csd99media Live Stream

001okay [Music] paul good evening call to order nancy kupko here mike davenport here shirelle fuller here dan nicholas here trey pavich here rick pavonato here joanna vazquez drexler here thank you thank you maybe let's stand for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all well this is a very pleasant evening because we're going to start with a student perspective we haven't had one for a while no thank you guys for coming all right so we have some representatives of north high here so if you guys could just introduce yourself and then share with the board your story that you're here to share can you hear me yes uh hi my

002name is emmett thulin i'm a senior at north and some things we were just going to talk about a few like shortfalls and some good things that are going on and one of the main things is that i think the teachers have been super accommodating through all of this whether that just be in class like a video or something doesn't work and just electronically it's not making sense they'll change their lesson plan around that and make do with it and then a lot of my teachers because 80 minutes an 80 minute period is something that we're not really all that used to they're accommodating for us and making like a little short like three minute go up use the bathroom go get a glass of water like a little something to eat like that and

003so i think that's just been really a positive thing that they're doing and then also i'm involved in the speech team at north and we just had our first all-team meeting today and um we got our head coach on the um i think like the dgn zoom account and so we've been able to use those meetings efficiently and well and i think that's something that activities like speech that can be fully online i think that's really positive that we're getting those going and moving and then just a few things that i think like might need a little work is that some teachers have been assigning work outside of class that's like additional lectures and i feel like some teachers aren't using their complete 80 minutes to the maximum capacity that it can be used for

004and so that's all that i have unless you have any questions for me all right let's keep going around and we'll then just and maybe some questions will come out hello okay great sound good um emma took some of my points so i'm just going to reiterate some of the stuff you said as well uh hello my name is george photos i'm a junior at dioscope north and i have been asked to give my opinions on the benefits and consequences of remote learning there are some things that i have liked and appreciated about remote learning and i love the way that the districts set up our schedules i feel like it gave us enough time to focus on that class at hand and then give us enough time to reset for our next class also

005i get more sleep and i think that's great i don't know about you guys but the way my schedule is set up um so my classes i don't have like a second period or a first period and i get to sleep in and get more rest which is great and like emma said i really appreciate what my teachers have done they've been super understanding like they understand everything with everything going on and they've been there for me whether it be after class or via email some things that i think found more challenging remote is that we're not face-to-face obviously with my classmates and my teachers doesn't really allow me to build that student-teacher relationship and even a student-student relationship there are some students in most of my classes that i don't even know and i

006just like to get to know them in some way another challenge for me is that it's difficult to stare at a screen for a long period of time i lose interest very quickly because of the no interaction with my my teachers and my fellow students as i said i'm a junior and junior year is usually a huge academic year because this is the year that colleges look at for grades additionally i feel like i'm kind of missing out on some class experiences such as labs and science classes or just different leadership opportunities in other classes which i feel like i can benefit from well i'm not done sorry currently at north i am a part of the positively north stars program which helps incoming freshmen transition from middle school to high school i have a

007younger brother nico who is a freshman and he has benefited greatly from this program i feel the way that mrs lichtman and mr leslie have done this was amazing he now knows that he's got more upperclassmen outlets to ask for help just besides me i'm also involved in the pe trainee course at north being remote has made that class very difficult because it is student-led and the whole purpose of that class is to provide in-person instruction giving students the experience it will lead their peers for the rain of this semester i feel that even the next semester as well i kind of want to go back to school i want to be in person uh whatever it would look like either hybrid or full-time but i want to go back once it's safe to return

008and stay and i feel like stay is a big point with that uh i don't really want to go back on like a trial basis and then get some back home to remote uh because i feel like that would just kind of be just as upsetting as getting school taken away in the first place um thank you for giving me the opportunity hello okay hi my name is veronica latocha and i am a freshman at north high school i would first like to thank all the teachers staff and board of education members for all the hard work you have put in to make this year the best that it can be i am truly grateful for all you have done for north high students especially freshmen to help us transition into this new learning experience

009today i wanted to talk about some of the things that are going well during during remote learning and some of the things that are not so i'm going to start with the things i do like overall i think that it is less stressful to do school online than in person we only have half of our classes each day and that helps us with the amount of work that we have it's also nice that i get to do work from home i get to be in a place where i know i can do quality work and also stay focused i have the chance to be comfortable while doing schoolwork which makes it a little less stressful there are also some things that i do find challenging the first is that students have a lot more responsibility

010on themselves we have to make sure that all of our assignments are turned in on time and in the right spot and if there's something wrong you have to contact your teacher in your own time i think that the biggest disadvantage when doing remote learning is not being able to be with people and socialize i think it is very important to be with your friends and other people so you can make new friends and make those in-person connections i also think that doing online learning is not the best for students mental health not only are we experiencing a pandemic but now we have to stare at our screens listening to our teacher talk all day and this is in addition to already being on our phones for most of the time one thing that i

011think has been the hardest for the freshman class is definitely making new friends we are all new to the school we don't know a lot of people and we cannot make those connections over a zoom call so in most classes we are sitting with strangers and are expected to make conversations even though we've never met or talked to these people in our life most of the time nobody talks when we're in our breakout rooms because again we don't know each other and it's a little awkward to talk to someone over a computer screen i'm hoping that we can go back to school using the hybrid plan this will give us a chance to make those in-person connections with students and teachers and also get better understanding in our classes as much as i love waking

012up and just opening my computer to get to class i think it would be most beneficial to go back to school even if it's just for a couple of days a week thank you any questions about difficulties because being engaged and staying engaged and i get like you said you know like having some frequent little breaks to grab a snack or grab some water or whatever has helped are there any other things you think that would be helpful to get students engaged especially freshman students while you know honoring social distances um i think that overall like i can stay engaged for a good amount of time but i think that those five-minute 10-minute breaks that our teachers give us are always helpful just because we can go away from our screens and just not like

013walk around or something just so that we can get kind of moving and just not sitting for a long period of time but overall i think that's really it and with that i think that um some of my teachers have been if they like make it more towards the middle of class whereas some teachers will put it like within the last 10 minutes which is kind of just like not very good as serving for a break and so if it's more structured towards where the students have to break in the middle i think that would prioritize just them being able to then focus for the first half and then come back and be re-energized for the second yeah i agree with what emma said they both pretty much summed up my answer as well and

014if you guys have any problems with connectivity and staying on zoom or just even getting on the sites et cetera yes yes like infrequently frequently it's mostly difficult especially in pe classes um when i grow up i want to be a pe teacher and the way that my pe class currently is structured is great but it's very difficult because our class is like student-led and if a student can't lead the class because of their connectivity issues the class doesn't really there's really no class um but it's every once in a while and then oh sorry and then just um with the connectivity part of it i some of like i've been in and out or just like technology doesn't work like i got a loaner chromebook because like my chromebook wasn't charging and then this

015chromebook doesn't have like audio hooked up through it so then it i have to call in from my phone and so i feel like it's just a lot of like the little issues or like your wi-fi's out or things like that but then i think teachers are also being good with it and they're like students are reaching out and there's a good line of communication open between everybody with it are you able to talk to your own sergeants it's okay i haven't really been having a lot of problems if something sometimes like you can't really hear the teacher just because it starts glitching and it's kind of hard to communicate just because you could have missed like an important part of what we're doing are you able to talk to your teachers when you need

016to like what outside of class are you able to reach people and say hey i miss this or i need help with that yeah i usually just email my teachers um let them know what happened and it usually gets clarified yeah we've uh we've sorry we've been using remind which is a great app um it's like it's more like a texting for lack of better words um instead of because some people are just only using emails so that's another way that we've been communicating with our teachers yeah i just had a question about the pe class you said the student led is the student here doing it or are they trying to lead it from home is that what you said to me yeah can you repeat the question i couldn't hear the pe question

017you said it was yeah it's working yeah so it's well i'm going to train e-course so our work we're uh leading via zoom so we're at our homes and uh like we like make a workout and we have to like perform the workout for the class and the classes like it's kind of like a repeating type thing so it's led from the students home and not at the correct yes okay that probably is the idea because it's the course is that the student is actually the leader of the pe class so they help design and lead that classroom experience for the rest of the students so uh yeah they're remote just like all yeah so they couldn't come in and use the school facilities because they'd be by themselves to lead that class yeah well

018when we had no students coming in until soon uh into the school during the day yeah i know but i was just wondering because that would be just one or two people so social distances would definitely apply because there's not a ton of students just asking i was just thinking about how that's being administered from a home space so yeah it's still all the challenges of transporting students absolutely any other questions so i'm uh so i heard uh i heard at least one of you say something to the fact that uh that you're getting more you feel like you're getting more work assigned to you um and that that was actually something i'm looking forward to hearing more feedback about i i was recently having a conversation with a high school friend of mine who's

019been a teacher he's a ap gov and instant teacher um in michigan and uh he we were talking about this and and something he was concerned about was as as they're doing remote is is that that temptation on the part of the teachers to take advantage of of possibly um you know the opportunity to have the students do more um outside of the actual class time and in difficulty in engaging exactly how much they should be or shouldn't be doing and i i kind of saw this first probably month or two of sort of a almost a conversation potentially back and forth between students and and their teachers trying to find that balance because this is new to everybody and but it is is something i think we need to maybe stay on top of

