Littleton Elementary School District Board Meeting 6/9/2020

001regular session this evening yeah 604 hey would you please take roll call prison mr. Raider dear dr. Raymond's present mrs. rains here missus arsenic here thank you thank you all once again can we go ahead and recite the Pledge of Allegiance States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation [Music] thank you so much again as a reminder if you'd silence any cell phone that you might have there with you you'd like it oh I didn't take a moment of silence and just get some thoughts those who are suffering and need help in this world today they might be watched over and taken care of properly thank you are there any board members who would like to make a statement this evening then I'd just like to say it's already been

002two or three weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to one of the drive-by promotions I was impressed with I thought there'd only be a few people there but I think we counted over a hundred cars it came through it was really impressive the kids came through I was impressed with many of the young women they were dressed up really nicely and both who had moon roofs on the top of their car their dad had him there and they were out waving and excited about it and some of the other young men were sitting in the in the front seat of the car and had a hard time even rolling down the window and we gave things fill them as they walk drive it miss congratulations follow those I think the thing that caught

003my attention is one of them drove by with 20/20 on their window on one side and 20-24 on the other one it kind of made me feel really old at that time so Cathy you might be young but I'm a few years on top of that so yeah all right dr. Freeman would you like to share your report with us Thank You mr. president buenas tardes to tell us and good evening to everyone probably the most significant thing happening in the district this past month were the probation for the promotion celebrations but before I talk about those I feel it's important to address what's transpiring across the country in the world so in the midst of the worldwide pandemic that has disproportionately impacted minorities and people of poverty we've all borne witness to the brutal

004treatment of African Americans in our country we recognize the demonstrations that followed the killings of George Floyd and madhai berry and many others are expressions of frustration that people of color have amassed over years of persecution in Justices inequality and racism the cruel indifference of Dericks oven and the heart-wrenching videos added to the disparate effects of the pandemic magnified the inequality and fuel the upheavals in our streets into what we can only hope will become a movement for greater justice in our society we must speak out against racism vitriol and violence silence only contributes to the problem in order to move forward we must not stand idly by when there's injustice this is the other epidemic facing our society we see it when people fail to act without regard to the impact it will have

005on their community and it appears in people who act out without regard for the impact their behaviors have another's in order to move forward we must understand that to say black lives matter does not mean that one thinks other lives do not it means to remember that they count as much as others not less to say that there is white privilege is not to say that white people have had easy luck it's to say that they've not had to suffer the years about treatment the most african-americans have had to endure in our society equity is central to the values in work of public schools yet we live in a time of almost obscene inequity the perpetual traumas of neck WA t and discrimination take a significant toll in the mental health and well-being of witnesses

006and victims we cannot undo these harms with platitudes of valuing everyone equally seeking equity is more than making things more accessible and must manifest in actively becoming more anti-racist and more anti discriminatory as leaders who value equity we must work to dismantle all forms of systemic racism and discrimination we must reaffirm our commitment to being culturally sensitive and ensure that cultural responsiveness permeates all members of our community our educators our students and their families it falls to all of us to build a sense of hope for our children and to articulate a vision of a future that's supportive and compassionate one day soon it will fall to all of them to help make a more just nation and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our prosperity we must oppose education policies that

007systematically reinforce inequity and support policies that bring our collective resources together in a way that builds capacity where opportunity has been scarce in these ways we can systematically reinforce equity and justice we stand in solidarity with those who are working to disrupt systemic oppression and promote equity and inclusion we take great pride in the diversity of our student body their outstanding growth there are many accomplishments and last month 730 of them of our eighth grade students matriculated from our district they'll start their journey into high school in a year like none has ever seen before in American education to mark this important milestone each one of our schools created a tunnel of hope along the front drives of our schools our little Ted Education Foundation helps support the schools with balloons signs and supplies students

008received a jump drive with the school created eighth grade promotion video a promotion yard sign they could display in their front yards and us and a scroll with kids that hope pledge among other things the level of energy and enthusiasm amongst our staff was amazing and many of the families decorated their cars as president Nielson said in really creative and colorful ways the students reacted in typical fashion while soaking it all in and others who looked embarrassed by the attention everyone had a lot of fun cheering the students and we all would like to thank mr. Nelson Tim is so Schneck for making time to represent the board at some of these events although the combined efforts although I mean pardon me through the combined efforts of the district and Southwest food service staff we

009were able to offer curbside pickup meals service to our students starting in mid March and ending just before Memorial Day that probe has ended and we've transitioned to our grab a meals summer feeding program meals are provided on Monday Wednesdays and Fridays free of charge to children up to 18 years old at Country Place Leadership Academy and Estrella Vista STEM Academy on May 27th it was the first day of meal service for breakfast and lunch including meals for the weekend so far summer feeding program has already served 5500 meals our staff and the Southwest food sorbets excellent team excellence team diligently work to follow all sanitation and social distancing guidelines so we can safeguard the health of our students our staff in our community our mission at Littleton in the Littleton district continues to be

010to create a comprehensive success oriented learning opportunities for everyone in our schools even in the midst of the pandemic our board is discussing tonight the challenges and opportunities for us as we consider how to open the new year later in this meeting our theme for the 2021 school year is sunshine in our pockets that's not just because sunshine is a good disinfectant but because we can't stop the feeling of all the progress we're looking forward to making with our students and staff this coming year in closing I'd like to express our appreciation to the Arizona Commission of the Arts for their donation of 1,500 dollars and that's all I have this evening if you can bear with us for a little bit president nielsen god got bumped off the meeting and we're rebooting you know

011banned now okay we could have gone to commercial I guess commercial break thank you know what back online now right thank you thank you dr. Freeman appreciate the instruction great insight that you do always have that you present that information to us we don't have any program showcases tonight so Britt anything call to the public anything to come in thank you item number nine the consent agenda are there any items on the consent agenda that any of you would like to discuss or have removed have removed from the consent agenda if there is not they have a motion to accept that as it is this is a me search Nick I move that we accept the consent agenda it's just Kathy I'll second thank you very much that's all those in favor hey I take

012a roll call mr. Nielsen why thank you Oh miss Sonic I thank you very much move ahem moving on them to item number can president intended enrollment contract there's no additional questions other than what we have discussed but one other time I have a motion to prove that any session I can I recommend the governing board approved the new employment contract for the superintendent thank you thank you very much we did take an eye on that one who though calling that one as well mr. Nelson by mr. Rader aye aye mrs. Reyes hi missus Ashima I thank you all very much item number 11 2020 2021 classroom safe under the excluding comment not comment component number 4 mr. president members of the board um we're bringing this item back this evening and a recommending partial

013approval of the 2020 2021 classroom site fund this would allow the bi-weekly payments to be made to employees as we work through changes for schools in the next fiscal year approval is recommended will allow for the leap committee to review the concerns that the board had only for component for and gather input from staff as more information and guidance is given from both the federal and state governments approval is recommended would allow the district to move forward on the components that the board had no questions or concerns about at the May meeting mr. Nielson you're a mute I keep forgetting to unmute myself I'm sorry any cut additional comments or questions on that if not may I have a motion to approve that's like funding - the component number for which we'll do some additional

014work on there it is this is Amy and I move that the governing board approve the revisions the classroom sight fund plan excluding component 4 for the 2020 2021 school year thank you this is mr. Rader I second thank you can we take a roll call dorita bye okay thank you very much we'll just get it to the point where we get this technology all down we won't have to use it anymore item number 12 and Skelly would you like to redo that one as well I guess mr. president members of the board I have two policies this evening and one exhibit to share no action we've taken by the board this evening on first reads and no action will be taken on the exhibit I'd like to start with 12 a policy gcd which

015is nearly identical to policy GDD the difference is one is administrative or professional staff and one is support staff so let me go through letter a policy gcd first standard practice is to review employment benefits and compare the districts to the surrounding areas we continually work to recruit and retain talent Cobin 19 moved this policy to the forefront as we realize that employees could lose vacation days due to the emergency closure in the need to have staff available during this time currently employees are allowed to carry forward 20 days of vacation and if they have more than that at the end of the fiscal year they may convert a minimal number of days based on years of employment to sick leave or lose those days altogether administration is recommending a change to the existing policy

016that would allow employees to carry forward 1.5 times the number of days currently allowed under policy there's also very limited circumstances that prohibit certain employees from taking vacation in addition to the policy is to allow the superintendent excuse me to pay out excess days to an employee when it is in the best interest of the district to do so as mentioned Koba 19 has created extenuating circumstances for the district as well as other organizations and companies so administration is asking the board to consider temporarily adding an additional six days which would bring it the cap to 36 just at a time that we could sunset that or the board can review that in a year to determine if they would like to make that change permanent we had an instance today actually that just came

017up we have several staff ready to take vacation that those first two weeks in July which is pretty typical and we've had to ask about four staff members to postpone that time due to the state asking for the review of our Arizona online application and so this is just one of the one example of how vacations have become very fluid to the point that you know we're looking to make this a little easier to maintain for our administrators I'd be happy to answer any questions that anyone might have about this any of you have any comments or questions on that um this is Amy and I have just a question so I guess my concern is if we have an employee who has a Creed more sick leave then they're not allowed to use it

