Livonia Public Schools Committee, Organizational, Regular Meeting July 26, 2021

001good evening welcome to the livonia public schools board of education committee of the whole meeting of july 2021. uh welcome this evening we uh we welcome our guests who are visiting with us in person uh we have been looking forward to this meeting very much the committee of the whole meetings are meetings that we discuss our topics our topics in great detail and one of the topics on our agenda this evening is our uh our plan for learning uh in the fall and what our covered mitigations uh will and will not be and at least at this point how that's going to look so we are uh all anxiously awaiting that information uh the first and for the first uh item on our agenda this evening uh if you'd like an agenda by the way

002they can be found i believe they are are they still outside the door here oh mr francis has them if mr francis can raise his hand there we go if you're in the room and you'd like an agenda or a blue slip in order to participate in audience communications you can find that with mr francis uh thank you if you are at home and you're tuning into our meeting you can follow along with our agenda by going to our website which is livoniapublicschools.org if you hover over the school board tab you can drop down to meeting information and select them this this specific meeting for tonight please note that there are a few meetings this evening so you'll want to be selecting the committee of the whole meeting uh we have i have a few

003blue slips that for this evening let's see here and i see that at least some of the blue slips are addressing coveted issues i'm going to read a statement that i prepare because we did have a number of folks who participated in audience communications last month and i i'm not sure if some of these are going to be repeat concepts or not but just so the folks are as aware as possible before they participate in audience communications i see from our blue slips that there are people here tonight wishing to address the board regarding the coveted procedures for the fall our last meeting was in june during which people spoke at audience communications advocating for the discontinuance of masks social distancing the offering of covert vaccination opportunities and other covet mitigation measures when school resumes

004this fall the board has not met has not met since june but this topic is on the agenda for discussion at this meeting tonight recommendations have already been prepared by our superintendent and administrate an administrative team based on health organization guidance and the current coveted situation in our own community if you're looking for more information on that if you'll just hang in hang with us for a few moments we'll get into that deep discussion for you a second topic that we spoke about spoken about at audience communications at our last meeting was critical race theory let me be clear critical race theory or crt is not taught in livonia public schools it is not part of michigan's adopted standards that guide what is taught in michigan public schools our curriculum is based on michigan state

005standards and can be found on the michigan department of education website under michigan academic standards our district is proud of our culture and climate work which includes our community with character and engagement and equity work reflecting the key elements of character and respectful interactions for everyone which is a hallmark of our district we have a sincere desire for our schools to be safe welcoming inclusive and respectful environments that support academic and socio-emotional needs of every student hopefully that will at least give some basis of factual information uh to some of the uh for some of the questions that are that have been raised lately uh the detail as i said for the upcoming fall cove we will be discussing just momentarily the first item on our on our agenda officially is audience communication audience communications

006at this time i'd like to just clarify what the role of the board of education is the role of the board of education is really three-fold and that is to hire and evaluate our superintendent to set policies for the district and to set our long-term goals and match the finances to those goals so if in your approach uh in your discussion with the uh with the board for audience communications if your question or comments relate to those areas you can expect a response back from the board of education if your questions pertain to almost any other area we would consider that a daily operations issue and you can expect your response if you have a specific question to come from our superintendent or our administrative team the audience communications is a time set aside for

007the board of education to listen to our community it's very distinctly not a question and answer session but it's a time for us to listen and take in what our community has to say uh we do have a three minute time limit on each speaker and the reason for that time limit is so that we can be fair and equitable to everybody who chooses to speak before the board we do have a timer so if you're with while you're participating in audience communications if you hear a tone start going off you'll know that you've hit your three-minute limit we have found that to be just a more polite way than trying to interrupt a speaker to let them know that their that their time is up so if you are speaking and you hear that

008time limit if you could wrap up your comments that would be very much appreciated uh i've got a couple of blue slips here or folks who would like to participate and the first is jeremy copp mr copp if you could join us there's a chair and a microphone here for you uh right up here yep um actually we're gonna use the podium oh we are okay podium thank you mr francis can you make sure that that microphone is on great and if you could state your name and your address for the record hi my name is jeremy kopp i'm not 16269 park street here in livonia terrific welcome my son goes to buchanan he's going to be in fourth grade and i caught wind like you were talking about that a lot of people came

009asking the mask mandates to be reversed i did keep my son from home last year because we were able to and i wanted to reduce numbers in the classroom he's going back this fall like i'm sure almost all the kids are so i wanted to come and speak in support of mass because i think a lot of people in our community do support it i want to make sure that's not lost so i hope you guys keep the mitigation strategies i'm not sure what's all going to happen myself i was able to get vaccinated which is why i'm here without a mask but again my son's under 12 so he doesn't have that opportunity so i'm just hoping that you guys consider keeping mass mandates for everyone until you know kids under 12 can be

010vaccinated and then at that point you know i really plan with you guys doing whatever you want but i'm hoping we can keep it at least till then okay thank you very much the next speaker this evening is john hilla mr hillah good evening if you could just say your name and your address for the record john 11031 melrose livonia 48150 thank you for giving me this time i've already communicated some thoughts to the board via a rather impolitic email i'll be more professional than my demeanor here but i'm here to basically echo mr kopp's thoughts on the request that the board retain a mandatory mask mandate especially for children under the age of 12 who do not have the option to be vaccinated this fall like mr copp i was able to enjoy uh

011on behalf of my daughter a very successful livonia virtual kindergarten year at grant for my daughter but she will be in school in person at webster this fall and we uh you know we've taken great pains over the past year and a half to keep our household covered free as a self-employed person i'd manage to work from home that is coming to an end for us we don't believe in my household that an overly vocal minority voting block should have undue influence over this body's decisions we would request that until as mr cop said masks can be removed safely for children under 12 by way of a percentage that is statistically significant of vaccination rates not only for children under 12 but for the population of livonia at large that we keep the mass bandit

012in place right now covid cases by way of the delta variant are spiking in michigan it's a little bit better in our state than in other states but nevertheless i expect that we see tomorrow when the state releases its new numbers yet another weekly doubling of the infection rate in this state the vaccination rate is stagnant we're hovering at 51 but 100 of mass removal in supermarkets somebody here is not abiding by the honor system please keep the mandate in place thank you very much for your hard work thank you very much that is all the blue slips i have for this meeting is there anybody else who wanted to participate in audience communications yes okay whichever one of the two of you is ready first uh feel free to approach the podium and if

013you could hand our your blue slip to dr terryl we'll get that thank you okay i have a blue slip for susan jablonski good job welcome if you could just say your name and your address for the record 29145 jaclyn drive livonia 48154 welcome my son christian will begin sixth grade in this school in the fall and i'm going to leave this short and sweet i'm a registered nurse you should be able to see the data and deaths of children and they speak for themselves i have two words personal responsibility if you choose to send your child in a mask by all means do so but do not force my child to be in a mask i have a science degree i don't know how many do i do and i'm telling you that masks

014do not work thank you thank you the next speaker is crystal fulton crystal if you could say your name and your address for us okay um good evening i'm crystal fulton i'm at 139 well i'm in livonia um we're hoping for a 30-minute audience communication instead of 15 minutes for the remaining audience communication times on the board meeting agenda we're also requesting public comment to be extended to four minutes instead of regular three minutes and we want you to understand that our district other districts have come out in support of not masking this flaw we want to encourage lps board members to be great leaders by making a decision for the physical and mental health of our children this fall and we want to know that if the fda approves the vaccine for use in

015children under 12 we will not tolerate any school staff thinking that they can encourage our children to be part of this experiment by getting the job and we will not be injecting our children with a drug which has no studies of long-term effects and i have here the revised school code on parentheses excerpt act 451 of 1976 it says rights of parents and legal guardians duties of public schools section 10 it is the natural fundamental right of parents and legal guardians to determine and direct the care teaching and education of their children the public schools of this state serve the needs of the peoples by cooperating with the people's parents and legal guardians to develop the people's intellectual capabilities and vocational skills in a safe and positive environment so i just want to inform of

016you of those facts thank you thank you is there anybody else present who would like to participate in audience communications this evening we have one more person so we'll wait just a moment if you'd like you can finish filling that out after your comments as long as it gets to dr terriel okay good evening if you could just state your name and your address for the record thank you my name and what if you could just state your name and your address please for us my name and my address yes is what you said yes please michelle cherry 29298 excuse me i'm sorry we really can't have a whole lot of communication um you want my street address your street at your street is fine just your street in your city okay i'm on linda

017street in livonia michigan thank you okay we can all agree that the education health and overall well-being of our children is paramount lynn sutfin spokesperson for the michigan department of health and human services said quote according to the cdc there are numerous studies that have been done on the effectiveness of mask i emailed lynn and i asked her to send me the numerous studies not one of them looked at children however according to the cdc studies she did send i quote to our knowledge only one randomized controlled trial has been conducted to examine the efficacy of cloth mask and these results do not favor their use moisture retention reuse of cloth mask and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection which suggests more harm than benefit masked mythbuster author dr theresa gilbert states

018quote children age 2 and up can safely wear masks for extended periods of time such as a school day or child care and they will not affect your child's ability to focus or learn in school i emailed dr gilbert i asked her could you please send me the studies behind your statements she sent me one study she said this is what we do know i quote from that study we only found two pediatric studies one was not related to covet 19 another one was performed with n95 respirators also quote this review did not cover the psychological and social consequences it did not examine periods as long as a full school day i wondered if dr gilbert even read her own cited study before the article was published by the american academy of pediatrics who quote

019accepts generous support from pfizer end quote math seemed to be a tool to coerce parents into vaccinating their kids not because of risk versus benefit but because of the generous support of companies like pfizer to the aap seems like a conflict of interest and maybe that's why the aap changed their supporters page last week if the above health authorities can't supply data that masks are safe for our children i'm asking you what data do you have to support a mask policy the cdc data indicates that children under 18 have a 99.998 covid19 recovery rate with no treatment a study recently published in the british medical journal concludes quote in contrast to other respiratory viruses children have less severe symptoms when infected with covid19 and hospitalization is incredibly rare on september 9 2020 dr fauci says

020asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person are we allowing teachers to be scared of our healthy children i'm going to close also with school code act 481 it is the natural fundamental right of parents and legal guardians to determine and direct the care teaching and education of their children thank you thank you i do not have any other blue slips i assume there's no one else who's wanting to participate in audience communication this evening thank you we're going to go on to the next item on our committee on our agenda which is our committee of the whole and committee of the whole item 2a is planning and updates for the 2021-2022 school year and at this time i'm going to turn the meeting over to our superintendent mrs

021andrews thank you president burton and so i'm going to follow up our the information shared with our board for review last week with regard to our recommended lps fall 2021 mask and mitigation measures so i'll first note that our administration has spent quite a bit of time on the review of the mdhhs guidance that came out in late june we have reviewed all of that guidance which came in the form of recommendations and not mandate so i will first state that any mandates that are made of public schools in the state we certainly would follow with regard to the recommendations that are made we're going to give careful consideration to those recommendations both from the mdhhs and any that come from our local health department i'd like to just share with you the information that

022we passed out and we'll walk through each section of that so again first we are we took a look at the information shared we had extensive dialogue amongst our administrative team i've had the opportunity to have conversations with a number of superintendents in our county and in surrounding counties as well to just get a sense of the decisions that folks are making with regard to how their summer mitigation measures are working because many districts are offering summer programming as as have we as well as their plans for the fall we've also reviewed the data in our community as you know mr francis keeps our covid tracker updated on a daily basis as that information comes from our city and on a regular basis from the state in fact i'm going to invite mr francis and

023dr teriel and mr abate and mrs keats to join us at the table for the conversation um in case they have anything they would like to share but we do track that data and we have had a very very low incidence of covid19 within our community and we continue to track that we've been tracking that as you know since the spring of 2020. so after careful review of all of this information we are asking the board to consider and support a continuation of our summer face mask and mitigation protocols those have been successful over the course of the past several weeks and that would include i'd like to walk through each of those pieces president burton if that works for you so with regard to mask wearing consistent with mdhhs and cdc recommendations wearing of

024masks indoors and again this is in draft form so we welcome any input that you may have to make modifications of this wearing of masks indoors will continue to be encouraged particularly for unvaccinated individuals however they will not be required this decision will be at the discretion of the parent or guardian individual staff member volunteer etc lps will continue to make face masks available to all individuals who desire having a mask as previously communicated wearing of masks outdoors is not required all athletic programs will continue to follow any mhsaa requirements masks are required on school buses and in district transportation for the u.s department education department's coven 19 handbook masks are required to be worn by staff and riders on all transportation operated by public and private school systems if this requirement changes in the

025future livonia public schools will revisit this topic so i'll pause for a moment there and have the board share with us any dialogue with regard to the recommended mask requirements certainly again masks would continue to be encouraged particularly for unvaccinated individuals however they would not be required and we would certainly spend time uh with on the issue of respecting anyone's choice two would you wear a mask to request a mask in school or to not okay comments from questions from the board members mrs acosta can you share what that has been like for the summer programs in terms of the mass mitigation students wearing masks and feeling comfortable wearing that another feeling sure yep so we've had about a third of our students choose to wear masks during our summer programming and that has gone

026well students have been very comfortable with seeing some students in masks others and not been very respectful of that personal choice and so that has gone very very well and we've been we've been pleased with that and also parents have expressed appreciation for the ability to you know have those available should they desire that for their students or to make the choice that they would rather not thank you thank you other board members mrs bradford thank you is it possible there would be uh there could be a time where our district may make a decision uh mandating masks in maybe specific buildings or district wide based on the conditions out in our community or in within the county the city um so with that is that a possibility so what i would say is we

027would would work very much as we did last year we had our mitigation measures in place we made decisions based on the data in front of us at that time as you know there were times when we looked at a particular school that may have been having a higher incident and we worked closely with the principal with the school community with the board of education and with our cabinet team to determine if additional mitigation measures whatever those were were appropriate to put in place and what i will do is i will just move to the quickly to the very last statement on our recommended document to the board which would state the board of education and district administration anticipates these measures will remain in place for the 2021-22 school year unless we experience an increase

028in covert related cases in our community or there are any changes in public health guidance or requirements that would necessitate our review and or update of protocols so i think it's only prudent as we did throughout the past 15 16 months is to continue to watch that data closely as you know we track it again on a very regular basis we're comfortable making these recommendations moving forward but again that's that is these are the recommendations we'd be making at this time thank you other board members mrs uh oakquest um i think it is very important as as you've stated but just to reiterate that respect is a hallmark of our district it is a character trait that we have taught to our kids and child to child or student to student i should say between

029adults to adults and between adults and students but respect is paramount i think it is worth saying every single time we have this discussion that we respect the decisions to either wear a mask or to not wear a mask and we will treat one another with respect no matter what their decision is on this topic absolutely um mhsaa was mentioned a moment ago uh can you fill us in on what mhsaa is and is not saying at this point because i know what parents of our student athletes are wondering what the situation is going to look like in the fall at this point in time all requirements for testing have been lifted so there are no testing requirements in place um so we do not have any planned protocol for that we have not received

