001[Music] do [Music] all right good evening everyone we will start with the pledge of allegiance tonight and officer george is going to leave one us under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you all right first up tonight we have public comments so welcome to 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 effective and dignified meeting open forum will be provided for up to 60 minutes in an effort to give as many individuals an opportunity to speak as possible during this period the board will enforce a three-minute limit per speaker and tonight we have several more speakers than we've had in the last couple of board meetings so
002i ask that you keep to the three minute limit after 60 minutes the board will close open forum and will proceed with its agenda 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 you may address the board by email communication i have a few reminders tonight 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 respective language if you're speaking in person please keep your face covering in place while you speak please limit discussions to the relevant business of the board tonight discussion of matters related
003to a specific student or employee is not allowed instead comments should be submitted in writing to the superintendent please remember to limit your comments to three minutes and avoid repeating the concerns of a previous speaker if you have questions that were that will require a response someone will follow up with you at a later time on behalf of the board i welcome you and appreciate your interest in blue valley as we ser we strive to provide the best education possible to our students when your name is called please introduce yourself before beginning your remarks as a reminder we ask that all remarks be limited to three minutes and so we'll go ahead and get started up first is james reese yeah over there so good evening um are we allowed to interactively ask questions or
004is this mainly a comment it's just an opportunity for you to comment okay it'd be nice if we could have a conversation maybe we could clear the air a little bit but that's okay um i know that's hard in this country now to actually have a civilized conversation but beside the point um so i guess my question is this or not a question but a statement when are kids going back to school full-time pretty simple um olathe i knew i know you know announced that they're going back march 1st so i know we have gating criteria that was set forth probably over the summer it's about nine months ago and i would say that that information now is pretty outdated based on what we know today so based on the science you know everybody talks
005about the science if you look at the science and you have any common sense you'll know that schools are not spreaders in the community that's been proven so why are we trying to link community cases with schools it just seems like at this point in time kind of illogical to do that but yet we still have that gating criteria in place and i don't know about you guys i haven't had any communication that you guys are thinking about changing that so i think that would be helpful um of course i've seen i know you've seen the news cdc said finally get back in school so if we're going based on science and based on now what nine months of information that we have in science that we have i'm really i think a lot of
006us are why are the kids not back in school full-time now so um i do know that blue valley has spent 3.1 million dollars on getting the schools to be quote-unquote safe you know with the air filtration systems all the ppe et cetera so that's a lot of money to spend so i'm wondering we spent all this money where's our return on investment where are we why are we not having the kids back in school i mean at what point you know everybody talks about being safe i mean did everybody drive here tonight didn't so you took a risk assessment you said okay am i going to walk or am i going to drive and if i drive i'm taking a risk because the roads are bad but i'm willing to take that risk every
007time you step out of your house you take a risk so unless being alive is the only thing you value then lock yourself in the basement if not let's get back to living our lives it's pretty simple um so the only thing i want to ask is and i'll make this more of a statement do we have stats on what's happened to our children as far as mental illness depression i know we've had an increase in rates in johnson county everybody has across the country but do we know those stats and we're taking and say look we have to balance these things out and i guess i'm just to the point where and i'm trying to keep myself level as you said i'm to the point where looking at this logically i can't figure out
008why in the world our kids are not in school full-time based on everything we know today i understand over the summer things were unknown but now i just don't understand so and i would say this open transparency with the parents in the community thanks maria good evening president taiseling dr merrigan members of the board my name is maria worthington i'm a mother an educator and a colleague i have a daughter isolated in virtual learning and one with a pre-existing condition i'm an english teacher at blue valley north and the president of blue valley nea i'm here as a positive educator voice invest invested in our blue valley students and the entire blue valley staff that cares so deeply for our students and community educators are at home watching and listening tonight words matter when we
009say that we want to reopen schools it makes it seem that schools are closed schools are open and they say different to say differently diminishes the difficult and beautiful work educators are doing every day i am here to lift up those educator voices we have educators like elementary sped and early ed who have been in person most of the year terrified about proper mitigation and the lack of social distancing we have secondary educators who have been working overtime to figure out how to balance virtual and hybrid learning with technology school specialists rsps esps are being asked to do more and more while being exposed to health risks by working with more and more students the fact is blue valley staff and families have gotten severely sick this year we must not minimize the pain and
010loss of these valued professionals if we truly believe in the strategic plan that values exemplary educators we need to think about how upcoming decisions might make a difference in their health and in their retention as educators in the district and parents we appreciate the energy and effort that you have put into advocating for students mental health the pandemic has exposed issues that we in education have been struggling with for so long when schools transition to all in person physically putting all the students bodies in our buildings will not make the mental health issues disappear mental health support should be a priority every year we need our blue valley community to refocus their energy into advocating for public school funding in the next couple of months we will begin cutting services programs and activities i look
011out to the audience and ask what programs do you want to cut how will that impact academic and mental health interventions again i ask what message do we want to send to the educators watching and listening tonight how do we value their sacrifice we are almost there protecting them with the vaccine we must remain steadfast in our efforts and ensure that everyone is kept safe and healthy and when we welcome our students back how will we support these educators going forward with the budget shortfall educators are embracing for the worst based on the decisions we make in the upcoming weeks educators will decide whether they stay i'm sorry or leave i just want to say we want to support that equitable environment and safe so thank you i appreciate it thank you for your comments
012uh next up is jill ackermann jill ackerman mom of four blue valley students i'm a family physician this is my eighth public statement since october 15th regarding remote learning i've presented scientific evidence and statements from cdc american academy of pediatrics american medical association new england journal of medicine unc duke medical university of south carolina brown university dr fauci among others tonight i have five takeaways one vaccines last week kansas began vaccinating k-12 educators and staff per governor kelly's prioritization and thankfully all kansans age 65 and up statistically the population at greatest risk are now eligible of the research i have previously cited not a single school or community in those studies had the benefit of vaccine availability at that time of data collection despite that the overwhelming evidence supported in-person learning accordingly the cdc director
013has stated vaccination is not a prerequisite for safely reopening two mitigation blue valley has successfully implemented mitigation measures in our elementary schools secondary schools do present unique challenges including lunchtime passing periods i'm optimistic the board and administration have used the past 11 months to prepare for this i commend the of johnson county school districts who have also prepared and have already voted for full in-person learning including olathe a district of nearly thirty thousand students as parents we will support our teachers and staff in holding our children accountable to respect these mitigation measures to keep our schools safe three choice you've provided the choice of virtual learning for families who desire please honor the choice of the majority of blue valley families that opt for the benefit and safety of full in-person learning and thank you
014for giving choice to our valuable teachers and staff with health risk factors or other circumstances that preclude them from educating in person four improve improving infection rates johnson county positivity has been cut in half since last month a constant and dramatic decline since january 7th the incidence rate in kansas has trended downward since january 10th and hospitalizations in johnson county have shown a marked decline in the past week five power and duty the jcdhe retains the power to close our schools should absenteeism illness and quarantine deem closure of public health necessity this is our safety net their recommendations for learning modes has not been updated since october 1st despite their statement that quote as new evidence emerges recommendations may change unquote four and a half months of mounting data and no update nonetheless their guidelines
015do say quote decisions on appropriate learning modes will continue to be made by school districts end quote the power and duty to fully open our schools is and always been in your hands alone thank you next is michelle mitchell hi my name is michelle mitchell i have a freshman and a junior at blue valley northwest i'm here to say it's time to open the middle in the high schools last summer when the gating criteria was adopted by this board the situation was completely different we now have vaccination and we also have declining measures in percent positive number of cases and hospitalizations we only had 640 cases in our county last week 4.1 percent positive and the mark website says we have 42 percent hospital capacity in johnson county if someone does need attention they'll be
016able to get it many peer-reviewed studies have indicated and proven that schools are not spreaders if anything they're safer than the greater community but a few of them said they're no worse than the greater community everything's open right now in johnson county except my high school kids are sitting at home half the time they have eight days of instruction this month it's a four week month eight days they'll be in person our high school and middle school kids have paid and are continuing to pay a huge price they've been stuck at home full-time or in hybrid for almost a year now education is essential and if everything else is open we've got to open up the schools and we know how to follow the mitigation strategies i signed up to be a sub i told
017you this in august when i spoke to you guys and i've been subbing and i've been so pleased with all the kids at all ages who are some believable i haven't had to really call anyone out for doing anything against all the mitigation strategies uh the hybrid learning model is significantly flawed my kids are in honors classes and they have two to three hour gaps when they're home with nothing to do i can't stand the screen time the tick tock the youtube that they're doing and their grades are good so it's not like they're not doing work i do not fault the teachers how can you possibly teach and keep half your class busy it's impossible we've set them up for failure as teachers because you can't do two things at once effectively and you
018can't just have kids at home with discretionary time my biggest fear as a parent is teenagers with discretionary time because i'm subbing sometimes so i'm not even home to peek over their shoulder and make sure that they're not doing anything bad finally the survival rate in johnson county is a hundred percent for ages 0 to 19. and now the 65 and olders and the teachers at higher risk have an opportunity to get vaccinated my in-laws and my mom are 65 with no health issues they got vaccinated last weekend it's it's the situation is different i urge you tonight to take action and discuss this and throw out the gating criteria and open the schools immediately let's not just throw this year away and start again in august let's get a quarter of learning in person
019in thank you michelle um up next we have amy thomas hi my name is amy thomas i am in the blue valley southwest school district i'm here today on behalf of my middle and high school students to ask you to eliminate the gating criteria and immediately move to full-time in-person learning olathe spring hill mill valley and johnson county have already made the decision to return middle and high school students to in-person learning full-time i'm asking blue valley to do the same the current hybrid mode is not working and i'd like to share why this is the case i've spent 25 years my career in talent acquisition and training and development we have learned in time that adults as well as children do not learn from sitting in front of a computer 10 to 20 years
020ago companies had new hires sit in front of a computer with interactive computer modules completing them then doing testing but over time we found that that did not work because they're not actually learning anything and they're not retaining anything this is not working for our children either my boys are in the latter half of the alphabet so we're we're lucky to get to go twice a week on those days they're home they have about a 10 minute zoom class and then they're teaching themselves the rest of the material asynchronous learning i'm not sure how this even qualifies as instructional hours my sophomore's gpa took a hit in the first semester which means he's going to have to work hard to make up for it in future semesters to be able to receive scholarship money my
021seventh grader has received all a's last semester however his map scores declined from the from fall of 2019 the last two semesters that is proof and evidence that they're not learning anything in school because they're not in school full-time five days a week getting instructed by their teachers i'd like to be clear i do not blame the teachers they are doing the best that they can they can do to handle the double workload you're putting on them in this hybrid mode i blame you the blue valley board of education no one asks for this learning mode yet the school board insists on shoving it down our throats i did not it did not work for elementary schools i do not know why you think it would work for middle and high school students when their
022curriculum is much more rigorous this board of education continues to move the goal posts first it was case numbers and it was positivity rate then it was the lack of staff then it was substitute teachers and now it's the vaccine the cdc has come out to say there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely opening schools this article which i sent you all last week says the study from the cdc published last month found little evidence of virus spread runs schools in the u.s and abroad when precautions are in place although i will tell you that schools all across the city or in person have been since full time since
023august and they're not social distancing i can tell you where now i've been here four times quoting statistics clearly you're not listening to the science because we've been telling you this over and over and over for several months now my seventh grader tells me that all the teachers he talks to want to be in school full time i've the parents have been here begging to go to school full time teachers want to go full time so my question is this who are you listening to please stop listening to the teachers unions that are influencing this decision and listen to your constituents who have the opportunity to vote you into office or not this year's election cycle thank you next up is kevin miner so i'm going to start with a question for the board how
024many blue valley students have committed suicide since we've been in remote or hybrid learning do you know yes no bob your head if you did not know this number you were derelict in your duties to not factor this number into your decisions related to getting kids back in the classrooms notwithstanding the flawed gating criteria being used by this board cdc director rochelle walinski publicly stated on february 3rd five days ago schools can safely reopen without teachers being vaccinated this is a director of the cdc saying this what else do you possibly need you need not look any further for evidence that in-person learning is safe than to look at parochial schools and some public schools blue valley or blue springs public schools st thomas aquinas bishop meage and too many others to list have maintained
025full-time in-person learning since last fall they are models of how to safely return to school for full-time dangerous as we are led to believe several teachers and students of all these schools would have died it would have been all over the tv news and in the kansas city star i personally have not heard of one teacher losing their life from the direct transmission of covet 19 by a student or from being in school so what's the obvious difference in between these parochial schools and public schools that allows parochial schools to stay open parochial schools are accountable to the parents of the students not the teachers unions if parochial schools don't provide full-time in-person learning parents will pull their kids and enroll them in a different parochial school that will provide full-time in-person learning hence the
