001good evening call to order the regular meeting of the board of education for august 19th 2020. i just want to make a note that don beeler will be joining us remotely this evening everyone please rise for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all reading of the mission statement we are committed to academic achievement and success for all students in a safe environment in partnership with families and our community our mission is to promote confidence inspire a passion for learning and to prepare our students to become responsible global citizens may i have a motion for the approval of the revised agenda motion second a second all those in favor all
002right um questions and comments from interested citizens i believe we have one person that's physically in person miss lorraine loaning i just want to make a note again as we did in the previous meeting that the podium is over here to my left um and it will be cleansed after you're done speaking and if you can just keep to social distancing as you're coming and going please hello my name is lorraine loaning i'm a district resident tonight i'm going to be super brief i want to talk about the agenda and all agendas not any in particular one um in a nod to transparency and a win for open government i would like it if all documents that are available to the public through freedom of information be attached to the agendas that we can see
003prior to the meeting other boards that i monitor do this routinely and they just stamp draft on it by not having access to these documents things like contracts and other stuff it's very hard for the public to comment before they are voted on agendas are usually posted a day or two before the meeting so if someone did want to request those documents sometimes the turnaround might not work for commenting before the meeting so i was just wondering if that is something that could be worked on and uh maybe we could do it routinely thank you thank you we also have a comment that was sent in so mr vitucci the district clerk will go ahead and read that one now sure i have one public comment from miss jolane frias thank you for your efforts
004in bringing our children back to school safely i have two questions will there be a separate isolation room in the nurse's office so that children who need to see the nurse don't come in contact with anyone showing covert related symptoms and the second question is what will be the grading policy for the first semester school year or school year and and just just to make a note we'll be answering those questions throughout today's presentation [Music] thank you uh mrs rodriguez is there an update on the questions and comments that were raised at the previous meeting yes i just want to make one note i know that i've taken off my mask but in front of me is what we call a sneeze guard which would allow me to not wear a mask i also want
005to make it noted that we are sitting up here it may not appear to the audience or the people that are watching us in the ca on camera that we are six feet uh of social distancing the district policy is that we do both that we wear a mask or and be six feet apart but in a case when you have a sneeze guard then you can remove the mask so i am going to do that for the purpose of today's presentation it's very difficult to speak as much as i will and wear a mask just for this purpose so i just wanted to make sure that everyone understood why i am taking off my mask the last speaker that we had was a group from the hudson valley change coalition and their concern was
006number one that that i had not reached out to them to talk to them about some of the things that the district is going to do as far as social justice and so i want to go back to late may early june when i did a video in response to what was going on in the country and i think i was pretty clear in saying that at that time we had not made any decisions about how we were going to address a systemic problem but i want to keep people in uh i want to remind our audience and people who are listening that systemic change doesn't happen with one event right so systemic change is something that happens when we look at an organization and we try to understand what what things we're lacking in
007and how we as a school district can do better and what areas we need to focus on so one of the things that we did was um the task force that was solely focused on scl this summer really took a look at you know the the the traumatic events that our students and our families faced as well as the social injustice and what they did was the committee uh looked at various organizations and we decided that we were going to partner with eye-opening enterprises and we have dr pickens is a clinical psychologist who is the leader of that organization he it is a black-owned company and so we feel that after speak speaking with them and meeting with them that they're really the right group to work with us they're going to work on two
008things the first thing they're going to work on is traumatic informed classrooms looking at our students how do we bring back our students and staff after being uh have having gone through what is amounts to a traumatic event and also taking a look at the issue of social equity and racial equity and one of the things i mentioned before is that they're going to be working with me doing what we call equity audits taking a look at the things that we do in this district and how we can improve to ensure that all our all of our students are equally represented throughout the district the other thing that and i'll talk a little bit more about this is that they're going to be doing a presentation tomorrow they're not only going to work with us
009but they're going to work with other people throughout the district and so in response to that that is our plan to work hand-in-hand with eye-opening enterprise and dr pickens um thank you i i just want to comment on that as well because um as mrs rodriguez had stated we as a board have been on on board with this as well since the the spring events and everything and we will actually be utilizing dr pickens for our board retreat which we will have on saturday september 12th so we will have a board retreat from 9 00 a.m to 12 p.m here at the high school um some of the first hour will be our board norms board goals etc and then dr pickens will join us virtually and he will be giving us an overview of
010the bridge program um the overview on the equity audit creating an equity task force and we will do an implicit bias exercise with the board members and the entire cabinet so i think it's important that we've been discussing this since the onset and it's coming from the board of education all the way down so we're looking forward to that event on september 12th and i think we'll have more information for his stuff i think it's on the scl page yes yes and when i do the presentation there's a piece where i talk about the event that we have tomorrow okay event for our parents yeah so there'll be information on the inspire section of our website for anybody who wants to go there and read about the program okay um next is the presentation of
011the final 2020 2021 reopening plan mrs rodriguez and the cabinet are going to give us air an update update this is our fourth presentation and so i just want to i'm going to shorten it because i've done this several times and i really want to hone in on some key information that people had been parents had been asking for so i just want to take everyone back we at the end of june the beginning of july we be we began to take a look at reopening we started with a core team that included the board members as well as the cabinet members and then we expanded it to have task force task forces and so that number went up to 90 people we did multiple things we had surveys we asked surveys for our staff
012survey for our parents service for our students and what we did was we gathered a lot of information and from that information we were able to come up with what we call our three priorities the first priorities are safety and well-being of our students staff and families and and i i want to talk a little i want to go off the script on this line because i do want to mention that on friday i did respond to a facebook post which i never do and i did because there were comments that were misinformation and i also felt that it made comments about the district's priorities which is the safety of our students so i want to make something really clear we will continue to have sros in our district for the safety and security of
013our students and staff and what i mean by that is that our sros are specifically trained to be resources in our buildings and throughout the past year they have been nothing but a great resource to our families and our students and so i want to take a moment to thank our sros both on the monroe side and on the woodbury side they have been amazing and they've been wonderful to have and wonderful to work with and they have been a good resources for not only our students but our parents so i just want to reaffirm our commitment to our sros now sros are a group of police officers who are trained and they can come from the woodbury side and they can come from the monroe side so i just want to make sure that
014everybody understands that our commitment has not changed to us you know with in regards to our sros so i go back to that was one of our priorities which is the safety and well-being of our students and so that was really influential in developing this plan the second is the social emotional support for our students staff and families and i talked a little bit about this before when this past year we not only had a global pandemic but we also had an economic downturn many of our families are really struggling economically and then to to to make matters worse we had social unrest and so we know that when we reopen schools come september we're going to be bringing people back who have been through a very difficult time so again the connection and the
015um partnership with eye-opening enterprise is going to be very helpful as we re-engage people back into the district and then the last piece is robust instruction and there's two types of instructions we're going to have online instruction and we're going to have in-person instruction and both of those instructions have to be robust and i would be remiss if i didn't say that throughout this year there's a potential that we will have to go to uh totally everyone fully remote i don't want people to think that that may not happen that may happen i think one of the things that i emphasize is that we need to be flexible we need to be able to pivot quickly meaning that if we go from in person to at home we need to be able to do this
016seamlessly and we need to do this seamlessly because our students depend on us instruction is so important for our students so no matter whether you're in person or you're at home getting a synchronous lesson the lesson has to be good so we will be working on that and then we talked about the fully remote you know our parents and guardians were given up until august 14 to make a decision i should share with the community that right now approximately 25 percent of our students will be remote and then we have what we call the hybrid which offers both traditional in classroom learning and synchronous remote learning our teachers will be returning on september 1st i think it was two meetings ago we changed our conf our um our calendar for the year so we're going
