Gilbert Public Schools District Board Meeting 09/01/2020

001mom good evening we are at the appointed time of six o'clock welcome to this evening's work-study session of the gilbert unified school district governing board welcome to staff dr mccord and those of you who are watching online and welcome to the board we are as indicated in a work study session item 2 2.01 is the health benchmarks and phased reopening update and i will defer to dr mccord do you need to do a roll call we don't okay just checking let me get my screen situated michael are you ready back there thank you good evening everyone governing board members all the folks here in the audience and those online uh tonight we wanted to talk about a couple things and the first part is is what we committed to and that is going over the

002benchmarks every time that we're together we have a new set that came out and then we'd also like to talk to you about just what we're doing as we're returning to campus on september 8th and we have an elementary principal junior high principal and a high school principal here to kind of talk about and let you know what they're doing on their campuses and it's represented what we're doing on all of our campuses and then we'll we'll also go through some things related to budget and covid as well as reviewing some of the health protocols that we'll have in place and how it relates to employees as well in terms of the training that's been done and then we'll sum it up so we'll get started again you'll see some of the same slides you've

003seen in weeks past and again looking at minimal moderate and substantial as it relates to cases percent positivity and covet-like illness and how we fall into those categories and this is uh provided by the arizona department of health when you're in each one of those areas whether it's green yellow or red they have specific boxes that they've checked off that you need to adhere to as you're opening up if you're opening up in some of those areas and then again as it relates to the learning styles as they relate to the level of spread green is traditional two yellow is hybrid and red is virtual with on-site support looking at these numbers are from last thursday for the week ending august 9th um if you look up on the right thus the graphs that come

004right off of the website looking at the first criteria which is case rate uh less than a thousand are declining we're at per 100 000 and we have met that and there's two areas within that you can meet we've actually met both you only need to meet one decline in cases or less than 100 cases per 100 000 individuals for two consecutive weeks looking at criteria two percent positivity uh the benchmark is at seven percent uh the last time he's a reporter on august second we it was at 8.6 knowing that we'd go down and it did of course to 6.1 and it's green on the chart because it's below the seven percent but it hasn't been there for two weeks but it's trending down and we expect to be there this thursday and then

005for the last one is hospital visits criteria three we are we've met it at 3.7 percent minimal risk if you look at the chart it's been below the 10 percent for quite a few weeks now so that's the maricopa county health benchmarks any questions on that i'll move over to gps boundaries this is again provided by maricopa county health department and they put together this dashboard that enables you to click on your boundaries to find out where you are in terms of each criteria we're at 42.11 per 100 000 for case rate we've met that area uh and it's at moderate risk criteria two seven percent positivity that's at 4.46 we again met that trending down in both areas and for criteria 3 we're at 3.0 which we met that and again it's at minimal

006risk and on the screen it's a little hard to see but that's been the numbers for the past two weeks i think dr mccord yes so we met this criteria number two because for two weeks in a row it's been below seven percent correct whereas for the whole county we've had one week as a couple weeks ago that we met it anticipating the second week to be met correct okay thank you you're welcome and then just side by side comparison of maricopa county as well as uh the gps boundaries again the same numbers any questions related to that all right dr mccormick yes sir this is trailing about two to two and a half weeks so that's correct the next week will be released thursday on the dashboard but again we know that much of

007that data is already available live perhaps not at the district level but on the county and county state level it's available on the ade or 80 adhs right website yeah and against looking and checking those numbers they are continually trending down as of the last couple weeks and the reason that they haven't transferred it to the dashboard is they recognize that in the last particularly the current week in the previous week but a little bit a little bit two weeks there's still data coming in and the numbers may change slightly correct but having watched it for the last month if we go back two weeks it's been my observation doesn't change by more than about a tenth or two tenths of a percent that's exactly what i've observed too yeah this is there's a couple

008things i do every morning when i get in and this is one of them right off the bat just to check see if the numbers are updated all right next we'd like to bring up principal of ashland rant well jason do you want to introduce us or you just want to bring up suzanne all right we'll bring up uh suzanne carlson she's principal of ashland ranch elementary and she's gonna talk to you about the protocols the things they put in place uh to start our hybrid model on september 8th suzanne hi good evening board members dr mccourt i'm honored to be here tonight to represent the elementary schools i i know we had a little bit of an unconventional start to the school year but i also want to share with you that i really

009see a shift in some excitement on our campuses as you know elementary schools teachers love what they do and the last few days you can really see that excitement in our teachers the copy machine has been going non-stop over the weekend the teachers were in putting up bulletin boards they're making their student name tags checking those class lists multiple times to make sure that they're really prepared for our students next week and at ashland we're allowing parents to come in and bring student supplies and there's wagons in the front offices and so we've had those opportunities the last few days to really interact with parents and students and and we're hearing those positive messages and that excitement as it builds for school next week and so there's a lot of really good things going on

010not just as at ashland but across the district many schools are welcoming kindergarten families and new families in this week as we prepare to start school and so i'm going to share a few of the things that we've done at ashland and many of these things are happening around the district to make sure that teachers and are in a place next week to teach and our students in our place to learn and i think that's our goal for everyone and so as you can see from the powerpoint up here are there are directional marker markings and signage throughout the campus and so when you come onto a campus you'll see the face mask signs as well as a variety of other signage to help students and parents know exactly what to expect so that they

011feel safe a procedure that we implemented this year is rather than going to the playground when they arrive they're going to go directly to their classroom and so those little dots that you see here in this picture are just some guiding points to help students find their way in that hallway picture there you can see some stripes and some arrows that will just help serve as another guiding point so that students stay to the right or to the left to hopefully keep some of that congestion down for those those wider areas in the school buildings the sanitation that's there are in all main traffic areas in the school we happen to have 12 at ashland i know at other elementary schools they've built some portable sanitizing stations so they can take them onto the playground

012area and into the cafeteria and so the principals have done a really nice job of ensuring that sanitize sanitation or the pumps are available for kids to use at all you know main entry points and then our custodians i can't say enough about the custodial staff they've been working since march to really care for our staff and our students they're cleaning key touch points around the school they're cleaning bathrooms regularly and and they've been trained by albert to really make sure that they know what needs to be done on the campuses and then another important thing to mention is our drinking fountains have been turned off for the safety of the students and the drinking fountains are also in each classroom and so those have been turned off many schools have put in the water

013filling stations and we have really communicated that with our families so that they know that they're going to need to bring water bottles and to make sure that their kiddos are staying hydrated but we feel like turning those drinking fountains off was in the best interest of the students but again communication is critical regarding that next all right and then cafeteria and recess seems like this is um one of the areas that our families and our students are really most concerned about i met with my site council and and that's what they shared that they were most interested in and so we've made multiple changes to how we're doing our our recess and how we're having kids eat lunch and so most schools are going to an eat first and then play a model so

014you can see from this picture the cafeteria tables will all be facing forward at ashland we put little dots on the seats to just serve as a a placeholder now we know that kindergartners or first graders or maybe even a sixth grader might slide up and down but it's just a visual marking just to help kids see you know where they should sit to help with that social distancing the kids will face forward and and they'll go through the line first and then play and to make sure that their hands are clean they'll wash their hands in their classroom prior to going to lunch we're encouraging students to wear a lanyard or to bring a baggie to place their mask in and all this information will be clearly communicated by administration and by our teachers

015prior to next week we are eliminating lunch cards and so the students used to take their lunch card and there was a lot of difference the teachers would touch it student would touch it and our cafeteria workers would touch it so we're just getting rid of lunch cards all together and we have a system in place at all schools so that this won't be an issue and then we've also extended the lunch time so there'll be fewer students in the cafeteria at once as well as there'll be one primary and one intermediate grade on the playground at a time we're also going to clean or fog the playground twice a day so we recognize that our students need to play it's important that kids get outside and they play and they will interact with each

016other we're going to practice routines and procedures and try to you know have kids social distance to an extent but to help with that process of having their hands clean we're going to clean that equipment twice a day and our custodians have been trained on that process and then again you can see markings for social distancing so that is ashland's basketball court and i had a great group of parents that came in on saturday and they painted all of those polka dots for me and so we're using that for social distancing and also helping with our bus lanes and so our buses come right in front of where the basketball court is and so students will line up there to load for buses and it will also help students recognize what bus they're on so

017if you're on bus 236 you'll know that you're going to line up on the green dot every day so it'll just make that process a lot easier do you have questions about lunches or recess i have a question about lunch okay how many classes will you have did you say that we'll have two in there at a time okay so what time how long is your lunch going to last it's 20 minutes of lunch and 20 minutes i'm talking about the entire lunch about an hour and 20 minutes okay which normally would it be would be less than that we were able to to stay within the window maybe we added about 10 minutes i'd have to go back and look at it but it was a we were able to make it work thank

018you i know for some campuses they adjusted specials a little bit um but with 27 schools we've all just been creative and made it work so i i have a question okay um you're going to have new students new to school kindergarteners first graders what is your plan tell those kindergartners get from the parent drop-off safely to the classroom right well really clear communication we brought our kindergartners in this summer well summer like a month ago summer it seems like a really a long time so the time frames so our kindergartners have come in i know some schools are hosting like small open houses this week with new families and kindergarteners and then just really clear communication and i think that will really help and so like pictures of parent drop off picture a parent

019pick up and those types of correspondence with families a parent will just be dropping off the kindergartners so what's the plan for getting the kindergartner from parent drop-off to the classroom safely especially on the first day right and that is just having a lot of extra hands so we have um you know like our social worker our psychologists our you know instructional coaches those types of individuals will be housed at those main entry points to take our kindergartners to class we also ask the kindergartner parents to like put labels at their kindergartners on their students as well as i'm sorry i lost my train of thought there but um to make sure that they get to class but the the fact that we're a hybrid model will really make a difference in this situation because

020we'll have half the number of kindergartners and so we will be able to more easily you know take care of those kindergartners but you know we'll make sure that they get where they need to go we have our front office staff and all of our campuses have acknowledged that so we had a principals meeting this morning and we spoke exactly to those points to make sure that you know all of our students are cared for and get to where they're going and we'll have signs you know student teachers and we looked at in a school of like every possible person that could care for kids and make sure they get to where they need to go all right thank you mrs carlson yeah you mentioned uh eliminating lunch cards and the touching thereof yes you

021said that you had an alternate system in place i won't expect that you're speaking for everyone but could you articulate what your system is right so um we have class lists and they have the id numbers on there and so the cafeteria manager has a class list with the id numbers on there because it was proposed at one point that the students would just know their id number but we all know that that's not realistic and so the students will go in in alphabetical order because the nice part is that the teacher since we're eating first will be walking the students down so the students will enter the cafeteria those that are buying in alphabetical order and then they will go up and they'll grab their food and then the cafeteria manager who knows most

022of the kids anyways can simply enter their id number and then they can move on and go eat quickly thank you you're welcome any other questions okay all right and then classroom setup and communication so our teachers have been really thoughtful about designing a classroom that works for their teaching style as well as the needs of their kids but being mindful of social distancing and so this is a picture of one classroom where the desks are facing forward and then they're separated to give some social distancing i also included a horseshoe table that you know shows some social distancing and some markings so that the teacher could do some small groups you know the teachers will really use that hybrid time to continue the relationships that they've established with the remote learning and then work

023to develop and establish those procedures and routines because there's obviously when the students left us in march those that were at ashland or our other schools they were used to certain procedures and we've obviously changed a lot of our procedures and routine so it's going to be really important that we use that time to talk about you know where we line up and how we will enter the school and all those arrows and those systems that we've created that we're hopeful will make a difference but it's going to take some time so our teachers will use that hybrid time to really see what those students needs are because we know that the students are going to come back with some needs that are different than when they left us and also work on those routines

024and so we're looking forward to that we're also very grateful to the school board for our full-time social worker we know that we'll really need this full-time social worker to address some of the needs that have gone on and make sure that the emotional needs are taking care of our students and then you can see the pictures from the bottom we've just tried to really do some positive messaging around the schools so that's a sign in the bathroom that says space keeps us safe so we're just as a little reminder like in that that middle sink there just to if there's another friend on each side of you to maybe just wait and wash your hands there in the classroom though there's things like the students will use their own supplies and we've messaged that