020um to make sure that that the balance is right that we're not seeing too much busy work um outside of outside of the classroom and i i i hate to categorize it as busy work but i lack of uh another term coming in coming to mind but the idea is just that um that you're not getting overly stressed and uh but it sounds like i heard comments about things being a little less stressful with all this i'm hearing you're more rested than you might have been otherwise and that's always been a concern of ours too that i mean idea kids coming in zero hour and staying after school and going home and getting all those uh all that all that homework done and then getting getting a few hours of sleep and getting up and

021doing it again so that seems to be um a positive there and we joanne and i were having a little conversation on the way in about trying to focus on on the things that we can do the things that are are positive versus uh what we're missing out on and and the negatives and so there's certainly some things about this that are that are if not different maybe even a little better than than the way we're doing things and hopefully we can expand about upon that and learn from it well i was going to just say you know i the thing that i don't have a question but i did observe that you were also positive and um so adaptable and taking on the challenge i believe one of you said you had to do

022take more responsibility for some of the things and i think you'll grow more because of that in the end and but i'm very impressed i'm hoping all the other students too are that you represent the way many of them are because i i think you're handling the challenge of this very very well i agree all right well thank you for coming out and presenting yes thank you very much we appreciate it now you're welcome to stick around and sit through a board meeting you're welcome to head on home either one run away as fast as you can i wouldn't do it no no guys we're gonna hear all about interesting stuff today actually a lot of their minds are going to be answered you're going to want to go home and tune in let's not

023get carried away okay so we're going to go with the um okay the workshop the first item is the school plan update empty all right [Music] i'm glad i can see that because do you want to do you want to take places with me no i'll be fine all right so uh we it's been uh three weeks three or four weeks since we've been together for a board meeting to uh discuss where we're at and returning to school just going through here a lot of material to share with you tonight tonight's really going to be focused on guidelines metrics and the things that we need to respond to in trying to get students back in person and then next monday will be hopefully uh we're working very diligently on coming up with concrete plans we'd

024like to have some of those to you for next week and then i'll walk through the timeline from there all right as you're well aware this summer was busy with lots of guidelines feedback and planning we've seen this before but this is every key date that led up to the august 17th first day of school but what i really want to point out is this is the timeline of changes since school started okay so we were supposed to be back on the 17th on that day four key pieces of guidance were released a quick reminder that just in the few days before that we received two major pieces of guidance that really caused us to not return on the 17th for in person and move to a remote model it wasn't until the week after

025that that we began the fully remote schedule that our students were speaking about today um so it's really been a only a few weeks that we've been operating under the newly the new fully remote schedule since then you can see many things including guidance that gets released and then updated on the same set of guidance so that's particularly frustrating for us because we'll get a piece of guidance and we'll start responding to it and planning for it and just when we think we understand it and we have answers ready to go then the rules of the game change again and we're back maybe not at square one but we're back having to adapt and change those things so being a lot of people are referring to this is the hamster wheel and that's kind of

026what it feels like uh as we've been working through this some of the major things that we'll talk about that are on this list the continuum of risk is greatly uh influencing our return to school that's from the cdc as well as the limiting and mixing of groups and cohorting the dashboards that have been released both at the state level and at the county level and then the exclusionary charts which indicate when it is that somebody should stay home or should be isolated or quarantined those started out very restrictive the week before school started and have been relaxed a little bit in the last couple of weeks especially related to reoccurring symptoms if you remember the last time we met we talked about how restrictive things like seasonal allergies would be and some of those

027limitations have been relaxed in the last week so that might make it easier for us to once we get people back to school keep them here and we were informed today that the cdc is issuing new guidance for schools to model so it will continue to come all right this slide continues to adapt and change but yes we are still continuing vigorously to try to return students to in-person learning i mean you heard it from our students tonight they want to be back here but we have to do it in a way where we're sure that it's safe and it fits inside of the guidelines that we have been told will keep students and staff and our wider community safe these are all the reasons that you've seen and they they remain what we hear

028is that remote learning is going well for most the stories that you heard from our students tonight are similar to the emails that are coming in there's a few bumps and glitches here and obviously we're very reliant on technology and it working we've had a few nationwide outages of zoom and of google and amazon web services which a lot of the tools are built on those are things that are out of our control we also have students that have some challenges with internet in in their homes that we have been actively working on heard tonight of a challenge with a chromebook i mean we're responding to those things we're trying to close those gaps we are working very closely with um a variety of internet providers we're working with dupage county and the dubai county

029regional office of education on getting internet service into into students homes we're working with the education foundation to purchase internet equipment for families that can't afford it so we are gina has been amazing working with the rest of the team in the organization to try to make sure that students have long term fixes for internet and technology issues because we fully anticipate that at some point in the year we'll needing to return to a longer period of remote once flu season comes in which we've talked about since the beginning so the team is focused on long-term fixes for our students not necessarily short-term fixes you heard some of the voices of our students tonight we're continuing to listen i receive probably half a dozen emails a day at least probably more than that on average

030we're monitoring monitoring social media and all of the normal networks that we follow our principals are meeting with students and staff and parents as well and constantly gathering information as to how it's going our feedback committee that the board asked us to form this summer is up and running and they're working on creating student family and staff surveys and we expect those to go out very soon we're working with a third party company that specializes in gathering this kind of feedback for schools so it will be faster for us to analyze and process that information and respond to it just getting it up and going for the first round is always the hardest part and it always takes us a little bit longer for student surveys because we have to allow families to opt out

031of those kinds of surveys so it takes a little bit longer to get wide scale mass student surveys up and running we have lots of opinions suggestions ideas coming in and and we read and respond to all of those we can't always give people the answers they want but we always try to explain why we're doing what we're doing and you know why we're responding the way we are there are a lot of strong feelings in all different directions on this and you can see some of those up there you know from wanting to be fully remote for the rest of the year to wanting to reopen tomorrow you know and you can see more synchronous less synchronous you know you heard some of the examples here today some feel like we should never reopen

032until there's a cure some think that we should reopen right away and that that this is not as big of a deal as it's made out to be i mean we're hearing stuff on all sides of it and we're listening to it and considering it and responsing responding to it one of the opinions that has been growing in its voice is that we should just ignore state guidance and state officials so one of the things that i've done in response to that consideration is reach out to the district legal counsel and just a reminder that legal counsel represents the district and the board they don't represent the administration and what they have provided is a memo that i've provided to the board but the closing summary of that memo is that the district is required

033to follow the governor's executive orders and should also abide by the joint guidance from isb and idph to have the greatest chance of avoiding liability for legal actions related to its response to the covet 19 pandemic now inside of that is obviously that our number one priority isn't avoiding liability it's about keeping students safe and as i've said many times before i have to trust that the health professionals in our state and in our county are interested in doing just that keeping our students our staff and our greater community safe and we have to design believe that that's what these guidelines are issued to do and i know that return to school and covid and safety guidelines and all of this is wrapped up in the larger political discourse however i have to look at

034this and assume that the measures we are taking are going to keep people healthy and safe and it is my first responsibility to do that my second responsibility as the superintendent is to protect the resources of this community and of the taxpayers within this community and to blatantly disregard guidelines and guidance and mandates from the state level that be the governor idph is the dupage county health department any of those organizations would greatly put the district at risk of lawsuits and whether or not those would win or lose those kinds of things take away district resources very quickly both in the form of administrative time and the time of the board of education and of our legal counsel and all of those leading the district but also in the resource of money those can get

035very expensive very quickly so my responsibility is to protect the students and of course the staff but also to protect district resources and i can only do that if we follow these guidelines and i know some people don't agree with them but that's not my option my my responsibility as the superintendent of schools here is to to carefully understand that guidance and then implement it with [Music] fidelity so i just want to iterate that we we understand a lot of these things that we're hearing a lot of frustration and frustration of the uncertainty people just want to know when and how and and how it's going to look and you heard from our students and if we come back we want to know that we're there and we don't want to flip flop back and

036forth we know that switching between these plans evolves a lot of capacity and energy i i was talking with nancy about this and in a lot of ways this is just redesigning school it's like picking up a city and relocating the whole city somewhere else and and there's a lot of complexity in this and every time you answer one question there's a a million more questions that come out of it and um you know this we know that the planning also impacts so many individuals right and it's different for each student it's different for each family and how we work through that is very complex and we we understand that that people just want to know what's going to happen so they can plan for it and they know what's coming next and is in

037and as we have all summer as soon as we know definitively what we're going to do we share it as widely as we can but we also know that each one of these scenarios is going to get intense feedback in scrutiny and that's fair i mean it's fair for the community to ask a lot of questions and seek to understand why we're doing things the way we're doing but but no you know that we're hard at work at doing this and we're also trying to run school at the same time if we would have been provided the guidance that we've received since the beginning of the school year back when we started this process at the beginning of july our plans would look much different today than they did when we presented them in august

038you know we would have built things much differently we'd probably be back to school right now but the fact is continued shifting and guidance and metrics and understanding of how this is all going to work makes it really difficult to plan for um and and we are on that hamster wheel of trying to get back but it just keeps churning and we're running school right now you know this would have been one thing in the summer when we had time to plan and staff and students weren't here but the administrative jobs that we hold are full-time jobs any other year and we're doing those same jobs right now and teachers are doing those same jobs right now and more because they're having a plan for completely different things than they've ever had to do before

