001do all right good evening ladies and gentlemen i've i've got 6 30 so i'd like to call to order this meeting of the bartholomew consolidated school corporation's regular school board meeting tonight's monday august 24th 2020 we're here in the admin building in columbus indiana in the terrace room uh thank you if you're joining us online or and thank all of you for here and uh present this evening we begin every meeting with reflections from one of our board members tonight uh mr rich stinner is asked to share with us thank you mr caldwell i ran across a set of uh poetry composed in these days of uh coronavirus covet 19. uh submissions from across the united states one jumped out at me it was from a ten-year-old fourth grader in california druviv asani is her
002name and her poem was entitled the silence i am the sound of children crying i am what makes you tremble and shiver in your bed late at night i am the blackness you see when you close your eyes i am the wolf hunting you down in a dark forest i am the majestic yet treacherous mountains high up with the clouds i am the rose you want to pluck but can't because my thorns are sharp like knives i'm the moonlight that shines at night i'm the nightmares you run from i'm the blizzard that will wipe you out on the waves pulling you under i am the north star shining bright in the dark blue sky above i'm as sweet as sugar with the ones i love i am bitter like a million lemons with the ones
003who have hurt me or my loved ones i am the silence growing louder in your ears i am me i am who i am meant to be i am who i want to be i am me i drew viva thank you mr stetter for sharing that if you're able would you stand with me and join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands a nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all of our board members are in attendance tonight so we have a quorum i'll call this meeting to order as a reminder to the rest of my colleagues on the board we have our mission vision and high expectation objectives posted behind us those
004continue to be uh guiding stars for uh the work and and the thinking and decisions that we make this evening um dr roberts we have a couple of presentations uh tonight and i think we're starting with miss heine of the 2020 bcsc teacher of the year award that is correct mr colwell this is the first time for this particular award so ms heine help us out here thank you mr caldwell dr roberts board members of the board this is an exciting evening we are recognizing our first district teacher of the year so this is quite quite an evening for for all of the candidates let me remind you a little bit of where we've been we started this process in january we thought we we felt like we needed this process and to recognize the
005teacher of the year because we have so many excellent outstanding teachers and we wanted to recognize them and for them to be able to participate in the state teacher of the year the state teacher of the year award program so we started that process in january we recognized all of the building winners in march at our board meeting that was an exciting night we had lots of people in attendance and a big celebration from that evening there were 18 building nominees we um collected portfolios for those that wanted to participate in the next phase and mindy mindy summers language arts english language arts teacher from central middle school is our award winner for this year so i want to talk a little bit about mindy first i have to start out by reading um her
006student engagement there were several pieces of this portfolio excuse me portfolio that they had to complete they had to have three letters of support they had to have a student engagement piece they had to have the school criteria a piece tied to their school criteria so i'm going to read to you her student engagement piece because i just found it fascinating you can tell she's a language arts teacher i'm going to start with that we are all but tiny ripples and together we can make a magnificent wave my cms classroom is a gorgeous blend of diverse individuals who all vary in skills and abilities values attitudes backgrounds and personality traits learning to treasure our diversity and our special role in the world is imperative to the optimal growth of our world learning community a unit
007that defines me as an educator would be the global read aloud a mall unbound by aisha said in some amal a young pakistani girl has a life and dreams that are threatened by societal norms with the weight of gender roles and social class upon her amal perseveres we started our unit discovering our place in the world we looked at reading as mirrors windows and sliding glass doors a mirror reflects traits of ourselves a window gives us a glimpse of other worlds that are real imaginary familiar or strange and a sliding glass door allows us to step inside and become a part of these worlds we slid the door open to a mall's world we did not take this journey alone we connected through google hangouts with a class in canada discussing tough topics such as
008poverty rights of children and gender roles in families we also connected with classrooms in new jersey and wisconsin by sending original art pieces and postcards reflecting how amal inspired her us with her strength and courage after seeing the world through the eyes of another i hope my little ripples come together as a colossal weight that was extraordinary great unit we had like like i said we asked for three letters of support she had one from a former student and the former student writes when i think of mrs summers i remember her energy first she possesses an unlimited amount of it which when coupled with her genuine passion for teaching allows her to set a classroom a light with excitement she talked a lot about the role you play in the extracurriculars at central middle school
009how you give so much of your time mrs summers is a teacher who did not only influence my middle school years but has left an indelible mark on my entire life as a parent a parent was another letter that says as a parent of one of her former students i can share that my son truly loved her class and the way she pushed him to go beyond his comfort zone my son's strengths are in math and science and he did not have a passion for reading and writing but mindy brought out a love of learning that he still carries with him today so i want to recognize mindy summers as bcsc's teacher of the year we have a plaque we have a continual plaque that we will place upstairs has mindy's name on it and
010she has a plaque for her as teacher of the year for bcsc you're welcome mindy we'd really like to hear from you i just want to say that i am absolutely humbled and blessed um if i had every single person here that i need to thank for this award then this room would be full to the brand this community has been amazing to me has been my family for this my 21st year in the corporation and i will say this that the world now more than ever needs education and i am so happy to be on the front lines and i appreciate this so much [Laughter] well she's doing that i'd like to recognize the members of the committee blake manuel darren sprong who's here this evening susan scott jolynne bodkins and dr shed represented
011the board thank you besides [Laughter] congratulations wendy congratulations so thanks to miss heine and the team for uh the work in getting this going and miss heine referenced the teacher of the years teacher of the year teachers plural of the year award ceremony back in march i think that was our last school board meeting in a normal normal environment so you're now much later able to celebrate mindy's again congratulations man it's terrific thank you dr roberts we have one other presentation i think dr roberts uh uh we want to recognize one of our uh middle school sros yes if we could have officer greg ross come forward please officer ross mr ross just to stand right there for just a moment we'll let everybody remind everybody of what happened last week most people i think
012in the community are aware we've been doing a lot with covet 19 over the last several months but then something else kind of popped up last week the things that happen within our schools and and uh officer ross doing the great job that he was doing had a chance to recognize that so last wednesday i believe uh august the what have been the 19th wednesday august the 19th uh around lunch time officer ross just doing his normal duties checking things out making sure the building is safe saw something suspicious in the parking lot out in front of central middle school between central and csa lincoln approached an individual and after some dialogues a little conversation and so forth ended up having to uh take care of the situation unfortunately uh we did find the person
013had two firearms on him fortunately officer ross was paying close attention to the circumstances and situations and intervene on behalf of our students and staff members we are blessed to have the partnerships we have in this community with our school resource officers from both the bartholomew county sheriff's department and the city of columbus police department so thank you to them we have a reminder of five officers that are available to our school corporation officer ross being one of those and it's the officer quizzenberry behind him who helps us kind of manage this this group that we have throughout the school corporation so officer ross congratulations and thank you very much on behalf of the community thank you all for that thank you so much okay [Laughter] thank you greg thank you again officer ross and
014officer quisenberry appreciate your service to our school corporation all right those two presentations behind us let's move ahead on the agenda we come to the section for public comments uh we have nine individuals who have signed to speak tonight i'll call you up and please when you come up uh just give us your your name and your address we ask that uh as miss chrisman who keeps our minutes uh we'll have that for the public record um ask that that if if someone has already said what you want to say it's okay to defer if you want to but we are always happy to listen as well and and refrain from using the names of individual students or staff members as possible please limit your remarks to three minutes each um first we have this
015evening uh miss barb wills the podium's up here barb sorry it's a circuitous path there okay thanks good evening my name is barb wills and i live at 5700 west state road 46. this has really been a crazy year and even in the best of circumstances there is no way everyone will be pleased this year is rife with an additional challenges covid federal and state governments hinting to outright threatening reduced funding to districts that do not open in person knowing that there are risks to in-person classes and very different risks to having only online learning available i believe you our board have worked hard extremely hard to try to offer both trying your best to appease as many as possible with the options available to us students and caregivers have made the choices that worked
016best within their households one in five of my bcsc students chose bridge i will let her speak to her experiences on that so far i will say it has not been ideal and that it's been more than a little stressful for her my other four are attending in with my children and my spouse we made this decision based largely on information that was presented at the july 20 board meeting i was encouraged by masks being required and the covet indicators with clearly noted numbers for minimal moderate and substantial spread in several categories but i apparently erroneously believe that we would also be given the numbers regarding how many covet cases in each building i thought we would have some sort of chart with each school the number of positive cases and ideally the number of
017contacts that were quarantined due to potential exposure to learn the first week of school that there was not a plan to release this information was a huge disappointment i realized bcsc put out a statement at the end of last week with this information i believe this is a huge step in the right direction i am however concerned that in the future this information will be released sporadically and perhaps not in easy to find locations in researching my comments for tonight i looked on bcscschools.org the tasks for site and our local newspaper website i eventually found this information on the republic site not in the original article but in a follow-up article in the thursday article flat rock stated that they would update their information on their website by school every friday i would like to
018see bcsc commit to updating the numbers of positive cases and contract case contract traced individuals on our bcsc schools org site once a week additionally i left the july 20 board meeting under the impression that if we were in substantial spread we would be closing in whole or in part according to the charts that were shown at the july 20 meeting affected areas would be closed for 24 hours before being cleaned and reopened after cleaning when deemed safe to do so were the buildings with the positive individuals closed for 24 hours and then cleaned before reopening we spent the first part of our the first two weeks of school in substantial spread for per capita positive rate and the first week in the red for hospitalizations please understand i am not saying that we should
019close i am simply asking for clear guidance on the criteria the board will use to determine if we are staying open as it seems that two categories of red were considered safe to stay open while the indicators are clear it is not clear to me how bcsc is determining whether to stay open or transition to e-learning do we need to have all the indicators in the red or is there a certain amount of time that we will continue person in-person classes while the indicators are in the highest categories i would love to see clear definition on this matter thank you thank you miss wills becky wills i believe you sort of just got introduced right becky good evening my name is becky wills i live at 57 west state road 46. i am currently a
020junior at north high school last year as a sophomore i was taught as with everyone else online for the last nine weeks of school given the circumstances i was impressed with the teachers flexibility and the quality of education they maintained online this semester i decided to do the bridge program i'm surprised and disappointed that this administration has not taken the time during summer to further improve online learning and additional resources rather they have placed the burden squarely on the shoulders of teachers guidance counselors and support staff my teachers do not have time for questions by both in-person and online students and i often do not get answers for multiple hours one teacher at east has 250 in-person students and 35 online students if this teacher takes an average of five minutes to answer or guide
021each student a day this would equate to 1425 minutes or 23.75 hours each day this would give her 15 minutes left in her entire day even though we were on block scheduling so she may not see every student every day there are questions about ongoing or upcoming assignments and those who generally need help in the class the quality of education students are receiving is in a sharp decline which could have been prevented if the administration had used their time wisely over the summer now we are here and the system is not working it's not the system you all sat here and promised us a few weeks ago it is not a system beneficial to students or teachers or even parents rectify this by sending everyone online where teachers can have the same guidelines for each
