SD308 Board of Education Meeting (3/15/2021)

001unit school district 308 board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mr bauman here mrs doyle here mrs cloner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan here mrs moyer here mrs swanson here please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge 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 before we move forward with item four i'd like to take a moment to consider that we are at march third march 15 2021 and one year and two days ago our kids left school for the last regular day and in the last year we've had thousands of deaths of people that are related to those or work for us or our parents of students in

002our district and i'd like at this time in honor of those individuals and their families to take a moment of silence for those that we've lost this last year thank you item four recognitions so this evening we are going to recognize our march pride employee recognition program winners this is a board of education program that acknowledges our pride recognition winners for the month of march pride stands for proudly recognizing individuals demonstrating excellence and recognizes the efforts of teachers and staff who are engaged in exceptional work across our district this year teachers and employees were nominated for this award by the schools they work in due to covid constraints winners are being chosen using our wheel of names prize wheel we would like to thank our generous program sponsors allied first bank chick-fil-a huntington learning center

003and culvers for their continued support of this program the following teachers were selected as our march teachers of the month maureen daler from prairie point brenda ferries from boulder hill diane johnson from long beach and julia stokel from lakewood creek the following employees were our march employees of the month noelle fahey from prairie point and asu sana mejares from plank junior high these winners did receive a certificate from the board of education a congratulatory letter from dr sparlin and a gift package from our sponsors so tonight we'll congratulate them all [Applause] item five i noticed a guest in the front row we do we have mr dan desanto who is the oswego village administrator mr desanto is here to share updates with the board in regards to the village of oswego so dan thank you

004for being with us tonight thank you dr sparlin president doyle members of the board of education i appreciate you giving me the time this evening as dr sparlin mentioned my name is dan desanto i'm the village administrator at the village of oswego here tonight to give you an update on what's going on in the village and i would like to walk you through that this evening the purpose of the meeting uh first is to highlight the partnership efforts between the village and the school district we're very grateful to be to be partners uh together and we'll highlight a few of those examples of that great partnership we'll talk about community comparisons with other communities in the district and how impact fees are assessed we'll discuss development fees in oswego and we'll also review some upcoming

005developments that you should have on your radar the village and the school district have a long history of partnership since my time here in oswego i've really enjoyed getting to know dr sparlin working closely together christy tyler has been an excellent advocate for the schools and a great partner as well ursula eric who i saw actually has helped us plan our amphitheater all the staff that i've interacted with it's been just just wonderful so i wanted to give a shout out to them because it's been been excellent and the board members as well who i've had the chance to to get to know over the years as well our staffs meet regularly we share we talk about shared services we talk about development we talk about common items of interest we actually have quarterly shared

006services meetings the last two years we've been doing that as recently as last week we had one some of the successes to come out of that those discussions are an intergovernmental agreement that this board and our board have passed that allow us to share resources we've allowed the school district to store salt in the village salt domes at a savings of two hundred thousand dollars for the district the school district has shared equipment with the village we don't have a scissor lift you do you have a lot of tall ceilings so it's been a great thing to be able to borrow that uh and another great example is just this weekend in this very building a wonderful mass vaccination effort took place so just great partnership and we really appreciate that i know the village

007president dr sparlin have a monthly meeting they talk about uh upcoming issues uh annually our tiff joint review board christie represents the the school district on that board and is able to attend those uh we have impact fee updates to the finance committee i've spoken over the years twice to the finance committee as recently as a few weeks ago it's a lot better having a microphone in this room it was really difficult for voices to carry the last meeting so this is nice i don't feel uh and also uh updates to the board of education like you're like you're receiving tonight and if this is something that the the board finds helpful happy to do this on an annual basis or whenever you'd like revenues and impact fees just some statistics i wanted to throw

008out for your review the numbers mostly if they're school numbers i got them from christy so i didn't i didn't make any of this up so oswego makes up about 46 of the student population at district we contribute about 47 percent of the eav to the district worth noting is last year the village added almost 20 million dollars in new construction eav into the district the majority of that 10.6 million came from commercial construction while 9 million came from residential construction over these past two years uh oswego's eav has increased by 87 million dollars or 9.4 percent far outpacing cpi inflation anything like that understanding that the district is capped on how much property tax you can assess i point that out just to show you that it's a main goal of ours to increase

009the tax base for which the district and all the taxing bodies are beneficiaries of i also want to point out that over these past two years 100 percent of impact fees assessed to developments generating students have been assessed and have been paid a little more on history of development impact fees back in 2001 the school district commissioned a study through northern illinois university the goal of that study was to establish fees to help fund new facilities based on the student growth coming from new development the resulting fees in my opinion are very accountable very complicated it's a thick packet and the number of fees are the dollar amount of fees are assessed based on the type of dwelling the number of bedrooms the market value of the unit there's a capital impact fee of doing

010this was to stimulate residential growth in the community and to financially support facilities and infrastructure that are related to that growth those fees were adopted later in that year and we're still using those fees today another type of fee but is different than impact fees are land cash donations land cash donations require developers of residential property to dedicate land for school sites or the equivalent market value of that land if the school does not need a site in that area and the idea for the for that donation is to effectively reserve land or help pay for schools or land that's previously been acquired by the district school buildings other infrastructure that goes into that oswego bases our land cash donations on a 1996 student veneration table that was prepared for the city of naperville by

011elders and associates a number of communities in the state of illinois and perhaps beyond use that same 1996 table and in terms of the dollar amount used for the per acre amount we have it set at 79 500 per acre and that was also adopted in 2015 as part of that overreaching study that we did back then a little small to see here but hopefully everyone's had a chance to take a look at this this is more for your information shows you what the land cash collections have been from the village to the district over the past a little over two years in total over about 418 thousand dollars in land cash collections the table below that is more of an informational item to show you on average what the impact fee is in the

012the darker green column there we go what the impact fee is depending on the unit type and then approximately what the land cash fee is for a total on the far right hand column impact fee collections so similar to the last slide which was land cash fee this is impact free collections you see these are substantially more in total over the past just over two years it's about 1.7 million dollars in impact fee collections and the bottom table here shows you the approved 2015 with the update from 2017 on the multi-family side how we distribute impact fees it's on a percentage basis that was factored by looking at all the capital needs from all the different taxing bodies back in 2015. so every impact fee dollar that comes in 38 for example would go to

013district 308. community comparison i already mentioned earlier that the village makes up about of the oswego makes up 46 of the student population in 308 and i have the other communities listed here um one thing i've included the comparable community impact fee table here that christie's been able to put together from the different taxing bodies that feed into district one note i want i think is very important because of what i talked about earlier that the old fee system which i believe all the other communities are still on is dependent on bedrooms and markets and so it's you can't just say what is the impact fee for this this type of house because it depends so it's hard to compare them this chart attempts to do that as you'll see oswego's town home fees at

0142800 are are significantly higher than most of the others our single family at 7 000 is higher than aurora's close to montgomery's but lower than plainfields but i want to put a footnote on here too uh in talking with the district and this is just what i understand a lot of this has to do with the transition fees that you see only plainfield charges however from my understanding in the the records over the past many years there's not been any transition fees paid by plainfield so i only point that out to say i'm not sure if they're charging them or not but if you take that out then they're about in line with the village on the single family and again not to keep reiterating but again the more expensive the property sells for in

015the other communities the less they actually end up paying in impact fees so it's hard to hard to compare apples to apples without more data this comparison just shows what development what have what's been happening in the development community on residential in these in these different communities and then what fees have been brought in by the different communities i wasn't able um at print time and still not to get aurora's numbers yet for how many residential dwelling units they've had the last few years uh in fairness as we go plainfield to montgomery we share this information with each other every year and i think from now on we'll start asking aurora to join that so it was easy for us for me to pull for everybody else but you'll see here in the last three

016years between these communities oswego does have the most dwelling units followed by plainfield and then montgomery's down a bit too when you scope come down to the next chart you'll see who's been paying impact fees to the district those past three years and so the total of two million dollars uh from oswego and you can see the other communities where they fall too another important footnote in here is that not all the home builds you see here are necessarily in 308 so because i know aurora and plainfield also feed into different districts so i don't know exactly where they're coming from lastly this is a little hard to see hopefully the copy have in front of you is a little easier to see this is something we came up with this year uh we had

017a really good meeting i thought with the superintendent sparlin and president doyle mr lightfoot we talked about just upcoming developments to keep you apprised of and another partnership that i didn't mention is the demographer the school district hires he meets with our staff every year and we go over something just like this where we can say you know where to cc development happening and then verify it with our planner so we can all be on the same page three developments that i would point to that were just recently approved by the village board rather than the residential side are redwood and that's 143 apartments on mill and orchard right about there aventara which is a single family development the little green spot at douglas and wolf and herdman erdmann is a senior development right next

018to village hall i also want to point out some of the commercial development which i know the district enjoys because it brings in a lot of ea it doesn't bring in new students and so it's very financially beneficial some of the new developments we've had just in the last two years our new strip center on orchard road you may have seen it with the girl scouts of america or one of the tenants the learning place a new daycare over in stonehill raising canes very popular to a lot of your students my understanding the old police station has now been sold to the private sector so it's back on the tax rolls hasn't gotten a tenant yet but again they're back on the private side paying taxes and then to come still is aspen dental which

019is under construction the old white castle popeye's chicken um another one we hear a lot of excitement about that's going to be right next to the strip center on orchard road in front of the jewel uh in the long awaited delta sonic which is a very large project that takes a very long time to build so we're we're hoping that they're open sometime this spring hopefully in may so that's uh when i talked about a lot of the you know 20 million dollars in new construction eav a lot of it came from those projects i just listed and lastly the last thing i wanted to just go through with the district is since i was at fortunate enough to speak in front of the finance committee we've heard some misconceptions out in the community that

020i was hoping i could correct today a few things that i picked up on or at least were told to me i wanted to clearly air on a few things recent developments in oswego have not been low-cost housing which is what a number of times i've heard if you look at the developments that have built in oswego look at the reserve at hudson crossing in downtown or the springs apartments behind walmart they have set new high bars for rental rates in oswego and i'm fairly certain in all of kendall county uh the monthly costs for those units are upwards of three thousand dollars uh it is very high quality and not low-cost living as as i've read so that's important and i'd also talk about how the fees contribute to that and this is one

021of my concerns about the old way where we had the higher the value the less you pay in fees we believe by having a flat fee you're making the bar high to develop an oswego and so when you're able when you want to develop an oswego you're going to have to use it's going to be more expensive construction resulting in higher cost construction resulting in higher quality building materials and higher quality construction so we think the fees actually if you removed impact fees we'd have a million permits coming into the village but then i might be concerned about the quality having the fees where they're at they were strategically set where they are to be at the very top of the market the highest amount of developers willing to pay while they can still build

022in town and we've seen that work and so i wanted to clarify that misconception also heard uh this one i couldn't believe but i heard that uh there's some thought that apartments do not pay property taxes that's very not true uh in fact we believe proper apartments pay higher property taxes per acre in per unit than single family even does so uh the springs for example that should come on the property tax rolls this year so in the next month or so we expect the assessor to show what they're gonna be paying in property taxes but i would be surprised if it's not over a half a million dollars a year so while the individual renter who's signing his rent check or his or her rent check it may not be signing a check to

