BOE Meeting (08/03/2020)

001order the oswego community unit school district 308 board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mr bauman yeah mrs doyle here mrs cloner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan here mrs moyer mrs swanson here please rise for the pledge of allegiance one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice good evening i would like to welcome everyone who is personally in attendance at tonight's school board meeting as was stated on the board agenda this meeting is open to the public in accordance with phase 4 guidance issued by the illinois department of public health and the illinois state board of education we are all social distancing as per the guidance and all individuals are required to wear a face covering at all times while in the school building we will be accommodating those

002who can't wear a mask by live streaming this meeting at www.sd308.org also if anyone would like to make a public comment to the board but can't do so in person because of the mask requirement you may always submit a comment in writing ahead of the meeting and your comment will be read during the public comments section of the meeting the directions to submit a written public comment are listed at the top of the meeting agenda we certainly recognize that wearing a face mask for long periods of time is inconvenient and sometimes uncomfortable however it does provide the best known protection against giving the virus to another person and it will be required of all individuals during this meeting if anyone needs a break from wearing a mask during the meeting please feel free to go

003outside for a break and take your mask off as you continue to remain six feet apart from others just put your mask back on before re-entering the building please understand that we will be monitoring the building and will be asking anyone without a mask to put one on or to leave the building we appreciate everyone's understanding and willingness to abide by these expectations for our collective safety and health thank you okay item 4.1 for public comment 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 residents interested in speaking to the board this evening are asked to have completed a comment card or submitted your

004comment by email 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 please note that comments are limited to three minutes per person and that no discussion of personnel matters including names or specific job titles 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 to ensure that all topics get addressed we will hear four comments per topic this evening and prioritize in-person public comment all other comments via email will be added into the minutes as we've done in previous meetings thank you michael raymond hello you guys

005hear me good enough i just want to thank you for inviting me here today and also for allowing me to speak i really appreciate the opportunity um as you can tell i have my little guy here today he was to be starting hopefully starting kindergarten i guess i'm a little distressed that uh for some reason if you're a protester or a rioter you're good to go but if you want to go to church or school you got to worry about coving and it's just driving me nuts i don't know you know i don't have any other children so he's my one and only he needs to be in school every kid needs to be in school there's no doubt in my mind um i don't know what you all are thinking um i just get

006the email that says you know what we're deciding not to do it after you send an email telling us to go buy all these supplies which we did and then it's well maybe we're not going to have school in person school i guess my idea would be i'm sure there are teachers that don't feel safe i'm sure there are parents that don't want to send their kids because they're worried about the virus let them remote learn i know there's teachers that want to teach and i know there's parents that want to send their kids why can't they be allowed to do it and that's really all i've got to say thank you thank you carrie samar good evening my name is carrie somar oea elementary advisor i am delivering the statement on behalf of the

007oswego education association no one wants to be back in the classroom more than teachers but the conditions must allow for a safe return the oea supports the recommendation of the superintendent and recommends to the board of education that the 2020-21 school year begin with remote learning that includes a transition plan to in-person learning when conditions allow teachers look forward to beginning work with the district to implement a remote learning program that meets the academic and social emotional needs of students create a transition plan that is in accordance with state and national guidance and return students to the classroom as soon as it is safe for students staff and the community thank you for your time brad boyer good evening i'm brad boyer i just wanted to start out with a quote from the american academy

008of pediatrics who a month ago recommended that all schools return to normal as soon as possible in the fall they said the importance of in-person learning is well documented and there's already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of the school closures in the spring of 2020. the negative impacts they're talking about are mental health issues and increased suicide rates among students so i'm going to tell an anecdotal story not to talk about myself but i'm sure this is a story many people have my wife and i moved to oswego about four years ago and the main reason we moved to where we moved was because of the school district and the grade school we have a five-year-old who's going into kindergarten she can't read she can't even be left by herself for extended

009periods of time she's five so my wife and i both work because we don't have the luxury of demanding that we don't go to a school so my question is what are we supposed to do under these circumstances and i would say that the only fair thing to do i would encourage you to vote no on this tonight and i would say that the the only fair thing to do for young kids would be to cut off the e-learning and provide some sort of voucher or payment to go to a private school because there's no way kids at that age are going to do virtual learning and get anything out of it i mean it's just absurd to even think about thank you joanne johnson good evening thank you for the opportunity to speak i've

010been a resident of oswego for over 20 years and have put five children through the oswego school system two of them are still in the school system two of them actually opened this very school that we're in and i cannot say enough about the teachers the staff the administration they care sincerely care about our children i can't help but to feel that the administration tried to do the right thing by giving us the opportunity to choose remote or in-person learning and i actually bragged about the fact that our school district stood up and did the right thing now i don't know the specifics behind the root cause of why we're looking at this question tonight the only thing that i can possibly come to is that our school district our board has been put in

011a position where their backs are against the wall and don't have the ability to provide the level of in-person safety requirements that our state is probably requiring because it all comes down to union and politics i don't give a about politics i care about our children the cdc as was mentioned is talking about children that are in high school that are taking their own lives if you've not seen there's a there's a youtube video called numb created by a 15 year old student a short film that depicts a child that is quarantined and trying to do remote learning and the mental anguish that they go through my children one's in eighth grade one is going to be a senior they are at their wit's end our children as stated by the american pediatrics association need

012to be back in school their mental well-being is at risk and the fact that politics are prohibiting us from being able to do the right thing for our children is absolutely unacceptable there are studies from other countries that show transmission from children under 10 years old to an adult is absolutely zero i understand that there is risk in going back our doctors our nurses are walmart cashier that is their job they go to work and they risk there is not much more in this world more important than a child's education it is not okay if a teacher is not comfortable coming back fine step down and we'll get somebody who's younger our school district i don't know what the percentage is but i know that my children's teachers are all young and they're not the

013at-risk group anybody at risk fine you know you do you but i know what's best for my child we pay some high taxes and if we are not able to get the education that we pay for at the very least there should be a voucher my children are both in ap classes straight a students and they spent more time doing homework when they were in in person school than when it was remote learning remote learning they sleep till noon they get up they do about an hour worth of work and they're done and they're still getting straight a's what does it tell me my children are not working hard this is a joke and my chil i put things in three groups we have our special ed kids we have our ap kids we have

014our gen ed kids our special ed kids they're getting clobbered by this they are getting farther and farther behind our ap kids i cannot answer a question for my children i can't help them and then the last is a gen ed that may be able to eke through this but the bottom line is it is about our children and i do urge a no and i urge us to get creative to figure out what we can do in order to get our children the education that they deserve all right that being our fourth reopening subject public comment we'll be closing public comment and all other emails regarding reopening plans will be added into the minutes okay item 5.1 board member comments we'd like to begin i'll just um start with uh saying you know um

015i um as well as my fellow board members have received um hundreds of emails um i i can say that i have been i'm doing my best to read them all i appreciate everybody's feedback people weighing in on this and many most and most of the emails have been very kind and um even when people have not been happy um with the paths that they've heard you know um people have come with a solution have been solution focused solution oriented and have acknowledged that we're all in a really really really hard position and i so i just want to say i appreciate the feedback i appreciate the emails i have not been able to respond to all of them i might not be able to rescind all of them but they are being read um

016and these are all things that i'm i'm hearing and digesting and i'm really taking to heart so i just want to tell the community that i appreciate their their involvement and and them reaching out so i'll go ahead and go next first i just want to say my name ruth kroner i don't want anybody to uh accuse faith dolquist of saying things that i said again i think there's some confusion last time and i get it our faces are covered and you maybe don't recognize all our voices maybe we sound the same faith i don't know i echo heather's comments about receiving lots of emails and appreciating the input from the public and i have also been reading all of the emails though not being able to respond to all of them i just want

017to say um this is not what any of us want nobody likes this nobody wants to be having to make any of these choices i personally want my children to be in person i want them in the classroom i know them i know that they learn best in person they want to be in the classroom um even my 13 year old who for years begged me to homeschool him was that was not going to happen he immediately he no i want to be in person but this is not about what i want this is about i'm not sitting here at this table to get what i want i'm sitting here to have the responsibility to make the choices that's best for our district and do i think it's best for students to be remote not

018really i think it's best for them to be in person but that's not necessarily possible we have to look at the whole picture and i agree students are falling behind and struggling and the kids that are already struggling are going to struggle more and i wish that i could fix that i know my kids are going to struggle my i have a senior also who's ap classes and that sucks but we don't always get what we want clearly i hope that tonight's presentation can shed some light on all the intricacies and all of the things that these people our administrators are dealing with and trying to make these plans and do the best for our students they care about these kids too their parents as well we're all parents up here on the board and

019so we get it and i can assure you that what happened in the spring with remote learning so to speak is not the same thing that's going to be happening it is not i'm not saying it's not going to be hard because it is going to be hard it's going to be hard for teachers it's going to be hard for students and it's going to be hard for parents but i hope that we can pull together as a community and support each other and encourage each other and i'll echo some comments that i made a couple weeks ago and attitude is everything that's one thing that you can control is your attitude and if we can try to be positive about this that is going to help our students get through the struggle so there

020have been some great emails coming through the last few weeks i don't know that there's a balance or an even number of pro in school pro remote but they each had valid viewpoints some of them i was able to respond to some i've had some text messages with um a couple i've had some phone conversations with the phone conversations are important because we were able to dialogue and answer each other's questions that an email is just not going to and we can understand the difference between private sector and public sector what a company with employees can do when they're checking temperatures and and keep control of their employees and what guidelines we follow through and when that's explained i think the understanding is a little bit different i get the concern i have a kid

021that's been out since january that was doing home learning before our remote learning and that wasn't great either so yeah i need i need my kids back in school but it's as ruth said it's not about what i want it's not a political game uh politics are out of it there are things as a school board there's a great word out there called mandates things are mandated of us and there are guidelines and there are people governing bodies ahead of us that we must follow and adhere to and follow the rules whether good or bad that's something that we must do i am concerned that we are going to lose a lot of kids i understand the administration is going to be doing their best to do the job i hope we're going to get

022some more information tonight but i think there's going to be struggling kids i volunteered in a in a classroom there are teachers here that can attest to that and there are kids bouncing off of the wall thank goodness for the tas that could take some kids out of the classroom so the teacher could focus keep those students occupied with some worksheets and i don't know how this how the parents are going to manage or do that at home so yes i want in-person learning but we have to make the decision based on the information that were provided i look forward to any new information that we hear tonight but i just again we need to understand we are on the same page we're not it's not an us against them we're all parents we all