022student and not be completely overwhelmed trying to perform the perfect balancing act obviously this would also be safer because the metrics you gave us at the beginning of the year are in the red but i'm sure that will be covered by someone else thank you thank you becky austin hover good afternoon i'm austin hover 8204 saxon court um i don't come with a big list of fancy words or uh hydra high education but i do come with two kids that do attend bcsc i've had a couple conversations with other parents that have children as well and i can only speak for my end but we're requiring these kids to wear masks during the school day to help minimalize the risk of exposure but has as i've spoken with my children they eat lunch and they
023take these straight off their my face to put food in their mouth to eat lunch and then they gotta put it right back on so during that period of eating lunch they're at full full strength to to get this airborne virus or be subject to being in contact with other children that are you know two feet away from them and unfortunately i've been on the receiving end of what i call a pink slip a distant plenary action because of not wearing a mask now i have an 11 and a 10 year old their attention spans are 11 and a 10 year old it's very hard for them to wear these eight hours a day i have been working since the start of corona and i haven't stopped i've been in several different states i've never
024contracted it i'm lucky i've been on the front lines up in indianapolis helping the military with disposing of medical equipment and i haven't had a symptom nobody that i've been in contact with during this eight months has had any symptoms or contraction not saying that i'm not a positive carrier but for me it's hard to sit back and watch my children be subject to things that i see grown adults not doing like myself and be reprimanded for that and the other thing is e-learning i work 60 hours a week my wife works 50 hours a week we we can't teach our children the subjects that teachers go to school for in college and specialize in we attempted to do the learning when it first came out in the beginning of the year um i'll be
025the first one to tell you i don't know how to navigate that system i was not taught there was nothing sent home that teaches you there's nothing you're subject to a ten-year-old child i'm trying to describe to you how to navigate through there you reach out to the teachers and they've got 30 other students that are in their class where their p their parents are reaching out with the same questions for me i don't see that working i i want my children in school i want them to learn i want them to be successful and i do not see that happening on a computer i just don't um i'm a hands-on person i can teach them the things that will help them get along in life but i can't teach them things that i don't
026understand myself and that's why we pay taxes and we come here to to talk to the school board for our concerns that's what i have for you thank you mr holbrook just for one point clarity are your two children in school at bc yesterday okay they are in class they attend elementary okay thank you thank you um i'm going to just because you pulled your mat here and i want to make sure we don't have people we have anything besides this guy i want to make sure that this this mic gets cleaned off thank you kelly appreciate that if you want to leave that here i can help you you might just leave it up there now that we're done front door we have next up teresa levins i am dr teresa levins i'm a
027family physician here in town thank you mr caldwell and dr roberts for letting me speak i have i would like to commend you on your ability to get school started these last two weeks have been hectic they've been hard but i appreciate the fact that you have done what the pediatricians wanted and what the family docs wanted which is to get the kids back in school and i appreciate the fact that it's been as safe as it can be but i have some concerns and i just want to voice those to you i have a daughter who is at the high school she's a sophomore and when i pick her up after school i've noticed that the kids are leaving the school and the masks are completely off they're walking in mass to the buses
028they're getting on the buses and they don't have their masks on i was surprised my daughter had her mask on yay for my daughter but i was really surprised at the number of kids who didn't have their masks on i'm also concerned about the spacing in the classrooms she tells me that she's in a classroom of 35 chairs there are 32 students in there not counting the bridge students and she says the desks are very very close and they're in that classroom for 88 minutes so it's very difficult to suggest that the social distancing is happening in the classroom the other thing is she tells me that they're supposed to be wiping down the common surfaces every every class that's not happening in most of her classes so i just want to make sure that
029you guys are know what's happening inside the school i know that you see the best when they see you walk through the halls they know how to behave they're students they're teachers they're administrators but i think what's really happening that the parents are seeing can be very concerning to them and i want and i wanted to make sure that you knew that i also have a concern about what's going to happen with these bridge students you know it's been two weeks are they all coming back to school next week and are they going to have room in their classrooms because again she's in full classrooms in all of her classes and i have to imagine that sophomore classes have bridge students in them so just some things i would really like to have you comment
030about if you can thank you thank you dr levins amy london good evening my name is amy london i live at 50 45 somerset lane i am here representing the columbus educators association as their president on behalf of cea i would like to thank you for starting to share the number of coveted cases in our school corporation our community spoke very loudly this last week and he listened and i appreciate that i also want to thank you for all the collaboration with cea that you've had while i've been president of the columbus educators association i know some of the board members of us that participated in that and we really appreciate that a few months ago we did a lot of collaborating together to work on a proposal to ask our community to invest in
031us through a referendum in exchange for the votes from our community the corporation would invest in us and students we ask that they believe the corporation would be would put the well-being of its staff and safety of its students first as well as be transparent in july when the board adopted a reopening plan safety of all involved was considered and at the front of our minds it still is the biggest concern in our community in the last few days cea conducted a survey of 314 teachers participated and the survey was related to how they feel it's going since we've completed two weeks of school so i want to share on their behalf what they have told us while most while almost half of them agreed students are wearing face masks social distancing is still a
032concern 249 teachers have said they have desks in their classroom that are three feet or less apart as an instructor 203 of them said they are unable to stay three feet away from their students during the day due to the physical makeup of their classroom in common areas especially at the high schools students are not able to socially distance due to the amount of students in the area and the space 23 percent of the teachers or 75 said they had been able to witness students social distancing our high schools simply have too many students in them each day to practice social distancing as outlined in our plan we that you voted on in july our community is concerned about social distancing also at recess as well as teachers the safety and mental well-being of teachers
033has to be considered right now there is a large number of teachers who are teaching in person and in bridge special ed teachers across their corporation are teaching in bridge in person and in cvp there are not enough hours in the day to prepare the lessons and instruct students at the level of excellence the level of varsity excellence exhibited by bcsc teachers in this current format ca would like to see specific metrics shared with the community in regards to when and if we would need to go to e-learning the uncertainty of what to look for if this step was needed is causing unneeded stress while we know there are things that are going well and there are some teachers who are having great success in their classrooms with little stress at this time cea asks
034that our administration and school board work with us and our community to find solutions to these concerns while we have 476 members as of today and cea we realize this only represents around 70 percent of our bcsc teachers so we would also encourage the board and administration to work with the format to gain feedback from all teachers in our corporation and ca is more than happy to help with that if needed thank you for your time we appreciate it and we appreciate you being here in your service thank you amy tracy kaiser 2771 bluebell court east dr roberts mr caldwell ladies and gentlemen of the school board i'm here to speak tonight on behalf of the show your work transparency now group which gathered today in a public display of concern we're here to ask
035the school board and administration at bcsc to commit to transparency in the covid19 metric reporting and decision making your decisions affect the health and the lives of the entire bcsc community never before have we so desperately needed to know we can trust you transparency builds that trust and secrecy destroys it within the past week you revealed data on case counts by building we thank you for that our community deserves this information and we hope you continue to share it regularly however during the july 20th school board meeting dr roberts presented and the majority of the school board approved a plan that included a set of metrics that were to be used to determine the status of bcsc schools but bcsc has refused repeated requests to share exactly how the metrics inform decision making and what
036will trigger a change to school status instead bcsc makes vague references to the information behind the information and significant qualifying information some of your own key indicators such as per capita positive rate have indicated significant spread for 14 days in a row as of today sometimes more than doubling your threshold for red yet no action has been taken and no concern displayed many parents who trusted their children for in-person learning did so because we trusted the plan we trusted you to abide by that plan and make tough decisions based on data not according to personal wishes interpretation or gut feeling it is not impossible to commit to a defined objective data-driven e-learning threshold other school corporations including marion county and brown county have defined and published thresholds in the absence of clear decision-making criteria from
037bcsc and the trust that transparency brings parents are left in the dark when parents expressed their concern on your recent public post a week ago bcsc hid our public comments from vue for more than two hours despite that attempt to silence us we know that we are not the only ones concerned the teachers in this school district who are on the front lines yet do not have a seat at this table or a voice in this room are concerned too we support them in their petition for information we ask you now dr roberts and the bcsc board to provide all of us the transparency that fosters trust we ask that you uphold your obligation to this district to provide clear insight into the conditions in our schools and the specific metrics and triggers being used
038to just to drive decision making thank you miss kaiser ross thomas good evening i'm ross thomas 2246 franklin street um first off i appreciate the opportunity to speak to you all tonight i really share in some of the concerns that have been put forth today particularly about um what seems to be a vague definition of substantial spread and what would trigger reevaluation i get the position that you are in and i understand that that politicians have have threatened the school system with with perhaps cutting funding if if students are not in school and and nobody wants to scare them off i understand the practicality of that but but the reality is these are numbers and statistics and in the long run the best thing to do is to be straightforward not vague you don't gain
039anything from that in the long run um as was said you have a lack of trust and we don't need that we all want to trust that everybody's doing the right thing and i think you are so it's simple enough to simply say look this is how it is and these are the numbers that we're going to use and i would hope that you would see that in the long run i'd rather see you fighting to keep that funding that that a politician is threatening to take away than trying to weasel around and have it the other way again i don't think you're doing that but if you're not straightforward that's the impression that people get and you just don't want to do that you really don't what i wanted to to ask about is
040we know that there are protocols in place at all of the facilities and i haven't been able to see how those protocols are being enforced whether they're being enforced internally whether it's being self-reported from each facility as to whether protocols are being followed i'm not sure whether there's a mechanism in place for teachers and staff who have concerns to to bring those to the administration and bring those to the board perhaps anonymously rather than having a teacher with concerns have to go to the person in charge at the school and say i think you're screwing up i would hope that those things are in place i would hope that there is a way for teachers and staff who say that we know how this is supposed to be working but but in this particular school
041it's it's not working in this way or another and there ought to be a way to report that i'm not sure that there is maybe there is i just haven't heard it and i would also hope that there is something more than simply self-reporting and it's more than just a phone call say hey how are things going over there all things are fine okay i would hope that that there is some way that that is being monitored i have concerns i i have a daughter in elementary school i certainly uh when i heard that well at recess no one wears masks at recess it's kind of fair game and everybody lines up to go outside and everybody lines up to go back in that seemed like a concern to me and i would imagine that
042it's a concern to some of the teachers and staff and i would hope that those kinds of things are are being evaluated and i hope again that there is some protocol in place to continue to make sure that the rules are being followed because if they're not you know my sons who are in high school i ask them every day hey are people wearing their masks well yeah for the most part for the most part well what happens when somebody doesn't wear their mask well i don't know that's a problem if if there isn't uh something in place to say listen if you're not wearing your mask there's going to be a consequence well there's no consequence for him a couple days later there's no consequence for him no consequence for her there just ought