017to have september 1 september 2 september 3 and september 4th we'll be in service days professional in service day for our teachers and really to provide them with professional development again we'll have dr pickens who will be doing some work with our staff on thursday and friday another piece that's going to be important for us is our connectivity we may have to make sure that we can um connect with our students virtually and then the last one is our health and safety protocols because there's going to be quite a number of health and safety protocols that we are all going to have to um learn and make sure that we follow in this what i call the new normal and at this point all of our instructional staff is going to be in the buildings
018five days a week so one of the things that we decided was that we would divide the students into what we call a a b groups and they're based on households so students will attend school on alternating days a b to minimize number of people in the building second members of the same household will attend school on the same day and then we took it one step further is that uh students will be part of the phase in we will have 25 percent of our students the last two weeks of september and i will show you that on a schedule but it will be considered a 1 a 2 b 1 and b 2. and if you take a look on the screen you can see that on september 1st our teachers will be returning
019to school and they'll be doing all of their professional development training and then monday september 7th is a holiday so our first day that our students will be in school will be remote and it will be synchronous and it'll be on september 8th we're going to do that for two weeks again taking a look at everything that we're doing to make sure that we are on target to bring in our students in our building and then the 21st we have i'm sorry then the 14th we have what i call synchronous mondays we will always have synchronous mondays and dr hassler will talk about what that schedule looks like but synchronous monday is going to be important even when we're in the hybrid because we have to make sure that our students know how to log
020on take a class online um and then we go into the week of september 21st again that monday is a synchronous monday and then we start with a1 b1 b1 a2 b2 just to make sure so people understand the number of students i asked mr masano yesterday approximately how many students will be coming to the building on september 22nd it's around 265 students so again we're phasing students into the building we're making sure that they know what the protocols are we're making sure if there's any issue that we're ready to change and um be responsive to any issues that that come up uh for that week students will go to school one day and then they'll be asynchronous for the rest of for the rest of that week now you go into the week of
021the 28th which is a holiday and we go back to the same thing a1 and b1 fully remote learning will start for the first two weeks so if you're a student who has chosen to be fully remote you two will be very similar as the rest of your classmates and a reminder again that mondays are always synchronous remote learning and live streaming will begin in person on october 19th again we are phasing everything in if we can and do it and be able to do this earlier we will but i'd like to give us time to be able to look at how things are working to make sure that we have addressed any issues to find out if there are students who are having technology issues at home with their own chromebooks and then we
022go to beginning tuesday october 6. is it is there a difference up there okay i'm sorry i saw you looking up there and i thought maybe there was an issue um then beginning on tuesday october 6 we'll have the entire a group so they will be coming to school the b group will be synchronous again they won't be they won't have access to live synchronous until the week of october 19th and then student groups will alternate by day hybrid schedule continues until the state dictates or things change and i wanted to just show you a calendar of that right so you see a b a b and then the week of the 19th is where we're going to be looking at um hopefully getting in live instruction so if you are a student who's on
023ho at home and you're a b student and on an a day you may want to log in to see your teacher live again we're hoping to do that sooner but i'd like to make sure i don't want to make any promises that we can't keep so the goal is to have that up and running by october 19th and then i'm going to have dr hassler take a look at he's going to share some sample student schedule and just to be sure i am i actually had this remote in a plastic so i'm going to hand this over to you you can you can hold on to that because i only have a couple of slides i'll use that for my okay so do you want to press that for you okay there's only there's
024only a couple okay so i'm gonna just you tell me and actually can you back up to the to the previous slide just to clarify very quickly even though mrs rodriguez said that the um october 19th is going to be the beginning of streaming of the in-person classes the remote synchronous mondays where students are not physically present at all will be streamed live correct it's the october 19 streaming of the in-person classes that will start thank you for making that point no problem okay you can so now can i click for you yes you can please you can go one more so as as mrs rodriguez said at the beginning to demonstrate the the the how quickly this is evolving and how fluid the situation is initially we we shared with the community that we
025wanted to have all of our students who were going to be um remote on those synchronous mondays and the first two weeks of the school year for example we initially plan on having all students on on a nine to two schedule and as we began to dig into the schedules and look at a number of different scenarios and really start to play out what the students day were going to look like we realized that it would probably be better for us to slightly stagger the start times of some of the the levels which allowed us to do a number of different things number one it meant that not every single student in the school district was going to have to log on simultaneously at nine o'clock you know if you're a family with with multiple
026children in the household depending upon what your situation is when when the child is remote getting all the kids up and running at at the same exact time might be challenging in addition we have quite a bit of shared staff across multiple buildings and having everybody on the same schedule made it problematic for teachers having to log in simultaneously if they were teaching at if they were scheduled to teach at the same time in in different buildings because normally our start times of the buildings are staggered it also allowed us to be able to give larger chunks of time for the staff to meet as departments or grade levels and have team meetings and professional development so what we put together is a series of of sample schedules at the elementary level to kind of
027go through what a typical day would look like a typical remote day would look like for our k1 students that's the first slide that's up so as i said we initially were looking at a 9 to 2 start date but we we decided that we were going to move our k1 students back slightly and have an 8 30 start time for them which is very close to their typical school start time which is around approximately 8 15. on the chart that i'm showing there are categories that are light purple and dark purple the light purple categories are whole group instruction where the entire class would be logged in and the teacher will be live on the computer with all of the students and the darker purple boxes are either times when the students are working
028independently off screen or the teacher is doing small group sessions or individual sessions with students and those are not whole group activities so in this particular case and again this is this is a sample in this particular case the students the k1 students would log on at 8 30 in the morning and the teacher would have their morning meeting and they would do morning meeting they would look they would do calendar work they would maybe do some social emotional activities with the students in the beginning it would be getting to know you activities after approximately 15 minutes the teacher then would move into a or continuant with the whole group instruction and in this case the teacher would start with an ela block there would be about 15 minutes or so of word study or
029phonics and there would be a reading mini lesson so that initial time period would be approximately 30 to 40 minutes of whole group instruction where the students would log on together after that time period there would be a block of time where the students would work independently on a number of different things they would do either small group guided reading work or they would read independently on their own the teacher would have the ability to be able to conference with their with individual students if necessary so the students would do that outside of the whole group there would be a a 10-minute break and then the teacher could then after that break continue with again another large group uh session where the students would have either a read-aloud or a writing mini-lesson and then they
030would again break off into that small group independent work or individual conferencing with the teacher that would get them through till about 10 15. the students would have specials in this case it would be from 10 15 to 10 45 the specials are going to be once again the typical rotation of our music uh physical education health library um after that after that for the specials will be for 30 minutes after the specials there will be a 30-minute lunch break following the lunch break the students would return to a whole group session at about 11 15. again the teacher in this case it would be a math block the teacher might start with a a mini lesson with the group of students again they would break off into small group or independent work where they
031would be in in either individual or small groups meeting with the classroom teacher there would be another break built into the afternoon the next half an hour from 12 30 to 1 would be uh content area instruction which might be either science or social studies and in the at the end of the day from 1 to 1 30 there would be a check-in time where again the teacher would return to either small group sessions or individual sessions with students so the day would basically be broken down into a series of large group small group or independent blocks where the kids are are working on their own um there would be a breaks broken in the morning and in the afternoon they would have a 30 minute special and a 30 minute lunch again this is
032this is a sample because the you know as as the buildings operate on a normal schedule the students have staggered times where they have their specials and the special teachers rotate from class to class that would be the case also remotely so this may fluctuate depending upon for example the students may come in for morning you know they may have their their google meet with morning meeting and they might start special at nine o'clock in the morning so the teacher may choose to do their ela block after special um this is this is just a sample of what the day would potentially look like should we go to the next one yep the next sample schedule that we put together is is what a sample day would look like at the grade two through five
