001okay good evening sorry for the delay the executive session of the wayne board of education regular meeting of march 18 2021 was convened virtually and hosted in the media center of anthony wayne middle school 201 garside avenue william new jersey the state of com statement of compliance setting forth time date and location was read in accordance with the requirements of the open public meetings act and the roll call was taken the meeting was recessed and is now being convened can i get a mover i'll move hello mr giordano and mr duffy uh please rise for a flag salute and a moment of silence i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all oops
002okay roll call mr moffatt mrs albanese here mr bubba here mr duffy president mr giordano here mrs kazan here mrs kumar mr pavlak here mrs put up yeah and mrs sheer here okay dr toback so for my report this evening i know that we have a number of presentations tonight so i'm going to make it very brief i just really have an announcement the wing board of education and the district administration the main education association mayor vergano and the wayne township health department have been working together to create an opportunity for wayne school employees to receive a covit 19 vaccination so as a result of this effort we're happy to report that 100 teachers per week will be able to be vaccinated at the wayne township vaccine clinic this includes all school employees i've mentioned
003teachers it's also employees thank you to all parties for making this a reality for our school employees hiv report i have to report that there are no cases of hiv during this reporting period can i interrupt dr toback this is an important development so i want to personally thank mayor vergano on behalf of the board and our teachers this is wonderful news and will go a long way in keeping our schools open going forward we've already compiled a list of teachers who need appointments and mayor vergano will be adding them to the vaccine schedule over the next few weeks if the dose important service you are offering to our school community at this time and we do appreciate it it takes a village thank you okay continue thank you i'm sorry i can't hear you
004would you say student reps which that's part where the student representatives get their reports okay are we ready gina joseph hi i'm here thank you for having me uh wayne hills wins two events places second overall in 2021 njaa pt physics olympics six students from the wayne hills engineering club competed virtually in three events in the njaa pt physics olympics on two saturdays in february and march this competition is held annually at monmouth regional high school and was held virtually for the first time this year isaac gotien celine kim sakshi lend nick pepoi and chris wu formed the powerhouse team from hills that scored first place in both the tower of cards and fermi question event the hills team also made a great showing in the toothpick roller coaster event and came in second place
005overall for this year's competition congratulations to all members of the wayne hills team great job congratulations to john osbach a senior at wayne hills who has been awarded the rensselaer medal for from rensselaer politec polytechnic institute this prestigious award has been awarded since 1916 to one student in any given high school and is designed to recognize the students strength and success in the fields of mathematics and science the wayne hills millennial winter guard is enjoying an exciting and productive virtual competition season with their show something in the attic so far the guard has earned two excellent ratings with three or more competitions to go the wayne hills jazz ensemble has planned an outdoor jazz coffee house for tuesday april 20th starting at 6 30 p.m this will be held on the oval in front of
006the school and audience members are asked to bring in law chairs also featured will be members of our jazz improvisation class the wayne hills schuyler colfax span through the aegis concert premiered on wayne hills tv channel on tuesday march 17th at seven o'clock the virtual concert features 6th and 7th and 8th grade band members of scms in the symphonic band from wayne hills high school a special guest performance by the wayne hills high school winning avengers ensemble is also included this concert can easily be seen anytime now by searching the wayne hills tv youtube page the wayne hills leo cub is club is participating in the 2021 vietnam veteran paracore challenge they will be using 500 feet of green paracord to produce around 64 quick release paracord bracelets that will be sent to operation gratitude
007leo club members will have from march 16th to march 26 to compete making the complete making those bracelets and turn them into mrs fishman in order to submit them in time for a completion the color green is one of the colors of service ribbons that vietnam veterans received so this will be a tangible way to express your gratitude for the cause and congratulations as the wayne hills boys high school team basketball team won their league championship this season thank you hi good evening thank you for having me again congratulations to the boys bowling team on finishing their season with a 7-0 win over saint joe's and a 9-5 record on the year led by seniors jared d'alessandro justin sonnet ryan tomback and michael adipietro the boys placed second in the independence division bnc boyce fencing
008finished with their best season ever this year valley's freshman james sun finished week 6 9-0 and was 24-6 on the season finishing second on the team to senior foilist zach januk who finished at 24 to 5. great year service boys wayne valley's winter track teams are off to a terrific start congratulations to the girls winner track team for winning the independent polar bear invitational they won 8 out of the 12 events contested and every team member contributed points to the victory at the same independent polar bear invitational senior gavin mcgarrity won the shotgun contest and junior ryan pena won both the 800 meter and 600 meter races great job to all congratulations to former wayne valley athlete and current girls fencing assistant coach francesca russo released 18th in the 2021 women's saber individual world cup
009and is currently striving for a spot on the 2021 u.s olympics team the wayne valley counselors have been sending messages of positivity to students and staff all month to spread kindness throughout the building almost 2 500 third-party compliments sent in by students and staff are nearly done being prepared and are set to be distributed soon mrs vodka's u.s history classes are busy creating their social reform projects to foster change in society each student can select a topic they believe in and design their own approach to fix the social issue and evaluate the democratic process thank you to ms ini's marketing classes and values one team for designing and promoting the fright pretty campaign to support former student lindsey slider and her fight against leukemia great job to juniors emily wilson and sydney betts on securing
010over 50 cobit vaccine appointments for vulneral vulnerable seniors in wean the girls independently organized a system to serve as a go-between for the unvaccinated and local health authorities and saint joseph's wayne hospital thank you one of these days i'll remember to unmute it causes feedback and it's i keep forgetting to turn on my apologies thank you joseph thank you gina great report did anyone have uh any donations to read uh yes i have one donation to read thank you wayne valley's wayne hills pto donated funds to benefit the students at wayne hills in the amount of 1 thank you thank you both have a great evening okay back to you dr toback looks really um to mr moffatt and for a discussion about the second public input on the 2021-2222 i'm sorry you're right sorry
011you are first mr moffat go ahead yes uh tonight is the second input session for the general public it is on for a vote tonight under an item o5 approval of the tentative budget once it's approved by the board after consideration tonight it'll it'll be forwarded to the county office for final review and we'll be ready for the public hearing once approved by the department on may 6. so it is on tonight and if you have any input please uh call in uh for the first session of uh open public comment thank you does that conclude your portion yes thank you mr moffat i'm assuming the board all had their time to look over the budget we've all received our copies and are up to speed unless anyone has any questions or discussion right now
012okay back to you dr toback okay so um this is richmond and i are once again happy to provide the community with the recommended plan for returning more of our students to school and for more instructional time especially glad to report that many parents wrote recently about how much their children are already enjoying some additional time in school and some more time with their friends so we've been working to do more in order to make sure that we heard voices from across the district we completed surveys for our parents and another survey for our staff members we know that many parents will be returning their children to school and we made some adjustments to our original proposal based on feedback that we received the presentation we're about to share was shared previously with the community
013yesterday to allow for time for review this evening we also have dr goldberg in attendance dr goldberg is an infectious disease specialist he works for the district as a consultant on pandemic related matters i also wanted to take a moment of um time this evening just to thank the community and we'll talk a little bit more about your response but what a great response that we had for our survey this is a huge help and it really helps us to understand what's most important to you i also wanted to once again reiterate a little bit what mrs cannon said regarding mayor bergano and the wayne health department along with the wa as far as our progress with making vaccines available to teachers that's a that's a huge step forward for the districts and uh i
014look forward to seeing that move along very quickly dr richard i'd like to just move on now to the chronovirus map part so let's get started okay so um we look at this every board meeting just to see the general trend in new jersey so in the united states um there's generally a downward trend in kobe cases but here in new jersey we experienced a plateau and now we're seeing an increase in cases so while there is an 11 increase in the number of new cases the number for those passing away or being hospitalized is decreasing there's definitely an increase in cases and we'll talk a little bit about what that looks like in the school district if you can go to the next page so there's a new department of health covert activity report
015that came out and this one is a little older the new one came out today we don't have it in here but it is essentially the same map except there's one additional county that is now high risk so as you can see if you look at the table at the very top there's one week where we dropped moderate risk otherwise we've been at high risk for some time okay if you can go to the next slide in terms of staffing and in terms of students positive and quarantining you could see that on march 4th at the beginning of the month our numbers were very low when you get to march 11th you could see there was almost like an explosion in cases when you add it together the totals add up to 341 either students
016and staff quarantining or students and staff positive for chronobytes so then you go to march 15th and i was hopeful that we would continue maybe in a slightly downward trend but now if you go to the next page you see quite a bit of growth in our numbers so this last positive and current this last positive according to chart shows our numbers um that's for today so unfortunately today is our worst day that we've had when it comes to the number of students and staff either positive or quarantining we went to over 400 individuals in the final column on the right since the chart was produced we actually had two more staff members that tested positive plus there's also a number of contact tracing investigations in process so that number at 403 is actually higher
017there is good news though previously i talked about the fact that when we have quarantining staff and positive staff getting around the number 50 that's something that caused us to shut down at this point we have an additional over 50 new subs we have permanent subs in every building and we also have 12 staff members back from medical leave after being vaccinated so that's all good news but those numbers are high and those numbers like i said that's that's really that that's our single worst day when it comes to that number um but those are the good news in that we have a good amount of time before we get to april 19th and our return to school okay so dr goldberg if you can go to the next i'm sorry dr bashar we'll be
018getting conductive goals back in a second okay so um as you can see we wanted to get to the point so our administrative recommendation is to proceed as planned with changes based on feedback from the community board of education employees and with consideration of overt activity and expert advice so the first thing the april 19th return so you can see the elementary k-2 for five abbreviated days of 145 dismissal no cohorts and social distancing is left less than six feet dr goldberg is on um as a panelist so i just wanted to ask him i mean you saw we had many additional cases and that's of course cause for concern but the question is is it safe or advisable to reduce social distancing to under six feet at the elementary grade levels so that is
019a question that exists in the district there's concern about that and dr goldberg i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that issue thank you um hopefully everyone can hear me uh somebody would just nod so i know that i haven't run a foul of modern technology as those of us with gray hair occasionally do i've spent quite a several months since i last spoke to the board into the community and i think we've learned quite a lot about covet and i think what we have learned and what has been shown in other school districts is that transmission of infection among the young children among the elementary school children k through two and uh sly older is not very efficient uh inevitably what we find is when in other schools have reported
020and other districts have reported that when these children become infected they become infected usually from their parents so it doesn't go up it usually goes down and i think that is the basis why you're seeing in many districts including wayne uh starting off with elementary school and and uh k through uh two years of age uh bringing them back in uh much sooner and at a if you will a much closer ability um the issue of six feet is soon to be settled officially by cdc i think within the next few weeks many of you i'm sure have read and seen that the six foot standard is probably going to drop down to a more recognizable three feet and again this is quite useful for allowing more children to get together in classroom and again
