001here here all right can everybody please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united and states of america for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all hey lauren you might have to move that so they can hear you they couldn't hear you all right um jenny you're up just so you know you've got uh five minutes and we can't respond to anything that you say okay we just have to listen to it okay all right so you're free you're up yes please okay i would just like to know how do you you can't answer me so we're paying a lot of money in tax and i'm speaking for a lot of people i don't understand how taxes in this community can
002continue to go up during a pandemic people are out of work people are losing their homes people are being forced out of their homes because they can't afford the increase in the taxes and the majority of our tax money is going to these schools and i would just like an explanation as to how how people sleep at night with all of this happening and i i don't i don't understand how people can continue to just say we need more money we need more money we need more money every year there's people losing their homes there's people that can't make their bills and this just continues to grow and every year it just continues and nobody stops it nobody says anything i'm here to speak for a lot of people and i would love to know
003what's going to be done about this because this is this is wrong what's happening this is wrong and it seems like it's pure greed is what is taking over this country now it's just absolute greed that's taking over now i don't have children and i pay an obscene amount of money into the school system i don't have children but i do it gladly because the school systems i believe in and they're important but to see this continuously happen and nobody says anything nobody does anything just every year we're just gonna keep that five percent keep getting that five percent every single year whatever it is i don't know exactly what it is but i don't know how people sleep at night thinking that this is okay teachers didn't work last year kids were out of
004school last year now i understand everybody's got to make a living but how can you still raise how can more money be needed for the schools we have a whole year and a half the school is not even being open how can they how can you continue to keep asking for more money can anybody say anything to this can anybody respo i mean come on people so i would be glad to i would be glad if you would uh send me in if we could set up a meeting i'd be glad to sit down and walk through all this with you i would be totally glad i do that all the time for community members we just can't have engagement here because we'll get we would get this a business meeting and we want to
005listen and want to i will be glad to sit down and spend some time i'll spend as much time as you need to go through any of these questions it's not really a matter of i mean i appreciate that it's not probably a matter of spending time and explaining it it's a matter of doing something i mean i'll explain it i'll listen to you and i and i think when when you see uh you know when i when i can show you what what it what's going on then we can talk about it and that's that's where i can really we can dive deeper into this though well what's going on is people are being forced out of their homes because the taxes go up every year and the majority of it is put to
006the schools like i said i'd be glad to let's can we meet be glad to i mean are you going to do something about it i mean is somebody going to step up and say something and actually do something about it i mean are we just going to look the other way and just you know we're just going to deal with it we're just going to continue to do what we're doing and let the taxpayers just continue to deal with it and eat it so you know yeah i know what you're saying and we are we are doing stuff so that's why i want to meet with you to talk about this is why we can't this turns this meeting can't it can't be the place for it so i i will tell you exactly
007what we're doing about it because we do have we do have uh clear plans in place for the finance committee we've been talking about things so so some things are actually being done yeah somebody's actually going to make something happen here somebody's going to actually do something instead of just talk about it and push it off again and push it and keep pushing it somebody's going to do something about it yeah we and we've been very clear board meetings about it so we've been you know so again this is why we don't have the converse because it will turn into i've already gone too far because if i had a hundred people here tonight talking i wouldn't have time to have this conversation so if you can give me an hour or two hours three
008hours of your time that's fine i will i will gladly do it because i appreciate your i live here too so i mean and again i don't i don't have a problem getting into the school system i don't have children it's just me and my husband i understand so you know i mean if i was a real jerk i could say something different but i i believe in it and i think it's you're not offending me at all you're not offending me at all i understand i understand i just want if you can give me time i would i would love to sit down with you okay so how am i supposed to reach out to you then to do that um do we have your contact did you if you have we have your
009contact i'll reach out to you tonight i don't have your email pardon if you want to add your email to this sheet i was hesitant if you if i can get your email i'll be glad to reach out i do thank you for coming i really do so your contact information what is how do i it's uh uh can we don't have my card with me but it's bob gold at big hollow us yeah so if you shoot me an email i will respond right back we'll set something up okay thank you so much i appreciate it all right item four mr gold all right um so tonight uh we're going to present the return to school plan i've got it on the screen behind you i'm not going to be because of the recent