033level um again very very similar to what the the day at the k-1 level might look like however the the two through five start time is going to be nine o'clock until two o'clock um however the the breakdown would be very similar students would have a a 30-minute special depending upon the time of the day when that's going to be scheduled based upon the the the special schedule that the buildings put together they'll also have a 30-minute lunch break break and again the teacher would design the staggered whole group sessions small group sessions and independent work sessions throughout the day so it's not like the students will have you know one of the concerns is is the the stamina of kids and the amount of time that they would be spending behind the screen even
034though the school day is nine to two it is not a full nine to two day in front of this computer screen it would be a blending of whole groups small group and off screen independent work that the students would follow at the middle level um and i should also note that that that schedule that those two schedules that i share with you that's what the schedule will look like on all remote mondays as well as the first two weeks of the school year at the the k-1 and the 2-5 level the next slide that we have up is what a day would look like for our middle school students synchronous mondays will look slightly different than tuesdays through thursdays where mondays in a fully remote schedule as well as the synchronous mondays will be
035an abbreviated day where this the school day starts at 9 30 it ends at at 2 30 and they would basically be following a period a nine period schedule the periods would be abbreviated down to about 26 minutes the teachers have the ability to see all of their students and the students have the ability to be able to see all of their teachers on on this on this particular schedule the purpose of this abbreviated day is for the teacher to kind of establish what the week will look like with their students and the the students would progress there's a a gap time in between each period of transition time to allow students to either take a break use the restroom the teachers will be in as mrs rodriguez indicated the teachers are going to be
036in the buildings for the you know during those first two weeks and on the remote mondays so the teachers will also at the middle school level and at the high school level at times have to be moving from classroom to classroom and re-logging into different computers because they will be following their building schedule as well so this schedule is is not on an a a day b day schedule every student will follow their one through nine schedule even if they're hybrid or remote they will go through the schedule on tuesdays and thursdays students at the middle school will follow a advisory and period one through four schedules so their day will begin with advisory starting at 9 30 advisory will go from 9 30 till 9 47 at the end of advisory they will begin
037period 1 they will progress through period 4. at the end of the day there will be a check-in period and because the students will have uh the first half of their day on tuesdays and thursdays and the second half of their day on wednesdays and fridays periods five through nine the check-in period gives an opportunity for the period five through nine students that do not see those teachers on that day to be able to check in with their classroom teachers so if a teacher gives an assignment and the students aren't scheduled you know if they have math period five and they don't see their math teacher on tuesdays and thursdays they will be able to check in and and have uh have a face-to-face discussion with their teacher during that check-in period at the end
038of the day and the day will conclude with approximately 35 minutes of of asynchronous independent work that the students will be doing the reverse will be happening on wednesdays and fridays where the second half of their day the students will go through their schedules again the day will begin with an advisory period the students will then move from advisory to period five and then progress for the remaining you know periods that they would typically have periods five through nine and again on wednesdays and fridays there's that check-in period where the students who um if you have social studies period one and it's a wednesday or friday and you don't see your social studies that day during that check-in time you have the ability to be able to check in with your social studies teacher um
039to ask any questions or get you know any clarification on things that you might need the next schedule that we have up is is similar to the middle school schedule except the times are slightly different the middle school fully remote day will be a nine to two day the again same as as the middle school on mondays and that's any mondays that are remote as well as the synchronous mondays the students are going to follow a an abbreviated schedule they'll have all nine periods one through nine every single student will follow the schedule there's no rotation or a or b or anything like that students will follow their building assigned period one through nine schedule the periods will be 26 minutes very very similar to the middle school except the start time will be different
040the high school fully remote days will be from nine to two and again similar to the middle school the students will follow periods one through four on tuesdays and thursdays there is no advisory at the high school so students will begin right at the start of the day at nine o'clock period one they'll go through periods one through four again similar to the middle school they will have a check-in period um if it's a one through four day the five through nine periods students will be able to check in with their teachers during that time period they'll have that asynchronous time at the end of the day and again wednesdays and fridays will be periods five through nine and again the check-in period at the end of the day for the period one through four
041students just just to make sure that that because the we've talked a lot about the differences between these remote situations these schedules that i'm sharing with you right now are the schedules that would be in place for the first two weeks of the school year as well as the mondays that were indicated at the middle school in high school at the elementary level mondays have the same schedule as the other days would hybrid students are going to follow their traditional building schedule we've gotten a lot of questions about what schedule will students follow if my child is hybrid on the a b model that mrs rodriguez mentioned earlier the regular building hours are going to be in place for hybrid students high school they come into school seven o'clock in the morning they go until
042two o'clock in the afternoon so that is the same schedule that will be throughout i've also been asked what are the hours of students who at the secondary level who are remote only option students the families who've opted to have their children educated remotely those students are going to also follow their high school schedule they will either be in remote only classes or they're going to be remote only students in hybrid classes and they're going to have to follow their regular nine period schedule the way that they again have been scheduled as in the past thank you i think this is a lot of information especially when you start talking about schedules and what student schedules will be like how are we going to make sure that everybody gets this so what what we're going
043to do is we wanted to sort of present this information to the community we are going to compile all this information sample schedules are going to be posted on the district website we're also going to um you know the if you go to the inspire page there's going to be links on there there's a section that says schedules we're going to compile all this information and we're going to put it there so people can get that permission yep mrs donahue i'll get to you in one second and then i have to and mrs talbert also the the sample schedules that i showed you at the elementary level your individual child's schedule will be shared with you at the elementary level by your child's teacher they'll let you know especially during those full two weeks when
044we're starting remotely when your special is when the lunches and and what those other staggered whole group and small group um times will be the middle school will be sending out what your period one through nine schedule will be as well as the high school so that will be communicated by the building this is donahue um my question is in parts sure and the parts depend on your answer to the first one okay in the middle school and the high school will students be changing rooms yes the students will be changing the rooms okay then the second part is how are the rooms being cleaned between okay i think that's part of the presentation yeah okay when we get to health and safety okay no problem yeah we're gonna get to that okay we have
045at the end of this presentation i have about 20 questions that we're going to be answering and i think that's one of them so we'll we'll answer that question no problem okay so i'm going to start with the the high school being that that's there and i'll work backwards so the high school questions that i have are what are we doing about abcdef days so as of as of right now the plan is that the days are going to rotate by week so if if it's an a day at the high school now not a day for hybrid students it's an a day a b c d e f it'll be an a day for the week then the final week will be a b day then the following week will be a c day
046to make sure that every student has the ability to be able to access that part of their schedule so that way it doesn't fall on you know an a day or a b day or a c day doesn't fall on the day the kids are not physically present in school in the hybrid model does that make sense the way that i'm saying it okay it does and the difference between the tuesday thursday and the wednesday friday i don't i see asynchronous on tuesday thursday and not on wednesday friday sure the reason is is because the we have a nine period day there are four periods during on tuesdays and thursdays five actual instructional periods plus the check-in on wednesdays and fridays that's the reason why the asynchronous is on tuesdays and thursdays not on wednesdays
047it's going to be straight live instruction through on wednesdays and fridays because it's a five period day does that make sense the way that i'm saying this okay and the middle school what about the music before school as of as of right now no and the reason is we're still we've gotten a lot of questions about you know how we're doing the large ensembles um the the ensembles that are scheduled during the school day we're working out how those are going to look to make sure that we can accomplish some social distancing we may have to move some of the locations the before school as of right now are not going to be happening we're looking at possibly remote opportunities for those so we're looking at a couple of different things but as of right
048now no okay and then with the elementary the k5 can you talk about specials what happens for specialists during the remote world sure the students are going to have a an instructional block it'll be whole group if you can go back to the elementary schedule in this case the sample schedule the students will have special from 10 45 to 11 15. so at 10 45 the students will log into google and their our teacher will be there to do a live whole group lesson with them now the we're going to be doing specials a little bit differently at the elementary level this year where and again this is as of right now this is where the plan is right now um the the plan is to because we have a typically when we were in
