CUSD 4 September 14 Special Board Meeting

001great i call this meeting to order kimberly can you do a roll call for me please karen anderson here tammy hines here john long here greg meyer here scott middleton here craig o'connor here lisa schumacher here we have a forum we're going to go ahead and get started first of all i want to say welcome to your visitors um it looks a little different than when we used to get together and be able to sit close together but hopefully this works out for everybody i also wanted to start off by saying tonight there is a plan and we're going to discuss plans and different options and things like that on a back to school for for our students all of our students in some form or another if if so desired so i know a

002lot of folks are here to talk about that and hopefully with with knowing that we welcome your comments and things like that but we just want to make sure that you understand that's what we're here for tonight a little bit of ground rules for the folks that are addressing the board each person is going to receive three minutes for public comments um in order to give the maximum number of people an opportunity to speak and i think we max out our chairs in here right pretty much um i think we have a few public comments that came in that dr costelli is going to address for us as well uh traditionally our public comments are limited to a total of 15 minutes per meeting but since we recognize this is a pretty hot topic we

003will we will discuss those things what i would like to do though is if you have the same comment as somebody else or if you have a sp or you have a spokesperson for a group that you're here for that you have that spoke spokesperson speak just in the interest of time and to hear everybody's opinions on this matter and um i don't believe we have anybody else waiting outside do we have one no i just think i think we have everybody we were thinking we might have more than our allotted number of folks we were able to have in here so we were going to ask folks to leave after they make their comments other folks come in but it sounds like there's nobody outside waiting at this point so let's go ahead and

004get started you want do you want to go ahead with yours yup i have a few people to call some to read and then we can move to the other public comments so i'll do the phone calls first hello mrs wheatley this is this is courtney costelli with columbia schools i have you down as wishing to address the board we have started our board meeting public comments and uh you have the board's attention if you would like to make a comment oh okay thank you and this is this is whiteley can you just ask them to say their names oh yeah can we just say your name for the record and then we do have a three-minute timeline okay perfect yeah and jessica wheatley and i just first i want to say that the teachers

005have done such a phenomenal job with this remote learning we're really impressed with it um obviously i think the goal for everyone is to get the kids back in school um i am also a teacher myself and i think one i would love to kids back and again i think we all know that but i just hope that you'll consider giving the teachers the time they need to teach remotely i know that was a big thing with our district and so they just really need that time it takes a lot of time and effort so that's my main comment okay all right thank you very much have a good night thank you you guys have a good night huh hello mr masik this is courtney costelli with columbia schools i have you down here wanting

006to address the board this evening that's correct okay and um what i need for you to do is just before you start your statement is just save your name for the record and that we do have a three minute time limit okay okay good you are free to start okay great my name is i'm the father of a mma sick who is in the third grade and her teacher is mrs boyles first of all a bottom line up front is we would like to be learning a continuity learning option for our daughter in the third grade one i am at high risk there's yet to be an example where any school or workplace has been capable of cycling coping who've been ahead of a vaccine or are taking measures to to ensure uh 100 safety

007from all from from people in the in those spaces two uh schools that have tried to return inevitably have uh have had to quarantine students that's making the environment inconsistent and confusing we are very happy with the experience material and recent increase in workload and i wanted to say a special thank you to mrs boyles and the other third grade teachers for doing such a fine job absent our typical in-school distractions my daughter is fully engaged focused and takes her learning to the next level by replicating her science experience at home and honestly it's a rare privilege to be so in tune with her learning as a parent and be a part of that experience in both science physical education reading etc my work i currently work for the department of defense and we have

008yet to return to business as usual because the science and the numbers do not suggest the mistakes to do so they're taking they're proceeding with caution as we would expect every workplace or school to do the same we know the teachers and the administration are doing the best they can with the information they have so we ask that you say consistently committed to your decision it makes sense to reevaluate every nine weeks but stick with the plan frankly we're appalled that the people within this community have campaigned to rally to bully the administration to return to school when a decision has already been made we ask that you do what is right what is safe and what is consistent we fully support you and we are very happy with the experience you you've gone the

009effort to bring at home the technology you know it's working well and the teachers are are expanding workload we couldn't honestly ask for anything more um yeah that's all i have to say again we just ask that you at least continue an option to have an e-learning environment thank you thank you have a good evening thank you hello mrs haven this is courtney costelli with columbia schools hi hi i'm calling because you expressed interest in addressing the board during the meeting in both public comments yes please okay and uh just for uh procedurals if you before you start state your name for the record and that we do have a three minute time uh period so whenever you're ready the board is listening okay my name is michelle haven i have a first grader in

010the district um and i'm just going to pose all of my questions and you guys can address them at will i am first wondering what has changed with since the hybrid option that we had as hybrid moved to remote when we were at four percent positivity we're currently at 11 and we're ready to thrust them all back into school it doesn't seem safe i'm also wondering what precautions what mandates will be in place to make sure the spread doesn't go any further than one classroom or one school will the whole class then be given their two weeks and what may be excused absences how did we get from we had nine weeks to have to go through this again to here we are at four where we're we're back to square one when the kids

011are finding their groove and the teachers are doing amazing and has everybody moving forward on a good trajectory and then now we're gonna go back to square one and then you're going to put the kids back in school and then have two weeks of learning the rules learning to walk in the line learning how the schedule works are the remote learners then going to be held back not learning because the kids in class then are having to do other things and my last question is how will remote learning work moving forward how long will it be offered how will the teachers be given time to do in class and remote learning how will the education be kept up on remote learning because we're obviously going to choose remote that feels famous for our family so

012all of those questions laid out there i'm happy to have more have feedback but i have three minutes so all right thank you very much okay thank you charles james jr and it says dear board of education first they want to express our family's appreciation for dr pistelli mr grody the administration and especially the teachers for having worked so hard to make remote learning work we feel they have done an amazing job under intense pressure and stress thank you very much for that effort i'm sure it was a grueling non-summer both of my parents were educators so i understand the vital with which you are being met i also have what i feel is a unique perspective on this my father charles james senior spent nine years on the lindbergh school district board he was

013president of the district for two of these years in the early 80s he presided as bussing middle and elementary school closures were being decided and implemented we were chased out of our house on three occasions due to bomb threats our driveway was spray painted with misspelled racial epithets we are not intimidated scared perhaps my dad voted for busing he and his fellow board members voted based on what they thought was right at the time they did not let the mob they did not let the mob win i implore you to take the same stand don't let the mob win in my view representative democracy is not intended for elected officials to quote do what we say we elect representatives to make decisions based on their experience and value set this whole argument that you have

014to do what people say is ridiculous the remedy for disapproval is the next election we cannot operate in an environment where those who yell most loudly are rewarded we are dismayed that an emergency board meeting has been called due to bullying and shrill parents we are angry that our teachers are being so mistreated there is no scientific or evidence-based reason to reopen schools right now indeed all public health measures are much worse than last brain all data and actual scientists not armchair epidemiologists who feel a certain way are predicting a bad fall in winter this reopening conversation is based on emotion not data or science the outcome is entirely predictable we made the right decision to close for nine weeks please do not alter that plan vacillation is a core modus operandi for any organization

015it is one thing to change course based upon new information none of which support reopening right now vacillation to appease the mob is unworkable thank you for your consideration we hope you do the right thing and don't let the mob win please uh feel free to share my comments openly that's all i have for people great um did we have a let's see who who would like to address the board next what i'd like to do is just uh something that i did not say at the beginning if you have specific instances for a child or a teacher please don't bring those to the board at this time this is a public meeting we don't we don't need any any uh children's names or anything like that so yes this is apoc you have to

016go first okay oh thank you i give a lot of thought before i'm here with your name thank you i'm jackie acock thank you i'm a lifelong colombian and my kids and grandkids went to the school system and i have a granddaughter who's a junior in high school and the reason i came to talk to you this evening is because i appreciate all that you've done but i'd like to give you a perspective that perhaps no one in this room has i was educated in love in the system in the school in columbia and i'm an rn in addition to being an rn i'm a nurse educator over the past 30 years i've taught on campus online and hybrid courses and i've i'd like to give you my opinion from my perspective as an educator

017who's done all three i recently resigned from central methodist university when they decided to go from hybrid to all virtual my observations now remember i'm dealing with adult learners supposedly high school kids are adult learners but we don't really know about that but what i've discovered is that online is not for everyone there's a breakdown many times of teacher-student relationship or in the case of a college professor sometimes it's very difficult to establish and in the first place good students will always do well no matter what system you utilize the students that have a problem are the c students are the students who are having difficulty many times these kids fall through the cracks and disengage and disengage forever students when given a choice would at least choose the hybrid as it gives them some

018of each i cannot imagine how these wonderful teachers are able to teach kindergarten first second third fourth grade it's amazing to me one of the things that spurred me on is i told you i'm an rn i haven't practiced clinically for eight years i've been teaching almost exclusively but i got from one of my nursing magazines they uh they questioned infection control nurses and members of the cdc who had children it was a very small study they only used 10 people but 50 percent of them said given the opportunity they would send their children to school and these are healthcare professionals who very well know the ins and outs of povid i'm asking you after this nine weeks to bring these kids back to school parents aren't nurses parents aren't teachers as much as we

019want to be we are not take precautions and go with of the hybrid model that you had planned on originally get the kids and families involved let them choose as healthcare workers they can make that decision you can protect yourself and protect your teachers we do it all the time i come from a family of health care workers okay lastly am i done thank you yes jessica okay good evening and thank you for the opportunity to provide public comments tonight my name is jessica ray and i'm a parent in the district i'd first like to express my appreciation to the board to district administration and to the staff for your leadership as we've embarked on this school year well the while last month may not have been a time to be a pioneer for a

020strategy for in-person learning we do have new information and i now have confidence in this board and our administration that we can be fast followers learning from the best practices of other schools in our region i'm sure you're sharing this we can talk a lot about how hard it is for all of us as adults whether it be parents staff administrators everybody is doing double duty it's hard and the kids are not here to give their voice so i'm as an advocate for my two children going to share their feelings since they couldn't be here this evening my nine-year-old is receiving asynchronous instruction uh the staff the administration has been fantastic and very responsive but she has struggled with the online platform and google classroom as have i somehow with the mba i still can't

021figure out how to tell what's due each week virtual learning is not compatible with her learning style and my normally happy go lucky kid is in tears at least two to three times per week her grades are poor this year and she routinely cries at night and tells me mom i am a failure i'm a failure at e-learning my eleven-year-old is receiving synchronous instruction the screens for remote learning are the size of an ipad she's an excellent worker but by the end of the day when we're viewing multiple students they're about the size of your thumb and she at the end of the day has a headache and has eye strain like i've heard from some others just from looking at that stream screen just sitting there isolated wearing earbuds for five hours straight before

022she starts to do homework and sits longer and looks at that screen even longer both kids are anxious about the technology challenges of remotely a leadership group to endorse a strategy that gets these kids in school for the maximum number of hours and days possible i believe in this administration and that the board will support this administration to offer that option for our children to support their their academic development and opportunity for success and i thank you for your time this evening amy boomer okay hi my name is amy goomersheimer and i think i have the exact same goal of everyone here in this room my goal is simply to have my children receive the best possible education this a synchronous learning is not conducive to providing the best education for our children studies show