039while we're trying to rebuild school and rethink school this is a monumental task to try to do all of this right now and we have to understand that just flipping the switch and saying we have a model and it works doesn't factor in all of the other things that go along with it some that we'll talk about later you alluded to you alluded alluded to it in the timeline but the science is changing all the time correct and the guidance is changing all the time and that's just a whole nother layer and it's not anybody's fault it's just that this is an evolving situation and there's a whole nother layer of complexity on top of all these other layers of complexities you can have the best plan and changes tomorrow because later on we'll try

040to show how we're trying to build so that even if numbers and metrics and guidance changes that we'll have a program that will likely work up to a certain threshold of transmission of kovit in our community we know there's no perfect solutions we know that no matter what we do [Music] somebody is going to be left out somebody's going to be unhappy we're doing our best to plan for the most that we can we we also hope that everybody understands that every individual is different how they respond to this is uniquely their experience and it doesn't make what's going on right now right or wrong their feelings right or wrong just what's right for somebody right now is very different than what's right for somebody else and we're trying to consider those individual needs and

041considerations into all the planning we're doing but it is challenging all right so what i want to spend a good chunk of time on tonight is making sure that the board in the community understands the changes that have occurred in health guidance since this summer so over the last month there's been a great deal that has come forward and this is what's really shaping our return to school planning to make sure that it fits within the health guidelines i've provided a summary document that i've shared with the board and we'll make sure that this is up on our website this is our internal and i'm going to put this in a format here where you can read it right but i just want to give you the big overall picture of what we've done here

042administratively is we've spent many hours with health officials to try to understand how the overlapping guidance of the illinois department of public health the dupage county health department and the cdc work together to help influence our decision making so that we know that whatever plans we're putting forward are safe for our student staff and greater community so what we've done is created this cross walk to show how the different pieces factor together the first piece of guidance that came out that our board was asking for for over two months before it came from illinois department of public health and i advocated with our state senator and isb to try to get this out sooner than we did got it are these different transmission levels that use metrics to determine what level of transmission community transmission

043we are in with colvin what it looks at is what's called a constellation method looks at a variety of factors and brings them together to indicate are we in minimal transmission moderate or substantial for the layman this is important because the greater the rate of transmission in the community the less likely your safety measures are to be effective so we need to integrate pieces that are less risky and this is what the health professionals have helped me understand it's all about risk management right and as transmission is greater in your community you can take less risk as transmission is more minimal in your community you can take more risks so we're trying to divide to devise programming that doesn't require a lot of changes based on where we're at in those transmission levels so where

044are we at right now i think i skipped a slide there we go [Music] all right yeah let's go back go to where we are right now there we go okay so these metrics are released every monday so these came out at 10 a.m today this is dupage county health departments metrics there's really six different metrics here all that it takes is for one of them to be in the next restrictive level and that's where we're at so one metric in moderate puts us in moderate one metric and substantial puts us in substantial where this gets complex is that the first metric in itself is a constellation metric okay so the first metric is where do we sit as a county either in the blue or orange orange is the warning level as defined by

045the illinois department of public health so what risk metric color are we in uh are we in blue or are we in orange and in the past week we moved from blue to orange that alone that one factor in moderate would be enough for us to be in moderate okay but we're also in moderate for the next one which is cases for 100 000 which is currently sitting at 89 that is a moderate factor then the next one looks a weekly case trend are we trending up or down in all of our cases this past week we went from trending down by 21 to trending up uh by 15 okay uh youth trend looks at cases under the age of 20 and how are we trending on that we went from trending down by 34

046last week to trending up by 43 percent this year this week uh those two last two metrics need to be trending for two consecutive weeks for them to kick in that's why you don't see uh rating for those because we haven't hit criteria for two consecutive weeks but it's trending in the wrong direction for both of those weekly test positive positivity the threshold for moderate is five percent we were above that last week we were below that this week so that one is trending in the correct direction and then the last one is neighboring counties in orange uh once in the last four weeks we only have only have had one neighboring county at a time once you move to two neighboring counties in the orange now that moves to moderate so we've been alternating

047between kane and will going back and forth but we haven't had both at the same time so that has left us in the minimal not the moderate that one is the most lengthy metric because once you're there it takes four straight weeks of being of not having those two there for you to move back to minimal okay it is very easy to move to the more restrictive level that could happen immediately on a weekly basis if we ended up next monday at 101 per 100 000 cases the second metric we would be in substantial you're immediately in that level and you need to be for two consecutive weeks out of that level to move out so if we move to substantial next week it's then two more weeks of good numbers they were they're all

048in moderate to get into moderate or that they're all in minimal to get to minimum so it's much harder to move backwards than it is to move they're more restricted it's two weeks at or below the established threshold correct okay two weeks at or below the established threshold to move into a less restrictive transmission level so this demonstrates how important our wider community is to making sure that we get back to school and once we're at school that we stay there and i'll show you the impact on school in a second but i just want to make sure that everybody understands kind of how these levels work and how we move in and out of them so so to be clear dupage has defined a two-week period as being as establishing a trend but when

049you're talking about something trending up or trending down even if something's trending down if it's not yet or below the threshold level so if we're 89 i thought we were 93 but if we're at 89 now and next week we're at 88 the week after that 87 were well let's say even more so but we're trending down but we're still not edible threshold so we're still considering right yeah we're and that wouldn't be on this metric be considered trending down you'd be trending down if you move to the next metric so you'd have to drop it here all right um so once again this is nothing that we as a district are setting right these are metrics that are being set by the health professionals these are this is data that's being gathered by idph

050and we are just monitoring it and using it to influence the decisions that we make going forward so how this impacts our instruction these are recommendations from the dupage county health department and really as you look through these the hybrid schedules we designed it over the summer would only work within the minimal level of transmission the key challenge for this is once we're into moderate what the health professionals really start getting concerned about is the number of people you come in contact with on a daily basis so we as an administrative team have been looking at it as kind of your individual cohorts how many unique people are you coming in contact with throughout your school day and at minimal we're not so worried about that because the ppe the social distancing the hand washing

051all of the other measures that we have put in place keep you and keep you safe because it's unlikely even though you're coming in contact with more people less of them are likely to have covet but as we move into moderate it's more likely that you're going to come in contact with somebody that has been exposed to covid so we need to reduce the number of times that your ppe has to put up a fight against somebody breaking through those defenses so we need to start limiting the number of people that you come in contact with at school on a daily basis and when we move into substantial we need to almost completely eliminate that risk so you can see some of the basic things that we're thinking about to move to bring student all

052students back on a regular basis in the moderate transmission level which is where we are now and will at least be here for three more weeks is the development the need to develop a new schedule that meets some of these safety guidelines which i'll show you how we do that in a second yep and we talked a little bit about this before so just to be clear so when we're changing trains so when we're going to change levels between minimum moderate and substantial if we become more restricted that's intermediate correct your numbers spiked we're going to be more restricted we're going to become less restrictive it's going to take a period of time to find as two two weeks but in essence it's really three weeks because we have some time to operationalize so if

053i was a teacher if i was teaching a math class and i found out this week oh our numbers are starting to look pretty good i would then know that potentially in no fewer than three weeks we would be moving we could be moving to a different type of schedule but i would have at least three weeks to think about how i was going to do this and plan right and this is important for students it's important for families that are managing their family schedules and who's watching out for kids and who's making dinner and all of those kinds of things right so um however the other direction could be immediate right it can become more restrictive immediate so i know that that can be challenging for families as well right so this is why

054it'll be important to communicate on a regular basis what direction is the data trending in right and right now it is not trending in the right direction and i am very concerned about how the labor day data that will influence the data this week will impact us for our next round of updates a week from now so hank at what point i don't see it up here does the data point to back to school next coming soon i'll get there so what we need to try to do obviously substantial transmission they're saying it's pretty much a remote schedule what they're looking for us to do is to bring in just very small groups of students at that point and really most students almost all students are remote what we need to try to do is

055to build a plan that works in moderate and minimal because that is most likely where we are going to spend the majority of our time for the remainder of the school year our challenge is the plan that we built this summer doesn't work there in moderate it only works in minimal and as i've said many times already even tonight had we had this data in june or july we would have a plan right now for students to be back in person that worked in moderate and minimal however we didn't have the luxury of having that information so the last thing i want to bring to your attention is the cdc recommendations and what the cdc recommendations these came out on august 24th do a nice job of talking about is this continuum of risk and

056matching up you know the lowest risk which is what you want to have when spread is substantial to the highest risk which is a risk you can take when uh community spread is minimal and especially lower minimum right each one of each one of these transmission levels you could think are you trending more on the less restrictive side or more towards the more restrictive side so that's how all of these things then piece together to give us what to do now our key dividing line is between some risk and medium risk because we expect that we're going to live in moderate most of the year and that's where moderate sits low moderate sits in medium risk high moderate sits in some risk and the difference between the sum and the medium risk is the mixing

057of groups right so when you're in some risk they want you to try to start cutting out the amount of times in which students are mixing throughout the day right they want to keep that your individual cohort the number of students you come in contact with small and as we move the other direction as we move to the left the first thing we get to into medium risk is the ability to start some mixing of groups so at the high school level the way the curriculum works we're not like in elementary school elementary schools can do some risk pretty easily right it's the same teacher with the same group of kids for the whole school day you know you might push in some specials you might have a lunch period but you could keep those

