise more importantly i get the honor to introduce her tonight our principal really wanted to be here tonight dr spencer but she is not able to be here so i get the honor to read her words for sandy and dr spencer says good evening blue valley esteemed patrons parents staff and board of education members thank you for the opportunity to acknowledge an outstanding educator sandy ernst embodies qualities her colleagues aspire to model after and possesses every characteristic of an effective educator as touted in educational research most importantly
011however mrs ernst is an educator who truly positively impacts the lives of all of our children parents of her kindergarten students over the course of 16 years would attest to mrs ernst's outstanding instruction and care mrs ernst classroom offers love and warmth founded in emotional wellness and security for her students she is connected to every child in a special way children in turn are connected within the classroom as a family of learners mrs ernst explicit instruction of literacy skills along with engaging developmental experiences have year after year set the foundation for success as cpe students have continued throughout their elementary school as a colleague mrs ernst epitomizes the goals of her colleagues to work together in a spirit of highly professional collaboration in the interests of students and their families she is one of the
012first to volunteer for an extra duty in the school when needed to lead professional learning to problem solve and to give student teachers an experience which blesses the profession with the next generation of effective educators she models lifelong learning and she's a continual learning her continual learner herself and has completed her master's degree in educational administration thank you for the opportunity to recognize mrs ernst this evening along with her colleagues and family including her husband erin and her sons hunter and hudson who are also special to our cpe family and those are the words of her principal dr spencer and just as her colleague she is one of the best and blue valley is so lucky to have her and even in my 30 years of teaching i go to her for help she's that
013good sandy i've been in your classroom before and i could not agree more with what your colleague leslie over here has said or what dr spencer wrote because you you are so student centered and you're looking for what is best for each and every little kiddo in your classroom and it's a fun room to be in and you know during these challenging times you're standing up here representing the best of our best and we just thank you for all that you do uh to make sure that your kindergartners get set up for success so thank you to you and to your family um who's here uh to support you because we know that sometimes we take you away from your family so is there anything that you would like to say sure well i just
014wanted to um thank my family um i wouldn't be able to do it without them not only my own personal family but my cpe family and i love what i do and i do it for my students i just that's why i went into teaching i actually went into teaching because i had a wonderful role model my mom was my kindergarten teacher so um i spent lots of hours in her classroom watching her do that and i just hope that i'm as good as she was to me and she continues to be she actually teaches overseas so she continues to be touching the lives of little little ones just alongside me so i love what i do thank you for all the support because i would not be able to do it without the support
015of blue valley the support of my family and the support of my cpe family and the cpe community so thank you [Applause] blue valley is known for having some of the best educators around and so it was so nice to be able to recognize some of those tonight and students as well we have one more recognition and dr merrigan is going to take that one but there is a time after recognitions where if you're just here for recognitions and you want to sneak out that is an opportunity to do that after our last recognition if you would like to stay for the rest of the board meeting we shouldn't certainly welcome that but we didn't want it to be awkward for those that were wanting to find a time to leave um this month is
016uh our school board recognition month it's a it's something that is done nationally it's time to recognize and thank our blue valley board of education members for the countless hours they serve as volunteers in helping shape the lives of youth through their leadership and i know dr merrigan you wanted to say a few words so these seven volunteers up here uh don't get paid anything i joke with them often that i'm going to double their pay because double zero was zero but they put countless hours and you know nobody signed up to be a school board member during covet and then our three new people actually ran during covet so um we so appreciate their willingness to serve our community and to to don't donate all of those hours and it's a it's a family
017effort too because they take time away from their family so there's a couple of things i want to highlight so in the back of the room you will see on the little white board some comments that you may want to go back and take a look at at the end of the meeting but our cap students who are in the teacher education program teacher education strand came over on friday and wrote messages to you um so that is there and then in front of you is a little jar that has some candy mints in it and your initials are on there so patrick and amy you'll want to make sure you switch but there also are some little note cards at the top and those were made by some stanley elementary students to share their
018appreciation for you so every time you reach into that little candy jar hopefully you'll think of the the students and and how much the work that you do influences them each and every day so thank you to our board of education uh we appreciate you and uh we feel very lucky to have uh seven committed board members in blue valley all right that brings our recognitions to a close let's first give our hand to our board of education members and then we're gonna go ahead and turn it back over to to you thank you christy thank you dr merrigan uh now we're going to go move on to the agenda item which is public comments um i want to read if you'd like to leave that would be the time to leave i we're going
019to start open form but first we want to welcome those who are in attendance 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 and effective and dignified meeting open form will be 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 will 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 if you do not have an opportunity to address the board during the meeting
020you may address the board by email communication i have a few reminders about open forum 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 use respectful language please limit discussion to the relevant business of the board tonight discussion of matters related to a specific student or employee is not allowed instead the comment should be submitted to 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 any 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 and we strive to provide the very best education
021possible to our students when your name is called introduce yourself before beginning your remarks as a reminder we ask that all remarks are limited to three minutes and let's get started the first speaker is amelia hopper thank you oh look i'm taller than the podium um hello um thank you for letting me speak here today i'm an 8th grader of prairie star middle school and i'm here to encourage you to keep the masking requirements in elementary and middle schools while i was searching for this information my obvious first choice was to look at the cdc's website which is based on science and actual facts one of the first things on their website was a link that says guidance for schools some speakers points based on their opinions but the cdc's hello the cdc states within
022the first three bullet points on this page quote protection against exposure remains essential in school settings because of the highly transmissible nature of kovid along with the mixing of vaccinated and unvaccinated people in schools the cdc recommends universal indoor masking for all students ages two years and older teachers staff and visitors that is straight from the center for disease control's website how is it that our schools are going against what the cdc is saying we need to do not only do your decisions impact what happens at school but it decides our safety in who we get to see our grandparents our friends everyone my parents are both at high risk for extreme complications from coronavirus every day that i go to school i worry that i could bring something home to them taking away the
023masking requirements will put a lot of families in jeopardy of contracting coven whether they believe in masks or not contact tracing was taken away from schools due to the rising amount of community spread and not being able to keep up with the surge given this you would think that masks would be even more important right now that was found on the blue valley coved protocol site i don't know about you but this makes no sense to me since there is no longer contact tracing or temperature checks and social distancing is not possible in our current classrooms what prevention measures other than masks remain without keeping masks in place you are asking for a covered tsunami in our schools growing up in blue valley schools i've always been told that blue valley would be a safe
024place for me but now i'm not so sure so with this input of a very concerned student please keep the masking requirements and keep us all safe thank you thank you next speaker is sloane heller good evening my name is sloane heller i'm a parent of two blue valley students i'm also the chairperson of freedom to learn we're a new kansas political action committee and we are dedicated to saving our public schools tonight i call upon everybody in this room and everybody who is watching wherever that camera might be to do all you can to support our amazing blue valley teachers i think there's one thing that we can all agree on right now and that is we want the best for our kids and the key to that is very clear and that is
025setting our teachers up for success we all need to advocate for our kids individual needs but we also need to trust our teachers to do what they were trained and hired to do educate and inspire our amazing students so instead of making assumptions about what might be taught or not taught in our classrooms let's do our due diligence let's ask our teachers questions and let's be kind in the process let's help our teachers focus on education by doing our part to keep our families and our communities healthy right now as we know our teachers are trying to reverse the covet slide help students get caught up after being out sick fill in the gaps left by staffing shortages and finally our teachers are doing all they can to help those students who are dealing with
026challenging times at home whether it's financial stress sick relatives as you just heard or the uncertainty of this ongoing pandemic unfortunately this community has become so divided that it's truly unrecognizable but we don't have to let that continue i challenge every member of this community including myself to come together in support of our teachers and ultimately the future of our incredible students thank you you back when my name is yvette nguyen and i have two children at bowie valley high and i have another in middle school i'd like to thank the board for taking comments this evening i'm asking that you keep masking at the k-8 level and reinstate masking at the high school level while omicron transmission is high two of our new board members ran on anti-science and anti-masking platforms and i suspect
027masks will be discussed this evening i would request as well that we revise the three percent rule this is reported weekly and it's a lagging indicator by the time you report your stats this friday omicron will have ripped through your school transparency and more timely data is necessary i have worked my entire professional career in healthcare i have a bachelor's in biology i have another in nursing and i have a masters in health care administration scientists physicians and epidemiologists all agree that masking will mitigate this spread this is a public health issue and it's not a political ploy to reduce freedoms your opinion about masking does not outweigh the science behind them my child has every right to attend school without catching a deadly disease and let me be clear i don't want masks forever
028only until it's determined we are through this immediate crisis last week our medical directors clearly stated we need help and our hospitals are failing our county commissioners decided it was not their responsibility to mask individuals i would disagree but what they have effectively done was to pass that decision to you tonight we have safety guidelines here at blue valley and they state we are continuing continuously working to prevent mitigate respond to and recov recover from a wide range of emergencies considering the governor just issued an emergency declaration last week due to omicron please follow your own safety guidelines quite frankly that is your duty and that is your responsibility to keep my children safe at school if the board decides not to mask how many days will our children be out of school because the
029staff is sick how many families will go to work with their kids at home more importantly how many student deaths are acceptable to this board how many students with long-hull covet newly diagnosed diabetes how many lawsuits for not keeping children safe i suspect the very people who want masks off will be first allowed to sue the district if their child dies or gets a long-haul coven what number will it take for you to understand that the science behind covet is real and not the political noise science and medicine should be dictating a decision here tonight not politics listen to the experts and not the uninformed please keep our schools open by masking and following our medical professionals and not your own political agendas thank you thank you kelly timson good evening my name is kelly
030timson and i am the parent of three children in the district i would first like to thank all of you for all of the time and energy you put into serving on the board in the past you have upheld the recommendations of the johnson county board of commissioners and required masks in all elementary and middle schools in the district i sincerely thank you for following this guidance and encourage you to continue to do so i am here this evening to encourage you to please implement mandatory masking in all high schools at your meeting on november 8th you voted to remove the mask mandate in high schools beginning on november 29th you did not make this decision lightly you analyzed the blue valley coveted data which at the time showed a decline in positive cases in
031the district at that time the total number of weekly positive cases in the district was 32 per week since that time the weekly average of positive cases is 105.5 cases per week if you just look at the two weeks of data since the high schools went to mask optional the weekly average is 129. positive cases per week this does not include data from last week as the cova dashboard has not been updated since december 17th this means that the weekly average of positive cases has increased to a value of over five times the value on which you base your decision to make masking optional at the high school while bvn and blue valley southwest returned to mandated masking for the next two weeks yesterday due to their percent positive reaching over three percent i encourage
032you to mandate masking in all high schools until we can get through this most recent surge at this point the other high schools reaching three percent is inevitable so why wait until the positivity rate reaches this level to bring back masking in high schools regardless of our views on masking i think all of us in this room can agree that the best learning environment for our students in the is in the classroom under the guidance of the highly qualified blue valley educators as we have seen in our local hospitals this surge is affecting the ability of hospitals to provide enough healthy staff members to care for patients i fear that if we continue to allow mass to be optional at the high schools teachers will become ill and there will not be enough highly qualified
033teachers and substitutes to educate our children i encourage you to put opinions aside and focus on taking care of our children faculty and staff by implementing a mask mandate in our high schools and continuing to follow the guidance of the johnson county board of commissioners by keeping the mask mandate in all elementary and middle schools thank you [Applause] thank you next speaker is terry hatch next speaker is cindy hulsher good evening thank you so much welcome new board members it's good to see you here and yeah there was probably never a worse year to run with so much going on in a pandemic so i am state senator cindy holzer part of my district covers blue valley territory and i'm happy to be here additionally thank you to the student who spoke earlier it's not
034easy getting up in front of people and talking and you did a wonderful job so thank you for that as you may or may not know the legislative session just started today and uh we are facing many many challenges and that includes issues facing our public schools and the biggest challenge that probably the biggest area that we need help with is in regard to attracting retaining teachers as alluded to previously we have had great teachers here we continue to have great teachers and we need to keep that going and obviously the pandemic has impacted recruiting and retaining those excellent individuals i am very excited though about the launch of freedom to learn if there's ever been a time when our teachers our students and staff need support it's now and those groups need to feel
035the support from community members so i am very excited about what that group is going to do as we try to work to ensure that all the important players in our schools feel they are supported as we move forward there are additional challenges i know that are facing our schools and our students things like helping students with dyslexia helping students with different learning styles mental health issues so please reach out to me and let's all work together to find ways to address those issues because what we often find is that so much of so much of the solution ends up falling on our schools as far as implementation and helping our students so we need your help as far as helping carve that path as far as how we handle those things moving forward additionally