030any updated guidance from mhsaa certainly if we do we will share that with the board and certainly be responsive to that as a community mr willenberg and our three outstanding athletic directors are in constant communication with the organization but no new information has come out and those prior requirements have been lifted okay thank you so basically unless we hear from mhsaa we'll just we're just proceeding as a normal fall in terms of athletics yes okay and uh following up on mrs acosta's question uh for our summer programming which has been extensive um can you let us know what the either student or staff coping numbers have been at this point i am not aware of any students or staff who have tested positive for covert 19 that has been uh that has given me notification

031of that okay terrific so granted we have reduced numbers in the fall or in the summer rather than we do in the fall but it's good to hear that we've been running a programming and some with masks some without masks and we've had no cases from students or staff okay thank you um other questions from board members regarding the mask portion of this discussion oh mr francis i don't have a question but just in case um somebody thinks of it afterwards there's a difference between what we have as a uh our mass guidance on in the schools and on the bus obviously so those are two different points and we have a separate section on transportation where we repeat the same statement with regard to mass being required i want the board to know that

032we followed up on that piece there's actually two separate law firms that work with that the district works with had answered our question on this topic verbatim the same saying as long as us ed still requires it you you need a continued requirement one of the attorneys did say that you heard that they because they haven't done updated uh documents in in a few months uh it he said they may be looking at that and that's why the note in here states that if that topic is readdressed or changed then of course the district will address based upon those changes so just a little clarification on on why those two the bus versus in the building are different okay pretty similar to state of michigan has lifted everything but if you're in an airport or

033bus or so for you know then that requirement still applies yeah good okay parallel okay any other comments from board superintendent or cabinet members on this portion seeing them focused we will move on to screening protocols so as you know the screener that we utilized last year was a we asked families to perform at home self-monitoring and then we also asked our staff to do the same we think that practice is appropriate to continue it's just a good reminder of what some of those key symptoms are and so if if someone is exhibiting those symptoms it certainly would make sense to follow the directions on those screeners so while we we may be making some adjustments to those and updating them for this school year we will have those for utilization in the fall for

034both staff visitors and students okay any comments or questions on that no and then the next section really just reiterates what mr francis just said about transportation that was a separate section on our mitigation measures for last year as well as summer so we thought we didn't want that to be confusing if somebody was someone was looking for that particular item as we take a look at distancing physical distancing again there are not requirements for that there was guidance given by the mdhhs and the cdc and so what we want to share i'll read for you verbatim what is on here and then have some dialogue about what the intent is of that our intent is to generally return to instructional practices for classrooms that are age-appropriate and instructionally impactful where possible lps will try

035to maximize distance between students stationary seating without impacting instruction in the event there continues to be a need to distance for both transmission or quarantine purposes this safety measure will be structured to ensure the least impact on the typical school experience so as i shared with you prior some of the things that were more challenging especially for our youngest learners where the inability to do things like gather together at the carpet for a mini lesson or for a story or to you know work in small groups so when we talk about making instructional decisions that are age appropriate and instructionally impactful we believe it's appropriate to return to those practices that are appropriate for those ages certainly where we can for instance you know a middle school classroom or a high school classroom where we

036can have where they're stationary student seating it certainly makes sense to have some of that distancing in place but what we're what we feel is important is that it have the least impact on the typical school experience as it relates to what is most impactful for our learners and for quality instruction so i'd open it up to any of my colleagues for any further explanation on that item cabinet or board mrs bonnifield thank you president burton in talking about the the distancing and um for our younger learners um we talked a little bit earlier about the small groups and the carpet time and things like that and i think um this sort of leads into the contact tracing and quarantines is that as a mitigation factor to maybe reduce the amount of quarantines that we

037have some kind of mitigation process where for example maybe a kindergarten class has a one of the students is test positive and then maybe rather than the quarantine process that it might be you know no carpet time for a week and you know no group time rather than eliminating the kids from the classroom and i'm just i'm just trying to limit the the the make distancing more of a priority priority than quarantining the kids well so still respecting the fact that one of the students you know was tested positive but how do we you know make the least impact on those kids that haven't tested positive um and making it a safe environment so we'll talk we're going we are going to talk about bitcoin they kind of crossed over quarantine so um if we

038want to finish up on the distancing and then might be happy well i mean yeah the distancing was yeah it kind of straddled the yeah one one kind of falls into the next uh mrs jarvis thank you a lot of these things that we're talking about now such as distancing or we'll be talking about like contact tracing and quarantines are actually predicated on something we already discussed which is the screening protocols i think we need to emphasize to our students and to our staff if you don't feel well stay home we would not have to talk about quarantining or distancing if sick people stayed home and we need to make that less of a stigma if you are not feeling well please stay home mr francis so on the uh uh distancing portion and there

039was the statement it that that says that um with the instructional practice of classroom that age appropriate and structurally impactful where possible lps will try to maximize distance between students stationary seating without impacting instruction something that spills over to other areas such as lunch etc i know that mr abate and i were talking last week with some folks and you know you made a good point about uh lunchtime you know when he was principal frost they they have students sort of in that general area not just in the cafeteria or if you're going to be grouping normally with eight maybe you make that six or five or four i know that we've purchased extra picnic tables for the three high schools to have a little bit more outdoor seating churchill has an entire section outside

040of their enclosed cafeteria that's just part of churchill now they did it before covet and it just played into spreading out the the students at lunch so just some that's just some examples of what we're talking about with regard to the stationary seating and and trying to be cognizant as whether a classroom teacher or as a principal with with your your lunch rooms we don't have the same schedule that we had in 2021 with regard to an additional lunch in some places but that's other ways that we can work to keep a distance with students with regard to at the lunch tables or or on the picnic tables and spreading folks out okay mr bhatti uh mr francis mostly uh caught that i was just gonna um just tack on this one little piece in

041uh fitting with that sort of uh the concept of a bridge year where we're trying to kind of work our way back to you know to what we had um we can do a lot of that in those spaces so you mentioned frost we used to have 16 kids at a lunch time we went all the way down to just six over this last year to get maximum space but you could come back up to eight or ten and still have nice spacing in that area and still use all those other places so in the same way that we're trying to keep our classrooms you know we're going to see a little uptick in the number of students in there not all the way back to what we used to have we could still do

042that in the other areas as well and so feel that you know space where we can and have that little bit of a bridge into what we used to do okay other comments from board or cabinet and as you were mentioning this really is in many many ways a bridge year our numbers our class size numbers etc and our spacing may not be what it looked like last year but we're not going you know going immediately right back to pre-pandemic uh situations uh but rather in in many areas we're looking at this as a bridge year and this is certainly one of them anybody else mrs opus turn it back over to you all right sounds great thank you um so we do still have a number of questions surrounding contact tracing and quarantines and

043so what i will tell you is we would like to re revisit this topic at our next committee of the whole meeting once i have a chance to get some additional information we have certainly sought that information and had a lot of dialogue amongst our districts many districts within the county um and also spoke with um making the request to the health department um on where they stand those guy that guidance has not been updated since the june first guidance that they put out and so we we are actually lacking a bit of clarity on what is required with regard to contact tracing and quarantines um but we really one of the things that we had discussed and i know i've shared with you is a desire for us to certainly be reasonable and responsible

044so the those are really two elements that we think are essential to keep in place and when we talk about responsible certainly you know throwing everything out to say where you know we wouldn't contact trace or students wouldn't quarantine may certainly contribute to the spread of a virus within a particular classroom or school setting which is certainly not something we would want to see happen we also know that the impact of an extended quarantine of 10 to 14 days is significant both academically and socially emotionally on our students and so one of the things that we've talked about is being able to explore a responsible and reasonable time frame that if a student was exposed and was considered a close contact um what what would be appropriate for a quarantine and then an allowance back

045in with regard to perhaps a negative pcr test etc and what that may look like and so we will continue um to have dialogue not only within the county but with our health department um on that and then we'd like to bring back a more specific recommendation um when we come to our august committee of the whole any comments on that item yes mr centers i i think the general direction you're looking at is is good i know there's a lot of frustration not only with families but with us that so many students are out so you know obviously we want to maximize the amount of time people are in the classroom right and uh one having coveted will not make you will not be in the classroom but two also if you're having close

046contact quarantine for a period maybe beyond what is uh maybe completely necessary so you know i think finding that responsible balance i think is really important and i look forward to seeing what you you get from as far as feedback goes mrs jarvis thank you when we address the quarantine and the close the close contact quarantining can we include please some clarity on how children should be learning from home during that time period okay anybody else on this portion and and to be clear we're we're trying to uh get information that's necessary for parents uh at this point of the summer but it still is until the month of july we would like to have had information from the health department and it is not for our lack of requesting it i want i want

047that to be very clear um not trying to throw the health department under the bus because again it is still the month of july and we start school in september but we are the michigan department of health and human services has uh directed that this type of guidance while it's not a requirement but the guidance is going to come from wayne county health department and wayne county health department simply has not given us that guidance yet we are asking for it on a regular basis we were expecting it shortly but we did not want to hold information going out to our community with other points of our plan based on just that one piece so we absolutely are going to continue to diligently seek the guidance from wayne county health department from what i understand

048it would come in the form of guidance as opposed to requirements which would give ultimate local control on that decision but as soon as we get the information we will be discussing it at a board of education meeting and passing that on to parents and if you know anyone who works at the health department you might want to give a holler and tell them it'd be a good time to share that information with us any other topic or comments on this portion seeing that mrs opus and then ppe and cleaning protocols and so we are going to continue to promote hand washing on a regular basis so can i just tell you that that's certainly not anything new i've been i was a teacher in a classroom 32 years ago and we encourage hand washing

049then as well but certainly hand washing sanitizing continue to be encouraged and easily accessible in all seriousness having those materials readily available are very very important both for individual use as well as classroom use as well as for our outstanding custodial and maintenance team we will we are recommending to continue maintaining enhanced cleaning and high touch surface sanitation those are just good strategies no matter what those are practices as you know we purchased the electrostatic machines with the hospital grade sanitation prior to covid those are purchased really to deal with an increase of germs during cold and flu season though we believe those are good practices that should continue in schools no matter what so those will continue to be in place and then finally the notification process if we have received notification that we

050have a cobia positive student or staff member we would go through the process we utilized last year which would start with the director of student services and or her designee and then move from there we do have a requirement to notify the health department within 24 hours and to also make that information publicly available on our website as you know we kept a daily database kept by mrs jenkins by school and by students separated by students and staff and will continue to do that while that requirement is in place so again those are the mitigation measures that we are recommending and i would be happy to answer any questions and at this time i'd really ask for your guidance and feedback on these recommendations because it's our desire that by week's end we're able to

051get something out to our staff and to our parents in our school community mrs acosta thank you president burton i know that last year we were limiting school and classroom visitors well i know that in some of the language here it mentions visitors will visitors be allowed in the school buildings this year yes thank you mr centers since you're looking for feedback i i do think um you've done obviously a lot of work has gone into this and i think you've all been very thoughtful about um trying to uh make our students comfortable not having to have to wear masks in situations where it might not be necessary but also realizing that there are some protocols that we can take and or we're required to take um so i think you've worked really hard to

052find uh the right balance here and i appreciate it i i know we're gonna continue to monitor see what happens hopefully things open up more that's the hope so you know thank you i i think what you have here is is good start and uh i look to see more on contract tracing and that's going to be you know obviously just really important it's going to be really impactful so thank you okay mrs bradford thank you president burton i also think this is a really great document and a good start i like the the the opportunity about the reason be responsible reasonable and respectful i think we have a lot obviously all each of our families have many different viewpoints on how they feel about what's been happening these past 16 months and we have

053to have some type of direction to go in which would be pleasant or kind of agreeable for all sorts of different students with different needs and and our staff and everything um i am real i think we really have to screen screening protocols is going to be extremely important because that's going to kind of guide us on how we go and and and which way we go i agree i think it's good that parents have a say in a decision but i do also think when you come when you send your child into school your child now is is grouped with you know 24 or hundreds of different students now so it changes their it can change our scenario a little bit so we have to be respectful and allow everybody to make the best

054decision for their children that they want without compromising the health since this is a health it's a definitely a health issue and we just don't know what it's going to look like in the fall and the winter and and what's going to happen so i like that we have some options and some decisions that we can make if we need be but i'm comfortable with how we're the direction we're going uh to start in the fall and i think um you've done a great job really trying to like mr center said keep up try try to keep some type of a balance it's not easy this has been hours of work on our staffs and i'm really appreciative of all your efforts in trying to put some type of new measures in place obviously last

055year it looked a lot different we had a lot of different type of mandates but i think this is a good start and um i know we're going to continue to work on this throughout the year so thank you for um everybody and and ask our parents and our community to be respectful responsible and reasonable with what measures we put into place and and do your best for for the health of everybody all our students thank you other board members or cabinet members who would like to weigh in on this mrs acosta thank you president burton just quick feedback um anytime that there's parent choice um i'm in full support and i think that's what our families were looking for that based on their own preferences in their homes that they would have the opportunity

056to choose what was right or what was best for them kind of similar to the decision that was made for virtual and in person that was a family choice so um i'm in support and i really like the direction that we're going other comments mrs jarvis thank you i'd like to just thank the administrative team this shows a lot of thought and i like the fact that it's a bridge we weren't trying to get to the end right away i don't think that would be reasonable but this does show that if we can really go either way depending on what the numbers do and we are prepared to look at those numbers i appreciate the fact that that hard data was included in this plan and we also have the advantage of having had sort

057of a trial run during the summer and using what we learned in our own community to help create this plan so it is really a very much personalized to livonia strategy and i like the fact that you know there's there's a lot of changes but we have not limited ourselves or locked ourselves in so that if we need to make any adjustments that is still open and i can't say anything on top of what mrs bradford said responsibility being reasonable and respectful respectful the three hours wow it used to be reading ready and arithmetic i like your three hours better so thank you any other board members like to weigh in um i will go then um i am in support of the plan that's being put forth at this point i think that it's

058it's significant anybody who is involved with with any child which is certainly everybody who's in this room right now and likely anybody who's listening to this to this meeting knows that absolutely safety comes first and i've been saying this for throughout this entire covet experience safety comes first without a doubt but safety looks different to different families and different children depending on what they need there's obviously copic safety is is been foremost on everyone's mind for quite some time but there's physical safety and those of us who have been involved with with children especially throughout this whole experience know that there's also mental safety there's social emotional safety and there's academic safety and i don't know that i've met one adult or child who's gone through the last 15 months or 16 months without being

059impacted in one way or another throughout those different levels of safety what i really like about this plan is that it's it's taking what we know of covid right now and it's taking what we know of the impact of the last 15 months on our students and trying to make the the the safest and best steps that we can forward right now toward post covid and we're i think we're taking significant steps to a postcode world but we're not quite there yet so we do need to keep some of these safety measures in place to keep our students back in our school buildings which is where i certainly wish that they could all be and look forward to the day that they all are back in our buildings um i'm i'm thankful very sincerely thankful

060to the entire lps community team which is starts with our phenomenal superintendent who has led this charge since june of last year for those who may not be aware uh not only was mrs oak west able to lead the charge of getting our kids back in school starting in october our staff in september our kids in october and for those who may not be aware that was a very rare thing most school districts around were not able to get their kids in school five days a week but thanks to the literally hundreds of people who worked together there were committees of about 250 people that started last summer to get our kids back in school then our parents supported us our staff supported us our kiddos did a phenomenal job uh coming in and and