043to be a protocol in place to make sure that that's happening and those are my concerns and again you may be addressing those i simply haven't heard it that's the last thing i would say just tell the truth just be straightforward with everybody um and we'll all be better off thanks thank you mr thomas leah jackman whitener so my name is leah jackman whitener my address is 60 54 meadow ridge in columbus i'm a community member i have two bcsc graduates and no current students so i am your average community member who cares about education and who went to the red for red rally because i care about teachers and i care about education i'm real concerned about public trust and especially some things that have happened this week the shift to having the task
044force manage the numbers makes sense but the way it was rolled out eroded public trust there were a lot of concerns others have mentioned the need for clear a clear understanding about whether the thresholds that were mentioned in july are still actually going to be valid or if decisions are going to be made based on those or not i really want to think about the communication that's happening i trust that administration teachers staff parents and kids are doing their best and i've heard from lots of teachers this week most of whom are really actually very thrilled and they tell like their voices are like the kids are doing great the kids are keeping their masks on like it seems like it's much less hassle about that stuff than they had prepared for but the teachers
045are struggling there's no way to distance even three feet apart in many many most of the rooms kids are switching back and forth between bridge and in person on a very frequent basis a person might get four roster changes a day or more a teacher might now if i'm a parent i think well this is great you know you can just like what what the week looks like what the numbers look like i could make a decision but apparently like for the teachers this is just a huge incredibly difficult situation especially when they're have maybe 35 kids in the room or you know x number of kids in the room and x number of kids that they're supposed to be monitoring online via zoom or whatever during the class and they can't as becky mentioned
046respond to those people's questions it's i thought they were going to be bridge teachers and in-law and on pers in person teachers but that they weren't going to be doing both but it sounds like most people in the high school levels are doing both that's complicated and as a community member it's only because i have a lot of teacher friends that i know that i would have just gone with oh this is what i heard the plan was the community needs accurate and complete information and the teachers need to be able to have open honest communication with the board with the administration to be able to make the to be able to make sure everyone has the information that's needed i know there's a long-standing policy where teachers are discouraged from speaking to board members
047or at board meetings and i am concerned about this because it feels like to me that the public ends up blaming teachers for problems that the teachers can't speak out about publicly we've muzzled our teachers and said you can't share your concerns and there's going to be some repercussions if you do well that just ends up with there's the board and then oh are the teachers bad because they're not saying what's wrong and then public distrust i think it's a huge problem we've got to shift the communication pattern to make it better i believe if if the communication were more open and teachers and staff voices were heard then we could deal with the the the true problem of safety during the pandemic and rebuild the public trust thank you thank you miss checkman while
048you amanda reed hello my name is amanda reed i live at 3355 grove parkway here in columbus um i'm impressed with our district uh generally i'll be very candid here in that when we had the opportunity to relocate from illinois to indiana we chose columbus because of this school district it was the first thing i researched as a mother and a parent i looked at the diversity of the schools the test scores parents feedback and we knew we wanted to be here it is disheartening to have enrolled my children in the bridge program and to see huge inequities across the elementary schools and how our students are experiencing bridge so i'm a person of data i'm a social scientist so i actually collected information from one of our online elementary school facebook groups for parents
049and what i found was huge inequities that our children are experiencing on a daily basis my own daughter sitting in the back there was told in her only interaction with her elementary school teacher that she was not the priority there are children in the classroom you will need to be self-service they are my first priority my six-year-old who is on an iep because he has reading comprehension issues has yet to actually interact with his teacher we are more than 10 days in takes 24 hours to get a response and i'm not blaming the teachers they are overburdened they are not properly resourced and my main concern is how did this slip past the administration how did we not know that there's actually one of the schools here where since august 14th children have less than
05015 minutes of any interaction with their teacher or classroom any interaction i sat in between calls at work today consoling another parent who when she provided feedback to our administrators was shamed and was told she should be more grateful for the stress that the teachers are under and when i own myself reached out and provided feedback early on just about general concerns about the quality because we had such a great experience in the spring with e-learning we really did i was told i could change schools that's heartbreaking we love this community i love this school district my daughter has thrived her self-esteem has gone through the roof what does it do to a nine-year-old girl's self-esteem when you tell her she's not a priority or to a six-year-old self-esteem when he sees it demonstrated every
051single day that he is not a priority these are inequities and we can't do that to our kids i'm fortunate i have a good sense of agency i'm happy to reach out to our administrators i am happy to try to help solution there's got to be best practices that can be extracted from across the district and proper oversight and governance from an administrative level to make sure these kids aren't falling between the cracks you guys did it in the spring it was great we had really positive experiences yes we were all overwhelmed but it was great and my kids felt like they were still a part of this community and they were a part of the school and just changing schools doesn't feel like collaboration it doesn't feel like solutioning it doesn't really feel like
052you're a part of any community it feels like my kids are expendable and i'm not the only one who feels this way and i know that the teachers are trying but we have to support them we have to help them we have to provide them with the resources in the governance so they can make it work they didn't become teachers because they want kids to feel expendable they became teachers because they care about our kids so how are we in the community going to provide better oversight to this and position them to be successful so i don't have to move my kids so other people don't have to move their kids and so other kids don't fall behind thank you miss reed thank you board members there will be an opportunity to to speak to
053any of these points uh that you have later this evening if you'd like um unless you want to do that right now i will make that available to you what's your wish would you rather address this later on in the evening after we've had a chance to hear some of dr roberts's report's latest updates okay i'm seeing head nods and more than anything all right thank you thank you all of you all nine of you spoke thank you for stepping up and and sharing with us what your experiences are it's it's greatly appreciated we have always uh limited but whatever access we have but we don't know your stories unless you tell them so that's appreciated that's all of the public comments that were listed this evening let's move on to our next section on
054the agenda board commendations board members anything that you want to bring forward from accomplishments this week hearing none school board member reports all right i know we had a couple of districts and facilities meeting we did yes so there was a district again facilities committee meeting first week of school so that thursday i do not have a report up here um mr dr bozeman went through the presentation that he shared with you at the last meeting so with that group just made sure that publicly they had the chance to see the same information that was that was shared with you so it was all the summer projects that have been completed and or are still ongoing thank you dr roberts dr roberts are there any cabinet reports for this evening i don't believe anything specifically
055no thank you well let's move on then to item 4 on our agenda update on the reopening plan dr roberts i'll just run through uh some information some number of specific numbers here for you and then we can get to any questions or concerns that you have as a board and in response to any comments that you heard so first of all from an enrollment standpoint we always try to give you enrollment information this time of year we are up a little bit but we never get too optimistic with that number because things change a lot in the first month month and a half of school year whether it's our school corporation or other school corporations at this point we're showing a number of eleven thousand four hundred forty four at least currently enrolled in
056power school our traditional uh student enrollment in person i'm not sure we can call anything traditional right now things do look different than they would have looked on march 11 which was our last student day uh prior to spring break and then we were out of course the rest of the spring and just now getting back at it but there are 8 242 students enrolled in person which is 72 of our student population the bridge program which has been referred to here a couple of times this evening 2657 individuals that's 23.2 percent of our school population or student population and then the columbus virtual pathway where cvp is 545 individuals or 4.8 percent a reminder that the bridge program is something that was developed just this year because of trying to give additional options to
057parents as they look to start the school year the columbus virtual pathway was an online pathway that already existed this is actually the beginning of year three for that particular remote option uh the most students we'd ever had in that was i believe 79 about 80. and you can see that that's a marked difference from anything that we have done in the past so in trying to to provide options we had a lot of people take advantage of those to put those numbers into perspective 2657 is bigger than any school building we have by a lot and if we look at that from a k-12 perspective since it is a k-12 program 2657 would be bigger than most school corporations in the state of indiana so it is quite an interesting uh challenge in terms
058of the allocation of resources to that and or the columbus virtual pathway but but obviously popular choices in terms of people taking advantage of them in terms of the breakdown a little bit further if we look at traditional um the elementary population 70. 70.4 percent of our students in elementary uh chose to be in the buildings 73.8 percent of secondary students in the buildings combining the remote options almost 30 percent 29.6 percent of our elementary students chose a remote option so approaching a third and secondary was a little over a fourth 26.2 percent of our secondary students choosing a remote option in terms of a couple of things that have been addressed mass compliance is a metric measure that we had indicated or stated back on july 20th when we introduced our reopening plan that
059we would follow so in a snapshot of time over the last week specifically so last week we did not task our principals that first week with trying to get this information as they were trying to just get school started after several months last year we did have them take snapshots of time and compose that by building when we average those by building we are looking at about 97 mass compliance in those two buildings but again that is a snapshot in time so uh we'll do that again this this week update that number but that is as of friday the last friday which would have been august the 21st from a physical distancing compliance standpoint that is not a metric that we had indicated and this is a moving target as well in terms of when
060are you looking is it during the passing periods is it uh at lunch time um is it any other common times or is it in the classroom and we are finding that we have challenges in terms of the classroom specifically with trying to maintain a six foot distance to begin with that's what's referenced initially in our plan but we do then also indicate three to six feet as being acceptable and that was based upon the recommendation recommendations of the american academy of pediatrics but he's trying to reach that three foot piece we are seeing that elementary school is about two-thirds of the classrooms so that would be averaging across the school buildings percent of classrooms so not lunchtime or hallways or anything like that we're looking at classrooms specifically 64.2 percent the secondary certainly has
061some challenges there but when we combine the middle school and high schools by percentage of classrooms we have a much better number about 91 percent in terms of the classroom student-to-teacher is at least again trying to get a feel for physical distancing those numbers do not look bad in trying to accomplish physical distancing but elementary is 21.41 and secondary 18.5 to 1 but we know that there are outliers in all of those cases numbers that stretch beyond those ratios but that is a snapshot of at least the average classroom student-teacher ratio in those buildings and when i say they're not bad again when you're trying to do physical distancing and trying to get three to six feet or six feet of separation any students around 20 is going to begin to challenge that because in
062a thousand foot square foot a thousand square foot classroom which is a typical classroom in the united states and in our school corporation the if a person actually had six feet of a circle around them of six feet you're approaching 113 square feet per person and so 113 square feet times a few students quickly gets you a thousand square feet so therein lies a challenge in terms of getting physical distancing between students um and again just a snapshot of what we have physical distancing in the classroom by percentage and then the ratios per building i would add just in terms of when we go back to the numbers there and it would appear that if you have 72 percent of your students physically in the building that would alleviate your physical distancing challenges or at
063least help address that but because of the number of teachers we also need to help with bridge and or the columbus virtual pathway and in some cases the buildings that had a large majority of their students come back then that begins to impact some of these percentages here so for example the 64.2 percent in elementary we have some elementary school buildings that are looking at maybe a third or so of their classrooms being what they they believe is a physical distancing number or percentage uh and in those buildings basically they have had a high percentage of their students come back an example would be rock creek elementary school if we look at the ranges of elementary schools in our school corporation south side has about 55 percent of its typical students in the building that
