001great welcome everybody welcome everybody uh at 601 i'd like to call this meeting to order could you could you do a roll call karen anderson here tammy hines yeah john long here greg meyer scott middleton greg o'connor lisa schumacher hey john hey john could you uh we're getting some feedback from you could you either use headset or kind of download it yeah it should be good okay there's nothing there's nothing in the background just a repeat of what we said so thanks okay thanks i'm on to welcome visitors uh we have a visitor here but uh welcome thank you very much and welcome for those of you that are tuned in via online uh public [Music] uh item a is returned to school [Music] yeah we um met last month at our board meeting the
002morning of our partnering we have a subcommittee consisting of parents teachers administration board of education and our uh county health administrator john wagner um we had recommended that we would have this special board meeting because we were thinking this would be a good time for us to be able to make a recommendation for our final move we were looking at what's going on with the quarantine because we weren't quite ready last month looking ahead um since that time the number of students being quarantined has increased we've had significant numbers of high school and then eagle view and we do the map testing kind of sidestepped an issue as a middle school as far as having to quarantine large numbers of students um this isn't assisted with our regional numbers the state may force our hand
003i do want the community to know that unless the state directs us unless the health department tells us we will not be moving backwards our goal is to move forward to get more students in but right now mr wagner does not recommend a expansion based on the regional numbers based on our more local numbers just looking at the state and with the holidays coming up we had a long discussion in this committee meeting and i'll let the two committee members talk more about that but coming after identifying all the struggling students the middle school and high school students that are struggling and doing them in from the social anxiety if they're never just not doing their work we need to identify them come up with a plan on how to address those needs for the
004rest of this time period we need to look at remote learning at the elementary school what would our staffing needs be at the elementary to be able to allow us to have a remote instructor so that our teachers can go longer days without having to do remote instruction we also talked a lot about the block schedule at the middle school in high school uh when we looked at it there's some pros and cons to it but with the incident incidents of somebody getting sick 48 hours and alternating days with morning classes this day after the classes that day but you don't get any advantages on the quarantine this is time to actually give us a black schedule where you go to the morning classes on monday tuesday wednesday would be amazing for this day thursday
005and friday would be the afternoon classes that would um sidestep a lot of the teen issues and so we're going to look more into that those are kind of intriguing action items we came with out of that technically [Music] given our numbers right now our exclusions are increasing and if you brought back more kids we would be probably doubling those numbers and so uh there's a lot of schools that are back in and they're closing down only to them hoping to then close down and so we talked about the ins and outs of that we just right now we feel like with the holidays coming up next semester would be probably the next time for a challenge miss heinz mr meyer is there anything i missed well i think the concern is just still i
006mean i completely understand where mr wagner's coming from and it makes complete sense the concern is when are we going to be able to go back and how are we going to make that change because talking to mr wagner it didn't seem very likely i know he thinks numbers are going to go down in january but it's still he was saying when you put all the kids together they're no longer social distance and that's when we're going to see more positive cases even within the district and they're kind of overwhelmed they said they can hire more people but i guess the question is you know when will we be able to and i think that's what we've got to figure out and i guess maybe study more deeply yeah the overwhelming part of it is
007is kind of frustrating and this is where i think we really need the community to come together for us because what what what happens is when we quarantine or when we exclude from school students um they're not positive they're they're they don't have a cozy case and so technically when they're at home they're doing whatever they would like to do and they're going out with their friends and they're still connecting with people and then that adds additional work on trying to track that down to do that um we really just need the community to work with us i'm trying to reduce these numbers by when you're quarantined or isolated to stay out of close contact with people to be going out after you've been told you need to stay home for 14 days and then
008still going out with all of your friends it's just it's counterproductive and it's not um assisting us in our ability to try and get kids back in school opinion on the matter is has never been a secret i want all the kids in all the time i think whatever we can do to move towards that goal is in our best interest as superintendent alluded to though the problem we have is with social distancing and not being a possibility for full classrooms we have one student that gets sick we have to quarantine so many and the problem is it multiplies and then you know there's a delicate balance where the kids that are have the possible exposure are doing social gatherings and getting further exposure which again compounds the problem in the school but that's offset