025out to all of our parents as well the students will sanitize before and after so if you're going to specials we'll have a system where this parent or the student i'm sorry the teacher is sanitizer using the little pumps to sanitize the students and then when they go to specials after they're done with specials then they'll have their hand sanitized when they're returning and again that's all about communication and it's been nice this last week for the first time we've had opportunities to meet with each in each grade level we met with the special teachers yesterday because we were doing all of our meetings remotely as well and so just like it'll be nice to have the students back in person it's made a huge difference in connecting with our teachers in person and hearing

026what their needs are and how we can address those needs and problem solved by having in-person meetings the last week and i know all the principals have had that opportunity and i think we've made you know a lot of progress in meeting the needs of our teachers on our support staff by having those small in-person meetings the last week or two so it's it's just meeting people's needs and hearing what they need and then we'll be regularly cleaning supplies our teachers have been given the rejuvenal and the microfiber cloths and they get a new one each day and then they're picked up each night and then delivered and then they're picked up by a company at the end of the week and they get another one so that's a real nice benefit that the teachers

027really appreciate and then ongoing training with site administration and the nurse regarding evolving information and as we know this situation is ever changing and so we don't claim to have all the answers we know that we're gonna come up with a procedure that we think is great or and then we're going to have to make some adjustments and so it's just a commitment to our parents and a commitment to our teachers and our support staff that if we get information that's new we're going to talk about it and then we're going to have to make some adjustments and we know that that's the case and it's just being transparent and upfront with new information and then being open to new ideas so you know we don't claim that those dots on the bus line are

028maybe the best idea but for right now with the information we have we think that's a great idea and so so that's what we're going with and so um and that communication piece is going to be critical to the success of this working i have a question about the the desks lots of teachers have tables and especially like at the primary kindergarten how are you addressing that right so so like at the and at least at ashland they had like little pods multiple tables so they've split and so they're having two at one table i don't know what all campuses look like so they were kind of like this but a little bit bigger at ashland and so we're doing two at a table and so my site council is great so we talked about

029that and it seemed like a good solution on at ashland's campus i have some larger tables and so instead of doing four we did like two on one side and one on another like that would be like for a fourth grade class we had some large rectangle tables instead of having like so they're not facing each other we would just set three at a table as a solution so what and you know i don't know if you can answer this what will happen when you have all the kids back you that doesn't sound like it would work when you've got you know i've been in classrooms where there's five or six kids at a table and every table is filled right well at least at this point and we've been able to make it work

030or like a combination of doing like three and then maybe a desk or two and um and we'll have those conversations with the kids because all kids you know have different learning styles too and we're hopeful that students may be like i'll take the solo desk and so in some classrooms we would do three with some you know single desks but you're right we may come into you know some obstacles if our class sizes would go up significantly higher than they're at but at this point we've been able to manage with the class sizes and the spacing concerns dr mccord do we budgeted for if we get to a situation when we have everybody back that that we have to maybe convert some of those classrooms that do have tables to desks we would be

031able to purchase some but not for the entire district no no i don't mean the entire district because not everybody has tables but just but a lot a lot of several do over the years i mean you know how this i mean being a former principal we we pushed people to go away from desks and um and then over time we've we've gotten things back from uh property control back to classrooms that uh for deaths that are in good shape and can be used but if we see a need we'll have to calculate out um what the cost of those will be to be able to put them in but i don't know what that would be just yet okay thank you ms carlson um i think our elementary students are resilient they'll probably get

032used to masks but what are some of the ways that you're going to work with teachers and help students to get used to this new normal of wearing a mask especially our younger students right well right after i completed this presentation then one of our bulletin boards is a social studies on wearing masks and so i think it is really having those you know just education on why they're important and how they keep us all safe and just those kind conversations with with kids we've had kids on our campus right now in the in-service our you know on-site learning program and for the most part they've done a phenomenal job and just with some just basic prompting and reminding um they put them back on and you know they're like all of us it gets

033warm and and they slide down but it's just you know it is going to just take some routines and procedures and and having those breaks built into so when they can go to recess and they can go to pe and some of those built-in times where they are able to take their masks off safely i think will be important okay but i don't i don't have uh you know i mean there will be some you know i mean but it it's not going to be i think a situation the answer is that all the kids will be wearing masks so it'll be easier to manage i think if everybody's there and and make sure that we can see that you know there's examples of how kids are wearing masks and what the expectations are and

034i think it's about laying it out there for expectations with kids some of them will have difficulties and some will either purposefully or you know accidentally have mask issues and it's just a conversation it's we want to make sure that kids also feel comfortable uh when they're having their mask on and they are having difficulties that we are kind with them about that just because we know it's not it's not something that they they're used to on a daily basis i mean even adults aren't used to it all day long and so uh and recognizing when kids may need a break and maybe it's time to take them outside for five ten minutes and distance them and let them take their mask off but we'll be very flexible with it in terms of helping them

035but we will make sure that they're wearing them all right thank you dr mccord i may be getting ahead of myself on this question that i'm going to ask and that's not necessarily for you miss carlson but what having experienced um getting classrooms cleaned and having a custodian call in sick and and spreading themselves you know having having to get all the classrooms cleaned at night how are we addressing the sanitizing uh every night in um i mean i can't even imagine trying to do that yeah it so we also have hired an extra set of five custodians that if we do have absences in places we can disperse them if we have a covet case specific that'll be the covid custodial team that would go and do the extra deep cleaning uh that needed

036to be in specific areas if if there was contamination but they have been trained they understand what the expectations are of the nightly cleaning and so but if we run into personnel issues um we'll continue to hire but we have hired extras just to begin with knowing that this could be an issue will they will they um you know i'm just trying i'm thinking about all that they have to do and then we're adding cleaning the desks on top of that yeah we are i mean it it's a lot of extra work for everybody not just the custodians but also the teachers and the administration on campus i mean who will be cleaning the desks then uh it'll be the custodians they'll deep clean them every night every other night every other night the teachers

037more than likely will probably go through and wipe off their desks as well and some of them i've been told that are going to do it two and three times a day and so it'll be a collaboration but the expectation first and foremost be the custodians to go through there thank you yep right i think that's it for me unless you have any other questions i appreciate your time well thank you for explaining so well and helping us understand dr mccord just following up on ms eugetti's question the i know we were waiting on back order of the and i don't even know what they're called now but the sand sanitizing guns what's the status of those i think they're in this week or we're good bonnie thank you i will wait until then next

038are we bringing both of you up at the same time or one of you all right come on up we have principal from greenfield junior high mr brian yee and principal from campo verde high school dr christa cox well congratulations i didn't realize you had received your doctorate so thank you overachiever all right good evening um dr mccord and governing board thank you for allowing us the opportunity to come in speak on behalf of all the schools and just the different logistics that we've put into place um i second what suzanne said and that uh this week has been probably my favorite week of work in six months because it's been the first time that things feel like we're planning um for the normalcy of what we're used to doing um just getting back to

039school so you know it's a second reopening so we're trying to think through all the things that you normally do when you're opening up on the first day after summer and we're trying to make sure that we don't forget anything so we wanted to start off the first phase of planning for us has been a lot of communication and making sure that we are hearing from all of our stakeholder groups as soon as we think we've thought of everything and that we put everything into place it seems like something else comes up that we have to add and address so we've broken this up into a few areas and the first one is starting with our staff and specifically our security at the high school level all of our high school principals have been meeting

040more as a collaborative group now than i think we ever have before it's nice and that we feel like we have a team that we can bounce ideas off of and collaborate for the size of our schools but then it's nice to talk through because each of our campuses are slightly different what that means and maybe just to get different insight with their expertise or their background so right now with our staff we're trying to plan regular meetings and right they are through webex right now so it does make it a little bit more difficult with asking questions so we've broken it down into smaller groups as well with our department chairs our school improvement committee and what we're doing is we're like even today we practiced our presentation to the staff on not just

041what we're sharing with you tonight but all of the pieces of our reopening and all the communication that's going to go out to our community get feedback from then and then we are on thursday going to then we go through that with our entire campus because we feel and have found that we get more feedback and questions when we are in those smaller groups when you have 150 staff on a webex it seems like people don't want to bombard the meeting as i'm sure you can all imagine and then with our safety or when we think of our safety on our campus our high school security teams are meeting frequently with our admin team because as dr mccord just mentioned everybody's positions are changing and everybody is kind of all hands on deck and every

042job is everyone's job and so we are going to be meeting this week with our security and admin team one more time to just go over everything you're going to hear us discuss in the next few slides how we can monitor that and manage what that looks like because our campuses are larger and we are going to make sure to get feedback every step of the way and then make sure that as we come across some hurdles that we are anticipating that we can hopefully iron those out during the two weeks of hybrid so that when we have close to 2000 and obviously for some other high schools a lot more than that um students on our campus that we are as prepared as possible um now again the last six months have proven that

043we don't really ever know how to be 100 prepared but we're going to continue to do our best and we've found that listening to our stakeholders helps us really to be as prepared as possible and then governing board members dr mccord thank you for the opportunity to speak with you tonight first time i've used the microphone it truly is a privilege to be able to represent the junior high principles tonight echoing what dr cox has said the collaboration that we've been able to do as a group has pushed us and may allowed us to grow together during these challenging times and to collaborate and problem solve the different challenges that are that we each face but then also meet the the needs of each of our communities in different ways such as our buildings being

044laid out a little bit differently we set up very similar but it's been great to meet with them once a week or if a day doesn't go by where we're texting as a group to problem solve whatever's coming up and the the regular communication that we're having with our staff um is not just unique to greenfield junior i know this is happening at our other junior highs as well where we're meeting with our leadership teams whether it's weekly sometimes daily and we're meeting with our staff weekly to give updates or just to have time for our staff to ask questions through webex because we know a lot of times we just need to listen and hear what those concerns are and then work with them to to try to solve those tomorrow is our first

045staff meeting in person that we're holding typically in the past we've held that in our library but to create more distancing we are holding that in our gymnasium in our bleachers tomorrow to to welcome everyone back officially face to face and and see some of our new faces that people have not seen other than on a webex screen and so we have found that this constant communication through whether it's webex or the the weekly newsletters that we send to our staff have been key to communicating information from our leadership and from the governing board on down and very similar to what dr cox has said breaking it up into smaller groups and assigning our and other administrators to meet with department chairs specific groups on campus such as our classified staff our office staff cafeteria

046staff custodial crew etc so that they all have the the opportunity for their voices to be heard and then moving on to our student population we want them to be prepared when they come onto campus next week and we know that we're going to have to do a lot of kind of practice rehearsal communication once we have them there but we started trying to think outside the box of what could we do ahead of time so the couple of things that um at the high school levels the principals all collaborated and came up with two ideas one is that we have our student councils creating kind of a safety video of how to properly wear your mask how to navigate the buildings with the changes what the expectations are and kind of the bigger major

047changes that they'll see and that video at least i believe for all of the schools should be going out by the end of the week i know campos is scheduled to go out on friday and then the second thing that we are hosting is our link crew normally all of our freshmen and our new students are welcomed in the day before school starts they do a huge orientation it really gets them pumped and excited to join the the high school culture we weren't able to do that so in lieu of that we had a lot of our freshman parents that were reaching out and similar to what you had shared about our kindergarten students parents and families feel very similar about freshmen coming into high school they're going from a smaller campus to a larger

048environment and it's very intimidating and so our link crew have set up for thursday and friday sign up genius and they are taking students in groups they're scheduled for after school hours so they will start once the live lessons end and students can choose which time works for them since their parents have to bring them we are having the just the students enter the campus we're having them wear masks and then every link link leader is going to be paired up with about five or six students to make sure that it's distanced and once they have the small group of students they're going to go to just keep the rotation going around campus at that point they will show them the major areas so that they know how to navigate around campus mainly to the

049the locker rooms the cafeteria and they will walk through each of our main hallways so that they know how to find their classrooms on the first day they'll be provided with maps and such so that and really have that opportunity with a link leader to go over any questions that they may have they'll get to see where the nurse's office is their counseling office some of those staple areas on campus like for the campuses that have like mindfulness rooms when we think about the anxiety that some of our students may have just returning to the campus we want them to feel safe and know who to go to if if that's how they're feeling and we opened that for any freshman and or new student to the campuses and all of the high schools will