026parents have a choice where to spend their money and the schools depend on those tuitions to remain in business they are responsible to their customers unlike public schools just think what for the 14 025 average cost per student in blue valley could provide to a parent of a blue valley student in the open market pembroke hill barstow aquinas anyone last week it was already said olathe opened up i've reviewed numerous public university studies that have looked at standardized testing results since the schools have moved to remote and hybrid learning these statistics indicate kids are learning approximately 50 percent of what they learned the previous years when they were in full-time classrooms think about that 50 percent of what these kids are supposed to be learning that's shameful you go to your website it says your
027this board strategic goal is to improve the academic performance of each student on your website you have this listed as 25 percent progress couldn't tell you where you came up with that grade ask any parent the district this is not the case my biggest reason for advocating for full-time in-person learning is student mental health and suicide prevention i have a file over there when my wife was a teacher in ninth grade of kids talking about committing suicide and not having anybody to talk to other than their teacher and if i could just say just a couple more things i was going to read sorry we have to keep moving okay these kids need teachers for some of these kids these teachers are all they have to talk to they can't they don't feel safe speaking
028with anyone else if you cannot make these tough decisions you need to step down from your positions and let someone else assume your positions that can make hard decisions based on science logic statistics and common sense if anybody would like to make a copy of any of these letters where these kids had reached out to my wife i brought the file over there after the meeting i would be happy to give them to you and redact the child's name thank you next up we have caroline donda okay i have her on the online list okay um christine white you're up next thank you for allowing us to speak tonight my name is christine white i'm a pediatrician and i have two kids at blue valley northwest the views i speak about tonight are my own
029and no one else's i'd like to share a quote with you from the nobel prize-winning physicist marie curie quote nothing in life is to be feared it is only to be understood now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less end quote i know every school board member in america is fearful of making the decision of whether to send kids back to school or to keep them safely at home one fear is that of a student or teacher contracting covet in the school setting even though studies show schools are safer than what people encounter in their daily lives in the community because schools are using mitigation techniques the fear perhaps of a student passing kova to a teacher even though the primary way a teacher or student contracts covid as shown
030in study after study is from parties or gatherings in their private lives where ppe is not used or the fear of students or teachers dying of covet that they contracted at school 99.5 percent so the boards do not need to fear the in-person option when the knowledge and understanding is there to do it safely also the kansas legislature passed a law in the spring protecting schools and businesses from liability and prosecution from coveted related outcomes out of their control i am sure our school boards in johnson county are fearful to dismiss the gating criteria created by the johnson county health department in july of 2020. that has been the basis for keeping kids out of school as described previously these criteria are skewed and are not applicable to students being in school and should not
031be the basis of any decision to allow kids to return to school the final fear i'm sure many school boards work under comes from pressure exerted by the nea and some teachers unions please note i am not calling out individual teachers here but the often vocal outspoken and politically active leadership of these organizations from what i hear from individual teachers they want to be in classrooms i know the unions hold a lot of power over school boards and superintendents and therefore their demands and conditions can determine whether our children receive a full and robust education or only crumbs the only fear i have in this grand experiment we have undertaken since march is the harm we are causing our children these harms have been well delineated and proven and i will not restate them here
032as a society i believe we will look back 15 years from now at our actions from and be ashamed of ourselves but it is never too late to try to do better as john wayne said quote courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway end quote and lastly as nelson mandela said i learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it the brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers fear thank you [Applause] next up is sherry mccants hi i'm a first time speaker and i won't have the three minutes so if somebody wants to take the rest of mine they can i'm sherry mccants and i'm a mother of uh two children in the blue valley high school southwest uh we
033moved here three years ago and the reason why we chose blue valley is because we heard it was such a great school with this pandemic and virtual learning my kids are suffering i have a senior that's not able to do the senior activities that usually seniors do and i have a junior that is has been a straight a student the whole time and actually had a lot of problems possibly flunking classes but we did get her to a c we've never seen this in her at all before she's an outgoing person and this has made her depressed and miserable to the point where that they are allowed to um take their zoom calls like in bed they don't even have to sometimes have their um zoom they don't even have to be to be seen
034or anything with this virtual learning we've never seen her act like this she's so outgoing and friendly i feel this has been the worst i just want my children back they've lost so much i just ask that we open up the blue valley schools for this last quarter so that the seniors can have their senior time and they can have their proms and things um the biggest thing is that because with hybrid they don't even get to see their friends because they are basically put in a school where they are just with different people that they have not been with before and this is part of school is developing these relationships so again i ask that the blue valley schools open up thank you sir and then sloan heller thank you good evening i'm sloane
035heller i'm a parent of a second grader at leawood elementary school last week leawood elementary school rallied around the chiefs every day there were theme dress-up days there were quizzes there were there was a remote author who did a read aloud the creative energy the collaboration this highly coordinated effort around chief spirit week provided a very stark contrast to what we saw surrounding other monumental events in our country's history including the most recent election the inauguration and the swearing-in of the very first black female asian-american vice president while i cannot speak to the entire school and what happened inside each and every class i can speak personally to what i saw and i can speak to the large sample of parents and students that i spoke to and here's what i can tell you in
036those classrooms this historic inauguration was not mentioned on january twentieth the word inauguration the word of a new president the word of a new vice president was not brought up in those classrooms while it was briefly touched on days later it begs the question why why was it an afterthought and why was the district's guidance to make this topic optional to be clear i am concerned that our children's education is not being dictated by the district but by our teachers and if our teachers are understandably and i understand uneasy or unprepared to have discussions that might provoke sensitive questions where does that leave our children to be clear i do not support political views being shared in class what i support is a greater focus on civics on current events and on debate and what
037i support is our teachers getting the support and the guidance that they need from our district to do their jobs without fear of retribution we all know our children are hearing what's happening in the news they're hearing our conversations about black lives matter divided country the pandemic the capital riots we all have stress we're taking on multiple jobs some of us are losing jobs we are doing our best to educate ours our children at home but we need the support of the district we need the support of our schools to back us up we cannot do this alone and i'm not done okay because this is important we cannot shield our children from the world we have to listen to them and we have to be prepared for their questions no matter how difficult they
038might be we have to find age-appropriate creative and thoughtful ways to foster critical thinkers respectful debates and glide our children to become members of a strong democracy we owe that to them sloan thank you very much i i have one more thing well i'm sorry we got to keep moving so that we can hear from everyone you're welcome to i know you've contacted the board and you're welcome to submit some other thoughts but we have several others that are going to share their thoughts tonight yeah i i can't i'm sorry it's i have to hold the same rules for everyone the next couple of presenters we have tonight are from patrons who submitted comments in writing and the first one up is i believe david edwards the following comments were submitted by david edwards student
039at blue valley high school good evening my name is david edwards and again i must address you tonight concerning the removal of to kill a mockingbird the adventures of tom sawyer the adventures of huckleberry fenn and of mice and men every month since october with a single exception i have spoken at the months meeting to try to get this board to host a meeting to hear out the people who want this book back and it should be apparent that doing such has gotten me nowhere the board of education seems to believe that they have no responsibility for this issue i was recently contacted by a district administrator who said this the board of education does not vote on or determine what those instructional resources should be building administration district administration and teachers make those determinations
040the board of education is democratically elected while it is unusual to vote on such matters i feel it is the responsibility of the board to do so in this instance these officials are not accountable to the taxpayers on an issue important to them you are the ones entrusted with the power and responsibility to review these decisions and while it is not usually the role of the board to do so it could be i'm only asking for a vote a simple admission that you support or stand against the removal of these books i must say however that by not voting you have made it clear where your support lies to kill a mockingbird is an engaging deep novel more so than other books the district's english teachers know this this is why so many of them
041decided to teach to kill a mockingbird over any of the other books available to them in previous years i understand that this book contains tough issues and i am close friends with people who both approve and disprove of this change but right now this change is not in the hands of the board and thus the voters but in the hands of a few unelected district administrators you have the power to take responsibility for this decision yet you use bureaucracy to avoid doing so thank you david next up is frank stewart the following comments were submitted by frank stewart the board implemented diversity equity and inclusion training for teachers and staff using a company called lively paradox is the board aware that this company promotes elements of critical race theory that are based on marxist principles
042and which are antithetical to america's traditional ideals of equality individual talent and personal character all right thank you frank next up is matthew thompson the following comments were submitted by matthew thompson whose student attends blue valley middle school blue valley board of education thank you for remaining steadfast in your dedication to the approved gating criteria throughout this school year cdc recommendations cited repeatedly by those demanding a return to 100 in person school are contingent upon coordinated mitigation efforts these efforts must include masking social distancing frequent hand washing and sanitation and proper ventilation at this time a return to a 100 in-person school is impossible under these aforementioned conditions social distancing cannot be achieved in blue valley educational facilities at full student capacity most sanitation efforts are left to the discretion of teaching staff and students
043themselves and are therefore applied inconsistently ventilation is adequate at some newer facilities but most older facilities lack return air circulation compliant with cdc recommendations meanwhile most teachers and school staff remain unvaccinated as they wait their turn blue valley is offering exemplary educational opportunities for its students albeit in a novel fashion it is reasonable for the blue valley board of education to ask our community to adjust to pandemic conditions and extend hybrid learning modes in secondary education until staff is vaccinated by their own choice if cdc reopening recommendations cannot be met thank you for your consideration all right last up we have sally grosbeck the following comments were submitted by sally grosbeck whose students attend prairie star elementary i am writing to ask you to reconsider the guidelines for registering for the virtual school option for
044next year we have used virtual school this year because my children and myself are immunocompromised obviously in person would be our number one option if we were not in the midst of a pandemic that many community members do not take seriously our school while doing its best to serve students during this time does not feel safe kids are not adequately social distance because rooms are not big enough as a former teacher i also know that young elementary kids and their parents don't always follow the rules about mask wearing or sending kids to school that are feeling ill thus we made the choice last fall and winter to do virtual school with the hopes that a kids vaccine would become available and allow our kids a chance to return next fall now with projections of the
045vaccine not being available until the fall or end of next year we were excited to hear that the virtual school would be offered again we thought as a family we could get by with one more semester of virtual that would keep us healthy and safe however according to the new registration guidelines the district is now forcing you to elect for an entire year of virtual those of us with high-risk family members who are not able to go to school during a pandemic will now have to either unenroll from the district for a virtual semester elsewhere or forfeit the whole school year to virtual despite the fact that a vaccine will likely become available halfway through the year while i realize that mid-year staffing and class changes are not ideal neither is forcing your high-risk families
046into two years of virtual school because the district has not made it safe for this population to return our kids deserve a chance to be in person as well and while it may not be appropriate to send them in the fall we should have the opportunity to send them in the spring if it is safe i urge you to reconsider this registration process all right thank you sally that wraps up open forum for tonight on behalf of the board of education i'd like to thank our participants we we thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts with us um and you'll notice we all we're taking notes and along with the administration during open forum and we'll follow up as needed with participants and next up i'm going to call the meeting to
047order first up on our agenda is to receive reports from board advisory committees and the first one is finance and ops operations thanks amy i have that one for kyle who's not able to be here tonight finance and operations committee met on thursday february 4th via zoom at that meeting dr collier was there and presented the district student fees for the 2021-2022 school year which is on your consent agenda this evening for the board's consideration should be noted on that that there were no fee increases that were approved or presented then director of facilities and operations jake slobotnick presented the design and bids for the gymnasium and performing arts edition at blue valley high school that project is scheduled to begin construction this spring and be completed by next december director of finance jenny daniel
048then presented an update on the funding and expenses related to covet 19. jake slobotnick presented five design and construction contracts jason gillum then presented three bids three purchases and ten contracts all of that is on the agenda for the board's approval this evening the next committee meeting uh for finance and operation is on thursday march 4th thank you dr american the next one is curcumin instruction with dr collier the curriculum and instruction board advisory committee met via zoom on january 20th as part of the blue valley strategic plan objectives updates were provided on topics of career-ready programming and virtual education the meeting began with the listen and learn budget conversation and activity members from the committee were given time to participate in the thought exchange in order to provide input into suggested solutions to address
049this the district budget challenges for the 21-22 school year katie bonama director for career ready programs updated the committee on career and technical education she noted beginning next year with our career ready partnerships we're starting a fire science program with the overland park fire department additionally she explained johnson county community college partner programs include full-time dual degree and cte program options the jcc dual degree program is a collaboration with counseling teams in blue valley and jcc where a student is working the partnership programs included include the following which she highlighted automation engineering technician auto technician construction management culinary and hospitality electrical technician electronics technician hvac plumbing technol technician welding and metal fabrication finally i along with kelly ott executive director curriculum instruction innovation and adam westell director of virtual learning provided an update on the