009by they have these emotional needs that they have to have to grow and develop and make friendships i mean it's a it's a double-edged sword there's unfortunately there's no good answer for it but i think the biggest problem that that i can't find a solution to is once we do get positive cases is how many people we have to quarantine that we lose in classrooms especially in the high school level and we're when they move from one class to another you're exposing so many people and the possibility right now is far more people would be would be isolated from school than attend and then what do you do with those people why they're isolated do not give them any education for entire 14 days which is definitely not the best interest of any kid we
010don't have the resources currently to throw all those into our mode session and back then that's not good for the kids again i'm no educational expert i think the risk to the children going back to school is very minimal i don't think that that i i think the i'm a big risk or reward guy there's no doubt about it but i think the risk to return to school is minimal for the kids but the problem is we're trying to prevent this disease from spreading and when you do that and you've got to quarantine so many different people on so many levels it just becomes nearly possible you bring up a good point that's the risk and that's um our job is to educate the students in the best fashion that we can and i think
011i agree that if we brought students back we wouldn't see a lot of students getting sick but what we would see is a lot of students with every sickness a bunch being quarantined and so it's uh for the continuity sake they're coming out and they're going back in and coming out going back in that's not education good either now we do have children that are struggling parents have made that quite clear we need to address that we need to come up with a plan on how we're going to identify and then support these students that are struggling both socially and academically and so that's what we're going to be coming up with uh now and and really hitting that hard one so great greg the committee made a recommendation not to make a change at
012this time we really made a recommendation we could come up with a recommendation so there's a this is a two-sided issue before the meeting was scheduled the governor is added additional mitigation for the region which we didn't count on happening before the health director was pretty much saying hey you know they were they were following the waterloo epidemic which he did say that there was a 60 kids quarantined none of them came down with it so that was very very positive on that thing so we were kind of poised to hey this is this is a go i think we can we can do it because i have two coming in then all sudden we come in and say you know we didn't anticipate the quarantine issue the the number of of kids that we've
013had to quarantine in the last two weeks and then with the i mean it's gone with the numbers in the region as the numbers in the region have gone up we've had to quarantine a lot more kids and um that just needs to turn back and come down and mr white was pretty optimistic that in january that will drop back down um he believes that there'll be a vaccine for first responders at that time to which that'll really start to progress forward in us getting back into a more normal situation so right now what we want to do is we want to focus in on how to support the struggling students and then in january i'm hoping that we will come back to the the next phase which is we were looking at an all-in
014like we'll take five right now all in it would be a kindergarten through 12th album there's been some discussion about maybe going kindergarten to age and then 912 followed by that we discussed that a little bit last time we met and again we were very optimistic that things were looking like we could be able to get back in but in the last few weeks since our last board meeting they really have taken the trip so another thing we had to take into consideration too is the thanksgiving holiday where it's anticipated that we're going to have a peak around thanksgiving time so if we go back in right before that or are we kind of shooting ourselves in the book where we might be better off waiting just a little bit longer addressing that concern my
015big thing too is i want to make sure that we're moving towards this the school i i wanted to sit back and say hey we're going to see what happens and let go you know if we're not going to put them back in let's work on our plans and procedures and policies to make it happen you know how we're going to handle these people on rainbow are they going to get different teachers or different future are teaching at different points i guess in the program so how do you synchronize those to make it there's just a lot of logistics that this is not in my opinion it's not boring it's not up to the board we're not i'm not an educational expert like i speak for anybody else but i said during the meeting i
016said you know let's get rid of music and pe and it was overwhelming hey you don't know what you're talking about we need those that's important to the things that again i'm not an educator you know i'm i'm looking at more of of a social and you know the big picture not just individual things so you know i definitely prefer the educational decisions to the administrator which i think we have a great administration team and we have a great set of teachers and i'm comfortable with the educational plan we just need to make sure that we follow the health department's recommendations as well as by the safety mr cook yeah i want to clarify my understanding on one minor detail we've got students that have gone forward right yes and all of us so we