050be doing that we've been fortunate last year miss delton our spanish teacher she went to training the previous year for the junior high version of the link crew and that's called web where everybody belongs and that empowers our 8th grade students to be leaders on campus to welcome our new 7th graders just like dr cox said and mrs carlson said the transition for sixth graders to seventh graders is a big jumping can be very scary so we found and identified that need that we needed to have something more robust to welcome and allow our seventh graders to feel more comfortable and miss delton has taken that and ran with the program and last year she had approximately i think 50 leaders and during the the springtime and over the summer that tripled to a higher

051number for this year even in the midst of having to do this virtually so the excitement that our eighth graders have to welcome our seventh grade students through the web program albeit virtually they've created a video like some of the link crew students have but it shows their passion for our campus and welcoming our seventh graders and and they will be on our campus over the next three days when we open our campus for students and parents to come walk the campus to find their classrooms to identify the markings on campus look at the benches look at how the hallways are laid out and our web leaders have signed up and filled all of our spots to where we actually had to open up more spots for our web leaders to be on campus to

052be able to participate so we're excited for that opportunity every wednesday we have what's called our our gsc where grizzlies support and connect it's a advisory type homeroom type 30 minutes that with our new schedule in the hybrid schedule and when we go to full in person due to the alignment with global academy we had to find a way to not have an hour lunch for our students and keep our 30 minute lunches for 7th graders and 8th graders so we are are adding that 30 minute gsc time during right after lunch and so we've always had that gsc it's just always been a different period of the day but using it this year and and having every wednesday which is a non-specific live instructional day via webex but we want our students to sign

053in into the buzz platform every every day so every wednesday we've had our gsc time at 8 30 with our first hour teacher teacher so our students sign in and this is where we've communicated a lot of our expectations sharing information campus wide info such as moving to uh in person on the ape where unfortunately they have to see a video of myself explain some of these things to them our teachers are doing many things that are uncomfortable for them with the video and so i felt i needed to stretch myself as well and to be able to get my face out there for our students i've recorded videos to share some of this news with them and create some contests and some hopefully some excitement where students are engaged and listening to what our

054campus-wide expectations are and so far we've seen we've received good feedback from that where our teachers receive a specific presentation that's from our admin team that we want them to share with our students and we will continue this through once we go to in person where that will occur every monday tuesday thursday and friday where we can share important campus-wide information or if something needs to change we can distribute that information during that time where everyone's getting the information at the same time all right and then moving on to our parents um i one of the things that mr yi just mentioned that i think is important is there have been a lot of things that we've been doing over the last several months and as we're prepping for the return of reopening campus that

055we've gotten a lot of positive feedback from parents that they really enjoy it and hope that we continue to do those things even in years to come and so it's challenged us to change some things that i really do see us keeping so for example we had sent out a video that was just uh uh welcome it was introducing admin counseling psychologists like your key stakeholders kind of in the front office and i i've never had so many parents email me asking me if we can do that every year because they felt that it made it more intimate and personal and that they really were able to see who it was as opposed to sitting in the back of an auditorium or something like that so i i am excited to see some of the

056things that this is going to change for years to come um but with that the communication right now um it is weekly it is daily and so one of some of the things that the high schoolers high schools have done is a lot of newsletters we're really trying to up our social media game i feel like that's like my part-time job right now is trying to be present on social media i we have and this is across the board we have more parents um reaching out to us even through social media sending us messages there so if that's how they feel more comfortable reaching out then we want to make sure that they know that we're accessible in any way and so we're trying to do the best that we can to get parents the

057information as much as we think we hear it all the time we're in meetings all the time we're we're with cabinet and uh the principals and even with our staff and so sometimes on our end we think that the communication has been clear and i think that the constant reminder that we've received is that parents are overwhelmed right now there's a lot on their plates and if they have numerous students in numerous schools it's a lot of information and so we're trying to mainstream the information that goes out like campo specifically we have a newsletter and we really have tried to say no one is sending emails out if you have something to say send it to us we will include it all in one place and it goes out now there are some extenuating

058circumstances where we want to get something out and we don't want to wait till the end of the week to get it in a newsletter but we are trying to utilize the newsletters and the social media similar to the elementaries we are including our site council to try to get input there uh those those meetings have been a little bit smaller than normal and i think that with that virtual presence and having those through webex that it's a little bit more difficult for our parents to they they want to attend in person so we're excited for i believe this month all the high schools are going to be hosting their first in-person site council meeting and i think that we'll continue to get more positive feedback there and then we are trying to work on

059making our faces more seen so stepping out of our comfort zone similar to what we are asking our staff like mr yi said and recording ourselves and um doing more interactive things through social media and even if it's sending out uh we've put our pictures on everything uh including in our when you walk into our front office we have tvs in a lot of our central areas and we're using those for similar to like um a doctor's office where it just kind of scrolls through the basics and we've tried to put counseling images on everything our images there's a couple of times where we look up and it's a little bit like startling because not used to seeing your face on everything but we are trying to do a good job of making sure that

060people know who they're talking to behind a screen because we've we all know it we've lost a little bit of that personal piece and and we're trying to overcompensate and make up for that until things return a little bit back to normal i'll echo what dr cox said about the overwhelming of communication that could come out especially at the beginning of going to the online online instruction and we received concerns from our stakeholders about the number of emails that they were receiving not only from our teachers but from you know their elementary kids teachers and then their high school teachers as well and so we tried to limit just like dr cox said the newsletters that go out to our community and so i took that on and and i send out a nightly newsletter

061to our parents that give gives them updates on what has occurred or any new information also with step-by-step instructions for our students to receive for the next day where they're supposed to sign in what time how to do that etc and so those new newsletters have gone out to our parents to our students and to our staff so that we're all receiving the same information and it's been great to have our tech services provide troubleshooting information that we can include in the newsletters along with communication from district that they have been sharing with our community but we put that in our newsletter as well so that all of the information is in one location for our parents to access and it's while it can be overwhelming at times to continue to do that each night

062we have found it beneficial and we have received positive feedback from our parents on as they navigate through the online world and so we'll see how often we do that when we go to in person we'll probably continue that for the first week of hybrid but then taper off to where it's not every day and i do know that the other junior highs as well continue to share through their newsletters to their community whether it's once a week or sometimes daily as well but also through a lot of their social media as well that they're sharing information such as their schedules or expectations the verbage that's specific to their campus that they have been sharing out so this next slide we felt it wasn't this has been in here for the last couple of board

063meetings but we felt it was important to just keep this included we know a lot of families are having questions about this and so we just felt it was important to keep this in here tonight in case if anybody is watching but i think we're good to go on to the next slide can i ask a question absolutely um with the a through l and then and through z is it worked out pretty much evenly i i will say the a through l for all of the high schools i know is a little bit heavier in numbers um but it really has worked out pretty smooth what we've done is if we have a family that has a conflict if they have two children with maybe last names or something along those lines we are

064trying to maybe push those to the m through z since we know that the numbers there is a little less but it really we were i'll be honest that we were anticipating and planning we put together a spreadsheet we thought we were going to have all these changes and at least for campo it's been very minimal like under maybe 15 families that have asked for a special situation or change based on their circumstance so and i'm not sure if it's the same for you brian it's been very similar it was it's been about a 60 40 with the a through l um but we had we broke down every class to see what their class periods were when they broke down by that and the i think the largest class that we had after the

065split was a class of 19 and there were a handful of those otherwise they were all closer to like a 12 13 kind of split so fortunately it worked out and just like dr cox said if if we've had requests to change we've moved them to the m through z to decrease that percentage this is where um the a lot of the collaboration with our fellow peers at the principal ranks about a staggered release and so that previous schedule it showed at the end of each class period there's a staggered release time so at the junior high level we have a 10 minute passing period window that we are are using for our passing period time and each of our junior highs are doing it a little bit different but very similar so i'll explain

066how we're doing it at greenfield the the 10 minutes so class ends on the 30 at the 30 of every hour during the class day we are dismissing our seventh graders at nine at the 30 and they have five minutes to go to their next classroom and so they'll walk across the campus if they need to get go to the restroom that's when they do that but they'll go straight to their next class while our 8th graders stay in class for those additional five minutes so when our seventh graders are then in their classrooms our eighth graders then dismiss at the 35 and then they walk and go to their next classroom if you can see on the on the picture in the pictures our hallway we do have the blue dividing line and our

067our one of our mantras on our campus which i believe is a lot at our junior high other junior highs as well are stayed to the right just like our driving drivers on the road we're staying to the right and that blue dividing line is always to our left and we do have just like the elementary schools we have little we have x's that mark outside the classroom for those class times where there may be 8th graders still in the classroom and they have to wait to dismiss we do have designated markings on our our floors for our students to wait that have that social distance in between in between them until they can go into the classroom we do have the the hallway doors we only walk in on the right and then when

068we exit the courtyard doors we exit through the right as well and so the arrows indicate that around campus and our our custodial crews across the junior highs and our building managers and i know our admin teams have been out um laying down the the tape and the arrows and signs across the different campuses across the junior highs everyone has a little bit different signage some are fancier than others we're using the blue painters tape because we feel if we have to make a change then we can pull up that tape and adjust accordingly some other campuses are had have pre-made signs that they made in their school colors to designate which way the flow of traffic goes in our hallways and and outside in the courtyards as well well congratulations on getting the line

069so straight with painters tape so at the high schools very similar we all collaborated and i will say that although each of the high schools may have a small deviation from this plan but they we are all pretty consistent we are doing for the most part one-way halls and um the the map picture isn't showing the greatest unless if you have really great vision on the slide but um every when you walk in if you notice on the top right picture both of the doors say enter whereas normally the right as an enter the left is an exit all every single hallway at campo is going to be you only walk in one direction and so that will really help when we have our staff stepping out into the hall during passing periods to just

070know that everybody should be going one way we know that this is going to take a little bit to train our students and so that's why we decided to just make this decision to start with the hybrid schedule while we have half the students on campus we had originally started planning to do very similar to what mr yi and the junior high principles were doing but we realized that with the number of students that are coming in and out of some of our doors i mean it it really bulks up and so we even though the way that we're doing it it seems like it might take a little bit more time to teach it up front and it may take some students a little bit longer to get across campus because they're having to

071go out and follow a certain pathway we do believe that um firmly that it's gonna alleviate the flow and we're not going to see 50 kids bunched up at a door trying to get in and out of a doorway at once we we were excited to each of the high schools tried to put their own spin a lot of the signs that we're putting up have something to do and tie into our campuses so at campo we always talk about the campo way so we're really excited about this all of our hallways now have arrows that say in their title camp away so they're just every time you walk into a hallway there's no mistaking if you should be going one way or the other and they're about every six feet apart and then at

072the entryway and exit way of every door you'll see something similar to this and when you go down to the end of this building you see two giant um copper signs that say exit so that it's very clearly marked for anybody coming in and out and then what we're doing these maps will be sent out ahead of time to our entire community and uh when our freshmen come to do their tours we're passing out campus maps as well just so they can get familiar with that and as far as the release time goes um we have taken a different approach in that since we are asking some if you look at these maps closely enough you'll recognize that depending on where your classroom is in the building you may be taking a longer way to

073get out of the building as opposed to maybe there's a door right there but it kind of goes against the flow of traffic and so we are taking the classrooms that are kind of on the outsides of the building and we're releasing we're letting the teachers know they're releasing first so that they have the most time to get across campus and then the classrooms that are right by the door they're going to be kind of the ones to exit last um we i'll be honest we've all tasked different assistant principals and like our building managers with um helping organize this and when this one was first presented it took a little bit to wrap our minds around but we were really confident and feel that it's going to go smoothly and similar to what mr

074yee said we a lot of this is let's see how it goes and if we're wrong then we're going to change the plan again and go from there but this is right now the plan we're going to start with on tuesday and i failed to note that our hallway doors starting in the morning will be propped open that go into the hallways to reduce the number of contact for students and staff touching the doors and then at the end of each class period our teachers one of their new norms is to prop their hallway or their classroom door open so that reduces the number of contact with their doors as well and so students literally just walk through a hallway and walk through a classroom door without having to open doors to get into a