018and maybe this was in policy and I just didn't realize it um so like I'm thinking of it we have a lot of younger teachers who may want to go on maternity leave and so currently they can only take 20 days miss oceanic this is only for vacation and it would affect 12-month employees because they're the only group that accrues the vacation I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about that okay thank you mm-hmm you I mean any of the rest of you have any other questions on that part of them there's not miss Kelly will you go to the next one well actually mr. Nielson it's exactly the same but if we don't have any questions we can ask miss Chizzy to throw the policy if they're really quick this we have pride taken pride

019in the fact that we treat all of our employee groups the same whether their support or certificated or administrative staff and so this just further aligns both policies to be exactly the same some other districts don't they still have the old way of doing things though unless you have questions it's basically the same okay any questions on either one of those not I appreciate your work there is killing thank you routine mr. president I need to do 12c as well so I'm sorry am i skipping over that yep okay what happened ooh number C please Thank You mr. president members of the board well see our exhibits for CA e and g Dae both exhibits are exactly the same but again address the two different employee groups the professional staff and then the support staff

020we have never had a telecommute or work from home agreement until the covetous einman to home occurred and so we started looking into some different things reading about policies that other districts have and took a look at so the exhibits here outline the expectations for telecommuting or working from home so prior to the closure of schools as I said there's no practice so this exhibit would set expectations for employees who are in positions that are conducive to telecommuting this arrangement is a viable flexible work option for some positions this exhibit would not make telecommuting and entitlement but rather an accommodation based on conditions that may arise for the employee or the employer this agreement in no way changes the terms or conditions of employment the Society of human resource management known as Sherm and the

021American Association for school personnel administrators asthma recommend that if tell community is a work option then guidelines need to be established to mutually protect the employer and the employee and this is what you see attached to this item this evening thank you any comments or questions about this all right anything else on that one no thank you mr. president and I'll turn it over to back to you thank you I'd let you take care of all of those now since I forgot you there on the last night dr. Freeman would you like to review number 13 with us yes I'm looking 13 tonight so to have some discussion maybe lay out some ideas for the opening of school for next year so if we could get the PowerPoint up on item 13 we can get

022started on that and as I'm waiting for that to come up of course the the first slide is the title slide which says what we're going to talk about tonight and of course when when our board meeting is being broadcast and recorded we like to have things go really smoothly and now I think everybody can see the title slide which is our meeting tonight in some discussion we don't have plans for action to be taken tonight but we would like to put together action items for the next meeting if we can as much as we confront load the school year so the next slide you'll see what our plan to gen defer this evening is so one is to review what's happened so far with the emergency action on the epidemic pandemic and then give

023board members an opportunity to share concerns that they've had themselves or they've heard in the community with the idea that our staff will be writing those down so if they don't come up in things that we've suggested to be addressed that we can get those on our list I'm sure to bring them back on June 23rd with some information for members if that's needed after we do that we'd like to review the feedback from the town halls and surveys that we've done so everybody has an idea of what kind input we got from the community we would like to explore some potential models it's not an exhaustive list but it gives an opportunity to have some discussion of pros and cons of different ways to approach the start of the school year and then if

024we could narrow down some options to start the year next year by hearing how the majority of the board might feel about wearing masks or things like that and that'll be the final part of our discussion today so let's start out by reviewing progress everybody is probably aware by now we finished out the year with home learning support a lot of paper packet materials were put out but there was also online support that kids could get academically and for social emotional learning and teachers did loom videos and sent things out a lot of work on communication on remind so the engagement did vary a lot from teacher to teacher and family to family and we learned a lot doing that our counselors social workers did a great job of helping provide support and I think

025everybody was a little surprised by the the impact that staying home and being locked down and I know I didn't think I'd struggle with it and I did more than I thought so hopefully maybe we've all learned a little bit more about ourselves and and have found a way to find some support I think a lot of us feel better by starting to put pieces together for the start of next year like we're making some progress the grab and go meals last summer we served three or not in the summer at the end of the school year we saw we served almost three hundred and sixteen thousand meals in the fourth quarter summer meals have started and I talked about that in my comments to start meeting we did some deep cleaning of campuses during

026the closure Oh we always do summer cleaning but of course we have disinfecting and things like that going on as well and custodians kind of following along behind people when offices are being used and making sure that those are wiped down we've started to order sanitizers I don't know if you can't really see the bottom of that slide I don't know if there's if we need to shrink it a little bit so the side spit that's going to be tricky so we've started ordering sanitizers wipes we're looking at plexiglass screens we're running into a problem with procurement where we have to go to bid if we purchase more than a certain number more than like $10,000 worth of equipment which means we have to go to bid if there's not a state bid and that

027slows things down quite a bit it is one of the areas of flexibility we've asked the legislature to address as emergency pandemic procurement waivers and those kind of things but we're trying to build up supplies we have several gallons a sanitizer and I think we have something like 10,000 masks so we're we're building up our supply pool now in hopes of hat being ready for whatever we're asked to do to start the school year so moving along we of course are continually monitoring the information at national and state levels the governor's last executive order his press conference materials coming out from the Department of Education the State Department helped the County Health Department attending a lot of webinars and zoo meetings reading a lot of material from other agencies and of course always weighing decisions

028on what we're doing based on staff student safety and well-being so for instance this month in June 12-month staff is back at their work areas two days a week and we have people who are you know wearing masks when they're out about on district property as a courtesy to other people to reduce any kind of spread mostly concerned about people who are asymptomatic but may have some of the virus we've been exploring a variety of scenarios to accommodate student learning and to present tonight districts have been talking to each other and comparing plans and those pros and cons some districts have already gone so far as to announce what they're going to do others are taking a little more time and we're in that category and I'll tell you in a slide or two about

029the things we still don't know coming up so one of those is working with the governor staff on flexibility that should be issued soon according to the staff the DHHS approved opening schools in Phase one even though they're bigger than groups of ten due to other factors that were concerns about kids and trying to weigh the concern about kids not being in school and kids being in school and so they've recommended that we figure out a way to get school going and so that's the challenge that we have moving forward Superintendent of Public Instruction Hoffman a de task force released a road map on June 1st and they're starting a technology task force now I think it's going to meet tomorrow which is intended to help with supporting teachers in distance learning and the department

030has also also has a continuity of operation plan that they hope to have ready this week so we don't have that yet we're kind of waiting to see what that says the Maricopa County Department of Public Health is issuing guidance with clear policy coming soon we've had a meeting with the head of that department and have a better understanding of how we can up at the spread of the virus when school opens its it's far from perfect and there are some things that are going to be out of the district's control where we're going to need to depend on Maricopa County Department of Public Health to tell us what to do if we have infections or any kind of spread and that probably would be on a school by school basis if school resumes with

031kids in the in the school setting finally the joint Legislative Budget Committee plans to release a complete fiscal year 2020 and 21 budget update on June 19th when they meet it'll include revised revenue forecasts along with updated state spending assumptions and the last release they did said that revenue was up a little bit from the last projection that projected a 1.1 billion dollar shortfall so they are seeing mostly some increases in privilege tax that may be a positive sign but I think the state's still looking at a downturn the matter the question is how much of a downturn will there be so that's what we know and what and what we're not sure of is what all of this will cost so we're getting a lot of information from national groups this is an analysis

032that was done by the school business officials and the school administrators national organizations and so they added up some of the additional factors that need to be considered when dealing with distancing and sanitizing copepod and so what they did is they took all of the kids in the United States and all the districts and divided that to get an average school district size and that was I think 3654 3456 something like and then added up the average cost of the average district now we're bigger than that I think probably by one and a quarter times so if you take that one point seven seven eight million and equate that out to a 6300 student school district that's about three million dollars if you just used those estimates of average cost our kovat relief we expect

033from the federal government is nine hundred thousand dollars so we have about a two million dollar gap these estimates are accurate which means school districts are gonna need probably more help from the state if we're gonna pour it try to put all of our students back in brick-and-mortar programs so in the next slide what you'll see is we're really not sure how those average estimates are gonna impact us in Arizona Arizona has some unique characteristics that make us different from say the Midwest or the Northeast seaboard that may not bear out to be true the gap may not be that big we're still waiting for the continuity of operations plan template from the department why we have some guidance from the county health department we're still waiting for clear policy protocols we know for instance

034that if students have an infection or showing signs they'll be sent home for 10 days and we know that the county health department will look at the amount of spread in the immediate area of the school on the amount of spread in the school to decide if they will close the school and for how long and we'll be working with the county health department and each one of those incidents and events we need to figure out how to address people infected and the ten days out if we're going to provide learning support and if it's staff what the impact on the school would be if you have a lot of staff or missing work because of a kovat infection um we're we're not sure what the flex authority will be that the governor mentioned in