036again i thank you all for your service i thank you for being here and let's look forward to getting things back on track and the respect of getting through this pandemic ensuring that we continue to educate our students in the excellent ways that we have in the past and i will just end with sharing my own personal story my oldest daughter is now in college her freshman year and while she doesn't go to didn't go to blue valley all of johnson county has had excellent schools and as a result of her instruction here in johnson county she'll graduate in three years with a chemical engineering degree and a minor that's fantastic and as a parent what else could you hope for i get to save a year's worth of college so so thank you to
037all of our teachers and everyone who makes so many great things happen appreciate you [Applause] thank you the next speaker is jason anderson good evening board members old and new i'm jason anderson i have a son in timber creek i'm also with freedom to learn which i'll introduce you to earlier this evening first i wanted to thank the administration for all of your ongoing efforts to keep our schools open and staffed i'd also like to thank dr schmidt for the time that he's generously shared with with me and others over the last week as we worked through how to best navigate the current medical crisis in the community i know that even in this room there isn't agreement on the best short-term steps to ensure the safety of our teachers and our kids and how
038to keep enough of the workforce healthy here and and elsewhere in the county keep the buildings and classrooms open what i would like to believe however is that we do share some of the same goals we all want kids to have the opportunity for in-person school we all want our teachers our coaches our staff to experience as little physical harm from covid as possible both for them and for the ones they care about in their families we want to help our hospitals our medical offices endure the current overwhelming caseload that they're experiencing many many people want the help i want to help people want to help people in this room in our neighbors the community but we can't help without timely information from you unfortunately the district has been shockingly quiet in 2022 on the
039issue of kovid and masks and omicron there's been no proactive messaging about the district's position on wrong there's been no response to the actions taken by shawnee mission or olathe or neighboring districts even as their absentee rates spiked a few of us do know who to ask to within the district and what to ask for to get the information we're looking for and so we've been able to tease out anecdotes about the state of the district but we can't afford a crisis in confidence at the same time that we have a crisis in the medical community now as you know on the board last week i had submitted an information request to the district and the board on behalf of our parent group we did not yet receive a response and so we have escalated
040that as a request a kansas open records act request both to the district and to the county health department but we also have a group of volunteers we have data scientists we have medical professionals that are ready and willing and eager to help out in this unusual moment we're ready to help with processing data or helping to collect data or helping to organize dashboards or make that information more available and consumable to the stakeholders in the community none of this is a critique of the hard work that support us up through now but we also recognize that the community has divisions about whether any of this even matters and we assume those divisions exist not just in the community but inside the halls of our buildings and the district without transparency trust fades we need
041to be able to trust each other on this issue so please know that let us know how we can best support you thank you [Applause] jessica eberlein is the next speaker did i pronounce that correctly no but that's okay nobody does not a big deal when i went to these schools i was jessica jackson and nobody nobody mispronounced that so i actually don't have anything prepared i just wanted to say thank you to the people that ran because i think this was a really tough year to run and i think like they said before you knew what you were getting into which makes you guys incredibly brave um because we clearly have all different kinds of opinions and it's our kids you know in this community that we're concerned about so um and i know
042you have to take a lot of time away from your families to run and then to be here so in all the existing folks this has been really tough for you guys too so i appreciate you guys listening to us i'm sorry i didn't have anything else prepared i just wanted to come and say thank you so thank you thank you [Applause] emily you rusky okay good evening sorry i have my notes on my phone my name is emily retsky and i'm the mom of a seventh and a ninth grader and i'm also a member of the freedom to learn steering committee i want to thank you all for examining or maybe re-examining the cova data from last week and mandating masks in some of the high schools that had a three percent coveted rate
043or higher as a board you are not responsible for public health but since the johnson county board of commissioners kicked the can down the curb you essentially are and you are um the only group that right now is in charge of our children and our teachers exposure to covid during the bulk of their weekdays i urge you to keep the current three percent policy and even go as far as instituting a district-wide mask mandate for the next four weeks or until the omicron search surge is over i'm not concerned about my family getting covered we've been vaccinated but if the district continues to ignore our public health issues kids will suffer learning loss again teachers will get sick or quit and students will lose the continuity of quality blue valley education that's what the kids
044will lose but what kind of message are you sending to your teachers administrators and staff when you don't ask all students regardless of the covered rate to mask at the height of the pandemic my child's high school lost three classroom teachers last year i'm sorry at semester three can we as a district and you as a board really afford that kind of turnover i don't think so remember when school shut down in 2020 and everybody talked about how much they loved and valued teachers and they were the best we couldn't do anything without them and now parents have no problem exposing them to covet daily accusing them of teaching critical race theory which they're not remember the time when they were great we loved them it's time for that to come back and respect our
045teachers again they're just trying to do their jobs so board i would encourage you to do yours protect your staff and students don't be afraid to vote your conscience don't feel the need to go along with the loudest voices in the room based on your values i assume there's going to be a lot of five to two votes i'm urging you to do what is right for everybody thank you the next speaker is aksana tashlik did i pronounce that correctly i apologize everybody does good evening my name is aksana tishlak i'm a mother of three kids one of them is currently in blue valley i ask the board to make masks optional in blue valley schools close maths and school settings don't work at the end of 2020 the cdc conducted a study at georgia
046elementary schools over 91 000 students teachers and administrators from 169 schools participated the study compared scovite 19 incidents in schools that used masking and social distances with those that had no such measures the conclusion of the study was that there was no statistically significant benefit to masking children there was some to mask in adults quote from the european center for disease prevention and control in primary schools the use of face masks is recommended for teachers and other adults but it is not recommended for students recently four days ago johnson's county director of health dr sanmi areola during the board of commissioners meeting four days ago in response to mrs ahera's questions about the effectiveness of close masks he said clothes masks are not tested they vary by different types if you ask him to give
047you percentage of heftiness i cannot give you that so what happens with mass mandates across the country and the world as of december nine states have bans that prevent schools from setting universal mass mundanes 17 states have masked mandates and all others have policies that varies from district to district if we look at the kovic death numbers as of today because i am an analyst i'm the data analyst and i looked at them and i compared them to census there is no statistically significant difference between states that have bands and that's those that have mandates uh the numbers from european countries that don't mask elementary school children look better than the numbers in the united states so masks have no benefits for children but do they harm here are the few questions you might ask
048are children learning emotional awareness and empathy as well when they have their faces covered up are they learning phonetics when they can see the faces of people who speak are they absorbing information as well when people around them are muffled with fabric are the shyest and quietest of them speak up in class as often and if they have muddles on their little faces um i have i will list several studies that answer those questions first one is from brown university and it showed up 23 drop in cognitive development of young children associated with covet mitigating measures including masks it is 23 reduction in iq of little children second study demonstrated that musk reduced the ability to properly understand emotions by adults by 30 percent imagine how much it impacts children third study showed that adults
049understood 10 percent fewer words spoken by a mask than unmasked person again think about children who don't know all the words yes and they depend on visual cues that are not present so i urge the board to do what is right what you have passion for focus on children's learning and make the masks optional please thank you thank you and i have all the studies listed here for anybody who is interested the next speaker is wendy connolly hi everyone i'm wendy connolly and i have two sons in the blue valley district and i want to welcome our new board members i'm rooting for you to serve well and i also hope that you are all rooting for our kids including my trans son for all the board of education members who stand against mass in
050schools during our current crisis i want to challenge you to shadow for full days this week and next a school para including cafeteria shifts a high risk teacher at a mask optional high school a school nurse any building attend an assembly at blue valley west and finish strong with a visit to a local emergency department hospital of your choice this challenge assumes these hard-working staff feel comfortable in your presence and consent to your visit given your irresponsible stances that put our entire community at risk for those true leaders on the board of education tonight who support science our local hospitals and blue valley students and staff i want to thank you for having the courage to do the right thing and i do know it's hard finally i would like to announce my strong support
051for the freedom to learn pac and tonight we'll be making their first donation thank you [Applause] thank you the next speaker is brad gambock the next be speaker is michelle mitchell hello my name is michelle mitchell i have a senior and a sophomore at blue valley northwest when this all started it was a sophomore and an eighth grader so it's been a couple years first and foremost thank you for serving i was really happy to see everyone sworn in tonight and here we go another year it's been a challenging time to lead the district and a challenging time to serve and we just are so grateful for you giving up so many hours of your time to serve and it's a lot and i i get that we've come a long way you know we
052started off in march of 20 with everything shut down and no sports or anything and then the summer 2020 we fought for sports and high schools were remote then we went to hybrid and then finally spring break 2021 we got to the end and everyone came in person i remember i wrote to the board last year it was just such a happy day that we got all the kids back in school that monday after spring break and i just felt really good about that but i just had several thoughts i wanted to share tonight because there's a lot going on there's a lot i'm sure your inboxes are inundated with emails and there's all kinds of decisions you're going to be making tonight but the first thought i wanted to share is a sincere thank
053you to all the teachers and the educators and all the staff and the buildings in the administration office you know education is essential in our community and i wish it was considered as an essential function as highly as health care and everything else but it's so important for our youth our adolescents and our children so thank you to all the educators and all the people that support the educators the second thought i want to share is that our adolescents and youth have paid a very disproportionately high price during this pandemic we've come a long way but that first year was very isolating and very discouraging for a lot of adolescents and i can speak mostly for the adolescents because i have two adolescents and you know we've just furthered the gap between the haves and
054the have-nots you know not everyone can afford the private tutoring that a lot of my colleagues and friends are hiring for their children and we're in blue valley in south johnson county it just i worry a lot about what's happening citywide and metro wide during this time because the years are adding up and we're losing valuable time with these kids the remote learning was awful i think everyone will agree to that i believe the state of kansas doesn't count it now is ours so we're not really concerned hybrid was even worse we went through all that last year but while we were going through all that we we lost a lot for those kids so i just encourage you as you make these tough decisions tonight to just consider the total well-being of the children
055and the education because we can't lose too many more years it's just gone on for so long and do what you need to do to keep the kids in school and educated in person every day because that's what they need thank you [Applause] the next speaker is holly rook good evening i'm holly rook and um our children go to a private school now they're sixth and third grade and we switched from the blue valley public schools um this this last year um i just want to thank the new board members you stepped up and um we're fearless and and it takes a lot of courage to run but i've said through this whole thing that courage is contagious it's even more contagious than covid and the fear-mongering and things that are dividing our community are
056not going to stand god's light will shine upon the truce and we will see that and i just i just thank you to those to all of the board members i just want you to also let you know that we're praying for you even though we agree to disagree we're praying for you we want you to make those heart choices those best choices for our kids and um and so i'm just going to speak from my heart we chose to um transfer our kids out of the blue valley public school systems and a lot of that was due to a lot of the mitigation factors that were going on and the parents weren't allowed a voice they weren't allowed a seat at the table um this is a one-way conversation with the board it's not
057a two-way dialogue and there's no healthy room for debate we get to um we we get to abide by what you want for our district or we get to choose other options and for our family we made the sacrifice we're driving a 40-minute commute each way to get our kids to school and we're also taking money out of our own pocket to pay for that private school education and i know a lot of other um parents who have made that choice as well there's going to be a lot of loss of funding that's going to come through this because your students are going to your your on the audit that comes out in january will will reflect that those that exit strategy for those parents and um and we're sending healthy we're we're quarantining healthy
058kids and and you know that you're including those we've learned in the percentage from last month um and so there are two high schools that actually are going to mask mandates again and i just pray that you would give the parents the freedom to choose in our schools we have the private school has given us the freedom to choose there are other school districts too spring hill they're giving the schools to parents the freedom to choose so i'm going to close with the verse from timothy for god has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind thank you thank you our next speaker is lisa mcmahon uh okay hi first i'd like to welcome the new school board members i appreciate the opportun opportunity to
059speak before you i know your job's not going to be easy different parents have different views however hopefully we can all agree that transparency is the key to improving our relationship i hope you find that i'm respectful to you as well as to other speakers today i'm here to speak about ending the mask mandates i know we've had pro mask doctors speak here before however with all due respect doctors are experts on mask nor pandemics osha experts are the ones that are called in to train the doctor doctors therefore i'm going to cite two osha credentialed and court approved subject matter experts with 20 years of experience in occupational and environmental toxicology and pandemic preparedness planning and response they are kristin megan and tammy clark the osha experts hold that mask do not spread do
060not prevent the spread of coven the viruses in aerosol which mass cannot stop they are only designed to stop droplets of blood and splatter aerosols penetrate through and around a mask as it's not sealed to your face and these pictures hopefully illustrate the point where you can see it goes through the mask and all around and these are different types of masks cloth surgical and the special ones in fact the osha experts say that masks actually spread the virus because they can soften cross contaminate for instance if you cough in your mask it shoots air and increases the spread similar to when you put your thumb over a garden hose perhaps this explains why the states with the strictest mandates have the highest rates of infections not only do mass spread covet the osha experts