064makes it a little bit easier to find at least additional classrooms to move students to or other spaces if we have a staff member to help split those kids out rock creek has about 88 percent of its students back in and when you take the 12 percent of students that chose online learning they are spread out among grades k-6 and so it doesn't necessarily alleviate numbers in those grades or in those classrooms easily so we have just differences in in the buildings and what percent of students chose to come back into a building versus not and and how easy or difficult that might make it for that building to try to accomplish physical distancing and our secondary schools i gave the range of our elementary schools at our element the elementary range is basically 55
065to 88 percent of students coming back into the buildings so pretty wide range and then 70 as you saw was the average in in terms of back in the buildings for elementary schools the secondary level i'll just hit that slide again the secondary level which was about 74 that's kind of where they were 75 to 81 percent of the students were coming back into that building uh into our secondary schools so the range a little tighter with secondary schools than it was with elementary schools but again just creating some some challenges um with physical distancing a few things to throw out we we acknowledge uh if you would have asked me on july 20th and we do try to get smarter each day that can be debated sometimes in terms of whether we've accomplished that
066or not but if you would have asked me on july 20th the most difficult things for us to accomplish uh getting students efficiently into the school buildings with doing temperature screenings would have been probably top on my list regardless of the number of students we were going to have come back into the building at that time that was an unknown we believed we would have a quarter or more coming back into our buildings and trying to screen them whether it be on the school bus or coming into a you know columbus north high school with a couple of thousand students we recognize that would be a challenge our our building principals our staff members teachers support staff anybody involved in that has actually made the physicals the temperature screening part uh a pretty good process
067we are getting close to the time of what it would typically take to get into the building without doing temperature screens so they're becoming efficient and effective at that physical distancing has become the most challenging one we have work to do as acknowledged there weeks one and two we've tried to determine the student numbers for the bcsc pathways i've shown that slide a few times in terms of what it looks like now for traditional versus bridge versus columbus virtual pathway and so this week next week we we understand most of these but going back and reviewing those school buildings i cited an example whether it be at the elementary school rock creek or smith or schmidt buildings that had large numbers of kids come back as just an fyi schmidt is now our largest school
068building when it comes to students in the building and so they had a high percentage of students remain in that building and so that challenges then the number of students in any given classroom and the number of teachers that are in there with that classroom ratio so whether it's school buildings it's departments do we have a department because of uh perhaps having to have a teacher transition into another role uh whether it be medically or or other reason and so they're helping out with enrollment we might have an english department for example which is the case at columbus east that has challenges with student numbers as we have have had to allocate resources differently there and then we have specific classrooms whether it's a department like english or school building what what specific classrooms do
069we have in different buildings that are that are having challenges with physical distancing and make sure we're addressing those barriers and then at the end of the week next friday september 4th providing updated information publicly regarding that physical distancing what improvements have we've been able to make over this week and just to qualify weeks three and four weeks one and two we've completed weeks three and four this week and next to see what resources reallocation of resources opportunities we have now that things have begun to settle in with numbers to address those continued needs from a physical distancing standpoint so there's a couple of extra pieces of information there um as we look forward to to this week and next in terms of the metrics that is today's snapshot that's the most up-to-date uh piece
070of information that we have that again is available on the covet 19 community task forces website i will take responsibility for that shift that was mentioned in one of the public comments in that we have been meeting regularly with our local medical professionals to understand the data and and not just take a red number and with that automatically make the decision to transition into e-learning we i'll get into the whipsaw effect here in just a second in terms of when you make a decision to go e-learning then when you make the decision to stop e-learning we have laid out a three-week plan that probably most of the audience have had a chance to see and that's what we we're committing to so we're not whip-sawing back and forth but this data again on on the
071kova 19 task force they are updating it by five o'clock five o'clock p.m every monday and thursday they're committed to that that is the same uh frequency at which we internally committed to at the meeting on july 20th when we approved the metrics uh in a board conversation you asked about having these uh this information published or made available on maybe a daily basis at that point in time we talked through that and said it's probably manageable a couple of times a week maybe every monday and then we settle on mondays and thursdays through again just the dialogue at that time the school corporation was getting data from all of these sources trying to grab the raw numbers and put that into a spreadsheet make sure and save the pdf and then come up with
072a public statement and get that information out and then manage the social media sites and that was referenced as well and so as we've managed those social media sites and had conversations with our covet task force and a reminder to the community the communities coveted 19 task force was a group that began meeting on february 28th to address the spread of covet 19 within our community two weeks later on friday march 13th that same group met and in conversation with local medical officials advised us advise our school corporation to close coming out of spring break and so we took that advice the covet 19 task force scheduled a meeting a press conference on that afternoon and allowed me to speak as well as many others about the potential spread of coven 19 at that time
073and we made the decision to call off school and so we have maintained contact we are part of that group since the beginning of it the inception of it on february 28th and so as we got into the school year and we were regularly trying to keep up with the data and post that it seemed appropriate to me uh to request of that covet 19 task force that that they assume the data and keep that up to date and we would still have a place to for the entire community to view this data is not being manufactured manipulated created by bcsc it is community data that we are getting from columbus regional health the bartholomew county health department and the indiana state department of health and so they agreed to do that and and there
074was a lapse from that friday that it first went out and we pointed people to the site to the monday in terms of getting the data in a format that would look like ours and so this is basically the same pdf that we were using before i believe it is still a pdf on the covet 19 task force site and so it can be saved and emailed and shared and whatever the case might be so this is the data if we look at the data and we try to understand that it is i guess easy for somebody to indicate that one red one day or one red three days or one red seven days should should take us to a place we had on july 20th when introducing this information did not indicate that there
075was a certain number of reds or a certain number of days of reds or anything we indicated that this would lead us to the conversation to consider e-learning and i can indicate that that happened last week we were having all kinds of conversations about the data that we had what was the information behind that why were we having a per capita increase why are we having hospitalization increases and what is a challenging piece from a school corporation's standpoint and we talk about information behind the information is if there is a nursing home that has an increased number of cases that's contributing to that it is difficult for bcsc to be the one talking about nursing homes that increases or a child care or daycare having an increase or a church having a situation where there's
076been an increased number of cases or there's another nursing home and a county a few counties away that's contributed to the hospitalizations it's it's really difficult again for the school corporation to be saying those kinds of things what we are doing is tracking the information that is community data it is community spread not bcsc and trying to understand that data as much as is possible which makes it then precise difficult to respond to the give us a precise answer as to when this is going to tip the scales and go to e-learning to give you an example i'm up at 4 o'clock in the morning to drive the roads for a snow day trying to pay attention to what's going on and i understand the head shake this is not a snow day and i
077completely agree because what this is a snow day is a one day situation we make the decision to close school for that one day we move on to the next day this is a decision to close school for three weeks at a minimum and then and then redo it again and so whether it's a on a snow day and trying to understand that it's snowed four inches and and many people will call me on a snow day and say it snowed four inches we can't go to school but when we check the situation whether it's an icy snow or a rainy snow or the trucks have been out all night or they're still parked in the garage or the temperature is going to be exit 7 o'clock a.m or whatever the case might be there
078are many factors that we're trying to decide to see if we can safely have school or not similarly if we're trying to understand community spread and i will acknowledge this is the first time in my life that i've tried to understand community spread of a virus and so as we process that information and try to understand that information and consult with local medical professionals we consulted with on march 13th to close school we're still consulting with those same individuals to understand the numbers that we have here and so to look at that in time last monday would have been monday august the 17th we still are in the red in terms of substantial spread or indicating substantial spread based upon the numbers we gave because we have not been provided numbers by the federal government
079we have not been provided numbers by the state of indiana we provided numbers here locally and so as we look at the numbers we gave and tracked that they are decreasing and so in that week period of time we had serious conversations about do we pull the trigger and go to e-learning we paid attention to the numbers and and had conversations with local medical professionals and saw that we were beginning to have a decrease and so we have a per capita decrease happening at this moment the positive test rate has started to decrease with the number that we see going down to 9.8 percent and getting into the green we have um the the yeah the test rate overall the increasing decreasing piece uh will likely go green with that based upon the trend information
080that's provided there the test turnaround time which many people will look at and say that probably doesn't contribute to substantial spread or not right but it is a number that helps us as a community if we have faster turnaround time we know our positive cases more quickly and it does contribute then to knowing that number tomorrow versus three days from now and allows us to to do things like quarantine students or staff members or whatever the case might be based upon that information but then you'll see the hospitalization so as we've looked at all this other information got into the yellow as we finished last week and thought that was a good thing that now hospitalizations have bounced up to a 15 and a 19. and so trying to understand the information behind that as
081all other numbers are going down so we have refrained from saying that x number of reds for x number of days uh is going to to send us to a closed situation because there is a lot of information that we are trying to gather to understand this this data and to make a decision based upon that so we'll continue that we have weekly meetings if not more based upon what the data is telling us with our local medical professionals the teachers association does have an individual that has sat in on those meetings all summer whether it be with dr nibalski the bartholomew county health department and or additional doctors that we involve from columbus regional health that also sit on the task force so the task force and bcsc has been intertwined since february 28th
082it is who we rely on to help give us information they are not making the decision at the end of the day based on the information we have bcsc would make the switch to go to e-learning if that is the determination based upon the metrics and the information we have so i wanted to make sure and get the most recent data and again this was not created by us it was posted by the the task force it's online now i made sure to check by 5 o'clock that we had the most up-to-date information they were providing to the community and so that that is it as to what we have at this moment in time additionally what we've looked at is internal information on july 20th we said nothing about an internal number but we
083became a little smarter and realized that internal spread and what what's happening with our kids and how they are impacting each other is going to be an important determinant i mean in this particular situation we could have no reds in the community and and still might have to close our schools down because of what's happening internally and so as we've also looked at that data all we see is our rolling seven-day per capita rate is 4.4 that number has been questioned because it's people say well it's because you're using 13 000 use the number of people in our building then then if we do that we'll have a different number and it won't necessarily be a larger number because positive cases are reported to us based on our enrolled students and our staff members whether
084they are in our building or not and so we could have a bridge student as a positive case not even in our building that's still going to count as a positive test case for us we could have a staff member who is not in our building they're doing e-learning they're doing columbus virtual pathway for example have a positive test case we know that and we have to work through that in terms of some personnel things that's going to count as a piece of our data but they're not in the building so we are using 13 000 about 11 000 students and actually be 11 444 so that that per capita rate would change and go down um and about 2 000 staff members as far as the number we're dividing by to get to that