050future of virtual ed for the coming school year the committee will meet again via zoom this week february 11th thank you dr collier the next report is for student activities good evening good evening the student activities committee met on january 28th the primary purpose for the january sac meeting was to share information regarding the blue valley school district budget for next year as well as an introduction to character and leadership development casey bruto director of communications presented budget information regarding the 21-22 school year including a listen and learn exercise i then introduced and the group discussed the development of a character and leadership program for all students involved in activities and athletics building administrators will solicit additional information from current sponsors and coaches for our next meeting high school and middle school administrators provided activity
051and athletic updates and the blue valley recreation also provided updates the next meeting for sac is scheduled for thursday february 18th thank you mr sevillefield next up we have health and well-being student services with dr schmidt good evening uh we the health and well-being board of ed advisory committee met on wednesday january 27th via zoom we began the evening with a with the committee participating in the listen and learn budget conversation becky miller communications coordinator shared a short video to educate everybody about the budget challenges that we were facing and then we participated in a thought exchange process where feedback was solicited secondly we followed up with a discussion about the suicide prevention intervention and postmention that takes place within our district tara walrod counselor and k-12 student service supports shared all the different curriculum
052that goes on that we're using at every single level in order to prevent suicide and promote mental health following that emily demo school psychologists explain the steps and options that are available when we come across a student with suicidal ideation and then we wrapped up with just some updates on student testing within the district covet testing thank you thank you much and the last report is diversity equity and inclusion with dr american the diversity equity and inclusion committee met on january 14th also via zoom and we did just what these other committees did and we spent the first half hour with the budget listen and learn tour which you're going to hear about a little bit later on this evening following that we spent time working on strategies in the five different components that this
053committee had identified around curriculum and instruction diversity equity and inclusion training for staff the response system for students the formation of diversity equity and inclusion subcommittees and student advisory boards they are going to continue working on strategies and a plan to present to this board of education later on this year our meeting is later this week on february 11th via zoom again thank you dr merrigan uh next step we'll receive reports from board members and the superintendent on items not included on the agenda tom mitchell would you like to go first thank you michelle benjamin okay patrick harley thank you stacy i do actually uh have a few things to run through real quick first the listen and learn that we have been able to do in the board advisory committees i just want to
054thank you all for doing that it has been very informative and insightful for the board to hear the comments from the patrons we have heard a lot about maintaining class sizes maintaining a diverse offering of activities we've heard a lot about mental health and keeping our great staff that we have here in blue valley so i do appreciate the efforts i know that was a large undertaking and i believe you did well over 50 different presentations second health and well-being dr schmidt i really appreciated that meeting last month the suicide prevention presentation and the continuing work that we do there is really really important i was really happy to hear that you have created a covet specific lessons for the high school kids which i think is extremely beneficial and i also really appreciate that
055you've taken the time to create a lesson for seniors as they're leaving blue valley on how to get help in the future and where to look for resources as they leave blue valley also acacia i had an opportunity to sit on the board of directors on january 20th and they voted to increase spectators for some sports in some instances from two to four i know we've applied that where we have space in our buildings and for winter sports happening right now dr merrigan i actually was wondering um we have some cold weather coming up and i know maybe some families are starting to think about what a snow day might look like in blue valley and i believe in the past you've referenced that those will still be in-person learning days even if the weather
056is bad is that still what we're planning this year right they would be remote learning days if we absolutely have to close our schools and it's not safe to to come in so yes okay okay um and then finally um in the past usually we announce um around spring break the last day of school will that be our process again this year for making that decision on when that final day will be yeah we typically announce that at the march board meeting and i think we will follow the same pattern this year and we will announce the last day of school then okay perfect thank you and then i guess also finally a consent agenda there were a couple of items coming up on the consent agenda we don't really normally get a chance to
057discuss those but i just wanted to highlight them one i really appreciate the district fees holding them steady this year i know that that is really important to a lot of our families not to be increasing costs and just wanted to thank you for that number two that middle school program guide oh my gosh that is extremely helpful i looked through that and you make it very easy for kids and for parents to figure out the progression from sixth to seventh and then even particularly for math to show what your options are in ninth grade i really like that um the only thing i was wondering is some of the classes particularly the electives mention that there can sometimes be a fee associated with those classes but i i didn't see anywhere in the guide
058where that fee was listed is there someplace else that they need to go to get that information for that dollar amount or is there a way to include it or put a link or something to that fee schedule yeah we can make sure that the fees are in there i haven't looked at the middle school one asked closely but i know in the high school one that's specifically listed yeah i remember it from the high school but that we can we can absolutely go just something to mention because i know that you know that is sensitive right now the last thing i would discuss then is the hr report and um looking at the number of retirements and resignations um in the school district and the change from this year to last year it has
059gone up a little bit and that is concerning for me we have tremendous staff here in blue valley and i definitely want to do everything we can to keep them and realize that we're in a position now where there are not as many kids at the college level that are studying to become teachers we have been talking about this now for a couple years that the the pool of applicants is shrinking uh dramatically actually and so i you know in the competition for those kids that do come out of those programs they they tend to get snapped up pretty quick so i'm not sure if we're thinking ahead and i'm sure um i'm sure we are uh hr is always on top of things but just want to make sure that we're thinking ahead for
060this spring and summer that we're trying to go after some of the best candidates that we can get to backfill not that you can backfill some of these great teachers and actually i saw on the list some of them were teachers i had when i was in blue valley so that made me a little bit sad but anyway so i just wanted to mention that and i think that that is all i have on my list for right now sorry it was so long yeah thank you for covering such a good list of topics thank you uh mike do you have any comments uh stacy took all my comments and jody um i do um i just wanted to mention you know we kind of touched on a little bit on the um i think
061it was the cni weeks and and learn more about our is it the the fire science program culinary and and all of these different partnerships that we have um with jccc and um it sounds absolutely amazing and i'm really excited about that my concern is that we need to make for sure that we're extremely clear about these options at the very least when kids are in eighth grade because you have to plan ahead for this so whatever we can do to to you know emphasize you know looking at the stuff in eighth grade i think i think we need to do it um so that that's just something i'm concerned about because after having you know one kiddo already go through high school you know she wanted to do caps you had to be incredibly
062strategic about the classes you take from you know ninth grade on um and then i've got a junior this year and and you know it things fill up it's too late your freshman year so that i just wanted to make for sure that we we can we can do well in uh regarding information in that area so so i can help relieve a little bit of that jody sarah baron who is the uh counselor who works between johnson county community college and blue valley right now was working on enrollment at the high school level but i had a chance to talk to katie and kelly and katie bonima and when she's through with that process her plan is to get into every single eighth grade classroom this year yet and do some sessions that way
063so we agree with you we need to bring this down into the middle school great i really appreciate that because truly setting through these sessions i wish i were going through again i would totally do fire science do it emt training and and all that so it was it was really exciting to hear that and the interest in the kids that were there um the questions they asked it was fantastic thank you jody thank you for taking the time to do that and dr american i do have a couple things first one last week february 1st through the 7th was national school counselor week so i have to give a shout out to my school counselor colleagues their work is important every year but especially important this year so thank you to all of our
064school counselors i also wanted to give you a little bit of a legislative update lots going on in topeka right now um we have testified getting given written testimony on several bills all of them which pertain to the priority positions that this board adopted in december um house bill 2068 and senate bill 61 which talked about the expansion of tax credits uh that was something this board specifically had as a priority not to happen um also house bill 2119 the student empowerment act which is goes a little bit further in that so that one is still evolving and then finally i think it was house bill 2601 we actually tested in support of this one which was raising the age from 18 to 21 for vaping products and taking flavors out of everything except menthol
065i think so i just wanted to give you an update on that and then finally i wanted to do a public thank you to the johnson county department of health and environment children's mercy dr schmidt and dr punswick you're going to hear in just a little bit about our first vaccination clinic that happened last week and that was a huge undertaking by children's mercy as well as the johnson county department of health and environment and then dr schmidt and dr punswick coordinated that within our district so that's it and like dr merrigan said thank you for um dr pogba for all the work you guys did on that next up i uh would like to see if we have a motion to approve the agenda for the february 8th regular board of education meeting i
066moved that the board of education approved the agenda for the february 8th 2021 regular board of education meeting as published thank you tom is there a second second thank you jody all those in favor please raise your right hand 7-0 thank you very much next up is the consent agenda stacy touched on a couple items earlier better there any items that board members would like to pull off the consent agenda hearing none do i have a motion to approve the consent agenda i move that the board of education approved the consent agenda for the february 8 2021 regular board of education meeting as published thank you stacy thank you michelle for the second all those in favor please raise your right hand passes 7-0 all right our first piece of new business tonight is a
067spring 2021 covid response update dr schmidt and dr punzwick are going to start this and then i will finish it off thank you very much um first of all i'd just like to review some of the dashboard information first of all i want to point out this is the first time that we've had four weeks in a row where we've had a negative trend in the total number of cases within our school district and i think that's a very important development as we as we move forward into the spring semester well there it is well the quarantine data we always have a little bit of a lag so you don't see the straight down uh trend that we've seen in the other areas but that's to be expected and i fully expend expect the next
068couple of weeks to also kind of trend in that direction because it's been following about a week behind and finally when we look at both staff and student cova data in the number of positive cases both students and staff have been trending strongly downward over the last four weeks and as i looked at the johnson county data for covid this is an almost an exact mirror of what we're seeing across our entire community and some of the and i just want to touch on a couple of things that have been presented before but we are continuing all systematic or symptomatic testing that we have in our district for students that means that we will issue them a card and at no cost to the parents or family they can go into the johnson county without
069an appointment and get a nasal swab test and get the results back in between 24 and 48 hours in addition to that our staff has saliva tests that we give them here at the school and they can take that home drop it off in fedex and get the results in a very short period of time as well and so we feel like we have a pretty good handle on when somebody is symptomatic getting them assessed so that we can figure out you know is this covet or is this something else and all of these are the state-of-the-art pcrc or pcr test and then we moved into some asymptomatic uh staff coveted tests i'm going to turn it over to eric for this you bet we can't say enough about the great partnership we have with
070mod labs mod is paid by state contract that does not cost the district any of our general funds and we provide tests every thursday for any employee who would like to take a test we started this right before we went on winter break and if you look at the numbers we've had almost 3 000 tests that have been provided to employees and we've had 14 positive test results from that that sample size it says 24 to 48 hours if they get the results but mod's been working really well with us to get those within usually that evening so our employees know about this before they go into the weekend we can provide the necessary supports for those individuals we're going to keep doing this every thursday for the rest of the semester because we do
071have the funding and mods been great to work with during this whole time and then expanding on the asymptomatic student covid tests we also are able to now start to test students and this goes back to the mod labs they've been a tremendous partner and our first set of tests are going to take place here later in february and we've had uh roughly 4 000 parents that have signed up for this voluntary test about 1900 at the elementary level and a thousand at middle school and 1400 in the high school level while we were planning on doing on-site testing originally we have changed course to make this a little more democratic or a little more open to more people and we are going to be sending these tests home now at the elementary middle and
072high school level while we had closed off parent permissions within the next week or with the next couple days we are going to be sending home another communication to the parents allowing them to sign up for the take-home test if they feel that's appropriate for their family yes that will be an email not yet but there will be mark if i could have a quick question too um so when i signed up i went in through canvas and i sent i've got two kids when i went in to sign up it's one kid's you know hit me in the face right so i went ahead and approved that one i don't think it allowed me to get the other kid so how do i check to see if i did indeed authorize that jody i'd
073like to say that your experience was unique it was not uh we have gone through and we're providing some more explicit directions about how to check whether or not your kids have signed up that's that's great fantastic thanks sorry patrick 4 000 yes is that a statistically significant number of kids to be testing in our universe of student population we wanted to we could have made it statistically uh more reliable uh had we had about triple the number of high school students that signed up but just as we spread it out across grade levels we weren't able to get to that standard and so that's why we're opening it up to everybody and just making it a take-home test so are we hoping to get more kids to sign up to be tested um certainly
074we want to make that available but we're but when you take the test home then what our advisors have said is then it's no longer statistically reliable to look at as a system it is it is reliable for individual cases okay thank you i've got a quick question too again sorry we're not going to let you go um so um if you broke it down into individual high schools and looking at the reliability statistically in the individual high schools did we even get close in any of them or is just all uh no no we didn't we didn't even get close to the number that we needed at certain high schools uh we were almost exactly at the number and then it would have been testing everybody and not statistically valid are there any other
