001[Music] uh once um all right straight up seven o'clock we're going to start with the pledge of allegiance so tommy garcia do you want to come join me right over here you know who also was named tommy me all right you ready to roll okay allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all pictures all right we'll turn this around okay we're on to public comments uh for tonight's meeting i will start out with a quick statement and then we'll get started welcome to those who are here 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
002orderly 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 the 60-minute open forum the board will enforce a three-minute limit per speaker after 60 minutes the board will close open forum and will proceed with his agenda items for the evening whether you plan to speak or just listen we're glad you're here because we care about the opinions and concerns of our patrons if you do not have an opportunity to address the board during the meeting you may address the board by email communication a few reminders about open forum that will help our speakers to have a constructive and positive experience when discussing items with the board when making remarks please be civil and use
003respectful language if you're speaking in person please keep your face covering in place while you speak please limit discussion to relevant business of the board tonight discussion of matters related to a specific student or employee is not allowed and said comments should be submitted and writing to the superintendent please remember to limit your comments to three minutes and avoid repeating the concerns of a previous speaker if you have any questions that require response someone will follow up with you at a later time on behalf of the blue valley board of education i welcome you and appreciate your interest in blue valley as we strive to provide the very best education possible to our students when your name is called tonight introduce yourself before beginning your remarks tonight we will start our open forum remarks with
004our patrons that are joining us remotely as a reminder and i know i was pretty loosely goosey on this last time we're gonna really limit this to three minutes so we've got a timer we got people gonna chime in if we go over three i'll be chiming in as well i don't want to be that guy but i want to get all 20 of our patrons who signed up tonight the ability to speak so let's get started first up is brad yaretzky pause volume so let the teachers can you hear me hey brad once you start again you're about 30 seconds in okay thanks can you hear me now tom yeah you're good perfect and the district representative parents that the virtual ad was the best option for those that desired a consistent instruction format
005which is the exact opposite of what has been provided we were promised virtual ed students would have teachers that were dedicated to virtue ed that's turned out to be false the falsity that was never disclosed by the district before the deadline for the final virtual ed decision was to be made instead the district provided virtual ed students with whatever was left over after the in-person learners had time with their teachers after having a synchronous instruction to those learners the main problems with the virtual ed program are it includes inadequate instructional time and interaction opportunity depending on the day the virtual students are getting between one quarter and one half of instruction in core classes as compared to in-person learners in some instances students are double and triple booked with classes during the same period some
006teachers even indicate that they're going to drop down a grade if they miss a certain number of those classes some elective courses for virtual learners are meeting as little as once a week while in-person learners are meeting daily while distance learning and i don't believe that the district is satisfied with the education it's currently providing to virtual learners and that discussions between concerned stakeholders and the district do continue and we're trying to develop an adequate solution but any solution short of virtual learners receiving the same educational opportunities as in-person learners is inadequate myself and other parents will continue to advocate for virtual learners and will continue to hold the district accountable to all students not just those parent groups that are funded by outside interests who have ulterior motives separate and apart from a top-notch
007public education not just those parents groups who flout the fact that we're in a global pandemic to show up and try to yell the loudest with all the hope that the board will be bullied into making the wrong decision for our students in our community as a whole all i and other virtual learner parents ask is that the district figure out virtual learning program so that all leaders all learners excuse me are receiving an adequate education this year thank you thank you brad up next nikki cannazzaro thank you i'm just trying to unmute myself my name is nikki canisero and i have three kids in the blue valley school district specifically i've got three kids at prairie star elementary i have a kindergartener a second grader and a fourth grader and i'm coming to ask
008again and make a request that we immediately move move our elementary students into full in-person learning immediately and move our high school and middle school students into at least a hybrid learning situation well i don't agree with the gating criteria that has been adopted for all the reasons that i'm quite confident many others are going to talk about tonight i primarily disagree with it because it has absolutely no reflection on the true measure of what we should be looking at and that is the severity of the cases of covid19 and and the effects that it's having on children which is essentially none or very minimal and even the adults in our community we have very low death rate very low hospitalization rate and i think those are the important things that we need to consider
009um quite frankly the effects of this covid19 as we're seeing it now is substantially less than what we see in the typical flu season and so i think consideration needs to be given to the severity or lack thereof of the copen 19 cases but i'm not going to talk a whole lot about the dating criteria because what i do want to talk about is even if we follow that gating criteria that gating criteria dictates that our elementary children should be learning in the classroom full time since at least september 4th superintendent merrigan sent out an email that said that we were in the yellow zone and in the yellow zone for elementary education students dictates that these children be learning in person the kansas department of health the johnson county department of health the cdc
010pediatric doctors association every known expert has told us that these elementary children need to be learning in school that is where they're going to get their education they cannot be learning remotely and certainly aren't learning by this hybrid situation now the last time we were here and we talked about it i think there was a unanimous agreement among all the experts even representatives from the school district that talked about and said that they didn't see the hybrid situation working for elementary children but at that time we went ahead and we went that way anyway and at that time we had no idea what the hybrid situation would look like as parents we didn't know i think even as teachers they didn't know and so we've gone down that path and so i'm here today to
011tell you that i now know what the hybrid situation looks like and it's not working we knew it wasn't going to work and now we've seen it and it's not working for our elementary age kids and here's why elementary age kids need structure they need interaction they need social and emotional development they need in-person learning what i've seen so far with the hybrid situation is one day of in-person learning nikki you've got 20 seconds and then a situation where i have a kindergartener who there was an entire day that she has nothing to do and that's her at home day and then we have a collective day with all the teachers but quite frankly it doesn't last the full day the at-home days as a kindergartner and even my friends aren't seeing any education they
012need to be in nikki i gotta i appreciate it we gotta cut you off so i can get everybody in i've got all your points so awesome thank you very much melissa janier thank you um i don't know if you can see me here my name is dr melissa jenner i am a physician and i'm here speaking as a private citizen on behalf of my two school-aged children who are enrolled in the virtual ed program through through blue valley our home school is oxford middle school and my address is available via public records um on june 22nd dr merrigan uh sent an email to all blue valley families stating that although there would be an all-virtual option for the school year little information was provided other than the program would be quote built and powered
013by blue valley instruction by blue valley teachers mere blue valley curriculum and standards and include live instruction with a mix of online activities lessons and assessments and quote then on july 15th a special board of education meeting was held during which the back to school guide for families was reviewed this document included a more detailed version of the virtual ed program some of the highlights include under curriculum quote students will have access to a robust list of courses most core courses and limited electives will be provided the full blue valley curriculum will be taught in the offered courses end quote under instruction students will experience high quality blue valley learning that families have come to know in a virtual format and finally under time the most important quote students in the virtual ed program should
014plan to spend a similar amount of time on schoolwork and live synchronous sessions with teachers as their in-person peers the all virtual option will not represent a reduction of learning time in case of the spring 2020 with continuous learning and quote uh now two months later in one week into the school year my sixth and eighth graders have yet to meet any of their elective teachers when they finally do meet these teachers they will only spend between 20 and 60 minutes a week in live instruction depending on the elective this includes my eighth grade spanish two class which is intended to count as ninth grade spanish but she will only be receiving one-fourth the instruction of her in-person peers as for the electives that only meet 20 minutes of live instruction they will be receiving
015a uh 0.08 or slightly less than 10 percent of the instruction time as their in-person peers court classes will receive approximately one half of live teaching as the in-person peers for the first four weeks of school students who are currently in quote distance learning have received and will continue to receive daily 50-minute instructional periods for all their classes including electives at the regularly scheduled times uh during the school day so in just these four short weeks the in-person students will receive anywhere from 500 minutes of extra instruction for course and up to 920 minutes of extra instruction in teacher-led course for some electives um i understood when i stood signed my kids up for virtual ed that there would be some times when they would be completing assignments and not be on uh the computer
016but i did not sign up for them to receive at most 50 teacher-led instructions in the course and 25 to an abysmal ten percent of just uh teacher-led instruction for these electives this is not equitable education um i really urge you to look at the virtual ed program contact other school systems other virtual schools reach out to families such as mine and see what ideas we have you still have time to make it right for these 6 500 students that are so far receiving a subpar education with the virtual ed program thank you so much for your time yeah thank you melissa okay thank you to our patrons who spoke remotely next we'll listen to recordings submitted written open forum comments for our written open forum comments while the comments were recorded by our staff
017the writer's name will appear on the screen first up is david straub i ask that the school board openly promote and encourage parents to use the food nutrition services drive-through meal pick-up service regardless of the family financial status use of the program brings in usda funds into the food program which can translate to retaining employees and trickles down to those companies and farms that provide the food enabling them to retain employees during these trying times up next kelly wiens we have just finished our first week of hybrid learning first i am impressed with the efforts taking place for in-person and the all virtual learning on wednesdays my concern lies on the distant learning days when there is no live instruction this falls back on the parents to monitor two full days on choice boards again
018we were told this was not the case for the fall i have been very disappointed in the understanding that it is the same and our children are only getting instruction two and a half days a week as the virtual wednesday is some instruction and three to four hours of independent work if our family was aware that this would be the case we would have signed up for virtual learning or moved to private education i would like to understand how the district is going to achieve the academic standard with live teaching only 50 percent of the time thank you for your response thank you kelly up next robin koenig the information from the district indicated that enrollment in the virtual ed program would provide the most consistent learning experience for our children be assured that education
019offered through virtual ed would be equal in quality to that provided to the in-person students we have discovered the reality is very different the rollout had the same technical and communication difficulties with student view in canvas as the distance learning but compounded by conflicting information widespread and irreconcilable scheduling conflicts and teacher assignment confusion teachers and parents had less than 24 hours with almost no counseling support to resolve the conflicts virtual ed classes weren't scheduled with any thought to avoiding conflicts but put into what time slots were left after in-person classes were scheduled the required attendance log is still not functional on the virtual ed site five of my son's seven classes were scheduled in the same two blocks and all alternate sessions offered by teachers also overlapped one conflict cannot be resolved and will be
020entirely asynchronous another was resolved by allowing him to sit in on a distance learning class which will be unavailable when gating criteria changes to attend his first two days of class required eight hours of my dedicated time all after 5 pm at night an extensive spreadsheet with all of the available sessions taught by my son's teachers and 26 email exchanges with teachers working in their off hours i am a project manager and my patients was still thin it was not electives causing the difficulty it was core courses for which options should be available the teachers were helpful to the extent that they could be but none of the counseling staff or the virtual ed principal offered assistance in finding solutions or looking for alternatives we were told there would be occasional conflicts to work out
021but nothing prepared us for this extent of schedule conflicts ironically if my son were an in-person student in distance learning he would not face the degree of scheduling conflicts because scheduling priority was given to in-person classes on the high school level it does not seem that the virtual ad option was given the same attention as in person it feels like an afterthought virtual ed kids deserve better we are sacrificing participation in our home schools my son has almost no blue valley west instructors because it was explicit on the bb website that this would provide the most consistent educational option thank you robin up next is alicia arkham beau my children have been going to bv schools for 13 years my oldest had the saddest senior year now we have three left my question is simple
022you have heard from community frontline leaders to explain how the gating criteria is flawed reporting three stats that are skewed you have cleared data that proves suicide is a higher risk you have been told repeatedly about our teen's depression since they were stripped of their livelihoods the horrible online experiences have only made it worse how many district student suicides will it take one two three deaths what's the tipping point for you all to listen thank you alicia dr jamie smiley all students need in-person dear blue valley school board with all due respect it is absolutely essential to get your students back to in-person learning the responsibility and work required for both virtual and in-person learning is too much to expect of your teachers and you will lose good teachers because they are too overwhelmed with
023all this responsibility you will lose good students and families to private schools because private schools have found a safe way to do in-person school distance learning is not the solution during this pandemic finding a way to do in-person learning safely is the solution parents teaching their kids is not the solution you can't put the responsibility of education on the parents and students parents are not trained to be teachers and should not be expected to be the solution all private schools are in person if bv does not find a way to do the same there will be an even bigger disparity between public and private education and you will have contributed to that gap by neglecting your students and not doing what is in their best interest school is essential teachers are essential private schools have