023the disadvantages of this learning are it lacks and send feedback it lacks personal interaction there is no live collaboration and real-time activities it can cause a lack of motivation as we heard from another parent it also requires self-discipline something that a child underneath the age of 10 i find that personally very hard to instill that when they haven't been taught that and they're not at the level where they can have that self-discipline to do it entirely on their own as a parent i would like to support all of these teachers that are behind me and also help my children learn the three r's reading writing and arithmetic to the best of their abilities but what i'm finding is that with a lack of books advanced notice of any other curriculum and no one-stop location to

024find my children's homework is resulting in additional stress on my two children i'm doing my normal working job and trying to support these teachers along with my kids but we need a better system of delivering the homework provide us with one single list of links to do's and supporting materials the amount of people who showed up here tonight is indicated how supportive are columbia parents of their children's education we need to know in advance what the children are being taught so that we can help them i've asked the principal and the superintendent why our fifth grade students do not have textbooks and only reading novels and i'm told that they're only available or they're not available due to changes in common core math so my question for the board is if this is indeed the

025case why did they have an online math textbook last year in fourth grade and in closing i'm asking that us as parents are provided with advanced notice of the assignments and what the teachers are teaching our children along with all lists of links all on one page to make it easier on us as working parents to be able to help support our teachers and staff mark hanson good evening thank you uh for the opportunity i'm mark janssen i have uh two children in the school district and thanks again for this opportunity i'm here to advocate for in-person learning as quickly as the board and administration sees fit and as much as you guys see fit i'm also assistant superintendent in freeberg and we've been remote learning for over the past month and it's going very

026well yes there were some bumps in the road in the beginning but over the last few weeks knock on wood we've been going pretty well we're in a group and things are going very well it can be done and we're doing it right now and the second thing is that i would like to say is a should the board and the administration recommend going back in person my plea is to parents um we have to keep in mind as parents you know previously we would send our child to school if he had a or he or she had a runny nose a headache fever we can't do that anymore so as parents we have to be vigilant with our kids health and if they wake up in the morning and they're not feeling well we

027have to keep them home and we have to do the right thing with that we all know how valuable in-person learning is that's why we're here that's what we're going after but in order to keep that going parents have to do their part as well we're in this together so in closing thank you again for the opportunity thank you board for what you're going through right now it's not easy i know it's not and administration thank you all for what you've done for our kids over these past few months and what you continue to do every day thank you thank you board members for the opportunity to speak here tonight my name is margaret rudolph and i guess before i get to my comments um you know we've already heard parents and commenters talk about

028the negative emotional impacts and the technical difficulties of remote learning for the average students and i'm here to speak about iep students so students have who have additional challenges in their learning experience and and i have a great deal of insight into the needs of iep students i am the mother of two iep students here in the columbia district and i've worked and i've worked as a substitute teacher here at cusd4 for eight years and i've been involved in my children's education in columbia from the beginning i've been a partner with the special education team from the moment my children have entered the district sorry i do find it difficult to speak through this so in any case i i consider myself a key partner with the teachers and the administration and i believe i've

029developed some very productive and helpful relationships over the years through those means so i see how important it is for iep students to receive the the patient assistance in a structured environment to ensure their academic success and progress and from the beginning as a less than five day week has been contemplated i've had discussions with board members as well as leading administration officials to ensure that iep students have their needs met in this unusual time and iep students including teens need the guidance from the special education team to prioritize and manage their workload as well as to receive guidance and understanding the material so that they make complete assignments and perform well on tests it is difficult via the fully remote learning for iep students to understand and complete assignments especially according to teacher expectations

030they might miss some details and we've experienced that ourselves parents must work with their children each evening after we do our own jobs and over the weekends to meet expectations and we must consult group google classroom at several i guess seven classes a day for high school and we checked with tys with skyward to determine daily and missing assignments and under these situations iep students run a risk of amassing a growing list of missing assignments over time now the special education team at chs have made themselves available to iep students via google meets and i've been very appreciative of their efforts and there's only so much they can do okay under the situation so we are all very appreciative the problem is that what they're able to do is not enough for iep students and

031i favor a return to the classroom for iep students in particular where they can receive hopefully daily help and and columbia's children have only one shot at obtaining the foundations for productive adulthood and we shouldn't let this year go to waste especially for iep students who will have few opportunities after their k-12 education to receive the tools they need for adulthood thank you kelly hello my name is kelly antelek i have two children in the district one in fifth grade one a sophomore in high school and i'm here to give my vote if you will for in-person learning at the beginning of registration there was an option for in-person and remote learning and so if the options were given to the parents those who selected remote learning should be happy and and i don't understand

032um why in person was then taken away from the other parents especially at mass work kids at least my kids are completing assignments for completion versus comprehension as a parent i have i have my fifth grader who i have to hold his hand every step of the way or he would be failing parents are doing most of the work and i'm not a teacher i don't have a teaching degree i don't know what i'm doing it i'm just winging it with him but i can tell you that he he just he he has a lot of anxiety he feels like he's a failure we have meltdowns multiple times a day because he doesn't have the computer training or the knowledge to navigate the system most 10 year olds don't know what a hyperlink is they

033don't know how to create a slideshow they don't know about checking emails daily and emails should not replace direct teacher-student communication and we constantly have tech issues at our home um it's just causing a ton of anxiety in our home and i feel like it's debilitating to these kids this is the we're building this is their their building blocks for future learning and they're not getting that i have a document if i can submit it you're doing fine thank you so much thank you hey bailey hello my name is kate bailey i think i know most my i'm here to advocate for in-person learning i'm a normal parent i have a lot of people i've discussed this with we're in the trenches every single day i'm so glad the board meeting was held today after

034a day of e-learning it is it's brutal the teachers are doing a great job i don't have a problem with that i come from a teacher that's retired from the school district we're struggling as a district you want me to send these kids to college one day and we are behind it's been how many months now i need to get them in they got to see their teachers they don't have a social group that they talk to anymore they're in their rooms for about you know five to six hours the only one they talk to is me and i they don't want to talk to me my mom they don't want to listen to me either and i just need some direction from the school board you guys are doing a great job but i

035need in-person learning thanks heidi sanders hello i'm heidi sanders and i have a child that is a freshman at columbia high school and there's been many good points made and just a few things i would like to add to the thought process of this big decision as a freshman and sophomore in high school your classes and your grades or the foundation for your junior year to apply to high school or to apply to college to get the act and sat scores you need for scholarships there's so many things that are affected and i feel that the parents that don't want their children in school are having that option but us parents that want the kids present are not having that voice and i would love to see that opportunity given to my son and i

036can tell you i've been working throughout this whole pandemic and i've not once got sick and i meet with individuals constantly daily so i feel there is a legitimate concern but i do feel it as possible to have a healthy school thank you hi good evening my name is carrie goleener and i have a kindergartner in the school district i also have a fifth grader in the school district i'm a graduate of columbia high school k through graduated from columbia high school my parents were both teachers in the school district and my dad retired as a teacher in the district i'm also the director and owner of creative kids incorporated in columbia and we were mandated to close as well we are our school for young children and we have been reopened since june 8th

037and we have had absolutely zero issues we have about 70 students and we have had absolutely no issues at all i do understand that they are younger children their ages two through six so i understand that young children this doesn't affect usually as often but i did want to address that we have been open and been doing fine as a school my child my son is five in the same age as some of the kids he'll be six in october and he has been struggling kindergarten is hard the teachers have done an amazing job but kindergarten is just very it's very difficult to really bond with children and have them do fine motor lessons and learn and really be motivated to be excited to please the teacher kids that age they love their teachers right

038and they want they need that feedback you know in person so if we could have a hybrid option that would be amazing if we could go back more than two days a week i would be in favor of that as well since we are doing school across town five days a week i do understand that if remote is still happening that they would need time to plan as well so fridays if they need to plan i understand that as well so um anyway i have other um things i'd like to discuss with the school board at a later time but we will we can do that at the next school board meeting but i am in favor and my daughter who's in fifth grade she is a wonder she's a great student straight a student

039however i have also heard her say she's a failure at this so i and i have never heard those words come out of her mouth and it's very disturbing she misses her friends she misses the social aspects for sure and you just can't compete with in person so thank you for the opportunity to speak jeremy lane my name is jeremy lane we moved here about 12 years ago for the school district we wanted our kids to grow up in a public school the actions and the decisions that you guys have made have made me regret that decision i've called every private school they have waiting lists now if mcdonald's is open and every other business is open there's no reason why these kids can't be in school five days a week i work in steel

040i'm deemed essential i don't save lives i don't do anything i make stuff out of steel i've never got to stay home from work my kids are bounced between sitters and anybody i can find so that they can be taken care of while i'm at work open the schools up this is ridiculous that's all i got to say nicholas i'm nicholas salfridge and i have a daughter that's um in eighth grade here and i went through the columbia school system from kindergarten through eighth grade my dad went to school here and my grandpa lived here as well so i've been in columbia my whole life and my daughter is very self-motivated and is doing a really good job on the online and the teachers are great but she is certainly lacking the social aspect and

041really as far as going into the workforce the most important skill that i obtained from going through school was certainly the social interaction with people also finding your groups of friends finding finding like people with similar interests and she is really has become definitely there's been become a recluse in some in some sense um and i thought there was a problem before this all happened definitely interesting time this is but before that i was you know had to monitor you know phone time and t you know and video game time and wanting her to interact more but this is really like what you can't really tell what tell your kid to get rid of your phone or put down your phone because what else are they going to do they can't really meet or hang

042out with people so i'm thinking they're missing out on a very very important job skill that's going to carry really start carrying over um for the rest of their lives if if they don't start interacting even at this this age especially when you're talking about seniors and juniors and seniors in high school they really need that interaction and and i would say to the majority of people and at least the people i talked to were really just for the facts that we see um we're not afraid um if if some the worst case scenario that you did have a situation we would not blame the school board the majority of parents that have chosen to take let their kid go to school and if there was a situation that their kid got sick we would

043not blame you because we we fully accept responsibility um i just want you that's i believe that's all i have to say chris coulter got some notes for you all tonight so get your pins ready a little bit about myself my name is chris poultre my dad was a school board president here at columbia district back in the 80s or 90s i served on a school board in a fountain district night myself obviously we didn't have to deal with anything you guys are dealing with now and i understand the importance of health and safety and things like that but i want you all to take down this i want you to look at the cdc.gov website and look at article written in july importance of reopening schools what that discusses is basically kids don't get

044sick kids are asymptomatic they might bring it home not me but that's my fault if i'm not taking pps you know prescribed things at home or in a mask wash my hands which everybody advised to do anyway that's just good hygiene the school doesn't take me like i said like he said there's no reliability on you guys people have jobs they have to have your kids have to go to school so people know the work it's just ridiculously disruptive to child i mean the kids have to be there for social groups for emotional connections they don't get that at home i mean we obviously have an emotional question my daughter was a son but they missed their friends and then like somebody admitted they go out anyway they're going to mcdonald's going to walmart wherever

045these other essential businesses are and they're hanging out with them down there walking around town no mask on and still i have the stats the full drive of monterey county population estimated 2020 for columbia 10 550 individuals covet tested 1755 of our citizens right out of that 1755 235 tested positive for code that's a positivity rate for colombia itself of 2.23 so i don't know the gentleman on the phone is calling us a mob or whatever but i look at statistics and i pulled these off for the websites of the government so if i'm a mob spewing specifically i've got a problem if you look at influenza b which the death rate this is a positive death rate for m flu right every year children die at a rate of 6.9 percent do we shut