023the assessor or the county believe me the owner of the property the complex is and they pay a lot especially for new construction i also want to point out that uh some of the rental properties that have been approved in some of the multi-family properties that have been approved that are owner-occupied condominium units there is a tremendous demand right now and when we're talking with developers the demand they're seeing is from young professionals without children and empty nesters without children that is that that is a key demographic that is looking to move to oswego and is a desirous of these type of units and they also demand a higher quality luxury unit as well in the the downtown property the reserve hudson crossing they had told us that they expect mostly empty nesters and they're

024finding that they're getting a lot of young professionals who are young singles who are looking to to live in a an environment that they believe is changing for the better in downtown oswego with more restaurant options the amenity of a pool those types of things but we believe very much in smart growth and attracting young professionals and the empty nesters to oswego because we do have a tremendous amount of single-family housing that is great for families already in town so i wanted to point those a few things out redwood at the apartment complex we talked about on milan orchard in other projects they do they see about 1.65 people per unit vast majority adults the springs they see 0.08 or i'm sorry 0.9 children per unit so these are not these are not developments that

025are that are intended to attract children they're low bedroom count um again higher value uh units so i wanted to i appreciate the chance to clear up a few things i'm happy to walk you through um this presentation today and also thank you for having me here happy to answer any questions thank you mr desanto for coming to share the news of oswego's new developments and clear some things up i appreciate that one of the things that i had heard when speaking with some of the new apartment owners along the same lines as you about where kids are coming from that had sparked some discussion here were the number of kids per unit versus the number of kids being educated out of living in that unit so for example if a child is with one

026parent part of the time in the apartment and the other parent the other part of the time that might be in a different school district um had you heard anything to that effect that could help us distinguish between a number of children per unit versus number of children educated in the district out of that unit i probably not but that would be that was one question that was kind of interesting um i didn't know if you had any insight on that i agree that is an interesting question and you know one and i don't have an answer for you but i'd be curious too is that a is that a newer phenomenon or is it something you would think has been going on for a long time my point is you know the tables were

027done in 1996 is this something that's maybe changed since 96 or was that the case back then it just wasn't counted i'd be curious in that as well that's a really that's a good question so i'm going to take that one and follow um for those of you ruth brent on the finance committee when mr de santo came um it was there was something you guys had talked about that you'd reported on in our last meeting about the it looks like you had commissioned together a study in 2014 on the impact fees was that what you were discussing if that would be a possibility in the future well our uh our primary conversation was was to ask each each of the representatives from the different um government agencies you know when was la you know

028what study are you using and what is the date on that uh with our goal being working towards the possibility of the district funding a revision of the niu study and so we're also engaging interest from the various bodies on if that would beneficial to them as well to have updated data that's defensible and shared across multiple entities dr sparlin besides the lyft or not dr sparling i'm sorry mr de santo besides the the lift truck which yes we have very high ceilings here one right out there um how are some of the other ways that we've been able to collaborate with the village at this point you've mentioned quite a few and i appreciate the willingness for inter-governmental cooperation um anything else that we've been able to offer to the village as well uh

029yes i think i was at the meeting on last week so christie might be able to add some but i know i also was not and i apologize but i know the last meeting we were we talked about i think some of your in-house staff has been able to do some sanitizing uh covet sanitizing that's something that we've been outsourcing we thought if it could be if we could save money maybe you could make money it might be something we could do together that was one that we explored and i think that the biggest thing that we've talked about is our joint purchasing power between us of course being a large employer entity as well as the village the library the police department all of those things how we can pull together and buy involved

030and give better savings yep that's awesome i think i think it would be great if mr desanja can come back after the new boards here laurie because i think much of what he said if i had heard that presentation when i was a new board member it would have been extremely helpful so not to be too repetitive but maybe that can happen once the new board is seated in april thank you for your suggestion i'd be happy to i'm sure we'll work something out and one other thing lori i know you and i ask this question i just want to make sure the board is aware and i think mr desantis you alluded to it but the the rsp studies that we look at as mr desantis said the data that that is shared today

031was already included in the rsp study as far as future growth and and plans yes yeah we had a uh dr farland and i had a meeting with i assume that the demographer right rsp correct we met with them one in january after after we admit previously to that and just went over a few things there was a couple small ones that he had that we didn't and a couple small ones that i had that he didn't um but we feel like we're in a real good place with the numbers right now anyone else any thoughts just to make sure i understood correctly when we talk about the impact fees there was different fees on a low valued residence or project versus a high valued residence or project so the the lower value project i

032believe you said is actually pays more impact fees so you've got a lower impact fee to encourage the the better construction is that correct yes from my understanding that was the idea at the time was well a few things one the lower the fee is for the higher priced housing that we're encouraging people to build higher priced housing and at the same time that higher price housing will pay more in property taxes that there's a benefit to um but at the same time what i think we're showing in oswego with our new fees from 2015 is that when you keep a flat fee you're still going to get the higher quality housing uh we do not we have not seen a push for the lower quality housing because they're paying a high fee in fact

033we see the opposite that their the higher fee requires them to sell the house for more and when i saw the the redwood project i did look up that company it looked like many of their projects or their neighborhoods were or they almost resembled looked like duplex housing similarly with i mean winding streets and single level dwellings rather than a traditional two or three story apartment building that i would envision is that what they're doing at mill or will that be more of a traditional two or three story building no you're you're exactly right it's going to be more of a town home style product you know sometimes when people hear apartments they think it's a six-story building that's packed with units in the cases of the springs for example or redwood which you're talking

034about you drive through those neighborhoods they're much more of a townhome style but it would be more like more like what you see at the springs more of a town home style okay anyone else all right thank you very much i'd like to thank you for postponing your visit also for the last year i know we've scheduled you this time last year that's right thank you thank you for making it here and we look forward to continued work together with the village same here thank you thank you thank you all right item 6.1 public common on behalf of the board of education i would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we receive from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system

035residents interested in speaking to the board this evening are asked to have completed a comment card and presented it to the secretary to the board when the secretary calls your name i ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback to ensure all topics get addressed we will hear three comments per topic this evening please note that comments are limited to five minutes per person and that no discussion of personnel matters or responses to questions are permitted the board does not participate in discussion during public comment follow-up to your questions or concerns will be addressed by administration through the contact information provided on the comment card i'm going to add in that we also still have some comments coming in via email so this evening in

036order to prioritize in person we will hear three items per topic but we will alternate between in-person and email format if those who don't have an opportunity to present their public comment via the microphone would like to put that in writing we can add that to the record just like we would any of the other emailed comments kayla anderson my name is kayla anderson and i'm an 8th grader at murphy junior high school this year has been difficult and that's the least you could say it hasn't been easy for anyone and i applaud you for trying to incorporate people's opinions i do feel as a student mine has been left out when it should be what is focused on the amount of changes that have been implemented this year is extremely frustrating if it's hard

037for parents to keep up how do you expect me and other students to constantly be aware of the class times i have just finally gotten into a routine and knowing when i get back from a week off it's all changing is very stressful adding days in isn't necessary it's just some people's preference as a student having an option to go full in and of a high risk of getting sick and possibly getting my family sick or losing my last year in junior high is a hard a very hard choice i have to make everyone has had a different experience this year starting being fully remote to adding back wednesdays into the school year wasn't an easy transition now we are in person for two days a week and i have three remote days which was

038another transition i made hearing you discuss going in five days plus an additional two hours to to the day is an insane transition we started we started with around 28 hours a week a week and now you want me to go to 40 hours a week in person in person or not 40 hours is a huge jump compared to the beginning of the year i've heard many people speaking about their children's mental health personally a constantly changing schedule is doing nothing but decreasing my mental health being in person is great but for the last seven weeks keeping the current structured schedule would be way more beneficial and safer for the students than pushing us in and flipping everything upside down one final time of course remote learning isn't fun but to be in school with

039double the kids in a small classroom eating lunch isn't safe for anyone many schools including mine have to rearrange classrooms and find ways to still meet the precautions in place by asking teachers and staff in every school defined space is easier said than done also having lunch in a building is extremely risky because there are no mass and limited space as i said earlier space is already an issue so if we are unable to find space to maintain restrictions and removing our map what is keeping us safe continuing with our schedule we have now is the best option compared to what is being presented not having enough sanitary materials and still discussing having everyone in for more days is dangerous we couldn't have predicted the pandemic but it's been a year now and we have

040seen how bad it can get why why would we offer the people the option to risk their lives because of the class setting we have remote learning down now and the teachers have done a phenomenal job with everything they've been put through they're forced to teach in person when they did not sign up for the possibility of getting sick instead they signed up to teach kids and help them grow to be completely honest the thing that i'm most upset over is the fact that parents opinions seem to be overshadowing the best option for children going into the school i wish more students would voice their opinion as opposed to being spoken for by parents who will never truly understand what school is like during these times thank you melody beaver my kids need to be

041back full day in person just like other districts all my kids are suffering especially my special needs son he has a 45-minute bus ride to school and then he is only at school for three hours just to have another 45 minute ride after school so he's on the bus for 1.5 hours and only in school for three hours it needs to be full time i hope 308 can find a way to make this happen my kids already have lost so much and i need to get back to work i can't work during school when my kids are on a preschool schedule and it's too costly for me to pay for daycare during school hours and the junior high and high schoolers get out after the elementary kids this is a huge issue affecting so many

042families now the vaccine had been out and given to staff some families don't have the luxury of being a stay-at-home parent need to start working again i hope we can get the option of five full days and lunch thank you pamela lot hi i'm pamela lotz my son goes to oswego high school i really didn't prepare for this tonight but i am going to just give you a little bit of background of what i've experienced with this whole pandemic my son was a pretty decent student he played rugby now he will not engage with school he will not log on to the remote learning he doesn't get it his mental health has declined i've had him in treatment twice i've had to not work for the last year to take care of him my husband

043has cancer he can't work so this is really a hardship on everybody i've noticed this also with all of his friends nobody they're not in school they may have their phone on but they're either chatting with each other or they're walking in and out of everybody's houses i've seen a lot of increase in drug use among all these kids and i seriously think it's due to them not being in school where they need to be you guys are failing us we need to have these kids back in school it's your job to listen to as parents and do what's right for these children and i really don't think you are thank you that was our third public comment on returning to school are there any comments in person regarding any other topics and i do

044not have any emails on any other as well so if anyone else has submitted a comment card you can submit your public comment via email to ursula and she'll put that into the record with the rest of the emails thank you very much all right item 7.1 board member comments let's start on tony's end i have nothing shockingly sure i got to volunteer some time this weekend and i'm not going to steal all the thunder because i know dr sparlin is going to share results with us but i'll talk around it i got to spend some time here on saturday for the boys swimming conference what was obviously very different about that this year is uh as with many sports there is no sectional there is no state meet so this was the big gorilla