010events this week uh things have changed a little bit for us and um so i'm i'll uh go through these slides i'm gonna send these slides to parents tonight along with a short video that kind of explains some things but um let me just jump right in um topics for discussion this slide these slides are full of information regarding the instructional plans and i'm going to flow through all these all these statements right here we are in instructional plan number two full capacity in person learning with classroom physical distancing uh required we start under some restrictions as you all know instruction plan one would be back to full full in-person learning with no restrictions back to what i would call normal three and four are listed here those are not options for us to consider
011unless we are forced into it so i think we all agree that we it's not a route we want to go again so yesterday governor pritzker came out with the state mass mandate until yesterday there was it was there was recommendations no mandates so this mandate changed things for us at least for the meantime it also includes sports for indoors not extra not outdoor sports and extracurriculars but indoors um in in early july when i put this slide deck together um cdc came out with guidance on july 9th and so in this slide deck you'll see a lot of the guidance from the cdc and i would just tell you that i don't want to read through all these bullets for you because you can read those on your own but basically at the time
012they were recommending masks be worn indoors they were you know maintaining three feet physical distancing between students and classrooms which is much easier for us to do than six feet they're recommending screening testing ventilation hand washing respiratory etiquette staying home and sick the things that we've been doing the past year the one place where they did require uh the um masks was on a bus that was it that was on july 9th um they what the cdc guidance i'm just going to paraphrase this a little bit but the cdc guidance opened the door for us to take in local considerations and make local decisions as to how we implement their guidance so i took this statement off the cdc guidance together with local public health officials schools should consider multiple factors when making decisions including
013community transmissions vaccination coverage screening testing and increasing trends in schools so i think that's one of the important things we need to consider moving forward is what's happening on our campus and the guidance is intended to help us make local decisions that's what the cdc guidance was those were takeaways from the july 9th guidance on the 27th they came out and said they changed they adjusted their guide and said they recommend everyone in the schools wear masks and the idph jumped on that as well and supported that again yesterday was the first time that it came out uh it was always still using the word recommends until yesterday governor pritzker mandated it so all of that is now kind of in the back on the back burner and we're under mass commanding again we'll still
014look at local factors right now this is a data the top chart is lake county lake county is now in submission substantial transmissions uh for instance rates low transmissions for for uh positivity rates um and then uh the chart below is is our zip code uh our zip codes various zip codes um again our mitigation strategy is same as last year we are we you know we're able to easily bring all the kids back now now that we're able to do three feet social distancing in the classroom we have all of these uh that are on this on these bullets all these are in place the one that's going to be new is the testing program we are signed up with the shield testing program uh this is going to be opt in for parents
015and staff who choose to opt in this is where the students would spit into a tube we can do it once or twice a week um and again it does require parent consent we're not going to force all families to do that but we do have this available this year we also have the buy next now test as well but this is this one is free of charge to our schools and the company will bring staff here and they'll do all the testing we just provide the space the illinois department of public health came out with a what we call the faq document it's kind of like it's a document that's really important for how we function because we we do have to follow the health department guidelines in like quarantine situations that's where it's
016very clear that the health department does have the final say on quarantines and our health department is is extremely involved in that so that's one area where we really have to follow you know their uh if they say that johnny's got a quarantine we have to follow that quarantine so they help us with contact tracing as well close contacts again a lot of wording on this page so i'm going to summarize it close contacts within a classroom the last bullet is what i want you to see close contacts who are within three to six feet of the infected student are not treated as a closed content as long as both students were engaged in consistent correct use of well-fitted masks and other k-12 prevention strategies in place such as universal and correct mask use physical