046down the schools or the business for that no why are we doing it now i prepare you guys to open up the schools send the kids to school five days a week normal hours and nobody will held account at least on my mark my name is chris poultre i will not hold you accountable for if my child gets sick but you need to help this community out you're part of the solution really it's not a problem you're part of the solution fix it you guys have the power to do it if you don't who's that for 2021 there's going to be people coming for your jobs you guys are here to help the community not to destroy it and what you're doing right now with the kids in school as kids and the schools is

047not productive in being a positive role model for this district i hope you guys really take a listen read that article it's actually real written and it's from the cdc and it actually provides a lot of insight about actually what goes on with kids and stuff and how they're affected by the negative impact of closing schools all right thank you guys very much have a good vote tonight 4-3 what about school what were those numbers 225 people tested positive for columbia 1755 people were tested or performed tests out of the population 10 550 if you do cross or positivity test that's 2.23 or plummet if you i didn't go into depth i wouldn't go into depth i can go to that no i just wanted nobody under 30 died of cobalt in modern county one

048time one person under 40 to 49 and four people 50 to 59 have died everybody else has been 60 years or older it's not a death threat or death sentence to our teachers or our students please open the schools up thank you alexa um ashley benz benzie ashley hi i don't have a whole lot to say other than i haven't i'm sorry um my fifth grader a lot of you know her mr dugan you probably remember her very outgoing great student everybody in all the schools she's been in has loved her all the administration teachers everybody um straight a student never had any problem loved school until now she's failing she's struggling very hard we went camping last weekend and people that she has met twice she wanted us to leave her with them so

049she didn't have to come back and do any more of this school it makes me very scared for her mental health and what the implications could all come from this um it's just a very unprecedented time none of us know what's going on you guys are doing as much as you possibly can and some kids thrive on computers and they love it she is a social butterfly she needs that immediate reinforcement a lot of kids do she needs to see your face she to know what you're actually thinking what you're meaning she's not getting that and it's very very detrimental to her at this point that's my biggest concern if it is five days a week it's five days a week if it's hybrid at least she's getting something i know you guys are gonna

050do whatever you can to make the best decisions that you possibly can for the whole um but it's just as a parent of a kid to see this big of a decline is very scary that's it thank you mrs kennedy 10 freely hi my name is jen briley i am a columbia graduate i have uh four children a ninth eighth seventh and fifth grader our experience with online i appreciate the board of education everything that you've done i appreciate all the teachers they've been fantastic with what they've had to work with but our experience with online has really been a struggle um as far as technical difficulty um as far as distractions we have four kids in the house and you know there's only so many places to go and we're trying to get them

051out of their bedrooms so that they are in more of a school environment but we're struggling with where to put the kids so they do have distractions all four of them are struggling grade wise from what they've done last year so i really just plead to get the kids in all school preferably every day but at least a hybrid schedule just for their mental health you know a lot of them have anxiety and it's just really been a struggle and i i just i hate to see that for my kids um the fifth grader they had sent i guess a worksheet for them to fill out and she filled in i am sheffield and okay about this school year she said i prefer she was asked i pretend she filled in that i'm enjoying online

052schooling and she's not and it's it's just been really hard so i just i really hope that for the kids mental health that they can get back in school and again i appreciate the opportunity to speak and thank you for all that we've done teachers and everyone thank you caitlyn brownberger hi i'm caitlin brownberger i'm the mother of a second grader and i just want to say that i do not envy your position as board members and as the administration right now the difficult task in which you have and i thank you for allowing us to speak and holding a special meeting tonight i want to say that i support our teachers and i am so incredibly proud i'm not an educator and i couldn't do i couldn't rework the wheel in six months and

053do what they have done it's been incredible and i'm grateful for them having said that um sorry my phone doesn't recognize my face with my mask on um i um also the gentleman mentioned numbers i also did some some numbers too with monroe county not specifically columbia but monroe county has 32 614 residents in monroe county 568 positive cases have been recorded as of september 11th now i'm uh i'm a former theater kid so math is not my strong suit i tried to do the math and what i came up with was less than two percent of residents are positive with kovid there's been 14 deaths that's so low to keep our students out of school and those deaths that that have occurred are in a population that doesn't affect our our students i am

054baffled at why the support and opening of daycares and restaurants is is being touted but the school itself which is a fundamental pillar of our community and cultivating the social and educational development development of our children is closed virtual if if people want to do virtual if liability is of concern people have had that opportunity to choose all virtual so that box has been checked my question is has there been enough time and reliable data to prove that a hybrid schedule is not a valid compromise when it comes to educating our children no matter our views regarding covid19 we all agree that we want what's best for our student population despite everyone's best efforts their education will suffer if we do not have at least some in-person learning what will it take to get kids

055back in school for in-person instruction what is the endgame the risks are not outweighing the benefits of the supreme importance of in-person instruction thank you so much and i pray and hope that you vote in favor letting these kids return to school hello um i have two children in the columbia school district a i have two children in columbia school district a first grader and a fourth grader both of them need extra help they're both in rti um i see my first grader come home in kindergarten she didn't even make it all the way through kindergarten because of coke she comes home and struggles every day to try and get homework done mommy i need help mommy i need this i work i'm an essential worker i work for the whole beginning my daughter my

056youngest one struggles my fourth grader my oldest one she just flies by i have maybe an hour a night to try and help them and on weekends my kids do not want to sit and do 10 hours for the homework they are struggling so bad please open the schools back up they need that one-on-one attention they need that help they need that extra help these videos aren't helping them the online learning is not helping at all like they need in-person attention so i'm begging you please open the schools that's everybody that signed in to um to talk to us this evening on to the next item on the agenda item 4 presentation by the columbia education association taylor you want to turn karen on or just my name is becky alexander i am a fifth

057grade teacher in the district and i'm also the union president this year my name is carla wanta i am a second grade teacher and i am union vice president my name is carly atwell i teach spanish at columbia middle school in columbia high school and i am the second vice president of columbia education association and i'm kerry clayton i teach high school anatomy biology and honors biology and i'm a high school representative so we wanted to start off by saying that speaking for the teachers we very much want kids back in the rooms i mean this is not anything that any of us wanted obviously our concerns are that we have a safe return and that we have enough time to prepare for that safe return so our presentation starts with time for kids um

058you know there are some kids that have been out and about more than others they might not feel as anxious as some of the kids who this change is going to affect more than others they need more than just a week to process that they are coming back to school and we want it to be as stress-free for them as possible in their return our next slide is also about time and time for the teachers and the staff to prepare for the return um you know in august we thought we were coming back and then we were told no you're going remote so preparations for having students in person came to a halt so that we could prepare for that remote learning so classrooms are not ready we don't feel that the teachers have we

059feel that the teachers need some time to prepare for what is essentially if we're going to have remote and in-person students we're going to have hybrid whether that's a b days or full days or whatever it is if we have remote and we have kids in the building we have a hybrid plan happening so we feel that the teachers need time and the schools need time to prepare so some of the things that we're still concerned about in regards to a safe return to school um i'm not going to read through everything on the slide but things like addressing scheduling concerns in order to maintain proper distance and protocols so that you know our children can stay safe substitute teachers um you know there's people are going to get sick teachers are going to get

060sick my kids might get sick and um you know we need people to be able to teach our classes if we have people there in person um so we need to have we need to have subs and currently we um like other districts it's not just columbia but we like other places are understaffed um in regards to substitute teachers and not just necessarily getting copenhagen correct you're gonna get those normal kind of correct illnesses that just happen correct um we do not have a full-time nurse in all of our buildings we have three nurses to staff four buildings um and so one of our concerns is that we have one one nurse um depending on you know what opens and how it opens if we had one nurse to staff two buildings um that's a

061concern of ours um and having a safe quarantine area for symptomatic students and then ppe um with masking and beyond um just there there are things that we feel could make it a safer return for both teachers and students in terms of barriers and other more specialized ppe that can ensure a safer return to school uh student screening and then we talked about uh possibly taking temperatures kind of screening kids prior to them coming in or even during the day i loved the comment that someone made about keeping their kids home if they're sick unfortunately that's not going to be the case all the time so we need to be able to kind of figure out if those kiddos are sick so that we can get them kind of into a quarantined kind of space

062and then home cleaning protocols when the kids are here it's going to need to be cleaned more often custodial health is going to be needed um how does that look you know what do we have in place for for that for cleaning i know the high school work kids and i guess six through eight where they've changed classrooms a great deal that's a lot of cleaning i mean i teach second grade so my kids are pretty much gonna be in their desk at their place and that might not need to be cleaned as much as a desk that's going to be used by seven different children throughout the day so cleaning protocols what does that look like what does it look like for teachers what's the cleaner how long does it need to sit is

063it you know is it feasible to have identified you know so there's just some things that we ready and prepared on before we would have children in the building uh students enrolling so uh we realized that the parents are going to be given a choice and that choice what they chose at in august or end of july might change they might love their situation and they might want to stay fully remote they might hate their situation they want to have their children come back to school but that could change so we're getting some time to have to have parents voice their what they want their children to do so i think it's going to take up a lot of time and i think with that in making sure that parents understand the safety protocol that's

064going into this too so they can make and like make an actual decision on what's what's happening so they can make an educated informed decision on do they feel safe with their child returning so something our students need over a third of our students have never set foot in the building kindergarten students um have never been inside this building they don't know their way around the school at all um second graders they've been in this building but they're new to carson i'm in the wrong building second graders have been in eagle view but they've never been here fifth graders are transitioning to middle school which is a lot different than it is at parkview and then these freshmen are being put into a building with all of these upperclassmen and they don't know their way

065around they don't know the one ways the ups and downs um and we're expecting them to do this without any open house no orientation um which talking to some of my freshmen they're very anxious about not knowing what to do when they come back um so none of our students have even been in the building in six months and normally they'd see friendly faces and now they're gonna see masked faces um which doesn't mean they won't be see friendly so we thought we'd give you kind of a snapshot of why we feel teachers need the time they need um if you look at this is for a k-5 teacher the hours that we are putting in as remote teachers at this time and i'm not going to read through that but you can see it

066just varies between group meets individual needs video creation collaborating and planning with our other team members getting and receiving and sending emails and just trying to be as helpful as we can to our students and video creation i know it seems like it shouldn't be a a huge like you know a 10-minute video seems like it should take 10 minutes to record when in reality a 10-minute video often takes two hours to record because you've misspoken or there's a phone ring or there's an echo or that you know there's something that came up and you have to you're on take nine and that's where you're at so and all of this doesn't go away when we bring kids we will still have remote people who choose to have their child be remote learners so all

067of this doesn't change we just now have added in we have in-person kits also you'll notice that there's not a lot of down time for coffee and chocolate which is which was my vote but not a lot of time in there we are busy and that's not having children in the classroom with us no i'm not saying i don't want my kids with me because i most certainly want them back in i just want the board to understand that when we bring these kids back in i have i have the same responsibilities for my remote kids and having in-person kids also so it's almost like i'm giving myself two jobs instead of just one job some of that's going to crisscross but i the teachers will have two jobs they will have to teach and

068get things ready for their remote learners and they will have to get things ready and teach their in-person learners so we gave you a little glimpse of a special ed teacher we don't have one here tonight to speak to this but they did create this slide for you you can see that their day is just as full if not even more so um than a regular teacher and this is currently because they are they are kind of in a i guess like a hybrid kind of situation where they do have children in person and and remote so they're they're busy they got a lot going on this is parkview then resource or the parking special insane situation some of this applies to eagle view too the two teachers who wrote this one is shared between