061doing their mask thing and doing whatever they had to do to get back in school but this has been literally thousands of people working together this is another significant step toward the end of this experience that we've all had to go through but i thank our our superintendent again our cabinet and our administrative team for putting together this plan having it be very thoughtful very respectful and and recognizing as we've said that not everybody is going to be in the same place um not everybody's been in the same place throughout the whole experience but if we can be respectful of one another and look to one another's needs not just our own and and as our board has said we may not always agree on every aspect of something but but can we come to

062consensus which is as our board discusses consensus is can i live with it as opposed to it's my favorite and i love everything about it but rather can i live with it and i'm very hopeful that everybody in livonia public schools can say this is a plan that i can live with um and we are definitely planning on taking steps toward there hopefully this plan will not need to be in place a year from now but for now this is a safe way to get our kids back in school um and to have a a freer better year this year than we were able to have last year so i thank all of those who are involved in this i can fully support this plan as we said we've been watching the coveted numbers and

063consistently we thank mr francis for i've told him i'm his his uh his covert number junkie he puts out numbers for the board on a very regular basis and the cabinet yeah i know i'm your follower yeah there are several of us but it's interesting that consistently livonia of state of michigan wayne county and livonia livonia has had the lowest numbers of coven cases and then it goes state of michigan and then it goes wayne county there's been a rare day or week where it's not gone in that order so i commend the people in livonia for doing what is necessary through many different mitigation measures to keep our numbers low in this community but it's because we've been able to keep our numbers low in this community that i feel comfortable going forward with

064this plan including the the masking optional portion of it so i look forward to seeing uh what's what the last piece of information that we need from wayne county but um i i think everyone involved in putting this plan together and i think it's it's a plan like i said that i'm i'm fully in support of and i'm certainly hoping that our community can come to consensus on that they can live with this so any other comments no mr mr johnson thank you president burton uh i'll try and be succinct i support these mitigation measures any other comments or questions i'll pipe into since everybody else has said any that's something and i've been silent i absolutely um support these measures um i think we know a lot between uh last year when this was

065you know foisted upon us and and we had to make a lot of you know knee-jerk and a lot of information coming at us and we just honestly really tried to do the best for the students that we could we lived through we learned a lot about it um and you know we're moving into this new year and just a reminder to everyone that again this is a lot like last year where we'll watch the numbers and and watch what's going on and if we see things going in the wrong direction then you know we'll have to sit down and have another conversation to see about what direction we need need to go in we're changing some things up um are they going to work are they not going to work the proof is in

066the pudding right and then we just uh move on with it so i'm i'm very excited about a lot of the stuff that's going on i agree with the you know personal responsibility um a lot of respect and again it's not perfect for everyone but we we honestly are trying to do the best that we can to be able to get the kids into the building make enough people comfortable so that we can keep the kids in the building and get them the education that they need and they deserve and do the best for our community any other cabinet or board members who like to weigh in okay thank you for that feedback and we will make the mod the couple of modifications that we've talked about either in the study session or the committee

067of the whole meeting clean this up and then we hope to be able to communicate this out certainly to our staff this week and as well as to our parent community thank you folks the next item on our agenda is item 3 our curriculum committee and i will turn it over to mrs acosta thank you item a is a summer programs update with mrs o'brien thank you mrs acosta i am very excited to share with you an update of some of the things that have been happening this summer for our students so as you know we applied for a grant to the state to provide our students with multiple different opportunities we looked at it as a menu that families could choose different ways to re-engage with school to have social emotional opportunities plus some

068academics so i just want to share with you as of today where we're at we finished our first camp so our first camp was hosted at cooper upper elementary we had 150 students there the theme was on robots and road trips so it was two weeks of reading and writing around a theme some math and then some stem activities teachers had optional professional development on how to use a variety of coding and i'll call them robots i'm probably wrong ways for kids to interact with some stem activities and we borrowed them from wayne county resa some of our schools have them in place but we they we arranged with wayne county to borrow a large batch of them which will be shared now at each sub subsequent camp today started our second camp it's at

069frost middle school we had 200 students registered i did not get a final number today of how many students showed up our themes are the olympics and roller coasters and water parks and camp 3 will be hosted at holmes middle school and currently we have 241 students signed up and that is on coding and edible and exploding science so doesn't that sound fun in addition to that we have over 800 courses for credit recovery so not 800 students but some students have more than one credit who have signed up either through our in-person summer school this month of july or through our online hybrid utilizing um two different platforms for students to regain some credits that they may have lost this past year we also have at every one of our k-1 schools camps in

070august for students to kind of come back for our kindergarteners and first graders so they'll actually be our first graders and second graders in the fall to come back kind of re-engage get stories read to them and they get to take a book home a day that the teacher reads to them and then have those social opportunities to play with other students we currently have 234 students signed up for those camps and um actually nigeria had theirs over the last two weeks because they start school earlier and they had 27 students at nishiro we also have 125 students participating in book clubs so teachers have signed up to host book clubs with students each student is in a group and they chose two different titles that they would read and then talk with other students

071led by a teacher and we have 241 students who are receiving tutoring in reading or math and we wrote this into the grant as a way for students to continue to engage utilizing our i-ready end-of-the-year assessment data that a student could get some targeted instruction each student gets five hours over the summer in 10 30 minute sessions or in five full hours if that's what the parent chose uh and we also offer it in person and virtually the funnest and that's not a good word i know but the funnest part has been that part of the grant was that a week was defined as monday through friday and they've now adjusted that in in the um from the state michigan department of education but we wrote into our grant family fun fridays and we wanted

072our families to find different ways to engage with each other and with fun activities so that students could get together and do some of the assembly or field trip types of things that we were unable to do during this past year our first one was mad science and we had 420 students participate in an hour session they signed up and got to participate in some stem activities and take home a bag of activities to do at home our second one was bowling and we had 320 students and families sign up for that last week we had dan the animal man at stevenson high school and he he presented in the pacs in addition to that families could come up and have lunch at stevenson and they signed up for food trucks or kona ice so

073they could just come up to stevenson and participate we did have some rain but we had great turnout and then this last this next friday is another version of mad science and this is more of a presentation show which would again be in our pacs and we have 700 students who have signed up for those or families so thousands of different opportunities for our students to engage with each other with learning with fun in in great ways to uh kind of re-engage with school so we're very excited we have a couple more weeks and i look forward at the end of summer to update you again any questions i'm just going to add on that we have um we are just so grateful for the tremendous interest our families have shown and certainly as well

074for all of our staff who have who are working these camps we have um at least a couple hundred if not more teachers para educators building principals who have been helping to coordinate the camps teach the students run the book clubs provide the one-on-one tutoring and we are absolutely thrilled that this many students have been able to take advantage of it i certainly want to acknowledge mrs o'brien for her tremendous efforts in preparing the grant preparing this information it it just seemed like a really neat idea a few months ago it has since come to the fruition with the help of many many people so at the risk of not not missing anyone we certainly want to thank our leaders who have helped coordinate each of these opportunities and all of our staff who are

075running the camps but the book clubs the tutoring the family fun fridays it is just tremendous to really be able to re-engage with our kiddos um to have our families have some of just those experiences they haven't been able to have over this past year we are really excited about our k-1 students coming in um at each of our k-4 schools to just give that jump start to learning for next school year um so again many many thanks to everyone that has been involved in making this happen so thank you mrs o'brien thank you mr centers the uh so what mrs oquist is not saying is that uh this was a lot this is a lot of planning it's a lot of work and after a really long covet year our staff jumped in enthusiastically

076and i've seen some of them sharing how much fun they're having with the students this summer and how engaging it is and it's such a credit to them um to just you know step up and they knew that this is something the community needed a lot of students took advantage of so i'm just so appreciative yeah it's been great thank you this is bonnefield mrs o'brien can you talk a little bit about the credit recovery i know you said 800 800 800 classes were available and i think we talked in the beginning of or in this in the spring that it's not necessarily just about the kids who maybe didn't yes thank you uh but that there were a lot of concerns because we were online in that um across the board our students had

077concerns about their grades whether it's failing and needing to pass or they've got a b and they want to get the a correct so they had holes that they wanted to be prepared for for next year yes absolutely and again to piggyback on what superintendent oku said we had staff who came up with great ideas and ways to support our secondary students so there are several different online platforms similar to iready instructional but ways for students to take their courses online so during the month of july we typically have our normal summer school students come to churchill this year they're instructed by our teachers or teachers we've hired for the summer they follow our syllabus and use our materials but in addition to that last year when we were closed we utilized online credit recovery

078online courses that kids could take instead of in person and so we've merged those two things this year students can earn multiple credits if they need them and in multiple ways so there's a hybrid version of the online where they could come to their high school next month in august and take their assessments at school in the computer lab with a teacher being there or staff member counselor to support them but the 800 is credit recovery opportunities that students have or course so at our middle schools we have students who are taking these courses to prepare them for high school some of the online courses so there's a wide variety of needs and again our counselors did a great job of helping us identify what students need and which platform might be the best way

079for them to engage in the content to prepare them for school but we also know that some families won't be able to take advantage of these things this summer so we'll be continuing to have some of these great plans moving forward for next school year any other questions comments mr centers there's pictures of that okay so we'll move on to item b which is the updated ala grades 910 materials again with mrs o'brien thank you mrs acosta um this is for your information and just some good news i wanted to share it's not something that needs to be voted on but in the fall of 2019 we adopted study sync for our ninth and tenth graders and it had an online platform and then we also bought a consumable book for students to annotate and

080have the short texts in them last year in the fall of 2020 the 11th and 12th grade textbook committee continued their work and they wanted to have the same textbook so we adopted study sync last fall for our 11th and 12th graders but we adopted the newest version last fall the 2021 version it was not available when we adopted for ninth and tenth grade and what we found through this year with lots of online teaching that the platform for the 2021 version of studysync was according to teachers easier to use easier for students to use had some updated articles and short text that were in their opinion very engaging so mrs fenkel pulled her 9th and 10th grade committee back together looked at the 2021 version of study sync and what it offered and we

081have worked with mcgraw-hill they have given us a credit for a hundred and sixteen thousand nine hundred and thirty dollars and forty cents five years of the online license of what we had originally bought and then we bought the 2021 version for our ninth and tenth graders um for a hundred and thirty two thousand eight hundred dollars which is a difference of fifteen thousand eight hundred sixty nine dollars and sixty cents so it's the same textbook it's the most updated and the teachers in talking to their colleagues had asked for us to make this change so we are going to purchase and get the credit and just wanted to share with you it's not something that um needs to be approved by the board but we wanted you to know about it and the approval

082is just because uh it does a dollar threshold correct you've already approved this textbook in the purchase of it okay any questions thank you we'll move on to item c purchase of hmh into reading materials for upper elementary schools mrs o'brien more textbooks adoptions so i am bringing to you a recommendation from our upper elementary ela textbook committee this committee started in the fall of 2019 and they actually when we came back to school last fall said we really want to continue to do our work and this committee met outside of the school day because we didn't have substitutes available this year they received pilot materials at their homes they did online training with consultants and they narrowed down so if you recall a few years ago i shared with you about ed reports being

083an outside source that rated textbooks and compared textbook publishers new materials with the common core state standards there were 15 ela programs that they started with for our upper owls that they looked at and they narrowed it down to three that they piloted this year so they piloted my perspectives my view they had a fifth grade program my my view and then my perspectives was the sixth grade wit and wisdom and then into reading so after piloting from january to the end of the year they met when school got out compared their ratings of the three programs and have come up with a recommendation for into reading which is what i'm bringing to you today we're purchasing a six-year online online license with additional writing programs so this program is not an integrated ela program

084like what we have at k4 where we have reading and writing integrated their writing program is about some of the things that they read but then they also write long pieces of writing which are lightly connected to the reading that they're doing but much more in depth more like middle school and high school so the writable program is also online and goes hand in hand with the reading and then three years of their consumable textbook which allows our students to annotate and write in and highlight and underline the text pieces that they are reading we're only purchasing three years of the consumable because we've not had a textbook at our upper l's in ela in a while and we want to make sure that the consumable is something that they will utilize to its fullest

085extent so we we put in we asked the publisher for three years of that figuring the first year you're learning it second and then by the third year we could have some conversation about the use of that consumable but the um quote is for six years of the online license and then this also includes professional development teacher materials the professional development is online now so it's shorter we've learned that some of those long day they fly in a consultant is not the best way so two hours of professional development for each grade level fifth and sixth before school students and then seven single hour continuation professional development so the total is 276 536 dollars and 36 cents mr centers and then mr so when i first got on the board almost 8 years ago we

086were in that period where we were in real financial hardship and we did not do any textbook adoptions but in recent years uh we have uh been able to do quite a bit and i know you are working very hard and the committee's worked very hard and what i see over and over again is that the process is extremely thorough and that there's a lot of teacher buy-in and uh when they are adopted people seem very satisfied so uh thank you you know for your work on this uh looking forward to it i think you know this is obviously literacy is so important and this is a key part of it so you know i appreciate the recommendation thank you and it's mrs corey and her textbook group who really through a tough year stayed

087focused and wanted to be able to start this school year off their colleagues have a new resource to use and they did a lot of work outside their school day thank you thank you mr johnson thank you mrs acosta mr ryan you indicated that this is a six-year license but we're only purchasing three years of the consumable to see if it's actually being utilized once we get to the third year if we find out that it is being utilized i'm assuming that there's an option to pick up the next three years of the six-year license yes there is just like our everyday math journals that we buy each year that we could we could um you know have a contract with the company and buy them every year or we could buy a bulk of

088another three years to match our six year online license okay thanks thank you mrs bradford thank you mrs acosta i just want to echo dan's sentiments this is a tough year for teachers to take on looking at materials and piloting them and and they're so needed as dan said we were ready for a new program and i just want to recognize everybody who worked on that committee because that had to have been tough and you i know they had to do much much take much time out of their outside day to really um delve into the three programs and what they like the best so hats off to everybody that worked on that committee thank you thank you any other comments so we're going to bring this to the regular meeting for voting sounds good

089thank you mrs o'brien and this concludes the curriculum report thank you and the next item on our agenda is item four building in sight and i will turn it over to mr setters thank you president burn all right we have uh four items this evening first of which is item 4a which is purchase of copy paper this is a yearly ritual for us i guess you would say uh so mr francis can you uh educate us on how much carpe paper we're getting and uh what we're gonna pay for certainly certainly um thank you very much i should go to i should go to that memo so with the with the uh uh purchase of the cop paper like you said this time each year we come in and uh mr lao who's the administrator

090of facilities and operations uh and is in charge of the district warehouse takes uh you know takes inventory of what we have in the warehouse and then places an order based upon the current supplies we have in anticipation for the coming school year i in the memo i had written to you and put in the board packet you can see that over the past two years the amounts we've ordered each summer have gone down a bit and and we can you know twofold one obviously with uh with covid and unless students in in the buildings and and being out for some periods of time but also just i think simply just the attrition of printing everything even though i just went and printed my medal as i apologize um but this is the the annual