061assert the following masquerade restrict 20 percent of oxygen which causes a neurological attack i know i didn't say that quite right repeated oxygen deprivation delays frontal lobe development in your brain as you probably know the frontal lobe is what regulates your self-control adhd is attributed to issues with the frontal lobe masks lower the immune function by impeding proper gaseous exchanges hemoglobin is delayed in providing oxygen to vital organs those with fatal organs are they say that they should not wear masks if you cover your face you're forced to breathe faster which increases your heart rate in addition to these experts there's linus pauling that proved oxygen deprived cells can become cancerous i hope we don't see a rise in adhd and cancer among children due to masking so now that we know that the science
062is not on the side of masking why are children still being masked it has come to my attention that school boards across the country that their hands are tied because they have received state funding which has a stipulation for masking children according to the u.s department of education i understand blue valley received 10.5 million naturally many of us parents have questions as to what happened with this money or the plans for the future thank you [Applause] thank you the next speaker is dave bowers and i apologize technical difficulty so i'll be giving a speech like my high schooler would as stated i'm dave bowers before i begin the opinions and thoughts that follow are strictly my own and now that that's out of the way good evening and thank you for the opportunity to address
063the board my wife and i have lived in the blue valley school district for 13 years we have six children who have graduated from or are currently attending a blue valley school we've seen a lot in our time and experience with the district and most of them have been extremely positive to say that the last few years has been vastly dif is different is vastly understating the obvious seeking a new normal has become increasingly difficult in the ever-evolving world we live in everything is different the political climate is different social issues are different even the public comments you have heard today are different than what was in the not too distant past looking over the board's mission vision and commitments i'm optimistic that this different board will yield some different and positive results it is
064our differences that make us stronger and while these differences can cause tension i'm also hopeful that we as a public and you as the board can embrace these differences and see through the blindness of differing opinions to focus on the work to focus on the work of the board that truly matters most is the impact that we leave upon our children we must act with a common goal civility and and all of us must model the type of behavior that we would want for our children because they are the future they are our legacy and they are watching us all thank you again for the opportunity and i wish you the best moving forward this 2022. thank you sally tricia hello my name is sally gersha and i have two students in our school district
065it's actually a bit of a dark day in blue valley a virus variant threatens our schools and community basic layers of protection have been removed in the interest of political gamesmanship distrust is high and the most controversial school board members in blue valley history have just been seated in addition to threatening the core blue valley beliefs of inclusion through celebrating diverse perspectives the right for everyone to feel safe and honesty and integrity an anti-public education advocate with the kansas policy institute now directly influences the actions of members of this board and has infiltrated online parent groups already lowering staffing standards has been proposed already banning books has been proposed already our student safety is threatened but we don't have to sit here and take it most of us are here for one purpose and that's
066our children and their future students parents and staff need to unite together to bring brighter days back to our world-class blue valley schools our administrators need to be rejuvenated by our collective voices as we soundly reject efforts to undermine classroom teachers reject efforts to diminish the quality of education or instruction and reject efforts to make children pawns in a political war i look to you you who are seated at home watching this meeting fellow parents who send your beloved children to school in this district teachers and staff who are asked to shoulder incredible responsibility during this time of crisis and do it every single day for our students and our children who are caught watching adults behave badly and have lost faith that they will be protected parents staff students let's work together let's turn
067on the lights let's shine a light on the good that is happening every day in our district let's stand together to stamp out the darkness sitting before us it will take all of us working together for what comes next but it's worth it our children are worth everything if you've been taking notes like i have please connect with the good folks working to protect our schools tonight you can find them at freedom2learnkansas.org and raise your hand for this effort thank you [Applause] thank you this wraps up the open forum for tonight on behalf of the board of education i'd like to thank our participants we appreciate that each of you took time to share your thoughts with us please know that the board and the district administration took notes during open form and will follow
068up as needed with participants at this time we're going to take a five minute break for our closed captioners [Applause] right i think we're going to get ready to reconvene if everybody please take their seats i'd appreciate it uh okay i'm going to call the january 10 regular board of education meeting to order first agenda item is receive reports from board advisory committees so i'll start us off there the diversity equity and inclusion committee met last thursday january 6th the first thing we did is to welcome at that point a new board member elect gina knapp to the committee who will be serving on that then mr scott roberts is the principal at blue valley southwest shared a new program that southwest is doing called distinguished speakers they were looking for speakers within our community
069that could come and share with the students at southwest it's a voluntary opportunity that students could choose to learn they're looking at speakers who can share about their careers and about their life experiences and so he was putting a plug into that committee he's kind of out there trying to get some folks then dr amy dillon director of human resources was back again to the committee she was there last year and shared the work that um her department has done around the recruitment and retention of a workforce in general but of course since it was the diversity equity and inclusion committee she focused on a diverse workforce and how they go about recruiting at different spots for a diverse teaching staff also talked about the retention of our staff that's as important as just recruiting
070them and getting them to be here and the committee gave great feedback as they always do and then finally dr kelly wessel shared the work that is done with all teachers during onboarding around how to have an inclusive classroom the next meeting of this group is on thursday february 3rd and the only other committee i think we had was the finance and operations committee and kyle hayden is going to give that report good evening the finance and operations board advisory committee met on january 6 via zoom the meeting started with the general district update on several items including the introduction of our new director of finance jeremy mcfadden the director of accounting and payroll nathan mull presented the quarterly summary of the district's investments since december 31st as of december 31st he explained that the
071overall investment balance and allocations remain consistent with what they had in the previous summary in september jake slobodnick director of facilities and operations gave an update on construction in the district elementary 24 is complete the blue valley high flex theater is scheduled to open this month and the gymnasium is schedule open next month jake slobodnick and director of business operations jason gillum presented the bids and contracts that are on the consent agenda for approval this evening the next meeting is scheduled for february 10th that is it for our committee reports thank you kyle and thank you dr merrigan the next agenda item is received reports from board members and the superintendent i'll start with amy would you like to start sure nothing specific for me but just welcome officially to the new board members gina
072i don't have anything specific either but i just want to thank the community for voting me into office and placing your confidence into me and i will do what i can to make sure to uphold um what we talked about during the campaign thank you jim no i don't have anything to say looking forward to working with everybody and appreciate the chance to work with you dr merrigan tom um i've got nothing jody i always have something for heaven's sake so um i just wanted to piggyback on the dei uh meeting was able to attend virtually last thursday and uh scott roberts um a new program that he has uh which is a distinguished speaker series that dr marigan had touched on but then right after that dr merrigan and i had an event to
073attend and i was able to connect with um leaders from the hispanic chamber of commerce that were very interested in in being speakers at that event so we're going to hook up and get some information there so kind of exciting it was good timing i also wanted to let the board know that um i will be in topeka tomorrow for the kansas association of school boards advoca advocacy and action conference which is all day tomorrow and the morning of wednesday and then i will be in topeka for the wednesday morning or wednesday i will be in topeka for uh as a member of the um let's see kasb board of directors uh region 11 representative so that'll be fun and so if anybody wants to touch base later in the week i'll give you guys
074a full report on all the exciting goings-on that i learned uh from from those meetings thanks katie not much else either just thank you to everyone i'm looking forward to um working with the board and dr merrigan and um just ready to get to work thank you dr merrigan i just want i want to echo and officially welcome again our three new board members i am excited to work with this board and and to continue the work that we're doing in blue valley i also want to give a thank you to all of our staff within our buildings our teachers our paraprofessionals our office staff our nurses people in the lunchroom our bus drivers everybody who has come together to start this school year you're going to hear just a little bit that we've had
075some staffing challenges but people have truly come together because we all agree that having kids in school is what we need so i do want to sincerely thank all of our staff for doing that thank you dr merrigan i would like to thank the speakers tonight the community i want to thank and welcome the new board members and um know that i echo all of dr merrigan's thankfulness and thoughtfulness about our staff and our teachers and all the hard work that they're doing every single day and the hard work will continue but we as as a board and administration certainly recognize that and want to work to make things better for us all not only for our community but for for our kids our job is to educate and and we need to educate and
076so i appreciate everybody's efforts i appreciate amelia coming and speaking tonight she was fantastic and i look forward to the rest of the year thank you the next agenda item has approved the agenda for the january 10th regular board of education meeting as published i'll move to the board of education approved agenda for the january 10th at the regular board of education meeting as published do i have a second second amy yeah right motion by tom second by amy do i have any discussion do i let's have a vote all in favor uh raise your right hand all in all against motion passes 7-0 uh the next item is the consent agenda do i have a motion to improve the consent agenda i move that the board of education approved the consent agenda for the
077january 10th regular board of education meeting as published second a motion by jody to approve and second by tom any discussion if not all in favor say aye raise your right hand uh all against raise your right hand passes seven zero that moves us to the new business portion of our um agenda and our first item is our covet update so dr schmidt and dr pinswick are going to lead us off and then several of us would be available for questions as well but this is our gosh monthly covet update just for the record i look forward when we're not doing a monthly covet update um it's but it's felt like it's a tradition you know at this point but i'm happy that we're performing a duet tonight instead of a solo um just as
078we do every month we start looking at you know some of the coveted information that were provided by the community uh typically i've just looked at this school year but as i went on to the metro snapshot i noticed that they started counting the data back on january 10 2020 and so i thought it was appropriate to look at it kind of in retrospect and as you can see we're at a very high place right now when you look at cases and hospitalizations but some positive news is that the death rate has not necessarily mirrored that and so that's that's good we also can say that you know the best predictor of the future is the past and so you can see as we've climbed up and sometimes felt like it wasn't never going to
079end it also quickly comes down often at the same rate that it went up so it's just something that i try to encourage myself with and anybody that i talk to that this is not going to last forever right now as you look at the johnson county report about the number of cases dr pinswick shared a updated slide with me just right before this meeting the incident rate when i pulled this together was 12 for every 100 000 people so another way of thinking about that is out of all the population in johnson county 1.241 percent are known to be positive with covet at this point unfortunately that rate has now gone up to about 1550 as of today uh positivity rate would be the of the people that get tested and we know that
080people that go in with symptoms are the ones that get tested so this is a larger number than what the overall population would have but 26.6 percent were positive that got tested right now it was what a little over 30 percent yep 30 point something percent so that's where we're at obviously we're well into the high category on both of those metrics uh from the health department um a little bit of good news i have to throw some of this in there as well is the pfizer booster has been approved for those that are 12 years old and older right now and that just came out in january and it is for the pfizer vaccine five months after the second shot and we continue to have the emergency use authorization for the pfizer vaccine for
081those that are five to eleven um and of course i mentioned the antivirals that have been come to the market that are in the pill form by both merck and pfizer and i believe both are now available in the community but not readily available within the community so when we talk vaccination you know it doesn't do us any good unless it's actually in the arms and so let's look at the vaccination rates as you can see since our last board meeting uh we've increased those that are in the 12 to 17 year old category we've bumped up by about 1.6 and so obviously the vaccination rate for this age group has slowed and so you start to think that those that are going to get the vaccine have already gotten it or are just in
082the final steps of that however in the five to 11 category in the last month we jumped up 12 and a half and 12.8 percent and there's also a pretty significant gap between the first shot and second shot so i know that these these families and kids we would anticipate are are planning on getting a second vaccine at some point in the future driving clinic if any of you that have watched the news the other night may have noticed a long line at the vaccination clinic uh over here ahmad uh i have to say right now i think uh dr pineswick would agree with me mod has been a tremendous partner for the school district and for the community we intentionally opened up that resource to the whole to all the students and family members
083that live in the household because we wanted to make sure that that resource was available we did not know that the tests were going to be quite as rare as they are right now which i think led to a lot of the push i do want to well while i have an audience remind everybody that appointments are required at the vaccination clinic especially on sunday when they have short hours and so that was the backlog that happened this week is we had a lot of people that were just seeking uh to check maybe they had symptoms but they wanted to check before they went back to school i appreciate the effort however it just overwhelmed our system at that point that's a vaccination you know there is a difference there i apologize this is the
084testing that took place um so anyway that that took place and those were long lines there um so speaking of testing you know you can see how in december the number of tests completed and the positivity rate uh was you know eight eight percent eight and a half percent and our rates were you know underneath two thousand i in a short week as we came back from break uh we had tests given and our positivity rate really did mirror the community at that point it was about 22 23 and ours were right at that number which makes sense because over the previous two weeks the kids were just members of the community and not members of our school district and and so the spread really equaled what was in the community so there have also