085point at the end of friday um so this is going through friday august the 21st we had nine positive cases in our buildings of those nine twos and this is since august 10th so tracking since the start of school in august the 10th two of those positive cases had actually been in a school building resulting in us having to identify closed contacts because of them and then isolating or quarantining those students and so two in-school building cases accounting for nine internal close contacts quarantines we do have 138 people that have been or are being quarantined i guess if they started on monday the 10th they probably came back today or are coming back tomorrow so we're about through two weeks right now others are still on quarantine and those are coming from external exposure meaning
086there's a positive case maybe in the child's household there's a there's a a party on a weekend and and kids were exposed to a positive case that come from some other school or some other place some wedding that that maybe it was identified there was a positive case and we have kids or staff members who were at that wedding and have been identified as close contacts and are in these numbers so we are reporting numbers that are not only what's happening inside bcsc but also what's happening outside bcsc which does lead me to a statement that keeping the doors open for person instruction is really hard and and without question without any apology i will state that it is my desire to have our students here they do it does need to be in a
087safe and secure situation environment if we have improvements to make we need to make them but it is my desire to have in-person instruction offered for the families in this community that choose to take advantage of that everyone in our school corporation is working as hard as they ever have in this particular job there are things that they are are having to do that i would not have believed they were having going to have to do as we got through the end of last school year and into this one um that effort is this entire community needs to be thanking uh those individuals and appreciate the effort that they are they are putting forth just to try to make sure that we have in-person instruction if we would make a decision to go to e-learning
088right now it would be easier for this school corporation every single person in it in terms of the job that we would have to do it would be an easier thing for us to do to go to e-learning but we are trying to keep an option available for our parents to still be able to send their kids to here which leads me to that second bullet point it's not about just what happens internally or within our school buildings it is what happens in this community so it's not about the compliance rate just of our kids and face masks it's about the compliance rate of everybody in this community it's not just about whether or not one of our kids or staff members stays quarantined or stays home because they're sick or stays home because they
089have kids in their house that are sick or at least around somebody that has some symptoms that might be coveted 19 related it's true of everybody in the community and so if we look at trying to maintain an in-person option the actions taken outside of our buildings are equally important maybe not more so because there's a heck of a lot more people outside of them than there are inside it's just as important as the actions that are taken inside so that's very quickly school board members data that i have available to you it was referenced in one of the comments that there is building data i've also shared that with you in the last few days data that was shared by the republic and and we can certainly commit to providing that information uh weekly
090uh that is that is not an issue the indiana state department of health of health is going to begin reporting that data i believe in september um maybe even on a daily basis so it is information that is going to be uh readily widely and readily available i don't again don't know exactly how to start but i think late september uh from the indiana state department of health by my building and i think my students and staff members so that is at least what i have before at this moment i have some other data in case there's some question that pops up and we need to try to dig into but would leave it open to questions comments at this point in time thank you dr roberts board members what questions do you have kat
091mr halfwire yes thank you for the information i appreciate all the uh people that spoke this evening is our mic on nick um i guess you know i've had several phone calls as well and i appreciate people reaching out to us and and kind of sharing their thoughts and and just their own experience just because some of the folks said you know unless we have kids or you know obviously we're not really allowed in the buildings but to be able to hear from the kids what's going on in the classroom and stuff and it does it is a little concerning and i know it's difficult that we only have x amount of teachers but we also only have x amount of dollars to pay our teachers as well and to overwhelm our teachers in doing
092both classroom and bridge and you know and especially everyone knows my you know my heart's pretty close to the our special ed uh teachers and staff that work so hard and everything and just to be able to walk through a lot of these avenues um you know are we going to this week start looking at the clock you know really what the classroom sites are you know i was at the dentist this week and i had one my hygienist mentioned that her daughter heard that there were nine kids or nine people at columbus north high school with covid and her girls were a junior and you know and i said well would probably make a difference if they were freshmen because then they wouldn't be in your girls junior classes however i know going to
093north and my kids being at north you know the hallways i mean during passing period you you need to know where you're going or you'll get run over um so you know then it it really kind of struck me that you know as a parent we do do alerts on different things just like with our officer you know catching the guy in the parking lot you know can we set up um some sort of alert to you know either the parents of that building if there are you know a positive case um i did hear and i haven't tracked it for sure but i did hear that edinburgh will do like a text message or something to parents without disclosing anything of you know just you know i'll just use an example lincoln elementary had
094three children in third grade that tested positive um the the you know the classroom is cleaned contact tracing is going on all as well but we will you know reach out if your kid was exposed or whatever but is that something that we can do because i know the numbers uh that you shared you know this last week with the number of you know uh exposures or the cova positive testing that helps but i also think that we need to go a step further as far as with the transparency of when we have those positive cases whether it's at north because then what i found out was that that wasn't the case and we all know how rumors are if we don't get information then rumor becomes the reality and and stuff so i just
095think sharing that information up front um just doing an alert to you know those those building parents or even you know the corporation that way people can start paying attention as well because you are spot on when you said that it's not only our kids our kids and faculty and everybody in the schools could do well but it's everybody outside of that how many times we go to the store and we see people with no mask on and they have to police themselves and everything so so i guess it's kind of just really a statement or a question can we do the alerts as far as when we have a positive in a school to kind of that way we're sharing because i know kids will go home and tell their mom and dads and
096you know if it's not true then that's one thing but if it is true then we need to notify the parents dr roberts you want to respond to that i guess i would i would wonder and i think about this as my child who had covered 19 if i'd won an e-alert going out to the entire community indicating that a positive test case is now in my child's building i was i remember ryan white and the the challenges of of having a disease and and the way people treat treated that person it was a very interesting situation um covet 19 is something that it's not hiv aids right but but certainly is something that people are paying close attention to and maybe behaving differently than toward a set of students either because they think that
097individual is positive or the people around that individual were positive and or then what people should be doing in terms of school i've seen that already and so i'm very anxious about information that begins to get too close to a student or staff member and identifies them as having covet 19. we we do have ferpa the family education rights and privacy act we also have the medical hipaa piece that we have to at least be very careful with the amount of information we release to not get too close to easily identifying that student and unfortunately even with the information we're releasing now it it it's not too hard to figure out who has coveted 19 because it's not just the individual that we're not allowing to come here it's everybody who probably sat around him
098or her whether it's in the classroom or on the bus or at lunch or or the recessed cohort or whatever the case might be so the adults in the building the other kids in the building quickly are able to go home and indicate that johnny's the one that has coven 19 and that that's the way that is even when we're just sharing with that amount of people and and so adding to that uh by being more transparent it adds to the possibility of it being more easily identifiable for that individual that just worries me right and i appreciate that because you know i know with hipaa you know just saying that you have a case in the school in a certain school you know that's not really violating the hipaa but on the other hand
099you're right you know but you know i i too just i don't know it's it's that double-edged sword as you spoke to and i just think we have to find a better way of maybe being a little more transparent because you know i know i heard some things um you know like i said you know different people having the covet and everything and um it just if we have to share information or people will seek that information somewhere right wrong or indifferent and it will instill the panic in our community and with teachers and stuff and i don't think we need you know we really need to do that i think everybody has walked around the covid and understand that you know it is a virus and all the things that go along with it
100um and you know we just i don't know i i don't know what the answer is and maybe that's where our you know our medical folks or somebody but i just i just feel so compelled that we we need to be a little more transparent in that aspect somehow protecting you know all that's involved so if it's something that we can kind of start looking at because the information that the republic shared and stuff i think that's very helpful just you know just even getting those numbers out there because you're right if we have 40 people in bartholomew county that tested positive and then we showed that we only had two in our schools so to speak then you know then you know that that's the outside we can't control that so thank you you
101stay healthwire and i think most of the other board members would agree that that timely information shared school specific would be helpful i would i would caution being careful about using our e-alert system because i think it has it carries with it a gravity right now of this is an extreme situation and and not that that culvert 19 incident is not extreme but i think it's going to be more frequent more likely to be more frequent and i wouldn't want to lessen that impact so i think dr roberts if you and your team can take that challenge of what's because i think i think it's also appropriate to have a separate but equally extraordinary approach to informing uh the appropriate people in the community you know the as you as you noted if it's a
102taylorsville event it's a taylorsville school community if it's a rock creek event it's a rock creek school community right so i think if we can do something like that and have the ability that may be a tall task in the time that it's given to do it but right that's appropriate board members other questions i actually have some comments and thank you julie i'm sorry did somebody else talk okay hearing things oh my gosh um so first of all i want to thank everybody who came up to speak today and express your opinions i appreciate your everything that you said um there are a few things just a couple things first of all thank you um also thank you miss dwyer for bringing up the transparency and and if we can't figure out a way
103to possibly share the share the numbers that you did i think it was last week and about the number of cases in a and also you know the face mask and the social distance because i know on the codewood website it's more of a community sharing so maybe there's a way that we can share those just internal bcsc numbers possibly on our website or in some other way with the reporting of right now the information you're sharing on the covet cases i think it said some buildings you had separated so i think that's good information put that somewhere it doesn't have to be the e-alert i guess but whatever form format that should take i think that's a really good idea and um there's i feel like i'm talking really loud i don't think okay
104okay thank you there are a couple things um from the beginning i've been a little concerned about and it's still concerning it's the social distancing and so i hope we continue to work on that and i know we will but it really make bothers me to hear that there are 30 children in a class um that's just to me unacceptable um and i i just don't know if that's true i mean first of all i hope that's i hope that's a rumor or maybe it's not but if there are 30 children in a class i know what those classrooms look like in a lot of the schools when you really need to split those up or do something that's just too many and then also if there's if there are teachers teaching traditional um bridge
105and cvp i think if especially our special ed teachers then is that actually happening or um so that needs to be looked at i think that's a that's a burden i mean that is a huge job and i know everybody all the teachers who whatever teachers are here tonight you have you all work so hard and we appreciate your work but that is really a lot to ask and i don't know if there's some way we can relieve that i don't know teacher's aides or teacher assistants can help out with that so i'm so i'm a little concerned about that so hopefully we can keep working on that and hey we're only two weeks in so you know we've worked out a few bugs we have a lot we have a lot more bugs and
106glitches to work out especially with the social distancing and um yeah i think the sanitizing somebody mentioned that i can't remember who it was i understand that's going fairly well though i've not heard too much about that some negatives about that but are the rooms being cleaned like after every class or should they be or how's that working does anybody know let's go i don't know who to ask you know so maybe those are those are little things or maybe they're things we don't know and it's different for every building but dr bozeman is not able to be here uh julie but i will i will get a okay a beta report from but um you know i know the work and i know that the work that the administration and the principals and the