049school we would have a rotation of specials monday would be music tuesday would be pe wednesday would be r um because now we're having this rotation of a's and b's what we've decided is we're going to do specials in blocks where students will have art for three weeks because at the elementary level we're in trimesters students will have art for three weeks music for three weeks physical education library health so that way we make sure the same kind of the same logic that we're using for the rotating of days at the heist of the days by week at the middle school in high school same sort of idea is so that way the kids get a full you know block of special and they don't have the risk of not being in school on the
050day that a particular special is scheduled for them okay thank you yep i have one question oh i'm sorry um going back to the fully remote side of the plan and i hate to even say this out loud but if god forbid we end up being shut down by the governor will that then be the schedule that we will go back to that we are following in those first 10 days yes the first two weeks that's part that's i mean there's many reasons for starting out remotely that's one of them okay that in the event that we get shut down every single person will go through the same schedule that we've done for the first two weeks okay thank you and mondays will always can you bring the middle school up again mrs rodriguez has
051it i think he's having fun telling me yes to be his clicker can i just ask about advisory what's the plan for advisory so advisory right now eric you have to face forward and speak because nobody can hear you oh sorry sorry um the the plan for advisory is the same as the plan has been in the past where basically the students come in advisory is going to be scheduled for kids where right now advisory is a group of students sixth seventh and eighth grade students have the same advisor for the same three years that they're going to be in the middle school that same exact model will apply during the the fully remote the fully remote schedule so same same plan so what do they do for those 17 minutes in the fully remote
052model of advisory same it's what they would normally do during the school day i think that they're also planning social emotional activities during that those time blocks that was basically my question yeah there you go doctor uh i had a question about the hybrid model yep it's so i just wanted to apologize for my back sorry sorry for my best i got us um i just want to make sure i understand so when you are an a1 student say on the days when you're not going into school and you're it's after the beginning of the first two weeks but not yet october 19th how are you going to be learning okay so can you rotate back to the please mrs rodriguez where do you want me to go back keep going back to the a1b1
053schedule got it got it yes okay that one uh no i think you talk about the last two weeks that schedule yes so for the you're talking about the week of september 20th and the week of september 27th where we're a1b1 so the question is that those weeks the students are going to be coming in once a week either a1 b1 a2 b2 they'll also have an opportunity to be able to have the live sessions that we're speaking about on remote mondays that will also be live so the students will have their live instruction on whatever day they're a1b1 they'll also have the classroom teacher live on monday who's going to kind of set the stage of what the week is going to be like that will be those weeks will still be asynchronous the
054remote only days will be asynchronous we will not be streaming they will be streaming on mondays but not on b1 a2 b2 days right and so for the a1 student on a b1 a2 and b2 day they're gonna have learning as they had in the springtime asynchronously correct synchronous until we go back to the live until we live streaming correct until we're able not until october 19th october 19th now par part of the issue possibly yes awesome right possibly earlier depending on one one of the one of the reasons for that is that um barghov can certainly help in on this a1 is the beginning of of kids beginning to come into the building we're going to have a lot of additional devices that are now going to be coming in because we're now going
055to be one-to-one so in addition to some of the remote only sessions that are going to be still streaming um you're you're going to have all of the students that are going to be coming in with their chromebooks so we're in we're rolling in 25 of the kids at a time to make sure that we have the proper connectivity we don't want to have every single class streaming across the entire school district plus now all of the additional students who are coming in with their devices and not being able to have the bandwidth to be able to broadcast all that so we're kind of incrementally phasing that in does that make sense the way that i'm explaining it it does okay but to start with for three days a student is going to have to
056learn as they were learning in the spring but probably even a little more advanced because you're following the curriculum and they're going to have to learn new things kind of independently correct but for the first two weeks they'll be synchronous so the students will be it'll be live so from the 8th to through the 18th the students will be live correct every student correct and just on the one-on-one chromebook um has it been explained to the families that the students will be bringing the chromebooks back and forth to school and that they should you know look maybe to put them in a case or put their name on them or that it's something that's going to be expected of them when they're in school yes so we are finalizing uh what we call uh device
057handbook i can't hear you it's gonna we will be finalizing uh what we deem as device handbook and that is going out to the parents shortly it's about seven to ten ten page document and it's outlined expectations of all the students that they should be bringing the device while they are coming to the school because we will not have our labs or any other devices so the reason for one to one pro process is eliminate all the other devices and then have the kids safely using their own district assigned device okay i also i know that there was some confusion with the devices that were picked up or if they had multiple children they didn't know which device went to which child is that something that they can do yes so is he fixed for
058that we are still working on that we are going to use a product um that we are working with our student management system ultimately that will be published under parent portal so then parent would know if i have three kids which device belong to which kid however the devices are universal so it doesn't really matter but i think it's important for parents to know that the device is for johnny device b is for josephine it's just accountability for the family well it's accountability and also we have when you're a senior you have to turn it in so we have to know which device you're turning in right um there is also a handbook that we are creating carol is working on it oh i'm sorry i just wanted to say about a handbook and so
059that handbook is going to have a lot of that information we're compiling all of that information now and eventually we'll have it printed for our families somebody else had a question this is okay okay hi okay so how about any student that requires extra help so the we haven't exactly worked out how extra help will look we're still going to offer it and the reason why i say that is we as of right now we're not going to be running the after school buses because we we need to know specifically who's going to be riding the transportation so normally if you're a middle school student and you decide that you're going to stay after school for extra help with your teacher your teacher writes you a bus pass and you can get on the bus
060freely we need to be able to manage how many kids are actually getting on the school bus so we can't just have it open for kids to be able to stay after school freely to get a bus pass from their teacher so we're looking at how that is going to take place remotely we haven't found a solution just yet only because kids have to take the bus home so if a student is going to be doing extra help after school and they're a middle school student and the middle school ends at three o'clock they may not be walking in the door until 3 45. so we haven't fully ironed out exactly how that is going to look just yet but we plan on offering extra help somebody somebody sent the question will students will students
061have access to ais services and things like that all of those services will will continue to be in place at the secondary level ais support is built right into their schedule periods one through nine depending upon the classes that they take at the elementary level we're planning on offering ais enl support to students during those small group times that i was referencing so the teacher may do a 10 to 15 minute mini lesson with the students whole group and then the students will break off to do independent work and small group the teacher will be able to check in with small groups of kids but we can also have ais providers to be available during that time block to also work with small groups of kids uh enl as well and things like that okay
062eric is it oh oh god you still got we are having four days for 12 1 1 811 yes yes we announced that yes they start they will start their regular schedule in uh what am i looking at september 22nd right okay september 22nd when we begin our a1 and b1 they'll come in for the four days they will okay so 15-1-1 we'll be doing the two days on we have not we haven't decided that yet as of right now but we haven't finalized yet we're still some of that depends on class size and things like that and we're still sifting through remote only requests so that's part of the reason i'm not sure if it may be more than the two days correct okay fine so my next question would be in the event
063a 1511 student has a one-to-one monitor and they're remote how is the monitor going to assist and support a student remotely will they be part of the remote learning will they be able to reinforce what they're learning or it really one-to-one monitors are really there to walk be with the students and work with the students but teaching assistants work with students so i'm not really sure if a one-to-one monitor is assigned to a student who's remote how will that one-to-one monitor work with the student it really depends upon the student's iep correct so that's what i mean if an if a student has right one has one-to-one monitor clearly would only be because they have it in the iep right correct so that monitor would be with them for those five days if you're only
064doing two days in and two days out and the one everyone is doing it from home right how would that monitor if it's in the bible because an iep is basically correct it's legal document it's like the bible how would they be able to assist or support depending on what their role is i think one of the students have one-on-one monitors for different reasons and one of them might be for physical needs so we have students who have one-on-one monitors for toileting needs for for example i don't know how that would happen on a remote no environment but if they're working remotely i think if your question is what happens to those one-on-one monitors how do they support them i think the response is we we have to determine what the needs are for each