069buildings i think what's key in this one to notice is these 35 virtual lessons a week that they have to get ready it's a lot for two grade levels for two grade books it's just a lot so they had to continue on to another slide because they have a lot i have um i'm across the hall from the special ed teacher at the middle school and her door is closed all day long creating videos on live chats or meets with students and she is constant so that's her right there at cms so then for fifth grade um right now this is our day starting at 7 30 with our first meet at 7 55 and it is non-stop meets trying to do some live discussions and teaching collaborating with teammates getting back on for more

070meets in the afternoon and then trying to get materials ready for at least the next day we've been trying to get ahead but in all honesty we are keeping our heads above water by being a day or two ahead at this point wow i don't mean to breath um so this is the this is kind of how my schedule is the same as the six through eight teachers we are on a synchronous schedule which means we are on a google me for each class with the bell schedule um you know it it's and it's fast paced i mean that 30 minutes it flies and then you're on the next meet and the next meet and the next meet um and then from 1 15 to 3 p.m so you're we're on meets and then um

071from 1 15 to 3 p.m i'm running virtual office hours having appointments i mean it it takes every bit of that time and i'm usually their best for the spot now you know but that's neither here nor there but it takes every bit of that time just to get ready for the next day so i think what i've just noticed that is missing so far is the grading going back and looking at the work and commenting and you know i'm used to going through a stack of papers being able to write a comment kind of getting a rhythm this is click here click there click here and i'll put it here i mean it is so time consuming and i just realized i'm not sure that there's a whole lot of grading and just giving

072some kind of feedback to the kids i mean this is not the kind of feedback we want to be giving we want to be talking to them and discussing work with them but to give them something um so at the high school it looks similar to um at the middle school we arrived at 7 30. many of us arrived before 7 20. we start our first google meet at 7 45 we sync or we synchrously meet um for all of our class periods for 35 minutes each and then we have a 30 minute lunch some teachers are even working through their lunches meeting with students because that's when it works for the students to get help especially in some of our college-level courses from one to three students are running virtual office hours where they're

073virtually available to help students so at that time they are helping out students i know i usually have two to three a day that i'm helping if not more and then we're also using that time to assess work provide feedback create more engaging and interactive lessons um for the next day and most of the chs teachers are creating their own videos their own lessons their own activities um different from the elementary schools we don't have teams necessarily we don't have a whole third grade team you know teaching picking a different subject we are having to create them all and prepare and assess for around 150 students each um and for some teachers we're continuing working into the evenings um at home and on the weekends and that's across the board yeah yeah well i think

074what's and it's a little different i'm going to not necessarily jump back to the slide that was k4 but you know your k4 teachers aren't used to that your k4 teachers don't departmentalize i teach every subject to my kids i know exactly where they are i know when i just speed up i know when i need to slow down i know when i need to pull these kids back into a small group now i really kind of only know what they're doing in math because that's my that's my subject so i need that time to talk with my team to figure out okay how are your kids doing the math do i need to slow down with my math lessons or my full speed ahead okay my kids aren't getting this reading lesson what can

075we do to to make sure you teach something remotely for my kids to understand so the team kind of plc time is becoming ever so precious to us k4 teachers probably not everybody truthful so going back with a hybrid model where we're going to have students in the classroom and remote this is going to then take all of the things we've been doing with remote and adding a whole nother layer to it we're still going to be teaching those live classes for those 35-minute periods but then we're gonna have five-minute passing periods in between that we're not only switching meets to get our remote learners still into where they are we are now answering student questions that are in person attempting to answer student questions that are online if we can see them we are

076monitoring the hallway welcoming students into a room checking emails to make sure we're not missing something if we have time going to the restroom and we're not sure what we're doing with desks or we can have time to wipe down these desks are we having students wipe down these desks what where's the safety of the cleaning um and then again lunch and then our time to run virtual office hours which will be helping our students like like you've said before in our normal remote time and um i i'm going to speak for myself as a science teacher and for vocational planning lab days for these a and b kids who are going to be coming on different days this is making prepping for multiple preps it's not so to try to explain this i teach

077three different science classes so therefore in the hybrid model i am now going to be planning for nine different lessons each day because i'll have my full remote learners my hybrid a and my hybrid b so if i have a lab that i'm doing the lab a group the a group shouldn't have the shouldn't be shouldn't be allowed to not do the lab because they're in a group while then the b group gets to do the lab and vice versa so we're talking about now nine different things for each day so i guess what we're asking for is support um we see all the different things that have to happen for a safe return um i guess my i have a small question for all of you which is what have you done to maybe

078educate yourself into what teachers are doing and what this looks like for us in our buildings and so forth you're about to make a very important decision well i've talked to a teacher and asked a lot of questions and i've gone back to mr grody and dr castelli to ask them questions based on what question or what concerns the teacher had excellent have they heard some of the same concerns yeah yeah thank you thank you for getting that i've actually talked to several teachers and uh gotten a lot of good feedback i've been read i've read every email from every parent every teacher i read your old summary word for word i didn't miss one email one word i gave everybody the attention they deserve i've done a lot of research i've been on the

079cbc side i've been i've been doing a lot of homework on probably far more than i ever intended thank you and i got some ideas you got some ideas right so do we okay so um you know we feel our teachers once are safe um you know they while kids are asymptomatic in this there are some teachers who are concerned about their own families and family members that they take care of or you know just feeling that they are safe and protected if we have students back in the building we are asking for asynchronous fridays just to give us the time to create these lessons for this hybrid model that we are possibly going to you've seen the hours it takes to create these lessons and to you know provide that for the remote learners

080um you know we still need to make connections with those remote learners we can't let them fall by the wayside because we have kids in person you know we we're used to having them in person we are going to make those connections we are going to um have that with them but um for the remote learners it's still going to require that time to give them the quality education that they need as remote learners and more than just like really what we're asking for is just time to time to prepare i mean going back to school with kids would be like the first day of school all over again and usually we have two or three days to get ready for that and um correct and i mean when we like i said when we

081did an about face on august 10th we were really trying to go all in to make sure that this started out successfully so that kids could have strong remote lessons and that we could we could do the best job possible because we know it's not i mean we know it's not an ideal situation we listen we get it um and we just want to make sure it's safe you know we we anticipate that students will still remain in a remote setting and we want to make sure those kids get a quality education too and it's it's just not going to change when when kids come to school and i just want to i just want to be confident you know you i've had all of all the people on this board most of you have

082i have had your children in my class and more than anything i want your kids to be safe no matter what what we're thinking about the virus and what it does to kids or whatever more than anything i just want your children to be safe i want to welcome them with open arms and i want i want them to feel safe and i want us to be able to make the connections we can to these kids because if you know me and you know my teaching and you've been in my classroom you know there's nothing i love more than having those kids with me but i would feel unfor i would feel it would feel unforgivable to me if something happened to one of those kids um they're they are like my own and i

083just want to make sure that when they're back in this building it's it's a safe place for them to be so there's a lot of things that go into that the time realm parents are going to need time to make their decisions once those decisions are made teachers are going to need to get those lists so that they can arrange desks make decisions for the classroom principals are going to need those numbers to possibly have lunch ready or have scheduling concerns so there's it's not something we can just start tomorrow it's just not so i think we are asking for a possible start date well i mean we just not tomorrow for sure not tomorrow but we are going to need parents and parents are going to need time to maybe they have you know

084are we going remote or am i not going to vote some parents might make that decision like that other parents might need you know i talk to grandma i got proper daycare i got to talk to a lot of people before i can make that decision so fine before we do this um also you know just because we make a decision today excuse me you make a decision today doesn't mean that you are stuck with that decision for the rest of your lives obviously you made the decision to stay fully remote for nine weeks and we're back here discussing it now so this decision that is made today doesn't necessarily have to be one that is forever so if we take a baby step or a couple baby steps and then in some time we

085figure out hey we can take some bigger steps it's re-visible or you might need to say when we need a backup card that might interrupt you we didn't vote it says remote that was a decision i'm not trying to throw the administration on the bus but it was not a school board no administration decision that they were fine to make but it's not that this quality voted to go all remote we voted for the highway and the situation changes where the administration felt it was investing with that and and again but it can change it can change okay questions for us i have a question i'm sure you have a time period of what you would want the start to happen what is that date you've got to have something i can see your smile

086i think the teachers could have this ready and ready to go by the 20th of the year september by the 28th of october but that's halloween but yes i that's what we are suggesting i guess we have all the union representatives here probably going to be healed after asking this question a little bit we have all the union members here you guys are the leadership um i know you guys mentioned school nurses being an issue which i hardly agree with i think we need not just uh i think our current requirement is just an emt or there's really not there's no maps this is the cea though they're not there they're they're not yeah on one teacher that's underneath their contract yes we have certified school nurse that's under the contract and then the other

087school nurses are under the assessment contract okay but i think what we're trying to find is we don't have a medical professional in each building which whether as a parent is terrifying yes whether they're an argument or the assessment union especially in this environment with kobit i i personally think we need an rn in every building but i guess there's some logistical problems well i mean we don't have any applicants any other questions for us um i also agree the feedback that i had from the teachers that i spoke to that was exactly what you guys understand it's the double duty and i agree wholeheartedly we're asking you guys to do two full-time jobs with in-person and remote do you have any idea how many students you you feel the union feels that it's going

088to participate all remote versus the all-in no idea no i wish we knew um if we go by the data that we had for registration that was 293 total in the district um obviously that may change we are going to whatever we decide and however this moves forward i have created a form that will be published in skyward and the parent would just go underneath their students profile and select just so that we can have an updated count because some of the people that i saw who were selected remote have also now decided that they are just homeschooling so that might be different so i just think we need a better picture of where we're at but there was 293 at that time um we are no it's more than that we have uh yeah

089there's a long time no we have like uh we have 1800 kids that is what you said was having two full-time jobs with why we would like to have the asynchronous fridays so the students wouldn't come in the building obviously the teachers would and we would still push that lesson similar to what it is now so we would push out remote lessons on friday i guess my train of thought is we if we have let's reverse that number so we're having 87 of our two in person and i understand the ieps they need special attention and that's great we want to make sure they get that but for the people that just are scared don't want to have other issues at home that they don't want to expose them to i have no problem with

090that but i guess my concern is we're spending half of our resources on 13 of the kids and half of 87 percent and i think we're kind of short changing those kids i would rather and i don't know how the union feels about it but i'd rather see a couple teachers depending on if if we take out 13 of our teachers and have them do all the remote we'll let you guys concentrate on all in person and not do that that will do well it like it doesn't it wouldn't work like well i teach spanish and we have three spanish teachers in the whole district and we can't pull a spanish teacher to be just doing remote it would it would never it would be impossible yeah like everything is k through 12. we are

091dealing we can deal with k through 5. i don't think they're in spanish yet right now yeah charlie tries to come down we don't let it go right unlock the doors here would be assigned we've got five five uh second grade teachers and we assign this one to be all remote that makes these class sizes all below it depends with how many people ever are in but my bigger concern is what if these people start to say you know what it's working i want to go back in and these classes get up and how many does this go to until we change it i also have a concern that if somebody in this classroom is on quarantine i would like to have that person in that classroom to get their remote learning from this teacher

092that they've got the relationship with but if we've got one person doing their own learning and we're not giving the teachers time to plan for the remote learning while they're in the day then anybody that's on quarantine here for those 14 days or sick we'll need to transfer over to this teacher and then transfer back and it's just it's it's i understand what you're saying when you look at it from a percentage standpoint when you actually think about how the school works and and what the subs would be in the classes coming in and the grade levels and the middle school in high school was the certifications it's just impossible but um at the elementary i i i think it's advised i've seen a lot of really and i really the teachers would support that