045and um and we had eight seniors this year and um as it works in swimming um swimmers tend to taper before the end of the season that allows them to drop time in that last meet and and really get a great time on the wall and i saw some i've been around swimming for a very long time i saw some incredible feats i saw over a full second drop in a 50 freestyle that doesn't happen what i saw a 10 second drop in a 500 freestyle i saw one of the oswego co-op swimmers come from three body lengths down to pass another swimmer in the last hundred yards the kids were going crazy and they had a wonderful swim meet you know disappointed for those seniors that they can't go on to sectionals in state

046meet but i think they were all thrilled with the times that they put up and the ultimate outcome which dr sparlin will share with you and the suspense will build ally matt heather ruth i got to participate in something as a parent and a board member this was a couple of weeks ago now which these days a couple of weeks seems like a lifetime but i was actually able to be in person to hear one of my kids play jazz band so that was very special it was a very limited audience so normally you go to a jazz concert and it's really loud and everyone's clapping and hollering and it was it was a little muted because everyone had their masks on of course but it was still really special to these kids work really

047hard and have worked remotely to be able to play together and so that was i was very pleased to be able to have that opportunity and i'd like to thank mrs croner for inviting me as her plus one as her husband was able unable to attend and i also got to go to the event and it was really good to see kids able to participate and play and they had their little horn covers on which i didn't realize until that moment really how much harder it makes playing an instrument so these kids are going to have some pretty darn powerful lungs when they can take those off so i imagine it'll get loud again pretty soon but it was it was a great performance by the jazz band got to see some young freshmen on

048there also which was kind of cool to see that this is continuing and that's pretty much all that happened i guess that was a few weeks ago i don't know it could have been yesterday or last month board committee reports equity was tony and ruth yeah once again great equity committee meeting we're working on that statement and lots of great continued discussion of the use of vocabulary words and words mean things and so being very specific about things that the as a committee they feel like we are wanting to convey and um yeah it's a great group of people that are on that committee it's a pretty big committee um but they're all very invested there's a lot of conversation from a lot of different people our next one will be in person so i'm

049sure it will be even tony better you have anything you wanted to ask just that i always bring up that the equity committee really deals with a lot of different kinds of equity it's equity as far as you know educational needs emotional social needs and the people on that committee really care about all the kids that are going to school and want them to have the kind of situation where school's a place where they feel welcome school is a place where they are heard and so i just i'm i'm excited about it it's a fairly new committee but i think it's going to do great things for the for the district and genuinely for for our student needs i think it'll do a lot item 7.3 the superintendent's report well good evening board last week

050was national school social workers week and tonight i'd like to take a moment to recognize all of our social workers in school district 308 for the part that they play with our students ensuring that our students success so tonight let's give ours all our social workers a little bit round of applause i'm sure they'd appreciate it i'd also like to share and congratulations to the following ohs panther artists and taking first place in the southwest prairie conference art competition uh jenna lovell took first place in painting stone carpentenner took first place in graphic design christian mateurn took first place in textiles and other crafts daniel donovan took second place in drawing delaney homan took second place in painting and carly cornstrom took third place in ceramics so congratulations to ohs in taking first place at

051the spc conference guards competition and building off of what mr whitefoot said i'd like to congratulate our 308 boys swimming team on winning the southwest prairie conference title this weekend both at the varsity and the junior university level so how about a round of applause for the swimmers and our art students who came in second plainfield so on march first in our public forum i had stated that our goal and intention was to start next year in a five-day learning environment i want everyone to know that we have put together four committees that begin meeting this week as we plan for next year included in this work we'll be putting together what the remote option looks like for next year as we begin planning for full time five days a week school we look forward

052to sharing the work of those committees with the with the board and the parents in the community in the very near future later this evening in the agenda the board will be asked to approve resolutions uh releasing 36 full-time teachers due to our enrollment changes i've always said i'll never tell i'll never say i know how someone feels unless i've walked in their shoes and i can remember back to my first two years of being a teacher and being an educator and receiving the same news that our there are 36 teachers are receiving this evening i remember the mixed emotions that i felt and how i you know just in general how how that how that hit me uh the good news here in 308 is that we're a very large district in many of

053those positions or people who are being released will be recalled as positions open and we are committed to recalling our current 308 teachers two positions as they open so with that said i'd like to thank all of our teachers for their time their commitment and their dedication to our school district that concludes my report for this evening thank you thank you item number eight approval of the consent agenda can i have a motion to approve please i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 8.1 minutes from the february 22 2021 board of education meeting open and closed session and from the march 1 2021 board of education public forum and 8.2 to acknowledge the foia requests received by the district second mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot hi mrs croner aye mr bauman

054aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye motion passes 7-0 item 9.1 item 9.1 is financial statements does the board have any questions regarding the financial statements that have been presented this evening all right hearing none item 9.2 is bringing board policy to colon 220 back to the board so that we may have a discussion on any changes regarding this policy prior to it being brought forward for approval so mrs doyle would you like to start us off yes so at our last meeting discussing this policy uh under an action item mr lightfoot had requested some further clarification at which point we had decided that this should really be a board discussion because there's really no more action for a committee to take what i had asked maureen to do was to provide

055the policy as it stands with the recommendations from i believe the press updates which are recommendations for policies and also some of the things [Music] that are not well the the one thing i'm thinking of in here that is not part of the press finding was that we would take final action on items in the posted agenda is that correct actually i think that was just clarification from what was there before so the first set in our documents is the policy as it stands this second is the recommendations that came from these new changes that will basically keep the effective purpose of the policy the same which is as it's always been that you can have any individual board member requesting the withdrawal of an item on the consent agendas that can be considered individually

056that the agendas will contain the general subject matter that we can put an item on the agenda if it's received at least 96 hours before the scheduled meeting and if it's less than that then it'll go on the next regularly scheduled meeting then we removed one section about district residence and then we added in the section about taking final action so this is our discussion to have mr lightfoot you wanted to have it um why don't you share some of your thoughts uh thank you lori and as i looked at at the revised it's up there i think i think we've now clarified it i think so yeah i i don't have any any additional comments does anyone else have any thoughts on the recommendations maureen had provided to us on the updates and the

057clarifications on this procedure no but thank you maureen for yeah wordsmithing that for us you're welcome yes thank you very very much second paragraph under agenda the red each board meeting agenda shall contain the general subject matter of any item that will be the subject of final action at the meeting so i have to zoom my screen in a little to see that one i i guess reading that um we have our first read our information item it comes back following board meeting we have an action item so if it's an action item at the meeting that agenda isn't going to have that subject matter as information and that's almost how you read that first sentence as written what do you mean i i guess i'm not following i read it just as like 9.1

058financial statements it might not uh i i guess i don't understand the the difference in the wording between general subject matter and well i guess i don't see it as [Music] are you trying to clarify uh not having these same things on as information and action is that what well there's information in action that that's a conversation we've had previous to as well um but again the clarification where it looks like it's going to be an information item and we're voting on it as well is that as it is in consent or something different in the second paragraph i don't think it's speaking to that one yeah anyone else feel free to weigh in but differently i i interpret i interpret the first sentence in paragraph two is simply stating that we will not take

059action on an item where we have not defined what that item is that we're acting on right so like at the previous meeting i know that several times this year because of so many things that have gone on um we have i i know i myself have asked maureen if can we vote on this this evening and we can't because it hasn't been on the action item so i think that that has been the practice and that is the recommended practice and this just codifies it yeah really the first sentence there in red in the last sentence in red kind of go together they're just saying that in order to act upon it and take final action it has to be clearly on the agenda but you can discuss other items that are not on

060the agenda you just can't take any action on them but this is how press had it in their recommended language they broke it up like this so but you're well you know we can certainly uh clarify it put put them together we've gone back and forth a number of times on this but this is the first time that i've read that sentence and it just it doesn't it doesn't read right to me so what you're saying is you'd like it to be more specific and in what way so if each board meeting agenda shall contain the general subject matter of any item that will be the subject of final action at the meeting if it's if it's on the agenda as an information item it's not going to be or shouldn't be on there as

061an action item correct there have been some on there have been a few unusual circumstances where dr sprang has requested this due to timing issues um usually related to financial matters that there's outside our control deadlines okay just making sure that's then that is how it reads i'm not following are you this this is not saying that something can't be both an information item and an action item in the same meeting it can be it just would have to appear so if you had something for instance financial statements um it's information right now tonight it's not under action items so you could not take action on the financial statements tonight because it wasn't listed on the agenda as an action item however you could have elementary gifted identification both as an information item and as

062an action item tonight and that would be okay because it's letting the public know you're going to be voting on that item tonight so my understanding in our policy is what it and i can't remember please forgive me the policy number but we do have a in one of our policies stating that no change to a policy will happen at information that the the procedure for changing a policy will be there will be information and then at a following meeting the action except in limited circumstances there's a need a timing-based need but that's referring specifically to changing a policy rather than changing correct and that then nothing or the financial policy is labeled policy development i don't know the number okay thank you any other questions so are we comfortable bringing this forward as 220

063as revised um for action at our next meeting yes we just talked about the concept yep yeah okay anybody opposed okay so we'll bring this forward for action at our next meeting maureen as revised thank you again for your work on that and the next is item 240 which is the one i have to tell you i am really excited about i am really really really genuinely excited about this it's something that i've hoped for for a really long time so that's kind of a big build up hope hope hope you deliver very good i hope i will too all right item 9.3 uh elementary gifted identification uh faith is going to provide us uh information whoop did i miss it hey yeah you missed the whole i 240. oh the 240 that i was

064super excited about oh well you know what i mean i'm excited about gifted education identification also but this i'm more excited about right now yeah you know i didn't know if you wanted to talk about the policy now because it's later in the agenda and there's the whole presentation or the whole conversation regarding it later down the agenda all right let's talk about well yeah it's just a teaser in 9.2 yeah it's the it's it's just the language the warm-up gotcha all right all right you can save a free presentation because that'll be cool too all right elementary gifted identification for upcoming year faith all right i'd just like to summarize the memo that was sent already kovitt has greatly impacted our ability to screen for elementary gifted programs usually about this time we would

065screen all of our second graders on school aptitude tests through our cogat and also be looking at our fall and winter achievement scores to identify those students this year with students not being in person and having a significant schooling loss that's not uh we're not capable of doing that so we brought a group of people together to talk about both how to identify students for the future and also continue the differentiation of instruction for those students as they come into third grade next year that would be exhibiting a much higher achievement levels in reading and or math so what we are proposing and what we would like to do is to delay the usual screening of all of our second graders until next year when we've had them in person and also had more time

066to recoup some of the possible learning loss but we realized that there's a lot of students that are going to come in and need that extra enrichment or advancement so we'll be working with all of our third grade teachers many of them already have their gifted criteria and coaching pieces already but we would be working with them early on to differentiate instruction while we identify those students and then we would do that by the middle of the year and then continue with the formalized gifted services at that time for those students for those people that are wondering how will you ever keep those students up and get them back on the trajectory we have many students each year that join later in fourth or fifth grade and make up that time and that are fine