023want the best for our kids and this is not forever it can't be forever so uh hopefully we'll we'll get through this tonight we're going to focus on on the school year and getting started and supporting all of our students the best we can thanks i'll take a crack at it um ali swanson so i am voting no tonight but i just i want to be clear why um over 70 of our parents want kids in classrooms and their voice has to be heard and we can say that we're taking all the politics out of it but we were elected by the people so i think i think that what i'm hearing in my conversations is that it's breaking down into two main points for me and those two points are instruction and safety um

024do we have a better plan for delivering instruction this fall yes we cannot i think we can all agree we cannot have a repeat of what happened in the fall and i appreciate all the hard work that's gone into it and i appreciate all the work that will go into it because we are going to ask more of our staff we just are but i also don't personally think that a kid's sitting in front of a computer for eight hours with a 40 minute lunch is going to result in authentic learning for a multitude of reasons and most of them start with me being a teacher i need to be in the classroom it starts with the importance of building relationships so while i understand what we're doing and why i continue to be disappointed

025with the ispe this the illinois state board the illinois department of public health the cdc they need a plan that can actually be implemented by schools so yeah our goal is to get these kids in school actually the you know great comments so far by everybody i think for the most part the board is in agreement on what needs to happen and what's happening why i think our votes are going to be a little bit different tonight for different reasons but i spent some time thinking about this and there's a few things i want to say you know there's there's the hard part of this right so um our administration has done an incredible job in creating not one not two but multiple solutions for us to return to the classroom they spent their summer

026their nights their weekends working on plans and what it's coming down to tonight that we're going to be talking about and looking at i don't know if we're going to comment more than this is to say the reality is as matt alluded to the seven of us sit here tonight because we were elected by the people that live in this community we were given the awesome power to make decisions to ensure that eighteen thousand kids can learn that's a great responsibility it's also a great burden on tonight's like on nights like tonight and yet the reality is is that this board of seven you will see is not going to be allowed to make a decision and the reason is and i was joking with someone but it's kind of true mommy and daddy are

027fighting and so the illinois department of public health has published a guideline that is in direct conflict with the cdc that is in direct conflict with the american council of pediatrics that is in direct contact with the kendall county health department and that is in conflict with some of their own employees and so i understand the the guidelines that we're going to look at it's impossible one kid shows up with a runny nose they are home quarantined for 14 days they have to have two negative tests and everybody that came into contact with them is also out it's in literally insanity i mean if you think about it it's it's that first day back by day two we'd have 100 kids out per building by day three it's 500 by day four it's i don't

028know that's how we got to where we are today then i have to take a step back and say yeah we are here for education and yet we get guidance that some sports are okay but yet they're not following the same exact precautions that have to be used in the classroom which i find ridiculous so trust me i i understand you know three and four wanted some in learning i think that's a realistic number i thought it might actually be a little higher than that but that's where we are um and and and we're gonna go forward from here and um i i also will be voting no but i i i hope and i pray because that's about what we have left that we're having a different conversation on october 1st and that's my

029only request for for the district is that we are while we're running the operations we need to be making that plan for what happens next thank you um i want to say that i agree with ruth and ellie that the um expectations for online learning in the fall are much different than they were in the spring a lot of people were very concerned and i think rightfully so i think that the way that it was rolled out in some ways was because no one knew what was going to happen with kovid and so they had to be careful because teachers were going home they didn't know how many people would get sick they didn't know how many parents would get sick and i think the load was made very light because that's what the thinking

030was but i know with the fall now we know that some people have been quarantining and doing what they're supposed to and so the expectations can be raised and it is realistic but i want to stress too that for the parents that are concerned about keeping up with that that i think that you can communicate with these teachers and with these other specialists that your children are seeing so that you can get what you need for your kids in a reasonable way and if you're not getting that you should definitely contact the board and let us know you need to reach out if you need help of any kind if your child is struggling emotionally and you don't feel like you can do what it takes to make that child safe or feel what they

031should feel reach out to the school district there are people that should be helping you if you need help with tech because i know tech can be hard for some people please reach out to the school district um parents am hoping that all the parents in the district are going to be as supportive as possible of their students and that means that sometimes as a parent you have to do things that are kind of annoying to you like getting them out of bed when they're teenagers or making their making your kids change out of their pajamas into their regular clothes and i hope everybody here knows i've been teaching for 30 years i've taught in five different districts i am not saying any of this lightly i'm not i thought about it and i've thought

032about it every which way um teachers you need to be ready to oh wait i want to go to one more kids the kids in our district know at least if they're third grade and above they know the technology i hope that they will use all the skills that they use for the other kinds of technology that our kids are on constantly and we all know that that's true we know that they're on technology constantly this is an opportunity for them to be on for an educational purpose so if they need help they should reach out to other people and they should help the little ones that they have contact with in their in their homes the kids that they have access to that maybe don't know the technology teachers i really hope that the

033teachers in our district are ready to deliver a strong model for the fall i really hope that they're ready to do everything that they can to show that this is not springtime this is not the same deal this is a different expectation and as a teacher i know that i'm ready no matter what happens to me and honestly i'm on the board here but i'm in yorkville and and yorkville has plans to go back in person um for me logistics and safety are the two things that go through my mind the most what brent says is true illness is inevitable illness is absolutely part of every day as a teacher that i've ever had and parsing the difference between symptoms that come from covid and symptoms that just come from something else is more than

034my pay grade i don't know why they're coughing or sneezing or tired i don't know why their headaches or their stomach aches or why they have to go to the bathroom a lot and sometimes i don't even know if they have a bathroom related issue because i can't see that and the idea of trying to keep something going that is continuous for children when all those things are kids are popping out having to go to the nurse they have to go home they're on for 10 days that is logistically very very difficult and you don't know when they're going to come back and the last thing i'll say is that discipline is something as a community and as a society that we need to decide we're going to engage in we need to engage in

035discipline for the sake of our health and we need to engage in discipline for the sake of our children's learning and the families that i've heard from who are determined to get their kids in education are very disciplined about it whether or not the school district is and that is beautiful and i thank those families very much i guess that just leaves me and i don't know that there's much i can add beyond what my fellow board members have said beyond the fact that i want nothing more than for my kid to start the year in person she also needs it and it's impossible it is not possible and that is something that i look in her face every day and regret because even sitting at this table we can't do for our kids what

036we want to do and it's heartbreaking but as a school board we have a code of conduct we have an oath of office we take when we take a seat at this table and number one in that code of conduct is that we'll represent all school district constituents honestly and equally and refused to resp surrender responsibilities to special interest or partisan political groups and what i keep thinking of when i see that number one thing that we are required to do is that we don't have the ability to always do that because of all the rest of the policies in here that require us to follow state board standards that require us to follow public health standards as brent said absolutely mom and dad are fighting we can't get a straight answer it's it's not

037available if it were the people at this table would have found it because we have spent months trying to get the right answers my hope is that we can understand that there's nothing there there's nothing that can be done that has not been done that we understand that hopefully if we can change the way we begin this year it can lead to us being able to be back in the classroom in some way safely sooner and that we can get our kids back where they need to be so i thank all of our administrators i'm appalled at the way the community has has targeted them with disrespectful ignorant comments threatening them that is not okay that is not the community i want to raise my child in and it is not okay i really appreciate

038all of the community members who have reached out respectfully to everyone at this table and to other administrators and i want to thank them for participating and for continuing to engage in educating themselves about the issues going on and looking for ways to help solve the real problems that we're facing right now so i appreciate that greatly dr sparlin we know that last spring we had given over control of this pandemic decision-making to you and you've graciously given it back to us for for these kinds of decisions because it's important that the people elected to represent your community get a chance to represent your community our community um so i appreciate you giving us that opportunity this evening and to all of our administrators that are here and not here thank you it's it's i

039was reinformed again tonight this is not the end this is the beginning of the work but they will be able to focus and provide something so much better than what we saw last spring that it won't be recognizable at least that's my strong hope that's that's pretty much what i have but thank you to everyone in the community that is struggling um we're struggling to we are all in this together so i thank you all for speaking up today okay now i gotta find my stuff again so item sick or wait attackers 5.2 yes 9.2 it's your super tennis report good evening board and i'd just like to start off by thanking you all for your heartfelt comments very well appreciated and as you all know on saturday i sent or said afternoon i sent

040a message to our community informing them that at this evening's meeting that under item 8.1 that i'd be recommending to the board of education that we approve to start the year with remote learning as i stated in that letter it was a very hard decision based on a variety of factors which we'll we'll address under item 7.2 under information this evening as you can imagine i've received a lot of input and as you all said you have as well much of that input that i've received has been affirmation that this recommendation uh didn't come as a surprise as many of the large districts in our area have either already made the decision or are making this decision this week as well i did also receive correspondence stating the opposite the reason i sent the letter

041on saturday was not only to be transparent with my recommendation but also to be informative in hopes that more people would be watching this evening's meeting because it's very under it's very important to understand the why and it's my hope for those who are watching this evening that they have a better understanding of the reasons behind the decision by the end of tonight's meeting so i'm going to save the rest of my comments for under informational items thank you can i have a motion item 6.0 approval of consent agenda can i have a motion to approve i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 6.1 minutes from the board of education meeting on july 13 2020 open and closed session and from the july 21st 2020 meeting open and closed session mrs

042moyer hi mr lightfoot hi miss morgan hi mrs swanson hi mrs croner hi mrs dorial aye mr bowman aye motion passes 7-0 item 7.1 item 7.1 is an informational technology proposal that outlines how our district can achieve one of their goals that we've been talking about for years and that is how to get to one-to-one technology uh mrs dalquist is going to start us off and then we'll hear from our director of technology uh mr oleson faith so thank you for the opportunity you may recall way back on march 16th before we'd heard a whole lot about covet 19 before we voted on the referendum before all of those things we made a presentation about the dire need to replace some of our chromebooks that were aging rapidly and we're going to kind of come

043in large waves of need both for the budget and for our students as cobin 19 progressed and we looked at what the fall would look like that even increased the need and the demand to have this conversation again with the covet guidelines our current number of devices they're saying that we should not share technology so even when we do become back in person we have a great need to increase that demand if we are to go to remote by choice or remote for all that also it puts a demand on our services as we would need to put computers in homes and in the hands of our students and staff and as we push those devices out it is much better to have a common device that we can all train and say here you