017density so basically what they're saying is as long as we're doing uh we're doing universal math they'll consider the three feet as close three feet is the distance that's okay if if a student does get sick with kovid they will draw a three foot circle around that student to determine anybody inside that three foot circle would be close contact anybody inside that circle for 15 minutes cumulative for the day if if we're not doing full mask it's six feet here's where here's where there's uh it's become what i think has been kind of a game changer in decision making uh when we talk about having to quarantine kids because our goal here is get all kids here and keep them here i don't want we don't want to have to call parents say that your
018child has a quarantine for 10 days we don't want to do any of that we want to keep them here because it causes problems for families it causes problems for our staff trying to serve kids both here at home so highlights option one for the unvaccinated students first of all any student that's vaccinated will not have to quarantine if they're close contact at all unless they start showing symptoms so if they're vaccinated that's a you know that's something for parents to consider when that option is before them but they're vaccinated they will not worry about quarantine unless they show symptoms so these rules are for unvaccinated students option one is a 14-day quarantine option two is a 10-day quarantine with some testing involved option three is a seven-day quarantine with some testing involved and no
019no symptoms showing but option four is kind of the deal breaker in my opinion but uh so option four they let us this is new and they're letting us test kids out of quarantine so if two students are if one student is is a close contact to another student who tested positive we do not have to send that student home at all if the student is if the parent is willing to allow the student to go through our testing program and get them screened i think it's every other day and for seven days and as long as no symptoms are showing that student would be a close contact but not miss one day of school so as long as no symptoms are showing their testing so this is a this is a great option for
020us to keep kids in school the kicker is that we cannot use this option unless we're requiring all all individuals in the building to wear masks so as soon as we go away from universal masking that option's off the table as of right now but so when we start school year with the mandate with the mask mandate in place this option four is in place and so we're hopeful that we'll be able to keep kids here um i do i'm not going to go through these in detail i have i just want to explain it to you i have a layered approach i have three different layers that maybe we could be moving in and out of throughout the school year uh layer one being the most liberal layer uh looser guidelines where masks would
021be recommended not required and you'll see in the slides if you read through all the bullets kind of what's in layer one layer two is an option where layer layer two is an option where students you know obviously unvaccinated in layer two would be able to take their masks off i'm sorry vaccinated students would be able to take their masks off unvaccinated maybe have the option if we did some test if they agreed to testing and so those are and these these layers could change because right now we are we are in layer three we're in the most strict layer that we have and that's with the uh with the mandate with masks uh you know it's that all individuals wear masking doors so so we are starting in layer three um initially when i
022written these slides i wrote i wrote that we would consider layer 3 if we were in substantial high transmission levels but one of the i'm not tying our hands to that because um uh if there are no issues on campus if we're doing fine then we don't maybe don't need to be so restrictive so as we go through this school year so that's why none of these are written so that we're our hands are time isb has a directive for fuller and personal learning which we've been planning the entire time uh what does come up with is the issue of remote learning so if you notice this in the middle of the sentence here um that well all schools must resume fully in person learning for all student attendance day is provided that remote instruction
023may be made available for students who have not received the vaccine or are not eligible for the vaccine only while they're under quarantine so that's so we're still going to provide remote learning while a student is away from the classroom for a few days under quarantine we still have to work out the details on that but that's what we still are required to provide that i can't have a parent call me tomorrow and say we don't feel comfortable sending our children we're going to keep them home we need you to do remote learning all year that that option is on the table for us right now we'll continue to monitor health and safety factors throughout the year um you know and then that that includes our community factors but it really i think what happens
024on campus is going to be the key and and that's that'll be key in making us making decisions if we're seeing breakouts throughout those the schools then we obviously have to tighten things up and make some changes so we're going to do our best to keep our mitigation strategies in place and i think we're very well prepared for the year i know that we have some anxious families on both sides of this issue some are nervous about sending their children because of of recent upticks in in the transmission rates and we have some that are upset about people wearing masks so we've got everybody on we got people on both sides of the issue and we just want kids to come back we want kids to be happy we are looking forward to really an