075hallway or a classroom and that's across the junior highs as well and that i can echo that for all the high schools as well that they're all being tasked with that as well so any questions on the staggering release or hallway setups i do want to go back to the communication i just want to say how much i appreciate the hard work that's gone into that i mean trying to get everything in one location so parents aren't overwhelmed and communicating every night that's that's a huge step up especially at a high school and a junior high level from from what you've done previously and i really really appreciate the efforts on communication because communication is always working until it doesn't and you don't know that it's not working until you are confronted with the problem

076of not having had that communication so the efforts of being proactive and really getting out there i think that's really important thank you all right so moving on to our buildings the this slide is really more specific to like our cafeterias and some of our larger buildings and rooms on campus and some of the pictures you're going to see here just are examples of how we're spacing students out and how we are going about signage so at the high schools the cafeterias we've had to be very creative some of the high schools for example campos cafeteria is rather small so it's it's a little bit more difficult in there and what we've done is we have a stage that's in there that normally is not used for tables and we've just accepted that we need

077to make it for tables so we've put about four tables up on that stage and as you can see in the picture up there we have a sign on every single table in the cafeteria we're limiting the chairs we do have a security officer and usually our sro are in are in the actual cafeteria throughout the entire lunch and so we have trained and asked them to just monitor that their high school students um that table right there looks like it would normally if you pulled up some more chairs take eight students but really it's like 16 of them that like to pull up with their friends so um we understand that we're gonna have to monitor that quite a bit until they get used to that and then you'll see the four students per

078table sign at the bottom of that we all the high schools are trying to put a positive spin on things so it's just our kind of our slogan i guess right now is help keep sam campos safe and so on um all the different uh signs you'll see different positive sayings like that to try to just be optimistic about it our classrooms are we have a lot of tables so i'm going to go back to that and i will say that that's something that we as soon as we knew that this was going to be part of our plan we started working with our um uh facilities to try to figure out what we have and what we don't have and so for right now we are changing out we did have a lot of

079desks not a ton but we had some desks that weren't being used or kind of set to the side for storage and we've pulled those out and gotten them into the classrooms that had a lot of tables and we have science labs where they only have lab tables so we're trying to say we'll bring in extra chairs or desks to the side or maybe down the row of the lab room and just separate maybe you only have two or three students at a lab table as opposed to normal the normal six that you would have um so just getting really creative with the classroom set up um and we have um our our band rooms our choir rooms they're they're all working uh diligently to just luckily they do have larger space so they're able

080to spread out and looking at our numbers um when because i'll be honest at the high schools we're not as worried for a lot of the buildings during the hybrid schedule it's more of the concern when we return in all and that's what we're planning for so the hybrid is just practicing it all so in our larger areas we are looking at class size numbers and if there's a class that we feel is going to be too large to fit in a regular classroom we're using some of our other facilities to host those classes so for example we have a couple of our ap lit classes that those kids are really proud and we don't want them to feel like they can't stay in there and that the numbers are a little bit higher and

081so we are going to have that teacher teach out of our auditorium potentially our library because there is a lot of space in there that during class periods isn't always being used so we're getting creative with our space around campus and then with the restrooms you'll see some pictures on the next slide but we also put signs up outside of all of our bathrooms that just say this many students at a time and it matches the number of stalls that are in there to just limit again at the high school level the bathrooms seem to be the place that students like to hang out so we're trying to really enforce and limit that and have asked our security and our teachers to just kind of if you see um students trying to gravitate to hanging

082out just kind of do a sweep and tell them that they need to line up and wait outside until there's more room available and i think i'm going to save a couple of these for the next slide we do have a self-filling water station in each of our buildings i know at the other high schools not all of them have them in every single building but at each of the high schools i believe based on conversations with them that they at least have some the nurse has most of our nurses have stations where they can fill up water there as well so we're going to be educating and really promoting our students and we have for weeks to please make sure you're prepared with water and then making sure that they know where those fillable

083stations are we did not have one in one of our buildings but a few weeks weeks ago one of our boosters pick up the cost to put one in the last building that we needed so i think that's the goal for all the high schools is to eventually try to have that taken care of just for cleansing cleanseliness um and then i think the rest is on the next slide so i'll let you talk and save the rest for next and so for our cafeteria situation we borrowed from the elementary model and we have the benches and so we separated those into three so those are divided into three for students three at a bench and our bottom right picture on the presentation is mrs moorhead's band classroom and she has hers already spread out

084in social distance and she had enough seats in there for her highest class that she would have so she was able to to do that and set that up in her classroom the that next slide showed how we have other areas where we distributed our tables and benches for our students of those bottom two right pictures outside this past summer we were fortunate that we were able to fence in our that dirt area that houses our a la carte lines and that now allows us to put benches out there where our students can be inside a campus and so not have that the the the street right there at their fingertips to run away which never happened but it always surprised me that we never had that enclosed so we have it enclosed now so

085we moved our our benches out there to create not only more space on the interior of our courtyard which we used to have for under each ramada so now we have three bench picnic type benches under the ramada to where we have it set up outside for students and then that other picture you can see we put benches along the interior walls to spread out the areas for our students and just today we were able to count all of the seats that we have inside the cafeteria in the new area along the walls along with now allowing students to if they would like to to eat on the grass picnic style to bring their own blanket or towel that they could sit on and and have that option as well to to utilize the space

086that we have in our campus and we have approximately 500 seats that we would have during a lunch period which right now addresses our student population for each lunch period if we had to identify a specific spot for every student to have a socially distanced area on the campus and i know the other junior highs were doing the exact same thing i know highland junior was making benches in their woods shop over the past weekend and previous week i know mesquite jr was doing the same to create additional seating for their students that they could add to areas where there was not seating previously to continue on with these pictures like mrs carlson said and dr cox has mentioned the spray bottle and with the cleaning solution of the rejuvenal and the microfiber towel we

087felt it was important for our our staff not only the custodial staff but for our teachers to know where those are located at in each classroom so we identified a specific spot in each classroom that's close to the door so that the teachers know where that's at in case they need to use it if they're subbing in a classroom or if a substitute needs to know where that's at but just as important for a custodial crew for the ease of them to refill those bottles they can identify it right when they walk in to see if it's low they can refill it and then also to grab the towel and put a new towel on there as part of the routine because we wanted to make that those additional responsibilities that they have as easy

088as possible for them and so we were able to install hooks in every classroom to do that and then that picture to the right we um we wanted to address when our custodians went to a classroom if a teacher came back to the classroom after that room was cleaned whether they were tutoring or they were coaching or they just came back at the end of or sometime earlier in the evening which we know teachers always come back to work extra that we wanted that room to be cleaned before the teachers and students got back the next day so our leadership team worked with our building coordinator to just come up with a simple green and red card system that if a teacher goes in to the classroom after school hours that they just flip the

089card to red so that the custodial crew knows that even if they have gone through it already they need to go back in and touch up some of those contact areas whether it's just the door the desk that they can make sure that each room is being addressed at the end of each night so that each day we're starting off with a sanitized room and along with that we're we're asking our students and we've been sharing this through our nightly newsletters that we're in this together and so our students have some responsibility in helping with the wellness of our campus and so we're asking them to bring disinfectant wipes or cleaning wipes to campus with them their own personal supply and that the expectation is when they walk into a classroom before they sit down

090at the desk that they personally clean the desk themselves with the with their own supply of the the disinfectant or cleaning wipes if a student does not have their own supply which we know are in demand and very scarce right now it we're asking the students their responsibility is to let that teacher know that they don't have any and the teacher can spray the area down and the student will then use paper towels that are supplied in each classroom to then wipe that area down and so where just like dr cox mentioned that first two weeks of hybrid getting our students understanding of our new norms and our protocols we're going to lean heavily on that those first couple weeks so that it just becomes part of the norm for our students when they come

091in that that's part of their routine not that our custodial crews are not cleaning it but it's just another layer of protection for themselves for their fellow students and for our staff that we want once again everyone to take part in and ownership and responsibility for their part in making this happen and just to wrap up the the previous slide in the slide kind of went hand in hand so um a couple of images that i wanted to to talk on um is at the high school levels there's so much that um is driven by our students and that that school culture and ownership and our students want to get back to their clubs their athletics their their their high school years and so we are um right now we know we're not quite there

092yet but we want them to start thinking of ideas and they are presenting ideas to us and um they are even within the realm of um socially distancing and and all of that they are working really hard to bring some of this stuff back into school even if it has to change the way that it looks so as far as like virtual assemblies go one of the things i wanted to point out the top left picture i didn't really know how how else to to show that to you guys but all of the high schools do have in the gyms and out on the field the capability to do live streaming and i'll i'll be honest that um i was watching i've seen some of it before but this last week i was watching some

093of it again just to kind of see the quality and it it's like hd like it looks like you're at the movies so we're really really excited that we have that feature because it allows us if we want to talk about like a welcome back assembly and our student council wants to do something they can either go out onto the field or into the gym and do their normal assembly where you usually have two thousand students or a thousand students at any given point in the the bleachers the teacher can just tune into this from their classroom and it can live stream virtually so it allows the high schools to do some of those interactive and engaging things that happen now again we have quite the focus on academics and norms and procedures that we

094have to get to first but our students are really excited to get some of these things moving and right now a lot of our clubs are coming to the rescue and helping us with a lot as well so at the different high schools each of the different clubs that they have are being tasked with and really they're the ones that came to us and were like what can we do to help so we have a one club that is just going around putting positive notes and posters all over campus to welcome students um we have another uh club that reached out that focuses on community service that asked what they could do to help custodial our custodial crew and help freshen up campus in in terms of the grounds and it's super sweet so we're

095just trying to let them feel like they they have ownership over the campus as well um but their their our students in our community are really really excited to get back um and again all of us principals were like sharing ideas so when one of our club sponsors bring something up and want to do it i'm sending a quick text i know mr yee mentioned i feel like uh the administrators right now are definitely um on the same page a lot more and it's nice because you can't think of all those ideas so we're sharing a lot of those different ideas for what it's going to look like and then as far as i i didn't mention it on the last slide but at the high schools that have the outdoor seating um we have

096also similar to all the junior high principals spread those out so um normally um and i'll use campo as an example we have a ramada and then there's kind of the ramada to the side by the cafeteria where there are there are picnic tables like one after another and so what we've done is um we spread them out but we don't have a lot of shaded areas so when you walk very similar to the picture the the bottom right where they're in the walkway kind of down we've done that and we have zip tied laminated signs to each of the tables that say the same just for per table and we've asked our security while they're doing their rounds and walking that if they see anyone taking advantage of that to just kind of redirect

097our students and remind them of what the new social norms are for our outdoor areas so i think that was everything that we kind of touched on on the last slide and at this point i don't know if anyone has any questions for the junior high or high school levels i don't have a question but i do have a comment and it's for all three of you and all of the all of the principals in the district having done this for a long time i can't even imagine i've actually had nightmares about it um but i want to just say that this is making me feel a whole lot better because i've been very concerned and worried about all of it and i just want to say thank you to all of you i think

098you've done a fabulous job thank you i had a question about i really think this is a great idea with the cloth and the cleaner right there in a certain spot are other schools doing this as well because you know being able to find that and know where it is i think that's pretty important to having it being useful to people so i know with our collaboration our discussion with our junior high principles when i shared that others were going to do something similar and then until they could buy the hooks because i did send my assistant principal out to lojos before you gave out the idea to go secure enough for every classroom office location on campus to have the hooks we did we did share that with others and um while they're looking

099to do something similar in the meantime they did find a central location so such as the desk in the in the classroom that their custodial crew would know where to go to exactly okay that's great what about at the high school um we just chose because the hooks were all sold out at lowe's so we decided to just say the the desk with the teacher um but it was actually mr yi was the one that had even thought about that and we appreciated it because i could see a teacher easily putting it in their shelf or in a cabinet or feeling like they're doing their job to keep their uh classroom tidy but then a custodian how long are they going to search for it and given all the extra work that we're asking them