021in younger children that you're talking about in the elementary school they just don't produce the same kind of viral spread as you can see in later on in the older population so bringing these young children back without cohorting but with social distancing uh and and we have spoken before dr tobacc and i about four feet still is going to be a foot greater than what will probably be the new standard and i think this is a uh excellent way of bringing these children back right so let's go on to the discussion about the middle school so um in the high school so that those students are coming back for a full day to increase instructional time but we're maintaining cohorts we're adding lunch so dr goldberg can you comment a little bit about serving school
022lunch and you can speak about whether it is advisable to maintain a school lunch program given the pandemic and if so how can that be done safely the um the issue with high school students and older i think is quite obvious especially looking at the graphs that you previously showed wherein the high schools are having more of a outbreak among their students and we do know that students in the high school level do pass it back and forth among themselves lunch is something that can be done safely it needs to be done with social distancing whenever possible now that the weather is turning nice uh if it could be done outside or in areas where windows are open and airflow can be assured just as we're seeing with restaurants now opening with more people involved
023in other states not so much new jersey i'm sorry to say but in new york and connecticut it can be done in a safe manner and i think that it should not be a problem if done correctly so just for anyone who's tuning in tonight with uh high school children so there are a number of steps the district is taking to increase safety for our students and for our staff so the first thing is that we are renting large tents um at least two for each high school and those tents will be um they'll be a combination they'll be used for lunch for students who like to go outside for lunch we also have a number of tables and chairs and benches a variety of different ways that students can stay outside um obviously if
024the weather is poor the tents will help as far as allowing students to stay outside even in whether that's not as ideal as what we'd like it to be the other thing there's exciting news for juniors at both high schools okay so the exciting news is that part of the plan to alleviate the number of students in the building for lunch is to also allow students to go out to lunch so traditionally that is a senior privilege we're going to extend that to the junior class for just this brief period of time to allow some additional flexibility and to allow students to be out of the building so all said and done there are ample opportunities for students and there's various ways that students can be spread out safely at our high schools and also
025at our middle schools um in middle school the benefits of that is a lot of different lunch periods so that's really high school is a challenge because they do have a unit lunch and so the unit lunch means all students are at lunch at the same time okay um dr burchard if you can go to the next page okay so basically what i've provided here is a summary of our special education program and our students in self-name programs are already receiving in-person instruction five days per week the next step in the progression is for our out-of-class resource students to return april 19th for four days of instruction at the middle of the high school level goal is to maintain our students in their current placement in cohorts and in rotation as their peers so that's
026for special education um if we can go on to the next slide for our parents have children in the early childhood center you can see basically what we've done is we've just simply included the schedule so this is more informational but obviously the difference is five days okay so it's the same schedule as far as time goes but five days you can go to the next slide please okay so this is basically an explanation about why april 19th was identified as a date to return dr goldberg in december health officials across the country warned against travel and gathering for the holidays and even with many families taking precautions two weeks later in mid-january we hit the peak of the pandemic just as health officials predicted most school districts in new jersey were closed during the
027first two weeks of january as a precaution what's different now and is it advisable to close schools after spring break and will remaining in cohorts help with that transition unfortunately from an epidemiologic point of view i don't think there is much difference at the moment now than there was back in december uh yes public health officials throughout the country warned uh post winter break or winter time off that there would be a surge in covet cases i can tell you with st joseph's we saw the surge and again shortly afterwards we saw the surge in children with that inflammatory disease uh process that occurred sometimes afterwards and it was directly related to people who just even with all the best meaning are truly coveted fatigued and let their guard down we can already see the
028pictures coming out of florida and other places where spring break occurs where it is obvious that social distancing mass wearing is still is not being done setting us up for a two-week period at the beginning of april where cases will rise again as was mentioned earlier unfortunately here in passaic county cases are beginning to rise again we're seeing some early early numbers from people have taken earlier spring breaks from other school systems or other family gatherings and it's going to be of concern um we will you know it's not difficult to predict that the same thing will happen again by keeping children and cohorts in the older uh school uh in in the high schools in other areas where transmission is always a problem it will allow for better quarantining and for better as you
029put it a surgical uh aspect rather than taking out whole classes or whole schools but at cohorts at a time i'd like to say that the immunizations that are going through will make a difference but it's still too early and most parents most people still unless they have qualified have not been immunized hopefully by summer uh this will not be an issue uh as immunizations take off and we'll be able to do without it but for now it is advisable to prepare just as we did back in january for an uptick in cases and the need to increase quarantine uh as a result okay dr rashad if you go to the next slide okay so the proposal that we had included may 3rd as a return date for grades three to five but there were
030three factors that led to a change in our recommendation and you can see those listed here we obviously received a good amount of feedback we knew that there would be problems with drop off and pick up and also there was a great concern among our employees about the transition back to school all at once so it's very difficult to have the first day of school with all the different things that have to be in place for elementary schools including the shields including all the other things that students are not used to because we do have a substantial number of students returning and so you'll be able to hear about that in just a few minutes when we go over the survey okay but um basically that's just an explanation about the april 26th state we
031did move that up and at this point what i'd like to do is turn things over to mrs reichschmann to talk about the parents and student survey results good evening everyone dr for surgery to advance the next slide i know many of you had an opportunity to look at the presentation online and i'm just going to share some broad strokes that further reinforce the plan that we are recommending tonight and shared with you all yesterday overall we had significant participation in the survey we received sorry i'll start over sorry about that good evening everyone um i i know many people had an opportunity to look at the survey results uh we shared it yesterday and for the purpose of this evening i will share out some broad strokes that further support and and reinforce the
032plan that we are recommending tonight and shared out with you yesterday we had great participation in the survey overall we received 6406 responses at the time that the survey closed on friday which is 84.8 percent of our total population so thank you to our community your participation was super important informing our decisions and recommendations we can go to the next slide um this slide details the questions that were specific to kindergarten 69.9 of kindergarten parents said that they would be willing to commit to an instructional model from april 19th through the end of the school year 69.3 percent said they would want their child to attend school five days per week without cohorts and with death shields in place 13.3 percent said they prefer the district maintain the current hybrid model with smaller classes and
03317.4 percent indicated that their children will remain virtual so you can see that close to 70 percent um are planning for their children to attend five days per week we can go to the next slide almost 70 percent um will maintain their in-person program and and now it will include five days per week and 13.3 indicated an interest in establishing a separate class for fully virtual kindergarten knowing that this could require a change of teacher you can go to the next slide for elementary population under the current model we have 75 attending school under the hybrid three day two day a week 21 are currently virtual 70.5 are willing to commit to an instructional model from april 19th to the end of the school year 69.7 percent of parents indicated they want their child to
034attend five days per week with death shields 18.1 percent prefer to prefer that the district maintain cohorts and 12.2 percent will remain fully virtual so once again close to 70 percent plan to send their children in five days a week you can go to the next slide a very small percentage um would switch to remote with the five day return plan we can go to the next step this slide includes our survey information for middle school almost 60 percent is willing to commit to an instructional model that runs from april 19th through the end of the school year 66.2 percent want their children to attend a full-day hybrid model 16.8 percent will stay remote and fifteen point eight percent prefer the minimal day so so again um the overwhelming majority sixty six point two percent
035are preferring that their children attend full day five day a week model i'm sorry full day hybrid model which is three days and two days for middle school next slide please this slide shows the participation from each middle school you can see we have parents participate just about the same amount from each middle school and there were questions in previous meetings about office hours 39 of our students attend office hours regularly this has been something that has been discussed and with the extension to the full day teachers would have an opportunity to build in class time to respond to student questions and provide extra support using breakout rooms we can go to the next slide this is our high school slide currently 48 of our students are virtual 51 said they are willing to commit
036to an instructional model from april 19th through the end of the school year 49 would prefer to have an option to provide two weeks notice to make a switch and 48.3 percent want their child to be in a full-day hybrid model in which lunch will be served so once again it looks like here a little less than half would like their child to attend full day in the hybrid bottle with lunch you can go to the next slide 55.8 percent um once again said they'd like their child to attend full day in the hybrid model and we gathered some information from our high school population about office hours 24 regularly attend office hours and as we did with middle school we discussed ways of building extra support and help time into the full day class
037period we can go to the next slide and dr toback is going to share some of the staff results so um we did a broad survey of staff and um so a very open-ended question that was asked at this point okay how about now okay there we go already so i apologize for that um we did a staff survey the staff survey was a very open-ended survey and you can see we had a good response from our staff not quite as many as we would like to see but we've also heard from the staff from different meetings and things like that so at this point you can see where the responses came from you could see on the next slide the positions so you can see the overwhelming majority of people that participated in the
038survey were teachers or educational specialists and also the paris and our support staff contributed greatly to the survey okay so um we opened the staff survey we allowed they mentioned for open-ended comments and so staff members could write whatever they wanted to um so we're very happy to see that many of our staff members wrote positive comments so you can see if you go through this there's a few takeaways one our staff members are very excited about seeing our students back in school and to returning at least to have a greater sense of normalcy so i think it was really um it was very nice that so many staff members wrote these comments we certainly appreciate it and we like the enthusiasm that we see in these comments if you go to the next slide
039which is a continuation of comments um the other thing the other takeaway i think that's important is that many of our staff members express they feel safe and they have fewer no concerns about health and safety so that's also a very nice thing to hear from our staff members the district to take make a great effort to make sure that our staff members have all the ppe and i think also our students do a great job as far as um in general following rules wearing their masks trying to maintain social distance um then we can get to the staff concerns okay so there's a number of pages of staff concerns um some of them about office hours you can see the issue of spring break is a very important issue for many staff members they're
040very concerned about what happens after spring break another issue that is raised here is the daily health assessment being completed so yes we still struggle we had an improvement but as of late we have basically had a lot of problems with the daily completion of the health check um staff members have also repeatedly expressed that the hybrid model is hard it is very difficult to teach two populations of students at the same time there's no question about that um so if we go to the next slide so you can see some of the staff members mentioned if we have the the number of employees necessary to effectively contact trace to keep everyone safe in a timely manner so that's something that does happen every day and at this point we do have enough staff members