075questions are we hoping patrick achieve by the the testing is it just to give parents peace of mind that their child doesn't isn't an asymptomatic carrier or is there some other benefit by having the test available throughout the district i'll i'll take that i think both so um any of those parents who signed up or any additional parents who sign up yes that would give you information about your child and we would want you to have that although there's not enough to make it at a 99 percent confidence interval that it's reliable the statisticians would tell you that this will give you a good indication within your district of um the the rates that are there with those students so we we do think that it gives you uh gives us data valuable data but
076again we're going to be very very careful that we don't go out and say that this is at a statistically valid 99 confidence interval because that would not be true thank you excellent all right so this was fresh off data from this last week we were very excited to be able to partner and dr merrigan talked about it earlier with children's mercy and our local health department we were able to walk into this phase two to provide educators vaccinations and so last week we had over 900 i think that the total as of right now in terms of our data analysis is 991 building staff have been vaccinated on february 4th and the 5th that's out of a total of just over 3 000 who said that they would like to have that vaccine we
077made sure that we had our special education staff who works in conditions that may have unmatched students our ada accommodations for individuals with health concerns and in our building staff 60 and over of age we have all these groups that are included at 991 we're going to continue to work through all of our staff by age bands and we're going to be continuing to work with the health department so that we can provide every one of our individual employees who wants a vaccine to have one what we've noticed too is that the vaccine rollout was very smooth last week and we've had to start a wait list of individuals who did not sign up the first time through and that number is over 160 staff members who said you know what i saw my fellow
078co-worker go through this i need to get on the list as well so that number is going to be growing but we won't stop until we get all those numbers uh vaccinated quick quick question for you eric yes um so my understanding is the vac this vaccination batch took place over in olathe so can you tell i mean we're trying to do everything we can here can you tell us about i mean are you going to have some closer options yes we will have a clinic i believe it's in two weeks it's going to be at hilltop and so both ourselves shawnee mission and blue valley they're the health department and children's mercy is working to find locations in all three districts so that they can move these as they roll out all the vaccines
079we didn't have enough vaccines to give every teacher a vaccine in the first week and they have to do them in phases as they receive those vaccines and so our location will be hilltop we're in the the planning stages with the health department on the specifics of that um when that rolls out and we believe it's going to be two fridays from um this friday and just another quick question dr pensawick the county is allocating vaccines they're determining how many we get and olathe gets and shawnee mission gets on a weekly basis is that correct that's correct uh they're working with the county superintendents so when they find out how many they have then they're just distributing those based on the um proper ratios for our districts okay dr ponzwick um you said that two
080fridays from now will be the hilltop location will there be another one next week or this friday uh there is one this friday that the health department is is hosting at olathe northwest okay that is for private schools in the county and daycare providers okay so in early childhood um at this point we don't have knowledge of that because they're allocating for that group okay and then they are going to have a clinic the week after we just don't know the location okay okay so not this friday but the following friday our teachers could hopefully be up again um for vaccines um how did it go with you know i hear stories on the news about you know they're giving out vaccines and they come to the end and they have extras or someone didn't
081show up and did we have that happen and how did we handle that how did we make sure that we got them all used in arms and that's great that's a great question so mark and i were working together on this on friday afternoon he was calling individuals and sending emails and we were there with the other school districts and the health department making sure at the end of the day they were going through and counting how many actual vaccines were left over for missed appointments throughout the day and they were able to get all of those into individuals that afternoon so they cut off at five o'clock but i know people were there on thursday night were there until nearly midnight and on friday i believe health department and uh children's mercy was there
082into the about the eight o'clock hour good great thank you quick quick question um also um how many how many uh vaccinations did we expect to have and then how many did we end up having so that's that's a moving target on monday it was 456 and it was additional 480 and then it was an additional 100. so it moved throughout the week but on monday we had everybody lined up at 456 and so tuesday and wednesday and thursday were all great news that we could have 991 individuals get in so we're ahead of schedule right now we originally said 65 and up right was our goal for this first round and we made it to 60. so that's yay that's great got lucky oh um i'm going to make an assumption you tell me
083if i'm wrong that we're making let's just say we're making it easy for a staff member to get a vaccination there's not a requirement to do it on in some strange convoluted fashion correct yeah we have evening and afternoon and on friday what we did is said appointments are available we'll cover your classes or we'll cover your shift we'll get somebody else there in line to help you out head head over to olathe northwest as fast as you can within the speed limit we we received an email from one of the elementary principals who talked about how one of the second grade teachers a lunch aide and a secretary and i think another specials teacher got the message that they were up for a vaccine they covered for everybody internally they talked about how everybody
084was just pitching in just to make sure that all of the staff members could get over when they're when their time came up yes patrick so at the current rate is is the vaccination clinics going to be completed for the roughly 3000 people or more in six to seven weeks is that what that is that that suggests yes that suggests that yes pending pending availability of vaccinations if i may brings up another question is has there any been any indication from the county um that the number of vaccines would slow down because i haven't read anything nationally that would suggest it does anything but accelerate you guys haven't heard anything you've not there i just visited with them before this meeting and there's not that expectation at all they don't they get very little lead
085time about how many vaccinations are there but i've heard nothing that would suggest that the rate will slow down okay thank you i'm sorry can i can i interrupt before i didn't know dr hunswick was done already um let me ask you a couple months ago um we talked about the sub rates and the shortage that we had and we put out a call and i know our community was very responsive and we had a lot of folks step forward and get licensed so that they could do that i also know that our numbers are decreasing quarantine how is that have we seen improvement are we having trouble staffing classes still or has that improved oh it's it's improved tremendously um this last week we had everything covered even on a friday um right before
086super bowl we were we were great we had all of our classes covered so we feel really good about that perfect thank you very much so again just want to reiterate how much these two really worked um they're being modest when they say on friday they literally were calling people and and i happened to run into somebody friday night at hyvee who was one of those people they called and she got a call at 3 30 at work and went to olathe northwest and got her shot so and they have a list so they know what order we're going in so that's we're ready if if they were to call us today and say that they have a thousand vaccinations available this weekend for blue valley employees i feel confident we would be able to
087to make that happen so kudos to them so i'm here now to talk about this road map for middle school high school full full time in person and i'm going to take us back to the navigating change gating criteria that we've heard a lot about that was developed by the kansas work group for kids which is a group of doctor organizations within the state of kansas who worked with kansas state department of education and presented that to the kansas school board that is guidance for the 2020-2021 school year it was adopted by the kansas state board of education on august 11th and then this board adopted it on august 18th we currently remain in yellow which is hybrid i want to highlight some other things that these two said which is the numbers in johnson
088county continue to go down um they're honestly at the best i've seen in a really long time so kudos to our community uh for con for um really heeding the advice and and for doing that i did just look at them this morning or excuse me this afternoon before i came in here and we are still currently in yellow but again the best numbers we've seen in a long time we also have guidance from the center for disease control we've had a lot of guidance from them i linked some of the recent articles and they do indicate that schools they've given several studies around schools not spreading and that it is safe to reopen they always put the caveat that it's safe to reopen and that here are the things you shouldn't do and that
089you may need to make sure you continue to socially distance and you follow all of those mitigation techniques so that's that's an important caveat that we want to make sure we remember we continue to get guidance from the johnson county department of health and environment we meet with them on a regular basis both the health coordinators as well as the superintendents to get it guidance and we've coordinated with them on lots of things most recently vaccinations testing all of those different opportunities and then finally we get guidance from the kansas state department of education on a regular basis i meet with them our curriculum folks meet with them and they've given us guidance on everything from hybrid remote full-time in-person to curricular standards and different things there so this is all the the guidance that
090that we've gotten so any questions or comments that any of you want to make on this before i move on tanya just just to kind of reiterate so you know and i've read i mean we've all um i can't think of anybody on the board that hasn't been reading and reading and reading and looking at articles and um and all um so just to reiterate the importance everything at least that i've been reading the importance of yeah you can you can it may be okay to put kids back in school full-time face-to-face but we've got to keep the mitigation efforts going right absolutely so i i that is not changing for the foreseeable future so masks hand sanitation distancing as much as we can and and we all know that six feet is is a
091challenge in any of our schools to to be able to have classrooms where everybody's six feet apart is is is difficult but yes all of those things will need to continue the other thing i would say is that this board has held fast to that uh gating criteria and um so that we haven't wait we haven't deviated from that it we have continued to look at that each uh i look at it every week but we formally look at it every couple of weeks yes so i think the cdc has announced that they're going to come out this week with new recommendations on opening schools do we know what that recommendation is going to be i do not they don't they don't call me before they release stuff i wish they would but no i
092i do not know what that is i mean to to patrick's point to you know from from the comments we've heard from from the cdc director you know it it looks consistent with what they've had put out before i you know i'm not seeing anything surprising at this point from what i'm reading but you know speculation who knows right things could things change all the time but right and and i would say our again our numbers within johnson county continue to decrease and we have the best numbers we've had since i've started doing the gating criteria today yes so if we're we're considering the the path to in in person full-time school what what does the social distancing environment look like are we putting kids back in school and 20 and 30 kids how are
093we managing so what what they would say is that six feet mast is the gold standard three feet mast is good and if you can't do that if you can't do three feet mast then you have to cohort small groups within classrooms so everybody needs to understand that that's what it will look like so in a in a class of 30 at a high school you likely can't be three feet apart and mast but you could like maybe i'd have to look at each classroom put a small cohort of no more than five students put distance another small cohort distance another small cohort so that's what they're saying that you would do again gold standard versus what is probably attainable within schools anybody else okay so with that in mind we know that we have
094student and staff testing options available for both symptomatic and asymptomatic it is available to any staff or student on a regular basis you heard tonight that we're ready to open up the testing for parents again if they wanted to sign their child up we have an estimated timeline for vaccinations looks like we're a little off on our spacing there but it's the first dose we started february 4th march 4th is an estimated timeline that we would get first dose and this is for building staff out of that 3000 there were district office staff members who will not go until everybody in a building has gone building staff second doses we know we already have the 991 who got vaccinated last week scheduled for their second dose on february 25th uh we know that that's that's
095when they'll start and then if you time it out uh three weeks from march 4th is march 18th again i would say that's an estimated timeline but based on those two things the administrative recommendation for this board to consider is that we return to full-time learning in the fourth quarter which starts march 23rd if we are in yellow or green according to the board of education adopted gating criteria so my question then dr merrigan is why would you choose you know march 23rd can you tell me the significance of that and you know what what it takes to get this going so uh march 23rd is the first day of the fourth quarter for students march 18th if you'll notice is we're we're done with our second dose for many of our staff building staff
096so that was part of that rationale this is the time it's again it's a natural transition from third to fourth quarter okay so just real quick if i can jump in yeah yeah please do there so um so for the board of education here so dr merrigan has made a recommendation on behalf of the administration and in order for us to do that there would have to be an addition to the gating criteria so i just want to open it up for conversation with the board to share thoughts comments any other questions of course i know dr merrigan will be open to take um but if michelle you want to kick it off i was going to say what you just said okay check um actually i was curious i feel like we're really good
097at our mitigation efforts i feel like the kids are masking i feel like we've got it figured out how the flow works in the building those sort of things the one thing that concerns me is um the spacing the social distancing and i understand in a classroom of 20 or 30 that you can cohort and and hopefully get that to where it's a controlled environment um for the classes that are a little bit larger and um maybe there's a little bit like like choir okay so you might have a lot more kids there how how and i'm thinking ahead you know and the weather is obviously going to be much better at the end of march is this something where they they may be moving around the building going outside trying to go into the
098pac i mean how are we going to provide enough distancing for those classes that are a little bit larger particularly when they're singing or yelling or something like that so choir and band would be the or or well orchestra you could mask up better but choir and band would be the two and we have not had an outbreak in choir band some could say that's because they've had half of the students but they would go to spaces like the performing arts center they would go outside if if the weather is sufficient i agree hopefully by the end of march it's much better than it is today but those would be the those would be some of the things that they would do they would have to be creative and some of the strategies that they
099would employ okay and then i guess you know this also gives you some time to consider each building on a case-by-case basis to figure out where you're going to get honestly just be able to safely house the kids put them in classrooms make sure that you're able to cohort is that something that the responsibility will fall on the administration in each school building where does that responsibility lie so those those conversations and that planning it isn't like we haven't done that we have been doing that and it would again you know just continue on uh in earnest of course now but we they have been doing that they've had those conversations all year about because it always has been the goal to bring kids back so this would require us to amend the current gating