100to do right now we wanted it to be as efficient as possible and i i will share that marcy has set up a meeting on thursday morning with all the high school and junior high principles where we are going to go more in depth on all of our plans so that we can collaborate one last time before tuesday to make sure if there's a little idea that seems simple but i mean our our brains are a little bit emotional right now right we're not we're not all thinking of everything and so i we are looking forward to that final planning meeting that if one school is doing something that maybe is going to benefit all campuses we're going to kind of share those ideas well it is a lot of work i mean i i

101really i know that we've gotten emails from parents but we're we're taking a two years worth of work and putting it into a couple weeks really because we would have had a year of making the decision and then a year of planning and we made a decision and now we're trying to to really plan for a lot of changes in a very short time so i do appreciate all the work that everyone's put in the administration i know the teachers the staff everybody has really you know this is what we do in education we collaborate we communicate we really put our hearts into it and i just don't i don't know another place that does that better than public education so thank you for all your contributions thank you thank you dr cox and mr

102yee at a point when we move to full time in person are you monitoring and keeping track of and i'm sure you are so i don't want to presume anything but the largest number of students in your classes when folks are back in person full time and how are we going to handle that have has that been a part of the discussion i can speak firsthand at campo i'm pretty sure that my registration ap has given me those numbers like 10 times a day and and we are right now when i i mentioned a moment ago that we know we already have three sections that i can think of off the top of my head that it wouldn't be ideal to put them in a classroom so that we're already identifying them and working with

103that teacher to start in a different environment on tuesday because we don't want them to be in their classroom for hybrid and then have to change the routine for those students come the 21st so um but we are going to have to monitor that because right now we have three identity three sections identified um but if that changes we would rather make that decision to move the location of the classroom sooner um and i i know that um missy has been heavily involved in helping us that if our numbers are at a point where we maybe need to offer an extra section or look at potentially getting a position posted for another staff member it's been a daily conversation at the high school level between district and the sites and very similar we i've tasked

104my assistant principal and our dean they oversee a different grade level and they've monitored the the enrollment and the rosters for our our campus and have to get to a certain level we do look to make the adjustments sooner for a hybrid so that if we don't have to change it in two weeks and we are waiting for just some last minute additional numbers from missy udall regarding as we transition to um the in person that if we need to adjust that we would be able to work with her for additional staffing and she just granted us an additional replaced an english position on campus we had a individual move over to global and so we were able to fill and post that position and hire someone this week where previously when the first transitions

105happened we lost a couple teachers and we absorbed that within our class ftes and it did not raise it to where it was an alarming level but at this point she knew that she couldn't do that or we could not do it this time and so we were able to fill that position right away and i do believe the other junior highs are doing the same thing very similar i know they when we talk that it's a daily watch list that we're looking over to ensure that the class sizes are not getting too large the the impact of that though obviously is a changing of schedules and we try to minimize that by keeping the student with the same teachers but just different hours and we've had um great support from our parents that understand

106when we share the reasons why that that schedule's impacted to reduce the class size and they've been supportive of that thank you and mrs carlson i don't want to look past you but i'm assured and assuming that the elementary schools are doing very similar things thank you i you know the the caveat there is that we all know what class averages are and we also know that class averages lie uh there are the averages and then there are actual numbers and so i'm really interested in the actual numbers not interested in the averages uh the average is average of the actual numbers right correct and uh i would echo what miss eugenie has said my my compliments and appreciation to all of you uh at the administrative level at the campus level for the work

107and the thought that has gone into this uh it is as good as i have seen and yet you've already acknowledged that nothing is perfect and we're going to be making adjustments on the fly and i appreciate that thank you very much thank you anybody else for them again thank you guys this is extremely informative and i think what miss you jetty said is i think this is an important presentation tonight but i think this is the most important piece of it for the mere fact that people can actually see what's going on on campuses and help put minds at ease and again to reiterate what you all said this is a work in progress this is something we've never done before and so we're going to be building the plane in the sky and

108we'll continue to build it thanks again thank you thanks next up we have director of health services jennifer frost good evening dr santa cruz members of the board dr mccord thank you for having me here tonight um we've been talking about a lot of these things over the last few weeks and months and so tonight i'm just going to go over again what we're doing in health services to monitor the symptoms of the students to support the students while they're on campus as well as the staff so um jennifer can you just pull your mic up a little bit i think you would we'd hear you a little better i need to get a teacher voice yes um one of the first things that we've been going over is making sure that we're looking at

109all the symptoms per cdc and department of health protocol and one of the things that i found was that there was a lot of anxiety regarding these symptoms because as you may already know they're very similar to the regular flu to a cold and so some of the things that we've gone over with the staff with my health assistants and the nurses is how to assess those students and make sure that they're assessing them appropriately and i'm extremely lucky because they already do that they already see those students and ask them all the important questions to make sure that when they're coming into the health office that it's actually a health issue as you know as teachers and educators students will come to the nurse's office for a variety of reasons and that headache may

110actually be a stomachache and that stomach ache may be that they don't like math and so the nurses and health assistants already do that on a daily basis in their day-to-day jobs not during a pandemic and so i'm extremely lucky because they took the information from the cdc as well as department of health as that part and then they have also looked at what they already do in the health office and so i believe our kids are in great hands and and will continue to have the kids come in as they need to we have asked that the teachers not send students down that aren't there for health reasons and so we did develop a guideline for teachers so that when they have a student that needs maybe a safety pin or a change of

111socks things like that that they're not being sent down to the health office so that we're not having healthy kiddos go down and be with the kids that aren't feeling well we did develop actually i didn't develop our marketing team developed a lot of great signage and education for stopping the spread of germs for how to wash your hands how to wear a mask all those things again very lucky for that department because they are able to make everything look great a lot of the signage is appropriate for the school as far as colors it fits in with their theme it's just something that i think helps the kids feel more comfortable but also doesn't look out of place necessarily again face coverings we've gone over a lot of that one of the things i've

112really appreciated working this year with education is that the staff and the teachers want to make sure that the kids are wearing their mask appropriately but there's a lot of support in making sure that we support them in the a way that it's a positive message and not something that's um what's the word i'm looking for it's not going to be a um right right and so um i really love that they want to make this something that they know it's uncomfortable necessarily it's new um but just to make it positive um the resources for testing we have a lot of resources to give families so if they have questions they can go to their health assistant or their nurse on campus they can find reef resources for testing there's isolation and quarantine guidelines that

113they have as well as some collaboration i've been lucky enough to have with some pediatricians in our community as well as pch's east valley location and so we've been able to get information from pediatricians in the area so that we know what they're seeing as well as what their guidelines and protocols are the next slide jennifer if i can ask so when you say resources available for testing isolation and quarantine and maybe you're going to going to address this in a moment but do families need to call their nurse is that available online is that something you send home if the kids come to the office or how can parents access that at every level so elementary and secondary and we do have some resources on our family website as well but the resources that

114we've put together for health offices the nurses are putting them out through newsletters they're available on the campus website they can contact their health assistant or their nurse and the nurse or health assistant can send them to them a variety of ways we're trying to be creative just as you've heard you know we don't want to send a lot of things home with kiddos just because they might not make it and also because they're not always on campus every day okay thank you miss frost can you speak to the internal communication that is occurring between and among health assistants and health offices as issues arise questions occur just a dialogue so that everyone knows what is happening across town are you talking about within the campuses within the within the campuses and even within the

115district yes um so another way that i got incredibly lucky is these nurses and health assistants are in constant communication with each other and with me and they are they're very supportive um one of them will send an email out and say you know this is an idea i had from my office what do you guys think and you'll have 57 emails a minute later about how they want to do it or how they like that idea they would not steal the hooks from lowe's [Laughter] the other way that they've supported each other is that we have a group of representatives they're a group of nurses that work together as kind of a middle step and they also answer questions as well and then i was extremely lucky because the district went ahead and granted

116me the ability to have two extra nurses that are working as a little bit of everything to be honest but they're helping with contact tracing with attendance protocols with orientation of new nurses and so those two nurses have been another place where the staff can go to for questions and resources thank you so i'm trying not to read the slides but to be honest there's so much information one of the things that we have found helpful is frequently asked questions because there are so many of them and so the first one was is the school going to send home every student that has just a runny nose and so one of the things we really wanted to send home for parents is that if they update their olr and their health history and we know

117that the student has chronic allergies or a migraine issue those things that really helps the nurse investigate what's going on with that child online registration if you're wondering yes um and so we really want to work with families do we want to send home every student with a runny nose no but with an abundance of caution we want to make sure that we're not allowing children that are symptomatic to stay in school and so working together with parents for that resource and making sure that you know this the parents know that if we have that information up front it'll be much easier for us to delineate whether this child is really sick or this is a chronic issue we have some handouts that have been great 10 things to do before school to make sure

118kids are ready to make sure that they're comfortable with the changes in everyday campus activities a daily health assessment for students that's something that we have out that the parents are going to be able to do every day with their child to make sure that their child's ready to go to school whether it be a fever or cough or runny nose and then when my when can my child return to school is something that we came up with because there are many different guidelines again cdc local guidelines and we wanted to make it an easy to read platform yes platform so that the parents can see exactly when their child will be able to return to school if they are sent home with covet-like symptoms if they're tested if what the test result is and

119then how they would come back from there so some of the questions that we've been getting as well is what happens if there is a positive teacher or student in my child's class the the district has been very very good about wanting to be transparent and vulnerable so of course just an example in the secondary schools typically if there's something like a communicable illness like lice they wouldn't send a letter out to all the six classes of that high school student but we've changed that for this year and so if there is a positive student in one class that student every class that student attends in the secondary level we'll get a notice um and from there we've been working with epidemiology from the department of health and then those contacts will be notified as

120appropriate if they meet that close contact guideline um what if they've been exposed outside of school is another big question and we would ask that they develop a close relationship with their health assistant or nurse on campus and call them right away and then the health assistant or the nurse will give them the guidelines of what to do next and the last one will i be notified if there's a positive student absolutely again with that transparency they will be notified that there is a positive student in class and then we will give them more information as the case evolves i have a question um hypothetical obviously oh my gosh everything that we're dealing with right now with having the number of charter schools and other school districts surrounding us that have opened and let's just

121say that some one of the schools has to close not ours but one of the others do we have any kind of a protocol about accepting students i know we can't pick and choose who we accept in public education but let's say one of this one of the charter schools has to close and 25 kids want to come to the district what how would we handle that mr actually mr carr brought that up at the last meeting and so we've not developed something in writing however with the media the way it is i know that we would be alerted as soon as it happened that the school closed and then we would have to work at that the department of health would quarantine would recommend quarantine for the students that were directly affected and we

122would have to work with them as far as whether we not we could let certain children come in would you be notified by the department of health which students would have to be quarantined um that i don't know is that a is that a um i don't believe it would be a violation no because it's a community health issue i think it would depend more on the parent notifying the health department where they're going does that make sense and so i think if we know we would address it but there could be circumstances where we don't right so i my question was so if if a parent we had a question about this if a parent if a child is um tested positive for kovaid and what is the first thing that they should do

123they should call well not the first thing they should do but as far as the school goes should they call the nurse first should they or the attendance office and let them know how do we what's the communication line i don't typically call the nurse at the school ever so i don't have that phone number you know so how how do you do that well there's two ways the first way is when you call the main number of the school it'll give you the option to choose the nurse's office but one thing that we've done that i think is a really great idea in theory is that we have created two attendance lines and so when you call the the school and you're calling your child in sick for the day it goes over the

124symptoms of covid and it says if you're calling your child in sick for any of these symptoms press two um if all other symptoms press one or not symptoms but all other reasons and so the attendance clerks are able to take that information from that second voicemail and put it on a spreadsheet that they share with the nurse the nurse then is able to follow up with those families and so if they say yes it's positive covid the nurse will know right away that they can call that family and give them that information that's great thank you and then let's see okay so then if if they call in and they say i've tested my childhood test deposit for covid the nurse will will talk to the nurse so the nurse will call them back