041occupying you know that our school nurses do a wonderful job with that along with our supervisor so we also have um some questions about space and classrooms we'll certainly look at some of those issues you know the numbers of students and how to fit them in there safely there might be some concerns about that understand that we're going to talk if you go to the next slide um there's there's also issues of zoom fatigue screen time teacher burnout these are all problems in every district and um you know we are we're hoping for better days it is difficult um i know that the staff firms have really put in an extraordinary effort to keep our schools going and to continue to work with their students one of the things that occurred this week under this
042on screen is a change to the win period so that was a topic of discussion at our last meeting and so we made some significant changes to the win period which is something mrs reichman will get to a little bit but that's a major change at the elementary level and so that's based on teacher input we made some changes for that um let's see what else we have here there's been some questions about when classrooms will be sanitized so we have a second shift of custodians that are i'm going to be doing that work some staff members asked about um n95 masks so those are options if staff members request them those are available um and then you can see if you go to the next screen the staff concerns by occupation so you could
043see um depending on the class of employee that we have in the district you can see the concerns that they have um things that were most represented you can see spring break as a concern the health screenings um you can see all these issues so we are working on all these things we've heard from our staff and certainly we're doing everything we can to address these issues um but first part is obviously it's um adding them together figuring out what's happening and figuring out what those concerns are and then acting upon them okay so at this point mrs reichman is going to go ahead and review a few other changes and you can go to the next step so as a step hold back um began to play there were a number of questions that
044came up about the win period we did listen to all we read all the comments listen to all of the concerns that were expressed can you hear me oh okay um and and what we did was we took a more flexible approach so this time the extension of the day from the time the children are home is intended for teachers to address any student needs they would be able to communicate with their teacher and get additional help for any work that was concepts skills or work that was taught that day or taught that week the classroom teacher would communicate directly with the students and parents to coordinate and communicate out what the plan is for the week it may be two days for math two days for language arts it may be flexible on any
045given day but more information would become forthcoming directly from the teacher it would also be a time for 504 meetings iep meetings counseling sessions meeting with colleagues teachers will maintain an activity log so we will know what their schedules look like and they will communicate out weekly with parents to let them know specifically when extra help is being offered for students and and again the other idea that's important to communicate is parents also have flexibility during this time to make determinations and decisions about what would be the best use of this time for their child as the weather gets nicer they may make a decision to use time outside engaging in a social or physical activity a pe activity or it may be time that a parent needs to run an errand or do something
046important for their child so the overall theme is that there is a lot more flexibility and an opportunity to just get extra help from the teacher and engage in counseling or other activities art music outside of the school day we can go to the next slide there's a lot of discussion about um and you saw on the survey asking parents to commit to an instructional model for the end of the school year ideally that simplifies things for us because we know how many students are in school but we do recognize that we have a process in place that many like and and would like to maintain so this slide um details parents as we have been doing can make the request to change the instructional model through the 15th of each month any physical change
047that occurs would happen on the first day of the next month and the next bullet just exemplifies if you were to submit a change on february 10th then your child would requesting to return to school your child would return on the first day of the next month which in this example is march 1st you know up until now i know that many principals have been super liberal and as requests have been coming in students have been flexing in and out it might not be so easy to do that anymore because we have a large number of students uh returning and we really have to figure out how to safely position all the deaths control trafficking and consider other things where we could be putting too many students in a situation at one time uh so
048parents should be prepared that requests need to be made by the 15th and it's very likely um and most likely that the first of the next month would be the day that the request would be honored parents um always have the option however for their child to go virtual at any time we can go to the next slide there were questions that came in about the change in schedule for kindergarten the priority was to maximize instructional time so the in-school time is reduced to two hours however that will be full instruction and we can maintain the current classroom teacher under this model under this revised schedule students would remain with their homeroom teacher and then their specials would be completed asynchronously at a convenient time at home we can go to the next slide we've
049received many many many questions about end of the year events i i know that we are anxiously anticipating the end of the year and looking forward to preserving all these celebrations right now you should continue to work with the schools with building administrators to organize and coordinate but anything that's planned right now has to be in coordination with the cdc and department of health guidelines we are waiting and anticipating that we'll have more information from um our local county superintendent she did indicate that they have been putting pressure and putting in requests to governor murphy and we are hoping to have some guidance on how to proceed with all these end of the year events soon so we anticipate that we would have that in the next couple weeks so so again anything that's being
050planned now we're operating under the current guidance in anticipation that we will have updated guidance um what we're thinking and hoping is that maybe after the spring break period ends a few weeks after that we'll have some updated guides and said you can go to the next slide but that concludes our presentation and we appreciate and thank you all for your participation in the survey did you have anything to add doctor to back okay so board member any questions for dr goldberg while we have them um this is albany i have questions actually regarding the plan now is the right time okay i have a couple of questions yes absolutely um one of my questions i think you answered tonight was did the staff participate in preferences for school model so it looks to me
051like they were asked to to give open-ended questions uh open-ended statements perhaps so i'm curious why we didn't ask staff and administrators to weigh in on what they feel is the best model suited for their building it might have been interesting to see from them maybe segregated by level or maybe either by building what their top three concerns were that might have helped us in seeing where areas that we needed to work on maybe also what their top three pros were that are working within their building so i think maybe we could have involved staff and admin at building administrators who are really on the front lines in the building more in you know what they thought worked best what didn't work i think it could have been useful information so that was one of
052my questions when i saw just the staff listings if you want me to ask them all and then you could you want to answer it now continue eileen oh okay i'm sorry mrs albanese oh thank you that's right i know that we've gotten this question a few times i don't know the answer um and i don't know that we've seen an answer the early childhood center parents have asked why we have an abbreviated schedule they're our youngest learners they're preparing for kindergarten i i myself don't know the answer as to why it's not a full day um and that we've gone back to a regular schedule for them so maybe we could have a discussion about that and my other real question is there's no obvious reason for why case numbers are going up uh
053why we're seeing additional infection so could you talk a little bit about maybe what the district sees as reasons for why we're seeing an increase prior to spring break that's a little different from what we saw from thanksgiving or the holiday break um are there things that maybe we could all be working on as far as trying to keep numbers down where do we see maybe potential areas that are giving us those increased numbers thank you uh ms alvanus uh before you ask uh doc in a minute mr duffy i think i want to let dr toback take you one at a time start with mrs albanese's questions and then you can go next mr duffy okay so um with regards to the concern about the principles and for the teachers so yes we had
054an open-ended discussion but we also met i met personally with every one of our principals to talk about each of the plans and what it is that they saw as important and their priorities so we did have a meeting and and in the end um we met actually twice with our principal groups and we also met with the wta representatives their officers a number of times with them as well um we also met with the wea to hear their concerns we had some lengthy meetings to go over some of the issues that they saw with the return to school plan and things like that so they were i'm very open with you know expressing in some cases some concerns about the plan um but we did have these meetings okay um so as far as
055the question about the case numbers increasing um overall we're in a situation where um there's there's a lot of different um i guess ways to to look at the situation right now in some cases there's a certain amount of randomness to the whole thing um in other cases there are some events there have been some um social events that have led to a good number of um of cases there are some athletic events non-school sponsored athletic events people playing games um you know outside of school number students in in close contact with each other and the other thing i guess is the reality that there are there are more students in school and so if you see the numbers yes there are a lot at the high school level there's also a lot the middle
056schools in the elementary level i think that just the fact that there's more students together in and out of school means there's more situations where student um is positive there's an exposure and there's more students quarantined we do quite a few students a huge number of students that are in the quarantine right now so um those are probably some of the driving factors with regarding the early childhood center you want to talk about that okay go ahead so to respond to your question about the the early childhood center um who apparently was supposed to operating on an abbreviated schedule which for the happy sessions is 30 minutes less and for the full day program is an hour and 25 minutes less in order for us to um recover all that time we would need to
057cover 11 teachers five days a week for their preps which is 55 preps we just did not have the staff we have posted for cpa positions um we're just not getting applicants there was also an issue with transportation so that's my my response mr duffy i'm sorry i didn't have my mic on i'm sorry i'm sorry can you hear me for uh dr girlboard um if you could the nj try to pull this up here the new jersey department uh health says that the self quarantine is voluntarily but it's compliance is expected can you give us a little bit on that not not really i don't work for the new jersey department of health and for those who i've worked with before know that i often i'm at odds with what they uh say the
058concept of self quarantine i think part of the problem is that a lot of things have become politicized over the last few months um in dealing with it and that the parts my speaking is that the new jersey department of health has tried to be everything to everybody self quarantine after exposure uh is still recommended um it is voluntary in that we do not have a police state where people go out and uh ensure that you're staying home the last time i think that was being done was back at the turn of the last century with when tuberculosis was rampant and there were actually tuberculosis police working for the new york state department of health uh who would ensure that you've stayed home um but i think it is still you know making itself making
059so voluntary just assumes that people will do the right thing um it's still something that should be done the only caveat to that is we're seeing that those people who have been immunized and who have been exposed and who remain asymptomatic do not need to be quarantined and that's the new caveat to that rule but i would still recommend that people who have been exposed uh to quarantine and the quarantine is 10 to 14 days depending on symptomatology so that's been exposed or have traveled i think the issue as far as i'm concerned exposed is the phrase is the word that i would uh say uh for traveling people who are traveling to endemic areas where they have not done social distancing have not worn masks i think it is in the interest of the
060general public that they quarantine but there too again uh there's nothing that in the recommend in the rules that say you have to so we just say that nobody really knows you know it's like filling out those forms when you come through customs you're on your honor one hopes that people will do the right thing one knows that they don't hence going back to the 14 days 14-day uh period after spring break that the schools have instituted uh to continue cohorting and uh just because we know that people just don't and i think a lot of it in fairness to people is just plain coveted fatigue from a personal point of view i'm really tired of wearing a mask i know it needs to be done i know we should all do it but like
061everybody else i yearn for the day to uh not have to do it i agree and uh if we said that this uh disease came out of china china's been wearing masks for how long well in the asian population in the asian culture wearing of masks is something that is quite common um and there's a lot to be said about wearing masks although not being reported heavily at this point this season we have seen almost no influenza in new jersey we have seen very little respiratory sensational virus in the pediatric population this is all due to quarantining social distancing and of course mass squaring so there are benefits to it uh above and beyond covet and um you know i i don't think this country will ever become like the asian countries where masses are