107counselors and the teachers are putting in to make some choices give students some choices give some parents some choices and dr roberts you're right if we just went to e-learning it would you know really be easy but we want to try to i know there are many parents who want their children to go to school and they get that's their best experience is to go to school so it's a very difficult decision but um i just wanted to mention that let's see i think those were the main things i wanted to bring up and just if i could if we could get some information on the social distancing and i know that's a work in progress on the transparency and then the other things that i discussed then i would really appreciate that information also
108if if if i if we could get that um i think that's it thank you yeah thank you dr bill's thanks mr persinger yeah um i wanted to speak on the uh comment that mr thomas made about the enforcement of protocols uh we've you know been discussing this return to school plan since you know well since march honestly but you know has voted on everything since you know this summer and we've been planning and putting all these actions into place but has there been any policies or anything put forth of actual enforcement of the mass mandate social distancing mandates anything like that because there is i don't remember seeing any of it yeah yeah james there has not been any specific policy rewritten in terms of enforcement of those two things they would fall under
109other expected behaviors so as behaviors are rolled out at the beginning of the year including what side of the hallway to walk walk on or or to use the proper stairwell now at columbus east as an example that says these are for down and these are for up same with wearing a face covering then or um maintaining physical distancing that if students are not being compliant or being insubordinate then it would fall in in that as it would for any other behavior that's expected so there's there's not been an addition or or a rewrite of policy regarding those two specific things wouldn't it be easy to make that an addition to you know say the dress code policy i mean i'm pretty sure we have pretty standard forms of discipline or correction behavior for somebody
110that would wear a swastika to school sure yeah so i don't see why it'd be any different if they're going to walk around and if they had a swastika on their face covering it probably would be exactly the same yeah so yeah so but i'm just saying that you know a requirement of not wearing something or you know girls have to wear uh shirts that are you know not bare midriff so right we could easily add a you have to wear a mask when on school property except for you know eating lunch or whatever or socially distancing okay i see recovery so uh in in terms of it being handled like the dress code it would there be a similar situation uh but it is not worded that way so if the question is could
111that be ordered or or or it has not been could it be done yes we could look at looking at adding language to something like the dress code policy or somewhere else if need be in order to make sure that that was that that progression of discipline was followed um without wouldn't have further conversation discussion but that could be a possibility so to clarify then dr roberts what direction have you given school principals about how to deal with the student who is not wearing a mask is first like any other expectation let's let's mold the behavior and make sure that we are getting students to understand the expectations we've laid forth or put forth and then follow that but as an educational institution we have not indicated to them the very first time that happens
112to come down in a way that results in immediate discipline but coach train uh we are seeing that students are complying again for the most part i don't know that we've had and bill or laura i would guess i would turn to you any disciplinary incidents i should take back we we had a gentleman indicated that maybe we had a disciplinary incident so there are things that are happening once we've gotten to a point and i don't know the exact uh situation there to get to that but there is discipline eventually being administered based upon the circumstances but the guidance has been work through your progression and so as you would coach any other behavior that you were rolling out at the beginning of the year during the pbis stuff and how we should behave
113at this event this situation in the hallways and the bathrooms in the classrooms like clothes to wear et cetera then you handle it in that way so there's not been an additional here's how you handle all these other things with mass though be more difficult or even more lenient you you need to to coach it up be positive but move through the discipline chain at the secondary level i can probably speak easier too in terms of what that looks like from detention to in school suspension to eventually out of school suspension and worse if somebody would continue to be compliant at the elementary school i'm not sure they're jumping to detention that quickly but uh there is that same progression of discipline okay i do feel that you know mass compliance should carry with it
114a bit more sense of urgency than you know a dress code or you know what side of the hallway to walk on yeah i think that's right i mean i think you know starting third week of school should be pretty clear if you're gonna be in the building i agree that's clear by now yes i agree the interesting thing is is like there's rarely anything that's one size fits all right and so we have students that that wearing a mask is a very interesting uh thing for them whether there's a sensitivity issue there's a medical issue or there's even maybe some challenges from from home or and whether there's support there and so working through those in the first couple of weeks i think has been the case we have some students who we are
115scaffolding the approach to wearing and maybe having them wear a face shield uh first face shields are not something that we necessarily approve of as a face covering but it seems to be something that maybe a kid will wear first and then we can move them toward a face covering or another child that we're getting face coverings on it at bits of time and working through that and increasing that amount of time as each day goes by so there is there are progressions happening too in terms of face covering but but i agree there is a sense of urgency there in two weeks in the expectation should be clear by now mr persinger anything else um well the only other question i have back on the chart of the metrics uh the indicators the hospitalizations
116i understand obviously what causes those numbers to you know go from 15 to 17 but what would cause them to go from 16 to 13. from 16 to 13. yeah is that just new hospitalizations per day or is that the current total amount of that is that is the number of people hospitalized that day so it is it's a running total so if we had you know that that 15th of august to the 16th of august it would have been three discharges of people who had coven 19 really who who had a diagnosis of coven 19 in the hospital yeah that's all or one new one and four discharges correct yeah whatever whatever that's the total number each day yeah okay what about death excuse me death i i i i've not been tracking those
117it's not been a i mean i actually i do know most of them at the time it's not been on me it's not our metrics i even think that would be an important piece of information though to you know have on here yes we went from 16 to 13 but it's not all great news three people didn't suddenly get better two of them died you know that's yeah i mean the running death rate in the country is something that all metrics you know nationwide have been tracking yeah you know news outlets you know national health associations local health department does publish the number of more the mortality rate as well in the county so that would be that would be the only source of it in our county would be that well we're getting our
118information from the health department right right yeah so they would have that i mean that would be something that'd be worth you know in the sense of transparency being honest about this is why the number of hospitalizations went from here to here instead of trying to make it look all good i mean you know it's not good if you know the number goes down because people pass away yeah and indeed i i i don't disagree that was not the case here but in terms of three deaths being the responsible for going from 16 to 13. with 175 000 in the country thus far i'm sure that we're going to have we have unfortunately our own number right right well since you're on that that the hospitalization's james the 15 and 19 i've i have checked
119into that since we are back to read in those numbers and it dropped down and actually we had a seven a few days ago thought that that had dropped further then as this is lagging data so we we as much as we want to be on august the 24th you can already see that the date is listed as august the 23rd uh so that's as up to date as we we feel we can be right now and that was as of noon today and the numbers get published uh still some pending things with rates but that hospitalization typically as the increase in per capita number would go up and we saw 15th 16th of august 21 22 if enough of those are serious enough it could result in hospitalizations there's going to be a lag
120time of five six seven days though the 15 19 could be a a reflection of august 15th august 16th in terms of the numbers of people that are actually now hospitalized comparatively so the the hospitalizations tend to reflect six seven days ago versus what they might today even though the number represents today again dr roberts my understanding was the hospitalization was uh was an important metric just because of our local healthcare community's ability to uh to handle the caseload is that that's correct and when when recommended as far as a number to use for red here it was more of the the hospital's ability to continue to provide care versus that representing community spread right um so there's there's a combination of things being looked at there when we look at hospitalization okay and rich
121might have more information about that than anybody else sitting here if he cares to add board members what other comments or questions you have mr health wire i and you may have already answered this and i was trying to to take this all in because i know we talked about the threshold or what i call the trigger points um and it's hard to identify those but let's say an elementary school ends up with you know 50 of the people humans in the building that end up with a positive case or we had to quarantine you know would that be something that we would like maybe just shut that one school down and do the sanitizing and everything basically probably quarantine everybody because maybe it's sporadic through all classrooms the cafeteria and music and art and
122all this um so would there be a way that we could say that you know maybe particularly if you know what what would that number just knowing how many kids or people are in that building if we hit a certain number because we know then it would take out the majority of the population in that school yeah so so first it would probably be a lot smaller number than 50 that would close that school building down just in terms of uh once once you have a a few positive cases now you have many potential people having to be quarantined including staff members and so we'd have a combination of trying to stop spread because of number of people and we'd also have a situation where we even if we wanted to stay open might not
123be able to because of the allocation of resources or who was left there the state department of health and kelly correct me if i'm wrong once you get to two positive cases in a classroom they're they're looking at sending that entire classroom home so we start off with from a close contact standpoint the individuals within six feet for 15 minutes or more and and work through that but when there's a second case in the classroom the the isdh is saying we probably had spread in that classroom and so because of that we at least look to shut that classroom down which then there's there's a potential domino effect of the wing of the building or the building and so it goes pretty quickly so that's that's how we would approach that and yes if anything
124is shut down then definitely we would be cleaning those spaces okay thank you dr roberts i've got a few questions but i think i see mr bryant leaning and let me let me let him go first mine is not so much on the covert and what we're doing in school mine is when are we going to strange a policy where the teachers can't come up and speak to a board member about a concern that they have we need to get that taken care of yeah and we've been talking about it for the last two three years and we really need to get it changed so that's all i have to say at 31-12 yes i guess i would ask did mrs london violate policy by speaking tonight no because i think she spoke on behalf
125of the cea as an educator speaking for a group of educators i don't believe she did but by the way pat i i think you or any one of us can bring that to this to this board uh hey here's the here's what i'd like to change on the policy i did go look our policy is just about copied verbatim on every school board in the state because again it's not something that one of our um brilliant or not so brilliant minds thought up it's it came from neola and and the wording i i looked i went on monroe county's website uh uh their school corporation it's it's the exact same wording so i think there are two challenges one is is the policy itself flawed and the second one is is is the understanding
126of that policy flawed in other words there's nothing that says that you nor i can talk cannot talk to an educator about education and what it does say is i shouldn't talk to teacher a about a problem they're having with specifically teacher b in a school or in our principal b in a school or outside of that that normal because it does it does threaten to go around what you hope is a process that's inside to to resolve issues and and uh i i get it there are times when um uh the the system is not just working for you you need to to be able to say i gotta go over somebody's head you do that reluctantly i've been in that situation in my working life you do it reluctantly because you know the
127blowback can be ugly but you do that when you think it's appropriate to do that and we need to make sure that we're thoughtful about listening and and trying to do it but i'm more than open for us to to consider rewriting that policy as it's written today to improve it okay but what we have right now with our teachers there's a lot of them that will not come up and speak about things that they're concerned about for education not a fellow teacher you know we as board members should be able to say hey you take that to your principal or you take it to your rep you take that to the superintendent you know we at least i hope i am uh smart enough to say you know hey that i can't do anything
128about but when you talk about education i mean there was a young lady that was here that said she chose this school corporation now and that was for a reason yes because we're better than monroe county brown county and any other yes that's the way i look at it so therefore i just think we need to get into that policy and change it so the teachers can come up and say hey this is what i feel about education not about my principal not about my fellow teacher or anything like that okay let's commit to take a look at that and and revisiting it because that's this is not the first time we've all wrestled with that as well as several of our our employees so let's do that dr shad mr stenner any other questions