065student and how they would be able to yeah and and it will truly be case by it it'll it will truly be case by case really physically they'll be home so they'll be taken care of right i'm talking about uh instilling reins you know uh reinforcing what they've learned go over modify things um maybe they have some behavioral maybe need some redirecting and that would be would be happening in school still could be happening during a zoom or however you would do it remotely yeah i'm just thinking and thinking about wondering how that would work and what that would look like i i think to your to your to your point some of our students receive receive aba services for example so um in the case of aba our teaching assistants are often the ones
066that provide that level of support to our kids so it may be in addition to if the students are only in addition to the scheduled instructional time they may have sessions with the teaching assistant specifically on aba skills and things like that so that would be that would be scheduled and worked on remotely in addition to i guess i'm thinking that if i have if my child who thank god graduated had a one-to-one monitor needed assistance needed it remotely that that monitor would be doing it on the days that they are maybe that monday maybe they're connecting in between that those days to help with certain things with note-taking because sometimes they need note-taking they're not fast enough things are now going to be remotely that's difficult sometimes when you're just sitting in a classroom
067to take notes so they may have that type of assistance i guess i'm talking in that kind of right right and i think it's again dependent upon the student's iep i think one of the things that everybody has to understand is that this is a really complex thing that we're doing and so we are working almost like i i made the analogy of painting a picture right so as i'm painting the picture i'm beginning to see clearly what this is going to look like and i think that there's a lot of anxious people whether it's a staff member or a parent and we are taking our time we're being deliberate about that so sometimes when we don't give information i just don't want anybody to think that we already know what we're doing but we're
068just not saying it but trust me if i knew it i would say it but i think it's really important for people to understand that this is truly unprecedented and that the work that's going in to develop a well-established plan is really complex and so little by little we're putting things together and and um if we don't answer something it's because we really don't know and it might be contingent on something else you know when we talk about special education there's so many other variables and so to be able to say what we did yesterday which would send out the video and say look we know that our eight one ones and our uh twelve one twos will be able to we'll be able to bring them four days was truly a lot of moving
069parts and so we're looking at everything and really trying to be as deliberate as possible to make sure that what we say can happen but also to provide the support that our students need because we have 6 700 students whether you're remote or you're in school you're our child and we have to make sure that we provide you with all your services or whatever it is that you need and this is by far i've been in education for over 30 years this is probably the most difficult thing i've ever been a part of and i think that your your question on extra help is a great example of that where certainly this is something that we're looking to be able to continue but the logistics of offering it in person are in challenge because of
070of transportation and we also can't just say the only way that you can stay for extra help is we can't have you on the bus as your parents are going to have to drive you like that that's and that becomes inequity right that's that's unrealistic so we want to make sure that we continue to offer it but logistically we haven't arrived at a place of how we can do that i mean another you know emily brought up at the last port of ed meeting extracurricular activities and clubs we're still very much digging into what that's going to look like what do we have the ability to be able to offer remotely part of the reason why we haven't really come out with the full explanation of everything is we you know we're taking over we're
071still trying to figure it out well thanks be honest because we we watched the video yesterday too for the special education portion of it and i just know that at the end of it too it was that for specific cases and because it is so individualized parents are encouraged to reach out to their building principal and or the director so i think if they have specific questions related to their child it's hard to answer it vaguely on such a broad scale because it was broad it is literally individual it really was and we have i think we have over 800 students we have over 800 special ed students so every every every iep obviously is unique individualized education program so i just think that we're getting there you know where we're we're working through those
072questions it's important to hear the questions because we have to put pen to paper and then come up with a plan but it is by far the most complex thing i've ever been a part of eric let me ask this question if for extra help is there a way to look back and to see who had extra help in the past to get like a historical point where maybe you could say you know by noon you could you have to sign up for extra help and it only x amount of students are allowed and once that quota gets filled then we won't accept him i know that's maybe bad because some kids might need help and they then they won't get it but right if you kind of historically know let's just say 60 kids
073are in extra help if you have three buses to accommodate those 60 kids then you you can cap it at say noon and those kids have to go online or whatever into the system log on and say i'm staying for extra help right there you would know how many kids were staying and not uh be over the limit or then you know last minute the buses would be crowded i mean you can't stay because they don't have a ride no but they have a bus right well the issue the issue with it oh sure i just jump in here you're the boss and i i'm glad that you said that out loud because it's it it appears that way but then here's the talking to your microphone please we have to be careful is that
074if a group of students stay after school and i have three activity buses and all of the kids seem to be from the same area i have a problem because i have to socially distance them on the bus too i think i mean i i hear you and i and i and i maybe we can work something out but i think the first month is really going to tell us hey who's coming to school b who's going to need help and then what we need to do is really plan in advance to know who is going to have to stay after school if we're going to run those activity buses but it's really hard when students decide on the day that they're going to stay after school so i think the month of september is
075a good month for us to talk to our teachers and talk to our students and talk to our parents to figure out you know what students are going to stay after school well we can maybe you could maybe run like a demo on a kid could say i would stay after school today and set up so you have an idea of the number of kids looking to stay home i mean you just do it as a test basis hey we're demoing this project so if you think you would want to stay up to school sign up for it and then you could get an idea of the children that maybe would do it and then maybe you could roll it out and see if it gets out of hand or not you might have to
076shut it down at some point but it would be better than you know not offering it because we can't find a solution what about remotely well but again we're talking about offering it remotely but the problem is again typically extra help is immediately at the conclusion of the school day if we offer it remotely either the kids are going to be remote when they're physically in school logging on right after the school day's over or they have to get on the bus and they're not going to get home until for 45 minutes so extra help won't have to won't be able to start until after but it also goes back to this discussion also goes back to like the the um some of the before school classes that the middle school offer similarly a lot
077of the music ensembles and things like that many of those students would take the high school bus when they came in and so again that's also problematic because we have we're trying to operate from a finite group of kids that we know are going to be accessing district transportation if you add into that additional kids who are going to be dropped off at the middle school before coming to the high school that's another layer of you know making sure that we know exactly who's going to be on the buses at at each individual time so we're still very much drilling down to some of those nuances so that would be intramurals as well i mean i know we don't know the sports but intramurals would be part of the same yep this is donahue yeah
078i apologize if i'm digressing but i'm trying to envision what my child's week would look like monday is it's all on it's all remote remote okay my child is tuesday thursday they come in tuesday thursday what happens to them on on wednesday and friday what do they do so wednesday and friday through october 19th is going to be asynchronous the students are again monday is going to be that remote only day they will be able to meet with their classroom teacher the teacher will be able to you know give them an idea of what's going on for the week there's also going to be some some scl activities that they're going to be doing with the kids and things like that they'll be in school tuesday or thursday so between the session on monday as
079well as their sessions on tuesday and thursday the teacher will be sharing with them and posting in google classroom the work that the students will be doing on the off days starting on october 19th we're planning on streaming live streaming the in class in person sessions so if i'm a b student and i'm not in school on tuesdays and thursdays on tuesday i can log into the google me and and stream and view what's happening within that classroom to be able to stay up to speed on what's happening similarly the teachers will still continue to be giving asynchronous assignments to kids or they will be able to um you know post videos and things like that in google classroom so that even in the event on those off days that kids are not able to
080log in they'll still have opportunities to be able to stay on top of their learning on those off days okay so if they're live streaming and my child misses are those recorded so that they could watch them at a later time or we're planning on doing that as well recording them so that way the kids have the ability to be able to watch and again because we know that um there are so many different scenarios that families are facing on those off days that students for many reasons may not be able to necessarily log in at that time synchronously right we're we're looking at as many different ways that we can make sure that they stay up to speed as much as possible thank you no problem last question well maybe as of uh let's