062worn all the time i refer you to today's discussion in congress between dr fauci and senator paul um but there's something to be said about it is there a wall mr duffy that's it thank you doctor okay um do any mrs kumar hi this is just a general question about the plan um so i noticed that in our current situation we're offering lunch at the high school lunch level eventually but why are we not offering it at the elementary level is my first question and the second question if you could just go into a little bit more detail on why we're staggering the start of the k-2 versus three to five so i actually had a hard time hearing it but i think your first question was about the full day why the elementary schools
063are are have a 145 dismissal is that what was that okay there's no lunch okay basically yep so there are um there's there's a number of factors that we're taking into consideration one if we have lunch it means we need um cafeteria and playground aids we have not okay we've um we've been advertising we have five total candidates of which three of them didn't respond didn't show up for interviews so we really have had a very hard time hiring cpas two it's a matter of spacing okay the amount of square footage we have available for students these are much smaller facilities and in some cases for example at some of our schools we don't have on the benefit of having a cafeteria and a gymnasium so it's really a very difficult thing there's the recommendation
064from our building principles and also our teachers the elementary level they had a hand in making recommendations about 145 um the other part of it is that there is there is a lot of concern about screen time so the win period does allow staff member i'm sorry there's a lot of students to take a step away it's a flexible time period and it does reduce the amount of screen time stream time has been a huge issue with elementary parents this year and so we tried to accommodate everybody's needs by having the 145 dismissal the um the question about staggering so from our principal's perspective we said i didn't meet with them and um one of the things we talked about was basically um we reviewed the information regarding the number of students returning we knew
065that we would have a significant number of students returning at our elementary schools and at their elementary schools there is only one principle there's no assistant principal and they are on their own their concern was there will be so many details that um in on any return to school first day of school is is a very difficult situation right it's a tough day there's a lot of crying that goes on there's a lot of very upset parents upset students there's also the issue of returning to an environment that students are not used to seeing they're returning to an environment where you have death shields everywhere you're returning to an environment that's not and they haven't been in school in many cases for quite some time so under those circumstances the principles felt it would be
066quite a transition for one group um and then but it would be impossible to have that transition happen simultaneously where you have the youngest students and then the older students all in the building at the same time they just felt it was just it was it was over the top in terms of what would be required of them and the fact that they would not be able to attend to all the needs that exist simultaneously okay any other board members this is sure you didn't think i wasn't going to speak did you cathy of course not i sent an email but i didn't get a response back so i just wanted to get some of these questions answered um my first thought is when we asked the community to be substitutes our pool overflowed so
067now i'm putting it out there and i think that we should put it out there for cpas the the cafeteria maybe they're all these people that agreed to be substitutes have now been fingerprinted and ready to go maybe some of them would like to reach out to the board office and say that they would consider being a cafeteria playground aide and then we would solve that problem um i i wanted to say that i noticed after reading the um comments from the teachers that one of the things that i noticed came up a few times was they are saying how um it is difficult not knowing which kids you're gonna have like every two weeks so i know i'm bringing this point up again but i would like for us to consider for fourth marking
068period to possibly saying that you make a decision and they're also asking for the lists ahead of time the teachers and i just wanted to point out that this is not just something that i'm bringing up this is something that the teachers are also asking for and would think would make their lives easier um i would like to i know that we had talked about end of the year activities however i as a board member haven't heard a word about any of them where we're looking to go with them or anything i guess as a board member i don't need to know that right now but as someone whose son graduated last year and was like you know on edge every minute trying to find out is my son gonna have a graduation what are
069we gonna do maybe we can just start informing the community of some ideas that we're thinking of just so they know that like these seniors are not being i mean you know i thought it was bad last year for my son and he was only out for part of the year i i completely feel for and i'm not just saying seniors i'm saying seniors eighth graders fifth graders you look forward to those activities for so long that you know now they've been out for a full year and we know that it's going to get nice out maybe we could just reach out to the community and of those different age groups and let them know some ideas that we have because sometimes the community could come back and help us and say well i know
070a place or i can help you never know what's going to come up if we bounce some ideas off of them um and i really want to see those seniors get something they've been in they've been in for a long time um i also wanted to ask about the sgos for the teachers i know that they did sgos this year i know that the state did not require sgos this year i believe i will have to look into that um and you don't have to answer this publicly but i would like to know if the teachers if we are using those sgos because from virtual teaching myself what i'm seeing is these kids are going in and out they're not there every day they're you know it would just be very difficult to judge a
071teacher on if a child's not fully coming to school every day to actually judge a cheat a teacher on their performance based on their sgos um and i just wanted to say we keep talking about the kids having coveted let's not forget that the staff gets covered too and and that's also definitely an issue um and you know what if it was i know that you chose the 419 date you gave me your rationale it was up to me we would be back in school tomorrow so thank you for all the work on the plan once again i know it's not easy um but if we could just keep some of these other things in mind moving forward i'd appreciate it thank you so this is here if you recall i did call you on
072march 16th to respond to your questions i understand it at that moment when they induct each other 4 30 and um so i would be more than happy to answer your questions at that time when i called you and um so i thought that you were okay because i said at that time that we uh i shared presentations with you and we shared a document with you from the rest of the board over the weekend so in the case i um i did a good job reaching out to you to go over whatever questions you might have had um with regard to um the question about seniors um well i'm sorry with the seniors the fifth graders the eighth graders the transitional events those are things right now that there are limitations so but we
073do have reservations that have been made um at different places for for these events hoping to move ahead and hoping that the restrictions that do exist will be lifted we are in prep we are in position to go ahead with our end-of-year events um with regard to the lock-in that really that's been debated here at the board level uh probably for the last few meetings there's been questions about whether or not we should have a lock-in not have a lock-in the good news is that based on the survey the lock-in show or i'm sorry there's a number of um parents who are okay with committing um if you see there's probably 60 to 70 or parents that when they participated said they would be more than happy to commit to a model so that does
074help us out and it does help the issue that you described about the uncertainty about who might be in a class you still have that problem no matter what in any school during a pandemic and it's a day-to-day thing where students can be quarantined you don't know what's going to be from day to day um so there's a lot of variables that are in place and so it would be nice to have more stability for everybody i think that would be wonderful i don't know if that's really possible this time um but again if um the board wants to have a situation where we lock in and we require um students or parents to commit their students and that's it for the year i mean that's that's really like i said we've debated that here
075at the board level for a while as far as the sjo part i have to get back to you about that do you have an answer so um provide me to the seo question student growth objectives this year the sgo is not appeared into the teacher evaluation system however we were guided by the state i do attend all the meetings to still have teachers it's best practice and it's something that's not supposed to be above and beyond something that we do we set tiered goals tied into a standard collecting data to help maximize each student's achievement towards meeting a grade level standard that we're responsible for teaching so once again as a best practice we informed and asked teachers to set these goals but they will not be evaluated um upon students meeting those goals
076so they're only their final evaluation will be based on their observations and anything they submit in their documentation lock but we were just maintaining them just for the purpose of it being a best practice and something that we always do anyway okay for remembers anyone else honestly i wish i could just say we're going to open for five days for everybody straight through um unfortunately based on the information and speaking with dr goldberg directly tonight i understand the issues that we face um i still i understand the principles in the elementary school their concern but i also have the concern for providing the least restrictive environment for our special ed students and it seems like they're going to be there but there's no regular ed classes so i just don't understand how we're going to
077have inclusion for the week we can't um yeah i had the same question about the preschool which you've answered already um the other thing and i'm not asking for an answer tonight i'm making a comment here i would like to see what our plan to become compliant with all the ieps with all the hours that we're missing with students and i think that's something we need to have a budget discussion about as well so i'd like to you know i'd ask that administration put together a plan as to how we're going to accomplish this over the next whatever summer next months whatever but i i'm going to support the the re the phase 5 and hopefully this is the last phase and the new phase in september we're going to be welcome back everybody i
078really hope that and i think with you know the guidance of dr goldberg as he continues to do um and dr goldberg thank you uh it's been a long journey with us and we've been through the ups and the downs and you've always been there to answer our questions and give us guidance and i do really appreciate that and i want to thank you publicly for that thank you you're welcome it's been an honor and we'll get back to mr paul becker with his questions um well could i just say one thing about academic uh this latest recovery plan is that uh mr moffat that will pay for academic recovery and services that will need to be extended um is this am i correct on this yes uh the second wave the most recent amount
079was 1.8 million dollars that's available for programs that you mentioned uh along with other costs that will uh be uh subsidize or reimburse the district um for those type activities and there's a potential third wave that's coming as a result of the 1.9 billion dollar stimulus package that was uh passed uh recently that'll pay for a lot of services thankfully um hopefully we'll be able to get everyone back on track as soon as things open up and the restrictions are lifted and it's it'll be nice to have the money to do so and not impact our other programs and services um going forward okay i'm sorry there's one question i forgot to ask dr goldberg you know there's been concern about the community about our playgrounds that are schools being closed okay and um so
080it makes sense to have this discussion it makes sense to ask you the question um our community so the municipal playgrounds are open the school playgrounds remain closed and i was um wondering dr goldberg if you could advise the school district about it's a that's a tricky proposition to open playgrounds but i wanted to hear from you if you would be willing to share with the board of ed about whether it's advisable to open playgrounds i also have to remember to unmute uh as i talk the issue of playgrounds it depends the issue opening playgrounds really depends on the supervision that can be provided um in them as well as what exactly we're talking about for playgrounds the municipal playgrounds have been open uh the weather is getting warmer i think that's maybe one of
081the reasons why we're seeing an uptick in cases uh as an aside if done correctly with uh cleaning of the facilities and with children remembering to wear masks etc i think it can be done but the issue is can it be done safely it does record to be done safely without going into detail of what exactly is in the playground it would take a large amount of people and um kind of listening to the conversation it seems that's a rate limited step so uh at this point you know i i don't think it would be an advisable thing thank you dr goldberg i'm sure dr tobacco will reach out to you with the updates on that as as we hopefully increase staffing mr duffy excuse me if i could um so doctor with all due
082respect we're talking about uh not opening playgrounds because of the the amount of people that we would take to clean or um sanitize those playgrounds is that my what you're saying is correct what i'm saying is that um you know thinking about and again i'm not sure what exactly we're talking about for playgrounds if you're talking about a playground with a jungle gym and a slide and you know a sandbox something i didn't have when i went to school but if that's what you're talking about you need people to supervise and make sure that children remain um you know wearing their masks and that these areas are kept clean and sanitized after usage that to my mind requires staff if it can be done you know if it can be done with the staff then