093as we do this as we said you know when we get done with the thing tonight we're going to continue to work with the cda and start building back more and more time more and more we need to do this i think wisely slowly and and you know we just can't have everybody come in tomorrow and have everybody in and and no more remote learning and we'll say my experience so far i'm hoping there's a vaccine and we don't have remote learning options next year i mean it really does make it pound plus a situation do you have any more questions well also my comments are not my right to treat you guys you've done a fantastic job with what you have i'm just uh we have to find a way we have to there

094always has to be something else keep throwing out ideas i would like to see maybe how would as an alternative to what greg's talking about maybe low live remote learning so that the kids can get longer hours the kids at home it's not going to be as interactive although you could have depends on the grade one kid could be in charge of answering the questions that kids at home have but um the camera we may have to get an extra camera for each room but the chromebook could be on the teacher and then the camera on the board and then at home kids are learning at the exact same time that the in-class kids are learning and they can get longer hours and not just get out at 12 30. i think that um fifth

095grade is leaning towards that with with uh k4 we don't want to we were thinking that we didn't want to hand hog-tie parents that much and say hey matt's at 9 30 get there saved onto a local drive and then uploaded into google classroom and they could watch it with the parents later they could it would probably need to be edited um yeah you can't we can't record any kit we there can be no kids in the recording there can be no because of ferpa so it's got to be correct so but i know that that's i mean if one camera is on you guys and one is on the board no kids are going to be in that sure and then you can't say john doe you have to say hey john don't do

096that instead of using their last name but i thought you used to laugh i mean that's all part of our time to figure that out correct how like is that going to work so i think that you're right you're not disagreeing but that might take away from the extra remote time where you're having to do well that takes away from the video creation right but not the meetings and the email answering and all the rest of it right because when you're not in the live environment i think you would still need to offer that time to students who are at home like that one-on-one google me just so that you can you know have some time to to talk with the kids and and build some rapport with the kids and your k-4 teachers don't

097want to have live instruction only because of the distractions that there are i mean while you're teaching lisa's over here anyway i'm going to come speak over here but lisa try to get her to not do that and there's just a lot of distractions that we deal with that would probably need to be edited out there's just going to be an editing end of it so it'd almost be faster for me to do a 10-minute 15-minute lesson no but then i'm not there and i'm going to you know what if i need it my police is not just friendly with her pencil and i need to address some other kind of issues or there's an outburst because we have some children that are on the spectrum in our classroom and so if there's an outburst

098what if uh someone decides they don't want to do this assignment today and they shove all the papers off their desk i know but there's just i think you're a teacher but your teaching staff is more comfortable doing the videos after that so we don't have to worry about that i mean some of the complaints with the remote learning has been the um asynchronous with the kindergarten two-fifth grade and the the synchronous 6-12 seems to be doing very well the problem with the eight with going synchronous in the little guys is some of our kids you know they don't have their appearance there at that moment to log in and it just it's there's another issue with that and so those details at their grade levels at the buildings we need to work with the

099administration and the teachers and get those hammered out what we need to do is really kind of look for the big picture and say how much are they coming back and what times are they coming back and and focusing on those things and then i'll guarantee you there's going to be issues this is a complex situation that everyone has their own solutions and everyone has their own ideas and what we need to do is listen to all those but and have subcommittees that work on that but right now i think what we need to do is focus in on what days are we going to be in session it is hard to learn without that direct back and forth which is it is and that's i think why we're here tonight looking at how we

100can get kids back to school and one of the things that i've heard from several parents is their kids are being knocked off the internet at home and then because the classes aren't being recorded they're really having a struggle so if there's a possibility that we can start recording and they can have a playback that would be very helpful for a lot of families because they're missing big chunks and sometimes they try to log back on and they can't get on i've had some students that then come to my office hours you know they contact me hey mr clayton i miss there's a perfect come to office hours like today i had a student we met during office hours and i got that student all caught up and on on that student's way and that's

101where i think that remote learning older kids i know it's not ideal but it is a lot more easier if older kids can go to the office hours they can ask their own questions they can take that initiative they might not like it socially but it's at least simpler to trying to heal the kingdom first secondly so yeah so we're looking at separation between k-2-5 and 6-12 um yeah mainly and mainly because of african-americans yeah it's as we listened to a lot of things well unless you wanted to pull up a chair i don't know right there i kind of just wrote off this little thing because i wanted to make sure that these points get set the complexity of the of the situation and everyone having their own solutions and everyone having their own

102ideas about the data and everything it makes it hard the fact of the matter is schools in this region are coming back into session kids are going back to the schools and they're getting that in-person learning and so they're doing it safely it's just it's time so tonight the decision on specifically it's not just time it's it's looking at it's looking at our local health department's data as well just like some of the folks that brought up here i mean you've been you've been working with our local health department and looking at that data so mrs david's brought up a bunch of questions and there are some concerns with the number of positivity rate what not in all these numbers there's people that will say that our numbers are worse now than they were when

103we went all remote however you know we were going to be a hybrid and a week before school started mr wagner call thank you for being here mr wagner um he called and he you know he said i don't recommend it and we went with the health department's recommendation other schools didn't um at first i was frustrated with those other schools but i i learned that i can watch them we can learn from them mr wagner's been watching them a lot closer than i have but we made that decision because the recommendation from the health department said we have concerns at this point in time i know it's not the nine weeks but we're making this decision because mr wagner said that he feels it's safe to return and so um what's gonna happen tonight

104is we've got to set the specifics then tomorrow we'll send out an email explaining those specifics to the parents parents will then state their desire to have students return or remain remote we're really not going to know where we're at until we know exactly how many people are remote how many people are in person and a lot of the fears of i can't do both of this teaching a classroom all remote it's a lot of work you don't know what it's going to be like teaching to all remote and 22 in the classroom or you know it's a it's a different thing i i get that trepidation and that's why we need to move slowly but we're going to be teaching in person and remote and um but once we have those numbers we can

105figure out the bus routes we can figure out the seating routes we can figure out the lunches we can get eagle's own staff back because we have to provide eagle zone because it's going to be a shorter day for the work nights but until there's a vaccine we're going to be teaching remotely and in person and that's going to have us challenges but we've had good conversations we don't always agree sometimes we we agree and then one of us changes our minds it just it happens as we learn more every day it's like it's a new situation and so um i do want to be clear on a few things though because people have been calling me and saying hey that school's all in why can't you and like the schools that are all in

106some attend regular hours i mean they're working their normal school day but they're a hybrid and they've got wednesdays off and they'll be freebergs in that situation so they're all in they teach a full school day but they've got a full day for remote learning as well um red bud and valentine are the two that are all in but they've got an hour or an hour and a half at the end of each day monday through friday where they get remote learning time we're going to need remote learning time for the teachers and right now what we did was we came up with a plan for a hybrid instruction hybrid has its pros it has its cons we are in a unique position because we were going to start hybrid we started all remote and

107i think our teachers did a great job doing something that we all thought was going to be impossible build those relationships through the online it's had some successes and it's been some less than successes but overall i think that it's been a great experience um tonight is the first step and we'll continue to work with the cba to start building that more time as we learn more and we see what's working what's not working do they need more time to upload the videos or do they need more time in the classroom and not worry about the videos so much can they take themselves while they're teaching can they not take themselves while they're teaching those are all things that we're going to need to work out but we should do it with the kids in

108school you know and i hope everybody's patient with us during that process it's a huge learning curve but i'll tell you why i'm new to columbia this is my first year here the teachers here i applaud all of them for handling the curve the way that they have it's been fantastic um the goal as everybody said in this room best education balanced with the safety issues in mind mr wagner's here to address any numbers issues regarding safety but the administration believes and this is a lot of conversations and um i know that the elementaries they'd like to see that asynchronous friday i still like the monday through friday option um really there are two options the hybrid has the students coming 00 to 1 30 monday tuesday wednesday thursday and friday was all ace and

109chris you know if we bring back the elementary kids you could do it monday through thursday eight to 1 30 and have friday let me rephrase that i've corrected so many people that are saying that it's not it's asynchronous instruction and that's the key thing is we could have that setup i think it would be better to go eight to 12 30 monday through friday with all the kids and it'd be a shorter time but you're five days a week ironically that would add up to the same amount of time for the remote learning and for the in-person learning um that's where we're at we're trying to get to this point where we agree this is the amount of time for in-person learning and this is the amount of time that we had for remote

110learning and then we'll work back and forth bargain if you will the impacts of how we can better this education for our community so i would suggest k5 returns monday through friday and that will be with all the students k5 for skipping hybrid because mr wagner says that looking at the elementaries that are all in we can do that safely yes you will have a little bit of social distancing issues but when he looks at his contact tracing it shouldn't be an issue and i would suggest that there are monday through friday all students from 8 to 12 30. this allows the exact number of remote learning minutes is the hybrid plan and actually by bringing the kids in it increases our in-person learning six to twelve because of all the passing periods i think

111we need to return to a monday tuesday be wednesday thursday friday all remote hybrid model that we had started with from the github that will be 8 to 12 30 as well exactly as we planned over the summer i would recommend that we start this on september 28th there are a lot of concerns and really today i just ordered a bunch of plastic dividers things that we felt like we didn't really need but as the teachers are seeing the uptick in the in the cases they're starting to say well i i think i'd like that so i think that we should get that for them um we do want everybody to be safe we want everybody to be comfortable we also want everybody back in school to get their education um once we do that

112if we started like on september 28 i would then suggest that by mid-october we meet with mr wagner again and we'll be in huge conversations but we meet in mid-october to discuss can we increase it will it be in discussions of tweaking the educational process to maximize the learning throughout that process mid-november we need to keep revisiting this to try and build up all the kids back i think the plan is solid um i think that we need everyone to understand though parents you need a plan a plan for a quarantine people are going to be getting sick and if someone gets sick in the class the people that are surrounding them need to be quarantined for 14 days so you need to have that emergency plan in your back pocket as far as what

113you're going to do with your children when they get quarantined um i would also ask employer beg anybody with a bachelor's degree that can you should get a sub certificate we're going to need you we're going to all need to stick together and work together to get people in our buildings to cover for the classrooms when we do have people that are sick and get out and that's the key thing we're in this together you know um somebody said that we're being bullied into the board meeting and and you know those kind of comments are kind of dividing i don't want to see us divided over this we all want what's best for our kids what i want to see is us coming together and doing it in a safe logical stepwise manner um we

114went all remote and the administration didn't make that decision based on the health department's recommendation i firmly believe that he has a public body should follow our health department's recommendations he's now recommending that we can go back in k5 hybrid 612. i recommend that we follow them i believe that we should start that on the 28th can i ask what's i'm just curious about sizes for k5 just um what what schools are like what are the classes comparisons like what do what how many students do we have in the k5 classroom versus the schools in monterey county that were looked at what were there just to see if we're comparing are we comparing a school that has 20 like we have maybe i don't know 20 kids are we comparing that to a school that

115maybe we're in the mid to low 20s and then is that what we were compared to as well like this about you know like are we looking at my red button are they those same sizes is that correct mr yeah on the younger kids the class size doesn't really matter because there's very little social distancing done in the class so if you have a positive case in a second grade class you're most likely quarantining that whole class because to identify who was a close contact and who was not is probably going to be impossible so a positive case and so this class size in those younger grades really doesn't matter that much because if somebody gets sick in there the social distancing is typically not met in those younger grades we have not seen many