017have full remote instruction going on so when somebody that's in school has to isolate there's still going to be construction so they are getting okay because i thought you said they were cut off for two weeks while they were isolated or maybe i just misunderstood there was one of the options socially from there there are districts that have a um a remote learner so there's a remote teacher so let's say that i teach third grade mr middleton teaches third grade this afternoon you're the remote teacher for third grade there are districts where if my kid one a student in my class gets put on a quarantine they don't get any instruction for those two weeks there's other districts that can take that student they put it with you so that now they're getting a new
018teacher but they're and they're kind of in a different classroom so we've got students now who are isolated right but i teach remotely and i teach in person and so that is all of the every teacher in our district teaches both right and that's why we go with the short day any student that's isolated is giving their own instruction yes they go into that okay that's why it works now that wouldn't necessarily work if we went all in is there any possibility that the k through 5 that is actually going every day 8 to 12 30 could be increased to a full school day that's what we were talking about with getting a remote instructor because really what it is is we've got so many people that are remote it you can't take away the
019time for the remote instruction unless you assign it and so just with quick numbers we believe we would need five new teachers to be able to put one at every grade level so that you can do the um remote instruction but then it's the question of what do we do for the kids that give that quarantine and move them in there we can come up with a plan for that look at it and then bring it to the board for consideration but then we have a concern that was brought up that the cea may have an issue with that because then those teachers are teaching in person kids all day versus the other teachers not so that was brought up yeah we would have to look and we would discuss we continue our discussions with
020those plans i mean no plan is being thrown out by the cea or by the administration or by the board but there are with every plan we want to make sure that we're not just looking at how to solve this problem here we need to look at all the other subsequent problems because when you talk to the surrounding districts that are doing this or that you find out what's worked and what hasn't and so what we want to do is we want to take what works while we still improve what hasn't well and that's where greg and i are saying we're not educators so we're sitting in there throwing out ideas not realizing that we have an issue with this over here either so that didn't come up but when it comes down to i
021mean if we have if we're talking about putting the younger kids back in i really don't as a board member i don't have a problem hiring five more teachers to handle the revoke if we get these kids back at school i i think it's [Music] we got to start somewhere and start working towards it i mean i'm going to say like i said that one meaning before why are we treating this so much different than the flu we don't close our school down because tons of kids get the flu we do close the school down because tons of kids get the school the food i mean there's been times when the school has been shut down for not an extended time like this but they have completely shut it down because the number of teachers
022that have been impacted the number of students and they need to do a massive claim so yes that does happen and we do that under the direction of the health department and so when that does happen um you do that with the health department in this situation we're doing the same thing it's the health department that's that's really kind of recommending that we don't change what we're doing right now well the health department i think you know yesterday he was for going back but i think some things came to light to him for him this morning from the government or from the state from the governor's office that he wasn't aware of either so he said it would be connor counter he said the state's moving in one direction it would be we would be
023going contrary to what the entire state is looking at so he would say that's one reason he's recommending not go back all in right now he's looking at the the state is in the re you know looking at the state our numbers are going up in our region our numbers are going down in our area the numbers are going down so with everything being closed down to try and mitigate those increasing numbers the school should not close down but should just stay where it's at but isn't he didn't even say the governor's office is considering like shutting the entire state back down or something and he said that would while they're considering that we should not be said that there's been talk about a statewide return to remotely withdrawal okay no i think that that's
024where we would need to because he didn't because i even said but that's different than what we had in march because we had an order that everybody was supposed to stay at home and he said no this would be a a move to a remote learning and if that happens the teachers would be able to come into the schools they'd still be able to teach but everybody would have to be remote okay i'm misunderstood and i don't i won't be very very clear on this for us to move backwards and become all remote it would take a proclamation from the state or the health department saying that we have to do that it is not our desire to do that at least right we're trying to move the other direction so the news is that