025exciting start school year and i put a note on here at the end that this presentation could change prior to the start of school based on updated guidance because you never know when that's going to come out we've been burned by that so uh does any of the board members have questions i have one question yeah can you go back to the slide that talked about remote learning requirements yes so it says here that we're required to uh that we're required to uh provide remote learning for students who have not received the vaccine or who are not eligible what about the students who were vaccinated but still catch it because according to that we don't have to give them assuming we would still give it to yes good question we would still give it to
026them yes okay i think when this guidance was written since people that are vaccinated were not getting sick i just make sure we're including everything yeah i think that's what it was yep what does lunch and recess look like at the different schools good question uh it's gonna look a lot like um a lot like normal we're gonna i mean we are uh basically the guidances do your best and i think uh i i believe at the middle school they they're at all three schools but i know of middle school they were putting dots down but they're gonna try to separate kids three feet but they'll take their masks off and eat and as far as the the building leaders will be sending specific details out and then recess we do we want to get
027them outside and outside they can take their maps off it's so that will be those will look very much like normal so are we going to give middle school the option to stay indoors anymore i'll have to check on that if the email if they wanted to stay inside and like i think years past they've been allowed to either come in stay in or go outside yeah yeah i just think that i mean i would just say parents should know yeah okay we'll communicate that is is there gonna be a set number of like mask breaks at least a minimum that we can so parents can know that their kids will have some opportunity to you know switch out a mask or take a little break from you know breathing in their mask okay we'll
028make sure that happens i know that uh um so those are some of those like i've talked to what principles individually about things i know they've talked about in pe maybe just trying to do some of those things and we want to try to get kids outside as much as possible so they can just you know take their masks off and and so we'll definitely keep that as a priority though and are we going to have extra masks available with kids you know the mask gets wet very quickly if they go through their two or three they have if they need another one yep we've got plenty plenty in stock in fact we went to pick up some more today from lake county they have uh supply that's overflowing so we're gonna grab on to
029as many as we can while the weather is still good will it be encouragement for teachers to maybe even have periods of parts of classes outside where they can especially in the younger grades yes yeah how sorry how will students receive their chromebooks if they're quarantined so if you have to notify them at home their parents at home that they have to say oh so if they're home and then we have to get them their chromebook yeah okay you know we haven't worked out that detail yet but i'm guessing we will deliver it okay so we've uh for the chromebooks we've assigned them to every student every student is getting a chromebook with a bag so that they can carry it to and from school if necessary we're going to encourage teachers to remind students
030if they're coming out with symptoms or if it's something for middle school they're probably going to carry back and forth every day but at the lower levels if they notice anything and encourage the students to take them home or if there's like a weather incident that's you know possibly coming up um to to take them home with them so uh the kids will have a portable and it's a heavy duty bag we unfortunately accidentally tested it out and it's it can take some beating so it's a it's a strong bag it gets intake back and forth okay but if they don't take them home they will be delivered i would assume this will answer yeah yeah we bought the bags this year because we've had when kids were transporting them we had a lot of
031breaks so i bought the bags for them but for busing we'll be able to go full capacity full capacity good question full capacity on the buses so right now we just are short bus drivers we're getting there we hire a couple we got a couple on the higher list so what about the hourly schedule is that going to go back to the way everything's back to normal back to normal yep yep and i have a message going out to families tonight as soon as we're done uh we'll send the message out and i let them know in the communication that to really keep a close eye on your email because building leaders because everything's different each building they're going to be sending out a lot of information in the next two weeks but yeah schedules
032will go all the way i'll go back to pre-pandemic and how are you going to monitor the distancing in the hallways during passing periods in middle school we'll do it our i mean it's going to be it's not going to be three to six feet in the hallways we'll basically just kind of do our best and try to we'll have presents in the hallways but it will not be i don't want to promise people that it's going to happen because there's just too many the good thing is at the middle school we have staggered bells so we don't have all 800 kids in the hall at the same time so uh um but you know it will be we're just gonna be trying to coach and teach kids into kind of keeping distance from each