083it can be done safely as i listened to the discussion about graduation i was thinking about uh the graduation up at the united states military academy at west point last year yes they held it but if you remember if you saw pictures people were sit were sitting six to 12 feet apart and everybody was well spaced out uh luckily they have a lot of room out the west point so they can do it it requires uh the ability to spread out it requires the ability to do it with the person with perk with increased personnel so i'm not against opening playgrounds by any means it just requires personnel i'm sorry doc dr toback do you know how many uh what the personnel is required to have the municipal playgrounds open well you have two things
084you have um as dr goldberg mentioned you have the cleaning component and you have the supervisory component so you would certainly need adequate staffing to watch the children play in the playgrounds and to make sure that they're following all the goals they need to follow with you know just basics keeping your distance and keeping your mask on right those are the main things um on top of that you would need someone to clean the playgrounds after every usage so you would need a custodian to clean each of these playgrounds based on what dr bolberg is saying there's a there's a reasonable expectation parents would have you would also probably have a situation where parents would want to perhaps opt their children out of using the playground and that would be a very difficult thing and
085the reason i say that is because some parents probably wouldn't be comfortable um with with their children using playgrounds because in the end they're worried about the spread and things like that so there might be parents in that situation as well so um it is it's something like i said it can be done you know it's it's the reason i ask the question is because i think it's a good question to ask because it is an important part of each school facility these playgrounds and the use of those playgrounds is something that the students miss and i have no doubt about that um and it's an unfortunate thing to see these beautiful playgrounds we have dr goldberg for your knowledge we have we have some very nice playgrounds beautiful playgrounds they have slides they have
086all kinds of different um things um but we're also the other thing to keep in mind i think right now is we're in a high risk area right we have like i said today was a was a pretty bad day for us in terms of student and staff um positive cases and quarantining so added together um you know there's maybe some things to look at but certainly if we'd like to move ahead as a school district of opening the playgrounds and adding the staff and everything that we would need to do that i'm more than happy to do that to be revisited mr duffy thank you thank you again dr goldberg anyone else are we going to keep dr goldberg on for the public did you want to stay with us dr goldberg in case
087anyone from the community had a question i think they've been uh looking forward to your appearance [Music] can i answer that question honestly perhaps [Laughter] is that a yes or no you know i uh honestly it was pretty much a no uh if it if there were if there are questions that i can answer i'll stay on but to be frank uh the community scares me no one's gonna force you to answer anything you obviously are our consultant but if there's something you feel you could uh help a community member understand better that that will be at your discretion um i will stay on for a while i need to get the charger on the phone thank you okay all right well we'll go alrighty well we'll we should be quick there's only a few
088hands raised thank you okay uh i assume we're done with questions on the plan i don't see any more hands up very good okay um mr moffatt revisions to the agenda does they have a few items tonight listed under m human resources we have a change on item number one which is approval of leave requests that'll be withdrawal number two which is id number seven three eight seven again that's a withdrawal on the emergent items section we have in section t emergent human resources we have a change to number two which is approval of district staff number seven we will be adding no medical benefits to the action on item number 11 approval of resignations number two will be revised location to rc slash board office we'll be adding a number 13 which is approval
089of increment withholding and the recommended action reads as follows resolve that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent withhold the salary and adjustment increment for employee number 7211 for the 2021 2022 school year for good cause with and directs the board secretary to provide the effective staff member with written notice of this action and reasons therefore within 10 days the next item will be in our next section which is emergent school resource legal we'll be adding two items number one is an approval of settlement agreement which uh action reads resolve that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent hereby approves a negotiated settlement agreement and release in the matter of employee id number 8216 dated march 18 2021 as attached by reference and further authorizes the board president and
090secretary to execute same on behalf of the board the business administrator and superintendent are authorized to take all further steps required by the terms of the settlement to further implement same we'll be adding extra x2 which is approval of another settlement agreement and the recommendation action is as as reads resolve that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent hereby approves a negotiated settlement agreement and release in the matter of student id number eight three five eight six four nine nine six two aol docket number eds 10631-20 agency reference number 20 21-32196 dated march 18 2021 as attached by reference and further authorize the board president and secretary to execute same on behalf of the board the business administrator and superintendent are authorized to take all further steps required by the terms of
091the settlement to further implement same and that concludes the changes to tonight's agenda thank you mr moffat okay on to our first public portion this portion of the meeting is open to citizens for common on agenda items only residents are to state their names addresses and subject matter comments may be limited to three minutes per person members of the public are discouraged from speaking negatively about an employee or student the board bears no responsibility for comments made by the public comments regarding employees or students cannot be legally responded to by the court other comments may be responded to tonight or at subsequent meetings under old business can i get a mover mr giordano mrs put up okay let's begin hi this is uh david ginsberg two amy way thank you uh very much to the
092board uh for all your hard work uh i think it's an excellent plan so really appreciate all the weekends and nights uh you guys have put into this just a couple of quick questions for dr toback and a point of clarification um i read his frequently asked questions and can he just uh share a little more after this about the dust shields in elementary school maybe a picture or two what the desks look like are they removable are they fixed it'd just be good to get a little sense of what those are gonna look like um understanding that in elementary school the desks won't be six feet apart uh most likely because of uh eliminating cohorts uh which based on dr goldman's recommendation is good um however can you give us a little sense is
093it three feet or four feet how close will the desk be i know each room may vary but any rough indication i think would be super helpful to the parents and there's obviously a lot of sanitizing stations in the school itself would you guys consider especially uh in the elementary schools we're getting rid of the cohorts in this the six feet putting sanitation like machines or pure bottles in the room itself just to actually you know encourage the kids to do it even more often um and can you also confirm that the windows will remain open in the classroom as we head to the spring i agree wholeheartedly with dr goldberg on the playgrounds as much as i love my son to be able to play the playground um it's just really unnecessary um so
094i think those should remain closed and there's really no reason to to open them and bring another element that challenges safety of high-touch areas into um play here right the focus on return to school should be just that return to the elements that are really necessary which is obviously classroom instruction what everyone is needing and do our best to eliminate things or just unnecessary um like being on playgrounds um municipal playgrounds are obviously very different because parents can be there with their kids watching the direct contact as well as making sure the kids are sanitizing and keeping their maths on so that's much more one-to-one experience versus what we would have here in school so um if you can answer those after this and faq that'd be i really appreciate it dr throwback and again
095thank you for all your guys time and effort i think it's a great plan thank you excaller good evening tori esposito 47 woodlot road um just want to say thank you i know it's been a long sometimes contentious year um i appreciate all the efforts from the mayor of the administration um and i really appreciate all the teachers feedback in the survey um you know personal story my uh my son's second grade teacher called me after school and just said you know i just want to let you know that i feel like i have my luca back and just just to hear that and just for him being in school and just being a different kid just means the world to me so i really appreciate it um my kids are really looking forward to
096going back and forth is excited now she only goes back a week after her brother in fourth grade um so again long hard fought year this is where we are thanks again thank you thank you next caller can you unmute is there a problem with the software dr bashard no they just need to unmute themselves okay can you unmute move on dr burchard allenton pesky 41 gibbs drive i also want to be the third caller to thank dr toback miss reichman and the board as a parent i advocate for schools to be open in a safe manner students have a right to attend school for in-person learning and students also currently may choose to attend school virtually as determined by their parents wayne is fortunate to have many dedicated teachers who want to teach today
097you prioritize the ability of teachers to get vaccinated more quickly and i think that's a major step in making the school environment even more safer at your last board of ed meeting i expressed my opinion that affording parents the ability to switch from remote to in person or vice versa is a flexible where in a flexible way with two weeks notice is a current benefit of the wayne return to the school plan it was a benefit since the start of the to 2021 school year and it remains a benefit today i have never personally executed the flexible two-week notice provision ever for my child but wayne parents deserve their physics flexibility in the in case they need to it helps the school environment because as dr goldberg stated today the science the science shows more
098likely transmission from parent to child than from child to parent allowing parents in the community flexibility provides opportunities for parents to be vaccinated and then to send their children back to school safely without worrying about having to wait long periods of time that is what is ideal restrictions to parents with forced deadlines is not helpful flexibility is beneficial no teacher i would think would want a student to come back prematurely just because a parent has um to meet a restrictive non-flexible deadline your survey reveals 40.2 percent of middle school parents agree with me 51 of high school parents no data was presented in your survey on what teachers view flexibility is key dr toback miss reichman are correct many parents viewed that flexibility as a benefit actually thousands of parents based on your survey view
099it this way let's open school for students for teachers with flexibility remaining as a benefit thank you next good evening ita ferrante wayne education association president i would also like to echo dr toback in thanking mayor vergano for his assistance in getting educators access to vaccination appointments the mayor has always been there for the teachers and educational support staff in wayne having access to a vaccine appointment is priceless for us however if the past few weeks have shown us anything it is that the virus is still gripping our community we have seen some disturbing trends recently the numbers are going up again letters warning parents of new infections and the need to quarantine are unfortunately everyday occurrences the reason is obvious the community is not maintaining proper safety protocols there are constant parties and social
100gatherings under the permission of and often with the encouragement of our parents this is unsafe and it is undermining the efforts of the educators the board and the administrators students are going to large unmasked gatherings and then coming into school and putting our teachers and fellow students at risk now kids are telling their teachers that they're going going together to places like florida on spring break they will return to the school and many will fill their morning coved forms dishonestly that will endanger all of us it is for that reason that we urge you to do as other districts have and go virtual for the two weeks after spring break we are now beginning to get our vaccines the next few weeks will no doubt see many more get vaccinated and we will finally have
101peace of mind and a chance to get out of the year safety safely and healthy don't take that chance away from us give us a chance to get out of this year healthy if the community want community wants to gather at spring break and the holidays they will you can't stop that none of us can but what you can do knowing that this will happen is to protect us from the consequences of this behavior thank you thank you next caller eileen d'amico 29 manor drive um i just have a couple of questions uh i guess first it was nice to see um in the presentation uh a number of the staff and teacher comments um and their concerns uh and i'm just wondering why the parent survey wasn't even remotely open-ended at all um we
102had no opportunity to provide comment so i'm just curious why that was um my second question and i guess it's for dr goldberg to an extent um it's really just more a point of clarification i i just i continue to be confused by this is that if i heard correctly um the risks with things like spring break or or you know extended holiday terms are really more about the behavior not about the travel if you will itself i think and i guess that is my question um you know it's things like being in large crowds being unmasked for you know extended periods of time and so on and so forth but i guess to dovetail with that my question then becomes are those risks really any greater whether you're in florida virginia kansas new york