085been some changes and and this has also been in the news with a high level of community spread we got a call in late december um between uh the two holidays and they they asked to talk to us the school districts and they informed us that we had moved to a new phase of the pandemic uh no longer was it as effective to contact trace when you have a widespread infection within the community they're not able to identify who you got it from and then also to go back and figure out how do we self-contain those few cases and so they said they're no longer going to focus you know ask us for data on who sat next to who in the cafeteria and all of that rather they were just going to say who's
086positive so that we can encourage them or have them self-isolate if they're positive and then also take precautions within that community and quite honestly if we were trying to contact race at this point not only would it be uh counterproductive or it wouldn't be real effective our nurses would not be able to do the jobs that they were originally hired to do you know taking care of kids with diabetics or medic medication uh and and so forth and so um that that allows them to focus more on the immediate health needs of our students so uh the other okay i already talked about the focusing on the positive cases and also there another change was that isolation switched from 10 days of isolation if you're positive do five days of isolation and then when you
087come back if you're asymptomatic you come back with a mask and that that is a mask that's just to stop any residual infection that a person might have so how does that affect blue valley how did that change our practices one is we're no longer gathering the close contact information which also means if we don't gather the information we're not communicating who sat next to who with her with her parents we are going to honor the five-day return with masking because you know that came from the cdc and then the kansas department of education um but we will also require masking and then we we have distance lunch because it you know when you're required to mask we also have to make sure that during lunch time you're also not infecting somebody else and then
088we also and i heard this a couple of comments about our data when we came back on wednesday it quickly became obvious with the number of cases that were out there the weekly reporting was no longer going to work and so we had to figure out a different way to report data to our community and so we work together with the i.t department and we are switching from the the the information that comes from johnson county health department which has the lag of a couple of days which is why we did weekly reports to a daily attendance from each school in fact dr merrigan has encouraged us strongly to get that onto the web page as soon as we can and so i i was just reviewing a draft of that right before this and
089so hopefully we will have that posted by tomorrow noon is our kind of deadline for that um so how does this metric this daily attendance how does that shake out you know how does that interact with the three percent right now because the contact tracing is not happening really the cases that we have is no longer it's probably 99.3 percent uh positive cases at this point so it's no longer the close contacts that we're counting it is just kids with covet or kids that um are symptomatic after a known contact like a household contact and we also know that you know kids that uh aren't coming back after five days because they're symptomatic well we're going to continue to count those as as kind of a coveted absence so when we look at that and
090we started running the reports on the sixth the second day you can see that our our rates were about you know 3.1 at elementary middle 2.7 high school 2.5 overall average and you can see the progression each day and then the today the average dropped down pretty pretty significantly and i anticipate what happened there is not that kobe quit spreading but that students finished their five days and they came back on a sixth day following any infection that they had over winter break or over maybe from new year's eve so as you all know southwest and north hit the three percent metric on uh last friday and um so we we did institute masking and that will be for two weeks and we will look at that again in two weeks and if they're below
091the three percent uh as the board policy is states now the mass would come off um if they're above that it would continue on for another two weeks uh today you know as you can see the numbers dropped pretty significantly from the friday dates um coveting illness so that was just the coveted numbers i was also asked about how does zakovic and illness combine and so we also put that information and that will also be on the web page so you can see where we're at with that high schools were a bit higher as far as illness goes for the first three days back and then i also provided a breakdown um and and right now these numbers don't have any meaning other than it's good to watch uh because some of the illness might
092be coveted but it might not be there's also a lot of flu uh within our region so dr schmidt would included in these absence numbers would we have if if i had a bereavement leave and i had to go to a funeral or when we start college visits again if i went on a college visit would they be included in these absence numbers no we wanted to make sure we were really honing in on health issues and so we are only looking at absences that have been coded covid or illness i was i was surprised to learn that there when i looked at the data there were several students that were already on college visits so uh this only is health related absences and not inc you know no doctors appointments or anything like that
093just if you're sick and just one other clarifying question we rely on parents or guardians to tell us the reason for the absence absolutely um well there's two different sources that we get our information one is the parents and that's our primary source we have always trusted our parents to be honest with us we have to rely on on that um uh when when a student is absent you know they say if they say they're ill they're ill if they say something else you know we don't go into the home to chase that down the other place that we get information is from the health department because we do sometimes get cove positive covet test that would switch somebody from ill to a covet related just depending on when we get that known information so
094sometimes the data will change so i've i'm not asking a question i'm i'm just clarifying it for everybody so i've been doing this long enough to know that sometimes a parent will see an absence and call you and say oh my my student wasn't sick i'm sorry i should have called in they had a college visit or they had a doctor's appointment so we're continually cleaning this up and so what i would say is to that when we run this data this is what it was at that point absolutely and um you know that's the downside of using absence data is it's reliant on you know what the reason for the absence but also it can can be a bit of a moving target but uh over over time we expect that those numbers that
095come into covet or atacovet or into illness and out of illness will kind of balance out over time quick quick question so when i report my child's absence on parent view i'm getting better at using that i used to just blow it off and call the school but um are are all the schools um consistent with the choices that i have because i know let's just say at southwest i've got maybe seven options um is that is is parent view the same for everybody as of two o'clock today yes okay oh yeah we we learned that it had different choices across the district who who is in charge of that i guess i'm wondering who monitors you know that who's the big over grand cuba our rit department okay dr schmidt said does that mean
096that some of the illness in covid may not be captured in those schools that did not have those options in parent view no because we still have our attendance clerks that are working you know on that and they're working with the nurses to change i mean if a parent put one thing and then it changes uh the nurse often lets the uh attendance clerk know and then that that's adjusted at that time right but surely they're not calling everybody who said excused on friday right now i think uh the ones we added like i think one of the schools pretty much just said excused and didn't have illness and so we asked that school to go back and look at the notes and adjust and you you will see a pretty low illness number at
097that point and that has to do with i think the change in our data collection more than an actual change in anything else so the data will get better as we get more proficient with knowing that the importance of this data so what explains the data for phu valley northwest or the drop so blue valley northwest before you know parents basically could say you're excused or they had very few choices right and so because we are going to start gathering information on illness and covid we had to add those those in and so they had to go back on that day today for today and started recording the illnesses the is one uh and probably probably they're not all in that number i mean it was the first you know first day that they tried
098to break it out i just want to be transparent about you know that data so i really don't think that northwest is that much healthier than the rest of the population we like to think we are now um so is there total absenteeism data available just to see like um for those that just i mean i know my son was absent friday for example and we just said excuse because that was the although he was a close contact right sure so is there total because he wouldn't be included in this as an example so is there total absenteeism data available um just to look at it to see there would be reports we could run but we don't have that that i mean i don't i haven't collected that information but it's it's available through
099a report and now that the daily numbers exist that's for that day yes okay so not an accumulation or an average or anything like that it's for them no this is just that day who was not in school for this reason okay and so if you're um if you're covet positive and you needed to miss three days of school or have five days of school you'd you'd count as one each of those days that you missed but when you come back at the end you no longer count even if you're there with masks yeah that's right that's right because you're at school so mark you these are going to go on the website right yes uh hopefully with one day lag yeah i mean um and then it'll include the covid plus whatever illness it
100could be strep throat yeah yeah it'll just but those will all be compliment bind together into illness uh i'm going to plan on running that report about 3 30 each day and then getting it over to communication they'll have to clean the data up and then publish it sometime the next morning i think what i understand is before noon the next day is when it'll hit is that right christy where'd christie go she waved she said yes any other questions before i turn it over to my colleague all right let's talk staff all right thank you dr schmidt we pulled these from last week local news reports and if you were just to do a simple google search right now you would see similar articles coming up uh from today on the 10th but going
101through this the entire metro is is looking at how are they going to staff and we had reports from children's mercy university of kansas our own fire department kansas city missouri that were struggling to be able to provide enough staff members to be able to run efficiently we're starting to feel a little bit of those here even in our district and the first thing we're going to look at are known positive cases so when you look at these next slides these identify our buildings the number of staff we have in those buildings the number that have been reported to johnson county health so what is the red cap for yeah the redcap forum is what the health department utilizes to gather and keep all of the data on individuals who are positive these data represent
102january 3rd through january 7th of last week we know as of today we have an additional 35 staff members that we're going to be added into the reports we don't have the breakdown by building yet because that's still being calculated but this is last week's from the third to the seventh and the number that reported to the health department for um positive for covid if you look at the percentages they vary by building if we look to the the next slides we see all of our middle level buildings again anywhere from 10 percent down to a zero percent within some of those those buildings so it's not necessarily across the board but we can identify it specifically for hot spots we have the next two slides are elementary had to break those down because of
103the numbers of them but you'll see the percentages here varying all the way up to nine percent on this slide and then on this slide again anywhere from six until 2.6 overall if you look at the elementaries five percent of our staff were out during that time for uh positive for covid and in this all buildings if you look at all our school houses we're just underneath that percentage at 4.8 as of last week let's look at historical data so going back to 2019 if you look at the absences now these numbers what they represent are anyone who is not reporting to work out of our entire employee staff so this is both classified certified administrators if you look at it 19 to 21 very similar numbers of what we see on the first week
104back from a winter break in which you have a wednesday thursday friday so we wanted to kind of look at calendar wise what matches up on a wednesday thursday friday after we return from a winter break so three years of very similar numbers and then this year you notice what the numbers look like nearly a hundred more absences per day than we received in 2019 to 21. how do we feel those yes absolutely if you look at this this is uh correlated to the number of individuals who are positive for coven during that time we had nearly 127 that tested positive the first time we came back directly correlated directly correlated in terms of that and then if you look at the substitute fill rate so we have over 457 subs that work for the
105district we had 156 of them report to work on friday that was amazing 156 individuals it's cold we're in a spike and they said yes i'm going to come help the school can't thank them enough but if you look at the fill rates for this now what these represent are both our paratus our nurses and our teachers these are the people that we get substitutes so we can continue to work through our day meeting the needs of children if you look at the percentages 19 to 21 within a range of one another uh 2022. here we are at 69-71-69 we were able to meet the needs barely as of last week we need to to mention as we look at these slides is that if you go below 60 in terms of your fill rate
106you're in a position that it's very difficult to be able to continue to keep the doors open of your schools with those numbers like i said we had 156 individuals come out and work for us on friday we had 150 that were working for us today but we still had just under 50 spots that were open today and when we talk about that how do we how do we handle it when we are 50 individuals down 50 individuals down across all of our buildings these are the things we're doing so we hired a substitute floater pole this is a great pool of individuals we have over 20 we're hiring an additional five that every morning they start looking at their contact information at 5 30 and they know that by 7 30 we're going to
107send them to a place that didn't get a job that was picked up our team dr dillon stacey montgomery is working up till 11 o'clock at night starting at 5 30 in the morning working to see where our vacancies are and the jobs that didn't get picked up for the 156 that picked up jobs we still had 50 left today we start moving those 25 and where they needed to go to be able to meet the needs because as you looked at the percentages some of our buildings may have seven openings that day others may have one we want to put our people to where their needs are if you look at the shift in the work responsibilities we just met today with a group of individuals who work in our districts curriculum instruction area
108helping out teachers with developing curriculum and instruction we met with them because it's all hands on deck we're going to be shifting their work responsibilities over the next two and a half weeks so that they are also on call to be able to go to where there's a need in a building so they're dropping what they're currently working on putting that on pause which is difficult work to do to put on pause but then going to where there is a need we also looked at utilizing the existing staff at the high school when we have supervision periods there are individual high school teachers that have been doing substitute every supervision period since december because we have uh needs that are in there we also utilize existing staff that are here in this office we've gone
109out dr merrigan and myself have gone out and i've been there to help out within classrooms continued recruitment at this time everybody's looking still for work we are always just like everyone else in the county we are like that if you go down 151st or 135th say now hiring we are still out recruiting individuals we're still onboarding people we have hired substitutes since we've come back since uh the winter break and i'm happy to say that and then mitigation efforts um we've talked about mitigation effort efforts in the past in the previous board meetings and when we talk about those we look at it from both the physical plant and then what we're doing for human behavior which leads us to talking about the next slide for you guys questions before we go on to
110that i just want to make the point that again i thank all of the groups that are willing to do all hands on debt because it truly is all hands on debt because everybody truly believes we need to do everything we can to to keep our schools open and so when we ask people to go and cover a class that means the work that they're supposed to do doesn't get done because you can't do two jobs you can't um lead a a group or develop math curriculum and go teach a third grade class you you know you have to trade those off if somebody from district office goes to a classroom it's a it's a fun day um but you don't get the work done the other thing i would say is that it always