033other and thankfully uh it's the uh 15-minute cumulative role that we're that we don't want to make sure we don't violate great questions and if you if you continue to have questions i mean shoot them to me because i want to make sure as an administrative team we're thinking of everything because we may not be right now we're trying to do our best to ease this transition from kids and family so when there is a close contact situation and you call somebody about quarantine first are you calling up about quarantine or is that the department of health that's telling them like how do we know that the kids are actually quarantining that our needs are quarantined first so our nurses are the are the first contact and they're communicating with the health department um and
034then our nurses will will be heavily involved in the determining who's close contact who's not so you say how do we know do it in as far as so for example we only have to quarantine those who are unvaccinated that will not follow option three if i'm correct right right so is somebody are we verifying vaccination status at that point somebody's closing contact okay yeah we have a we have access to the vaccination status for kids and so we will uh that's in a in a system online so we'll know that and then uh um we'll probably just notify the parents and obviously the parents who child has the quarantine but uh we wouldn't make a a notification we wouldn't make a notification there's a positive test we will notify right and on option four
035do we on those one three five and seven days do we test them before they're allowed admitted to the school or is the test run in the morning and it takes time before we get a result like how do we make sure when somebody's tested they're not admitted until they clear right no it's it's it's not an immediate test this the spit the shield test is not so um there's a we're still working out a detail on that because if we if we do that test with the binex now which we have that our nurses give that and it's a 15 minute okay so that one was immediate and that might be the way we go with that option four because uh this company that's doing the shield testing will not be here every day
036so they're gonna come on a regular basis and do the testing for people that opt in so dr pittman and i were talking yesterday about possibly just doing the binex now for the kids that are on quarantine because our nurses can do it it'll be fine to do that unless we get overwhelmed because if we don't have a big staff to do that but i'm i'm thinking at least the way we've set up now i mean we should be okay and does option four also apply for teachers and staff yes good question i just found that out today so adults do qualify for that so there's a lot of tools here to help us keep people here which is good and that's if we can keep people here i think that we can be off
037to a great start so anybody have anything else and so then basically we're in this level three of masks and testing until the mandate is yeah is lifted when the mandate's lifted that's when we'll have options to consider yeah and that's where the next two items come into play is i put on the item five possible action item and item six is a possible action item not knowing if you as a board want to vote on at this point i mean there's really nothing to vote on because we are we're in what we're in i think it's something for the future to know like option six or item six is voting on a resolution that that says that you want me to make decisions as we go in and out of these phases option five
038would be if you just would rather uh our item five would be you you'd rather vote initially tonight i was thinking we were going to have to do one of the other i think at this point this is our return to school plan because the mask issue is mandated everything else is pretty clear but when the mask issue gets dropped we'll have some decisions local decisions to make so i don't know if we need to iron that out now or however you want to do it tomorrow well seeing as we don't know how long the masked mandate's going to be i don't think there's that we should make that decision now do we still need to approve the return to school plan as it is because even though there is the mathematic there's still some
039information in there that's local policy like using an option for for testing as our primary method yes but i want i mean in the presentation complete we talked a lot about testing and testing of kids here i want to make sure that everybody's clear that your kid will not be tested unless the parent says it's okay absolutely under any of the options under any of the different levels unless the parent says okay your child will not be tested yep correct okay we have we've informed shield of that some some districts are doing an opt-out model where they're testing everybody unless the parent opts out we're doing an opt-in model where we're only testing them if they ask to be tested perfect and and they'll verify that at the time of testing yeah right because some
040kids won't know everyone's going out to get tested i'm going to go out but yeah yeah there's a i think there's a whole bar code system and they got a scan but we'll have a consent form that all parents have to fill out first okay yep i think the return return school plan is fine for us to vote on improvement is basically what's been discussed over the pandemic planning committee yeah everything along those lines um i think as far as item six goes we can discuss that after item five so anybody else have anything else on the return to school plan nope can i please have a motion to approve approve a superintendent's return to school plan motion second ash and geary yes yes yes yes yes yes all right the next one the resolution