067for the accelerated math classes as they get to junior high as we look into that we also have more more students that sometimes want additional screening in third and fourth grade that would be usually done around this time as well we are postponing that to a little bit of an earlier time next year and then would use the same process and start gifted programs for those students after we are able to do all of our regular screening and assessments what questions does the board have for faith in regards to the information presented any questions i just have a quick one um so you had said that you were thinking the middle of the year for the second grade for the second graders is that um you know what kind of i guess what kind of

068impact does that have you know since that i mean it is this you know significant time frame um what kind of impact does that potentially sure we would already be differentiating instruction and looking at the students that are at that top piece and providing different instruction for that the initial screening is more two-pronged where you're looking at both of the iq or the school aptitude test as well as the achievement piece so that needs to happen over two different windows so it will take a little bit longer to be able to do those pieces so the real crux of how we will do that is the differentiation piece and we're using our gifted teachers to support that as well as our instructional coaches and that'll be looking at how students are doing on the math

069assessments as they're coming through and then dividing students up to provide that differentiated instruction but it would not be a formal these are the only students in the gifted process until about mid-year my concern has always been just taking test scores like i would like us to take some other factors into consideration and there are other pieces especially as you look into parents or teachers saying i would like a second look at these these are talking about the initial screenings that we look at to establish the first set of criteria about who would be invited there is an appeals process and things that become part of that too i have a lot of questions about the process for elementary gifted education one of which surrounds the word that you used accelerated math um and if

070that would really qualify as a gifted program and i'd be interested in hearing more about that down the road but for the moment i appreciate you giving us this update i know that this is a piece that is really important also and we don't want to get lost as we move forward thank you all right okay item 9.4 is in regards to the idea of potentially adding a student ambassadors to the board of education for the 21 22 school year this was something that we talked about earlier in the year something i was asked to put together a timeline in process for this agenda uh the board has been provided an information uh packet with with a tentative timeline in within that packet the timeline the board has been provided begins with this conversation tonight

071and ends in july with interviews where the board will be selecting student ambassadors one from each high school to begin this august uh so with that what questions does the board have i'm really really excited about this did i mention that you did mention it dr sparlin will student ambassadors be able to cast a vote as a board of education member no they will not no will they attend closed session no they will not but they are allowed to give input as to their perspective on what's going on it's at the high schools and maybe through other things do they have a way of uh gaining information about junior high and elementary you know they will that'll be conversations that we'll have with the principals they will work with the student you know with the

072student council the principal advisory committees and be required to do certain things at the high school to report back to the board of education and you know ongoings within the high school and then by sitting on the uh sitting here at the table with us as with the board obviously as non-voting members they'll provide that student voice the student perspective that we that we heard from a public comment earlier that would be able to be voiced on issues that the board is facing and addressing i have a question for lori doyle if um as president do you have to keep the meeting shorter so these student investors can get out on time to meet for a few requirements i'm going to defer to maureen on the limitations on the time the timing of students much

073earlier yes so i think it's a wonderful program have whoever's in charge of that do the uh the the clock okay so obviously the agenda is going to have to be adjusted so that those topics are going to be early on and allowing those students to be out here by 10 o'clock well hopefully we're all out of here by 10 o'clock i mean i'm not going to lie i'm kind of hoping for that well you're not going to be here so i'm just saying for somebody who's got invested interest in timing i don't know um anyway so i'm seeing in here uh job description well it's not really a job description it's a position description um for a student advisory member to the board of education there's general description there are responsibilities um would it

074be out of line to remove the word job from the responsibilities section since it's not really a job so much no we can definitely do that we talked about that thank you and then um i like that it includes the requirement to be eligible for all co-curricular activities i like that they'll be working with their principal um this isn't just going to be the goal of this and and i know that this is true but just for the good of the order um this isn't just reciting a litany of events happening at the high school at the junior higher elementary this is part of the goal of achieving student voice because as we know this year especially the things that we do affect our kids our kids are the ones who will live the decisions

075that we make and so having some individuals provide some insight into what that could look like from another end is really important and i'm very excited as i mentioned that we will be doing that here i think it's huge for accountability and transparency i think both of those things will increase when you have young people looking at the process and way down the road you get some better board members maybe some of them will become board members or they'll recommend it to their friends or you know who knows if they'll even be boards of education by then but community service is always a good thing so i read in the documents that these ambassadors would be meeting with their principals prior to board meetings and that one of their roles would be to present a

076state of their school report which is i think great structure right so that there's an expectation on the student as to what the what their requirements are as as part of the procedure there i i think and i know we're i know we're early on i think we might need a little bit more structure in making sure that the candidates understand exactly what happens at a board meeting or what can happen prior to a board meeting and what i mean by that is it's not going to be just their friends saying hey can you talk about this and why can't we do this in sports and all that kind of stuff my point is that they i think it needs to be laid out in such a manner that they understand the board is going

077to be talking about controversial issues and they are going to be expected to potentially weigh in on those controversial issues and that their viewpoints may not necessarily line up with their own personal viewpoints or the feedback they're getting from their fellow students or the student government et cetera right and i that happens i think that's important to understand i think it's important to understand other than yes i get a if i'm a high school kid this looks like something really fun if if i am thinking about a future in government public speaking any like this is wonderful opportunity i'm just saying i think we need to make sure that the applicants understand exactly what they're getting ourselves into well i think that as we all know as fully indoctrinated not really indoctrinated i don't know

078what the right word is as fully sworn members of the board we know how much training and how much learning happens um and and i think you hit on the absolutely the hardest part about being a board member which is separating your own beliefs from what you're being asked to discuss so i cannot imagine that it would be responsible of any adult involved in this to not include that sort of training i'm sure we can specify that if that's not specified already however i i cannot imagine that that would not happen um there would be a lot of training that goes into this this is a big commitment this isn't just coming on monday nights i know it feels like sometimes we just show up on a monday night and here we are but there's

079a lot of work that goes in behind this um that it will it's it's a big responsibility it's just as much as any other activity um so yeah it's gonna have to be a pretty heavy commitment can i ask a question has there been any thought or documenting put into how the board members are going to interact with these student ambassadors because i think that's important too all of us had to learn when we were new sometimes they'll make mistakes or they'll misunderstand something like many people do you know all of us so is there anything that kind of outlines how the board members interact with the student ambassadors you know i think what we'll be doing is we'll be putting together some training just like we do with new board members when they come

080on we go through some training through professional organizations and training within our own organization we'll do the same thing with the with the student ambassadors as well yeah i just think that you should probably address that as a board because i think the way that you react to them might make it a better or a worse experience depending yeah i can't imagine that that wouldn't be true i i can't imagine we wouldn't put something in place like that it just hasn't we're not at that stage yet yeah and i would just for i know there won't be any issues but let's address it before there are so i was just saying i i don't know that there should be direct electronic communication between board members and students that should probably be routed through the building

081principle just as an idea i'm not going to say which individual it should be routed between just because you don't know what the nature of the topic would be but i again that this is not a brand new concept so we'll have that stuff included that's not the stage that we're in at the moment do we have a district we're consulting with as far as them having the student ambassador and giving us some tips well funny enough dr sparlin has actually been employed in a district where they had one of these so he has had some first-hand experience yep and then you know i uh aurora west they have they have them and i've been in contact with their superintendent they sent me a lot of their information i also looked across you know across

082the country and you know you know just searching trying to find information you know it's like anything eclectic see what works talk with people borrow it make it your own and so that's kind of the process i've gone through to develop this packet here and that'll be the process that i believe will continue to be collaborative as we work as we work towards this in july and august thank you all right well thank you very much i'm excited to get this information out and i'll be having some conversations with some of our kids in the near future all right item 9.5 if we could pull up the presentation please all right on monday march 1st the board of education board approved phase 3 of our reopening plan to begin on april 7th so last tuesday

083the illinois state board of education and the illinois department of public health issued new joint guidance upon reading the new guidance we immediately began thinking about what this could mean to our currently approved phase 3. when the board approved phase 3 plan we were preparing and operating under the guidance at that time with the new guidance we felt that we should at least discuss what the new guidance could mean to 308 and have a discussion with the board this evening so the new guidance still requires mask wearing at all times in school social distancing guidance of six feet has now been reduced to a minimum of three feet this is a positive because as you all know uh when we shared our phase three plan for the secondary level we've shared that we couldn't guarantee

084six foot distancing in all of our classes so that's that the new guidance is very good for us in our regards to our current phase three it's important to note that for contract tracing purposes in quarantining that any student that is within six foot for 15 minutes or more of a positive case would still be need to be quarantined the new guidance also somewhat addresses the space restrictions in large areas such as cafeterias previously large spaces like these were limited to 50 people the new guidance now allows larger spaces such as cafeterias to have more than 50 people in that space to eat as long as the students are spaced out at least six foot apart when they have their masks off so as i just said the new guidance helps with this issue but

085we are still under strict protocols in these spaces ensuring six foot distancing when students do not have masks on next slide please with the new guidance our priorities for learning options remain the same so throughout this pandemic this is a slide that you've seen in each one of our presentations minimize the health risk for students and staff maximize the time for in-person instruction enable families to have some choice in how to address the educational needs of their children minimize disruption to current teacher relationships and to maintain students ability to con continue in their current classes so now that we have our choice window for phase three closed uh the following are the percentages of students who have chosen in-person instruction at each of the three different levels and as you can see from elementary elementary

086increased from 66 to 73 percent in person junior high increased from 61 to 68 percent in person in high school increased from 55 to 59 percent in person so this slide shows a scale representing what the board we feel needs to consider the question is whether or not we should implement another change to no already approved phase three to increase more in-person instruction or not there are pros and cons to making any additional changes that the board should consider our proof phase three plan already combined our current a and b groups at the secondary level so that all in-person students are attending school four days per week five hours per day our elementary students had already made the change to four hour days per week for in person as i stated earlier when the new

087guidelines came out we immediately began to have conversations and uh in regards to could we offer more in-person learning time while at the same time trying to meet the priorities for learning options that we've been operating under since we began uh bringing our students back into our buildings so i'm now going to ask faith to share what we came up with as we think about the question should we consider modifying the phase 3 plan that was approved by the board of education on march first at first it's important to note that the changes that can be made without altering arrival or dismissal can be done by april 7th however if we change the arrival or dismissal times it causes a lot of rework on bus routes so the fastest that the transportation department can do

088that is april 19th if we alter the arrival or the dismissal times so i'd first like us to go through and i'm going to go through different options at the different levels and then i thought we'd circle back uh and talk about them after each of the after i've gone through the whole presentation so at high school the current option which is option one out there that is uh currently supposed to happen uh april 7th is four days of in-person instruction for five hours a day it does have student support time obviously that would be no change for transportation because that's what they've been really busy building right now option two is a change from that original plan to go to five days of in-person instruction still with no lunch that could start april 7th

089i would still have student support time and some change for transportation uh why we would consider doing that now one of the bullet points that dr sparlin on his slide had about remote instruction is that we still have to require that but it is a little less of an emphasis now with the new state guidelines on what that would look like and as we look forward to the fall and that parameter being even smaller we and we will be looking at having remote instruction in a very different manner come the fall but i wanted to highlight that as to why that's an option now for option two i know a lot of people are questioning okay why aren't you going to a full day at the high school and that remains to be a big