091purchase for that uh we're looking to um we the quote was included in in your uh packet as well it's from contract paper group they have the the the resa um bid on that so that does satisfy the board's requirement uh we're this year looking at eighty eight thousand six hundred sixty sixty six hundred sixty seven dollars and forty cents worth of paper and that's a combination of you know mostly the traditional eight and a half by 11 white paper but also some pastel colors and the larger 11 by 17 white copy paper so again it's a fairly as mr setters mentioned standard item yes could you just share in prior the two prior years how much we've spent yeah so going back to 1920 school year we spent 141 000 85 and the year

092prior the 2021 103 seventy 872 dollars and this year as i mentioned a little more than eighty eight thousand six hundred sixty seven and that's there's a fluctuation in the price obviously a paper for you know year to year but essentially that gives you some type of grasp of how there's been less that we've ordered these past couple of years okay does anyone have questions or comments yes mrs bradford thank you i'm just is that are we can we make the assumption that there was a lot some paper left over from last year is that what you're saying yes there generally is yeah there generally is some paper left over but we we noticed from uh from the year prior there was there's a substantial amount left over because when we left school in march

093so that lowered the order for the 20-21 year and then again we we had paper left over and just generating an estimate off of off of prior use this will go into stock we try to have enough that carries us through the year if something is is off on a given year there's some reason a spike in and how much it is used and ordered through the warehouse we we may have to come back but we've been pretty good about about having enough to get us through the air yeah that's and it's possible too that with the use of uh the devices and everything we can maybe have cut back a little bit also see that continue to hitch back great thank you you're welcome any other comments or questions i'd like to request this

094to be on the consent agenda consent agenda that sounds great thank you all right that brings us to item b which is purchase of school buses um this is a 2021 proposed 2021 bond purchase this is something that uh the the district team made up of the the transportation supervisor the fleet garage supervisor the finance department mrs smith has been involved in these conversations uh mrs oquist and myself uh mrs smith and uh mr martin as well as uh miss ashley had all sat down had this conversation recently so it's an ongoing process and plan to replace our our bus fleet as we move along the board had last year approved a bus purchase at that time and this is again the continuation of that process we when we went out for the to the

095community for the 2021 bond proposal one of the items in there was to replace buses you cannot replace or purchase a bus using sinking fund dollars oftentimes we have conversations about how similar sinking fund and bond dollars are in this regard they're they're very stark in their difference and that you can't use sinking fund dollars to purchase those buses you can use the bond items the bond dollars and in this in this regard the details of this purchase are specifically uh also leaning into the idea of getting our old tech diesel buses off the road and out of the fleet and replacing them with either propane or gasoline as we've discussed in the past we do not intend to completely wipe out all of our diesel buses it is the opinion of the transportation department

096and the fleet garage supervisor who's been with us nearly 40 years and has seen the original 1980s version of propane and buses and all the way the arc of that into the current models and and the difference between them uh he is of the opinion and i am in agreement and i think our entire team is in agreement that we would have three different types of of energy source buses and not putting all your eggs in one basket if you will so we do look towards in the future clean diesel but also the cleantech propane specifically the current roush ford and bluebird partnership in that in that manufacturing of of the propane bus as well as some traditional gasoline buses so this specific purchase that we are requesting and recommending is for six 71 passenger

097special needs wheelchair buses they would have three in gasoline and three in propane so that purchase and you you have the quote and there's two separate quotes for uh for you in your packet that came from msbo this is the same purchase purchasing consortium that we used on our last purchase we worked through them so you'll see three quotes from three uh retail and the only one we want to focus on is holland and i mentioned in in the memo the reason for that is they're the only ones that are selling the bluebird buses which is what right now is entirely our fleet so we are are currently working with the bluebird fleet they're also blue birds the only manufacturer that works in that partnership with ford and with roush to get that clean propane

098fueling system so with that the cost is 705 492 for all six buses again three gasoline three propane and then in conjunction and related to that we had applied to the michigan department of environment great lakes and energy known as eagle and their um grant program and we were again an award letter for seventy three thousand five hundred and twenty nine dollars so a little more than ten percent of this purchase for us to retire two old tech diesel buses and those would be two traditional 77 passenger general buses if you will that we've determined we we won't need in the in the near future so we were able to say we can get those off the road those are the last of those 07s that we've talked about over the past couple of years

099and they didn't qualify in the past because they didn't have enough miles on them but after use you know after more use they now qualify and we and we were notified that we would be awarded that so it's the type of grant that we have to outlay the capital first receive the buses and then get reimbursed those dollars so mrs smith if you're out there anywhere the only thing i'd add to that mr francis thank you for that detailed review and i just want to share something else that mr martin had talked about was the ability for us to not be overly reliant on any one bus or one source and which allows us to withstand some of the fluctuation in pricing um to be able to maintain and run those buses and so we

100talked about that at great length the importance of utilizing all three and they all have certainly their benefits but that allows us to again not be reliant on significant fluctuations in market costs that would impact the district in an adverse way so this really allows us to maintain a balanced fleet and continue to take advantage of grant opportunities and so i appreciate mrs smith and mr francis working with our transportation supervisor and fleet garage supervisor to continue to bring in those additional dollars to help support these purchases and one last item on this with regard to the current wheelchair buses that we have we would hold on to those until we take re receipt of the new buses it could take many months and that's why we're doing this very early in fiscal 22 is

101to get that clock ticking these buses are made to order mr martin worked with the representative with msbo and had all the exact specifications that that we intended on on that quote and then once it's built and we receive it then we can look to sell those uh 14s those 2014s great thank you mr francis uh it looks like mr johnson then spawn field go ahead mr johnson thank you mr sanders mr francis you you indicate the total cost of 705 and some change is that net of the reimbursement no no that's that's what the board is going to be asked to approve and then minus that so really it's exactly 10.4 percent will be reimbursed of that amount okay so we'll actually in the end be be spending less than that because of the

102reimbursement but i didn't want to do a net number i needed the full number because i wanted the board to understand the amount that you're going to be approving right okay i just want to make make clear that the reimbursement is coming later off of this number okay uh and you mentioned in 2022 when do we expect uh delivery of these buses well we don't have a definitive timeline they start the build but it can take months it could take six seven eight months for that to occur which was in the past and all of you have had this conversation with mrs smith with regard to the budget hey we have these dollars set aside it never came in in time for june 30th therefore we're rolling it over that occurs because it is such

103a long lead time so we're starting this process in july okay thank you this is bob mr francis the two buses that were retiring for the um uh for the the refund for the grant um those need to be destroyed correct that's part of the grant process we are unable to resell those buses you're correct they cannot be sold they cannot the point of the this specific grant is to take them off of the road okay and then how many other buses um did you i'm sorry did you say we're gonna be retired once we get the six new buses so we'll once the six new buses come in we'll also have six of our current fort 2014 wheelchair buses that we would look to sell because they're 2014 they do have life in them

104we could be able to get dollars for them from another district or another entity who might want to purchase them so net will we will have two less okay 77 passenger buses in our fleet which we've determined is not going to impact us correct because we have more buses in our fleet than we put on the road any given day for backups etc absolutely thank you you're welcome president yes um mr francis i'm not sure if this is a question for you or mrs smith but uh when we do get the grant money uh back into the district the 72 000 will that go then back into the bond fund or into the general fund i'll let her answer that i'm going to say the the general and see if i'm right or wrong so

105we would be paying for it out of the bond fund so then the bond fund would be uh reimbursed see i told you to listen all right that's why i said we may want to ask mr smith hardy thank you very much all right anything else all right request this for the regular regular agenda correct perfect all right that brings us to item c which is purchase of mobile devices you have two separate quotes in your packet um because they're from two different manu or two different uh companies i'm sorry presidio and cdwg with regard to the mobile devices so we have chromebooks and the microsoft surface go to machines first of all the chromebooks plus the uh and in charging carts that go with them so there's a 3936 chromebooks 137 charging or storage

106carts that we have on the quote this is part of just that general replacement cycle with regard to our chromebooks chromebooks google stops support of them after five years and so we need to be on a replacement cycle so as noted in both mr clan's memo as well as mine at the end of this coming school year google will will stop support it doesn't mean it shuts down completely and and doesn't work but you won't get any updates you want it becomes more difficult more challenging the chromebooks are just designed that way the hardware doesn't necessarily last as long as as some other items and they just put them on those five five-year support plans from the company we have no say in that it's not something we ask them to please stop supporting this

107we'd love it if they kept supporting them but this is just part of our natural replacement cycle so i just want to kind of clarify that this wasn't something that we're saying we need a whole bunch more for x y z we do but it is part of that natural cycle and that that uh piece we're matching with at the same time the um 459 surface go twos and 17 charging carts for those from cdwg those are the same machines um that we purchased for the k-1s this past school year knowing that we have students coming back to our classrooms and for face-to-face instruction we need to purchase more machines to be able to have enough for of them for our k-1s across the district and across all the buildings so in combination we're saying

108that we're using the federal covert related funding you know i talked to mrs smith about how we plan to pay for these and that general statement because i know that she in the district are receiving and accounting for different federal funding sources from cover-related funds from the federal government it gives her a little bit more leeway in how she's paying for them but it does really help with the bond as well because normally we would have been planning to do that chromebook replacement cycle from the bond so this is giving us a little bit of relief of from from right away coming out of our tech line item budget from the 2021 bond mrs charmers thank you mr francis last year when we had students who were in person we had a chromebook for them

109at school and then we provided one for home so that they did not have to transport back and forth which with a kindergartner and first grader that's a recipe for trouble so is that the plan again this year to have students who are in person have a school computer and a home computer for the k1 the the microsoft surface go to's those are for the k-1s and those are items that are kept in the school so they are not traveling them back and forth as far as any type of planned one-to-one program with regard to the chromebooks or any other mobile devices the district tech committee is in conversation that's our plan is to have a a plan for the next fall of how that would work and be distributed we did not if we

110have to distribute something on and pivot on a dime we will like we did last year but it's not the the ideal way of of doing it and of tracking it so we we decided to to take a step back take a breath and use this year to come up with a more organized one-to-one device and what grade levels those would cover how that would work what it would look like etc so right now we are not necessarily going to be giving every single person a chromebook like we did when we had to pivot and students were home if there are families that have a need that there's a concern that they don't have something they absolutely should talk to us and we will work through those with those students all right anything else mrs

111berger um what will be happening with those that are now out of date so we get to use them this year because they'll end they'll end support from google in the fall not this fall the fall of 22. so they'll still be in use this year and it's going to take time as with a lot of tech and basically most of the supply chain on anything you know items coming in so that will give us we want to get this purchase the ball rolling now see them come in even when we get them they need to be touched they need to be set up and and ready uh to deploy so once we get them then we will have the these ones these new ones that we're looking to purchase the nearly 000 into the

112system and ready to deploy and then we'll know as we near the end of the 21-22 school year we'll start taking off uh those those 17s offline okay yeah so it'll be sort of an overlap year okay since we don't know exactly when they'll be in and ready for a deployment we're not going to count on them necessarily for student use right away but at some point there's going to be that bridge where we have the quote unquote xtras and then we'll have to retire them at the end of the school year the seventeens will retire at the end of the school year okay that makes sense it does and then after they're retired is that something that we can sell or are they truly unusable for anybody or do we keep them on hand

113for emergency backup no there's actually a market for them especially in uh in other nations who don't have aren't at the same perhaps uh socioeconomic uh leveling capacity of of the united states that we have the ability to they will there is a secondary market for recycling or even resale and uh thus far that's where we've gone with our with our out-of-date or i should say i shouldn't it's a bad way of saying it makes them sound like they don't work are no longer supported by google chromebooks is either recycle or a secondary market okay thank you you're welcome all right anything else no i i appreciate that they i do think that um towards the end of the life with technology advancing so fast they do they do get a little sluggish so uh

114getting the new refreshed versions i think will be really nice for the students regular please thank you all right that brings us to one last item and building on site committee and that is item for d central office abatement change this is something that i i um i've been waiting to bring to the board we needed to get the quote from from from globalgreen globalgreen is the company who received the low bid to do the abatement of the central office renovation project so they did that abatement demo in the building long story short there's always not always there's oftentimes something you just don't see the tile that was hot was under tile that wasn't hot which was under carpet so when they did the original walkthrough on scope it we didn't know it existed so

115of course as you start to pull back items in demo they found um in that back west building that's the 900 year old building there this tile was under a couple of layers we had to get it abated so unfortunately that causes a a change order that was beyond the the amount that we had put into our um in into our extra dollars on that so i come to you with the twenty thousand five hundred and sixty dollars uh of a change order for the approval that i would request to go on the regular meeting we cannot pay a company until the board approves even if it's one penny or one dollar over the amount that you improved questions comments well uh you know certainly asbestos is nothing to mess with so uh we appreciate

116the diligence of making sure it's taken care of right and uh you know we these things do happen from time to time where when you start tearing open walls and stuff you find things so 100 year old things absolutely well thank you and uh that would you you like that on the regular directions please i mean if you want to put it somewhere else that's up to you but i would like on the next meeting great all right thank mr uh johnson can i just ask a question before we go forward i'm looking at the letter from um global green and i just want to make sure the numbers are right because they show a total of 26 560. yeah if you we we did this three times with them this is where it landed

117if you notice it go up to under number one c they mentioned that that portion is a deduct so if you add under two price if you add the 6000 to the 20650 and then take out the 90 you land at the 26 560. and i'm not 100 sure why they don't put up minus sign somewhere but okay but you're certain it's it's 26.50 correct okay thanks mr sanders yeah thank you that's good it wait so you say your number again 20 it's 26 560. correct yeah you said 20. i think your minimum is 20. did i tell you your memo oh yeah your memo says 20. i did i just i saw it 650. but it hasn't totaled 26. the the the the number on the quote is correct and and i apologize that

118i wrote um you're right i put 20 i have to type on my part take note of the function motion i'll check that okay i'll check then if not then we'll have you i'll make sure we amend that okay i see now we're here yep great all right thank you very much that concludes building insight thank you the next item on our person on our agenda this evening is item five personnel committee i'll remind those of you who have joined us part way through this committee we are still in our committee of the whole meeting um we will get through this as as expeditiously as possible and get to the reason several of you are here uh personnel committee for committee of the whole and i will turn this over to mrs bradford thank you

119president burton oh look they're already here and ready tony and mrs keats are here thank you good evening we wanted to give you a brief update on the work we've been doing this summer uh this summer has consisted of a lot of interviews for a variety of positions we are happy to say that at this time all of the elementary folks have been recalled from layoffs so we were very excited about that in fact uh we predict that we should be posting for a couple positions in the in the near future so we're thrilled that that has happened um currently we have about 85 student registrations k-12 in the district which is on pace with what we had last year so we're going to be taking a look at those numbers how they factor into

120schools to see if there's any other staffing needs we may in fact need just today some special area postings have gone up one for music pe and art that's unusual that we would post for all three but in fact they are up so get the word out um and i'll turn it over to my partner here for the secondary piece secondary looks very similar as you may recall we had 11 people unfortunately who were laid off from the secondary ranks all but two have been recalled there were some counselors in there as well that worked out particularly well all of those counselors recalled to their original positions and in one case to an improved position with less travel more concentration in one particular building there are as i said two folks remaining summer can be