058kids together in their own unique group for the whole day that's not how high school is built so we need to bring students back and we need some mixing to be able to run a school day we've looked at some like one period per day models and it's just not worth the lift to bring students in for just one period the disruption on all the other periods is so great that it it's not worth the trade-off okay so we need to have at least a schedule that allows some mixing of students throughout the school day all right so what the dupage county health department has released is a return to school framework to provide us some local guidance about how these metrics work and they've worked very closely with the regional office of education and

059all of the local superintendents to try to help us understand how this tool works and what it does is it gives us a pathway to in-person instruction that will be safe for students and when we factor all of these things together what you come up with this is this handy-dandy diagram that i have tried to put together to piece together everything that we know across all of the stuff i just shared you shared with you really as i said the dividing line in phase four that's where we're at for the state levels state phase is phase 4 we have kind of these six degrees inside of phase four that range from low minimal so you would be in that those transmission levels everything would be minimal and the numbers inside of those things would be

060pretty low the next one would be still being minimal but the numbers would be trending towards moderate right then low moderate we're just into moderate to high moderate the numbers are trending towards substantial to low substantial we just got into it to high substantial we're very clearly in the substantial level to then falling out of phase four and going into phase three phase three would be like what we were in spring right we'd be stay at home moving all the way across the continuum phase five would be everybody's back to school every day 100 of students are in attendance although it might still be with some kind of safety protocols in place as we look at this our dividing line on this really falls between low moderate and high moderate as we are in the

061kind of the low to mid moderate we can start bringing students back in an a b schedule as long as we limit how many times they mix throughout the day so that means limiting the number of passing periods which means limiting the number of classes that occur on any school day our hybrid schedule we built this summer had four mixes throughout the day the health department would like to see us limit those and you can see here like at low minimal we could do the four mixes but as we move to high minimal they'd like for us to drop those number of mixes and maybe three or less as we're in moderate where we're at now they'd like to see a single passing period if we could do that on a daily basis what starts

062to happen as we build these schedules is the schedules that were hybrids start to look more like the fully remote schedules right where you have big blocks of time where you have one class transition during the school day um students would come in for half a day but only go to two class periods not not four right so it starts to this is why it's starting to get helpful is because the guidance is starting to point us in the directional in the direction of instructional outcomes of planned design then what we're also trying to we're going to have to work on that we're going to have to work on a plan where the all of our students can come back on a regular basis as long as we're in modern but then we also want

063to work on programming that for our most at-risk students that even if we're in substantial that we're still able to provide students at risk resources they need on a daily basis right up until we move into phase three should that happen so we're going to try to cover the whole continuum from phase three to phase five with programming uh it looks very different depending on what the community spread is and where we're at so the group as we move more towards substantial the number of students and the size of the groups and the amount of mixing reduces as the transmission levels become more substantial so what's the dominating standard between low moderate it's or any of the other ones yeah that's what i was wondering is it how are you how are you deciding where

064you're at exactly so that's a great question and what it comes down to is our own school community and what those metrics look like for us so that's kind of up to to our administrative team in conversations with the local health department to determine where we're at right now and a plan that will work in it what we're trying to do is develop a plan that will work nearly through deep into high moderate right that until it looks like we're flipping close to flipping over to substantial that it will continue to work we want them the least flip-flopping like our students talked about earlier as possible so we wanted to develop a plan that it looks like nearly all the way through moderate and all the way through definitely all the way through minimal that

065we'll be able to have students here on a regular basis all students that wish to return returning um that's the goal of what we're trying to build right now but what switches that it's us talking to the health department about here's what the metrics look like here's what it looks like in downers grove and woodridge and our greater community here's been our response to it here's been the number of cases that we've seen show up within our own schools because that'll measure how well is our own community following the safety measures and protocols it's a very school-by-school case-by-case basis as to where that dividing line is and when you move from one to the other do you have data that looks at specifically our community versus the county as a whole yes yeah we can

066pull off of their dashboards our zip codes and see what our data looks like all right yeah i get it [Music] are there any other high schools that are currently in dupage county no other high school is open right now we're all wrestling with the same stuff and i'll talk about i'm getting to where that works all right so here's a this is a good one for you to just spend some time digesting and if you have questions uh you know i can definitely address them next week when we're hopefully talking about how future programming fits inside of this continuum so here i've just identified a few of the major challenges these are the top most difficult challenges there's many more underneath this but first of all is just you know developing programs for our

067students most at risk we want our most at risk students to be able to comment anywhere in that continuum from phase four on up right so we're working on that we're trying to bring [Music] students that fit that criteria back as soon as possible uh revising a schedule for all in-person learners that fits within that moderate and minimal range to do that work we're eyeing an october return and i'll explain a little bit more about that in a second we have some health guidance that has changed drastically especially related to the fitting of n95 masks for nurses and custodians so each one of those folks that might come in contact directly with cov related symptoms or have to clean up after that all need to meet with a medical professional and have them asks fitted

068and getting the appropriate masks that fit the person a and can be fitted appropriately b has been a challenge as you can imagine the availability of medical medical grade and 95 masks is you know it's not like you just walk into walgreens and pick one up so that has been a challenge to get all the other ppe we have had very little challenge getting but our first round of n95 masks that were on the idph list originally were then removed from the idph list so then we had to go acquire a separate round of masks which we did but they didn't fit half of our people so then we had to run order another round and every time those come in you have to schedule an appointment good sam has been amazing to work with

069with us on this they've been great partners but you imagine they're seeing a lot of people as well not just us so we have to get those folks scheduled get them in get it fitted make sure that they know what they're doing to be healthy and safe with those so that has been has slowed us down and getting some of our at-risk groups back because we can't bring anybody back until we have nurses to take care of people that might be sick and custodians that could clean a space where somebody could have had covet haven't you thought about certifying anybody yeah we've looked at it but right now we've just been focused on i'm just getting them fitted um transportation is hugely complex especially because we share transportation services with district 68 and 58 so

070any plan that we're talking about for returning all of our students for in-person learning also needs to fit inside of the district 58 and 68 plans that are being developed and they're developing their plans under the same changing guidance that we're developing our plans so now you have a three-way fit that have to work together as well so this is you know it's just the complexity of the problem that makes this go slower and it isn't just like we could start tomorrow um the changing exclusionary guidance and decisions and the availability of students and staff have that those changes have actually made this better or more likely that we're going to return in the in the loosening of those restrictions in the last week here however whatever plan that we build that fits in moderate

071and minimal we still need to make sure that it fits within the needs of all of our families so before we just bring everybody back we need to know who's coming back and how many families wish to return with school looking this way rather than what we talked about in the summer so just as in the summer we put out here's our plan here's how the hybrid schedule is going to work here's what it's going to look like for your kid do you want to come back to school with school looking this way we need to do the same provide that same opportunity to our families and whatever we build here so we need enough time to communicate whatever this new schedule is and what it looks like to allow families to understand that to

072tell us if they're coming back some families might look at this and say yeah you know i was concerned this summer but i'm in now because i'm i'm much more comfortable with this new plan than i was with the old plan other families might look at this and say whoa wait wait a second this summer i didn't know about this minimal moderate substantial stuff and now that we're in moderate and trending the wrong way i don't want to send my kid to school right so we built a lot of classroom assignments sections all of those things based on the number of students that would be in each classroom right because if we had a if we had a small class but more students returning in that small class and they were scheduled in a small

073classroom because it was a small class but now we can't do social distancing in there because more kids are going to return we had to move them to a larger class and us another class into that smaller class so we have to get all of that survey data back from our family so we can reschedule parts of the building and make sure social distancing can be maintained when students are back we also need to survey we sent out a survey to all of our families about transportation to know if students are coming and if they're riding the bus and if we have bus routes that have more than 11 students on them then we need to build seating charts for each of those buses that takes time as well over the next couple of weeks

074to build the seating charts communicate them to everybody make sure there are bus monitors that we have bus monitors for every bus that have been trained on how the seating charts work and everything else so there's a lot of pieces that go into this over the next few weeks this is why you're hearing october i know it sounds like we should be able to develop a schedule in the next couple of days and then next week have everybody back to school and as much as i would love to be able to say that we could do that it is just not possible to do that even if this is all that we had to do right and weren't just also trying to run teaching and learning at the same time we're doing all of this

075and we'll see what the cdc guidance says tomorrow i mean the change in guidance could cause us to have to go back rethink something and move it forward so one thing that happened at the beginning of the year we were when we were going to go hybrid was to start remotes because we had a staffing issue and then we were going to then go hybrid after that and i'm not hearing him making much of an issue of that right now is a major challenge yeah we the the challenge with staff at the beginning of the year was the accommodations process if you remember we had over 110 staff members that we had needed to work through those accommodation steps for so it was uh it wasn't staff didn't want to return it's we just had

076to work through that process and understanding 110 staff members individual situations and determining if we could meet that accommodation or not or if it was legitimate or not that just took us into the start of the school year we have resolved all of those we're prepared for this um and actually any schedule that we build with less class periods shifting in a day makes covering subs and those that much easier right so in some ways those changes make the staff issues simpler because it's just not as many moving parts once everybody's here it's important for people to hear that yeah i've already heard from some people is it is there's still a staffing problem no that's um and so and then the other piece of it on the transportation i mean i'm seeing signs up

077for first student hiring bus drivers i mean i mean isn't that also a possible challenge not not only the coordination with our our partner districts but just the availability of bus yeah we've been working very closely with first student and we'll be we believe that we'll have enough uh actual buses and and drivers uh the challenge is as you'll see in one of the next slides all the high schools in dupage county are on the same timeline right so we're all going to be looking to return at the same time uh or within weeks of one another so we we count on it we have a good relationship with first student and the fact that we do have this cooperative between the three schools although it does create complexities it does make us more of