103or new jersey you know if you're sitting in your own backyard with 200 people and you're all unmasked and you're in close quarters is the risk any greater or lesser because you're in new jersey than you are um in any other state especially in instances where other states right now anyway have case counts that are a lot lower than ours um so i'm just hoping for some clarification there and if it's the behavior that's the concern okay fine um but you know let's just be clear it's not so much the travel itself it's the behavior that's exhibited and quite frankly that's going to happen whether you're in florida or whether you're here in new jersey um i did see the slides with the number of parents that you know were willing to or would be
104happy with committing to a decision as far as going virtual or um in person for the remainder of the year which is really at this point only you know three months um i guess just based on i would be curious though from a high school student perspective senior parents and students specifically what percentage of those folks uh would be willing or happy with committing to a decision and based on that you know the questions been asked before i'm going to ask it again why are we not willing or looking to consider a senior only cohort for the last three months of the year um quite honestly i've had opportunity to speak to a number of senior students at hills about a week and a half two weeks ago for some other things and the one
105resounding theme uh if it's not been heard by others already is that they just want the opportunity to be together they understand us together socially distance with masks and all the other precautions they just want the opportunity to be together as a class for the last few months of the school year so i urge you please to consider you know putting a commitment type thing in place even if it's only for the high school level and if there's a way to then safely get the seniors who want to be there back in school for the last few months of the year last but not least um i just like to ask what if anything the administration the board of ed um you're doing as a group or as individuals to lobby or to help the
106county lobby for state officials to make some decisions now versus waiting until you know what could be a few weeks after spring break um for to lift capacity restrictions or to add senior activities such as project grad graduation you're way over time now mrs d'amico i think we hear your question no worries um thank you next caller hi jenny franklin 21 keyland drive um i just have a couple of questions tonight the first being um the fact that we won't consider combining the cohorts again at the high school level that wasn't even a question in our survey um how many kids are coming back to the high school on april 1st and is that why we can't combine them or or do we just not want to do that um because the numbers don't support
107it as you know most of the classes have three or four kids in them right now the other question i have is that um at some point in like the last month maybe when we returned this most recent time um the parents started receiving a letter every time there was a positive case for a child or a positive case for a staff member we now receive an email from the school which was fine and it's it was helping me uh have a feeling of how many positive cases there were um i think we've received two letters for staff and four for students say in the past month so now to come here tonight and see that graph and see that there are four positive staff members at wayne valley so okay maybe that two happened
108today uh and 22 positive students we have not received 22 letters about positive students so where where are these students are they virtual students are we are are we only receiving letters for students who are coming to school um or you know this these numbers don't add up so that's my question thank you thank you excaller hi tara daly 53 osceola road dr goldberg thanks for staying on because my question's for you can you please define exposure for the community so everyone is on the same page um my other question is for dr toback if the cdc makes the three-foot social distancing recommendation will the district address this plan uh right now the cohorts are not being combined at the high school level but over 50 of the students are virtual right now my son
109today he had two classes where he was the only child in the class the maximum number of students he has in a class are five students so knowing those numbers i would really like to understand why the cohorts at the high school cannot be combined lastly we have all been in this together now for a year the finger pointing about who is doing what in the community has got to stop when mrs albanese asked before about how what was going on in the community that's caused the increase and the answer was given talking about students and what they've been doing and sports but your own chart says there's 40 teachers out right now i personally don't care what those teachers have been doing this is a virus it's none of anybody's business let's all just
110do the right thing wash our hands wear your mask follow the guidelines that you've put into place and trust each other talking about spring break i'm very confused why the staff is so concerned about spring break if there's children quarantining how does that affect the staff coming to work and doing their job those families won't come they will follow the plan that you have put out let's some positive things are happening here the teachers are getting vaccinated our community is getting vaccinated the children are loving being in school more please let's support each other and be positive thank you okay thank you next caller hi jennifer tury 31 mayfair drive i just wanted to follow up with an email i had sent this week and dr toback did respond and say that my questions would
111be answered tonight in regards to why the early childhood center is not moving towards its full day i know that dr reichman did answer these questions vaguely she stated there's a staffing issue with covering preps for the preschool teachers i would appreciate a little more elaboration on what that means and who typically was covering those preps in a plan prior to kovid for preschool teachers she also stated that transportation was an issue and and what does that mean because if the district had planned to open um on in a normal year why is transportation now an issue i also know that the preschool is extremely um under enrolled right now the numbers are extremely low so if there is such an under enrollment couldn't the administration be creative in possibly combining classes my son's class
112has three in-person students right now um so if there's a coverage issue why can't classes be combined we do know that the cdc says the this the youngest children um have the lice uh least likelihood of spreading the virus and they don't have to social distance with six feet so again i i just uh it doesn't sit well with me the the response to why the youngest population in this district is not being prioritized to return to school full-time to prepare them for kindergarten next year which is going to be a full day again i would just appreciate a little more elaboration on these questions as to the rationale why the early childhood center is not reopening and for the students in that building that have ieps to echo um what commissioner pavlik said that
113we are going to be looking at a situation for compensatory services for these students and what is the district going to do um to to make up for all the lost time for these students in their ieps um so i would just appreciate answers to those questions thank you for your time and i appreciate all the hard work going into these plans thank you okay thank you next caller good evening uh nicole conte old homestead road i just wanted to circle back to miss kumar's um comment earlier about why we are a question about why we are staggering the return between k-12 and then three through five so uh dr toback the response was that um after conversations with the principals they thought it would be too hectic to have everybody returned basically at the
114same time i just want to point out how ridiculous that sounds considering these administrators are responsible for the return of hundreds of students every year in september and then again in spring and fall so i really would like to just get a little more insight about what that's about um and to just again reiterate the community's needs and wants to have this pushed up even further and have that at least at the same date as the k through 12 the april 19th i don't see the need for the additional week that's all thank you hi uh can you hear me great uh this is evie wenting seven seminole thank you everybody uh for all your work you've put in i had a comment about the positive rates we keep talking about these positive rates and
115they're increasing but we're not mentioning the hospital hospitalizations um i know my husband who works at the hospital when it was bad there were over 200 people with covet at the hospital now the number is about 30. we should when we make these decisions about our children we should consider that as well not just worry about tests because a lot of the people have no symptoms with um i did wanted to check on the playground issue that was mentioned earlier today when do the kids because right now they don't have any playground time they go to school they barely have lunch and they come home so when we're talking about opening the playground in my mind is when my son leaves first grade that's when he runs for the playground where there is an adult
116with him watching right now they're just running around on the grass because they don't really have a choice but they would love to go on the playground with selected friends and there is always an adult presence so what are you talking about when you say you need staffing and you need cleaning and you need all these different things when are you thinking the kids are actually going on the playground at the time of school time i don't understand so those were my comments and i agree with the caller before me when it comes to the high school my son i asked him he had a history class he was the only kid in that class so if it's possible to combine those um and make them go full time my my all three kids love
117going to school and they wish they could go every day so i definitely support that so thank you again for your work and everything thank you good night thank you next caller hi can you guys hear me okay yes we can thanks all right first i want to say my name is angela tetla i am a parrot anthony wayne i'm also currently the vice president of the wayne paris education association um i would like to say thank you for all that you guys have done this past year to keep our students and our staff safe i'm asking this question as i'm hearing it being asked amongst employees in the building and i will also piggyback on edith's question about spring break dr goldberg had said something that piqued my interest if we were to prepare
118as we did in january according to dr goldberg regarding um after the winter break for the holidays so shouldn't we do as we did in january and be virtual for the two weeks after spring break i mean as a parent had just previously stated it's not the behavior it's the behavior of people and not necessarily the location so families will be getting together and families will be traveling out of state to visit other families and some will be going on spring break um and i would love to say that all children stay home when they are sick that simply doesn't happen um so in in keeping with the ideas of keeping the students and staff safe i'm going to ask the board to seriously consider being virtual for the two weeks after spring break to
119keep everyone safe as our numbers have increased um since the beginning of march quite dramatically and again thank you for everything you've done and that's just my question for tonight please consider virtual for two two weeks after spring break thank you next caller hi my name is nicola tito i'm at 25 grammar drive can you guys hear me okay awesome so just real quick um again thank you all i feel like as a parent in this community and i've been on all of these board meeting board meetings for many months now i've listened intently and um i really do see that there has been a lot of progress made and that is really comforting and um it's great to see but i i have just a question and a comment and my comment firstly is
120and it's really more directly um to the wea president i feel like a lot of these comments about parents are extraordinarily divisive insulting and outright untrue i can tell you that um for myself and many other speaking for many other parents in the community we have all taken a step back from very successful careers to be home for our children at this very difficult time as i'm sure many of you have as well um we are not in town throwing parties and disregarding guidelines we want nothing more than to work with you know our teachers our community and to make things right again so i really feel like those kinds of comments which seem to be happening on a monthly basis that really needs to she really needs to think about that and think about
121how that's affecting the parents in the community that's the first thing the second thing is um dr goldberg mentioned earlier that um he felt like you know we needed to think twice about the spring break situation and possibly um you know uh go you know have a virtual time period i believe after and i understand that but i at the when we looked at things and he was comparing where we were in january as to where we are now um i completely agreed with it in january but now um vaccinations are thankfully making teachers a priority and um evacuation vaccinations are in circulation and they were not prior so um i am wondering if if as we move forward if if that will be taken into consideration a little bit more and if if if
122we will if that will kind of impact things going forward um in the decision making that was really my only two question and comment thank you all very much i appreciate your time thank you next caller uh hi ilana ginsberg i have a student at lafayette elementary school uh in the spirit of going virtual after spring break i i know that two weeks has been discussed but with an option of one week after spring break so the week of april five uh be considered uh and then accelerating the return full-time date um to april 12 that would kind of appease everybody the teacher is wanting the um quarantine period or the virtual period rather after spring break and the parents who want their kids to go back full time uh getting that a week earlier
123uh so if that could just be answered as part of the follow-up questions that'd be great thank you okay thank you next hello hi um my name is morale 11 stanford place i'm calling um in regards to um i know allergy season is right around the corner and my concern is i guess a concern and also to get some clarity as far as what the district has in place um addressing you know students who are going to be severely you know allergic to pollen seasonal allergies sneezing is you know definitely gonna happen so um in particular my son i was told to keep him home for 10 days in quarantine him because he sneezed virtually so what does the district have in place for students who like my son they're going to experience these symptoms