100criteria to include yellow and green to be full in person what kind of safety valves do we have as far as if the numbers were to go back up again i mean i guess because we're keeping the gating criteria that is our safety valve in general but are we gonna i guess from a building perspective you know we might have great numbers but a building might pop up and have an issue how are we going to work to tamp that down and i'm sure this is a silly question because we've been doing it all year it's not it's not a silly question we would just like we've been doing in our elementaries we would look at classrooms we would look now it's a little harder at middle and high school because kids travel but we
101would look at classrooms we would look at the building we would consult with the health department and if it appears that a building needs to shut down for a short period of time we would do that we would we've shut classrooms down for short periods of time if we've needed to do that have we had to do that um in elementary schools very much because i know you know we've been we have not had to shut a whole building down no we have had to shut um classroom individual classrooms down for uh short periods of time okay yeah dr marin did we go over this plan with the health department the health department is aware of the plan yes okay and did they have any recommendations or suggestions or they just said thank you very
102much they uh they always have recommendations for us they would want us to continue to contact trace religiously which we agreed that we would need to do that they felt more comfortable about this without winter sports quite honestly um but they they did look at it and give us some feedback um speaking of winter sports and you know kind of more high contact sports so just remind me spring we really don't have high contact sports that we're needing to be concerned about we do not i'm looking at david none of the spring sports are on the national federation's high contact list the national federation also reviewed their high contact low contact medium contact and they've gotten rid of those designations just because they know that transmission can happen whether it's a high contact sport or
103a low contact sport i have a question for dr merrigan real quick and then a question for the board as well so just to kind of take michelle's question one step further with the recommendation the red would still be in play across the district or if something was if numbers were to increase across the board in the community so that's kind of a ceiling that helps us in the event that things did get um kind of bad again sorry if this board chose to do this the gating criteria would still hold the difference would be that in yellow and green it would be full time in person if we were to go to orange or red yes there there is that safety mitt i know one of the concerns i you know hear over and
104over is that you know you're never going to get to with what we're seeing number wise you never get to read and you're never going to get to green and so this changes that you know slightly to allow us to kind of be in green to be able to try to pull this off i have concerns over numbers raising after spring break do you have any concerns in that area or um well you know i just think it's important to remind our community oh i wholeheartedly agree with you on that jody that uh this is really up to all of us um but you know there we could wait two weeks and then there'd be another event and we'd have to wait another two weeks i just feel like march 23rd is our best case
105to end the year to get a a strong solid quarter in you know i think to jody's point well there's always going to be something right thanksgiving christmas super bowl spring break flag day it's going to go on it's going to go on a long time and then and we're going to eventually get past some of that so our gating criteria per what we agreed on in august technically ends anyway at the end of the school year correct yeah i believe the verbiage we put in there ends at the 2021 school year which could be may 31st it could be june 4th whatever we find to decide correct correct okay um can can have a couple minutes here yeah awesome so i i put some thoughts here in regards to in person school as as
106a lot of folks know i've i am at least around here am wholeheartedly interested in really getting our kids back in school and have been for a while so i've taken some stuff that i've received lately or i pulled out of some of our blue valley stuff and i just wanted to read it here to our team middle school our middle school building administrators are excited to have students back in the building they report that the energy is contagious and that it has been very easy to adapt that came from shelly nielsen executive director of school administration middle school the high school second semester is off to a good start having students in our buildings creates an energy positive atmosphere that cannot be replicated otherwise that came from david stubblefield executive director of school administration
107i received a text from a person who sends me a lot of notes who does it in a great way in a high road manner in regards to las vegas and clark county and i received it and i sent it to it's clark county is a large district in vegas they talked about going back in person to school doing all the social emotional issues with their kids there's a response i got i sent this to dr american i read this earlier and it brought me to tears i had to close my office door and pull myself together because this is how i feel much of the time i don't sleep or eat on a regular basis because i am worried about our kids and that's from dr american parents show the students that you hear
108them you see them acknowledge them by following the recommendations of the cdc and others and open the middle school in high school for those who cannot attend teach your parent they just want and need a few months to feel like kids enjoy seeing teachers and peers and most importantly learn i have so much respect for you and our district i'm a proud teacher and parent i just would not be able to forgive myself if i didn't reach out with my pain thank you so much for taking the time to read this email i can't even begin to imagine how difficult your job is i was at waterway the other day on 135th which we all go to right and uh you leaned against the pole and it was a nice day in early january and
109you watched the kids which were typically blue valley boys and girls watching your car and the kid was cleaning my car and i had my stack of my blue valley school board president cards still in my cup holder before he took over um the position and he came to me up to me and he says you know as they spin their towel as they're walking towards you we all know the deal and says hey are you really a school board president i said yeah probably for a few more days because man i'd really like to get back to school and so a conversation started and a group of kids migrated towards me and um and i felt their pain and i feel that pain with my kids every single day thomas and peyton i have
110a freshman in high school at northwest and then a senior at blue valley high and i feel it every single day with them the ultimate driver for the quality of life we do enjoy here in the community is without a doubt education and we have always strived to provide the absolute best education we could in working with our administrative team to do that and of course that is one of the main reasons people choose to live in blue valley and the aforementioned quality of life it affords us as our community begins to heal from the trials of this past year has brought upon us extreme challenges in the way it has polarized our community here we are once again needing the foundation of this community more than ever and that foundation to me is education
111being board president 2020 was extremely difficult for me personally and extremely challenging as well for my fellow board members though not a vocal as many people wanted me to be in regards to wanting our kids to be back in school i always try to ensure we're headed in the right direction to find the balance between the different opinions of our community fellow board members and administration a challenge to say the least dr merrigan you and i have spoken more than i have with my wife over the past year and like my fellow board members i have appreciated our friendship and partnership and your leadership more than you can imagine and your unwavering desire to get our kids back in school and i really want everybody to know that it has been a unwavering desire and
112i appreciate you for that our most important duty as a board is to hire the superintendent and to let you lead us and i've said to you a lot over this past year we have all said it to you these two words lead us so here we are the time is now to get our kids back in school full time and though i wish it was sooner i do i wish it was sooner i cannot go against my word to you to tell you to lead us it is time to get our bad kids back in school and thank you for leading us and i know march 23rd is not perfect with everybody but i am just thrilled that we have a possible date and a discussion that we're having now to get our kids
113back in school and i appreciate that thank you so i want to mike you tried to jump in just a little bit okay i appreciate that do you have anything i do have one question i i know the gating criteria sets forth the the process of the policy that we're going to follow we know that many parents may have made a decision on whether or not it's going virtual or in person based on the criteria and we change it in the middle of the semester how are we going to deal with any parents that would say you know gee i want to go virtual because as we'd indicated here today you know every two weeks there's probably another event that occurs that can change courses so here's what i would say is that a lot
114of things have changed since we adopted that gating criteria and we have i believe these two things here along with the numbers that continue to decline and we quite honestly could end up in green all on with and then we would be full in regardless um so i would say we of course would work with individual parents but as a general rule um we we are not going to open it up and say people can switch back and forth okay thank you i guess i just wanted to be really clear that we're still following you know the best science information that we have at the time the recommendations by the cdc mitigation standards etc but but we feel as though with these additional tools that we have that there's a good possibility that we can
115get full time in person fourth quarter yes and i would say thank you for uh again saying the mitigation standards uh i i know that um our principles and our teachers uh will only be comfortable if we follow strict mitigation standards which is masks distance when we can hand sanitation distancing cohorting when we need to our ventilation systems are in good shape we've looked at those we'll go outside when we can we'll open up outside areas you know again when we can for classrooms and for lunch man please do um just one quick question there is no plan you said and i guess um dr panzwick may have said it or maybe dr schmidt in terms of testing both symptomatic or generally asymptomatic because if you're symptomatic you're not coming to school right um there
116is no plan to stop that no that will continue to be offered to both staff and student students okay thank you you're all congress so it sounds like um just based off the what dr american just said the new things and i think you touched on it jody as well but vaccinations and testing as well as just overall county numbers community numbers improving it sounds like there's new things in place that would allow us to make this addition to the criteria so i guess i would ask if there's any board members that are ready one more chance at any questions or comments and if not i would ask if if a board member would be willing to make a motion out here okay dr berger let's let's question jody did you just real quick john
117hold on one second dr american let's i think we covered this already but would you please explain um things take some time to get into place and so would you kind of explain your position on that would you explain your position on that please thank you so march 23rd is a natural break fourth quarter um we will continue to we will continue to follow the mitigation techniques we will continue to work with those larger classes and and figure out how to get them outside some of those types of things again we will have had an opportunity to do a symptomatic student testing at that point vaccinations will continue to roll down okay thank you tom did you want to jump back in no i just want to i think we need to um enhance the
118thoughts on the vaccination with our teachers and your road map um if you will for um not the why sooner but so again we obviously we gotta we need our teachers we gotta have them like i love the teachers in blue valley a lot of folks will think we've been thoughtful this real matter you've been thoughtful to get us to this date i just wanted to to fully understand the vaccination there with the teachers and the comfort level and all that if you want so as you heard uh on february 4th and 5th uh last thursday and friday we had 991 i think was the number who received their first shot their second shot is scheduled for february 25th we we know that will happen the other rest of the two-thirds of the building staff
119that have expressed interest in getting a vaccination because we will not require it but have expressed interest in getting that vaccination we'll start um you heard that we won't have anybody this week but likely next week and then we'll keep working with them each week to get more and more staff vaccinated so that's the process that we'll take once you get your first shot it's we've been having pfizer so if we continue to have that three weeks later we will get our second shot so that is the process that we will work through to get staff vaccinated next would be a motion from the board if someone would like to make a motion well i just you know i've chicken scratched some things here um to cobble emotion together um you want me to read
120this yeah um so it sound okay so it sounds like i'm just what from what i'm hearing um the majority of the board's comfort level is sticking with the plan for the 23rd correct is that what i'm sensing here so i'm i moved the blue valley board of education to men the current navigating change getting criteria adopted which date was it august 18th to extend the in-person learning mode to would it be the yellow gating criteria and then put the date march 23rd i don't know am i getting closer upon the continued administration something with protesting covid of our students we can be specific on symptomatic asymptomatic students and staff and the continued administration of the cobia 19 vaccination um and vulnerable individuals in our community so i i've just taken thoughts from folks um
121again i'd love to go earlier but i want to lead and i want to honor everybody's thoughts on the march 23rd date is what i have there sorry man i'm just i'm on the fly i think so here's what i so again i i want to get these kids in i want dr merrigan to lead i've mentioned i wish it was sooner i really do and i really mean that i'm trying to find the balance here to get this get a date and so we can start planning ahead and we can move on and and do everything we need to do so um i move that the blue valley board of education amend the current gating the navigating change gating criteria as adopted on august 18 to extend the in-person learning mode to the yellow
122gating category for the fourth quarter or i'd love to be specific and say march 23rd is that right is that the tuesday contingent upon the continued administration of voluntary testing of coping 19 testing of symptomatic and asymptomatic students and staff and the continued administration of voluntary coven 19 vaccinations to the district staff and vulnerable individuals in the community so i'm trying to honor dr merrigan's thoughts on the staff teachers um some folks are folks that want to think we need a safety net with the gating criteria and then pick a specific date so we can get these kids back in school yes mr sites so we have a motion on the floor right correct and i don't think i think we discuss it after there's a second that's my understanding of how this works yes
123yes i'll second what tom just said okay thank you so we'll open it back up for discussion um any comments to the motion any thoughts yeah patrick so do we think this is the best plan going forward at the time to whoever dr american why don't you go first and then the board can comment i think that this is the best i do think this is the best plan going forward i think there are some uh who think it's too long to wait i think there are some who are going to come and say uh just like anything with this we've done this year they're going to come and say you should wait two weeks after that because we'll just have gotten back from spring break so i i think you'll have both sides of
124this i believe this is the best plan moving forward to get our kids in to have a solid fourth quarter does anybody else on the board want to comment on is patrick's question i'll i'll just say um obviously this has been an interesting year um but we need to kind of just fall back on a few things you know obviously we know we said we set this in august we knew what we knew back then and it was very little so we chose the navigating change criteria now we know a lot more things have actually improved how we handle the virus in the community it's better i think as long as we are sure that we are able to vaccinate teachers that we are able to offer regular testing of students on a voluntary basis
125um that we strongly continue to follow the mask mandate which is pretty much our big time safety net right since we know it's not always going to be possible to socially distance to the six foot and even three foot in some of our larger classes if community numbers do go up we still do have a way to kind of switch back and catch ourselves from letting it get out of hand again we do already have contact tracing stuff in place very robust contact tracing right and we are always closely watching for individual school pop-ups and we've also seen in our own schools that within school transmission is i do want to say rare from what the numbers i've seen it really is not happening in our schools because our teachers and our staff are doing