041so i don't i mean i guess i'll open this up for discussion i don't know what people are feeling about allowing the superintendent to make the decision at will or if we want to have board meetings like we did last year i just feel like since it's such an open-ended window as far as when this mandate will be lifted and what situation we'll be in i think the board's gonna have to reassess you know how the community is feeling and just everything at that point come back to me i was still reading it actually okay lauren well i haven't read this okay um but if you have the bob if you if this is if we decide that you can make the decisions do you pose any uh liability or is it different liability than
042if the board makes the decisions good question the uh so where i get in a little bit of a bind is um i can't i shouldn't say i can't i could it's hard for me to make a recommendation to the board that is outside of that could put the that is against some guidance from the cdc or so even though i might so a board can decide that but if i personally advise you that and then we have a problem then it it causes me some issues as well so uh because i'm so i've been advised that's where it gets a little bit dragged but right now the way the cdc guidance was written it's all recommended nothing was required so there's we had some you know until they came out with the the mandate
043that's where things kind of change so if i were like tonight if i were to say i know the governor said it's mandate but i don't want to do that so i'm recommending we go this way that would be a a big issue because it's a mandate but uh all the way it was written prior to that there was some there was definitely there were schools all over the state that were interpreting and attorneys and everybody interpreting there was some guy there was some flexibility in there for us to make local decisions but uh when it becomes if it came down to situation i guess what i'm trying to say it came out situation where there was some strong mandates that you guys as a board you wanted me to go against i would have
044a hard time recommending that personally cool ah i think just given i i would agree with ashley given everything that's happened over the past year who knows where we're gonna be in a couple months that we should probably discuss what's going on here derek i agree right now we don't know when it's going to be lifted it could be two weeks from now it could be six months from now and we don't know why it will be lifted the situation at our school versus the rest of the state so i think we're better off discussing it at that time doug yeah i i agree this is the board should discuss it at the time that it's needed or to be addressed i also just don't think we need to put it all on superintendent's shoulders
045i guess how how long will it take for us see if the mandate came down in two weeks we would need how many days before we can convene a meeting it's two days how many days is it before you can convene a meeting on the board it's started to change two days two days i think there's a stipulation for an emergency meeting i'd have to look into that i think there's some i can we can do emergency meeting for some reason so i have to see if this qualify probably would okay and then you need four people to vote right yeah okay yep that's fine we can i'm fine with waiting until later and we could bring the resolution back later you might decide later hey let's if things are pretty good let's just bring
046it back and let's do that but just so people understand if we're doing that it's not going to be if the mandate is lifted it's not going to be the next day right that the rules will change it wouldn't be until we convened as a board right okay and it and it's possible that even around here we were having problems so we wouldn't want to lift the mandate ourselves so it's possible we want to take our time correct can i please then uh for item six it seems the board's in agreement can i please have a motion to postpone uh item six until uh deemed necessary by the superintendent motion per second ash and joe uh all in favor any opposed ice habit employment report anybody have any questions can i mention one thing with
047the appointment report the there's there's a page that's landscaped it includes the import employment of uh missy carr second grade teacher on the bottom that one is an extra one that was uh added right before the meeting i want to let you know second grade and fourth grade right now are kind of hovering trying to keep we've had a goal of keeping k four as close to 20 as possible and second grade is at probably averaging 22-23 right now so we added a teacher especially in the environment we're in we if we get close to 20 it's best we added a teacher to get it down to 20. fourth grade we might be doing the same thing i would bring a name to you on monday night because we're about 24 in fourth grade and
048we can't it's hard to get that many kids in a room three feet apart and we had a goal as a board for the last few years to get them to 20 anyway uh so but we've been waiting on uh right now uh we are at i think 189 fourth graders uh but we're verifying that they're all really coming back so we're working on that fully higher future but i want you to know that's what that second grade teacher is we're getting close to not i'm getting close to not having classroom space i just it i mean um it looks like we credited some years on bradley and missy i'm sorry i couldn't understand it looks like we credited years for bradley and missy oh yes all right was there any do we have any
049concerns about why they left their previous employer no not at this point i know missy just moved from another state relocated uh to this area and uh so i do know that i had that conversation with dr biancolon today uh bradley same thing about him today at our new teacher orientation he relocated to this area and has been working in a private school okay uh so yeah all right anybody else have questions no no can i please have a motion to prove the employment report second lauren and gary yes yes yes yes yes right that's it can i please have a motion to adjourn