035his press conference one of the things that we need to really provide flexibility and options for the school boards and school districts is a student count flexibility so what you're hearing a lot of districts talking about is alternating schedules we're calling them a B plans so whether people meet in the morning or the afternoon or they meet on Monday and Tuesday and somebody else meets on Thursday and Friday that in an a B plan you schedule your buildings so only half the students are in it at a time that allows you to have social distancing there's absolutely no way to have social distancing with everybody in the school at once and you know all of you who have been to visit classrooms can appreciate that with about half the kids you can probably get 6

036feet or so between them in a classroom um if you tried to get 6 feet between every kid in a line down the hallway it would take the entire hallway and so in common areas and doorways and things like that there isn't really probably the opportunity to have a true 6 feet we probably you know can try to keep kids at arm's length from each other so there's not a lot of touching but depending on the plan that we choose when we go back we'll have to really be honest with our community about describing what we'll be able to provide for social distancing for parents to consider when they decide what to do with their kids so the other is I mentioned procurement in the pandemic we very quickly get to procurement limits and we're

037competing for humor procurement if you can imagine all over the United States schools are buying sanitizer and all over the United States schools are buying plexiglass screens and all over the United States people are trying to buy distancing things hotspots computers and all of those things are in large demand and so if we can get some exceptions on procurement from the legislature just in the case of an emergency we could get more orders and probably sooner and maybe have be able to get have more of that on hand when needed and not waiting for it look for instance we'd hate to have to close school because we didn't have certain supplies and joint Legislative Budget Committee as I said is meeting later this month it the their meeting will be before our next board meeting

038but what we're understanding is if the legislature is going to go into special session on anything that will impact the budget like school stability at school budget stability proposals they're not going to want to do that till after they know what the revenue is so that's um that's cutting it pretty close for us I don't know how much state government could be geared up and ready to act but it's possible that there will be implications for the school district budget based on a special session that may actually happen after we've already started the fiscal year and started to work on their budget we'll have to do budget revisions in October if that's the case so there is quite a bit of uncertainty that we're dealing with as we move forward in the next slide you'll

039see that some of the things that we're reinforcing for reducing the spread include encouraging people to stay home when appropriate if kids have fever or they have any other symptoms we really don't want them to come to school to help reduce the spread we're going to be doing a lot with educating the learning community and communicating expectations that will probably be over and over and over again and I think you're hearing that in other places as well developing criteria for return to school and return to school during the year when people are sent home or if school has to close configuring spaces and routines with things like plexiglass shields masks limiting access to space or spreading out access to space over time and then developing criteria to handle potential closures we may be in a

040situation where the county tells us to close the school tomorrow we need to get the word to everybody that school is not in session tomorrow it's it's kind of like a snow day situation might be in the Midwest that school is not happening and so communication will be key in making sure that we have good contact information for our parents and those kinds of things will be more important than ever before and let's see we're getting close I think close to the end of part one which is new protocols those would be business rules for cleaning and disinfecting and so what County Health Department is telling us is that it's it's this isn't a virus that's got a super hearty sheet so really shook soap and water pretty low intensity EPA recommended cleaning supplies take

041care of this virus pretty well it's just going to be a matter of how much we're cleaning how often and what method and we're gonna want to be really clear and consistent with communicating that to staff into the community and then modified layouts in routine so offices will probably have screens class rooms if depending on what configuration the board elects to use for next year could have some distancing and and it could be more or less students may be making their own little desk partitions they can keep with them keep them clean or make them disposable minimizing sharing of things like computers things in the library obviously in the cafeteria there'd have to be a lot of cleaning and wiping down between cohorts there's a question about if you even want to open your playground

042if we want to have middle school sports how the nurse can handle isolation in the area he's sick of course everybody who sees the nurse doesn't necessarily have COBIT they dispense hundreds of medications a day in that office and so the nurse's office is a busy place even when people are managing regular healthy routines and then probably limiting access and gatherings of people so if you do have an event it it may not be people coming to campus like they're used to and and our parent night probably will be a virtual parent night or things like that so that we're not having big crowds in small spaces now we're two part two so that's a quick review of the things we know the things we don't know and one of the things that we want

043to know that we don't know is what concerns members may have or things that they'd like to be sure under consideration by the district if there's any themes of concerns from their constituents based on our communication media coverage on the padam Akande arizona trends i know we got a lot of comments on people in our community who are checking out all the resources from the cdc and watching the news and of course the news recently has showed a big increase in infections and so I'm sure that's concerning to people if some mr. president you want me to just take people when they call it their name or would you like to guide that discussion you just like to go ahead and they don't want you just go down or go up a little right there

044and just ask as you've got that set up there and if there's any comment there additional things you'd like to see you fill that one wait till everybody gets done here so so so would you like me to go thank you very much I think as far as concerns as a parent myself I think one of the the concerns I had and I don't want this to be taken as an insult to the staff and the remarkable job that was undertaken to transition from a normal school year to no school and a matter of days but I think in my mind I always assumed we would be more prepared to switch to a fully online or fully digital learning environment and I don't think that this is uncommon for our district but the the paper

045packets kind of back going back in time if you will I I assumed that we would be able to to really transition to teachers providing learning opportunities through the one on one devices that we provide and other sources directly to our students so I think as we move forward from from my perspective there's still going to be tons of unknowns and that we need to be prepared to transition from classroom learning partial classroom rat learning to full digital learning to a mixture of both and it almost needs to be seamless and interchangeable so that students and teachers have the flexibility to determine I'm not able to go home to school today somebody in my family said I think I've might have been excused or exposed to somebody so that they're able to make these determinations

046themselves and choose not to come in and whether it's a teacher that doesn't feel safe or doesn't feel like they can come in or it's a student that they're still we're still able to provide continuity this students or continuity and education to all of our students so in my mind and maybe this is moving the on the this the initial part of this discussion I'd really like to see us be prepared for a 100% online education and that just as I'm sitting in a at the D ulc tonight with the group we were interacting through technology that our students would bring their one-on-one devices and be receiving their education through digital means even if they're in person classrooms so that if the very next day that the teacher is unable to come in or the

047the student is unable to come in that the education could still continue I think of course there's also tons of logistical concerns regarding whether we need this stager start times for all of our grades for example so that you don't have a lot of kids coming on the campus at the same time is transportation even feasible if we're have to limit seats to one student per seat staggered throughout a bus does that mean the buses capacity is only ten and does it make sense to be running buses or how many additional buses that we need to run for ten or fifteen students and of course to what type of protocols do we have for screening at bus stops as students come on this campus and what are our expectations for parents again that maybe that's

048more than we were supposed to say at this initial point but I think that those are just some of the common themes that I've been thinking about as I've been reviewing the roadmap for reopening schools and some of our previous discussion so I'm sure there's there's lots to still cover but those are just kind of some of my initial thoughts so did he leave anything for the rest of the members thank you John I appreciate it okay next are you going in alphabetical order or how are you we're gonna do it the roll she's got to have a to just call names we go down ah so much has been covered so I I will be brief I think safety is we know is the primary concern and so making sure that we have processes

049in order for those students who might be at a higher risk and alternatives if we actually go back into the classroom would be of concern to me in addition to that piggybacking on what John was mentioning I think being able to move to 100% online in a way that offers creativity which I think can be challenging but I think in important in order to maintain the attention of the students and then that the item that's really significant for me is are having metrics like a way to measure the effectiveness of whatever it is that we're doing but in particular if we're going to be online primarily it we need to have some metrics that look to whether we you know increased or decreased the retention of information and/or learning I'm not sure what of all

050of those metrics would be but I think that will that will be really important for us to think of in advance so that we'll know if we're being effective or not beyond the testing which I don't know if we even know what the statewide testing will be in the future but if we developed our own metrics then we could track the effectiveness of the measures that we put in place that's all I can think of right now thank you very much appreciate that this is Ray I kind of mimic both comments before so I'm trying gonna try not to go over them again and definitely that was a concern when I mr. Raider mentioned I had assumed we would be able to do much more online earn e-learning than we did I did get a

051lot of community feedback on the paper packets and I will say people were quite surprised how antiquated that process was so I myself have seen the packets I have grandkids and I was also thinking to myself to be quite honest as a parent I would have been extremely disappointed and that's not to say this was easy believe me I get it I just think we need to do focus more energy on technology or whatever it is to get ourselves up to standard I had a parent contact me who has a friend in a different district and I mean they were just telling me what they were able to do which was light years away from where I thought we were so I realized we can't be like everyone but to me who seems extremely antiquated

052so that was extremely important enough for me to say it again I can tell you and opening the city has opened a weave we're in phase one we have three phases so we opened our first phase in June our second phase in July and our third phase in August Wow I can tell you things we've learned things we've done very well and things were still learning so I can't imagine children trying to herd them together and yet keep them apart and you have an extremely extremely challenging job the biggest challenge I think you'll face is telling children or parents if you're unwell stay home never happen you can say it to your pink but they think they have allergies they have a headache it's okay you just have a little sore throat that to me