129for i don't have questions okay dr roberts i do have a couple of questions um one of the comments tonight um highlighted the the difficulty of teaching online and in person both i was under the impression as we went into the school year that only lincoln had decided to do that uh both uh teachers teaching online and in person simultaneously and that some of the middle schools and high schools were going to teach both online and in person but not simultaneously which i understood are we in a much more prevalent status of teachers teaching both at the same time now i don't know how to state that in terms of prevalent because i don't know what the comparison was you know for what you have well in the elementary level laura help me out here
130the lincoln indeed is is a a school building that is um doing both my wife is a second grade teacher lincoln and has i think 18 students who are in class and nine who are online the middle schools and high schools have ended up in a similar model middle schools probably in particular the high school it's based upon the class and what the students have and as as we have attempted to make options as widely available as possible for our parents including an a la carte situation in some cases that if you have if you want to be in bridge but you have a class that is is is required to have some in-person instruction a career in technical education course it's required for credit in that course to have over 50 instruction in the
131classroom a dual credit course similarly then we have individuals that are that are doing both and and because of that strain of numbers in both cases it has resulted in a large number i i don't have a a number for you jeff but a large number of individuals who are doing both in our discussions with the teachers association before june and july as as amy indicated we've been talking about these things for for a long time it was not our desire to have that be the case as we've had more and more people taking advantage of the electronic option it evolved into a model that looked more and more like that and what we had have indicated is that if in the circumstances of situations we can get that corrected we need to so continue
132to look at that in cases where we have to look at a stipend or some additional opportunity to recognize the time that might be required after school to to find that out or to figure that out now that is done in two ways one you go to contract language that currently exists and see if you can find a way to do it there or you have to come up with something new and and that's that's there's a little bit of a challenge in there there may be an mou possibility or something like that but contract language is negotiated so that's a and so it doesn't happen you know within a within a few hours so short answer is we have many teachers that are doing both is it more than just lincoln now in the
133elementary level i'm going to defer to dr hack rock creek might be into you have circumstances where for example uh there might be nine students kindergarten that um wanted the bridge option the teachers at that school and let's just say it's richards the teachers at that school said we want to just take those kindergartners and wrap them up into our own work and so those kindergarten teachers may say we're teaching physically in the classroom but those nine were providing packets those nine were checking in with and that that was their choice to do that we've had some other situations departmentalization at our elementaries where for example a teacher may be teaching fifth grade and their partner is physically there they're online and the teacher says i'm gonna do that i'm gonna teach online with your
134fifth graders while you go teach my fifth graders physically so so we do have some partnerships happening there um across the district i would say at the elementary it's few but there are those situations where that's happening absolutely so laura when when uh when a teacher has let's take jim's better half's example 18 and 9 that she's teaching at the same time is her delivery of the bridge comparable to the delivery of uh education on the bridge for a teacher that is dedicated to the bridge a teacher that maybe has 40 or 50 but they are they are full-time full bridge they're there they're online they're back and forth with the kids all day i mean is that is that delivery common yes absolutely because our teachers at the elementary have plc time they actually
135plan together they actually talk about their content they actually talk about delivery and then they have chosen we we did not do this at the district level we've said uh how do you want to massage this bridge option for your students lincoln did an entirely different program in a different sort of look but fifth grade let's just say at parkside may say hey these are our kids you teach bridge for this period i want to teach it for this period traditionally i'll be here traditionally you'll be there and then we'll switch our students as need be so so we are seeing that happen again few few fewer than most but it does happen in our elementaries and our kindergarten is just a different beast because those kindergarten teachers want to love all their kids and
136they don't want to release them to a bridge teacher they just say let me have my let's just say 21 and i'll have three in bridge but i'll keep i'll keep up with them i'll keep working with them i'll create those packets for them i'll be connected with the families i'll communicate with the families i don't want to send those three to another building or another site or to another teacher i want i want them myself okay yeah but i think jeff as dr hacks going through that we have to acknowledge that if we have a teacher coming into a building spending all day on bridge that's their job i mean that has become their alternate assignment it's going to look different um than than the teacher who is splitting splitting time between the in-person
137instruction and in that online i think so and i and you know i know a double-edged sword isn't is an overused metaphor but but but i think we have to recognize that in that desire to be flexible and listen to our teachers and let give them some leeway it will reduce the the standardization it will reduce the the leveling of how we deliver that right i mean it throws more variables in and and uh i don't have an answer for that i mean i i think i think it is you're just going to have to recognize that how do we standardize then uh so that so that i'm confident that the content one bridge student gets who's got a dedicated bridge teacher is comparable to the the content bridge student who's um one of nine
138in a class of 27 where two-thirds of their classmates are right there face-to-face with the teacher yeah because i i do believe you know i heard i heard the critique that um maybe maybe the the bridge students sometimes get the gets the short end of the stick right i think that happens to some kids in some class when there's 25 of you and you're all in the classroom right that i mean there are just some that that shout down the other students and and demand a lot of okay i was one of those right demanding a lot of the teachers time right so so yeah i get that and so i know some of that is just the nature of the beast but but but this it's exacerbated here with with uh well the key
139difference between that and what's happening on the bridge program would be while you're in the classroom getting shot down you can still sit there and listen to the teacher yeah bridge student can't well they can no they can if the if the bridge teacher's teaching both right they are they can be online and access to what's going on in the classroom i believe not necessarily not necessarily no so so just using my wife as an example she she is not doesn't have those students in her classroom 100 of the time there are there are times that they might be avail present in that instruction or whatever but not it's not and again the system is a little bit helpful james thanks i was under impression that they kind of did the full day with their
140classmates just online they're not no and again being mindful that we're two weeks into this pathway and so we are truly truly um trying to trying to work through some of these options with teachers and and helping them design their lessons so that they are engaging so that they are building relationships these very first two weeks and that that was our get go and that was our our mission to our teachers was build that relationship because we know that that is critical right now and then again working towards mastery working towards proficiency all of our students are still in indiana standards so that's a beautiful thing um all of our teachers again are having that plc plc time to talk about what are we working on this week as a group how are your students
141doing what do we need to think about instructionally um and then we're giving that charge to those online teachers to think about their instruction and how to meet the needs of the students in an online setting because it is tough um it is tough to engage with the child who typically you could go sit hip to hip with now you're getting feedback and giving feedback in a totally different environment right so teachers are doing things that they've never done before we offer pd every thursday for one hour to our bridge teachers just to have that opportunity to work with them we've had three of those actually now two on the thursdays but then one prior to so our our teachers are learning with us and we're hearing them um we've given them opportunities to give
142us feedback it it's that's one of the positives that we did here are the collaborative spirit the collaborative spirit between our bridge teachers and our traditional teachers still in our buildings okay thanks laura dr roberts you also said that the student-teacher ratio in the elementary schools right now was about 21.4 to 1. yes that's great and what's the range on that is it 16 to 30 or is it is it 20 to 20. because that number is in person so in class um so you're going to and you might know this off your head top of your head better than me laura someone sir sure clifton creek probably has that lower ratio um probably 16 to 17 per teacher and then our higher end probably um would be rock creek um which teeters around 27
143to one that doesn't that that could be right up that's off the top of my head i could be out there and katie dave could be saying oh we're at 28 laura and so i missed that one but that's that's about where we are um so and we do have that span so so having spent all day with a four-year-old and a two-year-old my grandkids and and my wife and i like the fact that there's two of us it's a one one to one ratio there in elementary school do we have um ta availability at all our schools that's fairly consistent per student so that that is a that is a something that we're working on we do have prime time tas in our buildings our title schools have the opportunity to have title tas
144we did have people that resigned um over the summer due to the covid situation or i wanted to to stay home with my children who are bridge so we have had that happen and we're in the process of replacing laura i should know but i don't what is prime time ta i don't know what that means so prime time originally was working with our um with our primary students but now are we what we consider to be a prime time ta can work with any group of students at our elementary level okay and we just kept that same title okay okay so it's it's all the tas that aren't a title that's right okay thank you sorry i should have known that but i don't know that so again that classification helps support all students
145and their needs we do have a few openings still when we talk to those principals are you getting applicants some are saying very few um so so they're trying to to look at those who when there are those openings and getting those hired as soon as possible yeah so it does take time we've got the budget for them we just have to find the people that can and will do it we definitely want to replace the ones we've lost qualified okay yeah and there is a difference between buildings though in terms of i think you asked a question jeff about yeah per student basis is that similar there are differences among the buildings based upon title one buildings and other other situations like that so we might have a few more tas in one building
146than we do another well i think about laura's example if you've got a few few students at clifty uh and and tas and if you've got a lot of students at rock creek and not as many tas right it just exacerbates the challenge for the teachers right i know it's a little more crowded and hard hurts social distancing but that one extra adult's got to be huge yeah yeah nelson might be able to take a group of kids and go somewhere else exactly to walk to another part of the building or outside or whatever right and then on on secondary then teresa if we said go spend our rainy day money and find us 30 more teachers would you slap me for such a silly suggestion because there's no way you could find 30 more
147teachers it would be tough this time of year maybe to find 30 more teachers but we if you said we needed to find 30 more teachers we do our best to do i mean for the ratios where we're challenged in the in the in the secondary middle school and high school that's about the only real viable option is if we had more just more staff right yes and we'd probably want to consider them as temporary staff yeah yeah oh yeah yeah we're we're working with the crisis right now right yeah all right okay dr roberts do you have any idea at the end of week four how many parents may come may tell you that they're bridge students they now want to send them back to in person is there a is there a inkling
148of okay we tried to bridge we don't like it we're coming in person and and by the way can they go the other way and they go from they they can also go from in person to yeah we yes yeah and part of the challenge is trying to make this research so those numbers again um moving more from bridge into traditional but we have had a few who were traditional and saw some of the changes and said we'd like to go to bridge right so more again coming from traditional into bridge we didn't fully understand what was happening or our wi-fi connection even though we've given them hot spots or just not um it's just not a good fit for them or their situations change with with their daycare and so now we want to
149physically come back in the building we've had more of that do i have a hard number no but i do know from the 11 principles that i work with it's been at least a handful in every building that have come back that have already come back well some some of his first day but we also said though that we asked the parents who who said we want to do bridge to make a four-week commitment right that's correct yeah we also did four weeks since the next friday before right it does but before that time we have been making adjustments for for parents or students to come back into the school and or go to bridge so um the the numbers have have held pretty close to 3 200 students in our remote options since the
150beginning of school and so that number coming in and out has has had to be roughly the same because the net outcome has been around that 3200 total but every every change is a conversation with the principal at the elementary level the counselors at the secondary um to say tell us more about this situation tell us why what do we need to think differently about how can we help you better with your child in this pathway and some it's it's a natural absolutely we need you or let's see what happens in the next week or so let's give it a little bit more time so those are definitely conversations with every child who every student and family who says i need a change so we we do dig into the why behind that change okay