078a heavy hitter in the bus market just because of the number of buses and and in the fleet that we need to maintain between three school districts so that does provide us a good leverage point to get our our buses up and running so hank and this is probably maybe you're going to get into this either later or maybe next week and you can schedule my biggest concern about any new schedule you know we have our where our schedule used to be we had the hybrid schedule we have the remote schedule so my biggest concern is if you look now if you go back a year ago when we're full time in school kids are doing four periods four period four days a week they're doing 50 minutes in a period so 200 minutes simple

079math now they're doing that same thing they're doing 80 minute classes twice a week so they're already losing 40 minutes of instruction time a week so i'm concerned about when we talk about limiting to one passing period to passing periods and only being at one or two classes i'm worried about impacting the amount of class time or face time with that teacher no matter if it's in person or or remote so that's a concern they didn't see up here like i said i'm sure that's more what we'll get into next week but it's a great point dan to just highlight and is a good uh good predictor of some of the things we'll talk about next week uh this year there was there's two about 240 minutes in a student schedule last year last year

080remember mondays are shortened because of the late start this year we have asked our teachers to plan for 240 minutes of student activity throughout the week so between the class periods on the 280 minutes plus the 25 minute period on monday and then any other work you're going to assign outside of that class meeting period should add up to that 240 minutes and as mike as you said teachers are a couple weeks into this and figuring out how to adjust and hit that i'm sure some are under that some are over that hopefully the difference of having 240 with and i don't know the numbers with 200 of it being either in person or on or you know zoom versus you know 150 so i i said that that's just going to be a big

081consideration in my mind a big concern as we look at any future schedules they actually mop up time with that teacher either remotely or in person yeah one of the things that definitely happens right now in fully remote is the most dedicated minutes that students are going to get as long as kovid's around right because the teacher for that black at time can have all of their students together in there once we move start moving to hybrid models you start doing everything's trade-offs right so the trade-off to get students back in person is inefficiencies in the schedule right they can't just wake up walk up to the computer and get to work they've got to get to school there's got to be passing periods we can only take up to half the students at a

082time you know and it's going to in some ways reduce the minutes it will reduce the efficiency of those minutes in comparison to they are how they are now right a teacher can really there's not many variables to there's no competing uh factors against them outside of the technology and you know the ability for students to pay attention for during a remote session right there's very few competing factors teachers can plan very clearly for what that environment is going to be assuming that everything works correctly right once we start moving to hybrid models teachers have to start planning for more types of learning activities right they're going to have to plan for students that are in person and students that are remote how those groups interact with one another how those transitions work they have

083to plan for in-person uh classroom management again and how does in-person classroom management work with masks on and with social distancing and all those things that we know eventually when students come back but you can imagine if right now and this is one of the concerns on our educational leadership team if right now the efficacy of instruction is at an increasing curve let's just assume it is because kids are getting used to it teachers are getting used to it everybody's used to the tools kids are planning they know their schedule all of those things are getting predictable and it's the maximum number of minutes that we can give everybody equally in that time as soon as we put a new schedule in place there will be a dip in that because everybody's got to plan

084differently teach differently it's everything it's the start of the school year all over again plus you need to build in opportunities for kids to get to know one another in person and to know each other's names and to know what that person looks like with a mask on and there is a huge of the school year there's going to be a tr there are trade-offs instructionally for the benefits of bringing students in for in-person learning and that's what we're trying to do is to make sure that the trade-offs are of value are worth it to make this all work worthwhile and that families know those trade-offs before they select what model do i want my child to be learning it so you know this is part of the stuff that takes time and working through

085and thoughtfulness especially because the rules of the game were kind of just established 10 days ago i can i just say too it's i think it's a bit of a trap if we get too caught up into trying to measure what we're doing based on the minutes a minute is not a minute is not a minute and in the end what we're really looking for are results right so the the question is ultimately um are we getting through the curriculum um are the students learning and you know what's what's the result of all of that and that's i think if we stay focused on that and and using the tools that we have that's that's where we need to be ultimately maybe we're not maybe we do need more minutes than what's being delivered right

086now we don't know yeah i mean because you can get through a schedule by just right i mean if there's in person there's asynchronous and there's synchronous learning and all three of them have positives and negatives and trade-offs and it's what mix of those is the best mix for our students moving forward and hopefully hopefully picking a model that's going to work and be there for more than a week people something like that yeah i've read some of you know some of the emails and and and you know people's comments about about things as well and it's it's i just think it's um i don't think that we we need to be looking at this from the standpoint of hey uh you know it's 240 minutes here it's 220 minutes this way or whatever and

087somehow there's something less happening no it's because we're really focused on quality it's what are you offering in each of those right in person it has a set of variables and experiences that we can't offer in any other way remote also has some of those you heard some of those advantages from our students tonight that we can't offer in person right um but it's about the balance of what goals are we trying to achieve instructionally within that and i will also point out like to bolster your minutes claim that you just made there's absolutely no educational research that correlates number of minutes to educational attainment right it's what happens inside of that time and the effectiveness of the teacher inside of that time is far more important but that's the trade-off right the more the

088teachers are having to plan for something new and adjust and adapt and i had this planned and now i have to do this that lowers the effectiveness of any minutes that we have within that class period so giving teachers time to plan to put together good experiences for kids to make sure that the time that they have with them is optimized to the the utmost of their ability regardless of the learning mode or model that is taking place is the most important factor which is another reason to go back to what you were saying nancy turning on a dime to go into one of these models that they've never taught in before is not a smart move to make we need to have time here for planning professional development to make sure that our teachers

089have time to do their work right because our teachers are professional they're going to research how other schools are doing this how it's working across the country and our teachers are going to put together good experiences for their kids but there's going to be a learning curve for any new model we introduced just like there was for remote learning at the beginning all right so programs for students that are most at risk t99 we're bringing them back tomorrow okay so remember that's its own building it's it's own students with their own unique set of uh abilities and and challenges so uh that's great we've worked through that uh we'll start bringing them back on an ab schedule each day uh tomorrow about just about who are these uh remind me about how many students do

090we have about how many teachers how many people are in that building i don't know in the new schedule how it's exactly working but it's less than 30 less than 30 yeah yeah on a daily basis i'm not sure i can't give you an example but generally but yeah um we're working as i mentioned earlier we're working with students that have internet challenges at home to try to get them long-term solutions but students that are critically challenged in that we're not able to close the gap if they're not able to connect to remote learning it's critical that we get them to a place where they can so we've identified a very small number of students at north a little bit larger number of students at south that we're going to start looking at just having

091them work from school remotely just knowing that we have internet we have power we have good environments where they could work we'll have an adult supervise that group of students while they just do the remote learning from here once again some approximation of the actual numbers i mean what's what small group in the context of 5000 students uh gina what numbers are we looking at for okay that's more than i would that's more than what i was so we're in the process of reaching out to all those families determine if it's appropriate for them to come in then we have to arrange for a location transportation all of those things to make sure that it it works and that they're being taken care of and we also have some folks with home challenges as well

092where they don't have stable housing or or there's some concerns about uh their wilderness or safety at home and we'll look at bringing some of those students in as well and they'll come in every day they won't be on anything yeah we're working on how that schedule will work for them uh english learners gina has been working on that all summer we're getting closer to those groups being able to come in and i say those groups because within the english learners there's multiple levels of english acquisition that we're responding to and then inside of special education we have the life skills group we have the multi-needs group we have other specific cohorts that we're looking to try to bring back in as well so the idea with all of these groups for students most at

093risk is to slowly just kind of build this and bring in more and more students and keep them sustainable and keep the programs we're trying to build those programs in a way that they're sustainable even if we move deeply into the substantial area so we're trying to keep the number of students that they come in contact with on a daily basis very small so that they could keep operating here even if transmission levels continue to grow this was the group that i was most when i was talking about remote for most this is that group so it's good to see that we're getting taken care all right so other neighboring districts you know i i meet with the other uh do do all dupage superintendents meet twice a week we meet on mondays and fridays

094to discuss how things are going to also meet with the dupage county health department understand what transmissions levels look like in the county and how to respond to those and then i meet with the district 99 partner superintendents once a week as well to discuss how programming is going in all of our partner districts we all continue to be very frustrated i imagine many of our families listen to what i'm talking about right now that want their kids back at school many of our students that want to be back at school tomorrow are frustrated and so am i so is our administrative team as i have continued to say if we would have had the guidance that we have now in june or july our kids would be back right now i am confident that

095we would have been able to build a safe program that worked in moderate or minimal especially given the time and space of the summer to do that however we are where we are now and you know being frustrated isn't going to help us fix it um so we're working closely to it yeah we we're sure that we don't have all of the best ideas in the county so we're working closely with other school districts to see what's working for them and how they're approaching it most of the other large public high schools and that's who we need to compare ourselves to that's right there's other large public high schools they're facing the same challenges and school sizes and uh and restrictions that we are are on similar time frames they're looking at either this week

096or next week starting to return their most at-risk students in a variety of different programs and then are looking at somewhere in october for a return for the sake of the the audience can you maybe further explain how it is that i mean the private schools are able to start but we we've already we already understand why you know we need to follow executive orders we need to follow the guidelines yeah because we are a public high school we clearly fall under the executive orders and the direction of illinois state board of education in the illinois department of public health right where a private school has more liberties that they can take within those guidelines it's essentially uh for lack of a better description a group of people that have a private membership to something