024found a way to be open if the private schools have found a way why hasn't blue valley the gold standard of public schools found a way how is it that private schools can be in person but blue valley can't make it happen how is it that blue valley has made it acceptable for sports and youth activities to be in person but not school and therefore seemingly making sports more important than education please listen to your parents who are advocating for their kids and are begging you to teach their kids in person to care about their mental health and safety and to care enough about your teachers and to protect them to do their jobs with ease blue valley school board members you have been elected to make blue valley public schools as strong and as
025of high quality as private schools please be advocates for our kids and their education and get these students back with their beloved teachers sincerely dr jamie smiley thank you jamie up next julie hamline students need in-person learning for quality education as well as mental health 40 positive cases over a two-month time period for the district's website in the entire district is miniscule if the gating criteria is based on anything that makes sense with the data it should be deaths hospitalization and building absences only when students are in the building all grades need to go back in person on september 21st numerous 6th graders were locked out of zoom in canvas on their first day of middle school my son called me at my work in tears because he couldn't log in of course since i'm
026not at home there's nothing i can do to help him teachers can't figure out how to help when their class can't see the same screen as them you are elected by the families in the district and need to do the right thing for them and not the teachers union i work in health care and there's no union for nurses here we are expected and paid to go do our jobs we weren't expecting to be in this situation either where we might get coveted and might expose our family members but we are doing what's right for our patients and doing our job teachers staff the union and most importantly the board of education need to do the same and do what's right for students and families thank you julie and our final person speaking remotely todd
027minster i am a parent of a student at blue river i would be here in person but thanks to the hybrid model i'm busy working by day and attempting to teach my child by night this board has already failed our students three times first when schools were shut down at the end of last year parents were left to educate their children with little to no district support my child was given a list of activities to choose from and he met with his teacher once a week for an hour of socialization this approach approved by the board was utterly inadequate second when the state board of education rejected the governor's mandate to delay school until after labor day this board could have started our children's education on time instead it delayed to make preparations what i
028asked was the district doing from march to august to prepare for a return to school third after initially offering full-time in-person schooling the board misinterpreted the covid statistics regarding risk to students and subsequently withdrew the live option in favor of what it felt was a safer hybrid option and yet other districts throughout the city are in school full time and in person and let's not even get started on the board's first attempt to use a gating criteria system that defied logic fortunately they quickly abandoned that flawed system regarding the risks from kobit the overall risk to elementary aged students of developing serious complications is almost zero it's statistically negligible while this risk to students should be a concern of the board its main concern needs to be its students the long-term educational development the risk
029of permanently disrupting their academic and social development by continuing the hybrid model is much much greater than the risk of developing complications from covid the board has previously failed its students on three key decisions but now they have a chance to get it right by sending our children back to school let's stop delaying the educational development of our kids let's stop forcing families with working parents to pay out of pocket for child care to support the hybrid system let's stop presenting the disadvantaged families in our district with even more obstacles by keeping kids out of school three days a week and let's stop this board streak of bad decisions at three by sending the kids back to school now thank you todd to round out our evening we'll hear from patrons who are here with
030us tonight i'll call you up one by one and again we'll limit our time to three minutes if you could please follow that so we can get everybody in here first up is krista spencer my name is krista spencer and i'm here today as a parent of a junior at blue valley west at the last board meeting many parents spoke as to why it was important that elementary school students should be in school my question to the board is why should the school situation whether it's remote in person or hybrid be any different for high school or middle school students than our elementary school students for my junior this is an important year his gpa at the end of this year will have a direct effect on any scholarship offers he may receive from colleges
031the classes he is in will have an impact on his act score he has a very demanding schedule with ap and honors classes all picked when he thought he would be in school learning with his peers with a full-time in-person teacher instead he is sitting in front of a computer for six hours a day after the third day of class last week he came up to me and said he hated online learning he misses the real-time collaboration of his teachers and classmates i imagine he is not alone in his feelings we knew online learning would be difficult for him and that is why when asked as parents we selected in-person learning we were setting him up for success but this current situation could be setting him up for failure as a parent i would like
032to know why it's okay for the elementary students to go back full time on october 5th but not middle school or high school parents argue that younger children struggle with online learning while i'm here to tell you that older students do too high school class blocks are two hours for many teacher but many teachers are already cutting this time short and finding it hard to fill this amount of time on zoom that leaves a lot of free time for students during the day if they were in school they would be that time would be devoted to learning i feel like my son and many others are left with advanced academic demands without the proper support to succeed and i worry my son will end up having to teach himself these very advanced subjects and unless
033you have a highly motivated student these students will fall through the cracks and possibly fail in closing i add you to urge a component in your gating criteria that accounts for the mental well-being of our high school kids and how the inherent flaws on in-line on in online learning in these critical years of their lives is affecting not only the fall semester of 2020 but potentially the rest of their lives depression and teen suicide are on the rise in our district we had another suicide within the district reported today we have got to get these kids back in school before it's too late kids cannot live in isolation high school student depression and suicide is not a trade-off for keeping students safe if private schools and public schools across the united states many in states
034with higher positivity rates in kansas can get their high school students back in the classroom full time why can't we thank you krista up next to carrie thank paschke my name is carrie paschke i have three children in the district one at southwest one at aubrey bend and one at timber creek i want to thank the board for the opportunity to speak to you here this evening i received the email from the district today about elementary kids returning to full-time in-person school i see what you did there with the timing of that email sending it out a few hours before this meeting and i must say well played for good reason this news makes a lot of people happy myself included because i have one in elementary so i'm sure appeasing some will make tonight
035go a little smoother for you as i mentioned earlier though i'm also the mom of a middle schooler and a high schooler and i would like to ask you what about them i try to give credit where credit is due so thank you for doing your part to give high schoolers a chance to play fall sports that was a big win for my sophomore cross country runner and i appreciate it it definitely benefited our high schoolers who actually play fall sports but with all due respect it did nothing for those who don't and did nothing for any of them academically it also did nothing for anyone in grades six through eight so it sounds to me like we've still got some work left to do i understand under the current gaiting sorry i understand under
036the current circumstances there is no one-size-fits-all solution to meet the educational needs of the blue valley students for this reason i greatly appreciate that parents were given a choice between virtual and in-person learning the problem is that what you said you were going to do is not what you did the choice you said we would have didn't end up being a choice at all the needs of the families who chose virtual are being met and i'm glad for them but the needs of those of us who chose in person are not as it stands today i have two distance learners and one child who is hybrid i can tell you with great confidence and unwanted experience that for our family it's not working and i'm a stay-at-home mom how do you expect working parents to
037do this between spotty internet access unknown passwords links that don't work glitchy zoom calls and canvas it's been both stressful and frustrating neither of which make our home a conducive learning environment but even if it was i wonder how much actual learning is taking place over the computer learning according to web servers is the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience study or by being taught is that happening online maybe but i would more like in what's happening to a maintaining of current knowledge and in some cases sadly a regressing of it and i want to be clear that i do not fault the teachers for any of this they have been positive flexible and professional but in my opinion they are not paid enough to do what's being asked to them right now it's
038not their fault some kids are disinterested have technical issues don't show up for zoom calls have no adult at home to help them get online or hold them accountable to complete their school work but it's become their problem to deal with while simultaneously trying to teach grade papers and write lesson plans and so i ask you who is thriving under these current circumstances sure there are some exceptions those children who are particularly well suited to online learning but i would venture to bet that the majority of us would agree that what's happening with the education of our children right now falls somewhere between mediocre and downright abysmal and i suppose this was acceptable back in march when this pandemic began and we shouldn't we didn't know any better but it's been six months shouldn't we
039be further along by now shouldn't we have reached the point where we say that just getting by isn't good enough may i finish yeah i'll finish this has taken its toll on our kids but not just academically their mental health is suffering too it's time we stop sitting idly by while the overall health of our children deteriorates particularly when there's something you can do about it don't leave our middle schoolers and high schoolers behind under the foolish and dangerous assumption that because they're old enough to stay home alone then they are okay to learn at home alone too [Applause] do you want to know the two scariest words you can hear from a teenager i'm fine you're giving teachers who aren't comfortable teaching in person the chance to teach virtually you've given families that aren't
040comfortable sending their kids to school in person the chance to learn virtually now it's time to make good on the offer you made to the rest of us to do what you said you were going to do and give those of us who chose full-time in-person learning the opportunity to send our kids all of our kids to school full-time and in person thank you thank you carrie uh updex carrie rayfold close enough yeah thank you good evening and thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight my name is carrie rayfeldt and i have three boys in elementary school at leawood as i was working on what i was going to say this evening about getting my boys back in school full time i realized i really had a lot to say about how hybrid learning
041has been going and the spring distance learning for our family but and it was actually so much that it was going to go over three minutes then i got an email from the district at about three o'clock that allowed me to cut a lot of what i had to say out so thank you thank you for that and thank you for the decision to send elementary students back full time starting october 5th it was the right decision and although i wish we were going back sooner this is still a huge win for our kids i'm still here speaking for a couple reasons though first to plead with you to please please please make sure that this is exactly what happens it is an urgent matter for our kids excuse me if i'm skeptical but i
042need more reassurance that my children will actually be back in school full-time we've been told before that we have the choice to send our kids back in person and then you took that option away the gating criteria is still flawed and remote learning still doesn't work second i'm here to ask you to please send high school and middle school back in person as well as we learned in elementary this week while hybrid may sound good in theory it simply does not work the children are not learning please reevaluate the gaining criteria the criteria we are currently using has three data points measuring the exact same thing these data points are more skewed toward positive cases because it is not a random sample of healthy individuals that are reflective of what you would see in our
043school buildings to make sure our kids are getting the education they deserve we have to be sure that we are using good data and the right data virtual learning or remote remote learning is not an acceptable substitute for in-person learning there is absolutely no way a virtual education will ever compare to in-person learning and i think the virtual parents that spoke tonight spoke to that very thing and i think that that's what they're learning probably too what really needs to be addressed however is the damage that all of the screen time and isolation is inflicting on our kids proven to lead to anxiety depression sleep disorders and attention deficit problems and these don't discriminate by age i i can finish up quickly it's time to open up our schools use the correct data to evaluate
044the risks stop living in fear and become the great district we all know blue valley to be as parents we will never stop fighting for our kids we expect education beyond expectations let's close the achievement gap let's give every child the opportunity to learn in person not just the ones who left our school district for private schools and tutors public schools purpose is to provide an equal education for all and with any form of virtual learning the children of blue valley are the ones who will be left behind thank you terry uh abnet sheena sidhu sheena okay um owen frederick i don't have much so maybe some time back for others hello my name is owen frederick i have a kindergartner and first grader in blue valley my wife is currently working 18 hours a
045week as an unpaid blue valley teacher um in the recent school uh funding case i think you guys remember that one again versus kansas this kansas supreme court cited the adequacy test from rose versus council for better education in its decision the state has an obligation to provide a free efficient and adequate education speaking from my own personal experience i will say that hybrid learning is neither free nor adequate [Applause] while i was pleased to read about the board's plans to return to in-person learning in october for k-5 the gating criteria creates too much uncertainty for teachers students and parents and uh i will also um well played yeah well played by you guys on the email timing today um of course it's not political right uh the board should remove all gating criteria for
046in-person learning and instead recognize school as essential schools should remain open for in-person learning so long as other kansas essential services are open thank you [Applause] thanks owen up next jennifer robertson jennifer's not here dr christine white hi my name is christine white i live at 11301 west 125th terrace i have two children that have graduated from blue valley northwest and two still there i'm a pediatrician in johnson county and i am speaking as a private citizen please hold your applause if any till the end because i got a lot to say and i got to speak fast i'm speaking tonight about the gating criteria and we'll use the johnson county numbers from the kansas department of health website as their numbers are more complete than those from the johnson county health department website and