126a fantastic job and our kids are complying i mean they get that this is important and they do want to be in school um so as long as we have building specific plans to keep those numbers in check i think this checks all the boxes and gives us a good plan to move forward where the majority of people will hopefully feel comfortable with this i do um a couple of things number one um we all tend to cherry pick the data that we want to see and i think it's important to remember that what the cdc data or cdc recommendations said send kids back full time so long as full mitigation continues and i'm going to throw a monkey wrench in here just for a second the motion i don't think says anything about full
127mitigation and i'm not sure what robert's rules are but i believe we now have to have a motion if we want to change his motion so i'll get to that in a moment the other thing the cdc said was they strongly suggested against if we put kids full time in school they strongly suggested against um what the national federation of high school uh athletic whatever it is um talked about high um high risk risk sports this takes us out of that high risk sports time frame so i support the march 23rd date we're out of that i just ask that we and i will move that we include a statement and i don't know what it will say yet in tom's motion that says contingent upon continued mitigation efforts comma and then the words that
128tom mentioned about continued testing and continued opportunities for vaccinations so that's my current motion quick question mike can i just ask you so did the navigating change criteria not include mitigation recommendations within that it did so i i felt as though that was covered under that i now i could be wrong right but but i felt as though that was already covered under that document um and because we're keeping that document yeah so i didn't feel as though we needed so but that should be cool that's just that's my perception of what i was reading um but but so the other thing i wanted to mention is i just want to make it very clear that we and i believe tom did use this the voluntary nature of vaccinations you know staff should be given
129the opportunity to have it but it's voluntary we're not putting a number on it we're not you know we wouldn't want to you know mandate anything like that because every every staff person's comfort level may be a little different in the um receiving the vaccinations i just want to make for sure that the opportunity was presented whether they choose to use it or not that's that's their personal choice yeah and the 3000 number that we gave you that's the number of staff who said that they wanted it we have over 4 000 employees when you start talking about bus drivers and all of those folks who are in that number as well quick question because you probably mentioned that that includes all of our cafeteria bus drivers all of that okay regular substitutes who substitute
130on a regular basis would be in there too so a quick question back to you mike based off what jody said about the inclusion of mitigation efforts in the gating criteria are you good with the motion as it stands i am so long as we are positive that that is included in the gating criteria and i'm willing to trust my esteemed colleague and dr american you confirmed that as well i believe yeah i'll i i can work to pull that up but i can tell you as we plan for the school year the um efforts that we have in place regarding mitigation came from the navigating change criteria that's what all of our administrators relied on okay and remember that's that thousand page document that outlined i mean every time we correct the gating credit
131the gating criteria is a two page uh chart but that's a part of the whole navigating i do think that it's covered in there i guess to respond to your question specifically i don't know that it hurts to leave it in um i don't know that there's any downside risk of reiterating this board's commitment to [Music] mitigation efforts if it dies for lack of second it's because this board decided not to include it and i might have to ask my trusted colleague sarah over in the corner do do we need to make a motion to amend the motion and then we make that motion we make the motion to amend i just made a motion to amend tom's motion we vote on that tom re-reads the motion with the piece with if it's approved right
132right if the board says yes then the motion is then amended and then the motion on the floor is the amended motion that tom made great okay so is there a second to mike's motion to amend the motion mike i don't want you to be offended but i'm not sure if we need to do it um and and the only reason i would hesitate to do it is i think we could sit here all night and come up with other things that are already in the navigating change document just to clarify um what's not in the navigating change document are the availability that we have now for testing and for vaccinations so i feel like that is very important to include and um differentiate and so um i i'm not i totally agree with and
133support you what you're trying to do the mitigation is the key to all of this right this is what has kept the numbers down and is allowing us to even really have this conversation on top of the fact that things have changed in the past several months and we now have vaccinations and we now have testing so um i would just respectfully suggest that we leave it out at this time and and believe me first of all you can't hurt my feelings um that's virtually impossible and second of all as long as it's in the current gating criteria i have no problem with it dying for lack of second all right so is there any further discussion any further discussion or questions around the motion that tom made can we ask tom to read it
134just so we all understand it one more time yeah i can read it again um i moved at the blue valley board of education amen the current navigating change gating criteria is adopted on august 18 2020 to extend the in-person learning mode to the yellow gating category for the fourth quarter academic for fourth academic quarter beginning march 23rd contingent upon the continued administration of voluntary covet 19 testing of symptomatic and asymptomatic students and staff and the continued administration of voluntary copinex copin 19 vaccinations to district staff and vulnerable individuals in the community so we have a second with mike let's go ahead and take a vote all those in favor please raise your right hand all right six one so the motion passes thank you next up on the agenda make sure i'm in the
135right spot here is uh 2021-2022 school registration with dr collier yeah dr collier's going to make her way up and talk about the 2021-2022 school year kellyat and i are going to discuss with you our plans around enrollment and registration and quite frankly the process that we're following for enrollment and registration at each level mirrors the same process we have used in the past this is always a good accounting for us to understand the total number of students that we that we will have returning to us in the fall as we plan for this enrollment registration really the return in the fall we are doing so emphasizing in-person learning with a return to the school structure with of which students are most familiar with that being stated kelly this evening will talk to you about
136the virtual option for next school year and how that will differ in comparison to this particular school year the one thing i would want to point out is that while we are going to reference a timeline starting here in the month of february we will have a window that we will communicate uh during the summer months regarding any transition between the learning modes that parents may make and we'll talk a little bit about about that oops sorry it would be good if i go ahead and turn here so sorry we do know that there are extenuating circumstances for some families that if they choose in person i think you heard some comments earlier this evening if they choose in person and they need to move to a virtual setting again we'll allow that in a
137summer window and of course next school year is if a family has an extenuating extreme circumstance we always want to work with a family individually on that and then there is the assumption at this point while we do not have new navigating change guidance if you will for the state for next school year we do plan to include at this point mitigation measures even for next year at this point kelly will begin to share with you our work around a virtual option for next school year can i ask you a quick question before you move on to dr on the year-long commitment piece can you just expand a little bit on why that versus uh each semester that what are the pros and cons of doing it that way sure thank you we know when
138we think about our virtual option we want to ensure that we have dedicated staff for that purpose so that's one two um we're really thinking very positively related to the conversation that you just had quite frankly that we are going to be safely in full time and so we're planning for a virtual option if you will more so in alignment with our strategic plan offering students more voice choice and flexibility as they seek to acquire their graduation credits you heard about cte during the cni presentation this evening and so our plans around virtual ed very much mere broader goals and less planning for remote learning that was designed in response to state guidance during learning during the pandemic so is it safe to say this is the direction we had been going if there wasn't
139a pandemic thank you very thank you very much for asking that it's exactly the right way we were headed prior to this madam president i am fellow board members i um please do not take this as a lack of interest but um i know we're not voting on anything else tonight i know we're covering two topics and i've set up some separate time to meet with you on i'm going to hit my son's basketball game at blue valley northwest so i just want to let everybody know that and i appreciate it so thank you thank you hey dr crawley uh and i don't i don't know who would be the best person to answer the question but you know i've had it you have to move forward i've had at least a semester virtual and
140um and i think it's a platform that's beneficial and valuable but um it's not my favorite um and so what are we doing to try and improve that experience i mean we've we're going through it we're going to continue it we've had numerous parents that say you know gee we're having transformation of kids from great students to marginal or terrible so how are we managing i mean if if you assume that code is going to be with us for a while and if you assume that a number of parents are going to still choose this option how do we make it good because it's not so what i would say is that our staff have worked extremely hard with our students and our families and the learning curve that they faced to present a virtual
141option when some of our teachers were teaching virtually and they didn't foresee that that was going to happen for them quite frankly this year so certainly they've done an amazing job what we have done prior to this year and even throughout the course of this year was study virtual education the concept in and of itself in terms of best best practices if you will in the market and we are seeking to design our plan for next year very similar to what we know is really best practice and so we want to ensure that the teachers have additional professional learning and tools to assist and enhance that anything else you would say so so can we can we come up with with a summary of how we're going to make it bigger better faster hey patrick
142would it be okay let's have him go through the presentation if that's okay with you guys and then maybe we can come back and just make sure that you know anything you hit on might answer a question or two and if not let's make sure we allow time to come back to it at the end sure so as as we do plan for the uh virtual option for the 21-22 school year the type of program we're planning for supports the strategic plans in terms of creating a variety flexibility choice and voices students seek to move through our systems and get their graduation credits to that end uh this next iteration reflects changes uh these changes that are in service to the strategic plan virtual education will be designed such that it allows students to experience
143that flexibility and choice particularly at the high school level as they plan and create their schedule the navigating change guidance document that you've we've talked a lot about tonight um with you know was given to us in july of 2020 the remote learning was made allowable to stay at that time for one year only and so based on our current guidance from the state and the information that katie referenced as far as research we are moving to establish a virtual school as a virtual option for next year and we believe this most tightly allows us to hold to blue valley's expectations curriculum and learning experiences the format should look rather similar to this year in at the elementary and middle school level both of those levels will use synchronous or live instruction coupled with asynchronous
144activities at the middle school level and students will have more elective choices and we're happy to be able to provide that at the high school level we will continue to offer the dual enrollment or flex option where students can opt to take some in-person classes in some virtual classes and additionally this level will notice a shift towards more asynchronous instruction to optimize the flexibility and the ability for students to take advantage of opportunities within the school day such as the johnson county community college options caps programming and other school to career pursuits [Music] well while you're there quick correct me if i'm wrong the high school plan you have is no different than what we've always done i mean right we've there's just more options it's always been kind of a flex yes there's more
145yeah it's just you know we only had so many options before there but okay correct there's more can i ask two questions before we move on sure um correct me if i'm wrong i said on kisha aren't there some guidelines and rules in place for participating in activities how would that work as we move to what you call a virtual school yeah and then number two if it's a virtual school is it only for those that reside in blue valley this is not something that we're going to market outside of our district is that correct correct this is for only blue valley resident students and the acacia rule we have no indication that there the waiver that was in place today is going to be in effect this coming year therefore students who choose the
146virtual option as their full-time placement will need to take one class in person in their brick and mortar home school to be eligible for acacia sanctioned um sports and activities so that is something that is different from from this this this current year uh moving into next year the high school has been able to successfully do that for a long time and there's a good road map for that from for middle school we're still working out the details but that will be that will definitely be in place one of the things i think that having a virtual school will allow us to do is to identify those educators who actually enjoy and thrive in this environment currently we have over 700 employees working in the virtual environment and as dr collier alluded to some were
147tapped on the shoulder late in the year some this wasn't on their radar is something we're going to have to going to do that year this year and we're looking to staff the virtual school with educators we'll be dedicated to virtual learning we'll have the ability to train them hopefully they'll be smaller in number and we will be able to specifically design instruction for the virtual environment we're really looking past a virtual program that's a response to a pandemic and looking to build a virtual program that is a really valuable piece to the future of blue valley in kids learning that leverages a type of instruction that opens up opportunities and choice so as dr collier alluded to we're really looking forward and positively that students and teachers who are engaged in the virtual program
148both it's their choice and they're finding value and benefit and learning in this manner so as i mentioned we are everything depends on enrollment which started this week at middle and high school and so it as those numbers come in we're hoping to identify as many full-time dedicated staff members as possible we do believe there'll be some part time just because the the numbers will never come out perfect but we are striving for that students in the virtual option this year should expect to have classmates and teachers from schools other than their home school they will continue to to work will continue to work through what the look doing these sports and activities looks like and students should be able to access some activities at their home school again we're still kind of working through
149some of that so and i do want to reiterate um the option that we fully acknowledge it's difficult to make a decision right here right now in february with some unknowns before school starts and so sometime in the summer families will have a chance to go from the in-person or flex option to full-time and virtual and we will help counsel those families who are on the fence are having a difficult time making a decision into the eight in person in person setting at first to then that would that just gives them the option if they need to in the summer to to change we're asking folks to default to in person and the change that will be allowed will be from the in person or flex to full-time virtual that allows us to understand or
150anticipate where the movement's going to go and so if movement's too virtual it's affecting one program getting the the numbers flowing that way rather than out to 36 buildings so we we think that's a way to manage the the change while still allowing families a choice okay kelly what's the approval process the approval process so we uh here in about a little over a week uh need to file with the state to have a virtual to get the virtual school going and go through this date they'll give us approval we have some questions to answer for them and some assurances to to sign and and then they support us through that process maybe i wasn't clear what is the what is the bar we're trying to to achieve i'm a little confused um what are
151they looking for in a in a to grant us permission to to provide a virtual school i don't know what the ground rules are right so we have to we can provide services you would see in a normal school so we need to provide counseling services we need to have a school administrator it's more taking some administered administrative boxes as well as a full curriculum and that sort of thing it's probably a balance i would say if i say both both things it's like any time you you you uh if we open up elementary 24 it's about the same types of things that they would ask for we have to assert that we would uh provide esl services we would provide special education services um it's more a list of assurances than anything again administrative