053it's gonna be your biggest challenge we have that with adults so how you're going to do that I think you're gonna have to have some tough tough criterias and what that'll look like I don't know one thing we found you must put markers especially I think that's going to be helpful with children tell people where they should stand if it's possible to mark the line the hallway line the hallway you guys stand on this line right kids are especially little kids are kind of used to be going stand in line now you just stand on maybe an animal or you know our theme or whatever maybe your district emblem or whatever it is get people used to knowing there's a place they have to go that would be true if you're considering serving lunch how

054you're gonna do that I don't know maybe you could bring lunch in the classrooms I'm not saying you could or maybe you could encourage parents more to buy you know bring lunches I don't know that's gonna be a challenge funding I'm concerned about funding if the surveys I'm hearing where I mean I just take our own employees are saying I don't want to come back because I'm concerned I'm concerned that it yeah it's not healthy I'm gonna get sick so I can't imagine sending my child and having those concerns if 20% of our children don't come back to the school you know what are we gonna do for funding how you gonna support the rest so funding is a great concern and I think dr. Freeman you had sent that survey out or something like

055that and it said twenty percent no seventeen percent maybe wow that's 37 percent of your population that just may not come no matter what you do so I think that's a huge concern my other concern is entry into the office is one thing we've learned with citizens coming in our front door nobody reads they don't pay attention they do look at the things on the wall and the lines on the floor so again I've seen some of those offices those front offices so crowded you're gonna have to figure out how you're gonna limit people are they gonna stand outside in line while you're trying to get parents in I don't know good luck with that we put markers outside that has helped with that we encourage based masks that have helped but our parents are

056a whole different you know seeing transportation said I don't know anything about that I've heard some community to talk about staggered start times or maybe k2 third comes on Monday and all Tuesday is shut down and you have more of a for learning for day learning module I've heard some just are definitely looking at that rotating rather than just staggered starts your staggering days and how that's going to be looked I think you're gonna find you're gonna have to have your nurses going to be overwhelmed there's no way one nurse in a school can tackle this so you're gonna have to figure out who's your go-to and teachers are gonna be overwhelmed with making Johnny and Mary separate somebody's gonna have to be the Kovac um liaison you're gonna track people how you're gonna do

057that I mean I am here in the city and I tell you I'm overwhelmed there's so much tracking especially you're gonna turn it in to the federal government you know so I feel for you any tips I can give you things we've learned that we've done well and done bad we're now considering possibly it's being discussed at least maybe postponing on July opening for several reasons one we've learned some things to employees don't necessarily what you know they're scared you're hearing things Kovach numbers are going up the ICU beds are full and so you want to keep people feeling very very safe that's absolutely critical and everything you can do in your power to do it calms their fear even if there's no fear to be had so enough about that you have a very

058very big job and I it's a struggle how you're going to do it's a lot of nation is going to be critical that's it thank you very much this is Austin okay um so my biggest concern and I a second the other members comments but my biggest one is focusing on the mental health of not only our students but our teachers I this past quarter did have to be a mom and I had to teach online at the same time and that was incredibly difficult for so many things my kids are very young they needed mommy with them when they were learning but I'd be there with my own students so I think recognizing our teachers and our employees if we do ask them to teach online and the fact that they will have other

059things in their homes going on when you're asking them to focus on they're students um and then recognizing that our older students will more than likely have to be babysitter's to the youngers so I'm very concerned about the mental health of our students when or if I mean hopefully we don't but if we do have to teach online that's a really big concern of mine and then when they are in school our students who are high risk and making sure that they have all the support that they need is a big concern for me as well funding of course is a big issue and then I don't know I don't know how I don't know how you're going to do it um yeah those are my biggest concerns thank you very much appreciate that I

060think the only other thing I could add to that and then we know how many people in our district and many families have internet access if not we maybe need to find out that more than their internet at home availability I guess the one question I have that if the family's big enough and they've got four kids or three kids or whatever coming to school if one of them stays home there's a parent say do you all stay home or just part of them stay home or you go because you're not taking whatever out I think again we need to get the parents the family playing part of that they don't know if they heard you mention but if there is somebody that's sick in one of the schools is a state come down and

061shut the school down or do you you the district do we as the district have the capability of saying oh we're leading up to this metric like where that was talking about and like when you see that there's some problem here do we shut it down or do we wait for another source to come in and shut it down for us I think those are the only comment about anything else any of you have triggered up with any of the other sort of spoken here tonight dr. Freeman we'll turn the time back to you okay thank you Neilsen and members so one of the things that one of the things that we've kind of worked through in planning is and if this isn't a slide but it's an agreement on terms so when we shut

062down for the fourth quarter House bill twenty nine ten allowed us to do distance learning with kids and you know that was like that you know the final days of spring break so we didn't reconvene the next Monday and put together a plan for learning activities for the remainder of the year that legislation is expiring and there's not new legislation for distance learning for the Fall so what that means is there's currently two models for funding schools one is the hundred and eighty day calendar where you keep track of the membership four hundred days and that converts into a student count for your base level that you multiply out to get your budget most everybody on the board is familiar with that because we go through that exercise each spring the other is called an

063AO I school which is an all online school in in that model you keep a log of activity each day to justify your attendance and then that becomes your student count that base level is reduced five percent so it's 95 percent of the base times that count that you produce for aoi or online and so what we finding is we were using a lot of these terms interchangeably one of the things that people aren't discussing and we're calling this now distance learning distance learning is when you're actually going to school at school but you're taking part of the day or a day to learn at home it's not measuring you online by a roster it's not measuring you completely by when you're in your seat school it would be a hybrid model right now that

064doesn't exist in state law in state law that would be a day you were absent from school even if you were doing homework it's one of the exceptions we're asking the legislature to make without that people who are doing alternating models of half days or every other day would have absenteeism greater than 50% for the year even even though it was excused if you can imagine missing 50 or 60 percent of the year because your schedule is that way and then missing 10 days because you get sick what that would do to the attendance rate of schools so we're so what we're doing now is we're really trying to talk about three things and so one is 100 day membership in your seat the other is hundred day membership online and the way that would

065work in Littleton is the online program becomes its own school so what we've applied to do is have an online school it has a separate C DDS number parents would actually have to transfer schools so if you're a parent who's online or who is attending scheduled to attend Astoria Vista next year and you want to go online you would have to transfer to the Littleton online school withdraw from one and enroll in the other the other would be a hybrid model where you might go two days to Estrella bust and do two days at home and we and we're calling those distance learning days just to keep them separate from online which is handled differently in state law um so when we get to models we'll talk more about what some of those options are

066in the pros and cons but before we do that we wanted to talk to you about the information we gathered in the surveys and town halls that we did I want to remind members of the board that these are not scientific opinion measurement there's no people support one candidate or another plus or minus three percent this is just feedback that's represented of the group of volunteers who participate to give you something my idea what some of the sentiment out in the community is this surveys aren't stratified or structured in any way that necessarily is a less statistical representation of our community or of anybody else that we talk to and so what we did find for instance when the community participated in the survey in the Town Hall is that the grade levels were all

067pretty evenly distributed we asked people what grades their kids were in and so we got a good cross-section of grade levels in our data all of the schools were represented in the data but some had higher participation than others no one was left out staff participation was the highest at about a hundred and fifty the student sample was small we invited more kids that actually made it and that's not that hasn't been unusual you know in our pattern attendance with kids but the kids that we had were really articulate and we really appreciated and valued their feedback so the next slide we're gonna start with the community and parent feedback so one of the things that the district always scores well and came out in the survey the end-of-the-year survey was that parents were really

068satisfied with communication between the district and the teachers in their home what they said in our survey and again this isn't scientific but 95 percent reported that they have Internet services so that the gap on connectivity is only 5 percent of our kids eighty four percent said they have some devices at home so the gap in having device to learn on is 16 percent so I think I think we're in pretty good shape there as far as our ability if we were going to try to go to distance or online is providing enough support to people to keep people connected 91 percent agreed the district supported families 80 percent felt they were able to assist with learning at home and 77% said the materials were helpful so if you flip that over that means 20%

069struggled and 23% didn't think that all the materials we provided were helpful 74% thought students should wear masks when they're returning to school in the fall now a lot of the rest the feedback we have is on comments that we collected in the Town Hall and I know some of you peeked in on the Town Hall where we used a padlet link for people to really free type a responses to different kinds of questions so we've gone through and pulled some of those out that we think are interesting inform the board so what we saw is comments range from being scared and nervous to confident about the data that shows kids are at low risk some parents were hesitant or unsure about letting their kids ride the bus and return to school so soon others

070said they were okay with riding the bus and some said they would just drive their kids to avoid the bus problem some were willing to delay the start of schools and others were ready to get back and wanted to start right away some of the parents wanted students in school because they needed to get back to work some had concerns they expressed that the distinct learning wasn't as good as being with teachers and they wanted more than just packets and suggested sometimes for live online teaching of lessons for their kids which sounds really consistent with some of the feedback we got from the board in the second part they also in the next slide they also indicated some willingness to adjust schedules but they're anxious to know when we're going to decide if we're making