124so to keep our kids home for 10 days because they sneeze i don't think is acceptable so if we can get some clarity on that and i appreciate everything that everybody has been doing and i am thankful so um i'm just you know it's just a concern and just to be proactive okay thank you can i get a mover mr giordano mr pavlak okay that concludes our public session um dr goldberg there were a couple of questions directed to you that you may answer if you wish you still with us dr goldberg i think he left his screen for a moment there he is he's back dr goldberg are you are you back i'm sorry i had a emergency call from the hospital there you are um not covered related so sorry to hear that
125okay did you want to address any of the comments or questions that were uh for you uh as i recall the first question um had to do with the definition of what a contact is uh it's changed obviously since the beginning of the epidemic period is now recognized as a total of 15 minutes within three feet over a 24-hour period so as you can see it's kind of very all-encompassing um throughout the day um i think there were comments about the uh playground issue um again it's a matter of of safety um and you know from a medical point of view it can be done but it will require uh more people involved i'm sorry i i'm looking for the list of the things that i had for questions but i don't seem to know
126where i put in the last five minutes uh does anybody recall the any of the other questions there was one about spring break i think there's a lot of consternation about should we close should we stay open what is your feeling on the spring break yeah um the the issue of spring break first off somebody asked why we're seeing an increase now uh prior to spring break and and i don't mean to be pejorative when i say that people are getting uh fatigued with covert restrictions this is just what we're seeing throughout the country and so we see an increase in it and it's not to mean that there aren't people who are working very hard to uh continue coverage restricting themselves um unfortunately not everybody is both involved in school systems and not involved
127in school systems given what we have seen in the past we know that for the time period after um for the time period after spring break for the 10 to 14 days afterward we'll probably see an increase in cases um that will be brought in from people who have traveled elsewhere and have been inadvertently infected i think one of the questions was you know why not one week versus two weeks uh right now the cdc recommendation for quarantine is between 10 to 14 days i know i've discussed this with other members of the board and with dr toback 14 days is the most conservative aspect that there is it may well be something that can be looked at as more data comes out but for now it was settled on 14 days the main question
128was did you feel we should go to virtual instruction versus in person to too again it's a matter of balance the most obvious thing is the the safest thing no doubt from a medical aspect of virtual and in fact staying virtual is the safest thing for the rest of the school year and until everyone is immunized and we've achieved herd immunity uh but it's not feasible especially when most parents and as a pediatrician i think children do belong back in school so balancing the risks balancing uh what they can be and using the social distancing and the cohorting approach this seems to be a safe way to do it uh neither being overly caught either being extremely overly cautious and neither being extremely overly cavalier it's a matter of finding a balance and seeing uh
129as best as we can do okay i think you've answered that sufficiently was there anything else from anyone for dr goldberg i think he needs to yeah go ahead there was one parent question um about allergies and covid and how to basically get advice as to being able to go to school when you have a chronic a child who has chronic allergies so i feel like that's both for dr goldberg and dr tobath i think as far as how to handle that the the issue of you know uh i think we dealt with this at the beginning of the covet experience when the board of health uh various states and various organizations put out a list of all encompassing uh symptoms that you were supposed to quarantine if you had any of them um and
130among them was headache body ache uh sneezing coughing uh and it you know it became really from my mind and for a lot of others an unworkable list because it didn't differentiate between a normal cold and a covid and the light i think what we've learned is that if you have fever you have an infection whether it's covet or it's going to be another viral illness that's another topic but for those people who normally have spring allergies they know and the family will know that this is part of their normal uh allergic reaction the rhinorrhea the runny nose the the slight cough the post nasal drip uh in the absence of fever uh my recommendation is to go to school or to participate in whatever manner it's being done obviously if you have fever this
131is not an allergic issue uh this is an infectious issue and until you're evaluated and tested for covet etc you need to stay in quarantine or stay home thank you that's good advice uh um anyone else for dr kohlberg okay well doctor thank you very much thank you we appreciate you being here yeah i also commend the board helped us tremendously trying to deal with a very difficult situation as we try to strike a balance between what's best for all involved and with that good night thank you thank you good night dr goldberg okay let's get back to our agenda i would like to go first dr pat i'm sorry now i'm calling you dr pat almost a couple more years okay whatever mr pavlak commissioner i pretty much answered anything so it doesn't matter
132um good evening uh the facilities and transportation committee met this evening myself mrs kazan mr mata mr blanchard mr skibitsky um we reviewed the esap program we have four schools completed with the new lighting which is highly cost effective we spoke about the we have a limited number of permits that were issued for the use of our gym by the boys club in the pal along with um covet protocols and restrictions for them as well as cleaning the district has ordered approximately 1700 shields both death shields and tabletop shields which we'll be in prior to the reopening we discussed playgrounds as we have also tonight we also discussed the tents that will be going up in a number in our high schools in our middle schools and we talked about the continual testing that's being
133done by the facilities department in the schools they're doing swab tests on on surfaces to determine the cleanliness and our numbers have coming back way below the acceptable uh the guidelines that have been set forth by the cdc we're also testing our buses transportation um we discussed the number of uh agreements with sussex county co-op for busing which uh have come in at a much better price than the other some of the other co-ops who all of a sudden decide they were raising prices uh we spoke about our upgraded computer system and our transfer system in the transportation department that integrates with um on course [Music] we will be reissuing approximately 2 500 bus passes within the next two weeks before school rio before we come before um let's see we're going to have them
134out by april 12th this is in in order to address the new the schedule in the high school and the middle school so all those are being bussed by high school middle school you will be getting a new bus pass which is about 2 500 students that will be reissuing to the state's coming in for their annual or their semi-annual bus inspection and you also spoke about the continuing training for the drivers for driver safety as well as culver protocols tsa came in and did an assessment of the transportation facility and kudos to the facilities and transportation tsa is going to take our program and they're going to they're going to use that as their model for the country so kudos to them that's it thank you mr pavlak they do a phenomenal job uh
135mr giordano thank you mrs kazan um today march 18 at five o'clock the uh personnel committee met uh participating was myself mrs cher and mrs puttup uh administrator available and uh briefing us was uh paula clark uh at the meeting we had a review of the personnel committee minutes from the february 25th meeting we then moved on to topics such as per diem and substitute rates we are discussing right now we also looked into long-term replacement rates also being discussed right now and we were given a preliminary idea and a list for the next meeting which will discuss uh riff and non-renewals for 2021 and that was what happened at the meeting today thank you okay thank you this is alvin thank you mrs kazan the communications committee met tonight at 5 p.m in attendance
136for board members eileen albanese michael bubba duan kumar and our administrator is dr mark toback we reviewed the phase 5 back to school plan that was shown tonight and we also had a discussion about recent media coverage and e-newsletter articles written about the district and that was our meeting thank you okay thank you does that cover everyone okay uh let's uh move some agenda items would someone like to move madam president mr padillac um i'd like to move the agenda as one item can i get a second mr giordano is there any discussion on any of the agenda items this is albany's thank you um on our number one the five plan um that's the return plan i know we've had a lot of discussion about this i know that there's been concern about trying
137to get kids back into school more quickly there's been concern about coming back too quickly when we're going to have um when we're looking at numbers that increase so i want to thank the administration for all the hard work i will support the plan i think it's it's really doing its best to listen to the community and to try to give the best that they can for as many as they can and i think that it's a plan that that works for our district um under oh school resources finance the tentative budget i continue to have a concern about the use of bank cap with the money that we have received for covered expenses with the additional money that we will receive um although we don't have a number yet from the new plan i
138have a concern about adding additional taxation to members of the community for people who are unaware bank cap is not money we have in the bank bank cap is the ability for the board to tax residents of the town over the two percent cap uh we're looking at over a million dollars in bank cap and i i'm not going to support a budget that includes that for taxpayers at this time we all know that there are many residents of our community who are struggling financially as a result of either covet illnesses or the pandemic i just don't see that we have that need at this point to add in that bank cap additional over a million dollars so i won't be supporting the tentative budget as it exists today thank you [Music] mr bubba um
139keeping with my past votes i've never supported a bank cap budget i just think it's just an excuse that we can use to tax that in this case we actually don't have to we did receive more money from the state we are getting more money from the federal government this isn't necessary we need to figure that out without over taxing thank you anyone else okay i'll comment on the budget um i happen to think it's a very good budget the increase is 2.6 total um and the reason for the bank cap is chapter 44. chapter 44 has had an impact on us that we haven't even begin to see the final of it's it's a partial this year it'll get worse next year because in its infinite wisdom the legislature gave us something and now
140they've taken it back as for the um federal money that can only be used for coveted related items our general fund still has to go to all the other things we typically support and the uptick in funding from the state was part of the plan to introduce full-day kindergarten so we do need unfortunately to use the bank cap um to pay for chapter 44 and the decrease uh to our district as a result um the school board association is lobbying against this because once again the teachers were taken care of the state health care uh plan was taken care of but the districts were not we get no relief this time um and that was part of the chapter 78 deal in the two percent cap so now that's being re revoked um so i
141i have to disagree with my colleagues that this band cap is unnecessary because you know all of these different funds are compromised for specific things uh when covet goes away the money goes away and it can't be used for anything else it can't be used for full day kindergarten it can't be used for salaries it can't be used for any of those things so um at least i can say for once since i've been a board member we're raising taxes and we're getting something quite grand for it full day kindergarten for this district which is going to be a big boom for our property values and for the students education so i'm happy to support it and i also want to thank the administration for all these months of work and going into phase five
142and uh i'm looking forward to concluding this year on a high note and getting all of those end-of-year activities done and hopefully we'll get some relief from the state on that as far as how many students we can have in the classroom etc so at this point did you have something mrs kumar yes i was just going to jump in before you do but that's okay um thank you um i was basically going to say what miss kazan just said about the fact that taxpayer 44 has really negatively affected our budget um and the fact that this bank cap and it's been what we've been working for for the past how many years to get this full day kindergarten up and running um so for that reason i think it's really important to support the
143budget so that's why i would be in support of the budget and uh thank you for the plan and hopefully we can go through and we can see a positive in terms of recovered numbers and everything else with our return to school plan in the next phase thank you anyone else do i hear eli snoring mr bubba um actually yes put yourself on you please we're all calling mr moffat mr duffy yes mr giordano yes mrs kumar yes mr pavlak yes mrs potter yes mr sheer yes mrs albanese no to oh number five yes to the rest mr bubba no to own number five yes to the rest mrs kazan motion carries yes yes that's a yes from me okay thank you get alrighty our second public portion for the evening okay this portion of
144the meeting is open to citizens for comment on any topic residents are to state their names addresses and subject matter comments may be limited to three minutes per person members of the public are discouraged from speaking negatively about an employer or student the board bears no responsibility for comments made by the public comments regarding employees or students cannot be legally responded to by the board other comments may be responded to tonight or at subsequent meetings under old business can i get a mover mr giordano second mrs kumar okay let's begin good evening tory esposito woodlot road in regards to spring break everybody is so quick to talk about virtual why don't we cancel spring break let the kids go to school so we alleviate that problem the problem if you go to a virtual for