152as opposed to um i don't want to say dictating that's not fair uh as opposed to looking at the curricular content or method of teaching we have to assign an assurance that will teach the state standards but just like in a brick and mortar school as a school district we get to implement our local but that would happen in any school we open correct we have to give state assessments we have to give any assessments we would give in the brick and mortar school it's part of our accreditation process the virtual school just like wolf springs elementary is a part of our accreditation process every single school yeah it establishes that ad is its own entity and not just a program i'm just trying to to determine whether there's any differentiation that the state requires
153in method of delivery other than its virtual not in person and apparently not there's not a lot i think that attendance may be the only thing that's that's really a difference on how the account attended and just a quick question before patrick jumps back into his but can you talk about the mix of synchronous and asynchronous that we might see today versus what should be expected in a virtual school right so in um in most virtual schools frankly especially the high school ones that we've researched the the the instruction is mainly asynchronous but it's specially tailored instruction made for asynchronous learning so that that is that is a a a place where we're going to work to improve at middle and elementary elementary i would expect it to look fairly similar our kids for the
154most part in elementary are are live a lot of the day minimally twice a day minimally they have their individual reading groups with their teachers and then some asynchronous pieces middle school you should expect in a 45-50 minute class period again those numbers are still kind of being defined but at least about 30 minutes a day live for class that's what we're aiming for all right it's all yours thank you so so you know i i'm a fan of virtual schools for a lot of different reasons but one thing i think we need to have a conversation about and i know teachers are working hard and they rise to the occasion and and they're really um doing a lot of good work but as we go forward i think one of the things we need
155to pay attention to is how do we make instruction effective you know we've got numerous stories or situations where parents have come in and said you know my kids doing great at playing video games all day i mean i understand there's a supervision element but i'm experiencing some of those same frustrations with um at least one of my kids and and so it's an inherent issue that i think in designing an effective program going forward and certainly that rises to the level of being a blue valley program or school if that's what we're going to call it so so i think we need to have those conversations and look at at how we can make the instruction effective because it you know there is hours of looking at the screen and how do we manage
156that um you know and i know we have online pe but that's another kind of misnomer right you have virtual pe right i mean i understand some of the program pieces to it but i mean those are the kind of things that i think we want to make take a look at very carefully and how do we make it effective you know is the child just going out and running around the block three times so that they can you know record some of their stuff or or what are we what are we putting together that's going to make the child successful in that environment one of the pieces that's really important in all of this as we plan for this next year is helping guide parents and knowing whether this option and the framework in
157which the instruction is delivered is right for their child so this year we know students and families were thrown into it if you will while there was choice it was all done in response to parent decision school um delivery of was in response to this pandemic what we want parents to do is very thoughtfully consider with their students for next year whether this is for them so in the information that's online we have vignettes if you will some guiding questions to help parents understand is this your child virtual may be for you does your child have set goals virtual may be for you and help parents thoughtfully make that decision too we think that'll be key and helpful for this next year patrick the other thing i would add is that i think the key
158is around teacher preparation and we asked our teachers to do a lot this year so we had how many 700 700 staff members some who got tapped on the shoulder probably literally a week before school started and so they're doing in person they're doing virtual they're trying to manage it all so that's not fair to our teachers either so this next year because we have the time to plan it will be smaller in number we'll be able to first of all take people who really have a true interest in doing that and will be able to help them get the training and the learning that they need in order to be successful so i think that's an important component of this that we need to make sure that we honor going forward yeah i agree
159i mean and and you're right this was one of those things where teachers were thrust into this environment where parents and children were thrust into making a decision with the information they have and and it is hugely challenging i just want to make sure we're taking that next step and learning and actually make i mean you know you do need to make sure parents understand what it is we also i think really need to take a look at how do we become effective in this some kids do great at it and we've heard stories of it and other kids it's just not possible and i just don't believe for a second that it's just not possible um and there's many elements that go into that you know how much time are the parents have in
160their and they're scheduled to be able to support and what does that support look like right you know what grade level does each grade level have require parents to spend so much time or so much supervision i mean obviously elementary is a much different environment than it is high school or middle and of course middle is probably more labor intensive than it is high school but yet sometimes these high school classes are pretty intense and they require a great deal of support and so i think bundling those pieces together is going to be required otherwise i think we're going to have the same problem going forward i think we have a shared goal absolutely in some of the statements that you made and and we know preparation teacher preparation um framework student voice in the
161process as we develop this all be very important in terms of um product and quality going forward because we want to build a program a school that sustains over time and meets student needs going forward yeah and under the circumstances we took a giant step forward and i think it was was helpful and beneficial but like i said we've gotta now take that next big step and do it right hey katie um now refresh my memory you have experience in a prior job in in getting a virtual skill school going is that not correct yes i i do have experience and and blue valley has a long history of um offering virtual options particularly at high school for flexibility for students yes i don't know if this is the appropriate time to discuss it because
162i know on the agenda we're going to talk about budget for next year but i'm going to ask the question because i think there's some misconceptions um especially in topeka and i want to clear them up at least for blue valley i can't speak for any other districts but if i'm not mistaken 85 percent of our cost is personnel um is there i'm trying to figure out where the savings might be from a from a budgetary perspective and i can't i can't come up with any the building still has to be heated the the um cafeteria busing or self-supporting for instance the uh um work still has to be done the athletic fields still have to be groomed the i'm trying to figure out if there's any say and i don't see any um because
163the incremental cost doesn't go down now if you if you were able to take an entire school out of service that's a different issue but i don't think we're talking about those numbers so i don't know if now is the time to to discuss that but i just can't like to get your perspective as we go forward is there any saving so i'll answer a little bit and then i think we can include this next month when we come back and talk about budget again when the real budget experts are here which would be kyle and jenny um but i had to look at my notes 88 percent of our budget is salary so you were pretty darn close there mike um i would agree with you unless we were able to say you know
164we don't need to open this new xyz building because we have so many students during virtual that that could be a construction savings and an operation savings eventually um but you're exactly right we still have to we still have to buy technology for those students we still need to provide resources for those students they even still could do a lunch they can qualify for lunch services if they qualify they can do all of those things so yeah but i would agree with you cheer cheer a question mike when we look at program versus school in the virtual world and we look at the associated expense really you don't see much difference quite frankly and then we move to okay so what's the concept we want to achieve for the students tied to the plan so
165that's how i would respond to your question and i would say sometimes it's perceived as it's a money maker but that's only if you're taking people outside of your district and we have no desire to do that none okay i just wanted to clear that up because there is a misconception well if a child isn't in school then you're saving a lot of money and at the end of the day we're not so okay thank you and from us and for a state from a state funding perspective if you've got a kid in virtual pro virtual school versus in person school the it differs correct it does differ and we will include that next month in our presentation to show you kind of because well right now we're still trying to estimate the numbers we
166know we're not going to have the numbers we had this year it will be considerably less but that will help us to identify what that budget looks like so again communication went out to families last week building principals have been communicating with parents about this process and then again just a reminder parents have any questions or concerns about making a choice or what's right for their student we encourage them to talk to the counselors staff or administrators at their school building that best know their child that can help help guide them so again the information's out we attempted to make that website very thorough for parents to to assist in the decision making so unless you have other questions patrick did you get everything you needed okay i just can i real quick say thank
167you this is something that we've talked about for a while in the district expanding the online opportunities for our students and this was great we took lemons and made lemonade and so i really really appreciate you guys pivoting so quickly this past year and i'm quite confident that going forward you will even make greater improvements so thank you for taking the effort to create this for us thank you all right thank you both let me make sure yeah you're up again right i am up and i will try to be efficient here um and be respectful of your time but again enrollment registration that's a glimpse towards getting ready to plan for next year as educational services is planning forward we want to design a plan that is mindful of meeting our needs meeting student
168needs academically developmentally social emotionally as they return to school for a brand new school year next year so this school year as has been discussed tonight the navigating change guidance that we received from the state informed our practices this year that was the allowance for remote learning that was also the allowance for virtual education and so from that then the state also provided us guidance regarding priority standards so when students are learning in a hybrid model all in person or remotely the state attempted to provide our teachers a clear direction in the priority standards and that was designed to ensure that students would be prepared next school year for the next level or courses this year to support students we have utilized some specific strategies and we also have learned so much from our students
169themselves so some examples of strategies we've utilized is the expansion of acadians or screening in the area of reading across all of our elementary grade levels so that we can identify students demonstrating struggles in reading earlier we expanded that to the middle level with two pilots this year at oxford middle school and overland trail middle school and we anticipate expansion of that next school year every school every level has involved been involved in providing interventions and supports that has looked different invitational support has looked like individual one-on-one teacher to student small groups with students to teachers either virtually or when they're in person and then in particular for the second semester there's there's been quite a bit of customized planning with counselors and staff to ensure that students are taking particularly at the middle and
170high level appropriate courses this second semester our students have taught us with their resiliency this year we have learned from our students at all levels within our school system that they do desire student choice voice and flexibility so we know this anecdotally from our staff from feedback that we have received really from staff parents and our students we have learned in the area of executive functioning or organization and time management that that is an area for us to focus on for more explicit teaching and not take any assumption of the student's ability to do that and how can we begin to teach those skills earlier within the system what we knew before has been emphasized more than we would have anticipated quite frankly having not experienced a pandemic before in schools is really that adult
171to student connection and relationships are so key and students have taught us how much they thrive in that relationship and your decision tonight will only help to further facilitate that fourth quarter and school connectedness is crucial so as we just talked to you about virtual ed solution for next school year we know that students feeling connected to the virtual ed school feeling connected to a home school feeling connected to groups is vital for their healthy development so the this piece i'm going to talk about just very briefly is about our short-term measures and then i want to speak a little bit to our long-term measures first of all there's the expansion of our screen reading screening which i just mentioned we will have professional learning specifically i'm sorry particularly expanded at middle and high school
172for teachers around the science of reading you've heard a little bit about that in the past from jennifer lizinski our short-term interventions is the course enrollment guidance that's occurring now our summer program will look similar this year however that being stated we know that we have some opportunities that we potentially want to look at when it comes to summer support and i'll talk about those in just just a moment and then we'll continue to offer this this summer credit recovery opportunities for our high school students um and then also we want to continue to look at where are some minutes in the day that we can capture in the future and we're doing so right now second semester to provide for intervention and support for students but it is the district's receipt of the esser
173funds that is really going to be imperative to us in terms of being able to potentially do some things out of the box or that we otherwise would not be able to do without those coveted relief funds for the school district so we will be designing a plan and submitting it to the state for a review and we'll also share it with you and so i would just share with you that while i'm providing this brief update this evening about support and learning forward you should expect that you'll hear from us on a regular if not monthly basis going forward about what we're doing for support and what this plan will look like so as we develop this plan going forward we want to make sure that the plan is mindful of the impact of
174living in a pandemic on the development of our students on their social physical emotional development so there's multiple factors that students have lived with this year whether it's parents losing a job loss of a family member social isolation from peers all of that impacts students ability and response to learning and instruction so going forward we will build a plan and present it to you that offers evidence-based solutions that we prevent provide a plan that is systemic and not left to the design of just each individual school but rather that we have a district response across levels for the interventions or supports that students will need planning for next year because the concern is about students preparedness for the next level or next school year we want to ensure that collectively we are recognizing the experiences
175students have had understanding the impact on their development and their response to instruction and just being present in the learning environment honoring and presenting space for their healing and also monitoring regularly that they are progressing in their learning towards the standards that we have identified are crucial for them to learn we're going to be engaging in some community partners and assisting us in development of this plan and next month i feel confident i'll be able to talk a little bit more about that for you with you if you have any questions again just a very high level overview to let you know we have some short term pieces in place we plan for a deeper plan that we'll come and talk to you about in terms of preparing for next year because the question is