025we're not finding positive transmissions between kids and kids at the higher levels but they may have had it at one of the lower levels there are three kids in one class but at the higher levels they're not so if the kids are having their masks on it seems to be working but they're getting it outside of the school the kids the kids that are being it's hard to say if they're getting it in school or not because when they're outside of the school they're still having contact without masks on and so the assumption is they're getting it outside of school so um but it's really hard to tell when people are not following the recommendations of their isolation so in talking in the committee um and you know we program these words calling all in
026and all this kind of thing all in means what all in would be every student in the school for a short period every day every student so zero uh no you would still have remote instruction i think i think i mean i think that needs to be clear for everybody because when you say all in some folks think okay we're taking away remote you're going back in and i understand that we need to have remote so those kids that are coming out and things like that but is that still an option that would be beyond the table for those folks that didn't want to send their kids today because we have like until this 12 to 10 12 percent i don't know how many kids are 333 remote unless this number's changed since last week
027that number has changed since last week every time we send out a letter stating that we've had a quarantine situation we get a handful if not a couple handfuls of families that are saying you know what i'm just going to go all remote mr wagner's recommendation of staying where we are what we then started talking about is what can we do because we know that there are issues like kids are having issues families are having issues what can we now do to address those issues to make what we're doing better for those for those that are having struggles whether it's failing they may not be failing because we're talking about struggling students it may not be failing students but those who are just their rates have gone down or they're socially emotionally struggling we've got
028to address that better than what we're doing now so that's really what we ended up discussing at the end was these are things that we're going to do i don't know if you want to get into those specifically or not or just those three areas though okay yeah so i think that's where we have to go at this point because we have i feel like we don't really have many other options is let's make it the best that we can well and then i would leave that as great said i'm an old educator so i would leave that up to you all to work on those things and get that that's not that's not a board decision it's just recognizing that um and i and i know the administration and and teachers have recognized there
029are issues and and need to need to address those so and that may be us hiring more we're going to have to hire more people to make that happen i and that's fine and that would be our role as to say go and do it so what we would need is the recommendation of what you need to make this happen and to be productive for kids if we need to hire more counselors to be more able to have more one-on-ones with the kids and to have more contact with them where they can either meet virtually or you know spend more time with them you know along with instruction we may need to really look at those specialties did you discuss anything about what you said um last week about a remote co-op like sharing with
030the other districts no we haven't discussed that it's still a um it's been kind of discussed around we've got co-ops with the um the surrounding district's location for some alternate education and um you know we have to look at that the hard part there is is that the you know the curriculum in all the districts is different and so really what you'd be doing at that point saying that the remote instructor would be leaving columbia so to speak and entering this other entity and so um the the moral question there is you know i'm glad scott actually asked the question earlier what is all in to me all them is back to full time just like we were i mean i'm to me all in does not reduce days it's full days quality education and
031you know what i'd really been if they're all possible what i think is the best solution again full days for all the kids and have remote learning be participating in the classroom have standards on the teachers let the kids that are remote participate remotely but they're part of the class i think that way you don't have to hire as many people the kids get the quality education if they do get sick they have to go remote they can participate remotely we are looking at some um technological things i know i and one of the original conversations and they were it was on remote learning and one of the things that they talked about was as craig was referencing having the cameras and everything and they did indicate that it was quite an expense to set
032up a classroom because you had to have multiple screens and the networks and stuff but it was it was quite a system so yeah it would definitely be worth putting our tech folks into figuring out what's needed how much is needed well look at the look at the possibilities yeah we have our community member that's part of iron iron man studios that does a lot of the conferences and whatnot and uh we actually meet with him tomorrow to go over some of the solutions that he's come up with that would be um simple because we're not we're not ab people we're not production people and so but he is and so we reached we he reached out to me and we performed this connection with looking at some of the options with those presentations and