116cases in the younger kids the biggest you know obviously the concern is the older kids where they're moving throughout the school that if we have a positive case and a student at in those older grades tracking where they've gone before we lose control of the whole school because then we start having cases pop up here there and that's what's going to would knock out the whole school casino younger grade where they're only in that classroom yes the whole classroom would be quarantined but we pretty much got it contained there we know we can set them out the school continue to operate they come back 14 days later two things i want to clarify uh the rollback for you guys from not opening in person uh to going full remote yes i was on that was

117solely on my recommendation and i went with it you know not solely on my recommendation but that was my recommendation the reason being behind that is we had no nothing to look at yet we didn't know what was going to happen and the other part of it we did not have our contact tracers in place we knew that if it had gotten into a school we were going to lose the contact tracing ability immediately and it was going to shut down the school right away we needed to get the health department need to get the contact tracers up and running along with seeing what was really happening in the schools so now we feel that you know no there is no difference in fact our numbers are higher than they were when you started as

118far as positive cases but we feel that now looking at what's happened in other schools seeing what's happening in our parochial schools and in valmeyer knowing when the case has come up we feel we can do a good job of locking it down into a small population taking out maybe a few students that were taking out a whole classroom to quarantine and still allowing the school to operate where at first before we knew we would lose it right away we didn't have the capability i didn't have the personnel hired yet to do all the contact tracing that was needed so now i think we can do that and i think you can safely bring it back and on the other side of that is risk first reward at first you know we weren't hearing all

119these problems with the kids you know the summer time no no real mental health issues with the kids and everything or just move them on into you know remote learning no problems now we start seeing more and more of these issues with the ability for them to learn their mental health issues and everything the risk is still there but the reward is much greater to bring them back in person than what the risk is so yes so and he's completely correct on the recommendation of the health department now is to bring the students back in safely older kids taking a little bit steps a little bit at a time and i'm not talking long periods of little steps if you give me two weeks at one stage before moving to the next one i'll know

120what's going on that whether or not no yes go ahead let's open it up a little more or no we need to stay right where we're at because we're we're right there on the edge or hey we need to do something else because we're about ready to lose control so you know we're going to be watching all that but it is time to bring them back as much as you possibly can now of course i don't know anything about the teaching part of that and what's possible for you guys to do but yes the recommendation is to bring them back as much as possible right now so you've been comfortable with k5 all in i think we can control any type of issues that would occur k through 5 all in yeah we'll shorten days

121or possibly even the friday asynchronous and then hybrid 6 12. yes can you give us an example let's say a high school student does come down with it what would happen anybody the official term anybody that's been within six feet of that individual for more than 15 minutes has to quarantine and that's why the tricky thing comes in you know if you have a full school where you know everybody's moving around we we're gonna have a very difficult time tracing that person's movement um to where we can get the people quarantined that need to be quarantined before they start other people start spreading and that's why the hybrid model just makes it makes it smaller we can hopefully track their movements a little bit better and get to people quarantine that need to before we

122lose control what we're really concerned with is when we start having cases when we get a positive case and we're not too sure that really where that person was at and then we start seeing you know a week later we start seeing positive cases pop up here and there then we've lost it and once that started happening then the only option is to shut it down for 14 days which isn't which isn't horrible i mean you know and then you can bring them right back but that's if we lose control and i'm not guaranteeing we're not going to lose control of some school at some point but even then losing control of the school i will know very rapidly when i think we've lost control of the school and that's when i would inform hey

123you know something needs to be done we're about ready to have this thing blow up and have a bunch of illness you know but i think right now i think we can stop that from happening uh you know and let me be clear on this one because i i want to make sure everybody understands if the health department recommends that we close a building or classroom or whatnot for 14 days as the administrator i would make the executive decision to do that you won't need board action on that but in 14 days they will be coming back in and so you know one of the questions i have for the board is do that allow people to opt out again and i think that what would need to happen is people are going to need

124to be able to opt out into an all remote environment based on you know if somebody in their family gets diagnosed with cancer and they realize they don't want to put their net at risk they should be able to pull the child out and you can do it all remote for them and so you know it's going to be tough that first 14 days people are going to not like it but hopefully it doesn't happen but if it does they might not decide to come back i don't know the health department is only an advisor i'm only advisory to school boards the only instance would be a full-blown outbreak where i thought that there was no option i mean that would take you know then i could step in and actually physically the health department

125does have the authority to close the school it would probably never happen it would be up to the the superintendents and everything to close the school on the advice hopefully we'll never get to the point where i have to be screaming saying you've got a quote you know so and then this would be a follow up for mrs clayton at high school level do the kids sit in the same desks every day for their class so that contact tracing would be much easier like do all of your kids in your class sit in the exact same seat or could we if they don't couldn't yeah probably be important to assign seating that's under if you look under some of the illinois state school board guidelines for seating and everything like that um if you don't

126have a scientist and i went through this with you both what i would suggest the teachers do at the start of each class is just snap a picture of the classroom we can always track it back you can do it the teachers have you can do it on their phones as long as they're their private phones i think that would help because yeah jabot did not have seating that was either the teacher writing down where everybody was sitting or a picture of a deceiving each quest that way we can always go back on this date who was sitting where you know and track it down so anything you can do through the school day to tell us who was next to who for extended periods of time i'm not worried about who's passing who in

127the hall who's lined up behind the other person in a hall for five minutes or something like that because it's that 15-minute uh issue that we've got to deal with i'm in favor of teachers having assigned seats and following that on a daily basis that's great that is that definitely is the best that we can always go back and track who's where consistent yeah and we'll have it on the buses probably day two i mean day one day two we're just gonna slow it down so we have to well and that's another thing too you know in the very beginning we asked paris hey can you help out on the buses by maybe bringing the kids to school and picking them up just to help with the load are we going to ask that again

128if they can help out i believe so that'd be great and another question you said so you just need a bachelor's degree to get a sub certificate yes because we may need that like you said yes enough subs because we were talking today and you said that we're we have one sub at the high school level is that correct we still have one sub at the high school one side that does confirm that they will suffer it's the same as mine it's the same versus the same person so we're splitting this middle school once up when i say i'm i'm i'm beseeching everyone to please get sub certified if you can that would be help very helpful how many high schools have gone down because they can't get songs that's one of the biggest problems

129yeah is that keeping the teachers in and especially in the lower grades because like i said there's it's almost impossible for some of those lower grades for the teachers to be you know high school it's not too bad teachers in the front of the room most of the time it's not within that six foot of students because they're teaching lower grades it's almost impossible so but there again the good thing with that is if there's a positive in the lower grade class most likely the teacher and the whole class are going out together so um that that's a little a little bit different um you know there's going to be cases we're going to have cases we're going to have people that gets it it's it's there's no question it's going to that we're going

130to have cases in the school it's how quick can we isolate them get them locked down and get them you know corn to get those people quarantined so it doesn't spread throughout the school teachers were not past seeing a whole lot of issues with teachers younger grades were seeing almost no issues most of those students that were quarantining on the younger grades are due to a parent being positive i mean they brought it home from work and now the household and if you look at illinois state school board one one member of a household is positive the the the kids have to be out of school there's all pretty good guidelines on the asymptomatic symptomatic for school age when they can come back and everything the school board's done a pretty good job of setting

131those guidelines and everything like that so you know the younger kids like spps we've had a couple students out because brother was positive or something like that or you know an older brother was positive coming back from college but we've had no real issues and i can tell you right now spps does not have the social distance in that the younger great they've done what they could but they they don't know that's a smaller school a lot more room that's one that when that's why i worked with them before they went back they have their desks six feet apart in every single classroom meaning if we had a positive and cabeau it would just take out that one student that was positive that's not possible in most schools um it's not possible during lunch either

132and lunch is going to be the biggest sticking point to getting back to full time in school is getting the 50 until that 50 person capacity goes away you know or that's going to be tough you know you got to utilize and try to figure out some unique areas to spread those kids out through their lunch periods right now with the 8 to 12 30 all in i mean we're still thinking administrators are grabbing gold correct for lunches at that level so we'd be across the board grab-and-go lunches yeah that's what a lot of people are going through huh that's what a lot of schools across the state have gone to just because they can't the lunch is just we get one positive case in the school and it's gonna it would take out the

133whole school because of the lunch period if you do the monday through thursday eight to one thirty and then the asynchronous with the k5 on friday you wouldn't be dealing with a lunch in in there but if it's at eight to twelve thirty monday through friday then you wouldn't it'd be a grab and go lunch for the elementaries and to be a little bit safer that way a lot much period is going to be what is a problem because when we have a positive tracking the movement of the student during the lunch period or something like that now maybe on the little her kids you could keep them in classrooms kind of in uh we actually just um a scene chart at lunch where they'd be sitting next to the people that they sound like

134to the classroom which right and then and that that's the only way to do that you know and then and no nobody says no outside you know it's just lunch because that's where you run into problems and that's what the problem with the older kids too is you know you're going to have them going all over the place so with recess i think in ics what they're doing is they're keeping like the second grade class but in this area of the school yard and then the other second grade class way over there so would that be possible that's perfect together so the whole thing you have to be thinking about is you know just keeping groups together as groups so that when one group has to go out it doesn't make it and you know

135um the other thing we've got to remember this is long term we're going to have to come up with something long-term this the vaccine's going to be available and probably before the end of the year not readily available to everybody but by the first starting next year the problem is it's a vaccine if we're lucky it's going to be 70 effective if we're unlucky it's going to go down almost to 40 to 50 and then you have one third of them then you have one third of the population not taking the vaccine so do you think that next year schools will be still providing a remote learning option i think you're going to have to i don't know what i i don't see how you're going to get away when you're quarantining somebody for 14

136days what are you going to do there's got to be some option because you're you may not you may not only be quarantining that one person that's sick you may be quarantining a whole second grade class or at least the portion of the classroom that maybe was on taxes and i think that being able to do remote learning for those that are under quarantine or are home on extended leave or some medical issue they broke no i would say no you know no i and i don't think i don't want to use remote learning like you're doing right now it's going to have to have some way for the kids to stay up with their school work when they're being it's not going to be that you're trying to provide a full quality education for

137that 14 days you're just not trying to basically right now if you have a student go out with my mom or something like that it's going to be the same thing you got to find a way to get into school work try to keep them up to speed as much as possible you know and then you know so it's going to be different but it's still going to be around and it's going to be a unique situation the other thing we've got coming up here in a month is we got flu season yeah if you look at the statistics more people die from the flu yearly than we've had total deaths do all students get flu shots do all parents get flu shots what's the difference between vaccinating for the flu and vaccinating the coconut

138once we get some of the treatment right and that's where we and that's the other thing that we've picked up over the past three months is the treatments the things that are available for people who do get really sick you know they've drastically improved the doctors have learned how to and not just the ones you hear about on the news they've learned how to deal with it from the people who are just just barely sick enough to go into the hospital how to treat them to get them out of the hospital when this first came out those people who were just sick enough to show up at the hospital ended up progressing all the way to ventilators now they have figured out the treatments how and that's what we've picked up so no we're approaching