111is better to have a teacher in the classroom so i'm i'm a certified teacher so i can go into any classroom but i'm telling you what it is much better to have a third grade teacher in there than me if you put me in a high school math classroom i feel pretty confident that i could cover that curriculum i'll go to an elementary classroom and i absolutely will do that to help keep our doors open but it's always better to have the the teacher in there so although we're covering it it's not always the absolute best for the students and quickly i think this morning in workshop you had mentioned the food service could you mention that again yeah absolutely so um currently we sit with 25 unfilled positions within food service and just um
112last week we had a day where we had a third of our employees that we would like to have were out because of illness and so when you look at 25 needs and then 25 who are unable to come to work because of covered reasons on a given day whether they are sick themselves having experiences or one of their family members or someone that they care for is sick they're not able to come to work that really puts a strain on being able to provide those meals for students they've been doing a fantastic job of it shifting up the things that they do to be able to provide those meals but we've even started a new log of individuals who can be called at a moment's notice from from district office to be able to
113go out and be able to help with breakfast in the morning and lunches as well so what's up before you is what was passed in november um and i actually went back and listened to the meeting just to make sure that that we had it correct but um what you what this board did and three of you weren't here but what the board did at that time is to extend the johnson county health order to grades 9 through 12. excuse me to approve the modification of its policy extending the order of high school and the 18 to 21 year old program to allow mass optional environment effective november 29th so we did this three weeks before the winter holiday unless the total percentage of students and keyword there is students it didn't say students and
114staff and i will we will take ownership for the fact that before break we were talking about students and staff but it says students and so that's what we need to do identified either past positive or identified for quarantine exceeds three percent so that's what we're working under right now and i think now is the time for the board to have discussion around this policy uh if we can continue this you can modify it however you choose so i'm going to open it up to the board cody i have a question when we're normally dealing with uh flu every winter what is our max percentage at which we would close down a school uh there isn't really a magic number on that if when we get to five percent what our nurses do is they
115start gathering and trying to see if there's any commonalities to the illness when we hit 10 percent we make a report to the health department we've also had five percent start cleaning our buildings more intensely uh airflow and those sorts of things in the 12 years that i've been here we have never closed a building so there's there's not really not a magic number i have heard of some other districts that have closed buildings when they get about 30 to 40 percent of the staff out and students down but frequently that's like on a friday to give about three days of deep cleaning and to let the virus pass is it safe to say because i was trying to look back and forth between the slides that covid is roughly half of the uh total
116illness out in each building does it look like we went from you know two to eight stuff like that um yeah i didn't i didn't break down the percentage but that's as i think back on the data that sounds about right yeah more or less okay thank you amy gina i have a couple questions for you dr schmidt um or somebody else might be able to answer i tried so i think you said that like we're we're at what thirty percent positivity deposit yeah the community thirty percent positivity on those that are getting tested so if i recall correctly i think last year in 2020 um one of our criteria for going to virtual was a percent positivity level in the community can anybody recall what that was was it five percent i i think
117you talk about the gating criteria yeah the gating criteria um i don't remember the exact percent that it was much less than 30 yeah i think i think it was represented in yeah in this this graphic i think when when it got to the high rate is when they started to they added progressively right more restrictions when when that moved up the chart okay so with the gating criteria i mean yeah nobody would be in person uh especially without masks in that time i know there's vaccinations available now um and then my next question was the three percent coveted positivity rate plus quarantines and tests to stay was it was that uh if i recall i think that was identified as the number because of that's where mod would be over kind of overwhelmed we
118wouldn't be able to really do much so we're there right we know we're definitely at that we we thought that at three percent our nurses would not be able to figure out like who sat next to whom right you know and so forth at lunch and in classes and so forth um and that that is true we wouldn't have been able to do that okay it also was we although the health department honestly if they were standing here would tell you they they think you should mask i think that's what they would say i don't want to put words in their mouth um but they also uh reviewed the plan and were okay with the three percent a couple of our neighboring districts do four um so they were certainly okay with the three and
119so sorry one more sorry um so then the three percent number that the board approved back in november so if that was still including quarantined kids um i assume that every building would be over the three percent rate that the board approved yes if you think about it we are quarantining between three and four students for every positive case you know give or take and so yes we'd be well over the three percent jim go ahead um well i don't have i don't have a question but uh and we're not we're not the johnson county health department or the or not the johnson county commission but the commission had every opportunity to invoke other mitigation a few days ago other mitigation efforts and over the course of the pandemic we've had all sorts of mitigation
120efforts ones that are actually effective you know stay-at-home orders those are effective that if everybody were sent back to their houses for 30 days that would um that would be an effective mitigation effort i'm not i'm not advocating it i'm we're not on the on the health commission but that would be effective um you know curfews vaccine mandates or other types of mitigation efforts all with the power of the government to say here's what we're going to do um you know quarantine mandates we don't have quarantine mandates in this county there are some in the around the world there are quarantine centers in my wife's hometown if you get coveted you go to a quarantine center and this is argentina required testing we have no required testing by the force of government as far as
121i'm aware we have county-wide mass mandates a lot of the people that spoke here tonight spoke a few days ago in front of the commission and advocated for a countywide math candidate which is a logical position to take from the perspective of somebody who who wants to see that as a as a mitigation technique uh you know a path in our schools but the commission punted on that one like in like two minutes there was notice there was almost no discussion um and we can't affect that change they didn't they didn't extend it to the high schoolers the amassed mandate to the high school so we're left with what we've got here currently so what we have is a the the only mitigation technique by the force of government in this county uh or at
122least in in most of blue valley there may be some towns maybe like prairie village and some others that have mass mandates is that we're going to forcibly mask two-year-olds to sixth graders and which then extends to eighth graders because they're in the same building and i just i i can't see that we picked what seems to me if i list those like ten mitigation mandates that the government whether it's the county commission the state and the federal government could implement the one that's the one that seems i don't think there's probably anybody in this room or watching online that thinks masking two-year-olds to five-year-olds in our early education center makes any sense and yet if we don't change this that's what's going to happen and it's because there's basically you know sloppy language in
123the in the johnson county health order you know the the all the whereas clauses in the in the health order um we're talking about allowing kindergarteners through fifth grade basically five to eleven-year-olds the opportunity to get vaccinated that opportunity has come they had it they extended it but the language in the order says all students up to uh sixth grade so that includes in blue valley our two-year-olds our three-year-olds that are at the hilltop that makes no sense i don't think anybody here really believes that we should be masking two-year-olds they're not there's not a country in europe that mass little kids and i think that that needs to go and um and i'm and i i mean we don't have to i don't need to make the motion right now but at least those
124are the points i i'd like to make a motion to these but i think we ought to at least discuss those particular points anybody else have any um comments or thoughts i was just going to ask dr merrigan or dr schmidt just to clarify the hilltop and then the early childhood kids that are in actual in elementary schools remind me of the age of those kids uh i don't have the order in front of me but i believe it's 6th grade and below i'm sorry the early childhood early early childhood yeah so three and three and four year olds and that can that includes students with disabilities and then peer models that are within that building about half of our students that are in that program are within elementary schools and the other half are
125at hilltop learning center got it thank you jim did you have something else if there's no more discussion then i would oh go ahead i think part of what everybody's facing is everybody's looking at the same data and coming to different conclusions and there's very strong feelings on both sides and it's very difficult to try and come together and make one solid decision when we are all faced with our own how we feel about the situation last week dr ariela stated that cloth masks would not work against omron i have no doubt that many people would not put their child in an n95 or even a k in 95. i personally believe that we are really not mitigating this at the elementary level i think that every kid if you watch the joy on their
126faces you see them playing stuff like that they really aren't wearing their mask right we know that we know that the surgical masks are pretty thin cloth masks don't work and i feel that we are just punishing them for a our county government not wanting to force adults to stay home and we're pushing it onto our youth just thinking that okay if that's the only thing we can do we're going to do that and it what to what end like jim stated a stay-at-home order would be way better than all of these children going to school with things that really aren't i don't think they're mitigating the problem so that's my opinion on the matter anybody else have any comments i don't disagree with some i don't disagree with some of that i the way
127i like this one we have four and a half options i don't know what jim's coming up with down there but we can either no mass k-12 just throwing these out there we can fully mask k-12 we can follow what we passed in november with mass from k through eight with the three percent quote unquote safety rule that now we're buttoning it up by sending out data every day pivoting a little bit quicker not every friday which we've are doing or you do a motion like that still make the mass optional when i look to the administration whether you need to do or do something different with the percentages to include everybody who's absent i'm just talking out loud just that's what i see is a four my half one is what jim is brewing
128down there which i just don't know just hearing you say you may have an idea um i'm not getting to you right away i'm just kind of talking through where we're headed on this if you will and correct me if i'm wrong that's just what i see as the different scenarios i would agree with that um i would add that um the medical pro and i'm not going to argue whether mass are effective or not because i know i wholeheartedly agree with katie that people have strong opinions on both sides of that and probably both sides are have valid facts absolutely valid facts uh the medical professionals that have reached out to us strongly advocate uh for masking in our schools i just want to put that out there go ahead jim okay i don't
129i don't disagree that there's a lot of medical professionals that um support masking and we're probably not going to to solve or convince each other in the masking debate um you know i think there's evidence that masking works um and but it's also it's also measured it's also weighted against uh the learning environment that we are subjecting children to our littlest ones um uh daily for two you know almost two years so at least there are two motions that i propose um so i can do these together and and or maybe i could separate them out how do you want me to do that sure does anybody else have any other motions they would consider offering we'll just make sure we get everything out there anybody else you gotta take one motion at a time
130you do um okay jim go ahead and make your first okay the first one will be to make a mask optional for all children in blue valley's early education programs regardless of where they're located is there a second a second can you stick that that's your whole motion right there that's the first one and are the motions related or what are the others no they're not necessarily related i mean the other one's going to deal with older kids okay can you read that yeah could you restate it masks would be optional for all children in blue valley's early education programs whether located in an elementary school or not so that would be hilltop or those that are located in them and and by the way my if i could you know uh politic for the
131motion for a second the the order to me is in the the health order is ambiguous as it relates to to these little kids because all the whereas clauses in that order um or that were basically to preamble to that order um are not addressing children early education uh you know in that age group um which i don't believe so you know melissa maybe you can correct me if i'm if i'm misstating that um and it was really geared towards kindergarten through sixth graders but we they get picked up in blue valley because of the of the nature of the way we do things the second the second point on that is the the the county doesn't in the order delegates enforcement of the health order to the school boards so you know we ought
132to be able to take the information in terms of how we were organized as a district and and and implement that in the in the way that makes sense for our district any other comments during the comment section yes yeah my story's the same as it's been every meeting i um our county has quote unquote mandated for that age group and like i've always said and i'm the one who pinned this or made this motion that i i wanted to honor what they did in regards through k through six or for us k through eight um so i'll stick to what i said for the last couple months in regards to the county's guidance with that and honoring what they've chosen thank you tom jody i'd just like to note dr schmidt so what are
133the numbers of at-risk children in this in this demographic that they're talking about um has anyone done any research maybe jim or someone on the board here who you know when we put this out what are we where were the kids held that this population tends to be well over half are students with disabilities and a good percentage of those i don't have the exact percentage i might have multiple physical disabilities you know health impaired um and so forth students with autism etc so yeah it would it would include students with health impairments and i assume that some of those children have mask exemptions for medical purposes absolutely any other comments everybody go ahead katie i also want to point out that there are high schoolers uh high schoolers there are high schools that are
1346a level in kansas that are mitigating this and navigating it successfully without masks and without kobe tracing um i've called them i've talked to their board presidents i've talked to their um who is cleaning and what they're doing and guys they're they are mask optional they have had very low cases of covet i don't know how we get there but private schools are doing it and doing it well um heritage is how many other private schools in our area are navigating this um without issue we also have like you know if you went over to hilltop on on saturday there were like 400 unmasked people walking in and out of that those doors going to basketball games etc i mean i i don't know what we're modeling for our children but we we say okay
135everybody in the community can go into the hilltop unmasked but you two you three and four year olds make sure you strap on that mask because that is going to save all the community spread that's going on in the in it just it's not logical but you know that's my pitch your emotions talk in elementary school right my my first motion here is just to the early elementary right or i'm sorry early education okay second one's gonna be for which we haven't gotten to but it's gonna be for everybody yeah but it's not it's a different motion okay i i was just trying to correlate katie's thoughts on the 6a high school so i'm just making sure it pertains to my second motion okay but also there's any other comments anybody ready for a vote
136okay all in favor of the motion raise your right hand yes yes yes get a second all against raise your right hand notion fails uh two to four two two five two to five sorry about that okay uh jim did you have a second motion i do okay um and this relates to the k through six uh blue valley here i'll just read it blue valley schools would continue its masking requirement for students k through six to where um would require a continuous requirement for k students k through six to where math in school as well seventh and eighth graders if they are co-located in a build in a school with uh kindergartner through sixth graders subject to the following change to the existing policy parents would be able to sign an exemption form based