121fluid hiring season can be fluid so if anything shakes loose there may be some possibility there and we'll certainly uh we'll certainly try um have a few specialty positions in the second carrier we've been working on certainly some administrative work thanks to at least one fell out in the crowd there that we have some openings to to fill um we have uh we found an acting teacher for kappa which was a a really specialized piece that can be hard to find and we're working on a abandoned orchestra director as well uh for uh for churchill so there's some parts that are out there from administrating administration into teaching et cetera um but we're working working on it we'll get all lined up and um you know if things things work out well hopefully we can

122bring back everybody but we'll see cautiously optimistic well on that point does anybody have any questions i just have a comment thank you for all of your hard work because this is always a fluid crazy time of the year and it's end of july so we still have all of august and you still look like you guys are maintaining your sanity trying to get everybody so thank you for all your hard work and and uh we hope to get some other new people in the district so it's exciting i think that's it then thank you thank you all right the next item on our agenda is item six finance committee mrs bonafield i don't see any items do you have any i have no item items thank you item seven is policy uh committee mr

123johnson is there anything for policy we don't have anything at this time this isn't just anything we do not and last item is item eight legislative committee mrs jarvis do we have anything for that i have no items unless mrs oakless has some we do not okay great uh we are going to take just a two to three minute break to reposition ourselves and then we will be back we have the organ an organizational meeting and a regular meeting to complete tonight we will be with you folks momentarily thank you for your patience ready good evening welcome to the livonia public schools board of education organizational meeting of july 2021 this is the first in a series of a few meetings this evening so thank you for your patience and bearing with us uh mrs

124bradford would you please take the role yes mrs acosta here mrs bonafield here mr centers here mrs jarvis here mr johnson here mrs bradford says here president burton here thank you we have a quorum uh this meeting is our organizational meeting it is a meeting that we have to take care of once a year to take care of just a few business housekeeping type items uh we will generally go through go through these motions fairly quickly i anticipate that this will be a rather a shorter meeting than the one before never can completely tell after which we'll have our regular meeting it is during the regular meeting that we'll be voting on several items uh going to go through a few quick housekeeping type issues if you're looking for an agenda they can be found

125on the bookshelf over near the door to my left if you are listening online and you'd like to follow along with our agenda you can find that on our website which is www.livoniapublicschools.org if you hover over the school board tab you can drop down to meeting information and you can select the meeting for today this specific meeting is called the organizational meeting because there are a few with today's date on them we are getting to next agenda item on our agenda is our audience communications uh a couple of things real quickly as far as audience communications respect is something that is crucial in livonia public schools it is a character trait that we teach to our kids we expect to enter in interactions between our students between our adults and between adults and students to

126one another it is absolutely something that this board holds very seriously and very near and dear to our hearts you have our commitment that we will treat one another with respect and everybody who approaches the board with respect and we ask anyone who's participating in the school board meeting to do the same this evening this type of let me see here this uh i'm going to skip over that for now the audience communications is a time for the board to listen to members of our community as opposed to a question and answer session we do ask that everybody honor our three-minute time limit per person the purpose of the three-minute time limit is so that we are fair and equitable to everybody who approaches and that one person doesn't get more time than another we

127have also a 15-minute time limit for audience communications at the beginning of each meeting and then the remainder would be following the business of the board in this case the remainder will be following the four or five uh agenda items that are on this agenda i do anticipate that these will go fairly quickly much more quickly than normal regular meetings of the board if you're looking in groaning to yourself see here as far as the three minute time limit on the speakers we do set a timer for three minutes on someone's phone so if you find it if you hear a tone going off when you're speaking then you'll know that you've hit your three minutes and that would be your polite cue to that it's time to wrap up your comments we find that

128to be a more polite way than interrupting a speaker so if you hear that you know that it's it's your turn to wrap it up and let the next person have a turn i do have a response to prior audience communications and seeing as several of the items that are being addressed were addressed at the last meeting i'm going to go ahead and read that now so because in doing so it may answer some of your questions that you're approaching the board on tonight during our last meeting was in june during which people spoke at audience communications advocating for the discontinuance of masks social distancing the offering of co-vaccination opportunities and other coveted mitigation measures when school resumes this fall the board met earlier this evening at our committee of the whole and this topic

129was discussed at length at that meeting recommendations were prepared by our superintendent and our administrative team based on health organization guidance and the current coveted situation in our own community and they were given the support by the board to hear the complete details of the livonia public schools plan for this fall i suggest that you listen to the video of that meeting which can be found at livoniapublicschools.org if you hover over the school board tab drop down to board meeting information and select the june of the july 26th committee of the whole meeting superintendent andrea oquist will give a summary of the the plan in just a few moments at our regular meeting in case you missed that meeting and you're here this evening and this information will also be sent out to all parents

130guardians and staff in the district board and the livonia public schools administrative team take very serious the physical mental social emotional and academic safety of each student entrusted to us as we transition carefully back to normal life from our covet experience the second topic that was spoken about in audience communication at our june meeting was the critical race theory let me be clear critical race theory or crt is not taught in livonia public schools it is not part of michigan's adopted standards that guide what is taught in any public school district in the state of michigan our curriculum is based on the michigan state standards and can be found at the michigan department of education website under michigan academic standards our district is very proud of our climate and culture work which includes our community

131with character and our engagement with equity work reflecting the key elements of character and respectful interactions for everyone which are a hallmark of our district we have a sincere desire for our schools to be safe welcoming inclusive and respectful environments that support the academic and social emotional needs of every student thank you very much uh we are going to now proceed with audience communications as i said we take 15 minutes at the beginning of this meeting and the remainder will be immediately following the motions that are attached to this meeting our first person to uh participate in audience communication i have jim and paula i'm sorry jim and paulette ola and if you can give your name an address um as has been pointed out in the past and is a very valid point please

132don't give your house number if you could just give us your name and your city that would be sufficient you stand here yep and your motion yes you can stand right there at the podium and that green light should indicate that your microphone is on okay yeah great we're you guys here jim ola and paulette ola we live in the seven in farmington area we're here well you can see my shirt so i'm very excited about the optional masks for the school year coming up we don't want the kids ever treated differently on the basis of their vaccination status because that's a two-tiered society and that's not welcoming and inclusive the things you just spoke about that lps wants to foster and we're fighting that in the you know the general society right now too

133so um that's something just that's very important to us um i wanted to read um the revised school code this is an excerpt act 451 of 1976 this is 380.10 rights of parents and legal guardians duties of public schools section 10 says it is the natural fundamental right of parents and legal guardians to determine and direct the care teaching and education of their children the public schools of this state serve the needs of the pupils by cooperating with the people's parents and legal guardians to develop the pupils intellectual capabilities and vocational skills in a safe and positive environment so that doesn't say anything about health departments and attorneys and other things it's talking about the parents and the schools working together so it's something to keep in mind too i think anything else you want

134to say and the last thing i just want to say is our journey is that we are lifers livonia lifers i call us we both went through lps and we have done lps and homeschooling for our kids so those are the two options that have worked for our family and so um we want to continue to have our daughter in school but you know everyone has to assess what's best for them so we appreciate all your hard work we're praying for you guys and thank you so much thank you our next speaker is crystal fulton good evening good evening um if you could just say your name um you're i'm crystal yes i'm on lions street in livonia the previous meeting i was asking if we had more than four minutes to speak was that

135possible answer to get back it's in our policy which is found on the website under livonia public schools dot org board policy so we're not allowed to request more time not tonight okay is that possible i guess we would request to have more time in the future maybe at the next board meeting maybe there would be we would hope to have it extended to four minutes instead of three minutes and also for the audience communication time which is usually 15 minutes we'd appreciate if we could extend it to 30 minutes for the next board meeting but also i just want to introduce ourselves we're part of united parents of lps we're just staying connected as parents in the community and trying to just learn more about our board because most of us weren't really involved

136and now we're looking to really connect with you guys and see if we can meet you know at a certain spot where we feel comfortable where we can actually i can send my first grader to school i understand that um you were saying that indoors are encouraged masking for unvaccinated i i assume no one's going to ask my child did you choose not to wear your mask because you're vaccinated i i would assume that wouldn't be part of that but i don't know so it confuses me a little i just get a little nervous wondering uh will things change where i would have to pull my kid back out and just kind of a last year repeat i know you guys don't know these answers because you're following the health department but maybe we can

137just keep in tight communication like we have been and with honesty but we do believe what we are is we're parents exercising the fundamental right to to direct the care teaching and education of our children we believe educators engaged in political rhetoric rhetoric in the classroom should be limited to healthy debate and welcoming to opposing views and it's not the role of our public educators to promote or celebrate sexual identities or lifestyles and that the medical decisions for our children are the responsibility of the parent including but not limited to placing a barrier over airways testing and vaccines medical decisions parents make for the children should remain private no children should be discriminated against or treated differently based on their medical history and we stand for integrity transparency health freedom and education without indoctrination okay

138thank you our next our next speaker is rayna vandermini i apologize if i mispronounced your name um good evening good evening if you could just state your name and your address reyna vendramini and i live on west chicago and livonia thank you okay um i came here to say thank you to the board and so quist for answering the questions that the united parents livonia public schools group we sent you a letter with eight questions and we got the answers and you know most of them were about what this coming school year would look like with any covet 19 related protocols or mitigation and a little bit about crt um and overall the answers were pretty promising and gave me some hope for the school year and even more so tonight but i still have

139somehow like some lingering doubt or questions i feel like the question that really is left are there is are our children really going to be safe this year safe from mandates that we don't think are appropriate or correct for our children and our families like as other people have said we want to be sure that we are able to direct the care and the education of our children including the health care choices what i'm worried about is what if the state or the county again decides to say that there is a mandate for masks or a mandate for contact tracing and quarantining we have a lot of scientific evidence and research and personal experience that shows that those policies failed i haven't asked livonia schools yet if they if you kept track of how many

140of the students that were close contact quarantined and had to stay home actually became symptomatic i do have that information from some other school districts i know off the top of my head that that question was asked in grand haven michigan and the answer was 0.21 percent of the students who were told to made to stay home in quarantining never became ill it's just not acceptable so my question going forward is if the state or the county or anyone else decides to mandate masks or contact tracing quarantining if anything about vaccines will you look at the evidence that these policies were not helpful and very likely harmful will you push back against them or will you say that this is what we have to do going forward no matter if these policies are good or

141bad for our children's health thank you thank you [Applause] our next speaker is jane woe [Applause] yep i did good evening good evening for the purposes of this meeting my name is jane woe i'm identifying as for the protection of others welcome i would like to bring it to everyone's attention that is livonia public schools and michigan department of education policy to allow minor children with no age given to change their names without parental consent authority or information they're not there telling the children if your parent isn't going to agree with what you've done just don't tell them you don't have to so when you said that you're teaching the kids respect i i tend to disagree with that i know children who have been taught complete and utter disrespect for who is supposed to

142be the most important authoritarian figure in their life and was never consented about it never asked whether it would be okay and never told about it so if you have a child that wants to change their name and their gender and they might need some therapy because of that they go denied their care because the schools choose not to tell the child according to the michigan department of education a parent should be involved in that decision making unless they're a danger to the child who is deciding this who is deciding whether or not the parent or the guardian is a danger to the child and who decided that we shouldn't be informed or that we shouldn't the child doesn't need our consent children's brains adolescent brains are not done developing until they reach the age

143of 25 they're more likely to make their decisions based on emotion not facts they're letting children do this without explaining the potential consequences that they could face as a result of these decisions and i think that is terrible as a parent if i were to make that decision for my child i would have long talks with them and therapy sessions with them so that they would understand the potential side effects that that this could bring to their future so i i think that we need some answers i think that we deserve more respect as parents i think parents should always be for informed always be informed there's no excuse for the school to allow a child to change their name gender pronouns or gender without a print being consented first and that's all i have

144to say and i think everybody needs to know that it's going on i'm not the only one thank you [Applause] the next person on our list is jonathan reilly mr riley good evening good evening jonathan riley from livonia thank you um i had come to speak about mass mandates but in light of recent changes i'm just going to keep my message brief i guess i would just urge you guys to continue to protect the liberty of the parents and the children that are here and to continue to listen to the voices of concerned parents because if our voices are not heard in this context we will make sure make sure our voices are heard in upcoming elections to get people in that will listen to the voices of parents that is it thank you thank

145you we have some business what four or five motions we have to take care of after which we will take care of the remainder of audience communications the next item on our agenda right now is item three adoption of the 2021-22 bylaws to establish meeting dates and other procedures may i have a motion please president burton mrs bradford move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district adopt the attached bylaws to establish 2021 2022 meeting dates procedures for the calling and posting of board meetings and authorization to sign contracts and legal documents for the board we have a motion by mrs bradford supported by mrs jarvis and we will hear clearly here hear from mrs ogust on this thank you president burton uh annually uh per the in being in compliance

146with the open compliance with the open meetings act it is necessary for our board to adopt our schedule for regular regular meetings and so on the attached document uh beyond this motion sheet you will see the regular meeting set for this school year i do want to make note that our starting time for regular meetings in the future will be 6 30 so that will remain in accordance with the start time of our committee of the whole previously our regular meetings began at seven so they will now start at the same time or scheduled to start at the same time as our committee of the whole meetings so that schedule of regular meetings is listed on the attached document thank you are there questions or comments regarding this item seeing none we have a motion

147by mrs bradford supported by by mrs jarvis for the adoption of the 2021-2022 bylaws to establish meeting dates and other procedures mrs bradford would you please take the role mrs bradford says yes mrs jarvis yes mr johnson yes mr centers yes mrs bonnifield yes mrs acosta yes president burton yes that motion passes the next item on our agenda is item four uh designation of 2021 22 bank depositories may i have a motion president mr centers move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district adopt the attached resolution designated jp morgan chase bank fifth third bank and michigan liquid asset fund plus as depositors for the school district during the 2021-22 school year support we have a motion by mr center supported by mrs bonafield and mrs smith good evening again president

148um so no changes to the three depositories these are all banks that we used last year i'll make note that chase is our primary bank we do have some changes within the depository so with chase we did use the um use of the last ones of the technology fund an old bond so that one we were able to close out and with the michigan liquid asset fund plus we now have the addition of the 2021 bond proceeds so okay great thank you are there any questions or comments from members of the board seeing none we have a motion supported by misters i'm sorry motion by mr center supported by mrs bonifield for the designation of the 22 bank depositories mrs bradford would you please take the role mr centers yes mrs bonifield yes mrs acosta

149yes mrs jarvis yes mr johnson yes mrs bradford says yes president burton yes and that motion passes the next item is item five appointment of of investment officer may i have a motion please president burton mrs acosta move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district appoint the treasurer miss allison smith as the investment officer in conjunction with the district's investment policy for the 2021-2022 school year support we have a motion by mrs acosta supported by mrs bradford and mrs opus thank you so much president burton so per our board policy the superintendent or the superintendent's designee would oversee the day-to-day management of the district's investments so ms smith as the district's investment officer will be responsible for transferring the appropriate funds to affect investment transactions from the investment of operating