090challenge for lunch the numbers that are up here uh prior to the release of that we had to keep large spaces at 50. this does allow us to go to that six foot distancing the example here at oe as you came in and saw all of the chairs separated in the big area out there we can have 165 students at a time and lunches do go two through two periods so that would be 330 students we could have here in the cafeteria and if you look at the number of for fourth period lunch of this is just our in-person students combined this isn't all of our students 440 then 384 we do not have space to be able to do that with those pieces um that is probably why when you think about like plainfield

091they're going to five half days without lunch 204 is going to five hour days um without lunch uh and looking at that so that's why we have option one and option two but it does not have a full day going on to talk about junior high very similar that our current option is four days with five days of five hours of in person starting april 7th having the student support time option two almost exact to the high school level it would be changing to five days so now that wednesday would be an in-person option this also could start april 7th have that student support time and some changes for transportation but we would be able to do that by april 7th similar data looking at junior high and what lunch spaces would look like we

092currently have lunch tables and that's the first column of how many students we could get in we could bring desks from other schools and bring those pieces in and then we would get to the numbers there in the middle column you can see by school the number of current in-person students of where we would need to be and that is much higher than what we would be at that capacity for the six foot social distancing then if we get to elementary option one is no change from what we are currently doing with the four half days of in person with one half day of combined remote instruction with in-person students and then if we go to option two which also could be available by april 7th is to switch to five half days of in-person

093instruction this would require a schedule change for our elementary students currently they are doing both all students in person and remote in the afternoon this would bring it excuse me to the morning and this would require that our remote students be live streamed into our classroom instruction if you recall at march 1st this is option c that we had talked about back then then it is possible by to go to a five full day of in-person instruction it would be a very large change from our original plan i have the highlighted date up there because that would not be possible until april 19th because it would be a dis different dismissal time lunch could be served with six foot distancing we would need to hire some additional staff to supervise at some schools some of

094our elementary schools are up at 85 percent capacity of in-person and having all of those students in the lunchroom even with six foot social distinct is not possible but we could spread some of that out our remote instruction would be live streamed k through five there would be no student support time or designated teacher time for remote students at early childhood we have option one which is currently what we're having option two we could go to five days of in-person instruction for both our am sessions and our pm sessions again that could start april 7th our self-contained special education programs those programs are already five days a week during phase three we would not suggest any changes for eva transition and goal eva and goal would not change however transition because of now the three

095foot social distancing we would be able to move to four days a week of in person with wednesday being community based instruction alternating between a and b groups so now what i'd like to do is go back and start at high school and talk about if there are questions or discussions and we'll go through each level yes my first question is that this doesn't look like a very big change from what had been approved at the last meeting why was this not recommended that time right so one of the reasons that we did not go with having five days is we wanted our remote students to be able to have one day a week that they would have the same experience as all their peers and be communi in a part of a community in

096that class at the high school level and we still had 40 and still have 40 percent of our students in that remote piece and that allows everybody to participate in that similar way also at that time there was state guidance that it needed to be very equal between remote and in-person instruction so this will not be the same experience for remote students as they would have with what is currently approved they would be it would be different because they would still just be live streaming in every day where wednesday is everybody is remote and it has a little piece so there is a change it's not depending on the student i can already hear other students saying yes mrs dalquis that was a dramatic change but it's not a change to the schedule it's not

097a schedule change it might have an impact change was there something in there about planning time or was that at elementary that was elementary the high school teachers are already teaching all of their schedules it would just be whether students were in person in front of them or not questions on high school does the does the time at the end of the day provide students with enough support time so i guess some students would say yes some teachers would say yes some teachers and students would say no it's not enough time with those pieces definitely we currently have more of our remote students using that support time than the in-person piece and when we had met on the committees prior to this and talking about which of the options to bring forward and talk about

098for march 1st there was a definite demand to have that student support time to be able to follow up in small groups with students so i guess my concern at a high school level is that kids are able to maybe just sign in and pop in if that makes sense like for me like you know here's my here's my zoom information you can pop in anytime during this hour and a half and i'll help you i don't care which class it is so i guess my concern with this would be in the high school and i do support five days a week and i do support that extra time at the end of the day for particularly for the kids who are at home learning but for me it's less about lunch and more about

099the rest of the kids so i guess my only concern is that the high school has the expectation that it's that it's not a you have to sign up at this time for this appointment my expectation would be from from this level and as a teacher myself that it's just open and any kid can come yes there are there are both invitations and then there are very highly recommended invitations and even if kids aren't highly recommended they might feel a need to come that they just haven't expressed and that's i think what i'm hearing i think so for me what i have found is that well i won't go see that teacher because they told me i had to make an appointment yeah i just need this question answered right like this one i'm trying

100to avoid like it's hard enough to connect with school when you're online learning right i want i want it to just be hey you know what can you just help me figure out this problem i got it from here so that's my concern at the high school level and a little bit at the junior high too okay i i want to jump back for a half second because as we have all learned um over the last year there's a lot of different phraseology that's used right so let's jump back to the the six foot rule around lunch and no masks is that a law rule recommendation uh where is it how was that written when we got that instruction so it's written as guidelines okay to be followed so then i'll two-part question this so

101then how do we and i'm not asking you because it is not your job to be an expert on what other districts are doing but when we read about district 203 in school for potentially six to seven hours a day or any of the other districts many of them are high school districts right uh glenbard et cetera et cetera so then how is a district like those which is similar size and has similar size buildings and student populations and in-person attendance rates is is there something specific as to why they can offer lunch in school and we're saying we can't i know that prior to this there were some school districts that were only doing the three foot social distancing i don't know if that is the case as they're still going to do that

102now that the state has come out with saying that if you're going to take your mass off you need to be six foot apart i believe that some of the high school districts that i've talked to they're doing that do have an open campus for lunch that a lot of students are leaving and doing those pieces i i know that there are other districts that are close by that are similar size that are not doing the lunch piece so we could inquire and find out i know that there are some districts that are still putting together their plans for after ibph guidelines too i would just argue why why would we ask our administrators to spend the kind of time when we have guidelines i i can't imagine why we wouldn't want to follow state

103recommendations on what will keep our kids and staff safe because we want to open the schools up and we want to know how to do that safely safely and we want to know if others which is why you have guidelines other schools have found a way to do it i'm not a i'm not saying it's acceptable for us to just say well we ca we tried and we can't no that we still need to work on this so we serve lunch and we have an hour at the end of the day for kids at west so the kids are in for say that again we so at west high we serve lunch but we also have that hour and what 15 minutes maybe hour hour and a half i can't i'm off eight hours so

104it all loops together for me but we still have that time at the end of the day for any kid who needs help hillary clinton clarifying question is are your kids going to school every day in high school at west yes right now we're five days a week but it's 50 50. so we have ab groups so my biggest classroom is 20 kids my smallest classroom is 14. but i mean they're having a board meeting tonight too i see them writing on the wall so for me what i'm going to look at is i want our kids to be safe i want our staff to be safe when i'm looking at the three to six foot when i was reading it there was a clarification that was made between staff members that had been vaccinated

105and staff members that had not been vaccinated and that staff members who had not been vaccinated should continue to maintain the six foot distancing is that something that is i don't even know where to begin to tackle that um because where do we fall in what we can require an employee to disclose um looking for a little bit of guidance on that i'm not sure where that comes from either and my suggestion our suggestion has been if you can give every staff member a six foot bubble that is the best course and that way you avoid even asking the question and getting into the potential ada issues that are raised if you require staff members to tell you if they have been vaccinated because we cannot have that we can't right we can't require anything

106i don't think no we can't require nor can we inquire well employers can mandate vaccines employers can ask if they have a legitimate reason to do so but it comes with risks and downsides of what do you use that information for and so if it's possible i don't think having teachers be in that six foot bubble at the front of the classes making or breaking your recommendations right is that correct correct i'm i'll just i'm just going to echo what lori said is um that um we have guidance from experts um and i'd like to follow that guidance is as best as we can in relation to um you know our safety and our students safety and our staff safety and so um you know i'm not interested in making any changes necessarily um to

107our original approved plan and i'm not interested in exploring more about how we're able to potentially do do launch it's just not something that i will entertain as a yes vote i have a quick question that's not necessarily specifically high school related it's maybe more a question for teresa [Music] with the change in recommendation being going from recommending six foot to three to six feet that dr smarlin like you had mentioned earlier that's actually what we kind of knew that we were going to be doing that anyway we had already said with our approval of phase three that we were not going to be able to have the six foot distancing in every single classroom but we would do the best we could um so one might say we were actually ahead of the game

108on that one since we approved that one the day before this came out um i just had my question is about um quarantining and contact tracing so i took my saturday and read through multiple times the new guidelines and i have some questions so it said in there that quarantining is still required for close exposure to a confirmed case within six feet of the confirmed case for a cumulative period of 15 minutes over 24 hours and not fully vaccinated so i think i remember at the beginning of the school year that that 15 minutes was it was 15 minutes in that lock at one time at one time but now that cumulative has been out for several months has it awesome yep okay so i should be keeping track of how long i'm around each

109person so four minutes here and five minutes right my question is it's fine the three to six feet the three feet didn't change this at all this is still six feet correct yeah and that's discussed in the guidance as a consideration as you put kids closer together obviously the quarantine numbers an opportunity for quarantine increases because that didn't change from six feet right and what are our current quarantining rules so let's say i was in spanish class with you know and i'm only four feet from the two people in front of me and two people on all four sides so and you test positive and i test positive on a tuesday i was in class with them on monday so i'm home quarantining for 14 days 10 10 days for you and 14 for your

110close contacts from the time from that monday from their third time of the last exposure to a known case so you as a case are defined um the day that you're tested that's when your 10 date that's day zero of your 10 days but we go back 48 hours for contact tracing purposes because you were technically contagious at that point and then so anyone that had contact with you within that six foot bubble for a cumulative total of 15 minutes quarantines for 14 days from the date of last exposure so if they were last with you in class on monday that's their day zero and then they go up 14 days from that point that's why we have so many sitting charts so many sitting chats yeah that's why we do have seating charts in

111every classroom and the bus so you can do the contact tracing but as in that scenario that you just described so if you just went through seven different classes that could be you know seven times four or five around you for that one exposure but that's i think that's that's the answer to the question that you're asking right is this for this it didn't change three to six it's correct still lessons it allows for closer yeah except for like faith discussed except for when masks are removed the guidance is very clear and that that is non-negotiable when masks are removed it's still a minimum of six feet so if i'm in spanish class and they're only four feet away but we're all wearing masks do they have to quarantine the people that were less than

112six feet from you do if you're positive if we're at lunch and we're three feet away from each other and everyone has their masks off is it still just the people within six feet of me six feet of you yes but but we would not be in a position at this point to seat people three feet away from each other without a mask on under the mandate it requires six right thank you yep [Music] so for the high school option two we're adding the the fifth day which is excellent and it sounds like we're not reducing anything or taking anything away from those in high school that have chosen the remote option is that correct we're actually just having fewer students participating in remote throughout the week on that particular wednesday correct so they would