071a change there can they had concerns about how recess and cafeteria were handled I think everybody shares that we're just going to have to figure that out and be really honest with the community about how that's going to be handled concerns were expressed about kids coming to school sick you know Kathy you address this not knowing who might be vulnerable we do have some families who've already disclosed they have vulnerable kids some autoimmune deficiency kids so we are gonna have a real challenge and addressing the needs of high-risk kids if they're coming to school instead of getting services online and there were concerns expressed about handling kids with special needs and IEP s obviously if we change the way we deliver teaching there's going to be a lot of changes to IEP s and and

072how we handle kids who have special needs if we've been doing it a certain way for a long time and now we have to change that will be complicated in the next slide you'll see a quote from a parent that said their feelings are really conflicted and if you look over the body of this work you'll see that not only are some people on one side of the fence and some people on the other some people are conflicted about you know where they want to be and they are having trouble with that some said we should open and just protect vulnerable while other said if we can provide adequate distancing they're concerned little kids will struggle to keep their hands to themselves and follow distancing expectations I think we heard that from board members also

073and this is a quote they cannot be trapped in a facemask all day in the next slide we're gonna shift to staff feedback so um all of the staff are concerned about clear expectations accountability absences and the availability of substitutes that people get sick 99% of the staff thought that the professional development offered during the fourth quarter was very helpful in ninety-one percent said they would be willing to work through alternative schedules if we presented those 90 percent would support a calendar change but they're concerned about how it impact based scheduling as many of you know teachers balance of pay that they have in the summer often runs out right of school starting and if we delay the start of school that means it's running out before school starts so we would have to take

074that into consideration 81% of the teachers indicate they're comfortable returning to work 20% would want accommodations we saw six people in the survey who said they absolutely would have a problem returning but that gives you some idea if that's if this is the case eighty percent are comfortable in 20% art that's one out of every five teachers who who may have a challenge coming back to work and that would that would be a staffing problem for the school district um some of the other feedback that we got was from the students and and they were just like everybody else they were on both ends of the spectrum they said that they didn't report a need for emotional support but they were worried about other people and people falling behind so I think you might hear

075that from a lot of people I'm fine but I'm worried about other people they didn't think six feet was realistic for kids and that there would be some barriers needed um they thought wipes needed to bring the frighted before and after lunch and there should be limited numbers in the cafeteria and one of them said distancing is not a problem if we all stay home learn online the in the next slide the kids the kids said that students do want to go to school and they do want to be face to face but maybe they could alternate days they thought the glue Google classroom was a really helpful as long as you have Wi-Fi so they're concerned about some of their friends that don't have access and one of the things we found is that

076there are some people who have access but it's not necessarily really strong and really reliable especially if everybody else in the neighborhood jumps on at the same time so that could be a challenge even though you have access the quality of it and students want tools they can connect with tea for information and health this probably comes back to the frustration people had with packets is if you get stuck or you don't understand I'm trying to figure a way through that and the kids recognize that too they want to be able to connect with teachers whether they're went you know when they're not at school and some supported the idea of distance learning from home but all of them want teacher support um students didn't agree on whether masks should be mandatory or optional and

077thought there would be issues with younger kids so that aligns with with the parent fear the community feedback and the strongest opinions supportive wearing masks but they thought kids would need to have brakes with time to breathe they suggested maybe stepping outside or something and those of us who've been wearing masks you know know they take some time to adjust to you know they can be challenging to keep on all the time for some those of us who wear glasses a lot of times it steams up our glasses and so having masks on a lot of the day definitely would be a challenge even if it's an expectation so moving right along we we were talking just in a broad sense about what some school models might look like so we're starting on either end

078of this slide at the top of the bottom with kind of virtual only Aoi classes all activities and events are online you are literally enrolled in an AO I school and you're doing online learning just like if you were on k12 or Primavera or one of those other virtual school websites the one all the way at the bottom is school back to the way it used to be with everybody showing up on the same day on the same bus playing on the playground and going to lunch so we don't think that's really an option anytime in the near future if you're not going to do that then what the health department's recommending is you try to get your groups smaller in what they call cohorts so a class could be a cohort or a half

079a class could be a cohort and then what you do is you keep those groups of students staying together with social distance in guidelines during the day if you have in-person classes you need to have activities and vents that have precautions for the health and safety of kids so those models then what we're calling is school-based programs and online based programs is blended programs in the middle these are some ideas about how the blended programs could work early grades students are enrolled in their schools in our school-based upper grades students are enrolled online and are online based so essentially the early grade students can spread out through the school the required hours for grades 1 through 3 are 720 hours a year so the school day could be shortened to 5 hours a day the

080problem with that would really be there aren't extra teachers so teachers would be seeing two sessions of kids and you'd be asking teachers to work like a 10-hour school day if you were gonna try to overlap early grades this is being tried in some other countries that probably don't have some of the same staffing issues that we would have in the US and especially in Arizona another is to have half the students attend school-based half of the days so a couple of school districts have announced that they're going to do this cartwright Elementary in Alhambra Elementary that said they're gonna have kids half of them on Monday Tuesday half of them on Thursday Friday or half of them on Monday Tuesday after the mine Wednesday Thursday and not have kids on Friday as we said

081before one of the challenges for this is if you're calling that distinct learning but you're not able to take attendance your absenteeism would be really high and a lot of us are concerned that the legislature might be punitive about that when they come into session next year in special session and that's why it's so we think it's so important for us to get that flexibility approved by them before we were entering into that kind of model and that's what we're working with the governor on right now the other is parents choose between school based or online based programs by semester or year just like they choose which school they want to go to now so we would essentially open up school choice again for parents who want to elect to go to the online school

082essentially making it partly the parents choice is if they're if they're not concerned so much about spreading issues is that they are choosing to put their kids in a school-based program and if they are concerned they could choose to put their kids into the online based program and it's a separate school so you'd no longer be a needy parent you'd be an online parent that's the reason why we've submitted the online application the only way to be able to do that is to be an online approved school through the State Board so our applications been submitted and are actually interviewing our people for demonstration on July 7th and that was the meaning that dr. Kelly referenced when she said people who thought they were having vacation after the fourth of July aren't having vacation after

083the fourth of July because they need to go do a demonstration in front of Rio Salado faculty to get a recommendation to the State Board for Littleton to be able to have online learning next year and that's moving pretty quick for the State Board in the department that we believe that at the very least we can get and one-year provisional online approval to move forward with that yep finally the other bullet is just other combinations so you could do a combination of say allow parents to choose the online school if they know they don't want their kids to be in school this semester or this year allow the parents who are school-based to have a blended program where they're at school a two or three days in two or three days at home where you

084have some direct teaching and then some extended practice from home so you have some online kids and some blended kids but nobody who's a hundred percent school-based these are all ideas that we've discussed and wanted to present to you to see what the feelings of the board were and how they thought those might be received by the community after hearing all of the townhall input so that's part for a brief introduction to models the any more work on the design of models kinds of depends on the direction we decide to take the next slide is the last thing here's here's questions that we know need to be answered so when will we know the plan we're telling people right now that the board will take action we think on components of the plan on the

08523rd so we are holding off on making commitments unless we get some advice from the board tonight on how we might narrow down some of the options when we'll return to school right now we haven't changed the school calendar so what we believe right now is the school calendar is the school calendar until it changes will the school calendar change that would take action by the board will we still have 180 days so if kids are on under date a DM attendance calendar you have to have 180 day calendar and you have to have a way to count kids to get your under day atm but all kids may not be in attendance at the school if there's distance learning approved by the legislature so you have 180 day calendar but students may only attend

08690 days in the building in 90 days in distance learning we don't know the answer to that yet well school day times have changes we think if if teachers are gonna have to split their classes and different different groups will be meeting on different days we might want to eliminate the early release day and put those minutes back into the other days standardize the length of day one of the concerns that staff had about how early the early schools were starting so that could provide some relief there by making a standard school day and a standard work day time that would help with the rotation the AV rotation between in-seat learning and distance learning what do we do about social distancing and when there's places where you can't necessarily have six feet of separation what

087are we going to do for breakfast and lunch we already do breakfast in the classroom so we we thought about doing lunch in the classroom but I think that is a different challenge if you're doing a/b rotations so for instance if you only have on on Tuesday and Wednesday instead of 28 kids in your room 14 and you're feeding 14 people breakfast and lunch this is different than trying to feed all nine hundred or a thousand kids in your school breakfast and lunch in the classroom every day in addition to the cleanup and sanitation and those kind of things so if you're if you're having more kids than that you might have some kind of special schedule extended scheduled cleaning in between cohorts or that kind of thing more questions in the next slide what

088will cleaning look like what the department's telling us is we need to clean kind of after use after cohorts so they'll be cleaning every night normally we clean the campuses every night but that doesn't include spraying with sanitation so that would have to be added and we would do that on an activity by activity night by night basis when will students be able to ride the bus obviously if half the kids are going to school because you're on an a/b plan and some of the kids are going online that frees up a lot of seats on the bus if we decide that parents have to choose between online and school based programs the availability of seats in the bus would depend on which parents chose which option so if one third of the parents chose