139and what i think we're going to see is we are going to be approaching a flu-like scenario um in the coming you know by the start of next year by the middle next year pretty much we're going to have to look at this just as the flu yeah father came home sick he got it at work on say the first of the month and he has a child that goes to school we're going to quarantine them for 14 days from the first or 14 days from when he's struggling it becomes really difficult with a parent that is positive especially of young kids the child will be quarantined for up to 25 days because it's if the parent is sick the parent is quarantined for 10 days the students 14 days don't start until that parent

140gets off a quarantine because obviously the student can't take care of themselves so the parents taken care of now a lot of times what we've seen here now extended families something like that they ship the child off as soon as the dad comes home so that students 14 days starts from when you separate them from that parent or dual parent households you know separate dad goes stay somewhere else or lives in the basement or something like that so we're seeing some of that but yeah it can be a long time especially for the single parent household the single parent is positive the students 14 days don't start until the parent comes off of quarantine and then the student's 14 days would start because they could turn up positive any time during those four running days

141okay what's your experience then with having like a fever check thing like parents checking the kids before they leave for school maybe logging it in the system aaron's checking the temperature a good idea school checking it it's probably not going to work okay because they make systems where the kids can like get scanned as they come in they do they're they're just not accurate enough i mean they you know i i don't say they're not accurate they're not the ones that you can afford are not accurate or not the ones we would afford could afford they're good warning signs meaning you can use it to pick up somebody's warning sign but in a school situation where the kid might be walking a block two blocks outside in 30 degree weather and then comes in by

142the time that scanner picks them up coming in the door it's going to it even if they were running 100 something temperature it's not going to catch it or vice versa if it's 100 degrees outside somebody's been sitting outside in the direct sun has a black shirt on when they come in it's going to send a notification off that that person's got a temperature same way even with the handheld thermometers depending on what you know if they haven't had time to get out of an extreme environment they're not doing any good so i yes the parent and no you're not going to have 100 compliance but you're going to have some that are checking their kids to mature before so it's it's definitely a good thing for parents to either sign off on or i

143don't know what type of system you have here um if it's possible to have them check a box each morning that's great but um that may not be possible you know and then what do you do when the parent doesn't check the box you know um so kind of it's kind of like because i talk to workplaces all the time since no different than any other time of the year don't send your kid to school if he's sick well i think the parent check part could be really great because sometimes the kids don't even realize they are sick and you take that temperature and you're like whoa you have a fever you know that would be and nobody would know but it could prevent something if we didn't and definitely something that you can put

144out that you want the parents to do i don't know that you need that you're going to have them reporting it to you every time or they do it but it's definitely something that you could definitely stress for the parents to do and especially on the younger kids and stuff like that parents should be monitoring their kids pretty closely and then i think i just have one last question sorry guys um just to confirm so you're recommending hybrid for six through 12 because they're changing classes and to control having to shut down the schools just to see what's going on like i said you mentioned it or somebody did with the school size and classroom size we kind of like i said jabot we're not having any real problems with it but i can't use

145them as an example of what's going to go here so on the upper grades a little bit slower to give me and people a chance to see what's happening i said two weeks is all you know if something's gonna come up i'll start to see it in two weeks that whether or not we need to go back or go forward and we can always go forward you know and you can go back a step but the hardest thing to do is going to be to bring them back and then have to go to all the remote again so we don't want to do that we don't want to bring them back and then go whoops we messed up all remote so high school we want to take a little slower than the grade school because

146i'm fairly confident on the lower grades we're going to be able to deal with anything it throws at us in high school if we went full in i'm not too sure we could deal with what may come without taking it slow enough that i can watch it on hybrid for the high school this is clayton would we be able to social distance and put those desks apart on hybrid it would depend upon the classroom there's no guarantee that it works out perfectly alphabetically like we could arrange at elementary levels because each each class is a different combination of students so yes we are going a through k in l through c one hour there might be five kids in the class and next time there might be 14. same thing in middle school and the

147key there is just to get as much room as possible you know between them and then we will look at it on a case-by-case basis you know if it's you know five and a half feet and we're not seeing a whole lot of spread that person's probably not going to be required to quarantine it five and a half feet but you know if we're seeing a whole lot of spring we're really concerned we'll err on that side of caution but it it's all on a case-by-case basis and the the contact tracers will all look at that and make the best decision you know like i said was it 14 minutes or was it 15 minutes that you're well you know we've got to look at a whole lot more than just the time so taking

148need i'll say metered incremental steps for the uppercase yes yes just so we can be sure i wish i could say bring them back just like the grades go i'd love to do that but i'm afraid if we do that we may be right back to all remote very quickly without because something comes up that i really didn't see you know where we go slow we'll probably be able to stop anything change our behavior change the patterning of the schools where we see it's being spread or where we're losing where i lose you know we have one kid that gets it and then we realize wait a second we don't know who he was around for these two hours here because of the movement through the school that's a problem but it's a problem that

149hopefully he wasn't around too many people that we can then change you know as we see things happen i don't have any questions but i do have a statement that i personally would like to say so for the record elisa schumacher believed that all students k-12 should be back in school full days every day with masks worn properly by all teachers administration and students 100 of the time and less eating or drinking unfortunately with the students in 6 through 12 having to change classes and not being able to social distance properly in the hallways makes it more difficult to bring those grade levels back every day possibly a solution would be to have the teachers move classes instead of students but that would not work for all classes especially those classes with labs pe choir

150band art and shop we need to try harder as a district because students are being affected educationally socially physically emotionally mentally and technically not to mention all the added stress remote learning has added to families in one of the many conversations with mr grote i had recommended k through 5 back in person every day all day with 6 through 12 going the hybrid model of two groups which we originally had in place and to continue work on ways to get those grades back full time in person soon there will be a lot of work on everyone's part to make sure our schools stay safe for all the students and faculty to return full time in person so stay home if you have a temp wash your hands and wear masks properly i firmly believe we

151need to be trying harder to satisfy our taxpayers of this district thank you to the administration teachers and all other employees who have put many hours in to make cusd4 great i have another question i think you're on camera can um just i've been listening to everything being said and here have heard listening to the parents to other board members to the cea um i don't have a prepared speech um but what i would like to say is you know everybody's been working hard i did get a chance this past week to spend some time with a couple of grandchildren up in south dakota who are both going to school remotely and parents that say children are having a hard time focusing we had a first grader that would come and finish the task and

152then run back to the play room and then come back to the computer finish the task back to the playroom and back and forth yeah it was hard keeping that first grader um focused he had a sixth grader who does have uh adhd and he would start at eight o'clock in the morning with the zoom do lessons and various things and that poor kid was going for almost 10 to 12 hours a day so i really felt like you know this was a big stress i would really like to see the kids back in school um i am in agreement that we do need to take the the smaller steps and offer that remote learning at a global level to those who really feel they need it as my kids are doing remotely because of

153uh parents that have some some health issues so um yes i would like to see us bring the kids back and and let's start with the uh i'm in agreement to start with the five days at uh the eight to twelve thirty four k through five and go um hybrid with the sixth grade 12 and see how it goes for a couple weeks and if things are going better then maybe we can start to bring those other kids back into some short days or every day and keep working our schedules um i would like us to you know maybe say this is a commitment for two weeks for four weeks through the end of the first quarter and then wait till at the end of first quarter to make the next change um and also

154as to make an allowance for those that are going remote that may decide they want to come back in full time parents that would need to would not be such an impact to our classrooms so that could you know possibly happen at a shorter notice and especially if there's a warranty an issue but again i've been hearing and listening um i i can certainly sympathize with all sides of this whole story and see the struggles that are there so um you know parents are struggling kids are struggling parents are succeeding i i commend those who are doing well my own kids i really feel like they're doing very well at this but um you know everybody all kids learn differently there are those that are visual learners those that have to read it to to

155get it those that have to have it shown to them and doing hands-on so um you know having the virtual really is only one form of learning so that's that's another reason i really feel like we need the kids back in the classroom but i don't want us to jump in and make mistakes and then have to be it back all remote that's all i have for right now thank you um it's come up that some kids have tested positive for the antibodies how how do you feel about those kids being in and and like would that be i mean could they be here every day because they've already had it or is that only depending on the test there's there's a whole lot of antibody tests out there that are not that accurate okay

156so as far as i know last i heard from the illinois state school board was that no they were not taking that in now but what you will end up with is kids that had tested positive and then are through their quarantine they're protected for three months from anything basically they would not be required to go quarantine again because of a close contact or anything a parent that had spoken to me had tested their kid to test the positive and then with giving blood at the red cross had um shown that they've got the antibodies right so they were wondering if they could call them instead of just on the a days or b days on the amd days that would yeah they would be protected from etching it and from spreading it for up

157to three minimum of three months by the survivor stating that this person has the proper tests and everything yes yeah we if they're monroe county residents will have a record of their tests can't go on an antibody test but we can go on the record of their initial diagnosis of having so then are they good to stay in school three months and then on three months positive that let's say july one that's only good for three months and then at that point they'd have to be back on height right as of right now that's what cdc is coming out of yes i have a question i guess the big debate now is how i think everybody's pretty much in agreement that we're going to bring the kids back the big question is what times and

158how long that sort of thing my biggest concern is if we bring them back until just 12 30 these kids have to go somewhere so they're gonna go to neighbor's house they're gonna go to daycare they're gonna get spread out which means they're gonna be exposed far more than in a safe school environment and that is the only issue with you know i have no problem with them being here all day the issue is with the 50-person capacity per room that the governor has put out and pass through jay carr so it is a rule it's not one of his things that he just said on guidelines or whatever he actually passed the mass rule and the 50-person capacity through jaycar making it a rule making it enforceable for the schools to figure out a

159way to have one do lunch basically that's the biggest issue no we have schools that are doing smaller schools that are there all day you know there's nothing that says you can't be there all day but it's just figuring out how you're going to feed the kids why they're here with that 50-person maximum capacity if we're making rabid gold bags anyway for the kids to get out of 12 30 is there not a possibility to have lunch inside a classroom if it's just sack lunches there's more exposure afterwards could we keep them here until three o'clock while the teacher is teaching the remote shoulders did they have play time though that's two and a half hours or you know well they have lunch i think right now what we need to do is is decide

160you know is it going to be the monday through friday for the shortened day or is it going to be two monday through thursday with friday asynchronous another association would like that one more i like the other one better it's the first hurdle we need to figure out and then we'll be working with the association to um look at some of these other options as we do so if we make it monday through thursday and the friday is a remote day on that remote day i guess is there a way that we can go to school eighth grade you still need time right now what you've according to with the association is kind of a uh this is the amount of time for in-person instruction and this is the remote learning time and so what

161we're trying to do is as we make this change and and not come back in the hybrid model as we had already agreed on coming back with all in person we're trying to hold those amounts of time solid until we have the classroom set up and then we'll be working together to increase those times then you give your speech on your notes like you said somebody like free birth were they going monday through friday or monday thursday full days and then friday remote monday and tuesday is i believe monday is monday tuesday yep monday and thursday are group a tuesday and friday's rupee wednesdays are the full-day remotes and this and this is your this is cape town right here yeah your day through the district and they're until three o'clock but they're two days

162a week correct so the same number of hours at the end of the day correct yes but me when we had done the first plan had agreed to a little bit of time at the end of every day for the remote learning because the hybrid we have that async i was thinking you said one school was full days monday through thursday and then friday was forward low no all right no they're wednesdays and valentine red leather both on monday to friday all out all day that early but their remote kids are a day behind the rest of their kids too so they've addressed it that way so we have no local schools that are monday through friday eight to three here always and spps is public schools but also the parents that are working parents