113it would be another day of live streaming in as opposed to having the teacher's full attention on all students remotely well i think lori had asked the question matt of why we this wasn't recommended last time to do five days and they said the wednesday is really more for just social emotional okay so the remote students feel like they're part of the classroom because on the wednesdays everyone's engaging online together and that's what i wanted to confirm that's the difference it's just that there's not as many kids in that remote well everybody's remote on wednesday so we're still at 41 of our students that are looking for fully remote learning at the high school level that it it actually has gone down about four percent um for remote but it's gone i'm gonna get the

114ups and downs around because i'm looking at the hybrid instruction in person so when we reverse it 37 we're remote in phase one uh phase two 45 and this is 41 so there's more than in phase one um but 41 of our students is still kind of a lot to me at high school we're looking at i mean we're talking about in real numbers how many how many enrollees in each high school around 2800 so if we're looking at all right so that's 5200 um 520 about would be 10 times 4 would be about 2 000 maybe that are remote um that's 2 000 kids that now won't have interaction time with the other half of their class and they haven't gotten the same kind of instruction because they've been remote while they were live

115streaming so there wasn't as much interaction is that what the point had been with because this was a big deal when we changed it from five back to four um so i want to make sure that we're understanding this distinction and is this a big deal and and why and what does this mean to to who lori i would add that i've talked to several parents whose kids are in sports either in the spring or coming up in this new summer season that their children plan to actually stay remote during their sports season because of the quarantining rules okay they signed up to be in person but don't plan to attend in person until after their sports season is over or will go in person until their sports season starts and then they'll move back

116to remote because they don't want to take the chance of i i get it and at the same time it's i i have to make the comment that like if if you're worried about quarantining i would be worried about your sports not just the school quarantining you but your sports quarantining you so that that is a different perspective than i have so thank you for sharing it so and i know faith probably glory kind of asked i think a question and we haven't given her a chance to respond um i everything that we discussed when we had our other vote on the phase that we're you know we're going to be moving into um it seems it seems to me none of the um updated guidance really we this just offers opening us up to

117not further conversation just puts an option to under here that was already an option when we were look you know when we were first discussing this that we decided not to do for for various for various reasons i just don't see how the updated guidance and looking at our option one and looking at our option two is there's nothing here that tells me that it makes the updated guidance makes a difference we're just discussing other options now right because can we just write doors for five days and who's for foreign well i mean that's not at this moment we're going to go through the junior high in the elementary we we can do it by school though she wants to do it by level by level that's what i'm saying yeah all right i i'm

118just i'm just trying to understand because when i saw the updated guidance i thought well we already knew we weren't doing the social dispensing at six feet right for all of our students we weren't able to offer that we were able to say that so what really changes is the capacity like the 50 capacity piece which helps us out a little bit with lunch but not fully you know we still aren't able to get to what we really kind of need to to be able to maintain safety as it is recommended so i i'm just not seeing i i'm do not i'm not devaluing the the idea of a fifth day of in-person school for students i'm sure that that is really impactful the pros and the cons that we discussed before for me have

119not changed and i think that the administration and teachers recommendation around that wednesday time for cohesion cohesiveness related to our remote learners is is still really important and while the state may be coming out with a less of an emphasis on guidance of having an equitable educational experience for remote learners versus in-person learners does not mean that i think that it shouldn't be a major consideration for us as a board i agree with heather same we're we're a district that just created a board advisory committee for equity and we're talking about adding student voice into our board level discussions it feels wrong to not consider equity in this kind of discussion also as mrs morgan had said there's a lot of different kinds of diversity in learners and there is no way to get the

120perfect fit for everyone but you know we need to do the best we can to provide an equitable education in my opinion and to say a little bit more on that lori i think that it being social workers week last week dr sparlin that we need to make sure that the district is reaching out to the kids that are struggling the kids that are depressed the kids that we have evidence that they are having a really hard time and through whatever means we can do that i think it's important to the parents and the kids to to do our best right i talked to three social workers this weekend and they told me that they typically get somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 as in this practice 15 to 17 kids a month they're getting

12130 to 40 a month and it's because they're not in school and and that's why i'm so adamant about us getting back to five days a week of full-time school i can appreciate that opinion any other questions about high school junior high any questions i would imagine that would largely be the same as for high school if there's nothing you want to ask there let's move to elementary where i think this is the most i have a question on junior high all right so i will so the argument for high school right now 59 of kids for high school is pretty indicative of all the emails i think we've all been getting like it's pretty split but look at the junior high the majority of junior high i mean i'm looking at the junior high

122and the elementary numbers of people that want their kids in school in phase three and well that's given the phase three that they know so from as you know with the emails we get there's a lot of people that chose that based on what they had you can't you can't translate one to the other necessarily um so i would just caution against a direct correlation between what they were specifically asked versus what we're assuming when we were phase one we were still a majority of people i mean i think i think it's our job too as a board to recognize that a majority of people myself included see the benefit of being in five days i think that in normal times that's absolutely the case what i'm seeing what i know that i'm teaching you're

123teaching on i can't i don't think that anybody here in this room would argue that five days a week in person is not the best way for students to learn by golly we have enough financial situations here if it we thought it was a good idea we might have used that at some point in our past as a financial savings if it were the best thing for students to be remote we didn't we didn't so what i'm going to go back to is strictly that we have gotten these recommendations we have guidance from the state and these are professionals and it's just my opinion and you get to have yours and everyone gets to have their own thing and i think that's one of the things that we've had on this board is a wide

124array of representation because there is just that big an array in our community so i would caution against saying that uh what are we at with junior high it's going in person for the hybrid instruction with the as approved march 1st so that how many junior high kids have we got about a thousand school times five yes about the same so again we're at 32 percent even with this 32 percent of that is what 1500 kids i don't know i don't know if i'm willing to give up those 1500 kids having an opportunity to act interact with their classmates at elementary we're looking at 27 percent how many elementary kids that we got we've got about six to eight hundred thirteen schools six thousand six thousand ish so six hundred times three eighteen hundred kids

125we're talking we're still talking about thousands of kids this isn't an overwhelming mandate to throw away guidelines this is that our community is still trying to decide in each household what will work best for their kids and so i think the fact that that's reflected in different opinions here is entirely appropriate but what we need to do is come to a consensus on if this change and if these guidelines mean that as a board we make a decision as a group of seven people on which way to go do you know what i mean okay so elementary i don't necessarily sorry it's ruth i don't necessarily have any questions i do have a several lot of questions written down here more just of a comment you mentioned some rough numbers and i understand 73 that

126look that's a big number and i and i understand the desire for for families to have their kids in school full-time i i get it however that does not mean that i'm okay with the option of to please this group these people to put these in-person students in a full day five days a week is telling five six seven-year-olds even ten-year-olds well you're gonna just be live streaming your classroom every day that is you guys i i will ask a question of our educational professionals who have taken child growth and development classes i would assume is that developmentally appropriate to have a kid sit in front of us we know how hard remote learning is now when they're engaging with a teacher yeah yeah and i will just say that that is one of my

127biggest objections with this particular change is that the live streaming in elementary school is not a productive uh way to do it and i think what we're doing if we vote for that is pretending that that's going to work out it's it's very hard just with zoom and i know that that's with you yeah and i know that that's what other surrounding districts are doing and i think it's terrible yeah i don't think it's appropriate and i am not i cannot in good conscience vote to do that as much as i do want these kids in school full-time i do but i cannot so is it is there not a way to get elementary kids and not necessarily even for a whole day but more than two and a half hours or three hours yeah

128if there's a way to do that please i mean i like i but if there were i mean this is what i asked mrs dahlquist at our meeting in february when she presented these options and i asked her is this the best we can do is the best we can do right now our district our resources our staff levels our families our everything is this the best that we can do to provide the most equitable education to all of our kids including our in-person students so here's where i struggle is at the junior high and high school level i can get five hours but at the elementary level where i think i think it all starts and is the most important we're getting two and a half and now cut out the beginning of the

129day and the end of the day so really you're only getting two hours so if i could talk a little bit about those different options um and i'm a former elementary teacher uh and uh elementary principal myself if you looked at starting the day at 8 40 and going to 140 it'd have to go a little bit later to work into the buses but we you can go up to five hours without the lunch piece we've talked about that but to have elementary students when we were way back in the initial steps thinking about going six and a half hours without lunch we said that's not an okay option by the time you tack on a bus ride there and a bus ride back a common question as you know everybody's like well why can't

130you just have it be four hours then wouldn't that be awesome yes that would be great we have to with our transportation our buses run a high school route a junior high and an elementary route and you have to have 40 to 50 minutes in between all of those different routes so that our buses can be maximized to run all of those different pieces so each puzzle piece of elementary junior high in high school has to nest or be adjacent to each other to be able to do that and this is the maximum amount of minutes given our junior high and high school five hour time to be able to do that don has run numbers with me more times than she would care to admit um as we have attempted to find more minutes

131i would love to find one and i i appreciate that but i feel like we're being held hostage by bus schedules busing has always been the biggest consideration now i mean i'm telling you the only time that bussing wasn't a consideration in my 30 years of education is when i worked at a school where everybody walked and that's it busing believe it or not is a huge consideration in education it's a big deal getting kids to and from school takes a lot of time a lot of logistics and because we don't have a lot of money we don't run a lot of buses so you have to get everybody on these tight routes and you have to get them in and out i watch these folks do their jobs it's not easy i think they

132do the best they can but that is the truth of our three levels that they depend on each other to get those buses in and out and we've seen what happens when it goes wrong we had a time when we were switching the bus situation i i think you were on the board back then and it wasn't happening and it was awful because kids were sitting at their stops i was teaching in the district at that time kids in elementary school were standing at their steps for 40 minutes in the cold in the winter we can't do that even though it'll be warmer i get that you got to have a system of transportation that works and it's got to work with everybody doing their part would we be able to have access to more

133buses via lease i mean obviously there would be greater cost would that even be a feasible solution for us aren't we paying christy what was it 40 we're already paying for special ed buses that are we are paying a certain amount anyway for the days and for calls and those are for the existing routes that will run on that remote learning day i'm just saying if we wanted to make transportation not be the issue yeah could we how how do we would that be a feasible issue because transportation you have to get the kids to school if you want them to go to school and we have to provide transportation just with the money the money well obviously the money involved but is it even with that is it even possible at this stage in

134the year no you can't we we would be leasing buses right now soon i see dawn shaking her head please no no no no no they'll laugh at me no they wouldn't laugh at you but and even if we could they would say no it's higher than bus drivers and we have a difficult time now uh finding that staff as do our contract providers have difficulty finding staff so this is a true impediment it's a true what is it you know how that's called where it's a roadblock kind of thing in the middle it's a it's a funnel it's a stopping point um that if we could broaden that which we can't is what i'm hearing that would change things but is i i mean obviously two and a half hours is not enough in