137on a list of acceptable exemptions including the child's physical well-being and mental well-being that's the end of the motion that's similar to what spring hill implemented for their elementary age so jim you're basically recommending for the remainder of the elementary kids and heist you know elementary kids and middle school kids to be able to have a mass exemption approved by their parents correct is that fair or correct that's correct okay is there a second uh discussion just enforcement dr american and staff on logistics um obviously we've got mass exemptions now but that amount i'm just just we do but it's it's a manageable number per building so the way i under would understand it is you would be directing administration to develop some sort of a bask exemption form that parents could sign that would
138include them being able to sign off um that it was a physical hindrance for them or mental they couldn't do because right so it would be um the numbers obviously would go up and it would be could i say that we absolutely could manage it no we we would develop some sort of a system but it would be more of a challenge than what it is now in a high school of 150 or middle school is a better example because that's what we're talking seventh and eighth grade they have you know five classes uh for them to figure out who has a mask and who doesn't each hour would would be more of a challenge tom did you have a comment no okay i would i was just that was my comment i was just
139asking thinking through it amy did you have a comment no tom asked the question i had to which was just to get some perspective on the i understand jim's perspective for sure but just kind of getting the administrator's side so that makes sense gina did you have anything you want to say uh katie did you have anything you want to say jody um i have a question dr merrigan just just in general um obviously covet has created a number of challenges in a number of areas of our departments and schools you have any idea generally not and i'm not asking for a hard number but you know how much of our staff and teacher time is in an administrator time is um focused on these kinds of code type issues and it doesn't it's not
140restricted to just mass but it's just dealing with the code uh part of of where it's at in our schools oh i think that would vary by day i would say if i'm in an elementary school today and there were five or six people who didn't have a sub because they were home for covid i probably spent my whole day doing it because i was um covering for classes i was trying to figure out how they were going to be covered if i'm in a building that has 10 to 15 kids come come down with with covid and i'm the nurse i'm spending my almost my whole day on that we're probably sending somebody over maybe to help them um mark has another job but he probably spends the majority of his time plus some
141on this i think it just varies by position and and what happens in that classroom if you if i'm in a classroom and uh i have 22 kids say i'm a third grade teacher with 22 kids and eight of them are out for illness or covid then i'm trying to figure out how to get work to those kiddos or communicate with those parents so it's a lot it's a lot for our staff but i don't know if that answered your question or not it does thank you anybody else have any other questions or comments on on the motion before the board okay is everybody ready to vote okay uh all in favor of the motion raise your right hand uh all against uh motion fails uh two to five any other uh comments or um
142uh motions on on i don't have another promotion i just want to make a i don't since my first meet i'm not sure when i i probably supposed to speak earlier today or earlier during the meeting to say a few general comments um because i know we're a divided community um it's reflected in the in the comments it was reflected in the election um it's reflected in the vote some of the votes tonight um so i i pulled this quote from um from the founder of entitlement encyclopedia britannica his name is mortimer adler and because i didn't i didn't i i suspected that that these motions would might not pass and you know i wish they would they would have for the you know families of our community but i understand that we we don't
143all agree and so adler said the conditions for intelligent disagreement are that you acknowledge your biases and i acknowledge i'm biased you know i think i know where my my biases stand are and they impact the way i view the world make your assumptions explicit attempt to be impartial and then finally you know remember remember this phrase or this sentence no one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught so i mean that's that's my uh commitment to the members of this board is to to go about you know trying to live out that in terms of my duty to the members of the community including the people that disagree with me so that's it thank you jim uh are we ready
144to move on to the next agenda item uh that's instructional material selection is is there any other any other motions on this one are we just going to i mean we need some direction from it administratively do you want us to follow this and we want to be very clear with our community that this is what we're following we will get daily um data um that will go up on our website but this is what we would be following is i guess that i'm just asking for clarification from the board is this is this currently is in effect right it currently is in effect correct okay and uh does does the board have any desire to make any changes to the current policy that we're following patrick so um yeah i do so to me
145right now this motion that was passed in november is obsolete because we're no longer contact tracing that the health department has told us that we're no longer contract tracing therefore this is no longer a valid percent so i feel like we have to do something different because this was not passed based on only students positivity but it also included uh quarantined individuals so um i do think we need to modify something personally i think i mean i would like to move to go back to masking for the next four weeks at all levels until we have better data and see if the peak has gone down we know that's what the doctors have urged to us at this point in the community including the chief medical officers at all the major um hospital systems so
146i'll make a motion to go back to full masking for the next four weeks for four weeks yeah okay is there a second a second is there any discussion the only discussion is i think it would be helpful for dr merrigan and the administration's sake to put a date to that because we get a little bit it becomes hard to enforce if we're all not in agreement on the date so just uh so the next board meeting is february 14th so i don't know if you want to put it in place till then if you want to make it february first it's up to you but i would agree with amy that a date is uh beneficial for this yeah i would say until the next board meeting so we can take action on it
147again at its expiration correct second any discussion i again i i want to i know things have changed but i want to follow our motion that we made in november and like eighth i think again we're following the county guidelines k through eight in our district the mask optional and i know the three percent and i know it's we're monitoring heavily we're mitigating like we can we're managing the best we can and that's i know things have changed again but that's the commitment we made and i think we can manage through this so i we've got our buffer in there with the three percent if we need to talk about the percentage we could do that but i think we've got like we talked about a couple months ago if things get like they are
148now we have a way to to do those type of things and so i would i want to stick with this again i'm not anti-anything i just i want to follow the county deals and then follow the motion that the board made in november do you think that it needs to be modified though because the three percent's obsolete no no i'm worthy of discussion you know if dr merrigan says hey absolutely i want to hear that or mark schmidt but i i don't quite know that yet if it's it's obsolete looking at the thorough work that dr schmidt's doing and monitoring some of this especially over the last couple days well he kind of said it was obsolete when we talked about what the number would be at if we counted uh direct contact which
149we're not anymore right so right if we were if we were contact tracing right we would absolutely have hit the three percent likely on the first or second first day probably right okay i would say gina what would you propose it be if it was just a change to the percentage if it was just a change i would add absenteeism similar to olathe and even go with seven percent or i would look for a recommendation from dr schmidt as to what a good absenteeism number would be or tanya but i think we have to add in some other factor because the three percent is now just positive and i believe the board passed it being quarantined and test to stay included in it right this is the verbiage from the motion so you have a
150problem or quarantined right so right yeah you currently have a motion on the table i think to um just to go back to full masking until february 14th so i think you have to act on that first and then we could look at it or jimmy does have any comments to make on the motion before the board jody well you know my concern is is you know after the four weeks i i guess i wish we kind of did it in the opposite the opposite way around just because that would be more of a long-term in my mind i could be wrong and maybe i'm just tired but um you know the four weeks i i understand but then we're going to be addressing again and what what's the opposite in your mind then just
151to make sure i understand the modification to this to add absenteeism which is i guess was like i said maybe i'm just well we can vote on this motion and then let gina try it again if it doesn't pass yes i should clarify that dr schmidt did you have yeah i just wanted to clarify um the health department can still quarantine it's just that it's very rare now for example we i think we have three quarantines right now that are like household contacts but it's just it used to be a large percentage and now it's just very very small i just wanted to point that out that quarantines haven't completely gone away katie tom when that original was passed um if i remember correctly did you mention at the last meeting that you didn't realize
152that test this day was going to be included in that correct correct what i noted the last meeting myself and mike sites was just following the letter of the law there from what was passed which is quarantine and positives right so at three percent you wouldn't have assumed it would have been test to stay so it still is kind of i did not assume and i made it but some other folks did assume it any other comments on the motion okay everybody ready to vote um all in favor of the motion raise your right hand all in against the motion raise your right hand motion fails three to four are there any other motions related to the policy before the board right now i'll move to add absenteeism into the policy that was adopted on
153november 8th at 7 percent so i just i want to clarify so you would be asking us to modify the uh november 8th board motion to include absenteeism of seven percent or higher would trigger masks correct overall overall um illness absenteeism and is it an and or or i mean is it an and or an or is it this or this correct it would be or similar to the olathe school district okay so to modify the november 8th forward motion to include illness overall illness absenteeism of seven percent or more correct okay i just wanna make sure i understood it yeah and does are you suggesting that three percent needs to be modified because it sounded you so i don't agree with that right i do believe it it's and does it absolutely end up
154at one percent or is that what you're thinking one percent or two percent because if it's if it was a bigger if it was three percent and it's included other things then i think what you're saying is it should be one or two percent right i do believe it should be one or two percent but i'm i mean right now i'm i don't know the correct number for i mean it's just totally arbitrary at this point i think the three percent has come to with some assumption of overwhelming mod and we're already there so i don't know how we come to a number that's overwhelming mod again um so it was already it was also come though from the health department i mean the health department actually was okay with four percent because that's what
155our neighboring districts are all doing and we went actually one percent less okay so dr merrigan um are you familiar are you still familiar with what a lathe is how they're operating yeah my understanding is that olathe um has an ore so they are either four i believe it's four percent who are um positive for covet or identified for quarantine so they have the same verbiage as we do there or their overall illness absenteeism is over uh seven percent and my understanding is is that the overall absenteeism is what triggered their high schools to go back so that that's my understanding of what olathe is currently and that's illness absenteeism correct illness absenteeism correct so gina is that your motion yeah we can keep it at three percent based on tonya's feedback that it comes
156from the health department so can we restate the motion just to make sure we all know i probably will get it wrong but i move to amend the motion passed at the board of education meeting on november 8th to include masking when absent building absenteeism for illness and covid exceeds seven percent second okay so a motion by can i can i just clarify this so it would read unless the total percentage of students positive or identified quarantine by johnson county exceeds three percent or absentee by illness exceeds seven percent whichever occurs first that accurate that's correct okay okay you're understanding also okay uh so um gina's motion made the motion it's seconded by jody discussion so one question i have and i don't know if it's appropriate for dr merrigan or dr schmidt so i'll
157let you guys decide but i'm curious now that you've lived this for a week you know with this kind of post-holiday world what do you guys believe is and i mean just if you were doing it what would you do just trying to understand that and if you say i want to pass then you can pass but um i'm curious what you guys would say i i can't give her i can't say what i would do because you're the board uh however what i what i can say is as looking at the data and this is the flexibility between uh when you're ill and when you become covet positive it would be a lower administrative burden to have the overall illness i would say first of all no matter what we do somebody's not going
158to be happy with this because they're again strong opinions on both sides i'm going to right now go to what our again medical professionals have advised us to do and that is that they have asked us to mask and i think this gives us an out if our numbers are really low and gives us an opportunity to not mask if if our numbers are low by adding in both metrics so i'm comfortable with both metrics i would just like to make a comment too i mean my focus and i think many of our focus on this board if i can speak just a little bit for us is how to keep you know behinds and chairs kiddos and chairs and our staff working um and educating um not just putting fires out and so um
159you know from from my understanding this is what the the health you know medical people have been telling us and i am so concerned about our staffing issues right now i am i'm hoping that this can help mitigate that sum because we want to try to finish the school year so i just i just wanted to put that comment out there amy did you have any other comments no gina well i just wanted to also um sort of as katie said that you know we know that our kids need to be in school more than anything right and um this is the best way to do it in my opinion in our health um professionals opinions jam any other comments katie any comments jody so we've kept with this motion essentially where masks are still
160going to be optional for high schools correct now we're just modifying the numbers that we think make a little more sense right now correct is that our overall optional until it hits these thresholds okay and it gives us flexibility on both sides so when they go below then we can right but we will have hit it in in every high school except northwest just so we're we're clear if you look at our our data we would have we want to be very transparent here we will have hit it in every high school except blue valley northwest so we would communicate out if the board passes this motion um to those other high schools i don't know if we can get it out tonight or not yet but it would be effective at least wednesday minimally
161any other comment tom no i'm just thinking about you know no votes on this i just you know you could just read either way i just i want to just honor this but i i can find a balance with the percentages i just okay any other comments go ahead dr there's the percentages that dr schmidt thank you for the student illness for covid and um overall illness so you can see they're all over uh seven percent except for blue valley northwest which actually hit it last week but they are not today why seven percent i think curiosity where that number from olathe comm and other decisions i don't know i would say that our normal percentage uh in a in a normal year is 96 ish 95 96 maybe more than that even i should
162just stay up here i think i think our numbers attendance rates normally about 96 percent at this point um looking back at what i said earlier at five percent absenteeism is when we typically do intensive cleaning and we start looking for uh common causes and then by ten percent is when we are um reporting it to the health department so i think you know at seven percent it kind of is a hedge to go lower to stop that spread to 10 i think that might have been part of the logic of olathe it that was a conversation a long time ago with them and we're just to clarify you we're already doing that extra cleaning and ventilation stuff on a regular basis yeah okay and do you know you going with seven because that's what