081say this is working out i have two more presentations remember this is perfect so it's working out great and it's november and on a regular uh like a wednesday where uh let's say your kid's not in school it's remote doesn't sign on they're absent like how are we like because otherwise you might have kids just not signing on and getting the work later on so are they correct the parents need to understand if i understand this correctly if your kid doesn't sign in at nine o'clock for his nine o'clock class he's absent from the class it's like cutting a class daily attendance is required however it is not necessarily a requirement for them to have to log into those synchronous sessions again because there may be some instances where if i'm in school tuesday and
082thursday and i'm remote on wednesday and friday there may be a whole array of different reasons why kids won't be able to log in during that time period we are looking to offer other opportunities again for the kids to be able to get credit for that day where to mrs what mrs donahue said if the teacher posts a live recording of that lesson the student may be able to log into google classroom later in the day and view the lesson that was posted by the teacher that took place earlier in the day the student could submit an assignment the student could do a post in google classroom and still get credit for that day even if they didn't necessarily log in live to that exact session however no matter what clear that i don't think
083this that should be the premise of like everyday behavior because right you're trying to get it so that on a friday the student is in period five at nine am he doesn't feel like waking up or she right she just says i'll do it later right it becomes a pattern now you have you know i i just think that it needs to be clear that at nine o'clock you need to be in period five whether you're in your home at your kitchen table or whether you're in a hybrid in your home you're in school period five is for nine o'clock and that's really how you need to do it and if you're not there you're considered absent from school that day i mean i know that sounds harsh but with what we're doing but you
084there has to be the rules have to be set pretty early and the kids need to understand that they're just not going to make up stuff all the time or they want to wait three weeks and then do a project to get all the credit it's that's not what this is that's what it was and no one liked it uh when we closed in in march and we're trying to make it better so we're trying to make it more like school so i just think everyone needs to be clear i'm sure the kids don't like me saying that but they need to get up at nine o'clock and log in and be in period five no matter what and if you don't you're marked absolutely so don't be an accountability people and how do you
085attract that yeah so so if they don't log in live who's taking attendance when they do log in so so we're the classroom teacher is ultimately responsible for taking attendance but in google classroom there are a number of different ways that students can log their attendance even after the fact of the live session correct and that's and that's the issue is that i mean we we had this conversation on monday that you know the period by period attendance piece where normally when you're when you're remote if you're not in your period three class and you log in later in that day and view the lesson and submit assignment that might not be until four o'clock in the afternoon that you might not officially get credit for that day because you weren't able to participate earlier
086in the day so i was just going to say that the state last year had different guidelines they have been very clear that we are required to take attendance and that school whether it's remote or in person has to be very similar to traditional school so we are required to do all of those pieces and that has for us an impact on state aid right so attendance is really critical for us for our students and parents need to know that as well however if a student is sick we expect parents to let us know they're not in today because they weren't feeling well or if they're remote they're not going to be logging on to their class because they're sick so there's still that piece of communication we need to know why a student isn't
087logging on i mean that's the other reason why we have the first two weeks because we need to make sure students are logging in and doing what they're supposed to do if they don't they will get a call from either a teacher a guidance counselor a building administrator we want to know why you're not in school and remote doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want it means that you are going to have especially on mondays you're going to have that synchronous monday you need to log in and you need to be present that's just a student piece that we spoke about quite a bit in the task force and it kind of goes to what a bunch of people have said so to anthony's point about those first couple of hybrid days that
088it's going to be asynchronous and that if your child is not physically in the building they're going to kind of be on their own to an extent yes but to an extent no because there will be an accountability piece that they will be expected to have an attendance and log into their assignments whereas in the spring it was very much my daughter's doing biology at 11 o'clock at night um so that part of it is again a little bit of an accountability piece the other part of it is as far as the extra help which is what we've talked about we might not have a solution to that exact problem yet but a piece of the sel component and the communication component is if your child is sitting home and doesn't understand something either the
089parent should be reaching out and or if you're i'm gonna have an eighth grader this year so i'm i'm confident that she could send an email to dr hassler i didn't understand this when i was home by myself remotely so i think those are pieces that to mrs rodriguez comments that we've made is to be flexible it's not going to be the the typical extra help where she stayed after school and saw the teacher but if she has a question it should be able to be addressed and i think as parents that's one of the pieces that we're looking for the accountability the communication the help if needed the the support system is there and i think that's one of the biggest reasons for the sel component and the synchronous mondays agreed and that was
090that's also in in the remote model that's up there that's also a function of that check-in period where you know in not only as somebody i mentioned earlier not only is this going to be the first two weeks of the school year but in the event that we get shut down for a prolonged period of time this is what the schedule will be like at the middle school and at the high school level the purpose of that check-in period is even though we're going through periods one through four and students may not see their periods five through nine teachers until the next day they'll still have that check-in period at the end of the day to be able to connect with their teacher in the event that they have any questions or issues right uh
091dr hassler i'm assuming that with this plan students in the same household will no longer be sharing the same device they'll each have their own correct yes yep all right [Music] okay reading you may have spoke about it while i was trying to log in okay i apologize and on the days that we have remote how are we getting lunch to the free and reduced students so we haven't decided that yet we do know that we have to provide lunch and i think i see all this in the audience but i'm not going to have them get up right all this but we've talked about this we know that we have a responsibility to our free and reduced students to provide lunch so one of the things that we are doing is we're going to
092provide them a bag to go so if i come in on monday i'm an a day student and i'm free and reduced and tuesday is my sync is my asynchronous day i get a bag to go okay the only day that's really difficult is monday because students aren't in school from friday on right so there's two days you really can't give them something to to have for monday so that's something that we're working on but we will be providing them with a a grab-and-go at the end of the day so dr house i know you mentioned briefly grading is something that's still being looked at but specifically uh i'll you know speak for the high school level you're also looking at possibly the redistribution of the waiting system with respect to like i know part
093of that is participation that may look different in the remote world versus the right homework i mean so all those things are being considered and mrs rodriguez's word of flexibility is definitely going to be a big part of that conversation right and and i think it's sort of that blending similar to to what mr d lorenzo was saying you know we want to make sure that we're still giving very clear parameters but at the same time making sure that we're accommodating for so many different scenarios um so yes i mean somebody somebody asked me the other day uh what's what's the status of midterms and final exams i said midterms i said that's in january for crying out loud we're trying to get through some remember right but it weighs into the you know right
094but enters into the waiting system right but that ultimately this is something that we we need to consider seriously now because teachers are establishing what their grade books are at the beginning of the school year and the the weighting of their of their f4 is dependent upon that and you know i i don't know that we're going to hear as to what the status is of regents exams but for quite a few of our courses the regents examine counts as the final exam so you know yeah okay i think that that was a non-answer i could tell no you know that was good nobody but but there is a so here's a piece that you should know is that we are when we talk about this it's important that we have some some sort of
095a traditional grading system correct the the grading system we had last year was not traditional for lack of a better word and i think that it was because everything just happened all at once and we weren't prepared but certainly this coming year there is an expectation that students teachers will teach students will learn and we will grade because that's important grading students is a is is important in feedback so like and i do believe also that we need to have flexibility let's not forget that we we're in a global pandemic meaning that people get sick students families get sick so you know what we want to do is make sure that our students understand that there's flexibility i love the fact that stacy said you know she's going to have her eighth grade daughter reach
096out to dr to dr hassan she's going to reach out to her teacher i think one of the things that we we can do at this time is help build make our students more resilient to be able to speak for themselves if something is not right so all of those pieces we're going to try to be as traditional with flexibility being able to pivot at the last minute i mean this is unfair and equitable and very we need to make sure that we establish for all that i know i'm going to we need we need to establish creating policies that are also consistent for students that whose families have opted for them to be remote only and for students who are physically present in school so right we need to make sure that all of