135a regular instructional day there's a lot that goes on in elementary besides instruction do you know i feel like have we talked about this i i have asked to see how so in the mornings when they're in person they're getting their basic instruction in reading writing math what else those are science and some social emotional and some social emotional correct in a typical normal school day how much less how many fewer minutes are they receiving in those core subjects that they're having in person and then the remote kids are having directly with their teachers in the afternoon is it similar is it significantly less it's it's slightly less um for math um than it is in a regular traditional day a normal school right um and it is fairly typical for the reading and the

136writing piece as it's composed you know combined now as it would be during a regular day um science and social studies is really where we're you know especially social studies and we're embedding some of that into our reading instructions so that we're still getting some of those themes and those concepts and using reading time to address that um some of the time if you you know lengthen the day there is typical things that are lost for lunch recess the all the specials things were doing remote instead of taking that time to do those pieces there's also some classroom procedure bathroom breaks those kind of things that happen more frequently the longer that you you know have that piece but it is still some loss of academic time compared to usual it's not that if you're

137going to be here though for six hours that it's six hours of academic time for an elementary student thanks okay but there's no science sciences videos and concepts that have been put through it's not direct instruction from the teacher but there is we've gone through and cataloged and used a lot of the great videos that go along with our curriculum to demonstrate experiments to do those pieces so it is not direct instruction but i would say that there is science instruction it's just asynchronous and on their own time does anyone else have any questions about elementary anything on early childhood self-contained eva transition goal mike oh go ahead have they told the teachers again no so one question i would have about transition moving to four days a week and you'd said that that six

138foot still applies we know that with some of our higher medical need classes there is currently a lot more involvement with a student that's already within the six foot distance because of those students needs i get that you can have the three to six feet but how does that apply again with the the staffing and that vaccination piece versus the non-vaccination piece and with students um the the same number of staff theoretically now having twice as many students with the higher needs at the same time while trying to maintain that social distance so transition is one of them i know that um swanson had just said hey did you talk to the teachers we did not pull all committees together since this guidance was released last week but the transition principle was in conversation with

139a lot of his staff about what should we do now because we were right on the edge of whether we wanted to combine students or not and that staff and the principal believe that now since we can do those pieces that they can still do that safely just like we would do that at junior higher high school that those numbers can now be combined so there was an opportunity to talk to the staff and the principal because it's such a smaller building and they share my it's in the building correct as our edm goal correct and they already were going to the five days right i do have a quick question that about the transition um i know a lot of our special education students a lot of things that i hear is that change

140is very difficult for them would the same thing apply to the students in the transition program or is this something that would be more beneficial you said you spoke to the staff right they're they're they're very excited about having this opportunity to bring those special needs students in more into this time but the six foot distancing was giving them quite a bit of pause before that so now they are saying with the new guidance this is something that they would like to do it will impact some of the students that they've only been coming you know two days and having it now be four days plus the community instruction but that is something that they wanted to move forward with thank you do you have room the kind of feeling that i'm getting is that

141there's not a lot of support to move forward with the change to the plan going forward but is there room in any of the buildings in any of the schedules to bring in any other at-risk students into the building we've heard stories of kids that um are epileptic that are just really truly just not making it i mean can we bring in 40 kids throughout the district that just really need to be in the if we're talking about our self-contained programs at all they're already at that point of coming in every day if you're talking about other students um we will be at four days for junior high in high school we're already at four days for elementary so i would want to know which of those classes if they're just if they're a resource

142student or their general education to come in for that fifth day when no other students were present i'm not sure that that would be helpful for them to do that so if there are students that are identifying as that need i would have them call us or the building to talk through what their individual needs are i mean so so the conversation is open if we have students that are at home they don't fall into some of the self-contained rooms already they're they're they're a high need they're a high risk we know they're out there right we know that there are kids that are out there can we provide any more instruction times for these kids in instruction time for them to be the only student that comes in for their eight classes that day

143i don't know that i would advise that that they would be the only in person so maybe the better question is what kinds of support can be offered to everest kids with the additional student support time and making sure that that's there or having some of our resource staff or our interventionists reach out to those students for the time that they're not in person instruction and provide either that one-to-one contact or additional academic support those are things that are already available to do that if you're talking about limiting screen time we'd really like them to come in person if they're not already coming in person and are able to do that or put them in school five days a week put them in school five days a week um any other questions no i haven't

144well if before we before we move on to it um and when we're looking at our reaction items um will this idea of the transition if well could we pull out transition as it well could we implement the transition move without implementing other other did you say you already did that i i think that they had already the transition will move they kind of operate this is our 18 to 22 year old students that have received certificates of completion of high school um but i mean or combining the av groups because right now are they alternating a b groups they have not been coming in for wednesday-based instruction yet that would be an ad no no are they coming in in an a group they're they're two days and two days so now we would

145be coming in with both a and b groups combined what mrs meyer is asking is can you implement one piece of these changes without all of the others and i think that would apply at any level is that something that could happen so here's what i would like to avoid okay and i'm going to attack onto this because i i wonder if it's not the same phase two we had this great plan we voted on it it was great a week later or a meeting later oh wait we can't do xyz peace and we said fine okay we get it but that's it and then a week later we had another one that had to change and same thing so i get real concerned when we have voted on march 1st for this dr sparlin

146has said this is what we're doing for the rest of this year the guidance has changed but my understanding is that it's only changed enough that it actually puts what we voted on within the guidelines is the change worth what's gained is the stress of the the the system the stability of the system as we talked about the stability the speed the i can't remember what the third one was openness yeah openness thank you is is that a stress that our system our district can can handle and i guess i would argue two things one if it can i i really would like to see that have been what had been recommended but since it wasn't and i know you were thinking about that i'm wondering if it's just the three to six feet or

147if there's a system stability that you're looking at here if you look at the difference to go to four to date four days to five days at junior high in high school it's really looking at what i think we need to do for our remote students and whether that fifth day of change of upsetting that and i know everybody's getting lots of emails from um students as well as parents and the right decision for one family is the not the right decision for another family and trying to weigh out whether we need to go to another change to be able to provide that fifth day i have and i'm sure you do too that social emotional piece once they're in for four days and have that connection is there more damage of social emotional to

148have another change and not have our in and not have our remote students that or is the social emotional piece to having five days of in person depending on the family depending on the student the answer is different when [Music] you bring this to us what are are you recommending or are you bringing it to us as information that we can consider i guess that i i want to know what the people that do this for a living think is best for our district our system our kids well can i i want to ask why why we're having this why is this on the agenda tonight oh is it did administration recommend that we put this on the agenda no they had the possibility a board member recommended that we put it on the agenda

149okay so these are options that we asked you to come to us with um to consider the new guidance so we already got their recommendations we already got their recommendations so has your recommendation changed um i'm wondering yeah looking at this information based on board member input is that the answer to that or well no a board member requested it be added to an agenda item so it was added as an agenda item okay so my only question now and i'm being honest is what is your question to faith based on that is is is this what if you is this what you think we ought to do to make another change or do you think that that what you recommended a couple weeks ago is well and actually that's not what you recommended a

150couple weeks ago but what we voted on a couple weeks ago is what is which one would you pick i guess i can't answer ask more plainly than that sure and i know that that's a really hard spot to pitch in it is and i know there's 18 000 kids that's the job i started a lot of a lot of different right a lot of different needs as you'd said right i would lead us toward option two and here's why i don't think it's a dramatic change from four days to five days one of the big changes for me personally is we were asking before for families to kind of go against the guidelines of what is three to six foot and make a choice of going against what the idph guidelines said or in-person

151instruction they no longer have to go against what the idph guidelines are saying to be able to choose in person and i think that made a difference for me on what that why now it's okay to push harder for that piece and to get us to the five days one of the other pieces that i wish we would have had more information on five six weeks ago when we were planning this is the status of our devices and to know how remote instruction of simultaneously doing both of these things were working out and it was still quite an experiment um at that point we hadn't even entered into some of the in-person instruction at that time for junior high in high school i continue to be really worried about our remote students but i feel

152good that we have our student support time on what that would look like and we still are not asking them to not that we use zoom but to zoom in or to live stream for a full day it's still that shortened amount of peace it's not an additional screen time and i at high school and junior high and that option two but that was not an easy decision to come to and then for elementary in elementary is even harder i i know that there are people that are really vying for option three but option three with doing uh live simultaneous instruction as a former elementary educator and i know there are other districts that are doing that i don't see option three as being something i can support this would be the option between option

153one and two if going option two causes the most change for our elementary schedule from going to am to pm and those pieces but as you know this is plan c that we talked about a while ago this was an option that we went to if we are trying to bring more in-person instruction especially if we're going to five days a week at junior high in high school i'm of the mindset that we should try to do that at elementary too and go to option two but i know that i've we've gone through and caused so much change to families and to community members and how all of this looks i know that that is very very difficult and this requires a flip on those pieces and we're getting emails both please get us five

154days please let us stay the same and the elementary piece causes the most disruption in those times it does so when you presented this to us a few meetings ago you'd had this flip to have live the fifth day in the morning instead of the afternoon or is it in the afternoon you know what i mean do you remember that one right so there's there's that one that you didn't recommend then you recommended a few weeks ago no change um to elementary and at that point you had said that that was because so they don't live stream and they are teaching in the morning and afternoon and teachers do need time to prepare both of those things right and they still would need that time this is combining everybody to do simultaneous in-person and remote

155in the morning as opposed to simultaneously all remote in the afternoon so it still builds in that time for teachers but it is more in-person time and at the point a few meetings ago you'd thought that that while if you could do it over that's probably how you'd do it you had set yeah in the morning um you'd said that you didn't feel that the benefit was going to outweigh the stress in the system that it would put at the elementary level so can you help us out there as the push to get more to in person to go to what we would need to do this allows us to do that we also have to set all of our devices to get to more in-person instruction we've also received all of the devices that

156we hadn't gotten yet from our original piece which allows us to do some more of this in a better fashion than where we were two weeks ago but do you think um and i'm just wondering so and i hear what you're saying and i think it makes it's very all very logical it is a little bit of a you know departure from what we were talking about before so we would have elementary school teach we would have our elementary teachers k-5 live streaming wednesday from teaching in the classroom live streaming to there's the remote learners on on wednesday mornings only is that correct right okay so what so are you so what kind of um investment in and i'm not saying that it's not worth it i'm saying what kind of investment in time training

157potentially equipment use i mean i know we have our new devices but sometimes other equipment's needed would um staff time to monitor maybe live streaming with a kindergarten class um would be needed to be able to do live streaming for one morning a week at the elementary level do you right is it a significant investment or there's not an investment in new devices there would be a lot of investment in helping teachers know how to do that setting up procedures on how to do that certainly other other districts are watching or what that would do at the upper grades i would suggest that we use things like digital community ambassadors where you have some students that take turns watching for the chat you know doing those pieces it is not ideal and it will be