044press f1 and this happens and those types of things and we also can manage some of the software and applications that would put out to that so i'm going to turn it over to kyle and he's going to walk through some of the logistics of the proposal good evening i'm here tonight to discuss purchasing one-to-one chromebooks for grade levels uh five through twelve all students would get a chromebook in those grade levels we're also proposing to hire five additional technology staff members to help our teachers with the new adjustment of technology we're planning to implement a student depot to repair chromebooks at one or both of the high schools this would mean that any damaged devices would get sent there and it's a great opportunity for career training and on on top of that we're

045also planning to increase the bandwidth throughout the district to make sure that we're prepared for these devices to come back on premise this slide i'm going to discuss the device costs overall for the next four years i'm promote proposing a lease to own option so i wanted to really showcase what this whole program would look like in its entirety so we're going to focus on the first column on the 2021 school year so it roughly is going to cost 759 000 for the first payment of the four-year lease and then if you travel down that column you'll see that 140 000 worth of funds have already been set aside towards devices and then we're applying 615 000 from the digital equity grant to the total of our revenue of 755 000 towards the 759 000

046cost which leaves us at the district sorry at the district level of 3604 so now if we travel across the columns the lease payments still stay the same because it's the four year lease and now in the 21 22 school year you can see uh the top two payments would be a 50 technology fee for all students in the one to one program plus the device funds that we have set aside so now you can see the revenues would be about 571 000 leaving a total cost of this program of roughly 188 dollars moving forward this slide is going to showcase the difference between the 50 technology fee from all students and no technology fee at a cost to the district so the bottom column shows that uh in 2122 if we don't pass the

047fifty dollar technology fee the district would be paying six hundred and nineteen thousand one hundred sixty four dollars per year for the remaining three years so tech fees would increase the sustainability of this program by 431 thousand dollars per year it would end up saving the district 1.1 million 293 000 over the term of the four-year lease additional costs to sodium associated with this one-to-one program would be our off-site content filtering our increased bandwidth at the building levels for a cost of about fifty six thousand dollars the additional i.t staff members would cost 275 000 and then we would be installing or putting carts with additional chromebooks in each of the buildings to cover if devices come back uncharged or repairs loaners anything like that so that would additionally cost us four hundred and fourteen

048thousand dollars for this upcoming year the next slide will give a summary of the cost to the district for the upcoming year so 759 000 for the lease of devices minus our funds and grants leaves us with 3 604 the additional support of software staff and bandwidth comes in at 414 000 bringing us to 418 000 total our current budget for the year we had set aside 720 000 so if we subtract the 418 we have a surplus of 301 thousand dollars still as a part of this program our timeline is going to hopefully be to place the order for chromebooks we would like to start hiring technology staff in august and september so that way we can get them trained now to help our teachers accept delivery in september october this is really an

049estimate at this point it depends on when we submit our order to find out when we can actually accept deliveries we would distribute devices hopefully in november december and then implement the student depot in november december as well so tonight i'm here to seek approval to purchase the student devices to hire five additional technology staff members and then implement a 50 technology fee for all students in grade levels 5 through 12. i'm going to ask the first question just to clarify that's a technology fee not beginning this year the following year yep for the 21-22 school year i have only two questions for you one had you factored in i'm assuming that our students that are able to take advantage of the fee waiver for income will also be exempt from the technology fee to

050the student depot we just heard that we can't share devices are we able to have students working on other devices for student depot that is something we'll look into to make sure that we follow all the safety protocols if it needs to be done by staff members we can definitely handle that to start out the program thank you i have a question kyle um we faith had presented about using all the devices that are available at the school sites um is that and factored into this um cost and and need if we take all the devices that we have that work at the different schools and we use all of those we still need this yes we have lots of chromebooks that are out almost at the end of their life the batteries are not

051charging things are not working well so we'll be pushing those you know out but we're already seeing from the ones that we pushed out to the springs sometimes the batteries those they're just not at their they're at the end of their lives but we're trying to use everything that we already have correct the second thing is when will you know about the grant that was listed up there it could be any day that we would find out it might be as long as a month what we plan to do if that and it's it's a grant that we really should qualify for it's not like a competitive type of a piece but if we don't we did talk about it our board meeting back in june about taking back some of the elementary social studies

052curriculum materials that we needed to pilot and using that money for the purchase of devices and tonight when we vote will we be voting based on the idea that we will get the grant but that something will change if we don't get the grant it will be that based on the grant else using the as we discussed at the june retreat using the social studies curriculum funding studies is the backup money because this is not a year when they will be able to probably adequately pilot a social studies curriculum so we don't want to just have money sitting there that can be utilized and who gives the grant who issues the grant it's a federal technology equity grant okay i have a question that goes back to what you said a little bit right before

053he spoke you said you talked about managing software and applications and we are one-to-one in my district um and we have chromebooks and there's some concern that some of the classes especially like the arts and the really anything with software there's some software that won't run on chromebooks so either you have to get a different type of software for that class or you my hope is that we would not tell them they need a new just pick a new platform because i don't think that's fair to staff right um especially if some of these things are being used in the real world so i guess my my concern is what are we doing is there some kind of patch where when these kids take these courses that we can load it onto those chromebooks for

054a certain amount of time whether it's a license or and has that been factored into the cost that hasn't been factored into the cost but i will say that ron in the technology department his main primary role is to deal with applications and make sure that we're identifying that and we're polling the teachers and addressing these concerns moving forward so supporting the teachers correct right so like i just wanted courses that would need additional modifications or even possibly a different device during those times but they're very small in number and we would be addressing that okay like sometime in the near future yes and then i had another question on the chromebook hearts i put a big x through mine and i will tell you why because we had carts in classrooms in some classrooms

055and kids would get the computer out and last year we switched to you come with your computer charged and you bring your own cord and you are responsible for it and now we have a ton of carts sitting around the building so before we go out and buy a new bunch of carts i want to first make sure that we've exhausted all efforts and you're new so there's a cute little district right to the you know that way yeah with it with a lot of carts hanging around hallways that they may be able to sell for a better price than what 84 000 is charging you yeah so i would just recommend that we exhaust all other efforts and talk to you know i mean we're a bigger district than you used to which i

056can appreciate but like we have a lot of things that happen with a lot of other districts around here and then my last one was the hiring of five additional staff so i was gonna question why you needed five additional staff but you said it was for training and and training on the software right so my question would be we're going to have a lot of tas we're going to have a lot of dean's assistants we're going to have a lot of other people that are in our buildings right now that right now are wondering am i going to have a job right so i would repurpose those people before and and retrain them before i would want to hire somebody else and that you know for what it's worth and you know like these

057are people who in our district our librarians do it do a lot of the stuff and we do have tech people but before we go out and hire five new staff members i would hope that we're utilizing what we have right now on that same vein do you anticipate the five additional tech staff would that be an ongoing is would that be an ongoing um expense an annual expense or is this um to really get us off the ground um in this you know first year year and a half that we're we're working towards this or i would personally see that as an ongoing expense when we're adding this number of devices i would see those employees as necessary to continue this and make this program thrive throughout the district as much as possible and

058then this is um you know so we were talking about you know one to one for you know k or i'm sorry fifth through twelfth um as we are looking at um you know providing um support giving students uh that are younger devices for remote learning possibilities um that would just be from our our current inventory and there would not be a fee associated with that we're not looking to implement a fee at kindergarten through fourth grade and then one of the things that will happen for our devices that aren't nearing the end of their life because we have some of those at the junior high in high school too as we get back to that and we purchase those for our junior high and high school students those devices that are now at the

059junior high in the high school when we get them back and they're not distributed to people's homes and things and we've cleaned them and we've done all of that they can then come to our elementary schools to help with the student-to-device ratio at our elementary schools can i ask this too where'd the number five come from the number five yeah like did we have i did we have tech tickets that would support work for five individuals or are we just so some of it and and all that kyle tuckes is definitely more expertise in that but i've gone through with other districts of when you make a large technology purchase and how they have to be touched distributed and then a lot of our staff are going to need training and knowing how to do

060that and have people on hand at the buildings and certainly we want to train our instructional coaches or we mentioned our librarians i think we've had a lot of success in other places of using students to do that but until you get that up and running it takes quite a bit of staff to do that i could see us either diminishing the five at a later time or changing their role to be a lot of what we would need to do and sound instruction with technology and we haven't utilized our technology department to do a whole lot of that piece of using them to really boost instruction and talk about where we want to go with instruction and how technology helps us get there but that is a great need here and we need that

061expertise and that ongoing side-by-side training for our staff to have that happen and that was something that we began discussions um you know in our teaching and learning committee knowing that there were a lot more possibilities out there and that we were probably going down this path towards more um curriculum and resources online and sort of the future and uh and so you know outside of these circumstances i know it's it is something that we've obviously been talking about for some time and knowing that's a path that we wanted to explore a bit more so um i did have a question i was a little con i was on the total cost for 2021 slide you had listed our current budget as 720 000 and probably just not reading reading it correctly but and then

062but on the other side we say that our funds annually including this year was a hundred and forty thousand so what where what's that 720 referencing so the 700 the funds that are there that are 140 are some of the typical funding that comes just about technology that is just from that that's kind of outside the district budget that we write for and have that granted the 720 000 is what we have within our district budget that we were putting toward the acquisition of devices to keep up with the dilemma and the scenario we discussed back in march okay thank you i just want to say i love the idea of having the student how do we phrase that sorry the depot the student depot yeah i actually was talking with my brother-in-law the other

063day who is in texas in a very large school district and that he was telling me that's something that they have in their school district and it runs very well and it's a great opportunity for students to gain technology experience that can help them to get a job a great job and even some certifications like some technology certifications i don't know all the words for those things but i think that's obviously that's maybe not something that's going to happen starting right now this fall but in the future i think that's going to be a great opportunity for our students i just wanted to get some clarification on these dates so i'm sure that there are people who are listening and watching right now who are wondering like why in the heck is it gonna accept

064delivery in september and october um and i just you had explained that everybody is buying computers right now for their schools and so it's just a matter of there's a delay in order processing because there's such a high demand and then also i think people are going to wonder why why are we not then distributing until november december and can you just kind of explain the process of what like how these devices come to us and what you're going to need to do before we can distribute them yes so we're going to have to unpackage the devices import all of these assets into our inventory system to make sure that we're keeping track and can identify purchase cycles before we can start distributing them out to staff and students we are currently already planning how

065the curbside pickup and all of the distribution models we're taking the time that we have from ordering the devices to getting the devices to hopefully speed up our timelines as much as possible are we gonna have to like power everything up and download software and stuff onto them or will it already come that way yep it'll already come that way ready for us and obviously if you get that done sooner this would speed up you're not looking to wait until november december just for the principal 100 as soon as we are ready we will announce that and start doing pickups have you checked amazon i hear prime's got one day delivery sometimes we'll check into that mr olenson thank you for the presentation thank you for answering my questions earlier today a couple of things