047i do have more copies of the handout i just ran out of staples so they're in my bag but i can give it to you later um the biggest problem with the ksde gating criteria is three of the numbers come from bias data when 90 of tests are done on symptomatic and exposed people the numbers are skewed artificially high percent positivity for example is nine to thirteen percent when you look at asymptomatic people tested before pre-op uh procedures it's one percent the second big problem with the gaining criteria is the percent positivity the incidence rate and the incidence trend all measure the same information they are not measuring independent predictors of disease the cards are stacked against our kids when three of the five criteria are measuring the same skewed data the third problem is
048we are truly at a new normal we are all going to be exposed to covid and slowly a consistent percentage of us will become infected recover develop antibodies and improve our herd immunity that will take a while we are not getting to the magical five percent percent positivity rate anytime soon so when we hear there are 400 new cases for example today in kansas i say so what what's important is that our hospitalization rates are down and our death rates are down we have the ability to care for the small percentage of people over 65 years old and who often have comorbidities that make them higher risk for civilian severe illness right now we have a case dimmick we have lots of cases but hospitalizations and deaths are under control the whole goal of our
049actions since march was to reach this point we are here now so if we must have gating criteria this is what i propose um if you look at figure 3 in your handout the three new criteria i propose are number one absenteeism number two hospitalization usage and number three incidence incidence trend in johnson county over an eight week period the first absenteeism should be tracked daily from school school and only co-positive tests should count towards it also each risk level should be increased as the previous ones are too restrictive i have a footnote in there noting what would be better after i spoke with a group of pediatricians today um let's see hospital usage is usually kept at an occupancy rate of 80 by the hospitals so the criteria risk levels must be changed to
050measure the percent of beds being utilized by coveted patients i got 20 seconds okay there's a footnote in there of what i would recommend for new gating criteria for hospitalization usage the third is trend and county incident rate over eight weeks to truly give us an idea of which way our infections are going knowing there will be a slight spike in fallen winter as viruses do increase in the fall and winter see figure four for instance rates they are decreasing overall thank you all for allowing elementary to return and fall in october please look at our county data and see past the cases that so many are held up on that's not what's important please see pass the fear and allow all of our students to be in class in person starting monday september 21st
051if that's what their families chose for them thank you dr white uh rebecca campbell i kind of feel bad i have to follow that i'm rebecca campbell thank you so much for letting me speak today um i actually have um six kids in six different grades and four different schools and i don't want to go on and say everything that they've said i don't i think the grading criteria has been insane um i feel like you know you you ask me what do i want i want my kids back in school i know the risks the teachers who want to go back know the risks and we've said we're willing to take it we don't think it's you know we've given the option to the parents who want to have their kids learn virtually you
052gave us an option let us do it we understand the risks um i'm not a teacher i cannot do what the teachers do i can't i do my best i can teach as a mom but that doesn't compare with the blue valley school teachers that's why i'm here i moved here from arizona the schools are not good here not good in arizona i love arizona but they're not great and i chose here i chose blue valley because of the schools i researched before i moved here we haven't even been here a year and my kids have had a total of three months of school in person i have a special needs son who luckily has been able to go back to school but i fought all summer and um he's so he's almost seven he
053started therapies when he was 15 months old he started school when he was three years old he went continually with therapies and schedules and routines to nothing to absolutely nothing for six months i he regressed he stopped communicating he's non-verbal he uses a device the school was trying to get us a dedicated device we didn't get that um and i was really worried about him you know going back to school getting back into the routine and he has been so happy and i'm going to go off on a little story here and he came down the stairs on saturday morning with his backpack ready for school it was a saturday he slept with his backpack last night and i pulled it off of him this morning he was curled up with it um i said
054it on the end of his bed he pulled it back in his bed when i came back again so school is more than learning learning is so important but there's more to it to the socialization the interaction all that stuff is so important and not just for him he's special needs but it's important for all of the kids they all need to be in there they need to be able decisions over the past several months i'll begin by saying how excited my family was to see dr merrigan's email this afternoon this is a huge positive step for blue valley and i'm so appreciative of district leadership taking parent and student feedback into consideration and getting us to this point i was already planning to speak this evening prior to receiving the email so i'll use
055this time to discuss a few of the reasons i signed up to be here tonight and why full-time in-person learning is most beneficial for our students blue valley has had only 40 cova cases out of over 25 000 students and staff that's about one-tenth of a percent for a fraction of a percent we can't close our schools we can't keep children out of their classrooms any longer last week my son had his first day of kindergarten in the chinese immersion program the point of this program is that he be immersed in the chinese language which simply cannot happen at home my family doesn't speak mandarin there's no possible way for us to immerse him in chinese language and culture during the days he's learning at home blue valley's website states that students in this program
056are to be quote spending half of the day in the target immersion language and half of the day in english end quote this is not the education my son has been receiving and as a parent this is concerning to me because we as families are asked by the district to make a k-12 commitment to immersion education but the very foundation on which the immersive experience is built has been sorely lacking i want to emphasize that my concerns are not as slight towards teachers or staff in any way there's simply no way for teachers to be teaching one group of students in person simultaneously teaching a second group online you can't be two places at once unfortunately this leaves a lot of parents daycare providers grandparents older siblings and other caregivers in the impractical position of
057sitting with young children during zoom meetings and navigating confusing instructions to keep them on track because remember kindergarteners can't read this isn't like asking a college student to watch a lecture online online learning with the kindergartener necessitates 100 caregiver involvement the solution is that all students need to be in the classroom full time in order to receive the immersive experience as promised in closing my children have had nothing but positive experiences with their blue valley teachers and staff they want to be at school and i believe that's a testament to the excellence of our teachers if i didn't believe in the quality of teachers and staff at blue valley i wouldn't be here tonight if i thought i could do a better job educating my kids i would be homeschooling them but i am here
058tonight advocating for our children because i know their best chance at success is being in the classroom with the teachers they love thank you for your time and we are looking forward to october 5th [Applause] thank you trisha i think that's it for our speakers tonight i am correct okay i will now call the meeting to order up first we'll see receive reports from our board advisory committees dr merrigan and dr hayden thank you the diversity equity and inclusion committee had its inaugural meeting on august 20th as you'll remember this committee was formed by the board in july i believe at their july meeting and we appointed patrons in maybe it was formed in june and we appointed patriots in july at this first meeting it was a great meeting we have both students some
059staff members as well as patrons on the committee and three board members we spent time talking about the purpose of the committee which is to look at topics involving diversity equity and inclusion and to provide feedback to the board we started by not really as a as an administrative team deciding what that group wanted to hear so we asked the committee that first time in august to identify what information would they like to see from blue valley was there data were there things that they wanted to to find out and they identified demographic data including staff student race achievement absenteeism and discipline district policies regarding consequences for racism and hate speech surveys of students to hear the issues recruiting practices training of staff around diversity equity inclusion police interactions and training of our school school
060resource officers the second thing we did at that first meeting is we identified you know what types of things should be included in a comprehensive diversity equity and inclusion plan and the committee talked about curriculum processes staff training it should include a comprehensive diversity equity and inclusion efforts uh talked about making sure we had an identifiable vision common language involvement of all stakeholders and then they also identified that what are other school districts doing are there some plans out there that we could look at that first committee meeting ended and we met for a second time on september 10th so this committee has met twice since our last board meeting on september 10th we actually brought back the first set of that data dr kelly wessel started by going over demographic data both for students
061and staff we also looked at some achievement as well as discipline and attendance data that that adam wade our director of academic achievement and accountability put together had great discussion had lots of questions that came up and this committee identified some additional data that they would like to see our next meeting is on thursday october 8th thank you dr american mr hayden thank you um the finance and operations board advisory committee met on thursday september 10th via zoom conference call we're pleased to have 16 of our 20 members present jason gillum director of business operations knight printed presented the bids and contracts there were four design and construction contracts and two bids the blue valley northwest turf practice field was one of the projects that was highlighted this project was identified as if you remember
062as a capital outlay funded project over a year ago and it came in under budget 27 state and local contracts and purchases were also presented the 2021 self-funded health plan with blue cross blue shield of kansas city was highlighted the estimated cost is approximately 29.1 million which is a very slight increase from previous year jason gillum director of business operations and charles ratham director of food nutrition services provided information about the back to school plan more of that information will be coming in this presentation in a few minutes director of finance jenny daniel and i talked about the financial impact of covet 19. the district has requested over 1.2 million dollars in reimbursements from johnson county they were appropriated federal relief funds via the care cares act and so we hope to hear more about
063that in the future next finance and operations committee meeting is scheduled for thursday october 10th thanks kyle in the next month we'll hear from the same committees and also student activities and curriculum instruction committees when they get rolling correct yes and health and well-being and health and well-being good deal okay receive reports from board members and the superintendent on items not included in the agenda jody dietz i will start with you absolutely i think i broke it already sorry um i just wanted to say um it's been a really amazing experience to be part of the the new dei um committee um you know being kind of the new guy on the block here um this this brand new committee is really i think solid we kicked off really well we've got an amazing group
064of parents patrons students and and staff and i am just amazed at at the brainstorming and ideas that are coming out of that so that's been really exciting and i can't wait to to really dig in and get some good work done thank you jody stacy will bring her bar hall thank you i would like to start just by thanking our teachers and our staff here at district office and out in all of the buildings uh throughout the district they have worked extremely hard uh to prepare for this challenging school year and their efforts are greatly appreciated there were those that spent the summer developing our virtual classes there were those that do a lot with a cleaning to make sure the buildings are prepared when the kids are there there are those that have
065planned for all of these changes particularly at the district office level and i really just want you to know how much i appreciate the hard work and the extra effort that you all have put in this year i know it has been extremely challenging and dr merrigan you and your administrative staff especially have been nothing short of amazing um you've handled all of this with grace and patience and kindness and i really do appreciate it we are very lucky to have wonderful people working in blue valley i would also like to thank the blue valley educational uh foundation for pivoting this year to the online community breakfast i really appreciated the thoughtfulness and how they set that up and i thought that it was a great event and as always appreciate their continued support of
066the district and then finally i have a quick uh update for the acacia board of directors that i represent our region for they did a great job working to create a path forward for our fall sports and activities to occur this spring if they are unable to compete this fall hopefully it will not come to that but i appreciate the quick action that they took to provide an alternative if needed and i do actually have another regularly scheduled board of directors meeting later this week so we'll have another update next month on what keisha is working on so that's all thanks thank you stacey mike sites nothing madam vice president so i have a two-part update i like jody i'm part of the dei committee i think i hit the jackpot because i'm also on
067finance and operations so i've gotten to attend all of the committee meetings that have occurred so far this school year so um i would echo what jody said um i was um extremely impressed with how we hit the ground running with the dei committee and they're ready to to make changes right away and it's just exciting to be part of that group professionally i'm a finance person so i always appreciate being part of the finance and operations committee and uh i'm excited to to continue through that process this year it's exciting to see the work that was done over the summer to our buildings we the bond referendum seems very long ago but it's exciting to see that progress as we drive around the community i did also want to say i do have an
068elementary son i'm the only one on the board that has an elementary kid so a fifth grader at overland trail elementary and we did select in-person learning so he's been doing hybrid since we started this year my husband and i are both employed so we're in the same boat as you guys we are working through it just like you are we um you know obviously sitting in the seat i understand the importance of making sure that we keep everybody healthy and i just want you to know that i'm i'm there with you i'm doing it every day um and um i i know it's not exactly how we wanted it but um we we have to keep the big picture in mind when making these changes so i i'm with you that my son certainly
069loves his days at school but we're making the hybrid model work for now awesome thank you amy michelle benjamin i think patrick does um on august 28th i attended a kasb kansas association school boards um meeting to talk about the legislative platform um there was nothing out of the ordinary a lot of talk about um equity with broadband and covid relief from um state and federal um and other than that um it was pretty much what we usually see on the legislative platform so i didn't want any there's no surprises but everyone's running into very similar situations as we are and i also just wanted to say thank you to not only our staff and our administration for all of the hard work i mean i can't even imagine if you've slept in three months