125and get the next information in the next steps of how to come back when to come back those kinds of things and other things that they need help with we'll then do the does the child or parent need to reach out to all of the teachers just like you normally would when you're absent and just send an email and say we're homesick can we get the schoolwork or is that something that automatically will start happening on the school end one of our checklists the the positive student checklist is named appropriately it actually talks about having the nurse speak with the administrator about you know yes we have the student the student's positive they're going to be out this amount of time the administrator would then lead that chain of events as far as supporting the

126student while they're at home if they feel well enough then they can receive their work and that's the great thing about the having the platform that we do now is that it's flexible and so they can still receive their work on that buzz platform like they are right now okay great so i guess i would just say to the parents reach out to your nurse or attendance yeah or attendance and then if you feel like you need to reach out to somebody else then do that otherwise there are things in place that will start we'll re the schools will reach out to you as well to make sure you're supported in that absolutely okay thanks any other questions no thank you jen very nice two weeks before i move on i have a can we

127go back to secondary for a couple of questions that i forgot we're past that slide of course sure who do you want to pick on so i i wanted to pick on junior high i know that at the high schools we have a student success center so if students choose a flex schedule they can go into the they can take an in-person class and go into the student success center to take their online class but i'm not aware of what we have at the junior high level to support that flex schedule so can you explain absolutely we did implement a center for success at the junior high level so if the student is on the flex schedule and there is a gap in between their courses or we know when our classes end at the

12830 their global class will start at the 30 as well so they can go right into our center for success success area which on our campus will be the library i know our other junior highs are very similar to doing this the same so that the librarian can monitor or assist as needed as they work on their chromebooks okay that's great then the other question i had was there's some concern about students having to transition from in person to online particularly if they end up getting sick with covid or transition from online to in person if they decide to change so what help is there to help students make that transition well it's been very clear from the beginning since we've gone to online instruction that all of our teachers whether it's our campus teachers

129or global that they are following the scope and sequence of the buzz platform and the florida virtual programming and the curriculum so that if in those situations when it does occur that a student can transition back and forth as easy as possible and we know it's not going to be ideal but the things that are in place are working with our counselors and and it's been mentioned earlier tonight the the social workers that all of our junior highs now have that will be another essential team player in in this transition that she our social worker she can help with the families transitioning and that a lot of that is the communication piece with our teacher so if we're getting someone from global finding out obviously what their grades are where they're at if the grades

130are lower than what they should be finding you know what we can do to help them move forward on our campus this year and i know some other junior highs as well we've gone to a campus-wide no consequence late policy with the situation that we that we're in we know some students will have troubles turning in late work and so we've developed a new policy that would allow students to turn in late work with and that they can see receive full credit up until the week before the grading period ends um to compensate for some of those situations that will that we know students will face when they transition all right thank you very much i appreciate that i think that's all my questions okay thank you sir all right next we'll talk about employees

131mr mcintosh all right good evening dr santa cruz governing board and dr mccord i'm here to talk about the employees and the changes over the past couple weeks we have our most susceptible personnel have now been placed at global so we think that all of the necessary changes with those teachers have been made we continue this week since the families made their choices to either change from global back into in person or vice versa we have done all of our staffing changes and we continue to do those based on the class size and the ratios and i'm very pleased to say that we're looking really good at the elementary and the junior high and the high school as far as the majority of the class sizes they're below the ratios that are set by the

132district [Music] and then if there is a need the principals will reach out to either myself and or missy udall and then determine what other types of changes we can do to lower those class sizes whether it's six fifths or scheduling change or adding a teacher as a whole so we're continuing to do that on the class sizes employees we report all the identified coveted cases with the employees and we use the guidelines in the forms that were created to report those to the necessary departments of health and then we have trained all of our faculty and staff on proper safety protocols prior to the students arriving next week and all of the um employees have been educated on the signs and symptoms of the cova to help identify students and or that's signs that

133they may be experiencing in the classroom mr mcdosh yes as far back to the staffing assignments and the class sizes wow and again i know the class averages or be what they may but there's then the extremes on either side of that is what you're saying is the reality of it so i appreciate that you're looking carefully at that to make sure that we can have the desks and have and dr cox that you mentioned you know at in the case that we can't then move it to the lecture hall or the auditorium let's figure out ways to to do this best we can but i anticipate that there might be we might have some students coming back or some students who will enroll which didn't go through this last process of parents choosing where

134they were going to be at so how will you continue to support our teachers who are already in place and our students who are already in place in making sure that they have what they need even as we add in the students who come back and enroll so right now as i said the the majority of the class sizes are left well below the ratios in order for growth but if they start to bubble up and get to the top there we we will hire new teachers we'll post and hire new teachers that's what we're doing right now in a couple situations at a couple of the high schools we only have two postings at the elementary so and we purposely left those tried to in the majority of cases you know some room for

135growth there for when those students arrive great thank you okay we we we sat this afternoon and he had every just talking elementary right now every elementary campus and every class size and and you know there were some that had 13 and then there were some that were up in you know in the upper 20s and so mr mcintosh obviously is keeping an eye on those grade levels that have a higher number uh and there may be already postings for those positions but when he talked about room for growth there's there's some room for growth there which is good but we got to manage that as well moving forward i mean we don't want to go a class to go from 20 to 32 you know on day two when we're fully in person so

136it'll also have to be something where i know like the elementary level especially you know parents are very interested those left and came back and maybe they wanted so-and-so's teacher well we got to definitely look at numbers and hold on to those numbers in those classrooms and so that may not happen for them as much as we'd like it to and much as they'd like it to we have to go with their space burst for safety purposes and then move from there i think that's a good point dr mccord even in the high schools i think and junior highs too have the level classes i know that there's been times where we and we try to accommodate the best we can but we're in a little bit different situation this year and i hope that

137our parents will understand as we are trying to accommodate the needs but also keep our class sizes to the most to the best that we can so hopefully we can all work together and find ways to accommodate that the best that we can but still maintain those class sizes okay moving on to return to work and the precautions and procedures for the employees we have ppe in each of the classrooms we provide them with their face coverings or face shields as appropriate and requested as you already know there's hand sanitizer in every classroom cleaning solutions provided for the daily spot cleaning of the high traffic areas those classrooms are sanitized daily we as already mentioned we have a coveted team of custodians to assist us in those higher needed areas and then there's a deep

138cleaning every third day at a minimum and then we also follow the district health protocols and reporting and returning to work which i spoke about earlier and notification of positive contacts and then as we return to work and the support that the district's offering we have employee assistance program and then regular communication with those vulnerable staff you know we'll reach out to them talk to them find out how they're doing and and do just basic check-ins there's training for the use of the online platforms and the supplemental resources and then instructional technology support dedicated to virtual learning mr mcintosh i know that yes sir i know that the eap is in place and that's a substantial benefit to our employees but we also have teachers and staff who are in the building now and who

139will be in the building as we move to full time in person who are concerned about their own anxiety and their own level of stress related to this pandemic will we have personnel available and alerted to checking in with those folks as as time permits well i think that's a really good point you know we have social workers at all of the elementaries in the junior highs and then the mental health counselors at the at the high school there's also you know the administrator or a relationships that get built on each campus to help those individuals who may be experiencing a rather higher level of anxiety and i can understand that as we report back so i think it just goes back to the communication within either the administration administrator or if it's bigger than

140that than those social workers mental health counselors are there to kind of help and guide them to other places but eap you know is you get 10 session 10 sessions for free for every employee so and they're the real counselors to assist and give the employees the tools to put in their tool belt to kind of lower their anxiety and come in to work each day absolutely and thank you for that i just want us to to be mindful of the fact that we have employees at every level who who may be experiencing a level of stress and anxiety that we don't really know about correct thank you mr mcintosh next miss bets good evening president santa cruz governing board members dr mccord i wanted to start with the transportation update as we can't start

141school without getting our kids there so just the fleet is in better shape than it's ever been so we have been taking advantage of the lung the long break in addition as you know we did implement the new routing software versatrans this last spring and so all of the regular education routes are totally completed have been verified all the drivers have driven the routes have substantiated their times one of the issues we had last year was with our software the the software indicated a time that were often as much as 30 minutes off which caused some of the delays and issues at the beginning of the school year last year so we believe that as far as our regular education buses go we're in good shape we did we did reinstate the wrist the wristband

142program for our kindergarten students so each bus we are affectionately giving a package of those colored laminated cards to every bus so that let's use greenfield elementary as the example they have the greatest number of buses so they have seven buses so each bus will have its own color and each kindergarten teacher will be given the appropriate yellow green blue purple red wristband to put on to the kindergarten student so that in the afternoon when they're going home they're able to match up the color that's shown in the bus window to the wristband on their wrist those have been all trans been transmitted to all of our elementary schools as well as the school classroom list given to to the entire school not just kindergarten but indicating what bus every student is on in the

143entire school so that has already occurred in addition at the junior high and the high schools they don't worry so much about kindergarten students and wristbands but they would like to know what the approximate lineup would be for the buses so that they know which students are on which bus that's going to come in first second third fourth etc and so those bus lineups have been sent out to our secondary schools as well assigned seating this has had come up recently that we really need to make sure that we're understanding who's on our buses and who and where they are sitting in the event of an outbreak where we're able to do some contact tracing so again it's difficult the first couple of weeks we're not in a steady state especially the first couple of

144weeks this year as only half of our students will be riding the bus on any one day so under those circumstances we're going to wait probably until the end of september and actually starting at the very beginning we're actually having the bus drivers indicate to all the students hey find a seat and then if you like that seat stay there for the next you know couple of months because we are going to assign you to a seat uh when when the appropriate time is and basically the driver will just send a seating assignment back and have the students write down their names at every grade level so in addition to that we wanted to make sure that we had some visibility as to which students are actually riding our bus so we have not been

145able to send it out today but it's ready to go tomorrow so we're sending out the registration form tomorrow asking our families first of all do you plan on using gilbert public schools busing services if the answer is no then they're done if they say yes and we're actually asking them is it occasionally or regularly this will just give us some more information on in the event of an outbreak how we can match up the student to the bus route that they're on in addition we did verify of course all of our buses do have cameras on them and we keep video and the video is kept anywhere between three weeks to a month and so in the event of an outbreak and we don't know for certain who the student was sitting next to

146were able to pull that video and be able to verify that fairly quickly the special education routes ongoing again this is a complexity that i learned about last year the issue that as special education students arrive and depending upon where they live they could impact the pickup and drop off times for every single student on that route that's already been routed requiring us to contact all the parents over and over again as their schedules change because we're adding students to routes this year with the assistance of the special education department we received every single student that had an iep that had an iep mandate of specialized transportation by the 15th or 20th of may so we've been active actively getting them all routed what happened then though is at the end of june and early

147july we had some significant upturns in covid 19 cases throughout the county and at that point in time many of our students with transportation and iep needs disenrolled from our neighborhood schools and enrolled in global academy so when that happened many of these students their transportation was deleted they're now online so theoretically they don't need transportation to go to school online so at this point in time the last couple of weeks we've been working very closely with the special education department identifying all those students with that need did they move back into a bricks and mortar so that we can get them routed as quickly as possible so right now we think that we've got everybody routed to the tune of maybe maybe as many as 30 to 40 individuals have not yet been routed

148which is much much better than in prior years so we feel like we're in pretty good shape there as well and then finally if you remember we did have a great deal of phone calls last year we believe that all these efforts that we've made will contribute greatly to the number of phone phone and emails coming in the first day of school but we do know that we're expecting those it's always difficult the first week or so of school and so we we have worked with technology services to get set up another phone bank with an additional six phones put into the conference room and areas in transportation so that we can manage all the phone calls so in addition wanted to share again as we've had resignations of other employees we've also seen resignations

149of our drivers so since august 1st or so we've lost about 12 drivers so we are actively recruiting at this point we have a game plan for tuesday morning to make sure that all of our routes are covered in addition i had been told that chandler public schools was providing some support to queen creek renting out their drivers as they are not yet in session so trace toby our director has been reaching out to local school districts around to find out can we open up a purchase order with mesa or with scottsdale or some of the other neighboring school districts to actually rent to their drivers for a period of a couple of weeks while that school district is not in session but gilbert public schools is so we're still working on those kinds of