033they were polished [Music] you know all in all kids every day all day the challenges for the district would be what going backwards i would think getting people sick and they have no place to go our logistical challenges would be um lunches you know how we're going to supervise lunch as well we allow 50 in the space um so the lunches it will be the scheduling of the remote you know separating the remote and so what happens with the proceeds when they come in and out um you know it's it's staffing so and then we had um i think that was mentioned before because i you know for those that weren't in that medium to go over those the concerns that we were talking about i think one of them too was just contact tracing
034it's already really challenging and it was said that it would be hands on death when it comes down to calling families and whatnot there's the times where i had a call we had a late incident happened and um there was a bus issue and so this is johnson this is just like steli and i all took a third of a list and we started calling families and saying you know it's just it's it's day-to-day operations of just the quarantine my goal is to try and get through a date without a quarantine situation and so far i've not hated friday night i was really optimistic that i'd be able to make it a couple days without a quarantine situation on saturday and sunday we both all had situations so just you know it keeps being brought
035up that lunches seem to be the problem um has anybody like sat down and thought about some ideas or whatever because i alone can sit and think of ideas that could happen for different each school like what do you you know do they eat in the classroom can they eat can we get volunteers to come in and supervise during the teacher's day free lunch is there a rotation of that i mean there's a lot of different schedules you've looked at but right now expanding the day because you do need to have that remote instructional time so unless you fix the remote instructional time you're spending the day an hour is pretty much the most reality expanded and that would be taken up by lunches and so the committee has been pretty clear adding that extra
036hour which would just include lunches would not be a good solution what we've got to do is fix that remote issue first so that the teachers don't have to do the remote time and that would allow us to go back to the full video and that's actually what you're going to be looking into maybe right i actually think the lunch is the easiest thing with this whole thing to solve man you brown bag and they eating their thing you pick up a lunch it's it is what it isn't there's a lot of pieces that need to happen for that to work so i was with a group of parents um friday night and a lot of their concerns are that after you do real cold in the classroom you've lost so much time during the
037roll call and you're when you're only in for a half day and you've got like basically 23 minutes of teaching time and it's not they they just feel like it's still not healthy and are they in band and choir are they allowed to play their instruments are they singing and if they're not doing stuff like that just during the pandemic is there something that we could do to just focus more on core classes instead of doing the band and the fire just during you know this pandemic because what if they're not allowed to play their instruments and they're not allowed to sing what kind of education are they getting and then require right now that maybe they could be practicing focusing more on the core subject music they are doing their instruments with slits in
038there i believe they and know are uh are sitting with their masks on one of the problems that we had also um you know this is a good thing but our band and our choir are both um large and so we came all in we'd be having classes where we had to split them and figure that out because there's over 50 kids that's why and i'm not against being inquired i'm just saying during this pandemic time is there something a little bit different and i think like the band empire are part of that mental emotional development for kids and to take that away from them could be quite an impact and there's kids that go on to be music majors and so you're taking you know it's just like you take away a chemistry class
039from a student that wants to be a chemistry major so you've got to have that there and that's that's the problem is i mean it'd be really easy to make a solution for mr middleton but they're not all mr middleton you know it's uh every child's individual and you want to try and reach that child that family and spark what's what's necessary while still getting the foundational things as well so at least i i said those exact comments during the committee meeting and about 95 percent of them don't tell me about that i mean i'm not against dana clara i'm just all right speaking up and bringing forward with some concerns that our parents have in our district and that was one of my points during the meeting also is i don't want to hear
040can't can't can't i want to hear what we saw how did we move forward i don't feel like we're that much different now than what we were our last board meeting when we discussed the return to school i think at the last board reading i was anticipating that at this time we'd be able to go with more students in and then the announcement came from the governor on monday and as he as we went through the week i could see this whole thing crumbling before us so i was i was really careful that his push was going to be to push us backwards and that would be not the direction i would would want to go at all and i think that being able to stay stable where we are is basically a small step