145spring break for two weeks may 31st is what memorial day oh we have two unused emergency days so now the kids are on friday and tuesday are we just going to end the school year on june 1st because you're going to quarantine again for two weeks if you're gonna go virtual cancel spring break we'd have to do it anyway if we had if we had extra unused emergency days that we have to eat into spring break if you go virtual you're gonna kill the momentum and the kids are just gonna be done just cancel spring break if that's if that's the case other districts are doing it they're keeping the kids in school and let them get out early just cancel spring break please and to the parents that call in that have their kids
146that have been remote all year don't worry about the playgrounds being open if your kid's not going to go on it the kids that go to school they want to be on so don't worry about that okay kids are you can go a half mile down the street on lowy and you can play in the playground all you want whatever you want let the kids play in school open it up if your kid's virtual that's fine you do you i do me everybody does everything that they want to do okay baseball nobody's going to be wearing masks in the in the spring a little league field okay please with the spring break keep it going don't go virtual or cancel spring break let the kids keep going to school if you can't go anywhere anyway
147that alleviates all the problems please thank you thank you next uh hi uh katie cluck 34 hellcrest drive um i want to talk about the uh diversity equity and inclusion goal um i know that it's a year-long goal um have you considered making it um renewing the goal for next year um it will take far longer than just a single year to uh dismantle the systems of imperialism white supremacy and racism that centuries have reinforced and that why um our educational system and just everything in society is the way it is so it's going to take a lot more than just one year have we considered it's just a continuous ongoing process of looking at and evaluating our curriculum as we keep going and then um will or how in will wayne schools um address
148the increase in racist incidents towards asian americans um it's not just an uh problem outside of our community but within it um especially there was a lot of increase in um racism towards asian americans uh towards the beginning of the pandemic um i saw it when i was in school it was uh definitely a problem and i was just wondering if uh the school has or the district has considered um talking about and supporting our asian american students uh because they're really hurting and they definitely uh need some support so uh thank you so much for everything you've been doing i really appreciate it thank you next spoiler hi eileen d'amico 29 manor drive um i'm just going to try and ask the last question that i ran out of time for before um and
149it was essentially this i'm just curious um specifically what if anything are members of the district administration the board either individually or in concert with each other doing to help at this point lobby our state officials to make decisions now which will most decidedly impact the ability for our seniors to have um many of the senior events that they are desperately looking forward to things like prom graduation senior awards senior breakfast their yearbook signing and so on and so forth um you know as as i think waiting until sort of sitting and waiting until maybe two weeks after spring break it's really just too late and i think you all know that to try and plan things that would technically have to happen sometime in early to mid may in order to avoid risk of
150having a quarantine for graduation as an example these are things that a lot of them have to happen in may um and you know to wait that late in april to try and even plan something just isn't feasible so that's my question but you know where i'm getting to with that is that i've had the opportunity to talk to a number of our seniors specifically at hills um about two weeks ago for some other things and um in the course of that conversation and full disclosure these are not friends of my son they're actually kids i'd never had the ability to speak to before and um a comment or a comment by one young lady who was on one of the zoom calls that we were conducting really says it all so i'm going to
151leave you with this um we were discussing the tradition of of the seniors putting their handprints on the walls of hills and the students were commenting how they really hoped um for the opportunity to be able to continue that tradition this year and the quote by the young woman uh was this i really hope that i can leave my handprint at wayne hills this year because i don't want the seniors to be forgotten i don't want to be forgotten this year any more than we already have been and that's a direct quote thank you thank you make it a mover mr giordano seconded mr pavlak okay dr back um [Music] how would you like to address you will you get back to the parents entirely up to you right so let's go through the um
152the questions i think i have most of them written down um so anyway starting off with mr ginsberg okay so before the school year started we provided a photo of a model classroom so provided parents with an opportunity to see what a classroom would look like during the pandemic and you saw it's pretty stark as far as all the normal things that we have in a classroom removed and so a lot of people were stunned by that photo i suppose the thing to do now would be to provide a photo now that we're going to have the desk shields in place so we can provide you a model classroom the question about sanitation stations our elementary classrooms for most part have sinks that is still the best way to keep your hands clean and to
153prevent the spread with regard to windows being open that is um really up that's something that's in every classroom depending on the temperature the conditions outside for medical conditions that students might have in in the classroom um mr esposito made comments but there were no questions mr tompesky made comments no questions made comments there were no questions eileen d'amico asked a question about um why was the teacher survey open-ended but not the parent survey um ultimately we we know that as far as our parents go um one we've certainly heard quite a bit of parent feedback but two the ability to collect collate and make sense of probably six to seven thousand comments is quite a difficult thing to do when you have all the other things added together um we have a very good
154sense of what our parent community thinks and so we didn't feel that that was necessary at the time and we also if we do collect information like that we want to do a good job with interpreting it making sense of it and that requires an awful lot of time um let's see here okay so with regard to the lobbying of officials i know that mrs reichmann mentioned about um our county superintendent talking about the fact there's tremendous amount of pressure on the governor's office to provide guidance and much like parents say well you know in other other communities they do this they do that we do know in other states there's different types of guidance that are available to school districts to plan events and then have the event approved based on a plan that
155you develop at each district those are the types of things that would provide every district with a lot of flexibility these things have been shared with the governor's office right and like i said i know there's already a lot of pressure the new jersey association of school administrators is the superintendent assistant superintendents organization i know for sure they are interested in hearing more um because we know that our students at the end of the year um they're depending on us to be able to deliver these events and i agree that they should not be planned for the last minute um that does make things very difficult again for not only uh it's a terrible situation for the students but it's also it's very difficult because there's a lot of high expectations here in every community
156for those events so to plan those at last minute um with regard to combining cohorts at this point we've had a discussion we've shared why we recommend not combining cohorts at all levels as far as letters for the staff the district the central office produces letters for each principle and so the principles are the ones that distribute those letters but for anybody in the community who would like to know about the different cases and where the cases are every letter that we produce is posted on our website the kova 19 the return to school website all those letters are there dating back to the beginning of the epidemic um [Music] so regarding other another question from mrs daley she asked about exposure she wanted dr goldberg to define exposure um let's see with regard to
157the high schools so based on the survey we do see that a number of students are going to be coming back however we also see there's a lot of cases right now in the high schools and so we do have to be concerned about that we do have spring break coming up we do know that that time period um we're not really quite sure so let's see what happens i think it's best to to move along in our progression but not do so in an overly aggressive way um mr terry asked about the ecc um we'll have to get back to you about that i'm not really quite sure you want to elaborate go ahead okay mr richman is going to elaborate right now sorry i can expand on that a little bit more if
158if we were to combine um classes we wouldn't be able to socially distance and we could end up in a situation so so right now we're looking at combining cohorts but not combining classes with continuing cohorts the numbers are going to range from 7 to 12 students in a class if we combine the classes we would exceed 16 and that would be very very difficult with small age children being confined to a seat with their death shield and not having any movement uh the buses stagger elementary is a minimal day so um you know that was a challenge as well with the ecc because of the way they're staggered one thing that we could do is we could revisit and i will speak with dr hammond and maybe it's a possibility for some classes to
159be combined where the numbers would be smaller once we know who's returning so i am more than happy to go back and revisit and see if we if there's anything additional we can do once we have a commitment from parents and know exactly who's returning we'll look at each situation um in each age group differently so then um going on to um comment from miss conte she asks about staggering one week so indicated that was ridiculous um i have explained the position of the district regarding the reason for staggering um with mrs ventic she had a comment not a question um angela tetla talked about two weeks virtual after spring break i didn't have a question for that um there was other questions and there was no comment there um the allergy season okay so
160the allergy question yep well we as far as okay so dr goldberg answered the medical side of it as far as the school district goes if there's a case where a child has an allergy okay for every school nurse there should be a record of that on file if there is no record of an allergy that we have on file then we have to investigate the situation we have to make sure so ultimately these situations we can avoid if um we do have a record of a child having allergies if we have no record of allergies then we have to be cautious about that um we don't just assume that a child has allergies and so that's how these things happen if there is a child that um has an allergy and we have document
161has allergies and we have documentation of that um then either one you can get a negative test you can go back um or you can come back with a note from your doctor but you're not quarantined and then you would at that point not be questioned again about those same symptoms in other words if the child had those same symptoms again once you have that record and you have a doctor's note on file then there's no need we know it's allergies so that's how sometimes there's confusion perhaps in a classroom and it could potentially lead to a situation of quarantine if the school is not made aware of a child with allergies um okay mr esposito he said what he said about spring break um katie cluck as far as the the goal we're going
162to continue to um look at that this year we do understand there's a lot of work to do with the goal and so we have every expectation to continue into the next year but those are those the goals of the district are an annual thing and that's something that happens generally in august we wouldn't be doing that right now um and if there are any incidents that you're referring to i'm not aware of them but it's certainly um if you'd like to email me or give me a call to describe what you're talking about i would be happy to open up an exam investigation of any situation where any group of students is being discriminated against or treated unfairly um i think that basically gets all the questions thank you dr toback okay here we
163are end of the evening uh old business new business mrs kumar i know i'm sorry i overlooked a retirement that needed to be read please go ahead thank you miss lisa barros a paraprofessional we are here today to show respect and love for mrs lisa barros lisa has spent 17 years supporting students and programs as a paraprofessional during her tenure she has served in the capacity of a one-to-one shared classroom paraprofessional and job coach lisa has touched many lives along the way including fellow colleagues teachers families and most importantly students she always puts students first and treats all with kindness and respect lisa is always available to lend a hand and is flexible punctual and has always provided consistency and diligence to all assignments lisa you will be missed wayne township public schools wishes you
164good luck in your future endeavors enjoy retirement with your family and grandchildren thank you mrs kumar anybody else board comments i just wanted to address mrs d'amico um i do attend a lot of meetings at the state level and uh all of the board members throughout the state are definitely concerned with if and when we're going to loosen these restrictions and basically it's all about how many vaccinations we could get accomplished and obviously the positivity rate so i think that's still the deciding factor but we're certainly getting closer on the vaccine situation and from what i've been told the beginning of april should be an onslaught of available doses and let's let's pray that happens because if that's the case we'll be closer to fully opening um and reducing some of the restrictions we're still
165dealing with under the executive orders uh and guidelines so um anyone and once again thank you mayor vergano uh for lining up appointments for our teachers and if you haven't heard from the administration and you want to get a vaccine obviously reach out to your principal and uh we'll get you on that list um i'm very happy about that anyone i need a mover mrs put up second and this is more okay