150things as well to mitigate some of that loss the i talked about the video cameras uh implementing the zonar z-pass so we had talked about this last year a couple of times with our with the superintendent's parent council we talked about it um in june about whether that would be a value things were looking pretty good at the end of june and we put that on the shelf however it's deemed now that we really should probably do that so higley unified as an example does not have z-pass they have another system by which they are having the students put their their pass on the bus so that that the the bus knows who's on the bus you know at any point in time so that's what the z-pass will do as well we we have

151moved forward on implementing that getting all the equipment put on all of our buses hoping to pilot it after fall break with with some of our elementary schools to start in addition we talked about the signage so our special education students starting july 8th july 8th september 8th starting september 8th we'll be going tuesday and then thursday and friday that first week so you can see the four-day sign on the bus there and then the monday thursday sign for those starting the next week and then the tuesday friday sign for those that will start tuesday and their second day will be on friday next week so that that way the students can see oh they're expecting me to be here today or oh they're not expecting me to be here today so all of our

152buses fortunately will be running their exact same routes every day again they'll just have fewer students on the bus giving them additional practice etc a couple of other additional things the dr mccord brought forward to us last year the idea of putting bus stop signs on our bus stop so those are being deployed tomorrow and thursday so that all of our students and families know where the bus stops are primarily for elementary they most of our elementary junior highs and high school bus stops are the same however it's mostly to support our elementary students so that's my report on transportation okay i can go on great i didn't hear you say the status of the sanitizing gun oh um yes that's in a future slide though dr santa cruz i'm still ahead i'm still ahead

153of myself okay so this is um this is uh breaking news so the summer meal program we were just notified yesterday that the u.s department of agriculture has extended that through december 31st 2020 and we received notification today from the department of education here in arizona that they've confirmed that and we are to begin providing meals to every single student whether they're free introduced or not as soon as possible we're starting to we'll we're ramping up for that to happen on the 8th of september a couple of things this is breaking news for all of our principals so the good news is all of our students are going to have are going to be fed the potentially difficulty is we might be creating a logistical issue because we'll have that many more students actually in

154cafeteria lines trying to get meals so however because all the meals are not going to be charged it will facilitate getting them in in and out of the line for purposes of the point of sale system etc so we're actually all very excited about that we will bring back there for all cafeteria workers to make sure that we can have as many lines as possible as our staffing will allow us we too have seen a fair amount of reductions in staff and nutrition services but we're fully advertising for additional cafeteria workers when i was speaking with the director today debbie mccarron she indicated that normally we're feeding about 40 percent of our student population she expects that this could go up to be 80 so the good news is we no longer will need to

155concern ourselves with not enough reimbursement for the national school lunch program and for our food services program um and then and then we will be able to serve the families throughout gilbert in a very positive way any questions on any of that okay great here comes dr santa cruz i'm waiting with favorite bread so how are we going to let families know about that or what is your plan to i guess maybe that will go out to principles and then they'll let families know how that will work so right now as an example we are still having a curbside pickup of our free introduced at lunch free and reduced lunch families and they're we're still providing that to them between 7 and 9 30 every morning that will continue and as they're coming we'll go

156ahead and give them a flyer and let them know that this will be continued through the 31st of december in addition anybody that comes to breakfast or lunch tomorrow they will not be charged so it will get out in that way as well but we're launching the flyer and all the communication um thursday friday this week will that be at the secondary level too yes it will be yes so it is amazing i mean that is amazing i have i just have to say it's going to be a huge i mean i think it's going to be very helpful to families during this difficult time and um just really puts us in a different place than we've ever been before so that's really amazing well and just to be clear i've already had some questions

157about wow then then really our nutrition service department is going to be in trouble because they're not going to have any revenue at all so i want to make sure it's clear that this is usda and these are all fully reimbursable meals so some of the changes that we're going to make are that the a la carte hot hot a la carte foods will not be available to the junior highs and high schools at least initially we're going to get into a steady state and figure out how much how much staff we have to be able to manage that there will be a la carte options however the the free meal will be a packaged meal that will be it'll be hot and cold um and there will be some choice but it will be

158the com the combination the combo pack that we provide generally for students so nobody will ever have to go with a cheese sandwich right nobody will ever have to go with this cheese sandwich that's exactly right so regarding the cleaning i'm going to start with the trident sprayers um dr santa cruz have they indicated how long that will continue is that indefinitely is it until december 31st that's where they are right now our understanding is there's a great deal of pressure to extend it through the entire fiscal year but we'll just monitor it as we have been it's been changing um every month at least so so um the they're cry they're called the trident sprayers and we have verified this twice i wish i could guarantee for certain that they're going to arrive on

159the 8th of september but we've verified twice that they're designated for gilbert public schools and there are 50 of them which means that every single school will have one this is a great tool it allows them to go through every classroom fairly quickly to desanitize every night and then in addition the playground it allows the custodian or the building manager to go out to the playground and spray the playground equipment twice a day to making sure that everything is desanitized it does not replace cleaning of course but it will go a long way towards making sure that our surfaces are safe throughout our buildings so every elementary school and junior high will have one and and every high school or junior high that has a weight room will have two so that they can be

160used in the weight room and then will be used throughout the building so we are expecting them all to come in on on the 8th of september and we will deploy them as soon as we get them in the good news is that we do have the chemical in though so that's ready to go at every single one of our school sites in addition 10 of those sprayers are designated for transportation with the same thing so that every time that they run around they're able to go and when i see a route i mean all three runs high school elementary junior high and they'll be able to go ahead and fog the inside of the bus so that the um so that when the afternoon run is available it's desanitized and then we'll we'll clean

161it at the end of the day on the buses as well and right now we're managing that we did not anticipate having the trident sprayers in time so we're managing that every single one of our buses has a spray pot bottle of this this qt material and so they are actually using a hand spray bottle to desanitize every time they're doing a special education run a preschool run whatever the case an evit run and they're doing that individually now on our buses as well um i'm happy to say that all of the plexiglas shields are in and have been installed and deployed to all of our schools the every single spray bottle we finally received all the sprayers that we needed to make sure that every classroom was fit with one the hand sanitizer bottles

162of course have been in for some time we made a commitment it was actually ashland ranch that we used as the model for determining how many dispensers how many hand sanitizers dispensers do we need in our average elementary school in gilbert and so it was at ashland that we determined the locations and we determined that there were 14 that were needed the dispensers were needed there were 14 per elementary so i can say that we are at at least eight for every elementary and they have the product to go with it we have prioritized the elementary schools over the junior highs and high schools just due to the age of the students and the fact that that we want to make sure it's purely visible and so every single school has a minimum of eight

163as well as the product to fill them as the dispensers are coming in we're going to fill in the 14 to the elementaries and then go to the junior high and high schools again all of the hand sanitizer bottles are fully available and so as they're being ordered by schools we are deploying those as well to all the areas for the junior high and high schools until we can get the other dispensers in so is that the hand sanitizer that's not at every classroom but it's just at spaces around the junior highs and high schools right so yes yes so like in the so marcy actually marcy taylor met with all of the junior high and high schools and determined where do we need them so the locations would have been and we have the

164bottles to go instead right now until we get the dispensers but the libraries the auditoriums the um the office area the attendance area those types of places have been identified so indicating that probably about eight would be needed for every junior high and high school seven or eight so again as soon as they come in we'll get them out as quickly as possible the good news is we we were having a hard time getting the hand sanitizer it is a foam hand sanitizer again so that it doesn't hopefully makes less of a mess but we do have a fair amount of product of that in right now as well so at least the product is coming in the delivery of clean cloths there are a few outliers and where for some reason we're having a

165hard time getting them in but generally speaking throughout the school district the class have been delivered and sent us is the company that's operating that and they're the ones who will be doing the laundering and bringing in the new the new clean class once a week at every single school um let's see and then the other thing is the bathroom cleaning machine so one of the things that that albert has talked about from the very beginning is that with these cleaning protocols let's try to get the equipment that we can to facilitate that process with our custodians and our building managers so the cleaning machines we have ordered as well two for every high school one for every junior high in elementary those are were expected in the same time as the trident sprayers we

166don't have confirmation of that at this point but but just to give you an idea these have been ordered since june so we've been trying to just constantly nudge when they come and when are they coming so we're happy to get the sprayers in this week this coming week so what are we doing until the sprayers come hopefully september 8th if they don't come what's our backup plan same with the bathroom cleaning machines what's the backup plan if those don't show up um so the bathroom cleaning machines all the custodians and the um and the building managers know how to clean a bathroom and so they would do what they've always been doing it's just that the the cleaning machines would help them do it quicker in addition the if we don't get these sprayers

167in there is an option to again we do have some extra spray spray triggers in now and spray bottles so we have options to be able to deploy those as well and get the chemical in there because it can be as i described with our buses that's what we're doing with our buses so that's an option um we have gotten confirmation though so we're we're we're feeling more positive than we have for a long time regarding these trident sprayers but i will keep you apprised yeah i just think as long as we have a backup plan in case it doesn't because we've we've committed to those those cleaning protocols and want to make sure that we're doing what we can you bet and then as far as the delivery of the cloths if they weren't

168delivered already you said there's a few outliers are you expecting them tomorrow or the next day i mean yeah so by tuesday for sure we had an issue with one school yesterday those were delivered yesterday so we're good there and then another school came up today and they're supposed to be delivered tomorrow morning yes they're on top of it albert's staying on top of it those are the only two that were outstanding now there's only one left that i know of at least okay thank you so much you bet and then finally performing arts i'd like to give a call out to um karen coleman she's worked very hard to figure out how can we make our instrument safe for our students so there were two products that she found the mighty mist is to

169sanitize the inside of horns and the super slick is really meant to sanitize the exterior of our wood instruments so the super slick is in and we're able to deploy that out to our our orchestras and probably especially with our clarinets and stuff like that for our band instruments and we're still waiting for the mighty mist to come in in addition she actually went out and hit up um lowe's and home depot for buckets um and then using probably some sort of a material a kitty litter type material so that there's a place that the students can like shake out their trumpets i was worried about that so so that it's not all over the carpet or in the air whatever the case may be there's some valves yeah yes and we have um we

170also had one student uh that that was sharing a horn and that we have put in an order to get a second horn so that we don't have that sharing going on as well so we are working with a performing arts group as well to come up with strategies sorry those buckets have been needed for years to know that they emptied that out on the carpet and just leave it i didn't want to get into that detail i'm sorry so again i guess just what is the backup for the brass instruments are those for the mighty mist is that for instruments that are shared like if you don't have an answer to that question so i've been a little bit external to that conversation but i will find out and i'll put it in this

171week's board memo so you're aware yeah any other questions on that oh the final thing before we get into the budget availability so in talking with um john castellano about technology so how are we going to clean our technology our chromebook so um in doing the research it seems that a 70 percent isopro isopropyl alcohol solution works very well for the keyboards and the exterior of the of the chromebooks and other laptops the issue is with the lcd screens and so it needs to be diluted to 50 percent concentration we we did have enough isopropyl alcohol in to deploy them all to our high schools and secondary so they think they can get started having that available to them we're working at getting a 50 solution but we do have enough alcohol where we can

172at least give them the alcohol and they can dilute it themselves to the 50 level and we're still working on options for our elementary schools so there are products out there there's electronic wipes and there's a 3m wipe that is meant for electronic materials we're looking at seeing how quickly we can procure those so that we can send them out to our elementary schools so that's all i have about um the cleaning are there any other questions so dr santa cruz are you are you good perfect thank you that brings up a question because you're talking about cleaning chromebooks which you know after someone has used it but since everybody has had a chromebook with the online learning how are we i mean we've had that before for junior highs and high schools are the

173elementary students going to be able to keep their chromebook what is the plan for elementary is it going to become a one-to-one and then they just carry their chromebook with them or what what is the plan for them we would ask that they they hang on to their chromebooks right now as we're using them and then if we're back full and we no longer need to use a buzz platform at the elementary level and and just shift over to uh what we've always done then we will collect them on each campus okay so yeah but they will be they will be we don't have enough to be able to leave one on campus and one at home they would be transporting those back and forth and with elementary kids they might be more at risk