097and then they can decide amongst themselves to stomach they can limit their they you know they can ask their families to you know sign something that says they're not going to sue them or something i don't i don't know but there's there's more than more control over that they definitely have more control over that and they tend to be smaller settings right there's smaller settings so they they a lot of times have like a grade level right you know a single grade level at each you know so you know you're not talking about large even the larger high schools are still very small in comparison to what we're talking about here i mean when i see a lot of community members that are frustrated sending me school districts that are open many of those school

098districts have less students than one class in one of our high schools yes if you have 500 to 600 kids you likely can be open right now especially at the elementary level sure you're not seeing large high schools like us that are in close proximity to chicago or that have a train line running through us that are taking people back and forth to chicago every day that are open it's just it's not you don't see that in the suburbs yet right it's just and we're all in similar spots stuff further west you're starting to see like lincoln way open up you're starting to see some of the smaller high schools that are able to work in this and develop programming but districts our size with as many students and staff and moving pieces that we

099have and also what that also offers that is a great advantage to our community is a great wealth in curricular choice for students if we only offered like english one two three and four and we had science one two three and four and social science one two three and four it'd be real easy to build a schedule and to do things remotely and in person but we don't by the time our students are in their sophomore year they're even in their freshman year they have a couple of uh options to them but by the time they're in their sophomore and junior years and especially senior year the the degree of curricular variants that we have is so great that it makes building schedules very complex i just shared that with a constituent the other day

100uh almost exactly as you just said and and you know i think it's it's also worth noting you know so many of us went to high school so long ago me probably more than you know you guys are all young no at any rate um you know high school doesn't look today like it did for me back between 1980 and 84. you know i i there's so many more classes offered things you know so i've heard from some people going you know thinking i mean i don't think i don't know that that everybody really understands you know the you know the the la you know how the breadth of of of what we're offering here and and that is making it more difficult um for us uh in terms of accommodating uh within these plans

101but i just thought it was important because we we've uh i know you've seen the same emails you know people saying well the schools are there's schools around us that are open why can't we do it we're fairly well off here and we've got smart people why can't we do it and these are these are the reasons why and i just the benefit of those watching um want them to understand we are working hard and the last point on here is uh we want to do this right this time now that we know what we know and about the fluidity of moving between these transmission levels we don't want to end up building a plan sending it out to the community and saying oh it changed so here we go again right we would like

102to now that we have this to try to future proof our plans and try to make something so that as long as we're in moderate that we can have students coming back on a regular basis but we want to make sure it's a good experience for students you know and that that's what we're trying to do right now we're trying to build that and hopefully um i mean we're spending the majority of our days on this and i i'm hoping to bring you a a pretty good plan next monday when we meet and then have some more timelines and details approach to it but we have a lot of chicken egg problems right now it's like we need to have transportation to bring students to school but we can't figure out transportation until we have

103a schedule yeah but i can't guarantee you a schedule until i know transportation works right so you move a little bit in one way and you say oh this is what i'm thinking and then you kind of throw it against the transportation wall and you're like oh wait that's not going to work so then you back up and now you got to move a little bit forward while the same time you're doing things with schedules you're doing it with classrooms you're doing it with curriculum you're doing it within the days of the week and how days off are falling and everything else so you move forward a little bit and you run into a roadblock and then you have to back off a little bit and push through it's a huge logic puzzle to work

104through so that's why it goes slower than we would like well the other thing is if if we aren't really ultra careful when we actually make a situation where we increase transmissibility that put this way back to square one and i don't think this would would people understand if you really want to get out of this yeah you gotta adhere to the rules you gotta wear your mess you gotta stay six feet away you gotta not be in congregate settings so we're going into whether where everybody's going to be inside transmissibility you know the numbers are going to rise so it's not it's it's not a oops made a mistake kind of thing right we will go immediately back well in the dupage county health department along with us we'll be looking at our own

105metrics within our own school walls and if we build a plan that helps increase the rate of spread in our own community we're going to be told by the health professionals you need to change something you know and i'd rather not have to keep doing this i'd rather build a plan that works that doesn't uh have community spread any greater than it is in the local community and we have a plan and we move forward for the rest of the year and we get off of this ride you know it would be interesting to know and it doesn't have to be for next week but at some point how are we going to track this we do we we have attendance codes and metrics and we have a report that we provide to the new

106page that's all set up yeah right yeah and that includes close contacts yeah there's a whole process for contact tracing and we work with the dupage county health department we have letters we have a whole process that's all been worked on over the last month i i have a little concern in terms of the you know us what you're going to bring to us in terms of us maybe bringing the students back um i would hate for us to be in in your looking at your continuum between phase three and phase five and if we're at the load of moderate uh band um but some of the metrics have us right at the edge of that and we've been trending up so i don't know what the break point is say for instance uh cases

107for that's where it becomes less cut and dry so far as what the metrics are saying and more talking with the health officials about our specific community our school that's why getting students back actually helps us with our metrics because if we get students back and they're following the guidelines and our rate of community spread while they're here at school is lower than the greater community we could demonstrate that kids are actually safer when they're here at school than when they're not right but until we are able to cross that threshold and demonstrate that we're we're stuck in this i don't think you're ever going to be able to demonstrate that because you're never going to be able to separate out if our community spread increases we can't tell this because kids came here or

108somebody came in from chicago or but we will know if it's greater than what the community is within our own walls we might not be able to demonstrate that it's less but we could definitely demonstrate that it's spreading faster within the same for the page yeah absolutely especially if we look at district 99 in comparison to the county numbers yeah [Music] and we've already talked through with the dupage county health department how some of those conversations will work they've made it very clear that it will be a collaborative conversation to determine what we should do with that that time so you know it'll be just like the conversations we're having now as to what we should do hey hank is the state or dupage county health department talked about uh recurring testing of students and

109like we're doing in most of our universities uh that's that conversation starting at the test level about some of the saliva tests and those kinds of things and the feasibility of widespread testing one of the i think i shared with the board last month one of the things that the dupage county health department is says one of our greatest limiting factors is is the lack of widespread testing that that would give the health professionals the data they need to know are these measures effective are we doing what we're supposed to do are we you know is this really somebody that has coveted and we need to respond and lock things down for their cohort of people or not um that if we had more rapid widespread testing they would be much more comfortable with moving

110us in the direction more towards minimal even if the metrics are are bad but you know it's it's the data they're doing it at our public universities now yeah so the funding is coming from somewhere for that well the funding like at u of i is coming from that is their own r d to be able to put a product to market both my daughter's colleges are are doing it too now i mean they tested coming in and now three and four weeks later they're they're testing all the kids again the other thing that universities have are like student health centers and you know they have people there on staff at a a level of medical expertise that a public high school doesn't have sure yeah but you said that what i heard you say

111to dan was that they're starting that they're working on that we're starting to have discussions about what that we're at the earliest level of discussions of what that would look like but it's something we're advocating for in dupage county with state officials to try to get more widespread testing at the student and staff level within high schools so we're asking for it we're asking for a pathway to that we're not but so far we are we aren't getting any um any sort of anything it's just believable that's coming or there's no way all right well remember testing is only a snapshot in time sure even just negative tomorrow today but more information is better than less no i don't disagree with you i'm as many tools as we can we can have uh to monitor

112and control the better so it's a shame we don't have this you know and the other before we move on here too um you mentioned uh about you know on this uh collaborating with our other districts and what's working for them what's their what's not in dupage county but aren't there aren't there examples uh elsewhere in the country where schools have have instituted some sort of hybrid type schedule already and you know are we seeing any data from from their experiences it's really challenging for yes we are we're looking at the stories and especially what is working instructionally in those settings uh is good to know but they're it's very rarely it's apple to apple when you go even outside of county lines let alone state lines you know the rules are different the expectations

113are different the communities are different so it it's really hard to say oh what you're doing is working let's just take that because they're not building with the same set of lego pieces that wasn't suggesting that at all but just you know to be able to know what is working no that applies or not actually a lot of the early conversations are about the frustrations that districts have because kids don't have access to technology resources so many of these district stories that are out there about districts that are trying to catch up to where we are now you know they're learning from us um you know so but the other ones that have kids going back or going back in wholesale are under a much different set of health guidelines and i mean those are

114things you could argue all day about but are are not within our purview to decide for all of the reasons i mentioned at the top all right so a couple of things in new schedule considerations just to review the hybrid schedule that we presented this summer so this is the baseline that we're starting from like we built a schedule this summer that works but it works only in minimal because what we built to was to follow the safety guidelines the six feet of social distancing that was the biggest thing that we were building around we had the uh we wanted every student to see every teacher every week but to do that you need to bring students back and they go through a four period rotation once and then a four period rotation the next

115time that doesn't work in moderate because you have too much mixing of students uh and then one of the things that we had was that we wanted to separate the time that in person was learning in person you know the in person was happening separate from remote because of the challenges for a teacher to manage all of the classroom environment of in person at the same time you're managing the outside and that was one of the key things that we built was that these were two distinct cohorts that were working in time and space and some of our same things exist as we try to build one for minimal and moderate safety guidelines six feet of social distancing now we add the limiting mixing of groups which drastically changes our schedule we still want the