151thank you laura sure and board members i know we're in the we hour three this meeting but i promise i just have only one more question dr roberts you mentioned the the the bcsc specific measures the your 4.4 positivity test rate and and the fact that the isdh has said they intend i i read the same thing that by no later than the end of september they intend to publish that information is it your understanding that would be it would be very similar information to what you published what the paper carried last week yes but i think and and kelly helped me out here is is it a daily reporting with the state department of health yeah so we're still yeah right what i believe i heard was potentially a daily per building reporting okay
152now that's going to lag behind again as as that data all gets recorded and passed through the system from the bartholomew county health department up up through there but potentially daily per building i don't think per capita rate which is on here is is a part of that we tried to just make a comparison right yeah try to be comfortable right all right mr caldwell on that dr roberts on that item a watch out is going to be that i think you said every week we're going to release building numbers and give updates and already i've heard there are possibly some differences between for example you're counting a bridge student who's not been in the building as a case is tested positive is reported as a positive and i have no reason other than personal
153experience to believe that isdh will do something different but you just can't predict how they're going to want the data and it's going to look like well last week when we make the switch from our own to isdh we need to be doubly strong in our communication efforts about why the numbers might look different right yeah yeah good point sure we have the secret decoder ring on what the that one translates okay because no matter what system you've developed the isdh will have something that's good watch out sure yeah that's a good watch out james can we just segregate out the bridge students and just lump them all into a bridge category we could um right so i guess per building you could do that because i mean it it right now we may have
154a building that's only had bridge students and it's reporting as one or whatever the number might be it's only been a bridge student but again we'll we'll take a look at that see what the best way to report it is the the i believe the state department of health is going to report it based upon the school that child is enrolled in and so we can report it and slice it even further to try to give information to the community but i think the public reporting that's going to occur is that students enrolled in this building and even if they they don't come into that building physically they are enrolled for us so it'll count that way so the other uh mr caldwell the the other issue that she raised that scared me a little
155bit because we've been accommodating and as people want to move from bridge to in person in the building or vice versa we've we've made changes a student here and the student there after doing the research that we need to do about the move being appropriate we're not anticipating a change of status for hundreds and hundreds of students at the end of week four are we no okay no but the way it's set up right now is that a possibility i i i don't think so i i mean it was in terms of the matrix and how we laid it out we were looking at a four week commitment but even though that's what's there our open dialogue with parents has been all along when you're ready to come back let's try to figure that out
156if we have a kid who's in our classroom right now needs to go to bridge or the columbus virtual pathway um let's figure that out so we are not seeing the dialogue bill laura that we're having that that's that four week mark is all sudden gonna result in a large number going the other direction thank you board members anything else on this topic thank you for your comments and and observations and questions let's move to item five on our agenda dr roberts you have uh items five eight through i do thank you so let me just jump into those in terms of these are consent agenda items requests for approval i start with the minutes of the regular school board meeting from august the 10th that was the end of our first day of school
157you have a list of supplemental contracts for various educators in our system for all the reasons that are listed there field trips and professional leaves you had a list of those i think just one on that list actually in school fundraisers we had a couple as we are starting to get at least back into school and have some extra cricket or other activities happening claims in payroll we had only one set because we had others on august the 10th the total for that set of funds was about 870 thousand dollars uh payroll one set of payroll uh claims august 14th so a little over two million dollars for that and then uh the teacher appreciation grant policy this is a required piece for you each year that's actually lifted that first part there from policy
15832 20.01 and then you also have a hard copy at your places and we're not changing the policy what this indicates or says basically is the grant what the teacher appreciation grant policy says is that when we receive our teacher appreciation grant dollars from the state of indiana we'll divide it in the following way that only teachers who have received an effective or highly effective rating will receive the grant dollars teachers who have a highly effective rating will receive 25 percent more than the effective teachers so that has been what we've done the last four years i believe and just repeating that policy and then i have at the last meeting we had board dialogue around the changing of regular school board meeting locations and so i wanted you to formally approve that so that
159we could list the administration terrorist room as the location for the dates that you see on the screen that allows us to maintain this format and for transparency purposes with with josh having the ability to just keep the equipment basically managing this way every time we pick this up and move it to a new setting new situation maybe for one meeting and we're trying to replicate or duplicate that also as we talked about the last time as we're trying to manage covet 19 manage this stuff going on the buildings we're not sure those sure those buildings need to have us in them um a couple of times a month or even once a month if it's those other buildings i did list through january 11th january 11th would be by statute the reorganization meeting for
160this board so you'll be determining officers swearing in board members determining the meeting locations and dates again for the next 18 months typically is what we do so we can determine the locations following january 11th based upon what you choose right so those are the items that i have thank you you're welcome dr roberts i'm i'm going to ask you to go back to jerk this page up as you're doing it um which one uh the one you had with the board meeting okay there we go yep uh board members do i have a motion to accept items um 5a through g is presented kathy uh motion second second thank you mr bryant uh dr roberts i think that's september 14th and 28th is that right oh you are correct thank you yeah i will
161try i would go in and edit but i think i'll mess up nick's piece but yeah make sure that was voting on that was me because it's the date is different but um any questions for dr roberts on this or miss heine on the policy the teacher appreciation teresa that is exactly as we have done in the past past four years okay all right if there's no questions all in favor of uh items five a through g approving those as presented by dr roberts indicate by raising your hand and saying aye aye aye all opposed same sign motion carries unanimously thank you dr robert you're welcome thank you miss heine human resources recommendations thank you i'm requesting approval of the human resource recommendations as presented this evening thank you board members you had that information
162in your board packet do i have a motion to accept the recommendations as presented by ms heine so mobe thank you miss dahl dwyers for a second thank you mr persinger any discussion all in favor indicate by saying aye and raising hand thank you all right all opposed same sign that motion carries unanimously hurtling to the end board input and review mr steiner any mr stinner anything else tonight i've already changed your name tonight that's fatigue sitting in sorry miss day health dwyer i'd just like to thank everyone that has reached out to us board members and brought some questions or concerns that they may have you know not all of it was concerns we had a lot of you know folks say thank you for keeping the doors open my kid is happy and
163thanks and i just especially like you know appreciate people that come and you know bring uh bring it to the full board here and especially um hearing from our columbus educators um i think that's a nice thing to hear um you know the good bad and ugly you know we we can't keep everybody happy but you know as long as we continue to try to make the effort and try to make it perfect um we're given that effort and i really appreciate that and thank you amy for being here this evening thank you kathy dr bills um i'm going to echo miss dwyer i mean i i'm glad everybody came out to speak tonight i was glad to see the participation and i also liked the questions on the everybody asked and i thought it
164was a very you know productive board meeting and we heard a lot of ideas and suggestions and and uh i just appreciate everybody's hard work and and just want to echo especially the hard work by the teachers um that are on our front lines right now and our teacher assistants i can't forget those bus drivers all those people thank you dr bills mr kersinger i just wanted to pay you back on what mr brian said earlier i would like to see us bring that 3112 policy up for a vote for revision specifically getting rid of sections b and c entirely there's no reason for them to be there i would like to see that up for a vote in the next board meeting or two all right james just one thing you should know one
165of the bad habits i learned at cummins is when you've got a good idea i'll probably turn around and ask you uh to work on it but i know you you'll be willing to help with the word smithing it and doing that so you and pat maybe i i'll lean on you to help us come up with a draft of something that we can look at is that all right sounds good all right good thank you pat and james i i i think you've got five other interested board members in and let's taking a look at it as well we've mentioned it several times over my tenure being here so far so it'd be nice to see something done with it thank you mr bryant anything else no i guess i have to echo the
166mistake of our doctor down there i'm finished okay well that's what happens when you sit in the back row you know rich and i are trying to carry y'all so it's dinner and diller steiner and diller back there okay dr shed anything from you i was i was just so glad to hear everything that was shared today and i appreciate it very much i appreciated that somebody reminded us we've only been in school 10 days um so there's i appreciate the work that's been done and it's continuously being done i think we've seen evidence of the things that we've heard at the last meeting even things that we heard today that the corporation has already addressed and i hope that reflects faith that will continue to address things as they come up it's only been
16710 days um is i've been trying to figure out it's interesting to me that the comments have changed i mean that it's it's a new iteration so there's been i mean first it was like why on earth are you opening because 72 percent of our families wanted us open so we had to and but then to find ways to come up with you know the right balance and to offer options we figured that out over the summer and that was the focus so now i feel it's not that we're fine-tuning i know it's more substantive than that but i appreciated that the comments were helping us okay we've got here we got three choices now how do we refine them and get them better and and i'm quite optimistic about that and i think that's
168what i appreciate and i appreciated that observation in what was shared with us today thank you dr shedd dr roberts anything else from you this year thank you mr coleman you know we really got focused on july 20th our board meeting on july 20th that was where we first saw the proposal for how we would reopen and at that time if you go look at our numbers our community numbers in june things are actually looking better and then it looks like maybe collectively as a community we really misbehaved over the july 4th weekend and that this has been the results of the numbers but but this group this administrative leadership team aired on the side of trying to offer choices and and you know we heard tonight that we have some some parts of the
169county that are taking advantage of bridge learning only at a 10 to 12 percent level and other parts of the county that are taking advantage of 45 percent of them and as you can imagine then again trying to standardize our public offering and yet and yet find a solution that's very different than how we've delivered education what i hope miss reed was seeing from us is that attracted them to this community um it's a different set of circumstances so we are two weeks in i do think you do week one just getting to know each other and finding out where the where the the exits are and week two has confirmed some of our gaps we've got gaps there's no doubt and i'm confident dr roberts you and your team know there are gaps sure
170and and are committed to working to those ms reed i'm i'm most i'm i'm less disheartened about the performance that we've had in delivering education than i am about the attitude you experienced um in your call that that's performance we're we're going to drop the ball sometime that's i learned that a long time ago you you make errors but man you can't you can't have the attitude of well tough luck right you can't do that i i want to apologize to you and your family personally for that that disheartens me uh and and and i know we'll do collectively what we can to make sure that that's that's not an experience you have with us again or any of our families have with us again i just i just want to say that that you
171know from this point before we know we've got to get better and we are two weeks in but that's that's 1 20th of our school year uh a little more than that has gone by right now and and uh that means we've only got 19 more of those chunks uh 17 more really to to work on so we have to get better i said on the 20th it's going to take a lot of patience and a lot of grace with each other i don't think it means silence though i'm really glad the nine of you that spoke tonight spoke thank you for sharing the things that aren't working we don't expect you to come and say boy you guys are doing great you know that's all right we break our own arms patting ourselves on
172the back enough we'll do that for ourselves but we do need to hear all of those opportunities to get better so thank you for doing that uh for continuing to bring focus to us we know we have lots of places to get better and i i already am seeing some of that improvement it's just we've still got a long way to go and and and continue to pray that we won't have to deal with cove at 19 constraints for a lot longer but i suspect 2021 will look a whole lot like it so this school year will so thank you for that i would remind my fellow board members and those uh in the community we have uh we will meet again here on september 14th is our next meeting at 6 30 pm if
173there's nothing else for this board meeting then this meeting's adjourned you