097that is equitable across the board circumstantial and those are the you know the reasons for them choosing one model over the other has a lot to do with their situation right so so all of those need to kind of factor into that determination and i hope everybody here realizes that you know i know there's a lot and for those of you that's sitting in the audience like these are a lot of questions but these are i mean there's 7 000 people that are at home having these same questions and yes we've presented and we've talked and we've answered but i i think that for the purpose of this this is why i'm asking these questions no i think questions are good as i said at the end of this presentation we have another 20 questions
098that we're going to be answering i i think we've at least at least one or two we've answered i mean i think we have at least one or two of those off but but it's important right it's it's a this is new so i i don't have little children i mean i have a grandson but i worry the same questions that you have i i have them that myself so this is all new we have to be flexible you know come september things may change i'm not really sure so we're planning two months at a time i'm planning for september and october let's see how that goes and then we plan for november and december and and that's covid taught us that that we need to be ready to do whatever it takes and i
099think that if there's any district that can do that um it's monroe woodbury so thank you eric for doing this no problem uh are you done i i or we do okay i'm gonna move on this is gonna be quick so i just want to the last time we were here i did have some pictures and so i have more pictures i think parents need to see what it looks like here's a classroom on the left is a classroom a high school classroom a middle school classroom a classroom at pine tree and sapphire as you can see we are maintaining six feet of social distancing when our students come in they'll be asked to sit at a desk they'll be asked to wear a mask and to maintain social distancing i think the biggest question
100that parents had for us and i'm going to show you a picture in a minute is what does the cafeteria look like it looks really different this is what a cafeteria will look like for us and it's not something that i want to present but i have to be transparent it's tough for kids who usually go into a cafeteria and sit with six or seven friends they are going to have to be socially distant remember that first priority which is keep our kids safe so i don't like this i'll be very honest but it's better than not having kids in the building so again i think we have to teach our kids to be resilient maybe they'll bring a book into the cafeteria and read or maybe i know some kids are going to be
101asking their principal maybe they can have their cell phone so they can text each other i don't know but anyway um it's it's really important for us to show our parents what it really looks like it's going to be different but it's okay i think that's the message that we have to send to our students it's okay because it keeps you safe you get to have lunch and you get a break what's the max capacity in the cafe it depends upon the building remember everything is six foot um distance and the size of the room so some will have um maybe somebody can answer that do we have any idea don't know depends upon the size of the room elsie was the average capacity of a classroom is that the question no i think she's
102asked about the cafeteria now i think that would depend it depends upon the size so it could be at the high school maybe 50 75 students so you showed somebody's saying something 87 in the large cafeteria at the high school and 247 in the small cafeteria for the high school thank you total total 100 at the middle school when you add all the three different areas the small calf the new calf and the big calf i don't know i forgot what it's called so seeing that i immediately thought of you know the monitors that have to clean those very quickly in between yes but you know what they're pretty good at doing that that that's they've they're used to okay to doing that i think yes oh i saw that you put up the a
103couple of the schools what does north main look like since north main is very different i don't have a north main picture but i will have it up we're trying to get as many pictures as possible because i think people need to see a visual again i think if you're a parent you need to talk to your child when you go into the cafeteria it's going to look really different but it's it's going to be okay and this is temporary we're going to get through this and you know in less than six months i'm hoping for some good news so they could still buy their lunch right they get online socially distant online buy their lunch i think so yes i just i just want to comment on lorraine's i know it doesn't pertain to
104the cafeteria but for the classroom piece of it because and i know dawn will probably speak to this later when we had visitation committee we were able to see a couple of the classrooms at a couple of the buildings but it's important to keep in mind that the administration kind of informed us that they weren't really able to set up those classrooms until the final numbers came in for those buildings as to whether or not the students were going to be remote only otherwise they would have been doing twice as much work the custodians and bringing the desks in so i think now that those buildings have those figures they're able to go in and now take care of their classroom sizes correct yes yes i think it's all contingent upon who um is fully
105remote who's in the building what schedules we have again it's i i have to say that the administrators who are doing all of this work this is daunting something as simple as going to lunch is is a daunting task and so i do want to thank the administrators for doing all of this work and the custodians because they've really been working very hard and we still haven't put up our directional signs right those pieces are coming in next week thursday and friday um which will tell students which way to go students and staff um to maintain social six feet of social distancing all of that is going to be be done next week so a lot of work [Music] but we're happy because we're going to get the kids i think you know it'll be
106good we'll we'll get students in the building and and i think i think when i spoke to emily she said she's excited about coming back to school so it's all worth it um here are some things we've spent one point uh 35 million dollars uh a lot of money uh we have disposable mass gloves sneeze guard i had mentioned this before this is a sneeze guard hand sanitizers you'll see some that are standing up and some that are attached to the wall the nurses have all these infrared thermometers so that they don't have to come in contact with us with uh another person we have antibacterial wipes which i have a a large bucket here because i'm sitting next to dr hassler and i have to make sure that when i hand him the remote
107it's clean and so i have my anti-bacterial wipes which are safe they're safe to use so i'll be the test there's an example of the hand sanitizer machine on the stage too so yes if the people viewing at home might be able to see those will be in the high traffic areas yes patrick yeah and used at night to disinfect the classrooms and the buildings yes and then we have those pacific air misters i think there's a one around there and you may have seen it when somebody spoke they sprayed afterwards that's a that's part of uh sanitizing everything um we need new garbage receptacles because everything is going to be remember how we all said we didn't want to use plastic well guess what we're going back to we're going back to plastic and
108so if we have plastic we have to throw it out and then plexiglas barriers in high traffic areas this this afternoon um i saw an arrival of a truck and it had all of these um large dividers and it's going to be used i believe in some of the nurses office there was a question about are we going to have a separate room we do we're required by the doh to have a room for students who are just usually sick and then students who are experiencing covet-like symptoms so we have to have two separate rooms and this week we had a meeting with the nursing department and our and our building principals and talked about protocol and how we're going to handle things so we've been um doing a lot of this work together to
109make sure again because safety is ours our number one priority and then these are just examples i talked about the sanitizers of the stand-up one and then then one that's attached to the wall another example of a sneeze guard we actually have in our custodians made about 200 of them themselves these we purchased am i correct yes yeah these we purchased we also purchased um another group from home depot i believe they're they're not as sturdy as these but we felt that especially at our elementary levels where teachers do a lot of work with the students that we needed to make sure our teachers had this kind of a plexiglass in between so that we again maintain everyone's safety and then gloves and masks and our disinfecting wipes so the last piece that i'm just
110going to briefly talk about and then go into questions are social emotional support as i mentioned before we have dr pickens we are going to be working with eye-opening enterprises we have our first webinar which is on thursday the title of that webinar so if you're a teacher and you're listening i recommend that you sign on it's called prioritize your wellness and self-care right one of the most important things for the people who are coming in to take care of our children and our families is that you first have to take care of yourself and so i encourage everyone to sign on and listen to dr pickens he's amazing uh he's just so well he's so thoughtful and i think the things that he's going to talk about are really going to be important for
111you as a administrator teacher staff member in the district board of education member to be able to take care of yourself because right now we know that a lot of people are experiencing a lot of stress anxiety and um this is all very new but it's important to take care of yourself so i encourage you to please uh if you haven't done so far please sign on and then he's going to be coming back on september 30th to do another presentation what's next is the first uh presentation going to be taped so that we can watch it yes okay yes thanks for asking that yes uh what's next so at a as per the governor's order the governor's been giving us a lot of orders and so we have one more um we will have
112to have a detailed plan posted on our website by august 21st we will then be announcing uh the week of the by friday august the 28th the ab groups i know that that's super important for our families who may be working with other families for child care and then professional development for our staff and ongoing communication through videos printed materials prior to the school opening i think that what we've learned is that people like videos i think they're like short videos and we may have been doing some really long videos this is another one that's going to be long but hopefully you can fast forward to whatever you think is important or pertinent to you um we're going to continue to do this and we're going to continue to refine this and i continue to