070and i do want to thank our patrons for being patient and understanding that this is this is a huge monumental undertaking it is not something that any of us took lightly anything that goes wrong it's never been because we didn't care or didn't thank you to everybody cute back up patrick okay anything from you you're good okay i'll pick you back on a couple things so blue valley ed foundation raised 290 thousand dollars close to an all-time record so great job to them to join lisa and cindy um kasp thank you for doing that i was in topeka all day on saturday for the nominated committee to nominate our next kansas association of school board president i know mike you were just up there as well on several kasp things so thank you for that
071stacey for your commitment to acacia as well of course thank you to our teachers and thank you to our patrons and i mean that i i've received hundreds of thousands of emails i recognize about every name in here thank you carrie for all your emails frederick plenty there and so i i do appreciate it we've read them all i can recognize about every name here that's just read them because i've truly read them all not time to respond to them all like a few weeks ago but appreciate your comments and your thoughts here well thought out high road and and over the past several weeks as well so thank you for coming in tonight too because i know it's not easy and i i enjoy listening to to everybody's thoughts and i truly mean that
072um board of education will start 6 p.m from now on right i was just going to make sure we noted that on the consent agenda that you're just getting ready to um act on in a minute we have changed our start times for our board meetings to 6 pm we have been doing them at 7 00 p.m and so we are changing that start time to 6 p.m starting in october okay dr morgan and tom can you guys talk a little bit about what we've decided to do a little differently going forward so it makes it easier for our patrons to see kind of what we do yeah absolutely i don't know if you want to start and i can chime in i think it's regards to our workshop normally and how we're absolutely here
073absolutely we um our board meet we have always had work sessions in the mornings with the board they've committed almost the whole day actually on board of education days they've come in and we've done work sessions in the morning and then we've had work our board meeting we are committed to doing all the work in the board meeting uh that will be live streamed so that's why we're going to start those meetings at 6 00 p.m so you will see more reports um more discussion more honestly we will always allow people to come but we because of code are going to have limited attendance right now but also we'll always have it live stream okay so normally we'd have board workshops on mondays from about 8 am to 1 pm going through tons of stuff
074we're going to do that all during the meetings these days if you will so patrons are welcome we'll have it live streamed um et cetera et cetera so that that'll be changing and we'll start at 6 pm to make sure we can get to all that as well so i don't have any other further comments on that good job you're good okay um approve the agenda from the for the september 14th 2020 regular board of education meeting looking for a motion motion by patrick hurley second by michelle benjamin all those in favor please raise your right hand motion passes 7-0 approve the consent agenda as published i move that the board of education approved the consent agenda for the september 14 regular board of education meaning as published second motion by mike seitz second by
075stacey obringer-varhall any items any board members want move from the consent agenda to new business for further discussion none all those in favor please raise your right hand that motion passes 7-0 i.t do we have any working microphones coming over there thank you there we go that one okay okay on to new business dr american first week of school report right so this is a little misleading because it talks about a lot of work we did up to get ready for school as well as what's happened within this first week and so it i'm going to start this but there are many of my friends over here who are going to come up and join who have done the actual work so to start i'm going to take us back maybe can we just advance
076it whoever's there there we go to the gating criteria as you remember on august 18th this board of education adopted the navigating change gating criteria that gating criteria was approved by the kansas board of education as a part of their navigating change document that's over 1 000 page document that includes all kinds of things about the return to school included in that document was the doctor groups that helped to develop that metrics as well as the kansas department of health and environment so this has been a point of confusion for folks the kansas department of health and environment is the one that keeps those gating criteria statistics their statistics are a little different than what johnson county's website the johnson county health and department department of health and environment does so we need to go
077to the kansas department of health and education's website when we look at that there is a little thing you click and it says school gating criteria and it gives you that information so for the most for the first time we had to do it i physically had to get a piece of paper out good thing i had the math degree and you know average things out this time there's a little math but for the most part now it's i can do it in my head you just have to add a couple of numbers together you can find most of the information on there you cannot find the hospital criteria the that the open beds in the hospital that is on the mark website and then finally absenteeism that or attendance that we've talked about or
078a couple people have talked about tonight will start to be used as a factor going forward we couldn't use it obviously before because we weren't in school we didn't know what that attendance would look like but going forward we will be able to do that the next evaluation of that is scheduled for next week the reason that we felt comfortable today saying that elementary would be able to be full in person is that again as you've heard from some folks today the gating criteria allows that if you're in the yellow or the orange when we get to the hybrid we'll talk a little bit about why we chose hybrid to start but it is our intention and nobody disagrees that we want those kids elementary kid all kids but elementary kids right now we're talking
079about back in school so that's the background of the gating criteria so the next thing i want to talk about is coveted reporting and i'm going to ask tara asher to come up here with me tara is our district nurse and um tara honestly has been is the behind the scenes person on our covid team so we have a covet team that's been in existence since june 1st since we came back to school this coved team anytime somebody whether it's a student or a staff member tests positive their supervisor contacts that covet team and we begin working with the health department we begin that contract tracing that is involved with that so it is on our website right now that between june 1st when we came back and the end of august they contact traced
080over 170 cases sometimes those were just exposures that didn't end up being positive obviously but there were 40 positives for coba 19 that we know of so that's the caveat i would i would say about summer if we had a staff member who didn't have to work in the summer teachers a paraprofessional who happened to have coveted they maybe didn't tell us if they were in the summer because they're not in session students the same thing those were just the folks on our facilities that we contracted the other thing i would say is that we're committed to reporting the information each week so every wednesday our nurses are going to submit the number of of people in their building so staff and students who are covered positive not have been exposed not we think maybe
081not they have symptoms but are coveted positive so that will give us good data around each of our buildings and that information will be on our district website every friday updated by school what i'm going to ask tara to talk to you about is what do we do over the weekend or even in the middle of a day if we get a report that a student or a staff member is covered positive in one of our buildings so i will tell you our nurses are working extremely hard on this we have cases that are coming in all the time so this doesn't stop during the day in the evenings on the weekends once a case comes into the covid team we reach out to the individual that is is positive and we work with our
082teams to make sure that we get that completely contact traced now this can last process can last you know 20 minutes it can last a couple hours to contact trace every part of that making sure that we got every part of that covered and everyone is safe and secure in our buildings so we'll go through that we make sure that our administrators are aware the building nurses are aware our custodial crews are aware of those cases and so we make sure that then we contact our building so we know that proper communication goes out if necessary if that is a part of a staff member if that's part of a student that we need to work with and we contact those families that are all affected by that so any any questions on on that
083process again those are hyperlinked to the district website so that folks if they're looking in board docs would be able to click right on that and it would show you it would take you right to where that information is housed and where the dashboard is going to be by school again every friday that will be updated yep and it'll go live friday morning correct correct i have a quick question on the absenteeism part um i know at least you know in our experience um we haven't really nailed down our classes yet and so i'm not 100 sure my kid's been counted as being present how do i so we will so we would work with we're we're working on that jody um so we're not going to count people um absent because there was confusion
084with canvas and synergy to start the first couple days absolutely so what what does specifically does that mean um this weekend i think we contact trace do we contact trace several cases so probably about eight cases that we went through um this is individuals that you know tell our staff that they're covid positive and then we have to contact trace through those to determine whether or not who was exposed and who wasn't okay any other questions from the board yep right it is it's positive cases only not i've been exposed not i have symptoms i think maybe it's you have a positive test that's come back okay any other questions on that from the board thank you um next i'm going to have kyle hayden come up and talk about some of our facility operations
085[Music] thank you first of all i want to talk a little bit about the mitigation efforts specifically around ppe better part of five months ago we really started the process of acquiring masks and gowns and gloves we deployed those to schools over the course the last couple weeks those are used by staff by students by visitors for the most part people do and we allow people to to wear their own math students to bring their own mass and so we have other cotton masks that are used to be handed out for those who don't have them and we also have disposable masks that can be used for folks if they show up and forgot their mask we're conducting screening via digital no touch thermometers so we're asking staff to go above and beyond to screen
086our students before they go into classrooms every day we also have ipad thermal screening systems that we place in our offices for staff and for visitors to use enhanced cleaning this is something that has been extraordinary effort on behalf of our custodial services and matt brooks and his team there's a number of different things that we use as far as products one of those products is tersano tersano is a toxin-free chemical we actually supply those to our classrooms too for teachers to use they can spray it on the desk any other high-touch surfaces throughout the day we also have what's called 360 clorox machines and those 360 clorox machines are able to provide a a another barrier of disinfectant for our facilities in particular if we have high risk areas or we call hot spots
087we use those 360 machines other things as far as enhanced cleaning efforts we're providing hand sanitizer additional hand sanitizer stations throughout our buildings we put in water bottle fillers that also are additional plexiglass barriers are all of our receptionist areas and then hvac system that's one of the things that i think has been a common question we have increased the amount of outside air that's coming into our schools and the recycling efforts are on a on a faster rate along with the filter replacement so those are some of the mitigation efforts um next slide do i do this okay on the food and nutrition services area once again a lot of heavy lifting by our staff here the new safety measures that put in place um first of all we tried to eliminate a lot
088of high touch surfaces and so what that means is there's a lot of pre-packaged food instead of food through um with the self-service model and so we're pre-packaging the food we're also um eliminated the the touch point pads and in lieu of that way at the elementary level and we use class lists and so this does teachers um could just bring the students down and the food service workers can the food service workers can utilize those class lists other things that have happened that are noteworthy we have now free breakfast and lunch for all blue valley students the state department along with the usda um has allowed for free breakfast and lunch for all students regardless of their eligibility and um this is going to be in place until that funding runs out hopefully through
089the full first semester in regards to that we served six thousand meals today to over one thousand students as far as transportation i think next slide we have some several safety measures in place there also um all students wear masks when they're on the bus we're running three different routes now to accommodate all of the hybrid models so we have the a day the b day and then we have all of our students especially with the when it comes to special education students we have 105 routes currently with elementary if we go back into middle school and high school model that will add up to about 150 that's about 10 less routes than we had last year right now we have just a little over 3 400 riders and that's a 33 decrease from last
090year hey kyle real quick in regards to buses thinking ahead middle school high schoolers school plenty of buses plenty of drivers good to go i know you mentioned 10 less routes than last year another challenges but any any thoughts on that currently we're we're well staffed but if we were to start school tomorrow all in all grades every day we would be understaffed right now we're still hiring i think the heads even jason told me today they had six people that they were going through interviews with today there's quite a process to go through to get drivers we have lost a number of drivers i think that's been a common theme throughout the metro just because of uncertainty for the job the other thing that's happened is because there's been a lot of activity routes
091that have been eliminated over time that drivers were using that as extra revenue income and so that's a a lot of cases has gone away and so um it's the the demand for transportation and bus drivers is definitely there and we're going to have to keep working to make sure that that need is met thanks kyle we're going to talk a little bit about staffing and that first bullet we talked about that their certified staff have done a tremendous job preparing for the multiple ways that we're going to be opening our buildings this year but on top of that like kyle was talking about in terms of our mitigation and the things that we had done over the summer our classified staff did amazing work over the summer getting our schools prepared getting them ready
092for our students and our staff members to come back you look at the numbers it's 150 new hires this year and typically we have our first kickoff in early august when we bring all of our new teachers back and we have a great kickoff event for them this year we did it in buildings to avoid getting together in mass and 150 this number right now is down from the previous two years showing that we had a good retention rate this school year since july 1st we've hired 35 staff members in the certified ranks that's included in that 150 number and then since july 1st we've hired 68 classified staff members and our numbers that you see below that are current openings we have seven certified openings that are currently covered by long-term substitute teachers this
093is a number that is represented most often in august it's some of our hard to fill areas a special education gifted education and we currently are still recruiting those individuals as we speak but right now they're filled with substitute teachers and we have 75 classified openings in both paraeducation buildings and grounds instructional support and we're working to fill those as well similar very similar numbers that we see in a typical august and the school year the last number is one that we tapped into today and 296 substitutes this is about 50 light from where we were in march but of the 296 we know that right now this afternoon we had to find a couple of substitute teachers for some needs we were able to call them at 11 o'clock and we had them here