066here i notice that we're using both the word um purchase and the word lease could you clarify that a little bit yeah so uh we're purchasing we're leasing to own it's different than how you would look at a car lease where you turn over any sort of asset at the end of this this is almost more like a mortgage if you look at it that way it is for equal payments to own the device outright by the district at the end of that right and so one i think we kind of hit on it tonight and i know you you you did for me but should we get the i'm trying to look at the big picture here the four years worth um should we anticipate that that that budget of just over seven hundred

067thousand dollars that we currently have as a light eye line item is we're going to continue that for the next four years so we're not really looking at spending this incremental amount of dollars above and beyond what our budget is already calling for does that make sense the way i'm asking that question it's already budgeted for is that the short version yeah yes and if you think about it you guys are more eloquent than me tonight um and then i had i had just a broader question because i i and i think a couple of us have the same question is you know we're we know the district owns a certain number of chromebooks already and we're going to one to one we understand that concept how many are we talking about a hundred percent

068new chromebooks for the two cohorts of five plus junior high and then high school or are we talking about twenty percent of the existing chromebooks in those two buildings plus this order we have our end-of-life devices percentage is so high that we are addressing both of the cohorts now because by next year we would be potentially back here trying to implement a similar program in the lower grade levels if we were to do percentages to start the program and then one last question um in in your experience uh in other districts and and working with your counterparts in other districts uh personally i've seen districts where you know freshman year you're given a computer and you're told that this is it don't break it or you know you're gonna have you're responsible for it and

069then the the student keeps that for a certain number of years i'm assuming this is a similar model we're just trying to make things a little bit easier by charging a technology fee on an annual basis instead of a lump sum up front is that correct correct the the technology fee makes this a sustainable program so we can project our incomes and our expenses to make sure that we can make this a program that lasts for more than just the four-year lease and then let me ask the fun question which is you know we i'm sure you're aware we have very active parent organizations at all levels of the district and if those organizations are able or we do internally with our own fundraisers able to add money or equipment is that something that we

070can do to defer some of these costs further that's something that we can definitely look into or we can look into how software could help with curriculum and other alternatives you know to help with the one-to-one programmer thank you so i'm looking at a lot of questions that relate to how other districts have implemented policies on technology use i presume that we'll start looking at some of these policies through our policy and legislative committee as well as we get these developed over the next few months i think that this would be a good time to kind of look at what that needs to look like for for the future this is this is a very different way of looking at technology than what we've had before for policies so hopefully you guys are able to

071figure out how you can organize some time to discuss that with your committees as well we can and i still have a question to ask yeah we're trying to transition out um and just for clarification for those listening and as i'm looking at it this timeline really doesn't come into play or in relevance to our remote learning program so this may piggyback more on a 7.2 question as we talk about end-of-life devices and things in dire need since we're not going to have these hopefully we're coming out of e-learning by the time you're delivering these that's my biggest hope that it's not curbside we're delivering those in person in the classroom the inventory of sustainable living breathing no not breathing but battery battery life chromebooks power cords we're we're good to go on what we

072anticipate the request to be for e-learning starting in a few weeks based on the need and demand that we had in the spring yes if there is a whole lot of new need that we didn't somehow people were saying that they didn't um you know that they need now that they didn't before we still have a bank of them here but that isn't an endless supply so i don't know how to predict i always try to under promise and over deliver and we're still calculating and getting track of how many students and staff need that but we certainly have a lot at the buildings and met that need last spring so i would definitely recommend that we not go by last springs numbers as the requirements for devices is different because the instruction needs are

073different and i know that with all the school buildings we've had several buildings we've pulled from already but that we've had several buildings we haven't touched yet so i'm assuming that of course you would look at those and look to provide the technology as soon as possible to the people who need it first and internet access as well and kyle and his department have sent out a survey to families to talk about bandwidth at home and those pieces because sending a chromebook home where you do not have internet access is pretty pointless does that request going to go through the building or the district i'm sorry man the building goes i'll read the request for the device as we move forward is that going to go through the building it comes through the district can

074we have can we move that technology survey because it's it's buried pretty deep at the moment can we move that a little bit higher on our website so that families can let you know as soon as possible if they're going to need it that way you have more time to plan and if you happen to get a few in trickling in earlier we can make sure we can provide for the start of the year we also like my big concern is that we want to do two cohorts worth of chromebooks at once so in four years what's going to happen you're going to have to do another big large like why i technology the technology fee he said would keep up with the cycle to make itself all right i think we're going to have

075a big hit can i clarify one thing on the seeking approval slide what you're actually seeking approval for is to lease the student devices so i just want to clarify that so because you'll be least to own though at least to own right but that you're we're entering the lease just so that it's clear instead of purchasing out right yes yes so it's really a zero interest financing more than a lease okay have we put out there i know that the technology survey went out um i've seen a lot of comments and i might have dismissed some things but um that people are ready to turn some of their devices in because they have made arrangements at home has that gone out how to how to turn their how to turn their devices if they

076have a district one in it has but it sounds like we need to state that again it sounds like we need an uh well i mean for real it's a very different game than the spring so i don't think that we can count on any information we had from the spring is reliable for this year because it's so different so i definitely would be looking to see a district-wide communication go out in by the end of the week for sure that says what to do if you have a school device what to do if you need a school device what to do if you need internet access so that it's big and bold and it's most accessible to the people that are least able to access our website because they don't have devices and internet

077and make sure that we have reached out in every way we can other than electronically thanks anybody else okay item 7.2 josh do we have the other presentation ready oh okay item 7.2 is an informational presentation that highlights the updates that we've received since the last board meeting on july 21st as well as some of our five-year projections this this slide that you see up there now over the past week we've as i just said we've received many different new guidelines from a variety of organizations new state guidelines were issued on july 23rd for the from the illinois state board of education as we mentioned earlier there's conflicting information from the illinois department of public health and the cdc the center of disease control that we will be addressing this evening we're also keeping a

078close eye on the continual increase in the positivity rate of cover 19 in the north central region which is kendall which where kendall county is located along with the increasing positivity rates in the regions boarding our hours we have some results from the union survey that was sent out to the teachers we have a more clearer picture of how many substitutes are planning to return for the upcoming year and updated cost for our in-person uh and remote by choice option along with our five-year with our five-year projections all right slide three this slide highlights the language that the illinois state board of education from the it highlights language from the illinois state board of education from june 23rd to their most recent guidance on july 23rd and as you can see on june 23rd isb

079strongly encouraged schools and districts to provide in-person instruction for all students especially those under the age of 13. on july 23rd the rhetoric changes a bit while both the illinois state board of education isb and illinois department of public health idph agree that in person is the goal it may not be safe or feasible to fully uh resume input in person learning so as you can see the tenor of isb and idph has changed as the guidance has changed and that's also understandable in june when the guidance was came out the covet positivity rates were at their lowest and there were high hopes and expectations of returning to in-person learning now in august the positivity rates are climbing and both organizations understand that what they put out and in june is a little bit different

080for august in the new guidance from isb they have also now recommended that remote learning have 2.5 hours of synchronous instruction which our current remote by choice plan does not have it's important to note though in june and early july when we did our survey and remote choice was it was not mandated at the time and but we felt at that time it was important to include that piece um and as i just mentioned the new guidance requires remote to be an option uh as well as a recommendation for that 2.5 2.5 hours of synchronous time the next slide depicts the data of the students and parents that made their selection of the two learning options so we had 12 798 parents and families that made the selection before the deadline we've had lots of

081people that have made it since then as you look at the very first row that's the number of students selecting remote by choice 2056 at elementary 1052 at junior high and 1120 at the high school level the next row is just the percentage of those students that actually did complete the selection before the deadline the bottom row is of the entire students that were enrolled and what that percentage chose the remote by choice it is important to note that after we had created our remote learning options and our described it to our parents on july 23rd the state said now remote learning by choice must have two and a half hours of synchronous instruction so this changes the impact of what is available for our students and families to even choose from it's also probably

082important to note that i got lots and lots of emails i'm sure that you all did too that people really are saying that they wanted to know and wanted to vote for remote for all and it was not an option that we had given them at this time there are certainly thousands of others that made the choice and like some of the choices that were there the fact is that those choices now are not available due to the new requirements from the state so this is a we did all of the data to look and see what it would look like to remove teachers to do the remote learning by choice what that looks like at the elementary level is we would need 73 teachers if we were to do the remote by choice 24

083teachers but that was the ingenuity option which is no longer an option and then also at the high school those 40 teachers just wanted to make the board on the community aware that we had done the numbers and looked at what that impact would be and i want to remind all that that isn't how we would lower class size because example at the elementary level i would take those 73 teachers and have them teach remote by choice and then i would have to combine all the other remaining in-person classrooms to have teachers and class sizes that would be more what we would usually have in person during regular times this also is the results our teacher union sent out a survey on 77 percent of the teachers who took the survey and those are the

084raw numbers uh we're requesting at that time for the district to go to remote learning for all i also wanted to talk about the number of staff taking leaves or wanting telework we we last talked we had about 170 staff members that were interested in that we had 72 that completed it the paperwork that was necessary to do that by the deadline and then we also have 25 staff that are asking for a leave of absence completely so those would be staff a lot of impact on staff available to do our teaching of our students i asked human resources to look to check on our substitute pool to see how many of our current substitute teacher our subs would be interested or still willing to come back to the school district uh in person for

085this year um as you can see as of july 30th we have received feedback from 303 of our 409 substitutes about their intent to return and as you can see from the information there 221 confirmed return 9 responded as undecided and 99 declined to return so at this time we have confirmation from a little more than 50 percent uh that they plan on returning for the fall you know during the regular school year um that pool 409 many times doesn't cover the number of absences that we have on a regular on a regular day you know during the year and to only have confirmation of half at this time definitely raises a concern for us in regards to being able to fill staff absences during the year i'm theresa comedis director of communications and public

086relations and i am here tonight to share with you some of the new and conflicting information that we've received from a number of health authorities i'll start by introducing the idea of where we get our information from so the school district looks to the kendall county health department as our primary source of information and in turn they look to idph for their guidance they are feeling the same level of frustration that we are in getting conflicting information getting changing information not being able to put our finger directly on how we could create a flow chart how we could create scenarios and know exactly what we would need to do to keep our students and staff safe and be in compliance with all of these new directions that we've received over the last week so when