150funds operating reserve funds and bond proceeds consistent with our policy and the actions of our board thank you are there questions or comments from members of the board seeing none we have a motion to appoint the um i'm sorry the promotion make sure that it went here motion for the appointment of investment officer that motion was made by mrs bradford supported by i'm sorry appointment for the let me try this again the motion was made by mrs acosta supported by mrs bradford and mrs bradford you please take the role mrs acosta yes mrs bradford says yes uh mrs battenfield yes mr johnson yes mrs mr centers yes mrs jarvis yes uh president burton yes and that motion passes the next item is item six appointment of staff member to be in charge of elections may

151i have a motion please president burton mrs jarvis move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district acknowledged the appointment of philip francis as the staff member in charge of school elections for the 2021-2022 school year this appointment is made by the board secretary with formal acknowledgement by the board of education support we have a motion by mrs jarvis supported by mr johnson and mrs opus thank you president burton as you know this is a much sought-after position on cabinet and mr francis is the fortunate individual who has been selected to be in charge the staff member in charge of school elections for this coming school year so we welcome him back into that position and he certainly works closely with our city clerk both in livonia and westland it really

152does an outstanding job not only in communicating with them but is also in close communication with mr lau our operations department our building supervisors because we do serve as host sites for elections at no cost other than certainly our personnel who work hard to make that happen so mr francis will be the person in charge of coordinating elections for this coming school year congratulations mr francis are there comments or questions for members of the board other than thank you we have a motion for the appointment of staff member to be in charge of elections that motion is made by mrs jarvis supported by mr johnson mrs bradford would you please take the role mrs jarvis yes mr johnson yes mrs bradford says yes mrs acosta yes mrs battlefield yes mr centers yes president burton yes

153and that motion passes unanimous congratulations yeah the next item on our agenda is item 8 post i'm sorry item 7 appointment of staff member to be responsible for posting board meeting notices may i have a motion please president burton mrs bonfield move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district acknowledged the appointment of the superintendent as the administrator in charge of posting meeting notices this appointment is made by the board secretary with formal acknowledgement by the board of education support we have a motion by mrs bonafield supported by mrs jarvis and mrs oakist thank you president burton as our final item this is an annual item that we cover each year to ensure that appropriate public meeting notices are made so it is certainly most convenient to have that take place

154by a member of our staff and our team here on site so the secretary of the board has made the recommendation that this uh responsibility come to me and mrs wozniak the executive assistant to the superintendent and the board takes over that responsibility and does post meeting notices in accordance with the open meetings act for each of our board meetings thank you are there comments or questions from the board seeing none we have a motion to appoint staff member to be responsible for posting board meeting notices the motion was made by mrs uh bonfield supported by mrs jervis and mrs bradford will you please take the role mrs battlefield yes mrs jarvis yes mrs bradford says yes mr centers yes mr johnson yes mrs acosta yes and president burton yes and that motion passes we

155will now resume the remainder of audience communications uh looks like i have about five more to go uh the next person on our list is nicholas margolis and nick mr michaelis you were the only one who requested the rema the regular meeting if you prefer to go in this organizational meeting you are the you're the only one and you're welcome to do so you're welcome to come on come on up good evening hello i appreciate you having me this is quite a privilege as well because of my first time to address an educational board other than my students i am an educator myself or i was in a recent pack and i just like to come here and ask everyone to hear our demand for uh uh the upcoming school year so excuse me do

156you mind taking just a second that way so that we can make sure we record your comments thank you yes so uh we we are here today to uh strongly recommend the reinstatement of the mass mandate for the upcoming lps school year we say so because recently there is an uptick in transmission mainly due to the delta variant and also a stagnation of the vaccination around the nation and so we feel particularly for the elementary students who don't quite have the right yet to uh choose to be vaccinated because of our um you know technology or whatnot not not quite there yet so we would just like to make that clear and uh hope that you can respond by phone or by email according to that sheet um with how you will plan to proceed

157with the um masking mandate in the coming future thank you sounds great thank you very much appreciate it the next speaker is laura heberger good evening good evening my name is laura heberger and i live on country club in livonia thank you um i appreciate your time this evening i originally came here today to express my opinion about wearing masks for this upcoming school year i have a sonnet stevenson and i have emailed many of you multiple times throughout this past year i will say that i am completely dismayed at the lack of response to my emails which is shocking given the respect the whatever the you know all the tenets that we spoke about or you brought up at the beginning of the meeting about having respect whether you agree or don't agree um

158as a parent i watched my who's my 15 year old who's now in 10th grade at stevenson just he was an a a minus student almost failed two or three classes this past year he was in person as much as possible and then when you went back to the you know stay-at-home orders um because the cases were going up that's when his grades started to go down i'm sure my son is not the only one that this happened to i'm sure everybody in this room can attest to the fact that students need to be around other students what i do want to share with you though is today i checked the cdc website to look at hospitalizations and deaths for children under the age of 17 in the u.s the stats do not lie when

159they show that the risk to children in this age group is literally zero the numbers are down 21 and a half percent over last week and down 85.3 percent now given these are just deaths and hospitalizations 85.3 percent over the height of the pandemic using april 2021 as an example even at the height of the pandemic the hospitalization and death rate was 0.49 that's that's a person 0.49 of one person per 100 000 kids over the last week for that same age group it's 0.0 per hundred thousand kids in hospitalizations and deaths the total 331 deaths over the past 18 months 331 deaths in this age group under the age of 17 in a country of 325 million people that's 335 under the age of 17. in 325 people 325 million people i know i'm

160out of time um what i would encourage you all to do as the board making decisions for our students as the numbers go up because they will you we know that the numbers are going up according to the cdc and everybody else who is terrified of this virus keep our children in mind because as the vaccine rates go up what the population in this country is what 50 57 i believe is vaccinated fully um and as children over the age of 12 also can be vaccinated should they choose to do so keep those numbers in mind as the numbers go up because teachers educators keep the kids in your thoughts when you're thinking about getting rid of the kids in school okay you guys can all get you could wrap up your comments that would

161be appreciated my comments are just that keep the children in mind when you're making decisions about closing the schools that's all i have to say thank you thank you [Applause] the next speaker is audrey rogers my name is audrey rogers and my family lives on ladywood and livonia our school-aged children have attended lps since kindergarten this evening i will address a few situations and questions that many parents would like answered to help guide them in determining if their children should remain in lps as students first educators engaged in political rhetoric in the classroom should be limited to healthy debate and welcoming to opposing views it should not lead to bullying ostracizing or shaming our children unfortunately the latter has taken place within some of our children's classrooms will lps address this issue among our teachers

162asking them to remain neutral in their teaching and to engage in political politics in a healthy way as described a moment ago does this board condone classroom environments where students are afraid to share their viewpoints for fear of being shamed or belittled next medical decisions for our children are the responsibility of the parents alone including but not limited to placing a burial barrier over airways testing and vaccines medical decisions parents make for their children should remain private no child should be discriminated against or treated less based on their medical history educators asking students to answer questions about their medical procedures or future medical procedures has led to ostracizing and shaming some students and should no longer be tolerated will lps instruct our teachers to refrain from asking students to make public these private health and

163medical related decisions does the board respect the fundamental right of the parent to direct the care of their child including whether his or her child's airways should remain unrestricted or restricted by a barrier for his or her child's safest and best health outcome finally it is not the role of public educators to promote or celebrate sexual identities or lifestyles it is not the role of public educators to entice our children into discussing or considering lifestyle choices by inviting them into a quote safe private meeting parents are kept in the dark about inviting our children to discuss matters of sexuality and gender identity with adults they have been trained to trust is exactly the type of situation law enforcement authorities warn parents about that can lend way to child grooming to becoming prey for child predators

164if the board does not know what i'm talking about i have provided um an email that was sent by district and a district employee's email address to 12 13 and 14 year old students does the board support private meetings with students in which parents are not informed of or welcome to witness will lps be transparent with parents about future meetings gatherings or trainings that our children are invited to attend as i personally spent time considering this email invitation sent to my young daughter i realized that our district has betrayed and violated mine and my husband's role as her parent and furthermore our trust thank you for your time and i look forward to hearing from you thank you [Applause] the next speaker is kevin stone mr stone good evening hello my name is kevin stone

165i'm from livonia i'm here to request that you reject all covid driven restrictions on the learning process and to make that decision permanent and final superintendent opus max optional are an outstanding start not every district has made that choice and it took real courage to make that recommendation however we already have board members who've said that they're considering rollbacks at any time in the future we have a year and a half of evidence and experience with who is affected by covid and how how it functions and we know that these restrictions are not warranted children are much less likely than adults to contract or spread the covet virus those children who do contract covet have virtually a 100 percent recovery rate as do adults in most cohorts if the school board is considering a repeat

166of last year's radical measures these actions must be proven essential and supported by undeniable scientific evidence the state of michigan utterly failed to meet that threshold last year and there remains zero scientific research justifying these actions children should not be held hostage to the irrational fears of a few adults i don't believe any government governmental body should have the power to muzzle and socially isolate healthy children in fact several states recently have passed laws preventing local governing bodies from passing such mandates unfortunately michigan was not one of those states however masking of children specifically already is illegal under michigan law you can look up state law 380-1307-b list which lists practices prohibited for public school personnel and now i quote under all circumstances including emergency situations 380-1307-b the state law prevents mistreatment of our students

167it cannot be overridden by michigan health department recommendations or so-called guidelines from the politicized cdc even good intentions by the board or district personnel do not justify violation of the law the state unilaterally imposed restrictions last year but now the lps school board has a choice another year of dystopian mandates will leave long lasting scars on our kids mental health and emotional development so i'm asking you tonight say no to irrational fear say no to anti-science mandates and give our children back the education that they deserve i'm the parent of a fourth grader at webster and second grader at buchanan thank you thank you [Applause] our next speaker is vanessa lin ms lynn good evening hi hi little nervous here okay hi my name is vanessa lynn i am a resident of plymouth currently um

168i'm looking to actually move to livonia my child attends ivywood classical academy i would like to try and find the words here um my daughter went to school i lied classical academy last year five days a week face to face full time she did not miss one single day um because of coverage or coverage restrictions um if you give me a second i'm nervous i'm gonna um access something here um while i'm thinking about it i'd like to reiterate um as uh the request to extend here um uh the three minute comments to four minutes please the next meeting i'd also ask that we extend the 15 minutes uh for public comment at the end to 30 minutes and as far as our policies i would ask for livonia that maybe you could take a

169cue from your partnering or your local school district your neighboring school district that's what i'm looking for um our communication we got from ivywood classical academy what will fall look like as of today michigan department of health and human services has only given guidance as to which includes recommendations and no requirements what does this mean for ivywood at this time it means that cohorts cohorts or cohorts will mix in the playground and in the lunchroom mass will be optional for students and staff despite vaccination status and we will not ask for con covin 19 vaccination status of students staff or any other adult and testing will not be conducted i cannot tell you the relief that i felt reading this i would hope that you guys would follow these guidelines just for records last day

170of school june 8th 2021 ivy classical academy number of person in days 180 number of virtual days zero number of shutdowns zero percent of students who attended in person one hundred percent percent of third graders who met the read by grade three state requirements to be promoted to fourth grade one hundred percent number of students came through six who will be retained zero so if we can do it i believe you can do it i hope that you stand up for these children i hope that you do not create a two-tier society within your your building that you honor parental decisions protected health information i think it would be appalling that any teacher or employee or member of your school system would ask any child as to why or why not they are or are

171not wearing a mask whether or not they plan to get a vaccine why they haven't gotten a vaccine i would just ask that you protect our children's right to privacy and protect their health both emotionally and physically thank you very much thank you and our last speaker this evening is v johnson good evening good evening johnson jamison court livonia 48 years maybe time to move on but i don't know so you answered my question and the reason i was here was was primarily about crt so you're you're supposedly not teaching it however there are 5 000 michigan teachers who have signed up to teach crt whether the school board allows it and my my question to you is you're taking federal money what if the feds say you have to teach it what are you

172going to do then especially when parents don't agree with it thank you thank you [Applause] that brings us to the last item on our organizational meeting schedule we will now go right into our regular meeting fred can you let me know when we are ready to transition still go right ahead okay you'll give us just a moment to switch screens here get our stuff together bear with us for a moment regular meeting of july 26 2021. mrs bradford would you please take the role yes mrs acosta here mrs bonifield here mr centers here mrs jarvis here mr johnson here mrs bradford says here president burton here we have a quorum uh mr johnson would you please leave us in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america

173and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all good evening folks and thank you to those of you who have hung around through this long evening in case we have some who are just now joining us our agendas for this evening's regular meeting can be found on the table to my left near the door if you are at home and you'd like to follow along with your with the agenda it can be found at our website which is livoniapublicschools.org if you hover over the board tab and drop down to meeting in board meeting information uh select the regular meeting of july 26 because there are a few on that tab the meeting that we are in right now is our regular meeting or as some

174refer to as our voting meeting you may not see the amount of discussion that you've seen in previous meetings and please be assured that that is not because the board takes any of these items lightly but rather it is that they've been talked about typically by at least it or in at least two other meetings prior to coming to tonight's item or tonight's agenda for a vote one thing that we do uh hold in high regard is respect in livonia public schools as i said earlier this evening but if you're just tuning in for just this portion of the meeting we absolutely give you our word that we will treat one another with respect we expect respect from our students and teach it to them on a regular basis and that goes from student to

175student from adult to adult and between our students and adults you have the commitment of this board of education that we will treat one another and anyone who is approaching this board with respect and we ask that you folks retreat the board with respect in return and we thank you for that the next item on our agenda is our item three communications and three a is the district update from the superintendent so i'll turn it over to mrs oquist thank you very much president burton so you are normally used to me sharing a powerpoint presentation highlighting our students and staff and that will be back in august and we will share with you a number of highlights from our summer programming mrs o'brien gave you a sneak peek this evening and we're excited to share

176some of the sights and sounds of that with you in august until that time i just want to share a couple of brief updates with you and this evening we have on our agenda we're thrilled to be bringing forward a number of important items including the appointment of two new administrators so we will be getting to that very soon and i would like to just do a quick review of the fall 2021 mask and mitigation measures that we recommended to the board this evening the board gave us feedback on those uh at our committee of the whole meeting and we will make uh any modifications that have been shared with us and then we will share that information with our staff and with our families later this week so the information that we had shared

177were based on a review of the mdhhs released guidance for schools which came to us at the end of june those came in the form of recommendations for schools to consider we reviewed that information in great detail had an opportunity to speak with colleagues in neighboring districts we also had an opportunity to put in place our summer mitigation measures which very much mirror those being recommended for the fall those have been implemented well this summer and we've seen good results from that those in combination with a very low incidence of cobin 19 in our local community both the board and our district administration have reviewed our current safety protocols that we are recommending for heading into fall of 2021. would you like me to share a brief update on those please do in case anyone's

178just tuning in for this portion all right with regard to mask wearing consistent with mdhhs and cdc recommendations wearing of masks indoors will continue to be encouraged particularly for unvaccinated individuals however they will not be required this decision will be at the discretion of the parent or guardian individual staff member school volunteer or visitor lps will continue to make face masks available to any individual in need of a mask as previously communicated wearing of masks outdoors is not required all athletic programs will continue to follow mhsaa requirements we had some questions from the board earlier on that all testing requirements have been lifted from the mhsaa and we do not have any of those protocols in place for this coming year masks are required on school buses and district transportation and mr francis you shared