163because we're going to have some people that are going to just stay here and and our staff like monitors i mean i remember when i was a kid my mom came into a recreation school we have those let's sign them up for stuff i'm willing to do anything that we can do to staff this i mean it's because i think we're going to have a lot of people doing the eagle zone and um you know i don't i don't want to have a waiting list for it so we're going to need to just wrap it up and figure it out so what about all the community service hours if the kids need to graduate they can help with legal zones degrees with people's own counsel's community service hours i don't need to pay them sir

164currently the workers all get paid but you would be able to but i mean you could make a recommendation and you did it as a high school student that's service and it would be a huge community service for parents i think there's a lot of good ideas you can close around here for sure yeah i think all of those are taking time to work through consensus to some degree and and there's a plan that appears to be workable as a first step while some of these ideas are getting further developed to see if they can really happen and so we need to make a decision on at least that first step here there's literally an infinite number of ways to do this right yes our our administration and our educators and health department officials know

165best piece this all together and so we probably need to let them digest some of the thoughts and ideas and see if they can come up with you know the next step after this first step and i would like to see a committee put together where you've got maybe two board members a teacher from each of the schools specialized teacher because we really haven't talked about special ed and some parents all you know maybe people with the opposing viewpoints to help really brainstorm and come up with some great ideas because that way nobody's alone in doing it and the community hasn't put yeah i think that that's a good idea and i i really think that that may be also a good process for part of the two-week review that if we continually go through

166like in every two-week review to uh establish you know what types of steps we can grow too and can get the feedback i'm fine with that you're just gonna sleep on it and get back to me so that might be tough with the teachers if it's you know meeting at six o'clock at night though i would do it nobody don't want to i mean i would do it but i can't take off work until the day to drive what would be your preference going monday through friday from 8 to 12 30 or doing monday through thursday 8 to 1 30 and then have friday as a remote and i didn't say all thank you okay so doing all the math if we stay until 1 30 and feed them lunch which is a major hurdle

167if we kind of work backwards so part b was going to get out at 120 so if i take off that half hour lunch i'm at 12 50. the 12 30 release time is only really losing 20 minutes of construction because we don't have to deal with lunch so i think that the k-12 k5 teachers would rather go 7 50 to 12 30 not have lunch and have friday as our synchronous day until we get a better handle on all of this because doing two jobs is is that's going to be it's going to be very hard on us and if we're only losing 20 minutes of instruction by not serving lunch it sounds like a major headache that we're not having you're still serving sorry it's not not serving it here thank still do

168grab and go i mean little one we're going to have to have snack time 12 30 is late it's good i'm going to need a snack so we're going to have to have snack time and you know hopefully the weather's nice we can go outside and have our grapes and have some mask off time but uh realistically if you wanted to know what the teachers would like that would be what the teachers would like and i don't know if it helps with busting or not because all of us would be busting at the same time all four buildings yeah because that would help her or not unless he's gonna be the same if you do a four day five day and we're all getting out of the same yeah so the only thing is you

169know it's only 20 minutes a day but i feel like parents are gonna say well it's already three hours less than what or two and a half hours less than what it normally was before i get that it is a second job and to ask us to do that in two hours sorry tyler um if you ask you guys to do that in two hours is rough i think your special ed department is going to suffer a great deal because they have so many different ieps that they have to follow so they have so many individual lessons that they have to create and kids they have to meet with um i don't know i think i think it's a i know it's a baby step and it sounds like oh they're only moving that we're

170only getting this much but in two weeks we could say you know hey we could do this let's keep them until 1 30 and try lunch and in two weeks we could say hey let's try let's try to do this on fridays too but i think we need to take a baby step first and see how see how it is see how how much we can handle otherwise you are going to have some stressed out teachers we're going to get sick you're going to need subs and we've already had that conversation thank you and what about you um you want to talk about that sure so currently right now we have our students who are in self-contained who this week started coming in four days a week so depending on what we decide then we

171will look at when we had our hybrid plan that we initially started with mrs gotcher had reached out to the students who had iet's not speech only but other ieps for various regions and they were if you're on a hybrid plan let's say you're 6 through 12 during that plan we gave them the option to come all four days um and then if we're all in okay through five and they would be being addressed the same way we still can't remove that though for like my remote kids we still have some families whose children have ieds who they have opted for fully remote that will not go away but we have plans for depending on what age level and what our plan is to walk away with so we know that in k through 5

172what about 6 through 12. so 6 through 12 if we do hybrid then we initially had plan like i said this is going to reach out to every family to say do you want to do an a and b stay as is like everybody else or do you want to have your child come in four days and so then they gave her the feedback so she would be following up for them to see if that is still their preference okay so right now am i speaking correctly so then if we're doing hybrid the kids would be here four days a week unless they whenever unless they choose not to they could be yes that's their choice and that would be until 12 30. okay let's wrap this up if i just kind of pull this

173together so we we talked about starting and we'll talk about we talked about starting on the 28th um 6 212 attending a hybrid a b schedule from 8 to 12 30 so we got that i guess it's down to the k through 5 piece monday through thursday with a friday is you mentioned earlier there was an issue with starting earlier with the sap the um sat the makeup for last year is scheduled for the 23rd which is a wednesday and so um whatever we started before that wednesday at the high school just needs to not have like there would have normally if we were still on our own and if we wait to the 28th the high school issue with the hvac that government be taken care of by the 28th i really would like

174to say yes however they were supposed to have a crane there this last weekend and um the rain pushed them off it wasn't hard rain but they thought it might have been so they're supposed to be there again this saturday i don't know if they scheduled the second one so um theoretically half of the hvac units should have been sat last last weekend and then other actions that this weekend should be done but the weather didn't help us very few things are going our way right now just a thought here um yeah we've talked about the kids transitioning back to schools that you know especially the freshmen that are going transitioning to the high school and have never been in the building um if you would start on the 28th would there be any possibility

175that either that prior thursday or prior or friday we could have one day of a freshman orientation and have them have just the freshmen come in could come in based on parts of the alphabet and run maybe three or four different sessions of opening the building up for a through a letter and doing that three or four sessions that one evening so they can come in and walk their schedule and then move on until the next group will come in nothing more than them being able to walk the building to see clients where it lasts as well so yes that again that would be based on when we decided to come back in did you get that karen yep thank you okay just talking about the money through thursday versus monday through friday so by

176our parents i we were doing monday through friday and we offer eagle view afterwards that's a great alternative for parents if we don't do that then they have to find daycare for just friday so is there unless we could do evil view on friday because parents have already rearranged once and now we're going to be asking them to rearrange again but then three four days are consistent but the fourth day would be if we didn't do the fourth day that will be very challenging for them and then we're asking daycare is then the fifth day yeah and then we'd be asking daycares who have really stepped up our churches who have really stepped up to still have a bunch of teachers but just on one day so i don't know how that would work i

177don't know which one families would rather go if we did evil views strictly on fridays then um the transportation would be a hundred percent up to the parents we wouldn't run business but they may be okay with that going to give them the full day i don't know if we'd want to start doing eagle zone all maybe starting at 8 o'clock in the morning or not i mean it's a nice our main business is education you know we provide this service after school versus i don't know if we want to start just offering it all day well then that makes me lean towards still being here on friday then you run into lunches as well on fridays if you started doing that um yeah i think just i guess i'm still in favor of going

178monday through friday and i'll support it as long as we continue to move in the right direction i'm just a little scared this is just going to be autopilot we're just going to stay good enough which well honestly that's why we're here before you know we never said we're not well we did say that parents can make the choice for nine weeks and then we did all that so that's where the nine weeks came in but when we first heard or we came back we heard from john and said okay that's why we got together now instead of waiting another couple of weeks for an export meeting to come together let's let's take some action once we hear there's some trends or some some differing opinions and things like that from uh from an authority

179as a health department to say it's time to come back and that's why we're sitting here now so and we're lucky to have mr right here yeah thank you for coming to our meeting and answering our questions and that's that's a big part of this deal you know it's everybody has their area of expertise the teachers are the best educators the administration you're in the health i mean it's our job as a board to put it all together and make a decision for the overall and i have to micromanage anything but really very sorry there is no wrong answer there's no right answer in any of this you just got to make a decision what you got taking that as many people's opinion that you can make the decision and then we adjust as we

180go i mean there's gonna there's gonna be mistakes we're gonna do maybe push something too far sometime and not have the proper things in place to just but we can correct it and that's why with especially with the high school we just need to be able to make sure we don't go too far that we just lose it that we can correct it as we go and i think this is the best way to start like i said i the other concern is you know like i said you got to keep in mind that in the upper grades two weeks revisited you know same way with the lower grades you know at what point do you go back to full school days and the people who don't want to send their kid to school you

181know what do you do then do you you know tell them they're only options home school or something like that because this virus is going to be a round for a long time so at some point you're going to have to make the decision that school is cool that's it so well the nice thing about doing it this way also is the parents that aren't afraid or worried or whenever they make their choice to keep their kids home we're not preventing anybody right no and that and i think that's good for right now lisa but you know after the vaccine becomes available beginning after at some point you're going to have to make the decision that school is back and that your remote option is more or less what it is during flu season if

182the teachers provide school work for ills students and stuff like that because this is not going to just all sudden vaccines available this goes away there's a whole lot of other things in in there that but and you can't continue to operate with a full remote option forever so what i'm hearing as far as as regards to the k-5 um monday through friday 8-12 30. we're hearing last part i remember 1 30 but i think i'm a mother yes so basically we're providing lunch to every student before they leave the school and we're definitely going to look at options for eagleview the lunches right now are still federally subsidized okay so even if we go or when we go back they'll still be federally suspected so everybody can have them maybe that's important because we're

183sending kids home and mom and dad know that they've got lunch and then it didn't cost them anything are there any other questions from the lord i didn't even ask especially kids who choose to still be remote are we gonna be able to take care of them just like i mean just i mean it's not gonna be the same as if they're in person but making sure that they get all the help that they need yeah so like our related services are doing teletherapy um so that would continue um and then as far as it would be the same as remote that our gen ed teachers are doing as much as they can remotely because we can't have them go into the houses so it's going to be equal and they'll just do just like

184the gennad teachers are doing but there is remote um teletherapy and things like that for related services so hearing everything that i've heard thus far i'd entertain a motion for us to return the students to in-person instruction on september 28th with k through 5 attending monday through friday from 8 to 12 30 and 6 to 12 attending a hybrid av schedule from 8 to 12 30. also we would have the option for remote learning for those parents and students who wish to choose that option yes greg o'connor makes that promotion second by john long i'm gonna ask a question right now is there any other questions from the board at this time is there any possibility or is it worth looking into to start the younger days standpoint for those who have two you know

185different different i would think it'd be not speaking for the parents but i would think it would be easier to know this is the day you know this whole household is going back to school can you please uh do rojo for me yes tammy hines hi john long yes craig meyer yes stop middle camp yes craig o'connor hi lisa schumacher yes karen anderson motion carries so we're going back to school on the 28th next item on the agenda is uh adjournment of course before i go to a german i usually have board president's priority which i never exercised at this time i am i want to thank everybody who came out and spoke tonight for those that are online that sent us emails for those that talked on the phone with dr costelli dialing up

186thank you very much to john wagner and monroe county health department it truly does take a community and a village for our kids and i really really do appreciate that i left out with the teachers thank you very much for what you've done thus far and what you continue to do for kids i didn't entertain a motion to adjourn this meeting everybody lisa schumacher karen anderson yeah kenny oh great thank you all thank you taylor you