087i came to you at our last board meeting we had just come out of a meeting with our regional office of education and a number of other superintendents in the area along with the health department and we were told about a conversation that the health departments had been having with the state in regards to potential changes coming down the pike things that maybe would make doing doing the quarantine and isolation requirements and tracing and all those kind of things in a school environment possible because as many of you have mentioned this evening and as we walk through some of this you'll see that many of this is nearly impossible unfortunately those are still only conversations they keep alluding to the health department that there will be additional faqs or guidance issued by idph but to

088this point we do not yet have any so that being said we are going back to our original more conservative guidance that was issued by idph it's the only thing that we can point back to in writing and so the health department has told us and given us those resources and we've tried to map that out and we'll share that with you this evening so i've pulled a couple of examples for you on what some of this conflicting guidance is cdc issued their information just shortly after isbe released the information july 23rd the cdc as some of you have mentioned is one source of information and as many people spoke this evening we all are citing different sources of information and they're all correct but unfortunately many are in opposing positions as to what we

089should or shouldn't do at this point one example of this cdc is saying that they're not recommending universal symptoms screening at the school levels this is primarily because young people often present asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic at school so the feasibility of conducting those kind of screenings and what ultimately we would catch is pretty low however the isbn idph guidance instructs us that we must conduct those temperature temperature and screening symptom screenings daily for every student staff member and visitor entering our building and if we opt to do the self-certification it would also be a daily check occurring at home and then being reported back to the school so a huge project we'll walk through that in a little bit another example is the exclusionary measures so again in this case cdc is coming out and recognizing

090that students have sickness in school we all know that we have policies around fevers and vomiting and other things in the school system and they're saying that if if someone in school has one of those illnesses that we should um be looking to our existing policies for those sicknesses and not necessarily looking at every single potential covid symptom as a long-term student absence however in direct conflict with that is the isbidph guidance which is saying that someone who either tests positive or shows any sign or any symptom of the illness needs to stay home and not just stay home but they're home for 10 days from that date that the symptom appears and when they come back they have to be fever-free for 24 hours without the use of medication this document is referred to

091as the crosswalk document this is issued by the illinois department of public health and was provided to us by kendall county health department it was last updated on july 20th to include a couple small things that were issued in the last round of updates so if we start on this left side of cases right off the bat you'll notice this is where we get stuck and trying to define what is a case when you look at the difference between isb idph and cdc they use different terminology like someone who is symptomatic someone who's a probable case someone who is suspected of having covet and they all define different things and what we're supposed to consider a case in order to follow through these guidelines so for for example here we'll just walk through a case

092in saying that we know that someone is positive so if an individual is positive for covid there's a timeline shared in the second section here this is the time-based strategy for release from isolation so from the date of onset of symptoms so a student becomes ill staff member becomes ill they would need to quarantine for 10 days and when they come back out of that quarantine they also have to be feeling well and be without a fever without those fever-reducing medications for at least 24 hours before they could be released from that isolation or a test based strategy which allows that isolation to come to end sooner would require two negative covid tests in a row 24 hours apart from each other at this point this is not the recommended strategy availability cost of the

093testing as well as the time frame associated with getting those tests versus waiting the 10 days in most cases the isolation strategy is what is being recommended so if we go to the right side the close contacts this is where we begin that tracing so someone who has been in contact with someone who has covet that is a close contact a close contact is defined by anyone that was in contact with a positive person for at least 15 minutes within six feet beginning two days prior to the symptom onset or the positive test so if we have someone who has close contact with someone who has covid but they're not going to be in contact with them any longer so a co-worker classmate someone that you can quarantine away from you would be required to

094quarantine for 14 days from the last date of contact if you have close contact with someone that you live with but you could avoid further close contact which means you're not sharing a restroom you're not sharing a kitchen you're actually able to be away from that person then again it that that time clock could start as soon as you um discontinue that close contact but when we talk about siblings parents that could be staff members spouses someone that's living in the same household this clock on the quarantine could be significantly delayed before it starts so if someone has a known case in a household their 10-day quarantine starts that first day that they're symptomatic or they get that positive test if you're going to have continued interaction and sharing the living quarters with somebody who

095has coveted your 14 day quarantine can't can't start until their 10 days ends the idea is that you have to wait till they're done being potentially contagious to you and then you have your 14 days to wait out to see if you become symptomatic so as we talk about potential close contacts and not available uh idph further illustrates in their definition uh that of their they released on july 20th that again anyone who has close contact with someone who has coveted would quarantine for 14 days from that last state of contact and it's defined within six feet at least 15 minutes two days before the symptom onset so if somebody is a positive case and not experiencing symptoms it would be two days prior to when that specimen was collected for the test or two

096days prior to the time that the patient became symptomatic when we talk about covid symptoms it's important to know that this is a pretty exhausting list it's fever of 100.4 or greater chills cough shortness of breath difficulty breathing fatigue muscle or body aches headache new loss of taste or smell sore throat congestion or runny nose nausea or vomiting and diarrhea as we look at the population of students that come down to the nurse's office on a daily basis in our student population it's a significant number of individuals that normally would have perhaps received a quick once over from a nurse but encouraged to go back to class for something very minor maybe not even visit the nurse those now would automatically be sent home would be subject to that 10-day isolation period so we'll walk

097through this as a scenario so we're going to use mary who's a high school student we're going to say that she developed a fever though we could replace that with developed a headache muscle aches congestion any other things we just talked about while she was at school and this was on a wednesday she was sent to the nurse since she is sick she'll be sent home she'll first have to be isolated in the school environment from all the other students while the evaluation is happening and while we're waiting for the parents to arrive to take her home once she's sent home she'll be asked quarantined for 10 days and be fever-free until she returns unless she's released with that two negative covid test 24 hours apart that testing strategy so for this case we'll say

098she's positive though we don't yet know if that could also include probable or suspected cases which might mean just symptomatic and no actual clinical test but if she's positive any one of her close contacts within six feet for 15 minutes or longer will have to quarantine for 14 days however that clock started two days prior so now we have to look back at where mary was on monday and tuesday before she became sick on wednesday if any one of the individuals within her closed contacts become symptomatic and they are now a case then again we would restart this at the top and trace back all of their contacts and anyone that potentially would be impacted in a quarantine as we think about this from what it could look like for a high school student she

099would have attended seven classes while she might be eating lunch with a smaller group there could be up to 50 people in that room she may have rode a bus with 49 other individuals this could require hundreds of students to quarantine from one patient or one student excuse me experiencing something as mild as a runny nose headache fatigue while in school addition to those quarantine requirements there is also a daily symptom screening requirement that is spelled out in the isb guidelines this requires that schools must conduct this daily temperature and symptom screening or require a daily self-certification and verification for all staff students and visitors prior to entering the school building what this looks like is that somebody has to verify that they are not experiencing any of those 11 coveted symptoms that we discussed

100earlier that they don't have the presence of a fever greater than 100.4 degrees fahrenheit and they haven't been exposed to anyone who has cova they're not caring for anyone who has it they haven't traveled to any of the areas out of the country that are hot spots for covid they have to verify all these things on a daily basis so the guidelines spell out that these symptom and temperature checks should be done prior to a student boarding a bus so what that means is we would be requiring all parents to self-certify that they have in fact checked their students temperature that they have done the symptom screening prior to sending their student to the bus prior to those students being dropped off at school each day or else the school needs to conduct that symptom

101and temperature check according to the guidelines prior to boarding a bus at minimum before they enter the school building the self-certification would likely be an electronic form or an app that would have to be completed for every student every day if the student does not have that self-certification done it's the school's responsibility to pull that student in and do that symptom and temperature check for those students in a district our size that could be hundreds if not thousands of students on a daily basis that would be pulling away from potential instruction time in order to conduct these symptoms we did go as far as trying to get creative with getting around some of these um requirements and trying to allow for some of our older students at the junior higher high school level to potentially

102certify upon arrival that they're well and that they coming in this building means that you aren't experiencing x y and z to try to move this along and make this work in the school building we were advised by the general counsel at isbe that in fact only parents or students over the age of 18 or emancipated minors would be allowed to do the certification so we cannot have the students certifying their wellness upon arrival i'm going to talk quick about the covid rates i just wanted to let you know that today there was 1298 new known cases in illinois and 10 new deaths today the governor did announce this morning that yesterday there were four counties in the state that were in the warning level that as of today there are now 11 counties that

103are in a warning level that means that they have two or more risk indicators that have gone up in illinois we have infections 7526 fatalities we are part of region 2 there are 11 regions in the state we are part of a region with a couple of counties that are experiencing some significant rises in cases and positivity rates when we look at our region positivity rates are measured daily and if we look back for approximately a month the positivity rate in late june was 2.6 the last published rate july 27 was 4.3 it's important to note that especially at the beginning as we first experienced the covid surge there was a lot of talk about how it wasn't impacting younger people this is part of the current surge that we're seeing in cases if you

104look at kendall county's numbers of all positive cases in kendall county are in persons under the age of 40. and i added all the way up to the age 49 if you take into account anyone under the age of 50 68 of the cases in kendall county are in persons 49 years old and younger so if you look at our age of our students and our teaching staff and our staff that are in our buildings there could be some potential impact both for the people impacted by covid and those around them and all of the quarantine requirements i'm excuse me christy tyler chief financial officer and i'm going to talk about uh the additional costs that the potential additional cost or estimated additional costs the district would incur for one semester of in-person instruction so

105first faith mentioned that we would need additional certified staff additional teachers to keep class sizes down at our current levels and that would be about 280 000 the cost of sanitizer for a semester that's hand sanitizer and disinfecting our disinfectant protocol for desks and things like that comes to just under five hundred thousand dollars for a semester the substitutes that number is uh pulled from fiscal year 19 because that's our last full year of school that we have data from that is one semester and that's 800 000 however we would expect that to increase additional equipment needs this is not a semester cost this is a one-time cost some of that additional equipment are serving carts to distribute food or meals at different points in the buildings air purifiers for the abandoned choir rooms things

106like that additional health aids that is just for what theresa just went over just that's for conducting that those screenings to make sure that everyone has who has self-certified to check them off and then to pull the children out who have not self-certified before they got to school as well as to help with additional sicknesses or different additional students who will be sent to the nurse just because of all those symptoms that she listed the custodial staff would need to increase because just of all the sanitization that needs to be done after every class leaves we would try to sanitize as much as we could as in addition to lunches and things like that so we would estimate that to be about 43 additional staff at a million dollars for a semester transportation that is