174could be when i think the cleaning need is primarily due to repairs that have to be made and those kinds of things so as um i think librarians are mostly collecting them and then um they're working with technology services to make sure that they're repaired and cleaned etc so i think that's the biggest need okay thank you so i wanted to talk about the budget availability there's a lot of moving parts to the budget in the current year as you know we are funded on current year funding but we have all these other grants out there and available to us i wanted to talk about that the biggest thing i want to talk about is the enrollment of bricks and mortar versus arizona online so to date we have about 27 800 enrollees in our

175neighborhood schools and about 5 600 or so and this changes daily so please i'm saying about don't hold me to the exact numbers versus last year our neighborhood enrollment was 33 000 and our online was 125 or 131. so that's a remarkable change you mean 1 000 no 131. 100 000 versus 5 000 because they were the full-time students all of them that's both part-time and full-time enrollment wow yeah so it's a big huge increase and as you know the um when it comes to arizona online the adm calculation the average daily membership calculation is is very different and as the first calculation occurred august 13th which is um five days after we started um the the uh counts were very very low but i just wanted to to make sure that you all were

176aware of those those numbers in addition to that looking globally now so how many students have we lost globally so we've lost about 980 students year over year in enrollment this is not average daily membership we've lost 980 students year over year so um so based upon that information we are going to see a reduction in our budget for the current year to get us to the 98 percent guard rail from last year okay however we have some cares act funding and i wanted to go into some detail about that as well as the enrollment stabilization grant so if we go to the next slide so i wanted to share that this is the analyses that we've done thus far regarding the cares act that was the amount of money that we knew we had

177that was over and above what we budgeted for that's the 2.3 million dollars and you can see the total looking at two years of identified direct spend associated with the pandemic that was eligible under the cares act funding is just over 2.1 million dollars so of that 2.3 million dollar pot we've spent 2.1 million leaving us with about 200 thousand dollars to meet additional needs that are related to covid so are there any questions on that so i wanted to make sure that i identified those details can you tell me what the online instruction six hundred one thousand so that was the expansion of the florida virtual and let's see in the uh training associated with all of our teachers being trained on the florida virtual so that was that was making it a site

178licensed le sorry a site license versus um versus a uh versus being pay as you go i know i thought we were going to save i thought we were looking at 350 to 400 it was and so we're identifying expenditures associated with eligibility for the cares act so to to to move some expenditures however to answer your question we spent about 350 000 last year but the budget was about 150 000 so the additional 200 dollars was the pay as you go especially during the summer when we had um summer school that was online um and so the then moving that three hundred fifty thousand dollars up to the site license brought us to the six hundred one thousand and then but that means globally i mean district-wide um k-12 that's the total cost i

179wouldn't assume that for in the future it would be back to a 350 000 a year it will not it will not unless we've made a decision that we're not going to keep the site license yes we can go back down to just the minimum uh going into the 2022 school year i believe do i have that correct barbara it's okay that's okay we don't need to talk about that right now thank you okay okay so um so then the other part of that is the 98 guard rail um so the 98 of weighted student count from last year so we were estimating a 400 student actually a 400 adm loss that's what we budgeted for going into 2021. so if we if we um lost less than 650 students we would be somewhere between

18098 and 100 but to date this is to date we have lost 900 students so therefore we are planning on revising our budget down that we that we gilbert public schools own so that reduction will be about 2.5 million dollars so we have 200 thousand dollars of karezak money available and that we know we need to reduce our our budget down by two and a half million dollars so we still have 2.3 million dollars to come up with to balance our budget for the current year so is that is that clear okay sorry one more thing so the enrollment stabilization grant is that to get us back to the 98 number so those are those are tied together that's what that's the mechanism of getting to that 98 that's correct okay thank you so um

181so staff has been looking at so we based upon the student accounts today um you know i had on the slide that we're looking at applying for 30 million dollars of the enrollment stabilization grant and that's relevant to that 27 000 students from 33 000 and the 5 600 students to the 134 so it's all related to all of that so we are going to be applying for about 30 million dollars of that enrollment stabilization grant to get up to your point to get up to that 98 funding of last year's weighted student count so just wanted to make sure that the board was aware of all that and so as part of that as part of the enrollment stabilization grant it is a federal grant and it was identified that we need to find

182covid related costs associated with that enrollment stabilization grant but they were going to be very open and and flexible about how we did that one of the things they mentioned was revenue losses so that we could if we could show where we had this much money in this particular fund last year and or in 19 and in 20 it decreased substantially we're able to apply for that delta so to date we've identified about five million dollars of revenue loss at the same time we're looking for all those expenditures that we could apply for the 30 million dollar enrollment stabilization grant and that's all very complicated and i'm very sorry but it's it's a little bit of a shell game at this point to try to figure out um where we're going to go from here

183and that grant by the way the grant application is due friday this week so is there are you confident is that a best case scenario that we could get 30 million or are you confident that or how do you feel about that i mean could we be looking at even a less you know less amount than that which would affect our our budget so i i i believe i believe the governor when he says that we will be funded to no less than 98 of the prior years weighted student count how we're going to get there i don't know so one of the things i think that we did anticipate as a group all of my peers was that we would just be funded to worst case we'd be funded through equalization at the 98

184percent of weighted student count but then there was the enrollment stabilization grant funding that was provided from the federal government and so so the state of arizona is using that first and i believe early on the governor identified some of the rainy day funds as being able to hold schools and charter public districts and charter schools harmless so i believe that not sure whether the enrollment stabilization grant will meet the full 30 million dollars but i do believe that we will have the funding in some way shape or form to meet that 98 percent of last year's weighted student count thank you i think that's all i got thanks nice job thank you next don for communication good evening dr dr santa cruz governing board members dr mccord um this is really just a summary

185of what we've talked about at the previous meetings um right now with regards to communication we're really focusing on back to campus just to reiterate some of what the principles shared today the communications at the campus level have been phenomenal and we've been monitoring from them from districts they've been very impressive communicating with our various stakeholders at this moment is definitely challenging and i greatly appreciate all of the expertise that the campuses have shown um some clear things that we just need to support our families with right now one of which is making sure um ms frost mentioned it is making sure that all of our families have accurate contact information and infinite campus as that feeds into blackboard which is our mass notification system luckily we have just gone through an annual update and

186all of our campuses have been working really hard within blackboard there is a report that can be generated to show how many emails are incorrect so i looked at our report for all of our campuses today and we are at below 0.4 bad emails which is phenomenal given the number of parents we have in our district so the campuses have been doing a wonderful job of course right now it's really important that we can communicate accurate and up-to-date information with all of our families so we'll be continuing to remind our families of that that if their contact information changes it's really important to get that updated infinite campus as soon as possible we're also constantly reminding our families right now that they should be expecting and looking out for regular communications from district and their

187campus as all the key information is shared and a lot of that information like has already been mentioned is around educating our families and how they can support their students with regard to expectations for return to campus so for example in our weekly district newsletters to families we're sharing uh what does that daily health assessment look like here's a downloadable pdf also you can view on the website video content about how to go through that daily health assessment video content on five easy steps to washing your hands correctly what families can do to support the efforts to educate their students on best practices for returning to our campuses we also have face covering information including the policy and the protocols prominently posted on the website and we continue to direct our families to that information

188via emails newsletters and of course uh posts on social media that's all i have i i have a question um what about our families that don't have english as their first language how do they get a translation or what are we doing to address those issues thank you for that it's a really important question i will say that because information is coming out so quickly it has been a real challenge to ensure that all information is translated however we've worked hard to identify key pieces of information to ensure that that is translated so for example the daily health assessment that is on the website is in both english and spanish also we're very lucky with our website so with the new district and school websites that we have it has a built-in google translate feature

189when we launched the websites we did work to test how good that translation was and it's around 98 accurate so that means that any uh content that is posted on the website not pdfs but the actual content that's on the page families can click that google translate and it will translate so because of that that is another reason as to why when we send out any communications to our family we also post it within the body of the text on the on the web page so that the translate feature is there it's not ideal i have high hopes for improving our translation services going forward okay thank you any other questions okay thank you thank you just to recap um what we've been doing since august 25th until going through this friday uh working on

190our phase in preparation as you've seen um this evening there's been a ton of preparation going into place we want to do this as well as possible when our students show up on tuesday september 8th we'll be delivering the hybrid model uh assuming the metrics are holding strong from the 8th through the 18th and then planning for a september 21st 5 day a week in person delivery model again hoping that the metrics are there if they're not we will either continue with hybrid or if it goes backwards from there we will have to continue online keeping a positive mindset about this and assuming that our dates will be intact but we also know that things can happen but um we'll talk about the positives moving forward hopefully that we won't have to address those and

191again we'll just continue with uh communication with our families and discuss the in-person and the online delivery models that we have available for our families that's it thank you for listening to us i know it's a lot of information but i think it's important that you as board members our community understands that we have been doing a lot to prepare for opening up the school again and as you can see from what our principles displayed they are extremely excited and want to do the very best they can for their students their staff and their families thank you dr mccord and just a reiteration they're in lies as we observed and listened to the presentations from all of those individuals who made themselves available this evening therein lies the rationale and the reason for why this

192wasn't a turnkey operation and why we needed the time to get ready for any kind of reopening and so at least for me and on behalf of my fellow board members i i would just offer a great amount of appreciation and gratitude for the work that's been done with the understanding that nothing is perfect we're doing the best we can and i think this is indicative of that so we thank you dr mccourt and the team and we thank the teachers and staff as they prepare for this eminent opening in whatever form and all of the work you have done will do and will continue to do on behalf of the students and the families of this district board members any additional commentary i'd like to add something also dr santa cruz if i may

193i really appreciate this i think all of you know that this is something that's i've been very worried about and i'm going to continue to be worried about it just because of everything that's gone on um but the the amount of work and thought that's put into this by all of you all of this staff and everything is is beyond anything that i could even be more grateful for i just i would like to just add something personal um i as you know i spent a lot of time in montana this summer and the city that we were in it used to be a mining town and now it is basically the hospitality industry and as a result of that when they were closed down during that period of time when they reopened in in

194may one of the things that i noticed everywhere we went was no one wanted to close down again and as a result of that people were working so hard trying to get keep things sanitized keep the social distancing because they what they relied on that job they didn't want to close down again and it was really impressive to see the cooperation in this one community of people wearing their masks cleaning things up socially distancing and i think that's what we can have here in this district and i would encourage all of our principals to have that let's make sure we don't have to close it down again attitude which i think you do and if we can just keep portraying that to our community that if everybody works together and does what we need to

195do that that is the right thing then you know the sky's the limit i agree thank you for that anyone else i just would like to express my gratitude for you know we have a number of people who presented tonight but we know that behind them are hundreds thousands of people working to make this all work and i would like to thank each of them wish we could do it individually but we're supposed to social distance we won't and just very much looking forward to having students back on the campus tuesday dr sasha i just wanted to add some thank yous i mean i this is this was a hard decision but it's a decision for our entire community we had a lot of people that came came in and spoke and gave their thoughts

196not one of them were over the age of 60. we are making this decision not just for our families but for everyone in this community and i think we're doing this as safely and carefully as we can using the benchmarks going back in a hybrid model so that we can monitor for a couple weeks get kids used to being back in school because it's been a long time for them i just you know i just i don't know of any time in my lifetime that kids have missed this much school although i heard about australia with their fires they missed a lot of school and the kids still were able to achieve and catch up and do well with their studies so i i expect the same of us that when we get back in

197school and we have our kids there that will all be responsible both in school and at home so that we can keep the virus spread down and keep everybody safe and have that education and i just think that's really really important for our kids to be back in school and that's what we all want some of us see it as going a little sooner and some of us see it as going a little later but i think having the time in the hybrid model we get time to get used to it we get time with the kids to help them adjust and i think it will be you know something that we can have in case things don't go well but i hope that we've learned our lesson from the summer and that we'll continue

198to have the kind of behavior we need in arizona to keep that spi that spread of the virus down and let our kids get back in school just thank you thank you ma'am everyone having had an opportunity to speak and to share appreciation if there is nothing else we are adjourned