163olathe is doing okay and then this would be for two weeks right it would follow the okay but just to be transparent let's talk about activities real quick yep so after school um pack gyms and i am basketball i i go to many watch my son and others um does the copen masking rule have to end after school and following the acacia guidelines i i assume i think we would need to clarify that because i think according to the order there's it really is kind of silent on that i don't know what their intent was i know and they may have done something different because i know they're meeting tonight that i know like for example shawnee mission actually um had a motion where they they only did it during school hours and after school
164hours they followed acacia guidelines there's some other schools not in our area who have done that as well so that would be one option i will tell you i cannot imagine trying to enforce this at a basketball game putting our high school administrators in that position is will be very difficult it was difficult during volleyball i yeah i totally agree i'm just saying if this is not part of the motion then the acacia rules apply which i'm not hearing they're changing anything like i've been to a tournament at shawnee mission in december before they made the changes it's mastering the day but it went to a game that night there's no mass i'm just getting everything out on the table here folks so they understand i think if you if you all want to include
165that in the motion you need to include that in the motion to be clear or to have a separate motion on activities i i i want to follow what keisha does i i don't want to do that i just want people to understand that i i agree i also want to follow what keisha does yeah quick question dr merrigan is is is the motion as its stated something that the administration would be able to do with a little or a lot of effort um the motion as it well we have the data now so um that's not something we have to to go back and figure out how to do um we have the data we have a mechanism for reporting the data on a daily basis um so i think there is it's something
166we could do with i would i would just like to have one day's grace period in in order to get it communicated out to the community and and so just just so uh dr schmidt you've been you and your team and and many in the buildings have been working tirelessly for the last um what four days is that right since we started this semester to tabulate collect check and put together those numbers and that took a considerable amount of effort and resources right it did in order to establish a procedure i think we're to the point now where we could gather that in a fairly reasonable amount of time in order to get posted the following day by noon okay katie um this is under the covet update that we're making a motion on this
167so i am concerned that throwing in a percentage for absenteeism regarding all illness is not appropriate to add on to a coveted motion so i'm just throwing that out because we aren't discussing absenteeism right now we're discussing covet and coping mitigation any other comments so do we want to vote on the motion or do we want to restate it i don't think do we need to restate it you don't need to okay now you don't have anything about activities in there so if we don't if you don't put something about activities in there then we will be requiring masking at our activities if if the building has to mask if you want us to follow acacia for that you're going to need to include that into motion or have a separate motion are we currently
168following acacia well we currently haven't had the mask so um in our high school since basketball and wrestling started and swimming well today yeah i i i want to follow the case your rules okay so then we know i want to include that it's not including activities because it's an optional event for folks correct correct why is it that we need to add in kisha to the motion because according to the health order it's a if we're extending the health order um the health order says in the building it doesn't time-bound it that say during the school day or from 7 to 3 30 or whatever it just says in the building i think we have a motion already and it's been seconded and and um i personally would like to go ahead and vote
169on that i think that activities can easily be handled separately and we can give you any clear enough direction um whatever happens with this motion um but uh i i think we've got we've got a motion that's seconded on the floor okay and melissa could correct me but i think we've we need to address that it's gina's motion on the floor if gina would choose to amend the motion she could have been the motion otherwise it's right to be voted on okay so i'm i'm confused though if from acacia perspective i want to make sure i know what i'm voting on you're not you're not voting on anything acacia on this motion you're you're mo if i if i vote yay then i'm approving masks every hour of the day um with this and in
170the evening and you're approving masking in that school so so would the the motion be modified then to during the school day that would work i just i i think having it separate might might be a better idea and i just so i don't want to lump in our after school activities that are acacia affiliated with this yeah practices yeah it's yeah optional type of deals i don't want to either if it's that simple saying the school day i i'm concerned about two motions if that's the only addition if we go back then we have to go back eventually perhaps and make a change and address both if there's if it's possible to wrap it into one i don't that's my opinion but i'm not i'm not a lawyer or i would think you'd have
171to go you know i would say in my mind the argument would be the other way i think if you by taking it separate you know they're separate entities and i would think that that cases you know if we if we decide to to keep it with just keisha that just kind of rolls on its own um in my mind but we've got two attorneys on here we've got three in the room at least the health order specifically exempts persons engaged in activities and athletics inside school buildings who should follow acacia and or school guidelines which to me is perfectly ambiguous as to whether you follow acacia or the school district people yeah it's the people doing the sport people doing the sport i think are fine it's the uh that's everybody the spectators okay
172spectators so so go ahead can we do it separate communication separate you can do it any way you want there's a motion that's been seconded it's on the floor it's been discussed we're ready to vote unless you want to amend it so personally i i'm probably going to vote it down because i'm worried that we're not going to have that something else is going to happen and then we're not going to have the opportunity to address kasha so i i'm just telling you why i might vote it down because i it's getting slippery here when you just so you don't put any constraints in there in terms of time of day to clarify today at north and southwest if i went there tonight to a basketball game they should everybody's masks they should match it
173should be so the one passed in november was to mask it doesn't have any specifications that say at eight a.m or eight p.m so we can um until monday this wasn't in pi so that's why it's like now we're having fun i know that the building administrators would appreciate having the clarification they needed any clarity can i make a suggestion yes um i think i think you should take your previous motion that was passed in november 8th and modify it one time as you want it modified um i have that motion in front of me and i'm happy to assist you in any way with that modification but if i'm hearing what you're wanting is emotion it would have to be an imminent motion from gina that would provide the seven percent absenteeism rate during
174the school day only for the whole motion correct as i think that would allow the acacia uh policies to be followed for okay we can amend it to say during the school day so are you gonna read it when you're done also too how are we gonna define illness because people have mental health days we have um females that need days off of school we have i mean if we're already at did you say uh at this time every year we're at 96 attendance that would be that would be fairly typical yeah i mean you add colds and then what if we get tipped over with mental health days or uh but we've always had those i would my argument would be we've always had colds and mental health days yeah flu um the one
175variable that's different this year is the code part yeah okay so is gina considering an amendment are you considering that she's working on it okay and that's a good question and if we stayed with this motion completely that we made and honored this we don't have the acacia stuff in here correct correct weird it's a little choppy but i live i'm not moving i'm giving you an option promotion gina um i move that the board of education uh modify the johnson county board of health order number 00-21 to grades 9 through 12 and the 18 through 21 year old program to allow a mask optional environment and these programs effective november 29 2021 unless the total percentage of students positive or identified for quarantine by the jcphe exceeds 3 or total absenteeism in the building
176is seven percent or higher and allow mass to be optional in all school buildings outside of the regular school total total absenteeism for illness so so are we modifying the policy are we modifying the order the policy that policy i know i think melissa originally stated the order well she was reading that i think all right that that could become important so in your last well if that's the motion doesn't it say we're modification but so that us or the johnson county i don't like to speak into mike okay yeah would you prefer to modify your november 8 order versus the existing joko order because i think you could say this adding this one in uh factor criteria and then making it applicable for only the school day i mean it's gina's order so um
177or emotion so what would be the difference so you i guess jean if you want to move this way you could say i move that the blue valley board of education modify its november 8th order approving a modification of its policy extending the johnson county board of health order number 00-21 to grades 9 through 12 and the 18 to 21 year old program to allow a mask optional environment in these programs effective november 29 2021 unless the total percentage of students positive or identified for quarantine by the jc dhe exceeds 3 percent or absenteeism due to illness is 3 percent or is exceeds 7 percent comma i would say making mass optional outside of the regular school day or allow it ask mask optional environment during okay here we go i moved the blue valley
178board of education modify its policy extending the johnson county board of health order number zero zero two one to grades nine through twelve and the eighteen to 21 year old program to allow a mass optional environment and those programs effective november 29th 2021 unless the total percentage of students positive or identified for quarantine by the jcdhe exceeds 3 percent or absenteeism exceeds seven percent absenteeism for illness absenteeism for illness thank you exceeds seven percent comma within the school day is there a second wait a minute with within the school day i i think you have to how do we add that on i think it's clearer if you just say um allowing mass to be optional in all school buildings outside of the regular school day okay so unless the total percentage of students positive
179are identified for quarantine the johnson county department of health exceeds three percent or absenteeism due to illness exceeds seven percent and mask optional outside of the regular school day correct it's your motion is that how we wanted it is it clear that this pertains to each individual building that's how the three percent man i don't know if there's more language there language it's appended to that but it doesn't say it's specific to each individual building and i know that's how it's applied do we need to indicate by building is that part of the order or no no the johnson county order yeah the buy building i just wondered if you pick it up that way so currently the order states all students up to sixth grade and it does say at one point any buildings
180with students who would be in sixth grade if if you're if you want to at the end of it gina could add applicable to all school buildings i think the proper language there would be to each specific to each individual school building because the order doesn't address nine through twelve you're saying this order this this policy as written would be a a general look at all 9 through 12 across the district that's the way i would interpret it are are you talking about the three percent the seven percent sorry i was misunderstanding the question yeah completely i know that's not how it's being applied but it's like you know it's only been applied here in the last two days it wasn't the intent but the way it's read yeah so you could say exceeds three
181percent or total absenteeism for illness exceeds seven percent in in the individual school building so don't you like to adopt tina one more time would you like to adopt that as stated do you want me to attempt to restate it and gina if i'm incorrect will you correct me please okay um i'm gonna try gina has moved that the blue valley board of education modify its november 8 order approving the modification of its policy extending the johnson county board of health order number 00-21 to grades 9 through 12 and the 18 to 21 year old program to allow a mask optional environment in these programs effective november 29 2021 unless the total percentage of students positive or identified for quarantine by the jcdhe or absenteeism for illness exceeds seven percent in any individual school building
182and to allow a mask to allow mass optional mass to be optional in all school buildings outside of the regular school day quickly i have a question so does that include like elementary does that change the policy at the elementary level or is that what the current policy is at the elementary level which part of it the after hours yes that would change for elementary there there isn't much outside of the school day at elementary i guess they're there i take that back there there's music programs or why care or yeah right so the motion though is all buildings after hours right but the the last part of it was all buildings you say all high school buildings yeah yeah it would need to say all high in a high schools high school yeah all
183high schools and then 18 to 21 year old program is there a second great um any other comments um i would suggest adding to be effective as dr schmidt said in not tomorrow but the day after tomorrow would you like to add that amendment i think we can give them what options do we have when we're marking absences on parent view what are all the options that we just added on yeah i believe the right now the options are excused um illness or covet okay i thought you said there were seven well that was southwest but they they last year david condenses down i was gonna say i've got like seven or eight that i have to go through the list i might i'm just concerned that we're going to start ripping in like allergies
184and stuff and keep hitting these numbers colds which yes i understand cold is an illness but that's just my for grouping in allergies with uh illness then we're punishing kids with mass that aren't actually above threshold so any of the comments everybody ready to vote okay all in favor of the motion raise your right hand all opposed uh motion passes four three okay any other uh topics of discussion on covid or um closed captioned people need a five second and let's take a five minute break we'll return and start the [Music] meeting the 908 can you guess good um get together once a week i was gonna give him a hard time next hey kelly i tried to get it how do we say it i appreciate it no problem what's up i think we're
185going to get ready and start the the meeting back up appreciate every return of their seats so our next presentation this evening uh kelly ott and christy bolton kelly is our executive director of curriculum instruction and innovation and christy bolton coordinates our libraries are going to talk to you about the ins the curriculum resource selection process so kelly take it away good evening i know how to clear a room right this is awesome so good evening my name is kelly ott i'm the executive director of curriculum instruction innovation for the district i come to you this evening to share information about our board of education policies related to curriculum development and resource selection there are three key policies that relate to our district processes to develop curriculum and select resources the purpose of curriculum is
186to define locally how and when students will learn state standards we often talk in terms of curriculum being what students learn and policy 4000 guides us in curriculum development within board policy 4600 the term learning resources encompasses a wide range of things the term learning resources includes all items a teacher may use to instruct including textbooks videos novels plays music and digital tools our policy remains the same regardless of the type of resource for its format finally there's policy 4730 and this guides our librarians as they curate and develop our school library collections tonight i'll go just a little deeper into each one of these policies introduce you to our coordinator of library media programming and then hand it off to our district council melissa hellman to share information on legal topics related legal topics
187related to these issues after i share a little about each these each of these topics and policies i will uh field any questions so we'll be sure to get you the answers that you seek policy 4000 sets forth guidance related to developing curriculum our policy is sorry our process is cyclical with some curriculum be developed or reviewed each year based on a defined revision plan even in these coveters this process is going on maybe not as much but it is still continuing curriculum is written by teams of teachers and refined by frequent and ongoing feedback loops these feedback loops not only include those teachers who teach the course at that hour at that level but also include our board of education curriculum instruction advisory committee often the process includes teachers from other levels or contents