158less for our students on wednesdays that are our remote students trying to find the balance between the importance of getting our kids in for in person now that we're building more and more toward that and also still doing what's right for our remote and this students april 7th leaves like what eight to ten wednesdays at the end of the day we're talking about less than ten weeks less than that it's around six wednesdays after that it's not it's not a lot of additional wednesdays i i appreciate you i appreciate you i appreciate your candor but that's what we need to know we need to know if this is what you're seeing at the level that you're working at this project that you think is what we can do that you think would be best for

159our kids and and this wednesday option i mean wednesdays we've heard numerous times it's kind of in my house wednesday isn't a intense school day with with what's happening online so if option two gets our students those that choose to be in the building for that fifth day and remote learners are live streaming in at least there's actually a class going on there's the additional math and social studies and and some some actually core subjects that are occurring on that fifth day well that's happening on the fifth day but they're all doing it together in the afternoon for two and a half hours correct sometimes you get you get a fifth day of people in kids in the building in the classroom that is a great option here it's it's a great option for some

160and an option for others here's some maybe hopefully final thoughts for me we voted to approve this phase three plan and we said this is it no more changes and i appreciate that a board member wanted to discuss it again there was some new guidance in my opinion the guidance is not a significant change not significant enough that it would allow us to come five days a week full time in person which is what everybody wants and we are planning to do that the next school year i feel like we need to say listen we we made a choice we told you this was our final choice dr sparlin communicated to our families this is it no more changes i feel like we need to stick with that and so i do not think that

161we should make any more changes but that's my opinion you know i i can't say it as a board member but i believe i heard you say it that next year five days in person that's what is going what barring anything happening from borrowing governance about what it is still in the documentation hold on it is important to note that these requirements are subject to change pursuant to changing public health conditions and subsequent updated public health guidance including when regions are subject to additional resurgence mitigations school leaders should remain alert for any updates and everybody needs to remember that it depends on your behavior sorry sorry but the goal is to not carry through scenarios like this into august i feel like i mean i would like to be able to send you guys a

162board and say i'm going to sit here and stay this is getting us through the end of the school year this is not how i want to start august 15th if i were sitting at this board beyond april that's what i would i would say and i just hope that's the goal i mean and i think the community wants people wants to hear that is our goal august 15th 16th where that first day of school is going to be that is what the current sitting board members that's your goal that you don't expect anything different right i'm just going to make sure it's it's stated guys let's just take there is a lot of confusion i i would hope that everyone is doing their part to lessen the confusion what i heard dr sparlin say

163in his comments tonight were that they've started their four committees working on this five full days a week in the fall i have not heard anything different from anyone in our district anywhere other than five full days a week in the fall so i'm a little confused why there's confusion but again i also am way more involved on a daily basis than an average community so so i would lighten this maybe open a whole another door um you said there's committee work to move forward to open up what what new committees need to be formed to do a standard return to school in august so one of the things that and we've been setting the agendas and most of the meetings all start this week when we bring all of our elementary students back we

164need to look at interventions and approaches differently than what we had in the past we need to really assign what are the essential standards that we need to make sure students got from the year before that we need to look at different assessments that we might be able to use i'm anticipating that the elementary committee for example will say we're not going to start hard fast with these are all the students that are interventions but let's go and build up and do some review time see where people are at and then start those special speed pieces when we look at the social emotional connections and learning and what that needs to look like we will have had some students that have not had school behaviors for a year or more and that needs to be

165addressed when we look at those pieces there are some great things that we have learned during remote learning on how to do professional development and how to post things in google classroom and keep things going for students that are out or hospitalized and we don't want to when i met with the principals we talked it back to the future like yes we want to get back but we wanted we don't want to just go back to the things that we things were we want to go back to the future with some of our learnings and the future needs of our students so there is quite a bit of work that needs to be done in order to rethink a school year when we come off of covid from from these pieces part of that also

166is to look at what does a remote option look like but the the students that need the remote piece will be very smaller in number and as some of the guidelines that comes out it can be limited to just those families that need that for health reasons and starting off the year knowing this is you could designate at the elementary levels for example remote teachers and not have anybody trying to do both so faith i hear you talking about things this sounds like at an elementary level are you anticipating this at the junior high and high school levels as well yes so if you look especially at classes such as math or even sometimes science that are more sequential we will have some students that have made all the progress that they needed to we

167will have some students that are behind what are the essential things that you need to make sure you learned in algebra that we recoup during geometry even though you might not need them right away in geometry by the time you get to algebra 2 there are huge holes so we'll have to make sure that we you know look through on what those pieces would look like when you look at our world languages and some of our students have really struggled with keeping up world language remotely how will we go back and make sure that they're at where they need to be to be able to do those pieces the social emotional connection is huge where people just in able to converse other than through our devices and to be able to have a discussion with

168face to face and to be able to get up and do public speaking that isn't through zoom there are a lot of things that we our students not by any fault of their own have not had a great opportunity to do for the last year that we need to make sure we give them those opportunities before they move out of our system or on to the next year so that's for next year um that's what planning phases you're in now um [Music] what does changing our plans at this point do to those plans for junior high and high school there it will be an adjustment to wednesday but it wednesday will now look like monday tuesday thursday and friday so well you have less anything it's really just the equity it's the equity piece for

169what that looks like at the junior high at the high school at elementary it is requiring them to think differently again about how they teach because now they're having to teach simultaneously in person and remote and i feel like i'm always asking a lot of our elementary staff this year if we kept wednesday the same as monday tuesday thursday friday without flipping it would that be better it right now they're not ever our elementary staff are never having to teach simultaneously our in-person and remote students that moving to this would require them to do that so it's not just a flipping of am or pm it's combining those two groups i'm maybe i'm not understanding yeah i'm just wondering if if wednesday looks just like monday tuesday thursday friday so instead of they don't have

170the remote teaching in the afternoon so the the amount of planning time to be able to do that right now contractually gets really really tight on what that would look like um and for some classes we would now not have the contractual amount of break time and planning time for our elementary teachers to do that all right so is there anything else anyone needs to ask about the information on this before we move into uh an action item so approving a approve or not approve a revised phase iii learning plan as discussed what what action item is this approving and we'll all have different thoughts on whether or not we want to vote for that or not but we got to vote for or against something so we need to pick what that would be

171i'm hearing faith say option two for junior high high school would be the new phase three and uh and it is important to note that those students haven't already started phase three this would just be a new phase you would have to send out a new survey we when we talked about this we didn't think we would we would allow students and families that need to make that choice just to call their school um and make that adjustment but not put out an entire i would need to communicate out put a video out do all of those things but if you've already said that four days of in person is good for your family we're assuming that you would probably want to do five days so i would just assume that in person understand where

172you're going with that that was a lot of effort and a lot of communication that went out with that survey and we'd need to communicate it all again and parents could still make the choice but yeah i gotcha okay so i just because it's 1003. so um and we could talk about this until the cows come home but we still need to decide what this action item looks like i think the cows are already home though um do you want to do it by level not really um so option two all the way down was what i heard from faith is is this what if you are going to vote for this is that what you would be voting for who are you asking lori the board as a whole so each we have to

173decide on things so that means we need to make a decision on if you're going to vote for some change what what change would would you want to vote for um because yet again there were in that wonderful position where you might vote no for a different reason than the person next to you um but at some point we have to have four votes for something either to change things or not change things so if you were going to vote to change things i think that what i'm hearing the major difference in is those who would like to vote for any change and those who would not like to vote for a change at this point um so i would ask why don't we just vote uh junior high high school together phase phase phase

174two as recommended yes or no and if it's no then we stick with the plan we adopted to the last meeting and if it's yes then we go to the recommended option two as presented tonight and then for the elementary we would do the same thing the option there is what two versus three so why wouldn't we just vote option two across right across the board that's what i'm saying so i think that i'm hearing that more voices that are interested in this and correct me if i'm wrong but that we would make one action item and that item would be to approve option two of a revised phase three learning plan would be the action item okay i think that captures it most accurately yes and i'm gonna say one more time too thank

175you to faith because you have a pretty surround like you have a very split board and i appreciate that you gave your honest opinion yeah absolutely that's a really important thing for everybody to hear yes um and we we need to have that information and i appreciate that and we'll own it as a board so yeah for sure whether you approve or disapprove of our decision you should email the board not necessarily administrators that's right we have asked to do this once again i'm just saying no well i mean we've asked for the responsibility to make decisions about this this year um and so we do need to take responsibility for all those decisions but that means that as a board we need to come to a decision also so i would think that that

176moves us nicely into item 10.1 whenever you have the wording one moment please thank you very much and while we're waiting on that then i'll just make a comment that i would prefer at the elementary level option three but it sounds like i'm the only one at the table that believes in it so are we gonna again we're voting on option one or option two no we're voting we're either voting yes on option two or no on option two and voting option one is what we currently have so voting no means staying with what we voted on last time and voting yes means the option to present it tonight okay thank you for clarifying you guys i make a motion to approve option two of the revised phase three learning plan as discussed second mrs

177swanson aye mrs doyle no miss morgan no mrs croner no mr bauman aye mrs moyer no mr lightfoot aye motion fails 3-4 will be remaining with the phase three as approved march 1st through the end of the year you ready item 5.2 or excuse me 10.2 approval bills for payment any thoughts can i have a motion to approve please i make a motion to authorize the payment of bills in the amount of 4 million hundred and twenty seven thousand seven hundred and sixty seventy six dollars and seventy four cents as presented second mrs corner hi mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye ms morgan aye mrs swanson aye mr storyal aye mr bauman aye motion passes seven zero item 10.3 rejecting the driver's ed vehicle bid i make a motion to reject the driver's education vehicle

178bid as discussed and presented second miss morgan aye mrs croner aye mrs doyle aye mrs swanson aye mr bowman aye mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye motion passes seven zero item 10.4 approval of the mou i make a motion to approve the mou with the oswego education association as presented second mr lightfoot aye ms morgan aye mrs doyle aye mrs swanson aye mr bowman aye mrs moyer aye mrs croner aye motion passes 7-0 item 10.5 i make a motion to approve the resolution authorizing dismissal and non-reemployment of first-year probationary teachers as presented second mrs doyle hi miss morgan hi mr lightfoot hi mrs moyer hi this is corner hi mrs swanson aye mr bowman aye motion passes 7-0 item 10.6 i make a motion to approve the resolution authorizing dismissal and non-reemployment of second-year probationary

179teachers as presented second mr lightfoot aye ms morgan aye mr bowman aye mrs moyer hi mrs corner i'm mrs swanson mrs doyle aye motion passes 7-0 item 10.7 i make a motion to approve the resolution authorizing dismissal and non-reemployment of probationary part-time teachers and teachers hired under a temporary contract as presented second mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot hi miss morgan hi mrs swanson aye mrs cloner aye mrs doyle aye mr bauman aye motion passes seven zero item 10.8 there is no action to be taken at this time item 10.9 i make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented second mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye mrs cloner aye mrs swanson aye mr bowman aye motion passes 7-0 item 10.10 i make a motion to approve the 2021-22

180administrator contracts as discussed and presented second mrs corner uh mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye mr family aye mrs swanson and mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye motion passes seven zero item 11.1 motion to adjourn i make a motion to adjourn second all in favor