116opportunity for every student to see every teacher regularly but it it's probably over a two week period not a one week period because of the limiting of the mixing of groups we still are working through the concept of in-person learning scheduled from separate from remote learning and determining whether or not we need to build a systematic schedule that puts those in separate buckets so that a teacher always has one group separated from the other or are we going to build a model that the teacher manages that time and space where they would be responsible for both groups and determining when they would learn at the same time and when they would work at separate times but we're working through with our instructional leaders of how that works this is the feedback that we're hearing from

117other school districts around the country is that that's really hard to do effectively really multitasking with two groups of students is a challenge so if we do that it's something we're going to have to talk about very carefully and provide a lot of examples for our staff as to how to do that effectively one of the other things one of the big key feedbacks that we did here between our hybrid schedule this summer and the remote schedule was how different they are from one another and that it's a complex change between one and the other right because we did build them from the ground up one to be totally developed to meet the needs of in-person learning one to meet the needs of remote they look very different but what we've heard from students and

118staff is can we get something that's more alike than different so it's easier to transition between the two because we know we're going to have to do that throughout the year so that's a variable we're introducing into this is to there might be some differences but to keep them closer than the original hybrid and remote schedule models looked so that's that's kind of what we're building from as we work right now oh i didn't change slides for you today there's those things i just said again all right we have some other considerations to solve for that sit on the calendar so as we look at our possible return dates in october october is a weird month at the beginning in the fact that the first week of october is a full week but then the

119next week of october we have a remote learning planning day that's the offset of the non-attendance day that is traditionally columbus day that occurs on monday then wednesday is sat testing for seniors we needed to find somewhere to put parent-teacher conferences so we're going to schedule them for that same week because that week is all messed up anyway but when we talk you heard from the kids today when they come back they want to come back to something consistent they don't want to come back and then go to something weird and then come back to something again right so the question is do we come back you know around october 5th that's a date many dupage schools are talking about and schools are debating the same thing we are do we come back on october

1205th have a week of some kind of a hybrid model then we have a week of it's all messed up and then go back to the hybrid model or do we just work plan get every detail work through work with our teachers to get everything in place and come back on the week of the 19th after the the messed up week with testing and everything else there's pros and cons with both right if you come back for the week before you can come back you could do a run we can learn from it you can adjust during the week that's crazy and it's going to be remote and then come back to improved the week after or do we just say you know what let's not bounce kids and teachers between two different things and

121let's just target the 19. that's a big conversation that we're going to have over the next week here right is determining what is that best date come back we know some people want to come back as soon as possible and i get that i do too but i also want to make sure that it works and it's within reason there's not these huge dips in the experience for our kids as a result of it no don't don't remember back when we were talking about the hybrid schedule this summer and um the notion that hey uh we'd like to get the kids back as soon as possible because we're thinking things are going to get worse as time goes on not get better so wouldn't that be consideration it is yeah yeah um if the numbers

122continue to look worse this might not even be a conversation for a while right um so that is another major pressure on here is that get kids back sooner than later because the numbers could go the wrong direction right you know we could also just be in a dip here because the labor day holiday and numbers could improve after this dip i i don't know the question is do they dip so far that we're now in substantial and have to work our way back out of it i'm just throwing in another consideration no it's it's all on the pro con list right now as we work through all of it so so that would leave about if you're talking the 19th that's what eight weeks after school yeah it's about the midpoint of the semester

123you know which okay that's not a bad time to transition to something i'm just trying to bring it up in my head yeah you know and then if we get if we end up in terrible date around that time i i don't know what happens from there you know off topic but have we decided anything or is there finals gonna look different for the semester yeah finals will definitely not look like they did in the past there's just no way for that to occur when do you think we give some indication of what that's going to look like what finals will look like yeah other than i mean i don't because that leaves everybody wondering okay it doesn't look anything like it he has in the past well in the spring they didn't either i

124mean it's totally different instruction standards i mean they just they can't look like they did in the past but i i haven't had the conversation with our teams yet about you know what they're talking about doing yet at the end of the year or the end of the semester and then we're looking we're working on the s.a.t um for the 14th yep you know waited a way to do that correct as safe as possible on that day the only students we would be able to have in the building are seniors you know so that would be a testing day for seniors okay all right and the last thing we're also working through is the teacher appraisal process and how that works because our old teacher evaluation system is all built around seeing teachers teach for

125a whole class period you know and those kinds of things and some informal drop-ins so you know ed and janice are getting into and their our administrators are dropping in and are being invited into remote classrooms right now but how this works especially for our non-tenured teachers we're working through and we have a meeting scheduled i think next week with our appraisal committee to work on this all right i know we've taken a lot of questions so far are there any left out there oh we weren't supposed to ask you something [Laughter] no i got them all out of the way in advance yeah anything else um we we heard a little from the students in terms of the kind of how's it going sort of question and response i'd um curious to hear something

126similar from the teaching staff yeah that's all coming in that survey information that's going on over the next couple of weeks so surveys will go to families to students and to staff to help us get feedback on how the experience is going and those surveys are being built by that feedback committee certainly we have some something ongoing yeah those will go out on a regular basis throughout the rest of the year okay but we we have meetings you know ed and janice move with their leadership team very frequently like weekly or or sometimes even more often and that's through the department chairs that's how we are getting feedback right now uh through that leadership structure but we're getting ready to have those surveys that go out so everybody can offer us their direct feedback so

127right now though certainly we must be receiving emails from parents and students about issues that are going on in their classrooms and absolutely so how was how was um was all that when we get the when we get information how is that being disseminated to the teachers well most we always encourage people to reach out to the teacher directly i mean it's the same thing that would have happened if people are in person right so if somebody reaches out to me i usually direct them back to their teacher or if they're not comfortable talking to the teacher then the department chair if that goes nowhere then the building level administrator and we work through the chain of command just like if it was in person so is there a general sense that what we're dealing

128with right now isn't much more different than we in a typical year or do we have any sense no it's very different but [Music] i don't it's hard to tell mike as to whether it's more or less it's just different right the types of issues are different the type of discipline issues are different attendance is all different parent concerns you know parents a lot of times are working at the table right next to their kids yeah stuff that they're hearing and providing feedback on is very different than a school year when you know a student comes home with this is what happened in class now it's this is what i heard in class so i just you know so what i'm hearing right now we're already so we are now this is are we four

129weeks in how many weeks are we now of the remote learning yeah but how many weeks have we been doing the remote schedule right what was that chance i don't know it feels like 40 years right now mike so and what i'm hearing is getting surveys and i just it seems if i'm just concerned that getting almost two months in before we're yeah but information i mean if you would have asked two weeks ago nobody had any routine established or anything else at that that time i mean you you got to give it time to breathe and to get into place and for people to get into a groove before you can ask them how how is it going you know i think we're getting to that point where it is time to do it

130plus we needed time with the feedback committee to do the work to build the surveys to find the right company to do it to to work through all of how the analytics are gonna work and the feedback will go so um you know in a regular year yeah and i i am i am sure that teachers are getting feedback from students and that they're hearing from students because that's you know that's what we're encouraging everybody to do that's the best way that a teacher on the ground can learn as to what's going on right now is to seek that feedback well my you know my own personal experience so far you know i have my daughter and and seems to be going quite well um but i have no idea of how representative that is

131if of everyone else's experience and it just you know i think most people are most people are giving us time and we appreciate that people are being patient with what's going on students are your patients out of our students today parents are as well knowing this is all new to everybody and and that we're going to work through it but people also just like they always are if we have something that majorly concerns a parent they're not afraid to reach out it's we're already four weeks in and and i don't want to wait another month before i'm i'm hearing hearing back from well mike i would assume that if it was horrible that we as an administration use the board would be hearing about it because our community has not been bashful so that's been

132my soul sort of i mean uh yes i they i certainly felt like with the volume of emails we were getting prior to our start of the school year that uh there's a lot of people that are not afraid to speak their mind well by no means like i said i don't think we have a perfect yet i think that people are being patient and you heard the kids teachers are improving their experience is getting better and i think as long as people see it continue to improve people's patients will remain but if they see it stagnate or go backwards people aren't going to be happy with what they're getting and um and we're we're providing lots of support for our teaching staff as well i i assume there's a lot of yeah there's a

133lot of time built in for professional development and for planning and team collaboration which there has to be because every teacher is a first year teacher all over again so um to develop and to deliver quality instruction our teachers need time to work with that especially across their teams right so that our kids are getting similar experiences within the same course the quicker we can gather information the better we're on i i think i have a question yeah um rod's team how are they handling because that was a little embarrassing to hear that a kid can't get his chromebook exchanged out and he has to listen to his phone he's got the computer well if it was one day okay but if this has been going on for a week who does he contact do

134the teachers know to direct those students and why hasn't that fixed because that's not right with as many chromebooks as we have bought over the years he should be able to get replaced or swapped out yeah i'm not sure about his particular timeline but we do have a help desk that's staffed our staff has worked you know all throughout the week and over the weekends to make sure i'm not sure about his particular issue but it sounds like he got a bum piece of equipment and then he ended up drawing a bad card and got it for a week you know well but i don't know rick how soon he reached back out to ask or i don't know his particular story but if somebody shows up with a bad chromebook at school we give