089the online option and that means two thirds of the kids would be in the school and instead of three kids in every seat there would be two kids in every see you probably could do that we just need to be really honest with parents in the community that it's not one kid in a sea it's two kids in a sea and I think if you get back to three kids in a seat that's going to be that's going to be a problem we don't have more drivers and more buses and we're concerned if we lower the capacity of the bus our student route mile calculations would be compromised in future budget years and we would need some relief from the legislature to address that um how will sick people will sick people be sent home

090of course they will for how long we don't know it depends on what they're sick with and right now the place that they wait is in the nurse's office if we want to set up a separate isolation area and as miss Reyes suggested the nurse one nurse is probably not going to handle it we probably will need some additional help in the health offices with nothing else just with communication expectations for using PPE we need some direction from the board on if all staff is going to be required to wear masks at school if all students are going to be required to wear masks daily health screenings you have really the option between trying to screen everybody and otherwise screening people who appear to be symptomatic the County Health Department have told us that temperature

091taking really doesn't help with kovetz bread that people can have an external temperature it's different than the internal temperature but the real danger in spreading COBIT especially is not from symptomatic people it's from asymptomatic people so if you just think about if you see somebody coughing and you know stuff coming out of their nose most people right now would give them a wide berth and be concerned that they might catch something it's the people who aren't presenting anything that appears to be unusual or unhealthy who may be able to spread the virus that the health department's really concerned about and when it comes to flu season kids are great flu spreaders so they don't have any reason to think kids wouldn't be great kovat spreaders - with a big concern of the health department is

092flu season at its peak usually fills up hospitals and if we have a flu season and a kovat season simultaneously it could easily overwhelm the healthcare system so we're gonna want to recommend people get flu shots and have other good health maintenance practices asleep and those kind of things but probably health screenings first of all to try to screen every kid every day would be overwhelming to staff but to have some protocols for when people need to be called pulled aside and screened would be prudent for us to develop that in addition to the questions you asked is our list of questions now have we generated more question for you or we have we generated some ideas where the board can start giving us direction on what kind of work we should be doing between

093now and the 23rd to provide you with the information and recommendations you'll need for changes in practice or policy thank you let's think about Devon if there's any quick comments tonight the possibility if we can put those down on paper and send those this is Kathy is it possible to reach out to I mean we shouldn't be in a sink tink by herself right I mean every school district every surrounding area superintendents meet do you find that there is plants more made than ours the same think tank are you able to sit down and talk to other districts and go you know and just kind of come brainstorm what might make sense to me that to me would be logical yeah mr. Reyes president Nielson so this happened meaning in in our region we've been

094meeting so the Towson region superintendents are really concerned about trying to stay as close to the same page as we can all of us have we've been meeting for the last few Monday mornings and we're meeting again Monday morning and all of us have feedback planned from our boards this week so we've been meeting really with our own opinions and concerns and then comparing to what other districts are doing a Mesa Unified ran a really huge committee I think they had like 170 people in 11 criteria the of course the State Department of Ed had a task force and released their road map so there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of people working together most of our frustration is in like we get guidance on what to do but guidance isn't the same

095as Authority so do we have the authority to let kids stay home and learn at home and still count them you know we don't know that we have that we're the thinking of the cabinet and the Tollison region superintendents right now is it's going to be almost impossible for districts to do distancing without that flexibility and like I said Cartwright in a hammer I've already said that's what they're gonna do so so in in that approach you're you're eventually going to paint the governor and the legislature into a corner that they need to make that legal or they need to penalize everybody but that that's still in the process I know in the city of Tolleson in that Tolleson region the contagion spread along the meatpacking plant is a particular concern and just because the

096packing plant is in Towson doesn't mean the people who work there aren't in our whole region don't live in our whole region so we don't know how many of our families actually are employed there but it's a significant number and if they're out and about in their community in their home so they have you know nieces and nephews and cousins that could impact the rate of spread just in our region just from that one thing so the the sentiment of the superintendent's is to be really conservative and have health and safety as a primary concern we just need some concessions from the state to make that work so budgets aren't devastated by trying to do that there are a lot of budgetary consequences for the decisions that people are making and the Legislature's been slow

097to react because they're concerned about what the revenue forecast is and we are all up against the wall for starting school and having to make some assumptions and probably just some priorities based on philosophy and we and you know we're for us that we don't have more clarity I the you know what some people have said is really when you think about government agencies they're working as fast as they can you know that we're getting things trickling out a month or two at a time and and so just like you were saying we have some great some huge challenges in implementing this I think people at the county health department the governor the legislature they have some huge challenges in trying to figure out how much they can accommodate the school system with the revenue

098they have we're always concerned that they may not be very accommodating that their their track records not great so I don't know what else to tell you except that yeah there is a lot of comparison going on and there's some pros and cons and risks to all of them but what we've committed to in our region is getting back together Monday morning and sharing with each other the feedback we got from our boards to see if we can keep our Regent in close alignment with you know kids being home from school and kids not being home from school if we were gonna go to some kind of alternating days to do the work to line up families so families can stay together when they're home or when they're away and those kind of things and

099so like we wouldn't need really start working on family alternating day attendance rosters pretty quickly if that's what we were going to be able to do so people would know which day they're reporting to school that that will take quite a bit of work and part of the reason is because just because people are in the same family doesn't mean everybody has the same name we can sort my address but just because they have the same address doesn't mean they're in the same family so let me just ask one more question and I'll let someone else ask so if a child first of all you let's just say not even a child a parent you find out or her child is it's covet positive okay and that's going to they will be they doctor will

100notify the tickets the Health Organization write the letter is generated to the health organization back to the parent or that thing I don't know how you'll know that we asked that they report to us I don't know what your method will be and at that point have you even thought through will you dictate that child can't come to school for ten days based on CDC and are you going to require a retest and if it's in the home are you going to require the child to stay home if it's mom or dad or brother or sister so those are I mean those are good questions miss reyes and those are exactly the things that school district administrators don't want to have to decide so we have doctorates but they're not in fixing people medically and

101so what we understand from the county health department and so we did make some progress I mean we didn't have that till last week like questions like that so if if a child has confirmed Kovac their home for ten days if they have covin without symptoms their home for ten days if they're exposed to somebody in their family their home for 14 days because there's a four day incubation so you add 4 plus 10 the the incubation period is actually you know where that virus can become active and spreadable before you even have symptoms and that's you know in a symptomatic person they can spread before the symptoms you know before the symptoms become noticeable they had one person on the you said you know I didn't feel bad until I realized they were putting

102on hand sanitizer and it didn't smell and they're like I went and got tested and they had Kovac but they weren't you know dying to breathe they just have this variety of symptoms and so that person spreading that virus it could impact somebody else completely differently so if you have a fever you're home at least 72 hours and then they they'll be they they don't have a retesting regiment it's one of the things that we would like to see is a testing regimen both for staff and students and there's not right now a county or a state plan to do that but both of those conditions are ten days out of school and and so if if we don't have like a distance learning component in place approved by the legislature they can't come in

103and sit down they're gonna miss ten days of school and so that's I mean these are all very realistic probable issues for delivering learning support to kids that aren't really contemplated in statute right now but we do know that we do know that 10 day in the 14-day rule and this is we do deal with communicable diseases all the time in the school district and the county has business rules for all of them so if we need any kind of more stringent EPA approved cleaner we actually do we do whatever the county tells us is necessary for health and safety so what you would have happen is the doctor would report a communicable disease to the county who would call us and then they'd give us guidance on how to respond and how to notify

104the community and what the notification needs to include so that's never discretionary for us and so depending on how communicable what is that true even for a child and tested positive you'll know that well so yes because the other thing is they can disclose to us then we call the county and then the county gives us direction there can be a delay of a day or two and if the slow if they use the slow test that could be three days instead of instant so there are variables that kind of leave the rest of the population at risk and kovat is new and that's um that's why we're pushing the county health department to what they said they will have a clearly clear outlined protocols for us is we want the if it's if it's

105rubella or whooping cough or any other thing there's a playbook in place where once it's reported to the county the county tells us what to do we want to have that same playbook in place for kovat so we're not making this up as we go when school starts we want to have clear direction from health officials on what the school should do we are not doctors or health officials we're reading teachers so and and they've given us more direction last week and they said more Direction is coming but we don't I mean for the comfort of all I hope we don't use our discretion in that we follow county health guidelines thank you any other have any of the rest of you get any comments you'd like to make dr. Freeman this is Amy um

106I'm sure you guys have already discussed this but have there been any plans about with an alternating schedule and kids on IEP s and compensatory minutes well that's a great question you're sounding and even though people with critical of use of paper packets or one of the issues is meeting needs of kids with special needs and discriminating against them into the delivery of service so there's a there's a big question about if service delivery for kids with special needs is gonna continue as you know most of those IEP s are written during the course of the year and they're good for a year so if you did your IEP in March it's essentially supposed to be good till next March but then you completely can change the configuration of the school you have essentially a