107the net the net between the expenses incurred for transportation and then what we receive from the transportation reimbursement claim other staff those would be staff like crossing guards playground supervisors things like that that would not be needed if we were in a remote situation utilities that is our estimated savings if we are not running our hvac equipment at 100 capacity for one semester classroom supplies those would be the reduction in what we would normally purchase for classroom materials copies things like that and then finally ppe supplies and that is primarily for our nursing staff and our health aides as they require additional ppe beyond just a face mask or face covering and so that grand total comes to just about 4.7 million and again that's for one semester can i ask a question here sure

108so miss tyler i know we talked about this uh the other day um you know the part i'm still struggling with is you know we i get it we talk about utilities being an actual savings over what we would do if we had the buildings open but if kovid was gone and we were in the buildings and we'd be spending that money so i i guess my my comment here is if someone's looking at this quickly and we're adding this up and we're saying oh oh my goodness 4.7 million dollars well some of that was already budgeted for correct it is budgeted for correct and and i would say the same thing about the substitutes if we were if code was gone and we were 100 in the classrooms we have a substantial budget for

109substitutes because of the size of our teaching staff correct that is correct some of the additional things that are covid related are the sanitizing disinfectant those kinds of things custodial staff and health aides those are probably primarily due to covid all right so if i can make a recommendation here it's going to be that it would be nice to see the actual additional cost above budget that is required right and and i i mentioned this before i'll mention it now when we get to the point where when we can go back into the classrooms and and even if covet is um pretty much gone i think we're still going to have requirements on sanitation ppe etc and so my point is we need to be making plans now for finding the money if it's above

110and beyond the budget because hopefully the disease goes away or is better maintained but we're still going to have increased operational costs this year and we can't plan on 4 million dollars in cuts but we need to know what what does that number really look like yes you're correct that covet is going to cause additional strains to our budget this year have you begun looking at what those are going to be yes well so the budget you'll be presented with a tentative budget during this month actually because you'll be asked to adapt the budget by law by the end of september i understand but for the purposes of this slide this doesn't look like an accurate number from what i'm hearing from you so i'm a little concerned that that we're not getting an accurate

111number these are based off of what i presented for the remote was it the remote for all right the remote for all remember i presented those as monthly and uh annual so these are taken those costs are these take these costs are taken from that information so these would be some of these would be savings if you will if we went to remote first semester as long as we went for the entire semester which is not guaranteed so that's not necessarily this this whole thing isn't necessarily relevant and i would like to say that i'm sorry i'm sorry we can't have public comment during open session except during public comment so last time we presented them by monthly and this time we just presented them as a semester so but i'm not sure we'll we'll

112have to clarify further once we're done here because the numbers that i'm seeing from this are are not what you just said would be the financial impact on our budget so i think what we're looking for is that and i understand that there's a general timeline but we also understand that for making decisions based on money you might need to speed that timeline up i would i would drill it down even simpler so the ones that are directly related to the conversation the sanitization and 43 extra custodians so that's about 1.5 million do we have an extra 1.5 million in this budget to cover 1.5 million plus the 280 uh additional certified staff did we have the 1.5 now million dollar surplus i mean i i don't need yes i i get the big picture

113but look at two line items we we don't have it and then and i would like to clarify something that i asked about when you presented this um is there anything up here that counts for the liability of even one person getting actually sick or dying there's nothing for the cost of that and then i don't know mr miller if you can repeat the numbers you gave us as far as if a staff member's out for a day versus if staff members hospitalized versus if a staff member is in icu i guess what frustrates me about this is that brent and i went and sat with administration through this and went through this and asked a couple of questions and pretty much said what everybody here is saying that we just want to see the

114numbers for for covid and you know like a lot of this stuff is still up there like classroom supplies we're gonna we're gonna if we were in class we would need subs we would need because either way we need more custodians either way we have transportation you're calling it a savings but you put it up here as not a savings so i understand what you're what you're saying it's a savings from whatever it is but like on for my own personal i just sat through a two and a half hour meeting where i made a bunch of suggestions with my colleague here and none of it was taken into consideration so that's frustrating for me so i think we have some clear direction on what kind of numbers we're looking for from you yeah going

115forward thanks but can i so but is she expected to and so i'm just wondering is the best way to get at that by looking at a month to month like like she had presented a month to month because we don't know when we're going to be coming back so we could say give me until august october 1st and that but that's a moving target so are we looking at a month-to-month kind of number so that if we go back in october or if we go back in december at all we're looking for the numbers the the budget when we budget for a year it's usually budgeted month to month so we're not looking just for those numbers we're looking for the total budget which we have coming up in september but we're looking for

116that a little bit sooner so that we can understand the ramifications in a little bit more thorough away but i think also what heather's saying makes sense is that is if you have a monthly count on what it is then you can figure that if we go back a month earlier this will all change because this is by semester right yeah that that but that as part of the overall budget and you know yeah i i certainly think that's important to look at and good to look at i i'm sort of with matt and i um i'm adding up two and a half million and i know that that's not i know that's an assumption of semester and i know we're kind of discussing what's the savings and versus what's this and that the other

117thing but i'm looking at about two and a half million and i don't so i mean i'm not so concerned about the i i'm concerned about the final numbers and concerned that we're being fiscally responsible um to me though can i get my answer from kenneth miller i'm not sure if he's allowed if that's a open or closed session item that's is it open he said he said it in open session last time that's why it took me a second lori but i remember him saying it out here absolutely and when our benefit consultants need a microphone when we had a strategy session with our benefit consultants they informed us that their actuaries have projected that it is approximately four hundred fifty dollars in medical claims for every mildly symptomatic infection of covid19 approximately one

118thousand two hundred and twenty five dollars for every moderately symptomatic infection of coven 19 approximately 35 000 dollars for every inpatient hospitalization due to a severe infection of covet 19 and approximately 72 thousand dollars for every intensive care unit hospitalization that occurs due to covet 19. okay i just wanted to bring that up again so basically the the long and short of this slide and then we can go ahead and move on i'm sure is that this is going to be above and beyond a far more expensive year than a typical year that is correct yes and so one of the reasons why we do this in a semester is because to put them into the five-year projections five-year projections obviously based on an entire year so this is the five-year projector projections if we

119had one semester of in-school and remote by choice so some students would attend school some would be remote by choice and if you look in the yell the first yellow surplus deficit column you'll see that in fiscal year 21 including all of those items we just listed that would be an 8 million dollar deficit for fiscal year 21. that would bring our fund balance down to 9.3 million at the end of 21 so june 30th of 21 and then if you follow that bottom yellow acro all the way across to fiscal year 25 and i know it's hard to see up there uh we're basically bankrupt at with 94 in the bank which is not even a day's worth of expenses moving on to five year projections if we went one semester remote for all

120that brings our deficit expected deficit in fiscal year 21 to 3 point just under 3.3 million bringing our fund balance at the end of june 30th 2021 to 14.1 million and bring that then across to fiscal year 25 is just under 5 million or about a week's worth of fund balance christy can i just have you clarify that the reason for the the massive drop particularly thank you i'm sorry um the reason we are will would be in a deficit situation in fiscal year 21 is because the state has only has in their budget has allocated flat funding for evidence-based funding the model the evidence-based funding the act itself indicates that the state would increase that funding level by 350 million dollars every year but because the state is experiencing financial strains just like just

121school districts and villages and things all across illinois they were only able to commit flat funding for their in the state budget for evidence-based funding we have budgeted or projected a 4.3 million dollar increase in our evidence-based funding for fiscal year 21. we that will not we will not receive that we will receive what we um basically what we got last year so that that alone would be a hit to our budget um even in um even if we didn't have additional sanitization custodial or staff needs so christy can you just clarify really quick that that 4.3 million dollar increase what is that so the people at home can kind of understand what that is it's kind of like a cost of living adjustment every year to the district because the state is supposed to

122be increasing their funding or is that because we're only at 63 percent correct they're supposed to be increasing that even though last year we stayed at 63 percent which was a flat percentage it was still an increased number dollar number correct so the goal of evidence-based funding is to get us a hunt to 100 adequacy by the year 2023 or something like that 10 years what year 2025 thank you 20 years yes and we're in the third year or going into the fourth year irregardless but yes the goal was to get us closer to 100 adequacy we have been hovering like you say around 63 despite the additional uh revenue every year so realistically we will probably drop in that percent right yes yes so when they calculate next year we should be lower than

123the 62 percent and i think you know lori's point what too was that um the 10-year plan that they had they stated for adequacy is not was not something that they're we're able to achieve um and so we were looking at maybe 20 years to get to that 100 but obviously we know correct correct it was never attainable in 10 years but in the third or fourth year already they're exercising their hold harmless and thank goodness for the hold harmless because else we would be in the same position we were in even so it's beyond frustrating that every budget cut we've made 43 million something like that in budget cuts over the last four years to see that wiped away it'd because of six months it is with the enormity of the restrictions and costs

124being placed on us it is i don't even think i've got words i i'd like to i think and i think they're still as in everything there's still a lot of uncertainty because this also what we're looking at is an assumption that starting in fiscal year 2023 the state's going to start up again and give us our increased dollars as we have been get had been getting um so there's that gap year and and i don't i mean none of us that's not guaranteed that's not a guarantee so none of us know one gap year right and also the 4.3 million that we lose this year we lose every year because every year we would have gotten 3.6 million on top of that 4.3 right new editions um can we can we afford choice just

125very simply can can our school district can we afford do we have the money to do choice instruction with all the requirements that are put on to us at this point isb is making it very difficult to to have choice so they're not only financially funding and increasing the restrictions right financially and in what they're expecting staff to do or how they're expecting children to arrive at school so we're being told sorry this is ruth croner again we're being told that by the state we're going to leave it up to the local school districts to just make their own plans and do their own thing however really they're telling us you can't do it because they're making it impossible they're taking away the funding to do the things that they're requiring school districts to do

126right and and just the requirements themselves are just unattainable ridiculous for the amount of funding that they've given us so far which is uh 980 000 for the cares act and the digital equity grant that's part of that also but that 1.6 million is not going to cut it for our district now the cares act and the digital equity grant those are federal dollars not correct from the states yes that's correct i have a question for teresa if we're able to jump around and now go ahead and based on this just for clarification because i heard the presentation tonight different than i did last week and i want to make sure i understand um and and that was the basis of me really saying no we can't do this it's impossible um the presentation i

127heard tonight was all based on a positive student a positive case scenario last week when we talked about this it was nothing to do with positive whether somebody had covid became positive or not the the directive i understood from from kendall county via idph any student so if if student a is complaining not feeling well goes to the nurse's office has a temperature that student is going home for 10 days as well as the closed contacts and that went for any of those 11 symptoms not necessarily that there was a positive test involved so this goes back to the frustration and identifying what we consider a case and you're exactly right we've received information that conflicts from the cdc as well as isb and even with excuse me as well as idph and even within