094by 11 30 to fill some of those voids so 296 we're currently still continuing to interview and hire substitute teachers and we feel good at that number right now knowing that we're going to be able to see that growth throughout the year all right thank you any questions for eric on staffing thank you all right mark as mentioned this evening um as a concern is the mental health of our students and so there are a variety of things that we have in place to assist our staff and as they work to assist our students whether they're interacting with them in person or while students are learning at home first and foremost at the beginning of this school year as any year but this year in particular is relationships understanding the transition that students are experiencing
095as they enter back into learning again whether that's at home or in person and then making connections and so we're trying to focus on as teachers are interacting with students making connections at all levels finding ways for students to interact so if parents have seen breakout rooms some of those breakout rooms on zoom have occurred to provide students interact opportunity to interact with each other so again that's the first piece of mental wellness within school it's relationships connections and understanding the transition students are experiencing second we have provided a variety of professional learning opportunities for our staff so in those additional days that we had at the beginning of the year the focus was on professional learning around sel i was just with a variety of teachers and principals the other day and through canvas
096i was able to observe a wide variety of sel lessons that our teachers have available to them to assist our students and walk through those lessons with them at the beginning our social workers have been doing amazing job working out reaching out to our families supporting them connecting them with resources and then also supporting our new families as they transition into the blue valley school district during this time our crisis response team which we have employed um more than one time now since the beginning of june is a variety of staff members our counselors administrators and additional staff that work to engage in a building with students parents and staff when we experience a crisis in the loss of a student or a staff member our school psychologists have been doing an amazing job of
097supporting our special education students whether those are elementary currently in person or at home and then we are working to expand our parent support this evening you heard some comments and concerns about screen screen time so we're connecting with start on presentations just as parents with assisting with screen time and how students are adapting to that at home and then also what that means for them in their free time if you will and then bv well has put together a series of courses to assist parents in supporting them and developing additional resource and tools as they help their families at home during this time we hope to expand additional parent support opportunities through parent university as we move through this next fall our hybrid model the elementary level um during in the hybrid model the
098elementary um absolutely i would want to acknowledge having been a former elementary teacher and principal and not done this myself quite frankly but having talked to our building principals and teachers and hearing from parents certainly the hybrid model is a difficult model and we would want to acknowledge that i also want to reiterate the praise you heard tonight about our teachers our teachers are doing an amazing job associated with what's happening i've had the opportunity to be in our schools and see our teachers helping our elementary students understand the mitigation measures that we have in place to help keep them safe so they are learning routines getting adjusted but in person just as i mentioned on the mental health slide the emphasis again is on relationships and connections that's always part of the beginning of
099any school year what parents are seeing on zoom right now should be about connections we want to develop connections and relationships first and then the and then the content follows that's true every year this year more than ever before so at the elementary level students are experiencing two live synchronous um zoom sessions a day that typically at the elementary is a morning meeting and then in the afternoon it's about a story time and connection or closed at the end of the day i am aware that there has been some complications associated with that live zoom a hybrid and we are working through that with our elementary teachers we are appreciative of the fact that we have been able to conduct kindergarten transition days and so with our kindergarten transition days our kindergarten students have had
100the opportunity with parents to come in certainly didn't look like it we would want it to traditionally but we certainly were glad we're able to do that all of our schools conducted beep and greets and those beef been greets allowed it allowed all of our parents to come to the schools collect our devices and have the opportunity to um collect those devices see our staff and so that was a really great opportunity and then again our staff now is going to be preparing for that full transition of our elementary students on october 5th so in those instances where our school administration have learned that live synchronous zooms aren't occurring twice a day we are working through that whoops but so on october 5th when we were back in school elementary full besides us working on
101it just a little more substance on that on what the next few weeks look like that transition with the teachers our administration our principals how does how does that look so october 5th is a great day if you will sure so october 5th it's about really looking at how do we maximize all of this space in our buildings uh for classroom teachers and students to move beyond that classroom setting based on uh the class size in it of itself it's about fine-tuning what lunch room will look like and what the different spaces in the lunch build and the what the different spaces in the buildings are going to look like for lunch to occur safely with our students it's about further helping all of our staff understand what transitions are going to look like in
102hallways when all the students are back what restroom is going to look like restroom breaks are going to look like when all of our students are back in the building so those pieces will be taking place and then additionally we're working very closely with our human resources department you heard from tara asher today preparing for what it will look like in the instance of substitutes or in any case potentially lack thereof anything else okay for our middle school and high school students in distance learning again you'll see the reference to the connections and relationships setting norms our students have been participating in live synchronous lessons as has been referenced tonight we were glad and really appreciated the staff working through and conducting sixth and ninth grade orientations and getting our devices in the hands of
103our sixth and ninth graders so that they were ready to go on the very first day of school and i'd also like to point out and thank the staff our technology staff who's just been doing an amazing job sometimes when those devices get opened up on the first day of school school or the night before they've worked really hard to process bv care students to assist when there have been issues with our student technology devices our library media centers have done an amazing job of not only collecting materials but getting materials already prepared to get in the hands of students because we will have at middle and high school additional materials pickups happening throughout our school the further the further our teachers move in instruction then the students will need additional materials either distance or
104our virtual learning so we're preparing those as well and our library media specialists have already started to engage in lessons with various classes as well this year our middle and high school at both levels they do have what's referred to as the black schedule and i'm sure you're aware now at this point our middle school and our high school have what we refer to as odd or even or these a b days on odd calendar days they're experiencing hours one three five and seven and the even days you can see our hours two four six and advisory one of the reasons our administrators committed to that was thinking about we talked about mental health earlier thinking about students experiencing a full load in each one of their days and wanting to reduce what that load
105looked like what that homework look like during this time learning in person or at home when we know there are a wide variety of stressors that students are living with during this time at middle school the middle school students experience two core classes every other day and then there are three electives and those and you can see the times there as well at middle school for electives in the virtual setting as referenced this evening those students are meeting for a decreased period of time in terms of live instruction but i will share with you all of the lessons being provided forward are intended to meet the times that are listed there on this screen whoops next piece i'd like to whoops i'm sorry to miss something patrick so how long have we had the block
106schedules in place as they are set forth today um this is the first year here in blue valley that the block has been consistent across all of our high schools and consistently across all of our middles in this fashion so did we have block schedules in some of the high schools in the previous years in previous years it was west high school we had modified block in four of our high schools and then west had basically that's good and so what was the modified block in the other high schools sorry modified block was that on monday tuesday and friday you met all seven of your hours and then on wednesday you had hours one three five and seven and on thursdays you had hours two four six so part of the reason as dr collier
107said was mental health is absolutely as if you think about kids and the stress they're under right now but the other thing is is that we always have planned at some point um to have kids in in session one of the mitigating factors is to have students out in the halls less often so if you have a black schedule you don't have them changing as often as if you're meeting hours one two three four five six seven where you're changing classes a you know five times instead of just the four so yes um could you address the i'm not sure i understood your answer regarding the reduced uh instructional time we heard and have received a number of emails talking about the reduction in instructional time i frankly don't understand it and i certainly would
108appreciate any insight you can give so the instruct the instructional time relative to i'll first talk about electives at the middle school that's really will be the focus of my answer part of that quite frankly is associated first with a commitment because students virtual students are being have teachers from across the district so we wanted to ensure first and foremost that we had the core established for our middle school students in doing that with a variety of schools that are intertwined in that schedule both for electives and core it did impact the ease at which students would access that live instruction based on teacher assignments and buildings and the rest of that teacher schedule however what we're doing based on feedback that we've received based on questions that we've had from parents we're going back
109and looking more closely at the electives because there are there are concerns particularly if i'm a spanish taking spanish and i only have live instruction three times a week that there's concern that that reduction in instruction will impact that student's acquisition of all those standards the lessons activities or recorded lessons that students would receive when the in-person instruction is decreased is the same and equivalent to what students might otherwise be receiving in the classroom it's delivered in a different fashion but because we uh we have the request to increase that time we've gone back and are looking at that i don't have the solution this evening for you particularly so help me just for a second it's day four we start at school wednesday thursday friday today is day four um if what i heard
110you say i think is that we will be back to the commitment that we made originally in instructional time we're absolutely working to achieve that instructional time i guess absolutely we're seeking to do that what we know in a virtual setting is that students can be provided and in our reporting to the state we meet the requirement that the state has for us and then that time that's provided for students can be provided both synchronously or asynchronously because of that live instruction and it feeling like a loss to students and parents we are actively seeking ways to find ways to increase that for students thank you hold on patrick you're mike science are you feel you've got your question answered are you good good okay i know good i don't know if we have another
111microphone as well it'd be awesome so in terms of i think was last night there was an email that went out that talked about a small adjustment in terms of the number of minutes and i think that referenced in part to the um number of office hours or and then to me explain that change but also it seems to me that that may be the best place to help manage or increase some of the minutes that would be available on the virtual side so your question patrick relates to high school and so unfortunately because i don't have that live demonstration of how we've been working with parents and students to build that to show that i think what i would like to do is clearly articulate how we are trying to problem solve because clearly
112it's been articulated that we took to date are not delivering on a promise and that's not blue valley and that's what we are aiming to do our staff have been working tirelessly to one resolve schedule issues that have existed for staff i'm sorry for students as we have worked to resolve those issues we are trying to go through each student's schedule individually that still has issues where a student might be double or triple booked when we're doing that when we're resolving the schedule issues we are also discussing how can we increase that synchronous time as you heard work as were concerns tonight what we tried to do related to the office hours was provide was to look at how do we provide individualized support for our students what we know is that the direct instruction
113whole group is what is preferred there so we have to look at that closely we haven't had in today the opportunity to go back and talk with that further with our building principles so we are looking at that additionally uh what's clear in the virtual setting is that parents desire uh ease of access to teachers and so we are also problem solving that i've heard that across distance learning as well when students have been engaged in a lesson with teachers and we actually communicated with teachers today if the zoom lesson the direct instruction is over the activity has begun the zoom lesson has ended and then the students are feeling as if they don't have that increased access to the teacher during the time that's blocked for the synchronous lesson so we a message went
114out to teachers today to assist them in ensuring that we're extending and keeping those zoom windows open so students can have assistance and support there as well um katie um so i know you guys have been working extremely hard this is a big this is a big endeavor but do you have some type of timeline that that is in kind of your head about going forward what we're kind of looking at or what what we as parents can kind of keep an eye out for or anything like that so i can tell you when we first discovered that there were schedule issues we began working on that immediately the first step was to unwind the issues that were discovered because of the issues we reported to you in connection to synergy and canvas and so
115we had about 82 staff members work over the weekend to that was goal one was to look closely at and unwind schedule issues and get students plugged into the right spot so that's one two now that we're working through that we have some situations where some students are a bit more some of the schedule issues are more complex so we're working with students and parents one-on-one we expect that to take place over the next two to three days um beyond that we've uh begin meeting with parents um either on phone calls or zoom meetings and then we're also taking some we're taking feedback in those because parents certainly are wanting to partner with us and we're wanting to partner with them to improve that and so we do have some additional meetings set up throughout
116this week so i think within the next week or two we can continue to work on on these issues but at this point we're still trying to get through the one by one some of those lingering student student issues so where will there be a point then we can actually as a parent look at the schedule and maybe print it or so i appreciate that question okay i wish um it was really quite that simple quite frankly in terms of the system and how um virtual is arranged and scheduled and what our reporting criteria is for the state so we feel as if over the weekend we tried to provide additional assistance to help parents and students see the schedule we know there's still been frustration with that and we've had staff work throughout the