107change in placement what's probably going to have to happen is people are going to need to have meetings we're gonna have special needs meetings going on like crazy there's a lot of [Music] papers and recommendations coming out now there has not been a lot of flexibility given by the Department of Ed or the US Department of Ed on how districts are supposed to do that we imagine that there's going to be some litigation and definitely complaints filed with the Department of Education it is probably you know the most complicated problem we'll have and you can see where a lot of this discussion that we're having tonight is designed around general ed issues which is which is still 87 percent of the students and I think one of the things we need to do because for

108the Office of Civil Rights is we have to be sure to treat kids with special needs with the same regard as kids who are generally kids and not give them for instance a less appropriate education and what we're trying to do is we think we got a we need to figure out what is appropriate free and appropriate public education under kovat before we start to modify it and I mean you bring up a good question but I think right now in this situation we're in we have a lot of unknowns we're gonna try to figure out how to start the year and then try to figure out how to modify it there's I'm sure all of you can appreciate our emails are just inundated with people who want to sell its solutions to these problems

109but we don't even we don't even know how stable our budgets are going to be and so the other thing you'll see is us being kind of conservative and what we're going to commit to with the idea just like miss Reyes was saying in their phases is that when we get going we're probably going to find a whole lot of issues that need to be addressed you know where we we thought we planned well but we're up against some things that weren't anticipated I mean I think we can anticipate running into things we don't anticipate what is the goal what is that we'll start data school right now we haven't changed it so it really it depends on it would depend on what the board wants to do so the greatest the greatest flexibility in

110starting is to have parents have online as an option for those who really really don't want to come back if we don't provide it as an option they'll go find an online school and we'll lose the enroll um we we think we all really need to have a in school brick-and-mortar option for parents because there's some who really don't believe there's a great risk and they really want to see their kids in school because they need to work they're looking at the well-being of their whole family overall and and weighing that together that's kind of what the State Health Department said is there's multiple things to think about the health and well-being of child other than just go vote or the flu or things like that and we think there's a bunch of people in

111the middle so if we had a combination of alternating days distance learning for ground people and some people could go completely online it's the most flexibility and most options and the thing about distance learning member radar alluded to this is you could change the number of days in or out of school depending on what the kovat spread looks like in your community so let's just say that there's a lot of Cova but then it dissipates and there is there are therapeutics and there are vaccinations by January is that you could reduce the number of days kids were distance learning and increase the number of days kids were in school because the the need for social distancing went down and you would have the flexibility to do that really in the online school you're kind of

112committing to that school for the year or at least a semester before you would transfer schools so I think a combination of approaches gives the school district and the parents on the most flexibility to me you know if you didn't hear anything else from the feedback of the town halls and you should have heard that they're all over the board in both ends of the spectrum and some in the middle which aren't quite as um you know vocal so that I mean I think that's really what we're facing we just wish that we could get the governor and the legislature and other agencies up to speed in time they realize schools are starting at the end of July beginning of August it's on their radar but the governor knows it's a problem but you can

113imagine lining up the political support to get something like that done I would think they're not going to call a special session till they have an idea what's going to happen for the special session yes our school starts the last Wednesday in July okay that's the current calendar so you need feedback from us by I mean today it's a lot of questions but are you looking I mean if they're you know if there's a leaning of the board like you think if we're going to bring kids to school they have to learn math we probably need to a policy you know that requires masks of staffer requires masks of students because it's currently not in dress code or any other policy and we'll get arguments for people that who says we have to wear a

114mask and all of a sudden there's the you know showdown in the driveway great so maybe we just start with that first and then either eliminate or don't keep it right so questions I put at the end or things that people could say that you know questions at the end of the presentation were you know well do you want the whole school district to go online and not have any programs in the schools is anybody for that okay we cross that off okay you want everybody to be in the schools with no blended or online options well Roger can just go back to the first one for a second I think just I think we need to be prepared to possibly be 100% online I don't think that's the desire but that's gonna depend upon

115what happens in the world and whether it's safe to me discussion dr. Ramos we were trying to make a distinction between me in line distance and yet because on lines a separate school funded a separate way so if to say you're gonna go online means withdrawing everybody from their school there and they're in and enrolling them in an online school so the flexibility part comes where you have distance learning from school not her kids who are evolved into online school and and and so understanding the model that's that blended program model the blended program is where you could if you had that capacity is shift from being in the building to out of the building without changing your school enrollment that make more sense I guess I used the wrong term distance learning it the

116effect you understand the effect yes yes so thank you for correcting me on the use of the term distance learning I have a question and you may not know the answer what win would be the time frame that a decision would have to be made like the latest time frame where dr. Ramos were everything we're doing is a scramble so if you think about I was trying to explain this to one the state senators the other day typically to get ready for the year we are talking about things we want to continue and don't want to continue in January in February we're listening to the legislature we're looking at dropped bills we're conferring professionally and then and then we thought in March like we were narrowing down the budget deciding how many teachers we were

117going to need and we approved contract language and issued renewals to people and that was for a regular year for starting in July then in April in May if we need to do procurement and bidding recruiting all of those things that have to happen in in April May and June all of that work is happening um really if you just think March offering contracts April May June July the teachers are here like we start holding conferences in the middle of July I think 11th or 12th or 13th we're holding professional development meetings so the lead time typically is is three four or five months and so we're right now having a discussion about what you would like your school is to look like that should have been a January February conversation to do everything so

118this is full-on scramble the you know in we're and all the districts are trying to you know do the right thing best they can limited guidance from the legislature so I don't know what we really think and we got some of this input from parents you know what difference is a week or two gonna make I mean if we said we were gonna start in October in Arizona that would make a difference if we said we're gonna start in January that would make a difference but right now you know we're in it where we're really in a full-on scramble to put together a whole different kind of school year than anybody's ever done before and you know every little bit that we could you know to take a bite out of the Apple tonight helps

119move us along and you know narrowing what the other implications are but if I mean I don't the best kind of the best model for doing business we've already passed that and so I mean I just imagine there's there's gonna be some things that we're gonna struggle with that we're not going to get right and we're gonna have to what do they say in the Marines adapt and improvise it's just being honest it's not the it's not a situation that I would wish to be in now their thoughts right there their possibility dr. Freeman that the two slides that you add with those questions can be sent out to each member of the board yeah we can I mean we can collect online and so as explaining if we say we're gonna allow an a/b

120schedule where half the kids are in school you know a couple days in half the other day that changes all the logistics and so it makes the logistics simpler as long as we can retain the funding and so that becomes a question for the legislature I think that's the direction most districts are going because they're really to keep social distancing and safety with a virus that's this communicable if you can't spread people out it's gonna be really hard to assure that the learning environment is I mean you can just imagine if the virus enters the learning environment kids are in clusters whole clusters of the kids are infected you're you may want to have school open but if everybody's sick including the teachers or you'll end up closing just like we did under the teacher

121walkout you can't there's not enough people who are buying learning so I I think the alternating schedule is what most people are going to go with even though we don't have approval for it and once we decide that then you know doing lunch and breakfast becomes easier because we don't have to go to the cafeteria once we do that you know cleaning up in designing the instructional day becomes easier because we know we're going to do a direct instruction of new information and practice on different days a keeping track of the kids one-to-one devices and they're learning and connecting with the parents will be easier because it'll be intermittent not long periods of time where you don't connect so you know I think PPE is a big question and if you split the kids in

122half bus writing becomes way less of a concern we can essentially keep the routes we have if we can split families together into two groups so we can keep them together and then even work with the high school system to do the same thing it I mean I mean really at this point if there's something that is appealing to members you know it would be good to have a discussion about if there's something that really seems like it's out of bounds to members like no matter what we do I don't want our school district to do this to to kind of stake that flag so we can start to narrow in on how to plan and then how to resource what kind of protocols we need that would be helpful I'm sorry to put this

123kind of pressure on you guys you know with the amount of time and information we have but hey you know I don't know that if we move the start of school back to weeks or even a month how much more guidance or help you would have I mean I think where no matter when we choose we're under a lot of pressure and if we choose the calendar if we choose to move the calendar we should probably try to do that with the Tollison system so families don't have kids in school and out of school at different times like we've done in the past mr. president just that point I actually think we need to proceed with school in July because I think our infection rates from flus and colds are actually going to be much

124worse in the fall and if we were gonna consider taking an extended break I would actually look at you know after Thanksgiving the Christmas just closing down completely to avoid some of those high infection rates or switching at that point so I think historically summertime and I know Cove it's a completely different beast when the weather's warm infection rates are typically lower for the other viruses that are out there so I would recommend actually that we get started so we have more flexibility throughout the year if we need to take extended breaks just a couple of other points and I think we could really talk about this all night long so I do like the idea of maybe responding to all of these questions to give you a little bit more guidance but again I