128idph we received some information from an epidemiologist that was telling us that this would be a clinically based positive and when we asked okay so if the student doesn't go get covid tested because they had a runny nose we aren't going to know so is that considered a probable case a suspected case is this um who makes that qualifier on whether or not that symptom is to be suspected as potentially covet or not and that is where idph has answered us kind of on both ends at this point and has openly admitted that there is disagreement between cdc idph and even within idph and so in talking with kendall county they share in that same level of frustration for us that we can't get anybody to give us a definition because when you look at

129these it's someone who tested positive or is suspected of having covid but we don't know what suspected means because if you follow the quarantine requirements a suspected case can be someone who has one of those 11 symptoms who's being sent home to quarantine for 10 days so that's one of the things that we just don't know i mean simply sending home all the students who come in with a runny nose a headache a fever any of those things it's hundreds of students across the district if we add to that that anyone that experiences those every person around them for the last two days has to go home our buildings would be empty in a matter of a few days and that verbally has come from our health department verbally they have spoken that statement that

130they will be going with suspected cases i'm with matt that's exactly what i heard over here it's two different things and i understand the frustration but we need to hear what you need to be on the same page so are we going probable or a positive test and that's that's not our decision to make where are we at right now our kendall county department of public health has told us that we must go from what i understand conservative route i need to hear you say that though so what what they are saying and talking with them again on sunday is that there is not a definition in specifically asking idph who are we supposed to put in that bucket of probable or suspected or symptomatic who are those people supposed to be that we're supposed

131to follow down and so people listening hear this was it tuesday that we spoke yes tuesday each of us spent about an hour on the phone with the director at the kendall county health department and the conversation was we are remaining very conservative yes and it's probable based on one of 11 symptoms right then on sunday it's changing again well your conversation is saying that now they're walking that back again because this is a change every week so what we need to know for the purposes tonight is are we required to follow the guidance that that they've issued that a suspected case has to be quarantined we just need to know that the best to your to the best of your ability right so um so it went yes no yes no and yes as

132you mentioned it's going back and forth every couple of days in my last conversation with rhiann from the health department and talking with them again over the weekend is idph is saying they hope that they'll have a definition for us in regards to who falls in that suspected probable category at this time they don't have that the last published evidence that we had from them and the from the state and from the isb guidelines right it's quoted right up here it says an individual who tests positive for covid or who shows any sign or symptom of illness should stay home and the guidelines of those who are suspected of having covid whether tested or not have to follow that fever reducing medications and the 10 days has to pass so again the last written guidance

133we had was incredibly conservative and as far as we know we don't need the we just need to know the the what you're telling us we need to follow publish yeah dr sparlin is telling us we need to follow i don't need to know if it's conservative i don't need to know whatever it is i need to know what we're following and that is what you're telling me you're following which is the written crosswalk is that what we're following this that quote right there is directly from the isbn idph joint guidance that was published on june 23rd which is still the most accurate information that came out from those two agencies within idph they have given us conflicting information since then but we don't have anything in writing to the contrary that's what i needed

134to know so see i i'm still i know okay bring me to the water okay let's go to the scenario okay mary because this this this scenario of mary i think it is different from last week uh last week it was if mary had the fever and went down that alone in and of itself initiated the sequence of events with the students on mary's bus the students around mary in the classroom possibly the teacher and this is and it's still conflicting here on this slide if positive or probable assuming that the fever the cough the aches are a probable case right and that's where the state is saying it's not the school district's responsibility to qualify any of those 11 symptoms as whether or not they're from covid or not we can't we can't make

135that qualification at the school level so they're telling us that anyone that has it anyone that's symptomatic of any of those 11 symptoms anyone exposed to it or anyone exposed to someone suspected of having it needs to follow those quarantine guidelines where we can't get the clarification and solid writing from them is who's going to decide of that list of 11 symptoms because right now our written guidance says anyone that has any one of those would be subject to the quarantine guidelines who's going to decide that so-and-so's running knows if the parents choosing not to get tested because we cannot require a test so if a symptomatic individual is at home is that individual a probable assumed suspected all of the different conflicting words that they're utilizing in their guidance we need to know if

136that individual is going to be considered a case in the crosswalk document right now the conflicting information that's gone back and forth would tell you yes in some places and no in other places but in the isb guidelines that came out on june 23rd it is very clear to us that that would be everyone that came in contact with a suspected case which a suspected case by definition would be someone that is experiencing one of those 11 symptoms at this point now again verbally they've been told by idph there could be additional faqs and guidance provided that may make that less of an impact in the school as far as quarantining for close contacts of probable cases however going back again to the initial piece there is no question around whether someone's going home for

13710 days if they experience any of those symptoms so within our schools we look at that we're estimating hundreds of students on a daily basis being sent home from the district just as a potential case regardless of any of their close contacts and every time we send one of them home they're out for 10 days potentially their siblings could be out for another 14 on top of that for 24 days well how i'm reading this is close contact is all of their classmates and their teachers too so in this scenario mary is home for 10 days but all of her classmates and teachers are home for 14 so she could potentially come back to school be the only person there correct and again she could she could get tested and come back negative with those

138two tests and come back to school after several days right but how long you can't use the rapid tests yes so that adds another layer of fun to this and that there's two different types of tests there's a rapid test and there's a clinical based test and the effectiveness of one versus the other is prescribed in here so this would be the crosswalk requires um that the testing be the pcr testing and it has to be two tests so and the pcr testing just to clarify is the clinical based test and that takes on average of how many days to get the results vary by location of where you're at give us a range typically one to three days so they would be at six or seven days very potentially with that test which is

139why they're not recommending that the test-based strategy be enacted in most cases they're suggesting that the isolation be the case so that means that any of the children that are symptomatic the first option would be for them to be home 10 days i don't want to con confuse myself i i think what i'm hearing is this i'm just going to be very very simple and just tell me yes or no if mary and we're going to take fever out of it because we all kind of know if you got a kid's fever you should stay home not irregardless of the fact that there will be parents that send their kids with fevers because there always are mary's at school and it's hot and she had an early morning cross-country practice so now she's sore and

140she's hot and she goes to the nurse because she's sore and hot mary is now home for 10 days all seven classes with 25 to 35 kids in each class they're all home for 14 days all seven teachers are home for 14 days she rode a bus with 49 kids and a bus driver so that's another 50 50 people down not to mention she was at cross country that morning for practice making her sore and hot and now we're not talking about 100 plus kids we're talking three or four hundred and we have eighteen thousand students what's your best guess on how long we'd last would we last a month if we're going by the definition we are going by the definition that we are hearing we are required to go to that's that's the

141basis of this right i need to know if that's what we're going dr sparrow maybe you need to answer this yes just like teresa just said no what are you saying i want to know that what you're saying is that we're required to follow a specif a specific suspected case with one symptom that's what we've been told that's all that's that's what i need to know so how long are we gonna are we gonna make it a week it would be a very short period of time yes well and and additionally one thing we haven't talked about is the work with the contact tracing and trying to figure this out so for each student that comes down to the office and goes home symptomatic and for each student that's called in sick from home that

142is symptomatic oh the called in sick called in sick also counts so you called your kid in sick for a sore throat they're out ten days now we're contract tracing them as well so the work alone with tracing back the number of students that could potentially be in the nurse's office being sent home and excluded is tremendous since kendall county we we can we know what we've been dealing with locally nice people but just nothing in print nothing formal referring to idph they're conflicted within themselves as well so the only other agency out there above idph is cdc who has actually put something in print with recommendations based on this why are we not allowed to go then to the higher authority above idph the written guidance that came out as the joint guidance on

143june 23rd is a joint guidance issued to us from the illinois state board of education and idph and so our governing agency would be the illinois state board of education and so we need to follow the guidelines that were published in that document and they stated we need to follow that is what that direct yeah that direct quote was out of that they don't give us the option of choosing between idph and cdc no in any way no in fact it goes even further to say that we should be consulting our local health department for any guidance for how we would implement these type of things within our school system and in all of our conversations with the health department they are going back to idp which is the primary source of information they don't

144they are not taking that information from cdc they are following idph as their authority on one thing that i noticed on here that i think it didn't get updated there was some information on here about kendall county is now in warning area also of cases so kendall county is one in one indicator yes isn't a warning level there are 11 counties that are in two or more risk indicators in the state as of today that's up from four yesterday and to and we only have one in kendall county and just to be clear even though we technically sit in three counties because our primary location is kendall county with the district administrative office we follow kendall county numbers correct can i switch gears for a minute pull up slide 8 in some conversations with some

145very fantastic people it says substitutes available and i want to just revisit this for a second because we did i did ask this question earlier and maureen can clarify if we expand the substitute pool by allowing anyone 21 or over with an associate's degree that's based on a board decision so that actually opens our pool up to candidates who could sub in a time when we are low in subs correct yeah so just something you know to consider and then if you look at slide four in slide five slide five my only question is we have all these teachers who have asked for time off i wonder how many of these teachers are very good with technology and would be great additions instead of hiring five technology people who could be trained to do technology

146not only to do technology but also to go out and teach technology so that's my comment on five and then on question four just to clarify for people at home um and i got an answer to this i'm not sure where i'm at with it but so anybody who chose remote by choice are they still remote by choice or are we automatically feeding them into remote for all and i asked that question because on july 24th i know my big question because i have athletes um was the ncaa was not at our last meeting the ncaa had not taken ingenuity but on july 24th they did accept it so for anyone who was thinking about that they did clarify that on july 24th that they are extended they are accepting on a limited basis but

147they are accepting those so are the remote for choice people automatically going to remote for all remote for or can they still choose because our intent is to get these kids back in school right like our intent if if if we clarify all this what you guys pardon me what we've all been arguing about for the last like the definitions and and once we get actual clarification once they excuse me get their together but once we get better definitions and once we can actually you know start to feed these kids back into the buildings with the teachers that's it's going to be scary for some people and some people who picked remote by choice picked it based on medical needs of their family which i appreciate some of them picked it out of fear again

148like i can appreciate whatever your reason was for picking it my concern is that we now have a bunch of people who picked remote by choice whom who will want to stay remote by choice if our intent is to move didn't they change the guidelines though on what remote by choice could look like that would make a genuity annuity doesn't mean right but it's but that's just a standard right it's just a suggestion i don't know right so i don't know if you're taking six classes and we can prove that these kids have been online for these for two and a half hours then theoretically we meet the requirement since well synchronous means that you're live with the teacher too not just that it's two and a half hours of instruction right but is it