117day assisting parents and we've also had reports that the modifications shared last night were what was assist very much of assistance to some families from there then we have to talk about what does that look like in terms of what we can do in terms of technology working with counselors to to condense that further jody i don't have a timeline in terms of when you're going to be able necessarily click right into parent view and just see it very clearly because the system doesn't work that way but it does work in a way that now parents can go in as they couldn't last thursday and see schedule on top for in person the remote schedule on the bottom with the correct teachers on the bottom sorry i don't want to monopolize this but um so
118my understanding is that there was a problem with the synergy and and canvas correct there was there was incr they weren't reading each other okay and then the other piece that that happened it's very technical and detailed there was some uh incorrect linking that happened in the student information system and we worked to resolve that and that issue created conflicts in the schedules that students saw either wrong teachers or double triple quadruple booked so it wasn't necessarily a a false faulty canvas we didn't the product is not faulty it was just the connection there was a connection so we had to work with canvas to problem shoot what the issue was within the system why the two systems weren't reading and that's been resolved that is why information on canvas and the courses etc uh
119was correct today where we had reports from teachers that maybe something didn't sync up right we're providing individual teacher assistance with that so here's the bottom line i think on the the virtual you can see the numbers on the screen 6475 students that's a 5a school district that i think we just need to be really clear on on what that is that's an entire district in some cases i've heard many times you guys have had since march why wouldn't you be ready we really didn't have since march um you know we were in school until june 1st the state did not give us an answer until july whether we could even do virtual and so that's when we had to start working on this so we've opened up enrollment a couple of times that hasn't
120helped us i will absolutely agree with you on this virtual education if you were to go to a virtual school and you were to look at their schedule what you will see is there are typically two 45-minute synchronous sessions the rest is asynchronous that the rest of it is is not live uh instruction what we heard in the last week is that that's not what our parents were expecting that's not what they want so we are going back to the drawing board as as dr collier said we had this entire district office was staffed all weekend people trying to solve this we will continue to look at this but tonight we're not prepared to give you an answer of exactly what that's going to look like i will tell you we already are scheduled for
1218 am tomorrow morning to get back on this and to look for a solution that will meet the needs of what we are hearing from this group of parents and students um so just to reaffirm what if we would have bought into let's say lawrence or the florida program or whatever what we would have gotten would have been the two we wouldn't have gotten any synchronous if we would have bought florida virtual there would have not necessarily been any synchronous if you were to go to lawrence virtual i believe that i looked on their website and it is two 45-minute sessions a week per class what we understood as we garnered parent feedback was the importance of maintaining access to blue valley curriculum so we've intended to maintain that and and provide that second blue
122access to blue valley teachers third we understand that for instance if i have a student that's taking and it was referenced this evening and comments uh multiple ap courses i want to make sure that i have a teacher a blue valley teacher that is trained to teach that content that's able to support my student and so that is one of the reasons that we sought to provide our virtual program with our content etc i appreciate your comments about the virtual online school certainly the staff and administration and the teachers have been faced with extraordinary challenges and their diligence and their dedication is much appreciated to try and put together this system um one thing i think that um we're learning is that you know the the 6400 kids in the virtual system were not seeking
123a virtual experience in the traditional sense it seems as though they were looking for a more traditional environment simply to deal with the apparent risks that are associated during the pandemic meaning that they've now expressed some concerns or at least some interest in having as much online or in-person instruction similar to possibly the in person or the distance learning environment and so i think you know that's very good information for us to consider how we go forward and again it's going to be a lot of effort and certainly appreciate the staff's dedication and commitment to make that happen it does seem to me that the um the office hours or the time that kids can contact their teachers can be dedicated based on the type of class and to me it seems like that's a
124pretty easy area where we can gain additional minutes for instruction some classes may need more opportunity for kids to contact their teachers and some classes won't and so that may require some additional analysis but to me in the interim the fact that we've already started school that may be the best opportunity to provide some additional minutes as we go forward thank you i have a question about um we've gotten some comments and emails about double booking right and how um the student had to choose between which one they were going to attend how are we addressing that because i i don't understand how that works so so in the simplest forms what i can tell you is that we provided direction to parents this morning and students so that they could see we paired courses
125so that if a teacher is double booked they'd either attend the uh they have it we haven't backed up together so that they don't miss if there's a double book any of that course so the first a teacher would take the first portion of that block the next teacher would take the next portion of that block provide the instruction they'd be provided their asynchronous work activities to do and then the next teacher would take the next portion of that for direct instruction to make sure students have access to the teacher and then that they would uh have you know additional time to complete their assignments for that so we tried to we worked with administrators to to pair classes to help decrease that so students weren't making a choice um again we know that still
126occurs in some instances but we we worked to rectify many of those instances and is that primarily a high school primarily a high school issue yes and then um are we how many students about are we talking about that has this issue does every high school student have some sort of double booking or is it just some that had issues i can tell you that we i can't give you that exact count right now i think we reviewed over 2200 schedules over the weekend i can't tell you exactly in this moment how may linger this evening that still may have some issues but i can tell you that's the amount of schedules that we reviewed but we do intend to rectify that we won't be able to rectify that in every situation based on some
127of the choices that students have made in courses that they may want to hang on to so in some instances we're talking to families and looking at the desires of the students relative to their core you know the the path they want to follow with certain courses and some students and parents actually um are um are not concerned about that because uh the student may choose asynchronous for for a variety of reasons so and and i do i want to say thank you because i know when we first put this out i don't remember the exact numbers but was it 140 classes or courses that we had to start and we got a lot of feedback saying this wasn't enough my child needs this class or and so we worked really hard to try and
128provide even more options for our kids and so that's where you think that some of these overlaps are is that so then you're saying that the option where the the student has said hey i know this might not work but i i this is important to me we did our best to to give them that option and now we're trying to kind of tag team to make it happen right so right we we started with a set number of courses and we got feedback that they wanted more and we wanted to provide that that you know it was a look at the number of courses you can you can just tell how many uh students are on there remember when we talked about the part-time virtual part time in in person that was going to
129be a really hard schedule to adjust that's part of the issue so you know one one person today we talked to had a class at one of the high schools and their synchronous class or their um online class with the synchronous session at the same time and that that has always been hard we have always said so those 54 who are doing part in person part virtual those were going to be hard schedules to match up and so those are the ones that count again counselors are going through we have always had at the high school level all the way back 21 years ago when i was doing this where you had to call a kid down and say okay let's look at your schedule you're taking class a class b they're only offered one
130time you know let's let's think about what options you have so that's that's the point that we're at michelle right and and i appreciate all the work i mean i know this is an extraordinary undertaking and bottom line is we wanted to try and give as many choices as possible and it's proving to be a little bit difficult to say the least so but thank you i know we'll get it fixed so what we know i would tell you this what i've heard repeatedly is the faith that parents put in our blue valley um school district and our staff and some make sure that we are meeting the guidelines set forth by the state one of those ways that we're doing that is um universe the advancement of the universal screening at our elementary level
131um in this instance we know that students will be moving uh all in person but our staff have been trained and we can our reading specialists came in over the summer and received training to assist us in delivering that in a very fetilicious way whether students are at home or in person so that's expanding and so why is that a benefit that's a benefit because we can look for early signs of struggling with with reading or quite frankly we can look closely at those intermediate students who may not be showing additional advancement in their reading skills and that you can see there's a fall window window and there's additional windows throughout the school year we have hired two additional individuals to assist colleen zinc she is our district orton gillingham trainer and so she will
132be and has already started to provide support to our reading specialist and is being deployed to assist with increased training of our staff stacy cates is working with us as a district consultant she has strength areas in middle and high school so we know middle and high school is one area that we need to increase training of staff the other piece too is she's going to be pivotal in helping our staff understand the impact of dyslexia even beyond the classroom what does that mean for me when i am learning in extracurricular activities participating in extracurricular activities what does that mean and then how do our staff working with those students in those areas need to adjust to support students even outside the classroom so we did have a series of trainings that were planned for
133staff throughout the summer that had to be adjusted or postponed but we are going to be continuing to provide that professional learning as well all of our building administrators here in about a week and a half will participate in professional learning around dyslexia as well dr collier yes quick question regarding dyslexia um how does either hybrid or distance or virtual learning affect the ability to recognize and then um i don't want to say treat that's the wrong word but help a child with dyslexia so one of the things that we did is uh worked on providing professional learning to our staff to help them understand what does quality literacy instruction look like either small group or whole group in distance learning so some of that professional learning has occurred to assist that on top of
134that the the screening that will be conducted will identify students who need additional supports we have our reading specialist who then will be prepared to support those students we have our staff who have been working with students and families in which mark will talk here uh further about to ensure that we are adhering to the 504 if students need accommodations etc when students are learning at home those are still applicable and working to ensure that we if students need additional time uh whatever the the case might be making sure that we employ those 504s for families at home thank you dr sawyer can i ask a quick question real fast um talking about the timelines and the checklists that we had of all those um items to do from the state if i recall the
135past year every time we've talked about this you said that we were either ahead or on track to meet those has anything changed with everything else going on that we might be in jeopardy of not meeting one of those checkpoints thank you for asking that question though quite frankly prior to the state board revisiting those guidelines most recently when we understood there was a possibility that state timeline might be adjusted blue valley did not adjust its timeline we understand the importance to our students so we maintained our goal of following our path forward to increase professional learning for our teachers to help our students so we did not vary good evening um i need to start off just with some words of gratitude uh truly in preparation for this year our special education teachers our
136special education related service providers have gone so far above and beyond than what they normally would have to do at the beginning of the school year to give you a couple of ideas parents of general ed students had the choice of choosing whether they were going to do virtual or whether they are going to do in person it was critical that we also provide that same choice to our special education families and to do that our teachers needed to pivot away from a in person iep to how do we implement that same iep and get the same type of results through virtual ed and so in the case of a thousand of our students over a thousand of our students 500 with disabilities over 500 with giftedness we changed that over and our goal was
137always to provide a free and appropriate public education that they can make progress in and so they were able to do that for our children that were going to be in person we had to do more than just the one plan as well we needed to be prepared for in person we needed to be prepared for distance learning what happens if a student is quarantined how do we make sure that a student is able to continue on their academic progress at that time and we called these contingency plans what happens if we were faced by these different contingencies so that we did not have to recreate the wheel on the fly so a lot of pre-planning while most certified theft returned on the 26th of august special ed teachers were back in early to mid
138august and they were doing that so that they could be prepared for when we showed up in school and we could provide whatever was necessary for the kids to make progress in fact in some cases we have some students with significant disabilities that operating a computer is just not going to be practical and they weren't going to be able to do that and make the gains that they needed and so each of our teachers collaborated with parents i think there were over 10 000 parent contacts over those several weeks before school started in order to come up with what that plan was so that the kids could be in the least restrictive environment at the end of the day though we have about 300 students that need to come into our schools even though middle
139school and high school are out or elementary uh the needs their services every single day and so through the iep process through this process we were able to make those exceptions and and i'm very proud of our staff i'm very proud of our principals for the support they put into that a huge thanks to our transportation department that was able to come up and and provide transportation for kids within a week's notice thanks to charles and food services who are feeding kids in buildings that were not designed or were not ready to be opened the kitchen but they came up with solutions uh to make sure that we were meeting our obligations uh so that's all i have tonight thank you questions for mark mike science do you have a question no i think i'm
140sorry he answered my question uh in the first bullet 10 years so mark i know you handed out your overall thoughts on how your world's going i mean again we're on day four i know you've been playing and working hard everything you talked about but your thoughts um right right now i've been so impressed with what our staff has done and how our parents have responded every year we have some concerns that parents would raise about you know a disagreement about how to how to meet the needs of kids and so forth every year we have that uh this year it has not been significantly more the the problem solving that is going on we've asked our teachers and our uh you know special ed leaders to approach every problem with collaboration and compassion and