135him a brand new one right there on the spot so i gotta i gotta i hate to pile on the rick's situation here but i can tell you that in that my daughter's had problems with her chromebook well individual issues are not indicative of a widespread issue i'm not hearing most kids aren't going to raise their hand if they have an issue they're going to try to work through it unless it actually leaks out to the teacher and the teacher may say hey i didn't realize you're having this problem and then forward it on we have most kids aren't going to be calling the switchboard to school saying hey i need there's a email address that we've told them all that's the help desk we every teacher knows how uh to get a student help

136every counselor knows how to so we have all of the processes in place a kid just needs or a parent just needs to let us know when we work through that and i have not heard other than the zoom issues that came up that were either nationwide or the ones related to malfunctioning hot spots that we couldn't quickly resolve i have not heard of widespread concerns about tech issues across the district there's always going to be look it's tech right right you're always saying there's got to be an avenue where they can advocate there is there's they're not going to do it on their own there are many ways in which they can do that we continue to publicize that to all of our students i'd like to know how long he's been working up

137like that i don't know about his individual issue right yeah but i'm not hearing about no i would like to know i'm not hearing about why there was a week it's been too long yeah like i said i i can't speak to his specific situation one one of the questions i have coming up and again that it doesn't have to be for next week but at some point i'd like to unders i'd like to hear more about how there's a lot of concerns about how we're going to do commercial support of our students counseling social workers etc remotely and i would um both promote it with hybrid it would be nice at some point soon just have an update about what's going on in there i would appreciate that no i'm sorry nancy i didn't

138quite social emotional supports for our students just to provide an update on that sorry i moved this so i could yeah absolutely thank you no we're very active in in those areas we can definitely provide an update anything else i know this has been a tremendous amount of work and thank you all this is not easy it is a moving target um i am glad uh i am proud that we are taking the safe that we are doing this doing things the safest way that we can and uh it's not easy and i do appreciate everybody's um patients both in administration and staff and students and in the community because it has been a hard thing i appreciate all the work that everybody has done because this has just been a tremendous lift so thank

139you all for everything you do every day all right uh next item to just quickly go through the board has been provided uh these materials but it just go through quickly here any master facility plan updates we're wrapping up phase b from the summer you're now sitting in the south steam edition if you go out front you'll see the new denim drive that's going in place i think those pavers go in this week right yeah so this is wrapping up um bleachers and squad rooms here at south are almost done uh dan and i kind of got a little peek of it last week but i didn't have the keys to get in so what is it the bottom left what is that that is the squadron uh underneath the bleachers so that's the space

140that's enclosed and heated that students can go the teams can go into yeah and if they're security's pretty good we couldn't get in south auditorium you can't drive the bit by the building without missing that a lot of work underway there here's a few pictures of the structure going up with the precast concrete what's the finish going to be on the outside of that i can't remember off the top of my head mike i know we've talked about it before but right now my brain isn't holding that right now we probably made room for some alternative schedule i'll have to go back and look so is that the fly that's the fly tower the biggest part of it is the fly tower yeah yeah and then in front of it is the small theater to

141the left of the image in front of the fly tower then the scene shop and the dressing rooms and then all the way over to the right is the theater classroom the new theater classroom the south florida commons is starting to take place including the grand staircase has gone in but a lot of the steel is in the structural steel is in place and if you get a chance to walk it now you'll get an idea of the size and scope of that space it's enormous here's a couple more pictures of the commons the one in the top left hand corner is that's grand staircase going up across all three levels with study lots on it then over at north high the gym and the alley are almost entirely completed at this point the serving

142area and kitchen their squad rooms are starting to get buttoned up and insulated and in place they're almost caught up the south i hear after that initial huge setback because of the foundations underneath it they've been trailing south high since the start north library and commons the library is beautiful these i added last minute so the board hasn't seen this because today they started bringing in the structural steel for the roof yeah for the roof that goes over it so i think that's today the next three days right that they're doing doing that so the crane over there is pretty cool we had a lot of neighbors out there watching the big chunks fly over the roof today so in the next couple of weeks that'll get sealed up and be ready to be worked

143on throughout the winter interesting structure the steam edition if you drive by that southeast corner the outside is starting to look complete the inside isn't there yet but it will be there in the next month here or so but it looks so much better it's gonna it's it's gonna end up being people are just gonna wonder didn't it always look like that correct the brick matches exactly yeah yeah looking good yeah it's looking really nice there instead of that wart yeah that was on the southwest all right uh i'm tours are still available uh if you haven't gone on one yet i just want to say hank gave me a tour two weeks ago it is phenomenal i suggest everybody to take them on a tour it is just worth it any chance that we

144could have one of our meetings at north um we can yeah we can talk about it okay yeah let me talk about it with the team and see we're just okay working the bugs out here right now and every time you know it's once again the the dip in the performance i think you've noticed that this meeting has been easier than the last one was yeah so i just if we were going to do if we were thinking of doing that then i would show up early like we kind of i gotta you know we did prior we had a little walk around here before meeting it'd be a lot easier for me to lead a tour on a night that's not a board all right so i'll schedule something with you then that'd be

145great you want to walk around the door yeah absolutely yeah dan went last week thank you this is an opportunity for audience members to address the board at any topic opportunity community high school district 99 for anybody who wishes to address the board is there anybody calling in wishes to address the lord we have uh we have some responses here let me make sure that i have the right date here all right uh we have a few receptions of visitor comments uh christina paschall if you're bored the difficulty our kids are facing as time goes by only gets worse please do everything you can to get back to school urgently and from gary baker encourage the board to strongly consider some form of in-person learning as the benefits of in-person learning as compared to remote

146learning exceed the perceived risks of the virus this has been demonstrated by other schools that have opened already thank you i'm beth baker as the mother of a district 99 student and someone who works with high schoolers from various schools in dupage county i would like to encourage the board to get students back to school for in-person learning given the low coveted risk for teens the extraordinary preventative measures from north and south had planned to implement the difficulties with remote learning and the increased mental health issues teens are experiencing by being out of school i think this is not the only reasonable i'm sorry i think that is not only reasonable for students to return in some measure but critical for them my son's best friend had a horrible experience with technology speaking such that

147in order to make it through most of his classes he's had to do his e-learning at our house the tech department at north after repeating contacts told the student's mother that they cannot find help for their son another student from a different district i work with has always been stable and grounded has repeatedly reached out to me for support and was called in to see her school psychologist recently she texted me that i don't even feel like i am living a life other students have expressed to me how much learning takes place online for a variety of reasons and how the 80-minute periods are extremely difficult for them to get through i know this is a tough situation for everyone especially those who have to make the important decisions and you're all in my thoughts

148and prayers pre please consider the costs of keeping students out of school when making your decisions from maria eason i want to share a comment from my daughter is a senior dgn that made was made to me via text during the school day she stated i feel like i'm not learning anything in any class this is an unsolicited comment made from a high achieving actively involved student this should be a concern for every person in the room she is a student that puts for puts for effort works independently and continually strives to do her best the model of learning is not working for her if it is not working for her i wonder who else it is not working for as a related service provider in an a bearing school district i see firsthand the

149number of students that this is also not working for i have yet to figure out how to provide classroom accommodations for many of the students in remote learning how do i provide the scaffolding prompting and support that my students need while maintaining privacy in a remote classroom it is impossible i assume that the teachers of district 99 also realize this lack of capacity to provide the needed supports to students we can all try our best but the reality is that we are unable to provide what we know is the best practice in a virtual world this is just one reason why students need to have at least some in-person instruction this does not address the growing mental health concerns the lack of successful distribution of meals to students the reduced capacity to observe suspected abuse

150neglect the reported increase in substance abuse nor the inequity in education that we are creating the students of district 99 need to see a change to the option for a hybrid model and i hope that the fear and lack of creativity does not prevent us from at least trying something that many schools districts in both illinois and other states have been able to accomplish from her maxi minstree our dgn jr is a distinct honor student so far as having rough days 80 minute periods are just too long for the students or teachers to stay focused on learning what is happening is teachers end up creating breakout sessions to allow students to discuss whereas the actual instruction is happening via homework to watch learning videos in short the school hours are in breakout sessions when students

151are attempting to have conversations but without really being taught anything this needs to change immediately if we plan to continue remote learning ideally i hope that we are working on getting back to school in earnest yes there is a pandemic raging but we cannot our life by fear at this point it seems as though we are not even making an attempt to bring students back to school in short here's the remote learning changes i am proposing no class longer than 45 minutes reduce breaks in between get through classes from eight to one pm teachers can have office hours between one and three when students can reach out to them via zoom scheduling a meeting etc and i'm really interested in seeing what attempts the district is making to get students back in school waiting for

152a vaccine is not an acceptable answer that is all of the comments that were received thank you all we uh do appreciate your comments and the emails that we receive are shared amongst the board of administration alike we're going to move into closed session is there anything else no action out of closed session no action no no we're going to move into into closed session we will not be uh taking any action when we come out but i need a motion to go into closed session or to discuss collective negotiating matters between the district and its employees other representatives or deliberations concerning saudi schedules for one or more classes of employees the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees specific individuals who serve as independent contractors in a park recreational or educational

153setting or specific volunteers of the district or legal counsel for the district including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee a specific individual who serves as an independent contractor in a park recreational or educational setting or a volunteer of the district or against legal counsel for the district to determine its solidity we have a motion so moved cherry moons thank you sheryl seconds thank you terry pavisic aye shirelle fuller aye dan nicholas aye rick mike davenport hi and nancy kapka hi we are in closed session we'll take a few minute break two minutes you