149just a requirement or is that a new is it's a it's a strong suggestion um on what it means to do that so the with the edge annuity piece so really the remote by choice versus remote for all is much different at junior high in high school than it is for elementary because elementary it's about the same schedule but it's taught by teachers at your home school which everybody really wanted anyway that we're filling out the survey right which is ironic because you're getting a brand new teacher which is not really a teacher that you know but that's a whole so then um at the junior high and high school piece we would not be doing that because we can have everyone taught by sd 308 teachers and supported that way the other reason to

150not offer ingenuity right now is it locks us into a semester of all of those students not coming into school because that is completely online where now what we are building is possibilities for remote by choice that would be more flexible that we could come into say in october and still give parents and students choice but if it's edgenuity i cannot go back and forth between their in-person classes of what they have for eight periods a day and then do pick up edge annuity courses because as you know a lot of our ingenuity courses don't perfectly line up with our regular courses and they're much more selection for our sd 308 courses than there are through edgenuity and we're wanting to provide that instruction by our sd 308 teachers while we have that flexibility and

151that will allow us to pivot and change with the new coveted rates or if there are new state guidelines to meet those needs so just to make sure i'm hearing it right so we're going to take all the remote by choice and they're now remote for all correct and we're going to work on some way for those families who picked reboot by choice for whatever reason to stay remote by choice even if we get back into the classroom correct and have it taught by sd 308 teachers i've we've been really busy in the last so like this is just the beginning is what i'm hearing because now we've got to be building out to allow for the fact that we had been preparing people for remote by choice and now we really do need to

152factor that in um in addition we're looking at a presentation the presentation that we had on right july 20 july 21st was that these were the scenarios and if we end up in a remote for all situation before the start of school everybody was remote for all right but it wasn't what about staff what do you mean about what happens if i have staff who who can teach in a remote environment and we have some staff with legitimate concerns right right so they're okay doing remote for all but you know the guidelines get clarified we can start bringing kids into buildings and now all of a sudden we've got a bunch of staff who that's a very good are in a full out panic because i you know i could have done this or i

153could have done this or i you know should have requested this so yeah and it's not for tonight that's not a tonight question i know but i just like i just want to make sure that this is something that we are considering like so will you have better clarity on what that will look like for us next week at our board meeting or what the uh say that we when we reevaluated in october and if things were more aligned to come back to school well i mean ideally what we'd like to see is that this isn't for a whole semester even though we're seeing whole semester numbers what we're looking at is we'd like to reevaluate this in in the end of september i understand that with this big we can't be changing every week

154we simply can't we're getting short i have heard on here not much about the fact that we were looking at start dates here and i didn't see that in the presentation i don't think tonight um we have some remote instruction days available five i believe what are are we looking still at in august 19th or 20th start date no no we would be looking at uh anywhere either august 24th or august 31st and will you be able to tell us that by next monday yes will you be able to tell us by next monday um so some districts are going back and forth between requiring staff to be teaching remote in the buildings which i think is is a really important thing um we'll have clarification on that as well yes and then we'll have

155some initial budget numbers from mrs tyler on what this is going to look like for this year's budget what else do we need to ask for for next week if we're putting a wish list or some some answers if following that train of thought with remote in the classroom being able to follow um the guidelines set forth does that enable a teacher who's and if i understand this correctly our remote for all is going to be the normal uh building classroom teachers with their normal assigned class load that they would have been in person online does that enable that teacher then to have some schedule time in the building throughout the day or the week when they're not live to have time with two to three students who are struggling failing falling behind need one-on-one

156support and could we please find out if the union is okay and it's not going to be a big deal with the union rep left make sure it's okay that a teacher is comfortable in the room with a couple of students three at a time throughout the week to make sure that they're not falling any further behind that is the biggest concern that we have as brent said we have an obligation to educate students and we're going to lose i'm telling you we're unless i just i'm a terrible parent and man can i ask what you mean by in the room do you mean on zoom or do you mean physically sending two kids to the school we're talking about teachers working via remote in their classroom so they're in the classroom in the building

157instructing remote not from home but in their classroom like eventually we'd like to phase in we're not going to be able to just open back up right you can't just like realize a thousand kids back at school we're gonna have to do some kind of a b split you guys have already thank you for already talking about a b k 12. you know what i mean like we have to make adjustments and the plan is not the the plan's not done and the plan's going to change 50 more times and it's going to irritate about a thousand more parents on a low end right but it's going to keep changing because the requirements are going to keep changing right so first of all you have to understand that this is not normal right and at

158some point kids have to be back in the buildings and teachers some of us are going to be okay with that and you have to bring them in by populations like i need first like so if i'm getting my wish list i want i need kids first i want i want my special ed kids so you'll have some kind of idea of what that can look like for us for next week so i um unless there's anything else higher level that we can ask for tonight make sure that you please get your wish list in on things you'd like to make sure that we discuss next week go ahead one thing that i know people would like to see is what does a phase what does the transition plan look like what metrics will be

159using um and when will we be at what points will we be evaluating um whether or not we're ready to begin in person those are some details i know that people are interested i have another question and that is i'm sure there are lots of parents at home who are extremely frustrated right now and they want to know what what can we do um we heard a lot about conflicting guidelines between the cdc and the isb and the idph so is there any value in in parents trying to contact these you know illinois department of health officials and saying putting pressure on them to please align your standards to a more realistic measure that lines up more with what the cdc is putting out like is there value in them doing that and how can

160they go about well i know that our local health department is advocating on like a daily basis with idph to try to push them and they again are getting that answer and likely parents would get the answer that there's additional guidance coming out soon but it never has a date on it that's been coming for a few months now pretty soon so um i i think what i'm hearing is yeah we probably i mean i i feel like this is an obligation as a citizen in the state to say get your act together and let us figure this out this is a real issue affecting millions of children they're cutting and when you throw it in there throw in that maybe we could use some money to pay for it too i'd appreciate that i'm

161sure everyone else would like to to make sure that we have the funding to pay for these things but this is this is this is a failure of our state board of education i'm not i'm i don't have any other way to say it other than this is a failure to all local school districts they are taking away a local ability to provide what their local community asks for which is a choice this is a failure in funding this is a failure in their recommendations and in their policy and shoot i'd say yeah maybe maybe you should probably get in contact can i can i just say one thing because i know that faith you guys have been working really hard i don't i don't think it's realistic to ask them to not only get

162us going but to also come back with this next week with a plan on how we're going to get back in like i i think that we have a i think we have a really good start right on on how to do the remote until we get some answers and like i realize that we have to also we have to we have to do that well but i don't know i don't think asking them in a week after us changing it already us changing it the state changing it the idpa is changing it like i don't think it's realistic like i i love so a wishlist idea right but that's not and correct me if i'm wrong but that's not a realistic timeline well okay so we don't even need to go into that too

163much further because i think that there's there's definitely some agreement there i think what we're we're talking about this evening is very simply we need to readdress this issue the end of september in our meeting we need to be looking at this again there is no way for us to keep going back and forth with all of the moving pieces it's it's a waste um so barring a massive shift that isn't so equivocal that we have to ask a thousand times for just say yes or no and there's no yes or no barring anything like that massively changing we're looking at the end of september that we'll revisit this as uh what you can present to us for phasing back in if we're at that point at that time absolutely is that reasonable to everyone

164yep yeah and yeah i wish we could give everybody an answer today i'd like an answer today too well and i i think i just want to um for for all of the viewers out there and there are many um i know that there was i mean i've seen all the questions and all the concerns we've read all the questions and concerns and there's a lot more nitty gritty detail that parents want and i think people were thinking oh we're going to get more information about that you know what is iep you know what do ip minutes look like and what are the options for a b and c and um and so that's not part of the discussion tonight but it doesn't mean that those that this is what these people have been working

165on for 12 to 16 hour days so questions that you have are coming they're coming patients go slower than facebook right there will you know there will be i was doing some video recordings and things um in preparation before the board meeting there will be work that i will do tonight um when we get home to be able to put things out on the website okay so tonight wait a second stop don't burn yourselves out that ended months ago i'm awake i'm aware so what what what i think i'd like i'd like to ask you to focus on is making this remote for all plan as concrete as you can so that we can get our community answers about what the first day of school is going to look like when is the first day

166of school what are they going to do with all the school supplies they purchased are we still asking them to make school supply purchases because the stores are about to put out halloween and who who has the technology they need at home these these are just please i i know how how much you want to please everybody right now and i know how hard we're all working and you are working all of you in our administration way too long of ours but please don't worry about the end until we make sure the beginning is really great well but a lot of what i was talking about is just communication on the beginning and you know knowing that here's when we're going to set up meetings with our special ed director so that people can have

167you know live time and get questions answered um how are we going to set up tech help where when is the faqs coming on on all of this it's just that it's not all going to happen in the middle of a board meeting right and now we know that the first day of school is for students is not going to be the 19th it is not going to be the 19th correct it will be pushed back at least one week at least to the 24th possibly the 31st we'll have that determination this week great thank you does anyone else have anything they need answered tonight for us to be able to move on to item 8 or can we follow up with questions as normal through email item 8.1 i'm not going to even ask

168if there's any more questions about this item for remote for all plan can i have a motion to approve i make a motion to approve the remote for all plan as presented on july 21st 2020 for the beginning of the 2020-21 school year second miss morgan aye mrs croner aye mr lightfoot no mrs moyer aye mr bowman i'm principal i'd like to say i would vote no but based on the information we've had the conversations that i've had personally it has to be yes mrs doyle yes mrs swanson no motion passes 5-2 can i have a motion to table item 8.2 please i make a motion to table item 8.2 second mrs croner hi mr lightfoot no mrs moyer hi mr bauman aye mrs swanson no mrs doyle i miss morgan aye motion passes 5-2

169item 8.3 i make a motion to approve the proposed technology purchase plan as amended second is that including and i think they have direction to include did we give direction to include we i thought we did current staff first i'm just making sure i mean if they're qualified for the positions of christ sure what was the amendment or how how was the amendment i think was just the wording and um i think there was some confusion police purchase or it was also it's a lease to own and that we made that adjustment right okay so you made the motion second there you go mrs doyle hi miss morgan aye mr lightfoot all right mrs moyer hi mrs croner hi mrs swanson aye mr bowman aye motion passes seven zero can i have a motion to

170adjourn i make a motion to adjourn all in favor hi hi thank you everyone for coming and thank you all for staying