141when when we went into those conversations with that forefront um we often are able to find solutions and so and you asked me a simple question in in short it's hard you know but i feel like we're making progress and we're on the right road and we're able to pivot when we need to pivot uh to meet the needs of these kids okay thank you and i just yeah i wanted to say thank you as well i appreciate all that you've done and the special ed teachers have done to support these kids so thank you okay thank you thank you mark all right so we saved the best for last here that's what chris mcmurlin said to me earlier now officer rhindle said i had two minutes so i better get started uh so athletics
142and activities we have uh we were on september 5th our blue valley students were allowed to return to activities in that return we have adopted the acacia activity specific risk mitigation considerations there are some big categories with that risk mitigation some general protocols what does uh check in for our students look like what is practices what do those practices look like travel protocol performance and competition uh protocols as well as um just how are we gonna contact trace and and how we're gonna work with our medical professionals so those are some big categories that we've adopted uh as we return uh to activities in athletics with our athletic directors activity directors coaches and sponsors some general things that we've talked about just personal hygiene hand washing temperature checks woody do our kids look like in
143terms of what are their requirements for their mass one of the big things that i think have been pretty important for us is maintaining some static groups uh limiting prolonged close contact uh typically that's been under 10 minutes for for our students we're also implementing no traveling outside of the kansas city metro area i think the furthest that we travel is to tica for crowd control inside crowley event size we are limiting that to immediate family of uh those students only um and that includes if we're at a soccer game that would include our cheerleaders our dance team members if we have a pet band that's there they would be a lot be limited to their immediate family only we also talked about some high risk activities according to nfhs those for blue valley include
144football include dance and also band and we got together with those coaches and sponsors uh to help mitigate some of those high-risk activities and those those coaches and sponsors got together along with the activity director the uh the athletic directors and came up with some very specific things to help mitigate the risk for some of those higher risk sports for example uh every uh football player in the blue valley school district will have a integrated cloth mask that they go that goes over their helmet uh we're i think we're the we might be one of the only school districts in the area that are utilizing this uh cloth mask uh this is coming directly from uh the university of oklahoma who is really leading the way for football in terms of risk mitigation again with
145the static groups and the you know limiting the prolonged contact our dance team sponsors got together uh and they also came up with a document that was specific to dance in terms of the choreography of trying to maximize the distance between our dancers for the choreography again limiting the contact prolonged contact one of the things that they talked about specifically about was no partner work or lifts during their choreography and of course mass which is very important our band directors i don't think there's a better group of educators in terms of band in in the country than what we have here in blue valley those folks got together and they talked about ways to keep their uh kids engaged uh safely they came up with a a strong plan we're still working through some of
146the things in terms of the ppe that's very specific to performing arts uh where they're covering uh the uh instruments um with you know for woodwind and brass instruments while playing also some of the some of our our our band students have to have at least nine feet of of space between them based on some of the guidance that has come out so these are all things that we feel pretty confident in and again the the name of this is is mitigating risk we know that it's not going to be zero risk when you get a group of teenagers together but again i you know the confidence that we have in our uh our coaches our sponsors our activity our athletic directors and then also our athletic trainers is pretty strong hey david if i
147can make a comment here um the emails that i've seen from our coaches the last two weeks or i guess since the fifth i've been so impressed with um they're really you know acting as mentors and they're really laying it out for their students and and telling them you know now it's up to you and and i've i've been really impressed by what i've read and what i've seen and just the leadership they've given so i just please pass along my thanks you bet absolutely i would reiterate that these are just a few of the high-risk activity plans um there is a 10-page document that the football coaches put together that the dance team coaches put together that the band directors put together things like um you know for football we're only playing each other
148basically so we're just playing in our two stadiums so we won't get on a bus uh players will drive themselves to the stadium and they'll get there i don't know an hour earlier or whatever the time frame is um some just basic things like that and they they really start from the minute they walk into practice until they're leaving and have done a very nice job in my humble opinion of putting some safety measures in place uh for our students david is that list online that parents can access the so are ours specifically is not what our uh folks came up with the general risk mitigation uh the big uh categories are online on the acacia website and we've modeled that however we've added some uh specific things just in terms of our facilities of
149how we're going to uh work within our footprint in blue valley in terms of risk mitigation but overall if you want to get a general sense of of more what you see than you see here um all you have to do is go to vacation website and see that but but if i was a parent i wanted to see what we were doing where could i find that at i think they should contact the coach their their individual coach i am confident that the coaches would love to share the work that they have done but most parents have got it by email per what jody said i would think on a lot of folks but yeah there's so if i'm a a cheer parent then the cheer sponsor would more than likely have shared those
150things with with that parent community my sites magic uh two questions david the first is i think what you said is that our protocols are more um i'll just say sensitive that's not the right word but more cautious than what keisha [Music] suggests correct or incorrect uh maybe in some areas um and i would use the term specific more than um i i just feel like we had to adopt to or adapt our plan to the uh the facilities that we use i guess my point is there's nothing in the cases suggestion that we haven't done correct okay that's number one and number two are the are the um activity plans and mitigation strategies the same across schools yes yeah we so so if i go to blue valley high i'll go crest i go
151to yeah i'm gonna find the same set of rules right so i think we were very uh intentional uh in that work that we wanted one blue valley document so if there if it's blue valley uh high school uh football then that's one document if it's dance that was one document it wasn't a a document that blue valley northwest came up with or in a separate one that blue valley west came up with there's one there's consistency among all folks absolutely you bet thank you other questions for david real quick on band cause i got a couple emails um so full marching band is not going right yeah so the the band yeah the band directors got together and based on uh the cancellation of the of many competitions that they typically would go to
152not our cancellations but the competitions that we typically go to outside of blue valley were cancelled uh so with that they decided that you know we were gonna have a um we were we were going to adjust our our marching uh season and adjust what we're doing with our kids based on that okay thank you other questions for david awesome appreciate your work thank you that is our presentation tonight dr american can you talk just a little bit more back to early in the presentation it talked about the the week of the 21st is an opportunity for us to reassess the data and where we're at elementary set now what what does it look like for middle and high and what do you anticipate the next steps being so the week of the 21st when
153we originally communicated we said we would go two weeks in the week of the 21st which is next week we will look at the kdhe gating criteria again we will include our attendance data within that and we will look at it and see where we're at and make a decision for middle and high school beginning on october 5th and if we're still in the yellow at that time do you we'll follow what the gating criteria says the getting criteria very clearly says middle and high school would be in session um hybrid at that point okay so bottom line in yellow next week we'll move to a hybrid middle school high school we have to look at the yeah we'll look at the data next week right and um make a determination about what it would
154be on october 5th okay let's make the determination next week next week is the week of the 21st correct that's the week that we said we would look at the data correct and we would make the determination for because we we committed through october 2nd with our teachers and our our students that we would uh be in distance learning at middle and high school okay but we could be in yellow if we're in yellow we could be back hybrid middle school high school by october 5th yes okay can i ask um i just lost my transplant are you giving up your time no i'll come yeah yeah it'll come back to me dr barrigan i want to go back if i can because there's significant there's a lot of information and what i would consider
155innuendo you know we've received 1500 emails um and and i i think many people don't understand a lot of things so if if you don't mind i'd like to ask you some questions about timing specifically um the when did we start to ask johnson county for some help in um working through what their suggestion is for for coming back to school that's the kind of health department you mean yeah oh the so the six public school superintendents uh meet with the johnson county health department uh every couple of weeks uh you saw tara tara and the different nurse coordinators meet there's an emergency management call every other tuesday morning that they give us updates that that we listen i'm sorry but we started asking them in july in july yeah okay in late june late
156june july in in march we closed schools because we were ordered to by the governor correct correct okay correct um when did the kansas department of education's uh gating criteria come out august 11th or 12th the it was presented to the state school board on the 11th and the 12th so it came out on social media on august 11th that's when i saw it i think it was formally approved by the state board on the 12th okay we met our board meeting was on the 10th okay i'm just trying to remember my memory isn't what it used to be um so we were given the gating criteria about as late as humanly possible and we were given the gating criteria by organizations that had the ability and the resources to determine from a from a
157medical perspective what that gating criteria could and should be my i would agree my point is and this is a little a little opinionated but um the the organization with the least amount of resource to study was given the biggest responsibility to make that decision correct correct okay thank you yeah i've never had a public health class i don't i don't know how to make decisions on public health thank you okay i'm back to where i was um so on october 5th do we know when we make that decision how long that will be for is that a two week or longer commitment do we have any idea what we're committing to be in learning mode wise um i would say that you can't just go in and out of hybrid remote hybrid remote i
158mean i think that we we need to commit to that uh we committed to this for a month i think minimally we would have to commit for a month um to see where we're at now the other thing i would say is that that i think that attendance i agree that attendance needs to be a big factor in this if we all of a sudden have you know and i hope we don't but if at one of our schools we had 10 classrooms all of a sudden that had to be quarantined and we had you know tens up you hear on the news all the time they can't get subs we might have to do something in one building you know i'm certainly hoping we wouldn't have to do it in an entire district but
159i think we need to be be prepared for that and um that's why we continue to actively recruit subs because we do want to be prepared for something like that quick quick follow-up on that so um planning for that contingency have we done that yeah i mean we well again as much as we can it's the actively recruiting subs because we need to have that that pool um that's you know mark with special ed talks about those contingency plans what if we have students who have to go into quarantine um we've talked about um again some beginning conversations of when is it that a class has to be you know if the whole class has to be quarantined that that obviously is easier because the teacher can they just do remote learning teachers home the
160students are home but what if just the teacher is remote or is quarantined but the class is not then you bring a sub in hopefully you can maybe zoom the teacher in if um if they're not sick if they're just on quarantine because they've been exposed in some manner that's some of the things we're working through right now with some small case samples right and just to clarify the amount of planning that goes into planning the curriculum for hybrid instruction is way different than teachers have done in the past so it's basically recreating their entire curriculum and now when we switch gears to go to whatever the next mode is we're now again recreating and switching so is that a big piece of why yeah we're asking a lot of our teachers i agree we
161are asking a lot of our teachers it's um honestly you know we we can't have school if we don't have teachers and so um that's why we we need to um do what we can to make sure they're comfortable make sure that they feel safe uh make sure that we have given them the resources that they need i just want to point out that that's part of why we need that lag time is for our teachers sanity for lack of better words because absolutely an exorbitant amount we have amazing teachers and i think that's something our you know we may disagree on different factors but i to a fault have not heard from a parent who is basically upset at a teacher they're upset at the the process that we're using or upset about the
162the decisions we've made but not at the teachers and that speaks to the faith that we have in blue valley that you know this might not look pretty for the next couple days or even weeks but we will get there and we will get there and do it the way we always do yep because we have those awesome teachers and administrators too thank you so much michelle great comments your question about confusing with the teachers was it going from hybrid to full-time or to the virtual to hybrid or do you like hybrids do you think hybrid's a challenge with a little bit i mean when you to to plan to teach in school hybrid yes that that's a completely different monster if you're in school teaching you have your curriculum that you've kind of set
163out and you know what your days are going to look like when we switch gears and go to hybrid now suddenly you're only going to see those kids every other day and then the three days they're at home now you have to go take what you were going to do online because they were remote you now need to turn it into a real live lesson which fine that's great but now we have to make sure that the remote part when they're on their off days complements what they did but you're seeing half on one half on the it's complicated it is not an easy monster at all so and then if we have to pull the plug and say okay we need to go remote now well now you have to kind of throw that
164out and go back to remote so and and that's a completely different way of teaching as well it's it's just it's a lot it's a lot to be flipping back and forth i mean if we have to because you know the county has said we need to have this classroom shut down or whatever but if if we can give a little bit of lag time to allow for our teachers to plan for that it's not something you can just have a backup plan necessarily it's something you're kind of working on all along because this is completely new for everybody so that's my experience as a teacher and and as someone who's written an online curriculum which is very difficult to do okay so i was just making sure i understand your your thoughts sir other