125just think the flexibility is the most important component because if you think about it at any time you could have 20% of your teachers out which would render all of all of your in-class room all of your online stuff ineffective so the more flexibility that we can build into it and in my mind I keep thinking about having one third grade teacher broadcasting let's just say third grade as an example broadcasting lessons to the entire district so that you only have let's say one teacher per grade or doing all of your instruction so you only ever have to worry about one teacher being sick and that all your students that are in the classroom are engaging through their mobile devices or watching those wonderful screens that we have in each of the in the classrooms

126and I know it's a it's a paradigm shift but I know my daughter and particular has no issue watching a screen all day and so that if a teacher is out and is unable to be in the classroom it's not is consequential and if a student needs to be at home they can still tune in and watch that exact same instruction that the in school students are saying because I do think we're we're gonna enter a paradigm in which there's no way to enforce attendance by students by teachers by staff so just understanding that any given day you could have twenty to fifty percent of your students or staff not coming regardless of what model you choose I think is is very important and then as just as far as the PPE since you brought

127it up I just don't think it's enforceable there's gonna be students that just are gonna refuse there's parents that are just gonna refuse and then again making sure it's used properly throughout an entire school day where it would actually be effective I think would also just be a logistical challenge students are gonna be taking it on and off the e to get drinks of water is just gonna be a mess so again I know we could talk about this all night but those are just kind of my closing thoughts on some of the topics we've been discussing it would like you know president Nielson just to address some of that some of exactly some of the things that member Raider brought up are being put together in a letter actually a four-point letter going from

128all the add alphabet organizations to the governor and addressing some of those exact issues is that the the way Arizona's run schools has been attendance based and the idea of attendance in attending school is completely in a paradigm shift and so things like that need to be thought of more broadly so there's a there's advocacy along those lines going on but we're you know we're a subdivision of the state and subject to their rules so trying to fit all those things together it's a challenge for us but you know people are working on that idea is that the way we've counted things is maybe a little antiquated for the era that we're in and moving into in you know moving the state along is going to be a challenge what is it that that we

129can do to give you some help and advice can we write anything down send it to you see if we can get those questions maybe in the next three or four days we can get something to you by Friday so I'm in the end of the weekend well I mean I I kind of you know I will eat rule II was not being glib when I asked board members or is there opposition to us having an online school I mean we're moving forward as if it's a need in the community and that parents could elect to be part of that but if if that's something that the board's opposed to we can stop working on that and it is it is a school it's it's got its own school number so parents who want to

130have their kids be part of that actually mean to change schools and enroll in the online school having said that we need a process in to reopen parent choice between now and the start of school year for them to elect to leave one school and go into another so it's it's one thing for us to say it it's another for us to to do the logistics getting it done if the if the parents who leave their school for online school are disproportionately coming from other schools we may need to rebalance staffing and other things at other schools so there's implications not only for going to online but for leaving the school you're enrolled in and so if we if we know that that's an option or not an option for a board it has a

131lot of the implications for logistics ports so the comments I heard from the board oh I'm sorry oh if we were to do online and say we just pick I don't know a little too much of whatever that becomes our online school right mainly that becomes an online school all of students that are in Littleton go somewhere else because we're turning that's going to online do I understand that correctly um mr. president remember Reyes no it's so right now we have seven schools plus the the alternative school program here it becomes your next school it's a brand new school it hasn't have any kids and it doesn't have any building so it is it is a new additional alternative for families in Littleton yeah I mean there's there's two programs um high schools do fractional

132attendance so they can have kids who are online and enrolled and they can be in JTED program they actually can get a 1.25 ATM for some of their kids when they combine programs together but Elementary's don't so to deliver that we need to be approved as an Aoi and then the difference is you count kids based on their online roster each day and you turn that town in for your funding and so if you establish that school it counts its kids differently than the other seven schools they're count they're counting on seat time and the online kids are counted on online time and what that means is not the number of kids in the district doesn't go down where they go to school changes this is Amy I personally um think having an online school

133and giving that option to parents especially during this time is a really great option I think that we do have some community members and some parents that are absolutely sure they do not want to send their student to school so if we can give them the option of an online school then we keep them in our district and in our attendance and they're not going to any of the other virtual schools that are out there thank you appreciate that him any others have any other thoughts we want to give some directions about the three men in the staff one of the things that I heard from members was about flexibility kids being able to stay home and learn or go to school and learn and so we can come back with a plan for sharing

134time in school sharing time away shared delivery of instruction one of the things that we heard from the community and heard from the board is we need a way to assess the kids progress which means really more connection between the teacher and the student that didn't really happen in the fourth quarter at the end of this year and that really needs to happen to help move kids forward and keep track of their progress so while we may be able to have one teacher deliver direct instruction we still need people to followup with the progress of the kids communicate with them and their parents remediate or enrich as the kids need to be so we think we still need to have a reasonable student to teacher ratio we've been encouraging teachers to share the duties of

135lesson planning and presenting for a long time and they're pretty they're they're they're pretty protective of their independence and so making them more interdependent probably will be one of byproducts of making some of these shifts is there opposition to having a be flexible planning or you know knowing the risks right now that the legislature doesn't have a system for counting those kids but a lot of districts are moving that direction is the board opposed to us doing that or is that something we should continue to look into that we would do as ourselves or would we do it in connection with Folsom district and the other elementary schools that you've been dealing with you know their thoughts on his question about and I'm starting to over drown myself in information if we could I'm committed

136to sending him something even by tomorrow if I could just have a little bit of time to think about it all and digest it and send me the questions and then I can respond back tomorrow and then I think that at this point you know we're just to me I feel like I'm going in a circle I'm not giving productive feedback thank you I appreciate it I think we're all the same way and that was my thought about giving the questions out that would at least give us something to look at and then if we could get our comments back maybe by Friday Friday afternoon that way whatever we've got he could take his meeting on Monday morning with the other superintendents or and say would be better if you could do Thursday you'll be

137Thursday afternoon that will give us Wednesday and Thursday to do that if you can get those questions out we'll put questions together and get them emailed to you tomorrow and then that would give us till Thursday afternoon to get comments back to him put those together and then he could meet and we can get that I like that you're the rest of you I'm in agreement this is a me go I'll so try to maybe make her remark about like what we heard the board say so for instance rule on PP might be hard to enforce and drink a whole lot of enforcement compliance time and things like that and if anybody wants to make a you know like an opposing statement or just say they agree with that you know that would help us

138more we can begin to narrow things more we can plan what's your question to us this particular question well so the question was is should masks be required to staff and students and I didn't hear a strong opinion from anybody on the board except John who said that's gonna be really hard to enforce with kids does that still mean you think staff should wear them are not wearing them but the opinion been presented so far by one member is enforcing masks on kids it's going to be a public okay so this is Kathleen this is my opinion I think forcing masks on on students I like the idea but it's probably impossible but I think in staff I think it's highly possible when they are in close quarters when they are someone in their office

139when you're in a meeting and you're not able to social distance I think a mask is appropriate I understand teaching you may not be able to do it but again if you're in close quarters and you're not able to do the six-foot distance you wearing a mask it doesn't doesn't hurt and it's actually the CDC has saying some the more you hear about it masks are key and critical and to potentially helping my spread so I'm off for staff not not students and reasonable reasonable criteria like you just said if they're in a in a situation where if you're by yourself you're in your office you don't need to wear it but if you're going out and there's you know five people to copier and you're waiting there why would it hurt mm-hmm okay that's

140perfect that's the kind of feedback that we need when we can make that into a sentence make it into a bullet bring it back to you to go thumbs-up or thumbs-down that's what we're looking for thank you good examples this is Amy and I'm an agreement with Kathy um about the staff I would and I'm sure we wouldn't do this but if a student wanted to wear a mask I wouldn't want them to be in violation of dress code so if we have to make that an option right that's code I would be an approved that we're gonna run into circumstances you guys where there's a vulnerable student yeah as a precaution for the vulnerable students people in the room - that is yep but only in that situation for instance otherwise it's optional okay

141you see how yeah we have that here in this city and I will tell you the majority of the staff appreciate it and feel comfortable with it because of their not having to worry about someone's infecting them I mean they it also lends itself to a certain comfort level and people seem to be very okay with it okay well I think I have some idea where members are we have a process for getting out questions and getting your feedback and then that'll help us next week pull some things together you know we'll be putting out preparation for a book a meeting the Friday before the 23rd and there may be some things coming down to the last minute so all the feedback that you have for us right now is helpful all right with that

142okay we'll get those questions out and then you've got the opportunity to get back with dr. Freeman in the next place you want him sent to you email to you in the comments mr. president and members of the board I will email to all the board members all I have to do is we'll talk okay work for everybody thumbs up all right all right if any of the rest of you got any comments if not the next item would be for an adjournment on this to go home and think a little bit about what it is and get back with Oh of the board adjourn at 8:19 a lot of second a second thank you very much all in favor hi any nays thank you so very much for all your time and effort tonight

143we really appreciate it we appreciate what the staff is doing and all the work that they're doing to try to get this taken care of in such a short time and thank you all for being here tonight preciate you Thank You Curtis thank you bye-bye