176how do we make up for the lost time if you will since last march what we know is that we can't redo what we know is that we cannot recapture the plan the time what we know is that we can plan with full knowledge of the impact on students and make sure we're prepared to respond to any vulnerabilities that students may have related to their their learning next school year dr crawler excuse me first of all thank you um when can we expect to see the the more detailed plan so i i anticipate likely in march we don't have a due date yet if you will mike um in terms of plan for the state and what might be included in all of that so once we have that we'll we'll bring that forward once
177we know what all those components are okay thank you and presumably that plan manages the challenges we face going forward yes that is correct we did called that so as you've heard a couple times when we did our committee reports we did a listen and learn uh tour session you know we presented to our to to all of you in december about our budget situation and we said we wanted to go out and seek some input so we we went out to every single building we did every single board advisory committee as well some other standing committees within the district as well as had an online place where patrons could give some feedback as we did this the first thing we always went back to is really we are here to prioritize what matters most
178this is the mission of our district uh we are looking for we are committed to reimagining learning and changing the world and we need to make sure our budget is prioritized and in those specific categories so what we did when we went out to these sessions is we started first with a video because we thought it was important that everybody had a level playing field around the budget so i'm going to show you this quick budget hopefully this works here quick video and then i will go through what some of the high level results are [Music] in blue valley's new strategic plan a commitment was made to reimagine learning and changing the world we want our students to be life ready this will require an atmosphere that fosters creativity exemplary educators and meaningful educational opportunities
179so every single student's potential can be realized our mission has never been more important as we balance the budget while prioritizing what matters most students school budgeting and finance is complex but generally speaking there are three buckets of funds that the school district gets to work with a capital outlay fund for the most part supports short-term construction for facilities and technology needs bond funds give us our long-term investment strategies for construction and technology a shout out to our community as bond funds are the result of support from blue valley community through a bond election the third bucket is operating funds these funds pay for yearly operational expenses including salaries benefits program offer and supplies utilities and other basic costs to run our schools and a detail that we can't leave out that makes budgeting even
180more complicated under state law capital outlay and bond funds cannot be transferred to the operating budget let's take a quick look at some of the tools and levers we've used and polled in recent years to ensure we're able to prioritize what matters most and have a balanced budget shifts to capital outlay in recent years the legislature added some flexibility in the use of capital outlay the district was able to move limited number of staff salaries like custodial staff to capital outlay which freed up some of the operating budget cash reserves in past years when we've experienced budget deficits we've used cash balances it is best practice to have enough in reserve to cover one month of payroll just in case the state is late in making their payments to the district or there's some other
181unexpected event we currently do not have quite enough in cash reserves to accomplish this so this lever is no longer available zero-based budgeting is a process that requires a budget be built one line item at a time starting with zero every budget administrator went through this process and the district was able to find savings and for the first time in about 10 years we raised some district fees which gave us some additional revenue at the same time last year a task force was charged with identifying 3.9 million in reductions that goal was met through staffing adjustments contracts and a few more shifts to capital outlay so why after all of these efforts are we having to make more cuts that's a fair question let's start with the obvious number one covet 19 happened we have
182less revenue coming in facility rental food service ticket sales etc we also have covet 19 cost mitigation efforts range from facility signage to face mass hand sanitizer and plastic barriers we built a virtual program that required more staffing and stipends for teachers to build courses even with 1.8 million in federal funds for coveted 19 expenses we have a 2.7 million dollar gap between coveted and expenses number two new facility funding the district receives additional funding when a new school opens we've been receiving this funding for newer schools like wolf springs as time goes on the funding decreases and ultimately goes away that's just how it works for the 2021-22 school year we will receive 1.4 million less in new facility funding so here's the bottom line when you take the projected revenue and subtract projected
183expenses we're looking at a more than four million dollar deficit for the 2021-22 school year now that you know the basics of our budget challenge let's work together to find options to close the gap so we can continue to prioritize what we care about most our students and their futures sorry so that was the opening that we started with each of these presentations this is um the culmination of all of those presentation this includes all of the staff our board advisory and committees other standing committees and that would be like pta pto presidents best council which is a group of business leaders that we've met with so all of that is coupled together so there were 2008 participants uh 4 398 thoughts and over 105 000 ratings the other thing i would say is that
184when we were done with this session we emailed it out to the participants so that they didn't have to just do it in the 30 minutes we were with them if they wanted to go back in because if you're like me don't think of it in those 30 minutes it happens later on that day or the next day so those were all awesome great sessions so here was the first question that we asked what do you value most and would want to see protected from budget reductions and then the second question is what could we suspend reduce or eliminate from the budget which of course is much harder so we started with the easy one but then we also got some really great feedback on question two so again these are really high level summaries
185question one what do you value most and want to see protected from budget reductions very clearly salary and benefits why and we ask people why when they put these in there you know it's important to attract and retain quality educators and you can't do that without a good salary and benefits a class size again we asked why um if you're better able to manage and personalize the needs of students the more students you have the harder it is to do that our staff our wonderful staff they really valued the people within the district at time talked about the value of collaboration time we don't teachers and educators want more of that so they certainly wouldn't want to see us eliminate any of that our mental health and sel programming educational programs just across the board
186the value of the quality of the different experiences for students professional development professional learning that was very important to our staff there was a plethora of other things some questions some comments a single thought uh then the resources that are within our district supplies curriculum uh technology was a another theme that came out of that and then the extracurricular experiences uh the the why for many times the wise kids come to school and and the value that they see in that so that was just an overview of the different categories or the different things that were really important to our staff now question two as i said uh this was much harder so question one you could you could just see it people immediately started putting thoughts in there and question two took a little
187bit of time to to think through because it's hard to think through that question two was what could we suspend reduce or eliminate from the budget and i'm going to go more into depth in each of these but non-operational things which we'll talk about in a minute personnel as mike you know mentioned earlier 88 of our budget is personnel so uh that was one that came up uh district operations uh they gave us revenue ideas so rather than reducing something they gave us ways to to look at getting more money specific educational programs and then extracurricular so if we dive into these the first one was non-operational and in this one you know the buckets in the video this is one where you need to continue to educate folks because an easy thing to mention
188to to when we're looking at things to reduce or suspend for a little while would be facility renovations and that's that different bucket of money that's bond or or capital outlay so that isn't the category we're talking about they also talked about learning resources so maybe wait a year on the math adoption or the reading adoption um that is that also doesn't typically come from our general fund that comes from a learning resources account and then finally technology again maybe don't refresh that also is not an operational expense that comes from capital outlay or bond funds but absolutely valid ideas um personnel so what would we suspend reduce or eliminate from the budget i'm looking at a little bit of my notes again 88 of our our budget is personnel uh salaries are about 71.6
189and health benefit health benefits are 16.7 and we heard loud and clear that health benefits were really important to our staff district staff uh came up a lot and that mainly they were talking about district office staff in many of our buildings they felt that maybe we were top heavy at district office last year and in the video you heard how we we did several cuts last year as well and we did cut six full-time administrators from the district office last year we will continue to look at district office but i can guarantee you four million dollars won't come out of district office it's just probably not possible um they asked us to look at retirement incentives so it's something we can look at we've done that in the past but we will do that
190again extended contact contract days we have some folks on extended contracts so beyond the days when kids are in session counselors school psychologists department chairs people over here at district office idc's all of those people now they do work during that time so we would really need to think about the work that we're having counselors do or idc's or whatever department chairs and decide if that's something that we could give up but that is something that came up and then finally various different building staff came up as different ideas um district operations so this one had a lot of different categories here of course one of the top ones that came up was branded merchandise so people talked about for national teacher day or american education week we'll give you a coaster with blue valley
191on it or some trinket and they said you know we don't necessarily need those that that seemed to be high on their list professional development or travel now this might look like it contradicts with the very first question because they said how important professional development was well here when you asked why they said because you know what we've learned how professional learning is important but we've learned how to do that virtually so do we need to travel anymore or could we do that in a more economical manner um energy energy and work from home uh were ideas around could we save costs by either you know putting the hvac higher or lower could we do four day work weeks allow people to work from home does that save any revenue because you don't have to
192operate your buildings so i i don't know we would have to look at that but that might be something the energy part might be something the work from home part probably won't work right now but we would of course entertain all ideas looking at discretionary budgets for buildings reducing those busing either reducing what we what we provide which there are some regulations around that printing was a popular one where do we need to print as much paper as we have in the past benefits and salary everybody knows that that's a large chunk of change and so would that be something we could look at and then finally food service and the ideas there were do we offer too many choices food services a self-sufficient uh fund so they that likely wouldn't help again our our
193general fund revenue so these were ideas people had around revenue uh one was to go to legislative so one of our legislative priorities is to fund a special education at the statutory rate and that should we continue to advocate for that um i think some folks thought we could go and just ask for more i don't necessarily think we can go and ask for more but we could do some of our priorities around that facilities um charging renting hilltop out charging facility fees we do that already and our facility department was quick to remind us that we can't gouge our public and that those really are set at a at a rate so that we don't necessarily make money but that we break even on that um fees uh we we have increased our fees
194the last couple years and that was not something that we were interested in doing in fact you already saw your fees for next year and and that was not something that we we put forward and then just some various other minor suggestions educational programs these are just some specific programs so chinese immersion as you know we have chinese immersion at two of our elementaries this one really wouldn't save us tons of money if you have 50 kindergartners you need two teachers whether they teach in chinese or english so there was a little bit of startup to train those teachers but that that part is really the the extent of that even like materials materials come out of our learning resources account which is not a general fund budget the other thing i would say is
195that as we replenish materials so for example to buy new math materials for a kindergarten first second grade classroom instead of buying them in english we will buy them in chinese so that's not an added expense elementary specials there was just some question around the elementary specials do we have the right ones should we be looking at different things there field trips and they even mentioned in non-coveted times field trips do we spend a lot of money on that field trips are very much pta pto driven so it's not a lot of general fund and then finally that low enrollment classes should we be looking at low enrollment classes at middle and high school and is there a way to combine across buildings um you know we've done a lot of remote and and virtual
196this year and is there a way to do that so you could offer some of those classes still but it's really hard for them to make they use the example of multi-variable calculus which is offered once across the whole district and we have one teacher i believe still just one teacher who teaches that so could we model it like that and then finally extracurricular should we or could we look at eliminating or charging for extracurricular activities um that wasn't rated overly high but it was an idea that came up that that we want to honor that it was there and then the second survey or it wasn't an actual meeting but it was just an online thought exchange was for our families that was open july 23rd through the 28th we had 376 participants 245
197thoughts but 17 000 ratings so lots of ratings in there same questions what do you value most and what would you suspend reduce or eliminate from the budget what do you value most you will see some very similar answers the blue valley staff class size non-operational budget items like we mentioned before district operations some specific programs a little bit on extracurricular so very much they value the staff in blue valley they they want small class sizes they certainly didn't want to see either one of those things go away and then the second question what should we suspend reduce or eliminate again personnel there was some various discussion around that district operations very similar comments specific educational programs again maybe extracurricular non operating budget ideas and then they also had some revenue ideas very similar to
198what we saw from staff so all of that is great feedback for us and i really appreciate the time that our staff took the time that our patrons took on our committees or in in doing the thought exchange to give us that feedback so here we are we started in december uh january was really our time to engage with with those groups uh we're giving you a board update um right now and then we plan to be back to you in march with a recommendation around how we're going to balance this budget and we have an internal budget task force that's looking at all of this feedback and crunching some numbers now to come back with a a plan for you in march that will allow us to balance our budget can i ask a
199question would you classify these as permanent or temporary reductions that is a great question so i think there are some that will be permanent and i think some were going to come to you with a temporary and i think the other thing i think is that we might come back with a couple of ideas that were generated on here but we need more i we need more time and more people involved so for example um if it involves a specific thing at elementary school we need some elementary teachers and who are involved in that some elementary principles to really take some time to study that i just use that as an example but we will come back with those recommendations as well any other questions thank you i want also want to thank christy mcnerlin
200and her staff they were at every single one of these meetings and ran the thought exchange for us ran the video um and so we truly appreciate the time that you put into uh making this very easy to give that feedback and i think christy reminded us that it reminded her of her days on the news i will say dr morgan you've wetted our appetite for more we can't get enough budget talk especially at nine o'clock right hold on let me get my list out on that note do i have a motion to adjourn yes i moved at the february 8th regular board of education meeting be adjourned excellent stacy and michelle thank you both all those in favor raise your right hand all right motions passes 6-0 and happy birthday stacy in a couple
201weeks you