179that on our last on our most recent copy correct that per the u.s education department covet 19 handbook masks are required to be worn by staff and riders on all transportation operated by public and private school systems if this requirement changes in the future lps will certainly revisit this topic another important aspect is we will continue to utilize screening protocols and those screening protocols were utilized successfully this past year for both staff this i should say for all staff visitors and parents and guardians would use the daily home screener we've already covered transportation with regard to distancing our intent is to generally return to instructional practices for classrooms that are age appropriate and instructionally impactful where possible lps will try to maximize distance between student stationary seating without impacting instruction in the event there continues

180to be a need to distance or both transmission and quarantine purposes this safety measure will be structured to ensure the least impact on the typical school experience for our students we had some brief discussion with regard to contact tracing and quarantines and are awaiting further guidance in that area we will continue to update in august on those items ppe and cleaning protocols hand washing and sanitizing will continue to be encouraged we have talked about many of the pieces that we put in place including enhanced cleaning of high touch surfaces and our disinfectant and disinfection strategies including our electrostatic sprayer will continue to be used by custodial staff to sanitize areas within our school and we believe that this is just a sound practice for maintenance and operations those machines were actually purchased prior to covid

181and those were purchased with the fourth site of our operations supervisor and really were i were identified to be utilized during normal cold and flu seasons to help address some of the transmission of germs and some of those that our little ones leave behind finally the notification process after a covid positive students and staff there is still requirement that we once notified of a verified case or suspected case involving a staff member or student once the district is notified by the parent we are required to notify the health department within 24 hours and we are also still required to maintain a database on our website a dashboard as we have this past year so again we'll make some of the brief uh updates that we shared during our committee of the whole meeting and during

182our study session discussion and then we will send this information out to our staff and our families later this week thank you president burden thank you very much there we go the next item on our agenda is item 3b written communications do any board members have written communications that they need to share the next item is item 3c audience communications i do not have any blue slips we did handle quite a bit of audience communications at our meetings prior uh this evening is there somebody present who wishes to participate sorry we do have one person who wishes to participate in audience communications hello i'm crystal fulton i'm on lion street in livonia um i have a couple more questions that i was told i should probably ask you guys now that you have admitted that

183everyone's idea of safety is individual will you mandate masks if the health department says to do so or will you stick to the idea that parents can choose whether a mask is appropriate for their children and also we wonder what is the threshold of cases where lps decides to then require masks i wrote that on the paper so maybe i could get an email back to the answer okay thank you very much is anybody else present who wishes to participate in audience communications seeing none we have we're on to our next item which is 3d response to prior audience communications bear with me for those who are present in the room uh this is a response to prior audience communications which uh if you're here the meeting we just took place uh you'll hear this

184twice our last meeting was in june during which people spoke at audience communications advocating for the discontinuance of masks social distancing the offering of coveted vaccination opportunities and other coveted mitigation measures when school resumes the board met earlier this evening at our committee of the whole and this topic was discussed at length at that meeting recommendations were prepared by our superintendent and administrative team based on health organization guidance and the current current coveted situation in our own community and we're given support by the board to hear the complete details of the livonia public schools plan for this fall i suggest that you listen to the video of that meeting which can be found at livoniapublicschools.org hover over the school board tab drop down to the board meeting information and select the june 26 i'm sorry

185the july 26 committee of the whole meeting please make sure to select committee of the whole as there were several meetings that evening superintendent andrea okus gave a summary just a few moments ago and this information will be sent out to all parents guardians and staff of the district the board in livonia public schools administrative team take very seriously the physical mental social emotional and academic safety of each student entrusted to us as we transition carefully from covid back to normal life a second topic that was spoken about at audience communications at our june meeting was critical race theory let me be clear critical race theory or crt is not taught in livonia public schools it is not part of the michigan's adopted standards that guide what is taught in any michigan public school system

186our curriculum is based on the michigan state standards and can be found on the michigan department of education website under michigan academic standards our district is proud of our culture and climate work which includes our community with character and our engagement and equity work reflecting the key elements of character and respectful interactions for everyone which are a hallmark of our district we have a sincere desire for our schools to be safe welcoming inclusive and respectful environments that support the academic and social and social emotional needs of every student on behalf of the board of education thank you very much the next item on our agenda this evening is item 4 the consent agenda and may i have a motion please president burton mr johnson move that the board of education of the livonia public schools

187school district approved the following consent agenda items as recommended by the superintendent 5a minutes of the public hearing of june 2021 5b minutes of the regular meeting of june 14 2021 8a purchase of copy paper support we have a motion by mr johnson supported by mrs bradford are there comments or questions on this item seeing none we have a motion for the consent agenda by mr johnson supported by mrs bradford and mrs bradford would you please take the role mr johnson yes mrs bradford says yes mrs jarvis yes mr centers yes mrs donafield yes mrs acosta yes president burton yes that motion passes thank you the next appointment is one we've been waiting for and a good number of our audience have been waiting for all evening so i thank you very much from the

188bottom of my heart for all of your patience uh the next item on our agenda is item six personnel matters and six a is the appointment of middle school principal may i have a motion please president mrs bradford moved at the board of education of the livonia public schools school district accept the recommendation of the superintendent and appoint kevin english as principal at emerson middle school oh that was a chorus there were there were several i i believe i heard mr center's voice first uh we have a motion by mrs bradford supported by mr centers and we will hear from our hr department of friends uh mr abated mrs keats yes thank you uh moment i've been waiting for one that these folks have been waiting for i'm excited to uh to introduce uh kevin

189english briefly uh my former partner for just a short time at uh frost middle school i'll walk you just uh quickly through uh some um resume items and give you a couple anecdotes about kevin so kevin has a ba from university of michigan english social studies teaching certs um and a master's of ed leadership from concordia but his first foray in education started well before that because he doesn't like to talk about it or brag about it but kevin english was elected to the van buren board of education at the age of 19 and served nearly a decade on that board concurrent with his with his teaching he did his teaching uh for uh um five years of ela instruction at wayne memorial and then became the ap at wayne memorial for another couple of

190years before coming over to us in the summer of 2019 i was fortunate enough to be on the screening and hiring committee for that because he was coming to frost i saw a resume come across saw wolverine saw an ela social studies guy you know saw a fellow board member i'm like this looks interesting we should talk to this fella and he interviews exceptionally well quite obviously and uh got that job we spent a year and a half together obviously our time was interrupted by pandemic during that time i watched kevin um you know dig in roll up his sleeves do anything he could for kids he was on he was online almost constantly working with kids working with parents trying to troubleshoot tech you name it but what what i really when i really

191saw kevin i really saw him we did um pbs lesson school-wide pbs lessons that shannon i used to do and uh he is a teacher to his core uh because we we stepped into that room with just a sea of frost students and it was like he never left the classroom he was uh just exceptional and that's why i knew that you know he was just a very student-centered leader so emerson's getting a very genuine person a dynamic leader uh mr palkasada is getting a great partner and paul himself of course is a very strong leader and well respected and there's a community together i think they're going to be great and that's that's kevin english congratulations kevin [Applause] [Music] [Applause] do we mrs opus go ahead thank you so i'll just add a few

192things about mr english and and uh really what a gift he has been to our administrative leadership team since he joined us in livonia public schools um so many people that have worked with kevin talked with kevin learned with kevin um speaks to his passion for the children with whom he works um his passion for enhan enhancing the role of literacy in the lives of our students his advocacy for the staff with whom he works because he has he has walked that walk um and he has served us very very well in the in the relatively short time that he has been here and we are truly thrilled to be having him join the emerson school community as principal and in partnership and leadership with mr paul casada who is here this evening along with

193members of the emerson staff i believe you will find kevin not only to be very humble about the gifts that he shares but also able to articulate and communicate a vision for learning in a vision for a school community that will engage really every child and every staff member and welcome parents as partners in the education process so we are absolutely thrilled to be bringing this recommendation to you this evening and we are well excited to welcome kevin up to the microphone before we hear from mr english uh are there comments or questions from the board no no come on back come on back are there comments or questions from the board of education sure mr centers uh so i first came familiar with kevin when he was a school board member and that's the

194first time we met and i remember um people saying that this guy's young he's young we're both young at the time uh we were uh dynamic you both still are okay all right good and like really going places uh so uh you know i when he came to the district i was really excited and just hearing the work he's been doing continue to be really excited so uh congratulations comments or questions from other board members we may have a few in a few minutes but we need to take care of a piece of business we have a motion uh for the appointment of a middle school principal and the motion was made by mrs bradford supported by mr centers may i uh mrs bradford will you please take the role yes mrs bradford says yes

195mr centers yes uh mrs acosta yes mr johnson yes mrs bonnifield yes mrs jarvis yes president burton yes motion passes congratulations i really appreciate uh you giving me a few minutes just to speak tonight um and and i think more importantly uh thank you superintendent oquest and members of the board of education for giving me this opportunity uh really i truly appreciate it and i take that so seriously and how important it is for me to do right by kids to do right by staff and to do right by our community as i've shared kind of throughout the interview process or with every kid and every every staff member school is what saved me growing up and that's kind of the heart and soul that i bring every single day whether i'm in the classroom

196or in the office i also wanted to thank a few other people tonight over the past few years i've learned a lot from mr abate i've learned a lot from miss wheeler even though we've only been together a short time as well as mr willenborg and so many others of the administrative ranks in the district and cabinet i truly have learned a lot for being here just a short time um so thinking ahead i'm so excited to lead with mr paul casada and to make sure that every student learns and has that memorable experience at emerson i know it's a great place so i'm excited to see what we can do together so many of the staff have reached out to me over these past couple of weeks and i'm so excited to get to

197know them and to work with them and truly i'm looking forward to collaborating with them and supporting them in any way that i can because they are in the trenches on the front lines and supporting our kids and that's what's most important so thank you again for this opportunity um know that i take it seriously and i will do right by our kids thank you absolutely oh yeah and uh probably who i should not have forgotten thank you mr willemborg uh right is uh my uh beautiful and incredibly intelligent wife she remains the best teacher um that i have ever met and have ever seen in the classroom i think i said that two years ago in front of the board and she's still a phenomenal teacher she also keeps me grounded too and i

198think that's important do you really think you should do that uh right or always keeping me on my toes but also just being a partner in kind of every step of my life so um thank you again and thank you stacey [Applause] it is always exciting to to put a new administrator into it into their positions and as we've said so many times uh our our administrators set the tone in our buildings our principals and our assistant principals just set the tone and it's different from building the building based on who the leaders are so it's it's so exciting when we can put leaders into into positions and and it's we've said it so often that have such enthusiasm enthusiasm and such passion for what they're doing that's exactly the kind of kind of administrators

199we'd love to have in livonia public schools so congratulations we will take a very brief brief recess after our next item for a moment of congratulations to our honorees our next item is item 6b appointment of student services coordinator may i have a motion please hold on one second tech moment hold on with us move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district accept the recommendation of the superintendent and appoint tom canblock they say that right calm palma i'm sorry todd thank you so much as student services coordinator support we have a motion by mr senator supported by mrs jarvis and we're going to hear from our hr folks again yes thank you president burton members of the board i am very excited to bring mr todd kombach here as a

200student services coordinator todd comes to us from huron valley schools uh before that he obtained his bachelor's degree at madonna university in social studies and history he followed up with a masters from madonna it with the learning disability endorsement after that he obtained his ed specialist degree from oakland university in addition to being a member of the oakland aspiring administrators academy he started his work as a high school and a middle school teacher and quickly he took over many roles such as the special education department head based on what we heard from the references that we called it was because of his ability to connect with students and staff very quickly most recently he was the assistant principal at white lake middle school which was also in huron valley schools his co-workers and supervisors just

201praised all that he accomplished when he was there they said they were very sad to lose him and we were truly gaining an amazing leader so i am very excited to welcome todd to our lps family so we can share his passion for advocating and educating all students excellent come and join us and while you are board members are there questions or comments that we have before we're here this is opus yep go jump right in thank you so much so as mr konbach joins us at the um at the table we are absolutely thrilled i was we i was very uh eager to go into our final interview um because we debrief after every uh after every set of interviews and so um as you know it's usually a three or four part process

202and after each interview i i can't tell you the enthusiasm that came from the leaders with whom mr kambach spoke and the really the extraordinary examples they shared about not only his work directly with students his coordination with staff the responsibilities he'd been given because what he demonstrates day in and day out as a leader and as an educator and he certainly did not disappoint when we met with him without question we were truly truly fortunate to have the opportunity to talk with him about this important position within our district as you know we have an exceptional student services department led by dr terial and coordinators who work tirelessly on behalf of all of the students in our district i know they are very excited here this evening and very excited to have him joining

203their team so we're thrilled to bring this recommendation to you thank you board members we have any other comments before we make this official i'm sorry mr centers first of all we were classmates at madonna so it's even worse than i messed his name you're on a first-name basis then yeah we were that's true so uh you i think we'll really enjoy working in student services uh jennifer terriel is just such a fierce advocate for our students and i think you know it's really contagious and uh you know it resonates with students it resonates with parents and uh i think you're just really gonna be a great piece to the puzzle here and i think you're gonna love it so welcome thank you any other comments or questions before we take care of our official

204business all righty we have a motion uh by mr center supported by mrs jarvis for the appointment of student services coordinator mrs bradford for you please take the role mr centers yes mrs jarvis yes uh mrs bonnifield yes mrs bradford says yes mr johnson yes mrs acosta yes president burton yes motion passes congratulations [Applause] well thank you all very much this is a true wonderful moment for myself i'd be remiss if i didn't start first by kind of thinking the people in huron valley who have allowed me to grow and get to this point to where i am now if you would have asked me three months ago even maybe two months ago i would have thought i never would have left i was in a great place but i had a very loyal friend

205who was here in the audience tonight who is also an administrator here in livonia public schools who called me out of the blue and said you know i think there's a wonderful opportunity for you here in livonia and i took a look at it and i said you know what something just told me to go for it and here we are right now and i'm very thankful to be here thank you board for the wonderful words that you just shared with uh with everybody here um thank you for the tremendous work that you guys do on a daily basis because when i uh before you know really jumping into this head over heels i asked other superintendents that i may know i asked other people in wayne county and oakland county what their thoughts were

206about livonia public schools and everybody raved about the work that is being done here in this district so thank you for the work that you guys do tremendously uh dr terrielle thank you as well um i asked her many many questions as they did me through the interview process but the more questions that i asked it was very apparent to me that my core values tremendously aligned with the core values that are here in livonia public schools i also want to thank the team that i'll be working with because they say you're kind of the average of the five or six people that you hang around with the most you know outside of my immediate family and i can tell you what the team that i'm going to be joining they are just tremendous and

207you know uh mrquest you just mentioned how hard they work and that's kind of my passion to hard work and always do what's best for students is my true core value everything really comes down to that so very excited to join that team also i would like to thank miss soquest again for just you know really putting out to me in the interview process what livonia schools is all about after left the conversation that we had together i was i couldn't have been any more excited because i just know that a lot of this starts at the top with our leadership and when you have tremendous leadership it kind of trickles down to everybody else that uh yeah uh that the district serves so bottom line is this when i went through the process and