188to ensure vertical alignment and integration of concepts when possible within fourth four thousand roles and responsibilities are also articulated as a board of education you are tasked with establishing policies overseeing their implementation and approving curricular documents the superintendent district and building administrators are responsible for implementing the policy and monitoring its implementation and finally teachers across the district are responsible for teaching the district curriculum and assessing students progress on those objectives set forth in our curricular documents next is 4 600. a policy 4600 assist us how we select and use various resources with students as they learn district curriculum this policy has stood the test of time as new and different types of materials have been introduced into educational settings over the years this policy remains relevant and purposeful this policy governs both district selected resources
189or district provided resources and the choices made by individual teachers who may use supplemental resources to meet meet the needs of students in their classrooms within this policy there are requirements that the selected resource have a tight alignment to district curriculum and is a quality resource the pos the policy provides specific criteria that assists us with those determinations within the policy there are also provisions for several situations including communication with families selecting alternative resources when there is a family concern and for allowing student choice its companion policy 4610 serves as a checks and balance and guides us where there is a concern about a particular resource that is in use a particular note with this policy are the administrative guidelines this portion of the policy gives us a depth of information and additional guidance around
190particular types of resources including those on the screen this fall policy 4600 was featured in several communications to administrators and staff due to the unique circumstances in which we find ourselves educators were urged to place focus on teaching the district curriculum focusing on priority standards and formative assessments this impro this approach ensures that all students learn the intended content skills even the most challenging of times because blue valley greatly respects teacher professionalism and fosters a culture in which teachers use the art of teaching to design instruction for their students our teachers regularly make decisions about supplemental resources these resources complement enhance both the curriculum and their instruction guidance was also provided this fall that reiterated the importance of policies 4600 and encouraged teachers to leverage the collective expertise when they're in their community professional learning
191communities to make those determinations the last policy um uh tonight that we'll talk a little bit about is policy 4730. 4730 provides directions direction to our library professionals as they select items and curate their school collections our libraries are at the heart of teaching and learning in our schools and library media specialists play a pivotal role in the culture of learning in a school community policy 4730 both emphasizes the importance of quality library media centers and provides vision for how collections are developed and maintained our library media specialists follow both this policy and policy 4600 as they select books and other resources for their school operational guidelines and visions set forth in 4730 include statements around those bulleted items on the screen libraries in our district should be non-exclusionary contain multiple points of view challenge
192censorship resist abridgement of free expression and the free access of ideas and provide a non-discriminatory use and access at this point i'd like to introduce you to christy bolton who serves as our district coordinator for library media services this is christie's 25th year in education she has 14 years of experience as a library media specialist and seven in her her current role chrissy works really closely with the curriculum and instruction department and all district librarians to lead our program and she's going to share additional information about how we uh how the library collection process works in our district and then we will be happy to take questions good evening um as stated earlier i'm christy bolton the k-12 library media coordinator i'm going to take just a few minutes to explain the process and resources
193used by school librarians thank you to build library collections and purchase library materials first it's important to know that school librarians are certified teachers and before becoming school librarians they must have taught a minimum of two years in any subject area or grade level and then they must obtain a master's degree many obtain a master's degree in library science which allows them to work in other fields outside of education such as public libraries academic libraries museum libraries and much more others obtain a master's in something such as instructional technology with a certification in library science either way they have completed hours of course this coursework includes classes around but not limited to building representative collections which i'll discuss more shortly locating professional reviews of materials and understanding all of the components of collection development case
194law around libraries research methods practices and instruction in library and information science ethics bias and policies and libraries cataloging of library materials and information resources and services for children and young adults second as librarians begin considering and reviewing materials for purchase they begin to generate lists of titles to consider a few ways they get ideas are student recommendations annual book award winner list such as william allen white best books for young adults the prince award and many many more librarians consult and review professional and reputable library resources and journals and they get ideas and recommendations from other librarians librarians also work with their teachers to look at district curriculum and purchase materials that support what is being taught in our classrooms librarians also have an enormous amount of data about their library collection each fall
195we submit each school's library catalog records to three or four of our main vendors who we purchase from these vendors take our records and analyze them compare them to massive amounts of data and metadata they have to then create reports that give us very valuable information we receive back data that shows the age of the items in our collection areas and not fiction and nonfiction that are lacking relevant materials how many titles we own per student topics covered and not covered by the collection and much more this information is extremely valuable to us and that it helps us set data driven collection development goals for every school year and aids us in selecting and deselecting materials all of these practices are very important but the most important practice for librarians is building collections that represent
196their student bodies when students visit their school library the goal is to provide them with books that are mirrors for them to see themselves books that are windows to help them see others and books that are when are excuse me and sliding glass stone books that are sliding glass doors that allow them to step into and learn about other worlds board of education policy 4730 which defines the library media program states library resources shall be provided for the interest information and enlightenment of the school community serve librarians take great pride in building collections that align with board of education policies and guidelines and represent each unique blue valley school community before we before we hand it off to melissa for some just information about legal issues surrounding these two topics are there any questions that
197we can entertain kellyanne christie thank you very much thank you yeah i mean you guys stayed here a long time so truly thank you and appreciate it i know it's the greatest night of your life but i i i anyway you guys do a great job i just i hate that you had to sit here for a long time but thank you we're going to live library is crucial obviously those are success and obviously the epicenter most of our schools so i just want to at least shout out a little bit to you for all you do thank you thankful thank you very much we'll let melissa share her information but we will be around if you have any questions thank you kelly and christy um i'm i know it's getting late so i'm going
198to try to brief brief um but give you the information that i think you need i'm going to talk to you a little bit about the current state of the law when it comes to removing library books that are already on our school library shelves because believe it or not there's some pretty fascinating law around this so the law that governs this is the first amendment um and as most of us know the first amendment is the law that gives us the freedom of religion speech press and the freedom to assemble not only does the first amendment allow us freedom to speak but it also says that we have freedom to receive information and ideas so it's that part of the first amendment that comes into play when we talk about removing books from our
199library shelves so the first landmark case around the first amendment in student rights was the tinker case and tinker said students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate those are pretty famous words the next case that is pertinent to this issue is the pico case which extended the first amendment to library materials the intent of removal is important that case said school officials cannot remove books because you do not like the ideas expressed in those books following that case was the case case this this was case versus the olathe school district it occurred in the 1990s um that case followed followed the pico case and again it held that school boards couldn't remove a school book simply because they did not like the content of the book or the ideas expressed in
200the book um and the last case that i found pertinent was a case brought by the aclu which found that it actually was permissible to remove a library book because it was inaccurate it talked about visiting cuba and it had inaccurate facts in it so that court actually upheld a school board's decision to remove a library book so the sentiment of the courts is that the first amendment rights of students may be implicated by removal of books from shelves of a school library this is because students have a right to receive information and ideas that's an inherent part of their freedom of speech and their first amendment rights and the cases also say that the board of education or school officials may not seek removal of a school book or have a library book just
201to prescribe what shall be orthodox and politics nationalism religion and other matters of opinion this is a direct quote from the pico case an unconstitutional motivation though would not be demonstrated if it were shown that school officials removed a book because it is pervasively vulgar um was educationally unsuitable the courts also considered whether school officials considered the advice of literary experts and the guidance of publications that rate books for students so take away motivation is key if the board intended removal of the book to deny students access to ideas which school officials or board members disagreed with then there's likely a constitutional violation again just there are some limitations to the authority to remove books from shelves and intent is is the big deal thank you i don't think so we just wanted to bring
202bring this a presentation to you to get to let you know um kind of the the background that goes into selecting library books and it's kind of a movement across the country right now um about removing some library books and we just wanted to to present all the facts to you here and i also want to give a shout out to our librarians and to christy because they are really the hubs of our school and and they do a lot to support our teachers and our students and i can think of lots of librarians in my career who have taken people who don't like to read and taken it as a challenge and found something in their library that really sparked that interest so um thank you to our librarians for all that work um
203thank you melissa appreciate your presentation the next agenda item is the calendar proposal good evening each year we come before you administratively to provide to you an option to consider for school calendar this evening as discussed this morning we will be bringing to you in february so this is your aware of an opportunity for your awareness and review we'll request from you in february a revision to the already approved 2223 calendar i'm wondering if we can project the 2223 calendar uh there it is thank you so on this calendar um we'll be uh speaking to you further in february but we'll be seeking your approval in the month of november after receiving feedback from parents students and staff about the request to consider a full fall break in the month of november we believe upon
204review of our minutes that we're able to achieve that we'll have further details about that week for you in november but we're we'll be making that recommendation to you also we're making the recommendation to move a professional learning day to the month of january as well and then on this calendar we have noted in green high school tentative testing day so we have testing day that occurs at the high school level but we haven't noted that spring testing day on the calendar in the past and our high school principals had uh made the request for us to do so so that will be the revisions we'll talk further about in february next up the february testing day is the state paid for a ct is what we're talking about correct thank you for the clarity
205next regarding the 2324 calendar so this is the calendar that we have worked very closely with again calendar committee representatives of our teaching staff and administration are part of this committee and we refer to board policy 2200 to guide the work and in doing so we are going to be posting this calendar on the district website as of tomorrow to allow for staff and parent feedback the committee will review the feedback once we have received that at the end of january you will receive a revise a potentially revised calendar to take action on in february you will note that parent-teacher conferences remain early in september so that the staff can receive feedback from parents as they get to know students you will see that we try to maintain a full fall break in the month
206of november you will also see that in the month of february the calendar committee has moved up the week of conferences i will be interested in the feedback we receive for that spring break currently is commensurate with spring break and past years and next year's calendar as well and in this calendar we also end the school year prior to winter i'm sorry prior to memorial day we do have built into this calendar days that would allow for traditional snow days as well again this will be posted for public feedback and then your review as well prior to take a request for action in february happy to answer any questions anybody have any questions dr collier i thank you for your presentation i do appreciate i believe you're adding um what three days to winter vacation
207um actually we're we're extending um the fall break window in november thanksgiving yes yes thanksgiving break giving a full working towards a full week in november and that was based on some feedback you receive from parents in the community parents staff and students quite frankly right and then again okay you'll get feedback from folks and then we'll re-look at this the next month yes that is correct thank you dr collier you're welcome and i'll stay here because i think i'm up next again okay that would be if there's no more further questions about the calendar and there's no action item then we'll go to policy 3430 is that right yes okay administration is bringing to you tonight board policy 3430 with a request for revision you can see the language that has been inserted into
208the policy red line there for you to review and consider much as we spoke about this morning during workshop this proposal does have the support of all of our high school administrators to be clear for our public this evening this suggests that any student has successfully completed 23 of 24 required graduation credits that they would be allowed to participate in the graduation ceremony if they have indicated a plan to successfully complete their remaining unit by the end of the calendar year that being stated would just like to point out that blue valley continues to maintain graduation credits 24 which exceed that of the state students would have opportunity to complete this work either in person or virtually because we don't we can't provide all options during the summer we left this open to the end
209of the calendar year and again building principles feel very strongly that this is tied to student motivation and assisting them in that final push to acquire their credits for graduation the diploma is awarded upon receipt of their credits i'm happy to uh take any questions yeah quick question so when you say the end of the calendar year does it need to say the end of that calendar year or is the clear enough you know what we we can add that the end of that calendar yeah yeah sure there are all these uh prior amendments has this uh previously been a policy or is it i'm just wondering what those prior amendments if they were unrelated you know unfortunately i don't have the history of those prior amendments i can tell you that this has been
210a topic that has been discussed by high school principals for a couple years colvit exacerbated the issue and they're trying to to really acknowledge you know that which is needed for students at that point but i have the specificity gym of those others [Music] but seven amendments is what you're noting right i don't know if it's suspension i'm just wondering whether that's this is a controversial issue or not in public education i've never heard it so this is the first time i've amended such a policy jim any other questions uh thank you very much dr collier appreciate your presentation excellent job uh do i have a motion to wait a minute i think we got birthdays for mark schmidt on january 14th so happy birthday um do we have a motion to adjourn i'll move
211the january 10th regular board of education meeting meeting be adjourned a second second jody motion by tom any discussion uh all in favor say uh raise your right hand uh motion passes seven zero thank you very much appreciate everybody staying tonight did a great job appreciate the board working through these issues you