165comments from the board questions dr megan could you just give us an update on kind of as you've visited uh classrooms and teachers over the last four days what's the uh feelings of the teachers how are they doing um just mentally and how are they getting back and doing so far so i would say first of all teachers are fueled by students so whether they saw their students in person you know i was at oxford middle school very first day of school and i think the whole school was out there welcoming the 15 special education students who were you know coming to the building because it was so exciting for them to see students in their building i saw them engaged on zoom working their absolute hardest so you asked where are teachers i think
166teachers are in the same spots our community is there are some that are chomping at the bit bring them back full time right now there are some who are nervous with the mitigation factors and um things just you know the way things are right now and making sure we can do all of those things uh and then there there are some who are really concerned and for many of those we've worked through that process with them and gotten them a full virtual assignment if possible not always possible but works through them but i would say our teachers are again our teachers are amazing and they are they're ready to work with kids is what they are great thank you so much so dr american over the next few weeks obviously focus on getting our elementary
167kids back to school correct and and continuing our virtual education with them making the most of it doing the everything you talked about katie all in fixing things immigration elementary eventually leading them to full time in person obviously virtual education piece that we talked about tonight fixing some issues that we've had and correcting those which we admitted and i know we're passionately on as well and then next week figuring out our next steps from middle school in high school correct correct okay any other questions from the board okay on to approve revisions to policies prohibiting discrimination harassment and retaliation i move that the board of education hold up i'm sorry michelle i was just going to give you guys a brief update and a description of what we're doing so we're good i appreciate your
168enthusiasm though so we're going to switch gears for a minute um and i get to come in front of you tonight with some really positive change that you've worked hard on this summer i'm proud of the work we've done for some policy revisions some really important work so our policies are currently set up we've got a separate set of policies for students those are 3 000 policies and a separate set for employees those are 6 000 policies we currently have a separate set of policies for anti-discrimination and anti-harassment we've worked hard over the past few months to try and consolidate those into one policy one for students and one for employees we have a much much much upgraded and stringent investigation process for discrimination and harassment complaints it involves many players in the district investigators
169and decision makers i'm proud of the changes that we've made we've worked hard to do and i thank the board for your time to do this and for your enthusiasm to do this so what's on your agenda tonight is an action item you will be if you approve this resending the anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies 36 22 and 3623 for students 6101 and 6520 for employees and then you will be approving new policies 36.25 for students and 65.25 for employees and if you don't have any questions then michelle you're up can i can i yeah yeah go ahead go ahead okay and i know i've brought this up before but you know reading through this so um it it talks about um staff and student concerns and i didn't see staff and staff i believe there
170should be staff and staff i didn't read it in here so that would be under your employee under 6525 if it's a staff and staff your investigators would be directors of human resources and decision maker would be your chief human resources officer i think that should be in 65 25 jody okay i'll keep looking i'm sure it's there i just didn't see it i saw the other two but i didn't see um and then the other question i know i brought this up before the you know the process um for um um making a complaint and the investigation and all of that and i know i brought up concerns about you know having it at the building level the investigator and i also think that you know my understanding is that that the investigator needs
171training so you're talking 35 plus maybe up to 40 individuals who need to have the specialized training which we're talking about building principles um i still have concerns about keeping that at the level i would in in my mind i would prefer that it was outside of the building for investigation but i know i've said it every time so i apologize for being redundant so no i i very much appreciate the concern that you've expressed with that and i agree with the concerns that you've raised and so in response to those concerns what we did was we built in a conflict of uh interest standard there and so if a building principle and really it is the job and um the role of a building principal to investigate issues in their building um to to
172shift that to another principle to come into another building it kind of it takes away that role that that principal has in that building but with the conflict of interest now built in if a principal or building administrator or school building administrator feels that they've had too much involvement in this situation to be fair and impartial then we do have a another a fallback where it would go to another investigator i'm sorry is that a self reporting a conflict of interest yes no it would be something that was dealt with through the school leadership team okay i think it would need to be raised obviously by the school building administrator yeah my only concern is it would be a self-reporting issue and if there's any any reason why that individual wouldn't want to report well
173with all due respect i don't know that i would call it self-reporting um and there will be training around this jenny you bring that point up we are going to have lots and lots and lots of training around this process because it is new and if you will note i am not involved in this process so i am here to help through this process especially this year as we're learning through it um so yes there's going to be a lot of training on what a conflict of interest looks like and it would be the responsibility of the school building administrator to identify that i just uh just would like to note that in in an ideal world i would really see that position as someone as a one individual who's been trained extremely well outside
174of um building administration in order to do a very thorough investigation and then that's that's maybe just a wish list thing i just and and this is by no means not something that we cannot continue to monitor consider um you know we are doing this not only because it's the right thing to do um we had some stringent deadlines under title ix that we're needing to comply with and i think you've done the right thing by not just adopting this for title ix but also for title vi complaints and so we are working under that deadline to get this done pretty quick but i will would continue to work with you to improve this especially as we see how our investigation process works okay and i think you just answered the question i was going
175to ask this was a requirement right because i noticed sometimes i read other school boards meeting minutes and i noticed that olathe and shawnee mission seem to have done some things like this recently and we are this is obviously a requirement somewhere by a set amount of time to update our policies with this is this true am i remembering this so in may just this past may the u.s department of education issued new title ix regulations which uh implemented these new investigation requirements and when we met and we talked about these and we talked about what our policies look like and what they should look like it was your decision and i believe i completely 100 support it that we should not just implement these requirements for title ix but we should also do so
176for title six now melissa thank you tell me about the on the uh self reporting the conflict of interest talk to me about tell me about the auditing or the oversight of that conflict because obviously there's a self-reporting component but how would we ensure that there wasn't a conflict or what's the audit process for evaluating that so in reality patrick when we have a situation that rises to the level of a formal type title nine or title six complaint it is very rarely just with a in the building level typically those have reached building uh school building leadership teams they've often come into my office and so there is oversight in the district office and probably quite awareness good awareness of what the school buildings administrators role has been in that in that issue or
177that incident and again i i hate to use the word self report because it's not a bad thing to have a conflict of interest it just shows that my our school building administrators were very involved in an incident from the get-go so i i don't i think it's a positive thing that they say you know what i have a conflict because i've been involved in this early on and i i don't know that i would be fair and impartial so melissa would i be fair in saying that through the training there would be a process where if i'm the administrator in a building i would have to ask myself a series of questions like have i dealt with this individual in other situations have i um whatever those questions might be i think that's absolutely
178this is this needs to be as less subjective as possible yeah i think that the education or the training component is absolutely critical i mean one of the things that i think mike's concern was that you know you may have an administrator who says well gee um i got this or i got it under control or boy if i don't handle this maybe it'll look bad for me so keep in mind the school building administrator is not the decision maker ever the school building administrator is simply the investigator and the investigation report is factual uh it is to show no bias it is just pure facts then that report is actually issued to both the claimant and the respondent for their feedback and questions then the report once it's finalized is delivered to the decision
179maker and the decision maker then must make the decision and issue a final decision report and that decision-making process i think is valuable i i think still the one the one concern that probably jodi and mike are thinking about is what happens when the administrator somewhere somebody said she fill in the blank x is going on and the administrator maybe heard it from somebody or didn't follow up and that's that i think the fact that starts to create the problems or the challenges when it's self reporting i i understand where you're coming from um i do think that there are enough processes built into this investigation process and decision making process that it is as tight as it can get i would patrick i think i feel a little better because i'd forgotten that the
180investigator then once the investigation is completed hands a copy of the investigation to let's just call the plain plain plaintiff and the defendant for lack of any other term who then get to comment before it goes to the um decision maker i i think that makes me feel better inside um and it takes out the the potential conflict of interest if it was hidden for some reason does that make sense it does and for what it's worth you have built in an extra step i didn't create and we didn't create here in blue valley this investigation and decision making process this is dictated to us by the u.s department of education and the new title ix regulations but you at blue valley the board of education built in an extra step on the conflict of
181interest so you're taking an extra precaution that that as far as i know no one else is taking so i'm back under the investigator section of this document um and it it really just refers to student on student for formal complaints alleging student on student prohibited conduct and then the second paragraph is for formal complaints alleging staff on student prohibited conduct so that's i guess that's what i was looking at i didn't see staff all right which policy are you on oh geez is it sounds like you're on 36 25 yeah yes okay go to 6525 the employee okay policy okay thank you i mean if i've done my job i'm sure it's there fingers crossed yeah no i'm sure other questions are you ready for that motion aren't you michelle okay thank you all
182right i move that the board of education risks and board policy number three six two two and three six two three and adopt new board policy number three six two five prohibition against discrimination harassment and retaliation students motioned by michelle benjamin a second by stacy o'bringer barhal any further discussion all those in favor please raise your right hand that motion passes 7-0 next motion i move that the board of education rescind board policy numbers 6101 and 6520 and adopt new board policy 6525 prohibition against discrimination harassment and retaliation employees motioned by stacey obringer-varhall is second by amy tyslein any further discussion just one um yes melissa hillman thank you um for keeping a straight number one and thank you to the board for um the way that you went about looking at this we introduced
183these don't ask me when some time ago and i think it's a testament to your all of all of your ability to understand and do good work um that we had the number of questions we did tonight so i agree i applaud you thank you for the rich dialogue board members and thank you for your work and going beyond on this one we appreciate it melissa all right we gotta yes all those in favor raise your right hand that motion passes seven zero appoint board member delegate and alternate to the kansas association of school boards delegate assembly i can probably give some some uh highlight to this one um every year at the kansas association of school boards of which we're a member um uh there is a uh there are two things that happen
184number one any changes um uh or i'm sorry the adoption of the legislative um uh platform thank you the adoption of the legislative platform that michelle has been working on um is one and the second is the um election of the president-elect designee that tom participated in from a vetting perspective um and this will be done this year december 2nd or 3rd or 4th it will be virtual um no one's going to to peak or wichita this year i actually was going to be here in overland park so nobody's going to overland park you can all come over to my house if you want um and what what these two individuals do will vote vote on behalf of blue valley for those two items along with 285 other school districts i move that the board
185of education appoints patrick hurley as board member delegate and stacey obringer-varlhall as a board member delegate alternate to the kansas association of school board's delegate assembly second motion by amy tyson second by mike sites any further discussion seeing none all those in favor raise your right hand that motion passes seven zero on to appoint patrons to board advisory committees yes let's get going all right second wish by jodie deeds second by amy ty's leading all those in favor raise your right hand motion passes 7-0 next motion i move that the board of education appoints long hunt of the blue valley west area to a new two-year term on the curriculum instruction board advisory committee watching my dirty deed second by stacy o'bringer barhal all those in favor raise your right hand motion passes 7-0 next
186motion i move that the board of education reappoints nicole piccolo of the blue valley north area to a two-year term on the student activities board advisory committee second i wish you my stacy second by jody dietz all this in favor of your right hand motion passes 7-0 next motion i move that the board of education appoints jc pearson of the blue valley northwest area to a new two-year term on the student activities board advisory committee second motion by stacey o'bringer barhal second by amy tysling all those in favor raise your right hand motion passes 7-0 i move that the board of education appoints paul taylor of the south area to a new two-year term on the facility planning board advisory committee motion by my side second by patrick hurley all those in favor raise your
187right hand motion passes seven zero x motion i move that the board of education appoints debbie clark of the south area to a new two-year term on the facility planning board advisory committee what should by mike site second by patrick hurley all those in favor raise your right hand motion passes 7-0 on to executive session sometimes it's necessary for the board of education to adjourn the open meeting to convene privately in executive session kansas law permits executive sessions for limited purposes such as discussing private information related to specific employees or students the board cannot vote or take any formal action while exec in executive session following our executive session tonight the board will reconvene in the open meeting for the sole purpose of adjourning the meeting there will be no further board action taken this
188evening you're welcome to stay until the meeting is formally adjourned adjourned or you may leave at this time looking for a motion i move that the board of education go into executive session for 30 minutes to discuss specific employees pursuant to the exception for non-elected personnel under coma and the open meeting will resume at 10 20 at which time there will be no additional discussion no action will be taken during executive session second motion by amy tiesling second by stacey obringer barhal all those in favor raise your right hand motion passes 7-0 we'll head to executive session you