208i went through this journey i realized that livonia public schools makes all decisions based on what is best for students and 100 that is my my core value as well uh with everything i do with kids and with with staff members um i could speak very you know for a long time but as i was doing my you know kind of reading you know summer kind of leisure reading i came across a quote that really summed up how i feel and uh you know what was going through my thought and i'm going to read it so i don't mess it up this is a teddy roosevelt quote far and away the best prize in life is the chance or opportunity to work hard at work that is worth doing so thank all of you thank

209all of uh livonia public schools and all stakeholders for this opportunity to do just that work that is 100 worth doing uh i'd be remiss if i didn't uh thank my parents who are here tonight uh jane and randy kombach who are amazing people i grew up in the city of wyandotte they were they were servant leaders with the city of wyandotte in different capacities for many years so a lot of what i learned you know come straight from them also my wife who is not here tonight she is at her soccer game with my daughter ella who is seven and my son who has two hopefully he didn't run on the field because usually that's what he does and interrupts the game but uh my wife is livonia works in livonia as well as

210a nurse and uh we really you know respect this area and i just cannot wait to get to meet everybody everything begins and ends with relationships and education and i got to meet some more people tonight and really looking forward to meeting everybody else down the road so thank you have a great night and i really appreciate this opportunity again to do work that is worth doing thank you thank you as is our custom we're going to take a brief recess approximately five minutes in order to congratulate our honorees of the evening we'll be right back good evening welcome to the continuation of the livonia public schools board of education regular meeting of july 26 2021 we are on to item 6c recalls may i have a motion please president burton mrs acosta move that

211the board of education accept the recommendation of the superintendent and recalled to district employment as teachers for the 2021-22 school year the persons listed on the attached document dated july 21st 2021 support we have a motion by mrs acosta supported by mrs bradford and we are going to hear from mrs keith mr batte so uh following the board authorization june 14 2021 uh we began the recall process uh and uh we you have a listing of folks who have we have brought back uh as we mentioned there are two that are remaining on layoff again cautiously optimistic perhaps we can work something out there um two of the folks on the list uh decline the recall one retired and that's where we stand at present with recall process okay great thank you are there comments

212or questions from the members of the board or the superintendent mr sanders i just uh it's very nice to see people recall it's always tough to pass the motion to put people on layoffs so i know you work very hard to get the staffing and make sure that people can get called back so i appreciate that and we're so fortunate to have our barn back we're very i'm very happy to see that so thank you any other comments or questions mrs acosta i was going to echo those sentiments i'm really excited to see these teachers coming back into the fold and especially the counselors that number of counselors coming back i'm excited to see that thank you absolutely any other comments or questions on the board seeing them we have a motion by mrs acosta

213supported by mrs bradford for recalls mrs bradford would you please take the role mrs acosta yes mrs bradford says yes mrs banefield yes mr johnson yes mrs jarvis yes mr centers yes president burton yes and that motion passes the next item on our agenda is item 6d resignation that does not require a board vote that's for informational purposes only the next item is 6e leaves of absence may i have a motion please president burton mrs jarvis move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district accept the recommendation of the superintendent and approve the requests for a leave of absence listed below elizabeth herring 2021 2022 school year yuriko ishida august 9th 2021 through october 29th 2021 rachel lee cavoli 2021 2022 school year support we have a motion by mrs jarvis

214supported by mr johnson and uh mr b yes uh the folks that you've named are requesting leaves for this upcoming school year uh requests are all in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement for the staff members for their bargaining unit and we ask that you please consider the approval of their leave time for the upcoming school year 2021-22 thank you are there comments or questions from the board or superintendent seeing none we have a motion by mrs jarvis supported by mr johnson for leaves of absence mrs bradford would you please take the role mrs jarvis yes mr johnson yes mr centers yes mrs bonifield yes mrs acosta yes mrs bradford says yes president burton yes and that motion passes the next item is item 6f retirements may i have a motion please president burton mrs

215bonfield move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district adopt the attached resolutions of appreciation for the services rendered by douglas coates valerie evans ebling jennifer hardy francis linda corvisis and julie mcrae support we have a motion by mrs bonafield supported by mrs jarvis mr abate yes thank you tonight we honor and congratulate five members of our lps family who are retiring and the staff members leave as these staff members leave leboni public schools they take with them a combined total of 133 years of experience on behalf of the administration i'd like to thank these wonderful staff members for the dedicated years of service they provided for the students of livonia public schools and we asked the board to please adopt the attached resolutions of appreciation for our retirees thank you

216are there comments or questions from the superintendent or members of the board congratulations and certainly best wishes and thanks to each of them absolutely it's always bittersweet when we look at our retirements list because folks there have given so very much of their lives uh in service to the students of our school district uh and in so doing have become friends with with co-workers in the team here at lps so uh it's it's with mixed emotions but we are uh we wish them well certainly on the next chapter of their lives and thank them so much for their service here in livonia public schools uh we have a motion for retirements from uh that was uh support that was given by mrs bonfield supported by mrs jarvis and mrs bradford would you please take the

217role mrs bannerfield yes mrs jarvis yes mrs bradford says yes mrs acosta yes mr centers yes mr johnson yes president burton yes and that motion passes the next item on our agenda is item 7a i'm sorry admin 7 which is instruction matters and 7a is approval to purchase hmh into reading ela materials for upper elementary schools may i have a motion please president burton mr johnson move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district approved the purchase of six year licenses for hmh into reading in teacher and support materials for our upper elementary schools at a cost of 276 536.36 including shipping and handling with one hundred and seventy six thousand four hundred ninety six dollars and eighty seven cents in free materials including teacher resources licenses and professional development support

218we have a motion by mr johnson supported by mr centers and we're going to hear from mrs orion thank you president burton um i am very happy to bring this recommendation to you just want to spend a few minutes reminding our community that we do have a textbook adoption that is board approved and that a process that includes teachers and administrators that we follow through each year with any content area or course that we look at and this process was followed by mrs jen corey the elementary curriculum coordinator and her team of upper all teachers and the instructional coach and one of the assistant principals and for the last year and a half they have been looking at materials and they waited until fall when we came back to school and really passionately wanted to

219finish the process in order to provide their colleagues with a new resource they started with 15 programs that they looked at and whittled it down to three that they piloted since january of this year one thing i did forget to say that president johnson read in the cap sheet was the large amount of free materials that hmh has provided us we worked really hard with them to provide the professional development some additional student licenses cutting their price on the consumables they were quite expensive when you're buying something year after year so they really did a nice job working well with us to provide us that much of free materials and so the 276 536 dollars and 36 cents comes from our elementary teaching textbook budget which is enhanced with the wayne county enhancement millage money

220excellent do we have comments and questions from the board or superintendent i think we're just we're very excited we are we are really excited about this i i would say that with each textbook purchase that is not an unusual sensation that comes along but um our certainly our upper elementary staff and leaders along with mrs o'brien and her team have really advocated for these materials to help address the tier one consistency of of rigorous and meaningful literacy and ela instruction for our students and really the commitment of this team to continue to work throughout this past year in order to have these materials in the hands of our staff in the hands of our students to start this year just really showed their tremendous dedication to getting this process done it is not a simple

221process and to have really high quality choices to begin and to narrow that down and then to pilot three is also a significant amount of work um including during the pandemic so really to get to this point we really think that this is the catalyst to help move us forward in in the area of ela instruction as you know this has just been a bit of a stubborn point in some of our student achievement areas and so i believe we are all really really eager to see this implemented across the board to bring that consistency that support of high quality materials for our teachers and a consistent opportunity for our our student learners excellent any comments or questions from other board members i would just like to thank to our community because uh with the

222support of the wayne county enhancement millage that's where a lot of this kind of textbook replacement is coming from that that had been lacking for a number of years when we went through the recession and then we're recovering from that so uh that is not lost on this board and it's it's a great appreciation any other comments or questions seeing none we have an emotion for approval to purchase hmh into reading ela materials for upper elementary schools motioned by mr johnson supported by mr centers mrs bradford would you please take the role mr johnson yes mr centers yes mrs jarvis yes mrs acosta yes mrs barnfield yes mrs bradford says yes i miss president burton yes and that motion passes thank you very much thank you the next item on our agenda is item 8

223business matters and 8b is the purchase of school buses from the 2021 bond may i have a motion please president burton mrs bradford move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district approved the purchase of three 71 passenger gasoline wheelchair buses and three 71 passenger propane wheelchair buses from holland bus company holland michigan for a cost of 705 thousand four hundred ninety two dollars support we have a motion by mrs bradford supported by mrs bonafield and we will hear from mr francis thank you president burton this is a purchase that will be coming from the 2021 bond fund and as a note with that the district has qualified for the michigan 2021 clean diesel program grant through eagle so after the purchase is made we will be reimbursed 73 529 these

224six wheelchair buses will be replacing six of our 2014 wheelchair buses but as i noted during the community of the hole we will of course hold on to our current buses until we actually take delivery of the new buses um and just again for those who are tuning in and may not have have seen the community of the whole the way we qualified for that seventy three thousand five hundred twenty nine dollars was that we will be decommissioning um our final two thousand seven uh passenger uh regular passenger buses 77 passenger bus that is uh an old tech diesel engine which is what qualifies us for that grant so we do recommend this purchase and we look forward to if the board approves them having them built and received thank you are there comments and

225questions from the members of the board seeing none we have a motion from mrs bonfield supported by i'm sorry mrs bradford supported by mrs bonfield for the purchase of school buses 2021 bond this is uh you take the motion please roll please a lot of bees yes well here we go mrs bradford says yes mrs bonifield says yes mr centers yes mrs jarvis yes mrs acosta yes mr johnson yes president burton yes that motion passes thank you the next item on our agenda is item 8c purchase of mobile devices may i have a motion please president mr centers move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district approved the purchase of chromebooks and chromebook charging storage carts from presidio network solutions group caledonia michigan in the amount of one million six

226hundred sixty two thousand three hundred seventy nine dollars in the purchase of microsoft surface go 2 machines and charging storage carts from cdw g chicago illinois in the amount of three hundred thirty five thousand five hundred eighty dollars for a total amount of one million nine hundred ninety seven thousand nine hundred fifty nine he had a dollars of support there um okay i think i heard mrs acosta's name in there or voice rather uh and we have mr francis to address this item for us thank you president burton this uh mobile device purchase is obviously two-fold we have the chromebooks and the carts and this is part of our regular recycle i'm sorry replacement cycle uh for replacing our chromebooks and getting those mixed up in those words our this will eventually replace our 2017s

227which google will no longer be supporting come next fall not this fall they'll still be okay during this school year the other leg of this purchase are the uh microsoft sofa surface go 2 machines those will be going to our k1 classrooms we have purchased these last school year the board's probably familiar with these and we are purchasing additional machines because we have students who were in livonia virtual for the 2020-2021 school year who are returning to the face-to-face instruction of the classroom therefore we need more machines to go around okay thank you this will be coming from the federal cover related funding sources okay are there comments or questions from the board members or the superintendent no seeing none we have a motion by mr centers supported by mrs acosta for the purchase of

228mobile devices and mrs bradford would you please take the role mr centers yes mrs acosta yes mrs bonafield yes mrs jarvis yes mr johnson yes mrs bradford says yes president burton yes that motion passes the next item on our agenda is item 8 d central office abatement change order may i have a motion please president burton mrs acosta move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district approved funds to pay a change order for asbestos abatement at the central office complexes administration building to global green services group dearborn heights michigan in the amount of twenty six thousand five hundred and sixty dollars support we have a motion by mrs acosta supported by mrs bonafield uh mr sciences this was a rather large change order to a rather large project that we

229found with regard to abatement in the central office administration building the total uh originally was approximately 71 thousand dollars if you you recall with regard to abatement so this was a large portion but as mentioned during the committee of the whole and in my memo this is tile that needed it it did have asbestos in it but it was buried beneath another layer of tire tile which also was buried beneath a layer of carpeting so when we did the original walkthrough and got the original bids it just was not a known item so with the the size of the amount of work and the change order it has gone beyond what the board or the amount the board originally approved so we need the board's approval uh on this item in order to pay global

230green for that work thank you are there comments or questions from the superintendent or board members seeing none we have a motion for central office abatement change order uh from mrs of costa supported by mrs bonafield uh mrs bradford beauty please save your role mrs acosta yes mrs bonafield yes mrs bradford says yes mr johnson yes mrs jarvis yes mr centers yes president burton yes and that motion passes thank you thank you very much the next item on our agenda is item nine hearing from board members and nine a is the approval for board members to attend masb virtual summer institute may i have a motion please president burton mrs jarvis move that the board of education of the livonia public schools school district approved the board trustees participation in the august 6th through 8th

2312021 virtual masb summer institute and or virtual classes for a total of 1 170 as follows madeleine acosta acosta 450 tammy bonafield 180 dan centers 270 mark johnson 270 support we have a motion by mrs jarvis supported by mrs bradford and mrs uh mrs oakwest believable hearing from you on this thank you so much president burton so per board policy bbbc these expenditures do require prior board approval and so as you know we are not only very supportive but very appreciative of the continued professional learning in which our board involves themselves especially through the michigan association of school boards so we also especially appreciate that during the summer months to take three days out of your your time to continue your professional growth and development and so we are pleased to bring this recommendation to

232you this evening thank you are there questions or comments from the members of the school board seeing them we have a motion for the approval of board for board members to attend masb virtual summer institute motioned by mrs jarvis supported by mrs bradford mrs bradford please take the role mrs jarvis yes mrs bradford says yes mrs acosta yes uh mr johnson yes mr centers yes mrs bonifield yes president burton yes and that motion passes the next item uh also thank you to my fellow board members who are again as mrs ogus said taking time out of your own summer days to keep your professional development up it's it certainly pays off in uh in in the teamwork of our board uh the next item on our agenda is item nine hearing from board members uh

233are there board members who have anything that they would like to share this evening mrs bradford i would just like to do a shout out to mr fred karn for setting up the library a media center today and i know this takes i i came in earlier um when we were in the other room and he was had it all set up laid out so perfectly and just really appreciate all his hard work we're going to could we add on to that of course please i'd actually like to thank the uh the riley custodial staff dave dave leclaire the building supervisor and we got some extra hands as well this this library was actually filled with chrome carts oh goodness tables all kinds of stuff it was there's actually the place where many of the

234things were being stored so they can clean out there we asked them to then reverse all of that and so um i want to thank them and and i think the next time i text dave it better not be to say could you meet me in the library yeah [Laughter] thanks a lot yeah i just we appreciate everybody's hard work i know i always miss people no no no no your friend has been so flexible he was down in the cafeteria with us he was in the in the collaboration room here so yeah he's a jack of all trades he's everywhere so thank you fred and all the staff at riley absolutely any other board members have anything they'd like to share this evening uh i will just say thank you to our our never

235dying cabinet team to hang in there with us here for several hours uh it's much appreciated for the the prep for all these meetings uh the back up help for all these meetings uh especially when we have lots of visitors is very much appreciated i would just like to wish everyone a wonderful remainder of their summer hopefully the information that mrs locust was able to share this evening on the fall plans for coming back to school will put a lot of folks minds at ease now they have something concrete they can plan on i know our board was was happy to support these measures and we're excited that we can go forward into another step toward normalcy for this upcoming fall so thank you so much for all of you who have hung in with

236us for a very very long evening and i wish you