041forward hahn uh this is science and mr meyer um i i i when i left the committee meeting last month i was almost positive that we would be making the recommendation to return to school today and um for four six through twelve six through twelve and still have remote learnings out of the hybrid for six to twelve and but still have remote learning available for folks and those kids that are quarantined yeah that was what we had agreed with we were yeah and we're talking about and yeah i'd love to have everybody in and and things like that but those are some of you know we need to take these these incremental steps to get there and and see how this works mr weiden was optimistic about that as well he said i don't see
042an issue with that but our numbers change right and i can understand where the where the committee couldn't come up with a record you know i shouldn't say couldn't um didn't have a solid recommendation because there's so many different um folks in there from so so many different perspectives and things like that that for us to to go back and and take a look at what the what the health department uh recommendation is it sands a a solid recommendation from our committee so i think that's kind of where we are today um exploring all the possibilities you guys have put out a lot of good ideas i think that administration is looking at different things too looking outside these four walls meaning these four walls of the district and what some of the other districts
043are doing not just in this in this area but maybe across the river and those kinds of things you know a district our size may not have the luxury of having a lot of space to really spread folks out like some some other some other less lesser enrollment places with with large buildings and things like that so at this point it sounds like we don't we're not going to make any change unless somebody would like to make a recommendation or make a motion to make a change tonight and we would open up the floor to the to the board members if they would like to make a motion to make a change this evening if not we would still be moving and it's not just the same it's always always looking for improvements and looking
044for that next step and what we can do though can i say something to you sure we have gotten so many letters from parents and the struggle for these kids is so it's so it's emotional because it's hard because these are kids the the struggle is so real for these kids and parents too but the kids and then we just i know all of us want to do what's best for the kids and that's given back but we can't go against the recommendations of the health department but i want parents to know too we hear you we understand i guess you know we understand to a point we're not the kid but gosh i feel for those kids so bad it just thinks to be a kid right now yep no totally agree i mean
045that's you know turn back time was just looking at the calendar november 18th is three weeks out i was thinking you know didn't want to go beyond three weeks before we sat down and discussed this again i think that's really important but when does the second quarter end not till december it's a semester in the semester it's a semester next semester so it's it's the right at is christmas break christmas break december 22nd [Music] as a subcommittee of the association of the administration to look at you know be able to update you with what we've done to identify and support the struggling and then also have the uh staffing needs maybe just i hate to state the obvious the one thing i think we've all observed through this whole situation is it's going to continue
046to be fluid dynamic chaining in full compliments and kudos to the administration for staying on property and doing the answer the best you can and trust that team to do their work continue to do work and come back and give us the recommendations that we can act on you know it's been a good discussion here this evening there's really nothing that i see that we can do do you know moving forward in the way of action i i'd also like to add that john wagner's done a great job in the the county and his last words leaving the meeting today was if anything changes i will call you know because it is a fluid and dynamic situation so in administration and and the faculty and staff the teachers everybody else i mean everybody's just they've
047had to turn on a dime and and do different things and and make concessions and and make things happen and we do appreciate that i want to make a point of clarification and kind of take on what greg was saying also when i made my statement and i don't want to hear can't it's really not coming from our administration that's coming from the community as whole you know they're reached their saturation point where they have to notify all these people in the close contact and it's taxing them and they are overloaded with their current work and what discussed about going all in we knew that that workload would probably double and they did step up and say we're willing to do it you know and so that's that's a big feather in their cap and
048i got a lot of respect for our administration and being willing to do the job and they they will do whatever it takes i think to make it happen it's it's obviously not on my time frame that i'd like to see but again i understand our limitations and any other questions or comments from the board seeing them i'd entertain a motion to adjourn motion by gregor connor second bye second by karen anderson can you do a roll call vote for me please kim tammy hines yes john long yeah yeah greg meyer yes scott middle camp yes greg o'connor hi lisa schumacher yes karen anderson yes great we are adjourned thank you very much everybody you