113say peop to everyone we're going to be safe and we're going to be able to reopen school safely um i'm sorry i i don't know if you answered my question while i went to the bathroom but how are the classrooms being cleaned between classes we're gonna we're gonna answer that that's a part of our q a okay so we'll well because otherwise we have a little we we've kind of worked our schedule out so we we have all of our questions and i will begin um with question number one will all the classes students requested be available during the hybrid semester as of right now yes we're planning on offering all of our courses that you know we would typically offer i mean there are again some there are logistical challenges where um you know
114there are some classes that are just naturally uh more you know instructionally beneficial for kids when they're physically present because of hands-on activities and things like that we're working on things like science labs and and those sorts of things however right now we're planning on offering uh as many classes as we possibly can so yes thank you mr or dr villas what support can the district provide for families who do not have internet and or wi-fi access in their home so as a district we have purchased about 100 t-mobile myfis uh last month and and we were very sharp enough to order in time and we received those devices we will be working with the doctor through dr morales department and distributing to that to the students who really need them we do have a
115list as of now we have about 12 students their parents do not have the the either the wireless access or the internet at home available also we are working with our local cable companies and we have a plan to use their services if needed to be to make sure that we provide the internet access to the students who do not have this of access available at home thank you at the high school and middle school levels as i have students in both how will changing classes be handled so uh students at the secondary level will continue to change classes as we've mentioned while wearing masks and maintaining social distancing additionally each classroom will have hand sanitizing canister and a canister of disinfecting wipes these wipes may be used between classes by a staff member to
116clean and disinfect desks that were recently used and although it's not recommended that students engage in any cleaning activities i think the use of these individual disinfecting wipes particularly at the secondary level is safe and unlikely to be a problem for a student if they were sort of uncomfortable with what was happening so this would be another means that the student could do to sort of disinfect the desk and uh that area and elsie you alluded to this we expect the covid related signage to be in next week and installed next week in the following week and so those are floor graphics the directional uh signs that you mentioned for hallways and stairwells so you know we're uh doing the majority of the disinfection and cleaning at night after hours so to speak um but
117there is the opportunity you know so the student as they come into a classroom would have to grab a wipe and clean their own desk or or a staff member yes is there alcohol in the disinfectant in this stuff no okay not as far as i know no they're right here right no the sanitizer that stuff the liquid oh the sanitizer does have alcohol in it yes okay so you know years ago the kids do drink it so you know young children so that's something to no then don't say that well it's been done so you know that's why so this is very important if you are a child the hand sanitizer you do not drink it do not taste it not put your mouth near it this is not something you want to do
118no consuming hands only no consuming okay uh question number four is i was hoping the district would consider allowing high school junior drivers to park for the day this year so i know that i spoke with mr cassie about it this is very much a consideration he's shaking his head yes so it's very much a consideration he will be reaching out and letting everyone know did you want to say something yes [Music] a letter will go out at the end of this weekend and they will start the online driver safety course starting on tuesday so similar to what senior drivers had to do you'll get an email that will prompt you to go ahead and take the online safety course follow the directions and it will be open to junior drivers that's awesome thank you
119thank you can adults take that driving course or that little seminar and thank you um what happens with students who need ais services for math and reading similar to our conversation earlier at the secondary level ais is something that is scheduled into a student's schedule at the at the middle school high school at the elementary level depending upon what the student's schedule is going to be now i'm talking remote only the the ais providers enl teachers can provide services to kids particularly during those small group independent group sessions that i was speaking about during in person it's going to be handled and scheduled the way that it has always been okay do we need to fill out the bus form if we are choosing the remote option that answer is no if you submitted if
120you notified the school district that you plan on um that you're requesting the remote only option transportation department is removing the students from routing um from that list as well as the parents who have notified the district that they plan on driving students themselves so no need to duplicate okay how will transportation keep children safe what is the plan for social distancing for bus pickup so for for our students it's our hope that our students and parents will make sure that social distancing is occurring at bus stops as students get onto the bus they'll enter they will occupy the seats in the back of the bus first and then fill them forward sitting one student per seat unless they're with a member of the same household at the end of each tier between the high
121school run the k1 middle school run and then the two five runs drivers will wipe down the high touch areas such as the tops of the seats and the handrails um using products and that have been issued by the transportation department um gloves and face shields must be worn when disinfecting between the tiers and then in between the am and pm run the buses will be disinfected for the afternoon we'll do this the same exact thing as students get onto the buses at their schools they'll they'll come on and they'll go right to the back of the bus first and then they'll be dismissed once they arrive at schools they'll start the safety protocols that they need to do at every single building so and i think it's important to note that when you're waiting
122for the bus you need to keep six feet of social distancing so that for the younger children it's going to be something that we need our parents to help us with and for the older students keep to six feet of social distancing particularly if you don't have your own mask while you're at the bus stop as soon as the bus pulls up and you get onto the bus if you don't have one one will be provided to you but if you don't have a mask while you're at the bus stop you should be practicing social distancing thank you how will students be graded on their online work grading of student work is going to happen the way that it traditionally happens if a student is a remote student and they're submitting assignments online the they'll
123it'll electronically get sent to the teacher and the teacher will grade it as they have previously okay gyms are not allowed to to open as per the governor so how can you have gym classes with kids sharing equipment so we're part of our our protocol is to avoid the sharing of equipment and pe classes are going to be outside as much as we possibly can get them outside in the event that we can't have them out the the gyms will be used but obviously we'll maintain the department of health guidelines and in the event that there's enough space in the gym then we're going to have to find alternatives for physical education as well but i also think the governor also um i don't think right i think that it's a different type of gym
124that the government if a child is ill with a negative covet test will will a negative cova test be required before returning to school actually that was one of the questions that we had with our nurses this past week if a student comes to school and they have covet-like symptoms any of the symptoms that we have listed whether it's a fever coughing all of those symptoms that student is going to be required to go see their physician and they're required to take a test the student will be required to have a negative test in order to return to school it's it's the standard it's what we're required to do by the orange county health department the next question is the epa has calculated the kill time of disinfectant products what products will be given throughout
125the day to the students and staff to sanitize their own desk and workplace spaces and what's the kill time kill time some products need to be left wet for two minutes or more so the kill time for the solution used for disinfecting wipes is approximately one minute and and i believe the name of that is this the solution that's uh added to the wipes is oxavir something like that and the pure tab solution that's what we use for the electrostatic sprayers the kill time for that product is about two minutes but that's used after school so there are no students around so that should matter less okay thank you will the number of students allowed to enter the restroom at the same time be limited so as to avoid overcrowding the answer is yes how
126will schools dismiss um dismiss students and how will students be picked up uh um well let me just say this since nobody's answering that one of the things we know for sure that we're going to have staggered dismissals right so we have to make sure that we're not dismissing all the students at the same time students that are being picked up it's a little difficult in some of the buildings i think for example like north main you don't have a large area so we're going to have to figure that out the other thing and this question doesn't doesn't um ask it but some of the parents are saying you know how long is the weight going to be if i have to pick up my child the truth of that answer is i'm really not
127sure it depends upon how many people decide to come and pick up their students so again as far as a school district we are going to be staggering our dismissals so that we don't have this mad rush of students leaving at the same time because students would probably forget that they have to social distance and again i go back to that's one of the reasons and one of the things that we're going to work with our students when we have those first two weeks the a1 and b1 so that we can talk about how do you leave i mean something as simple that we've always done now seems super complicated um but yes we will have staggered pickups and and i do want to you know remind parents that there may be additional wait time
128it would be disingenuous if i said no there's not going to be additional wait time it is because more people will be picking up their their children some of those pieces are going to be communicated at the building level i mean one of the things we're talking about is traffic patterns during dismissal if there's an increase in the number of parents that are picking their students up um you know some of those procedures are going to have to be modified from what they were previously just to accommodate for some of these new processes so some of those details haven't been finalized yet yep i just want to speak to the parent side of that because and i've been guilty of this in the past so full disclosure is patience i know that there have been
129times that i've scheduled my middle school daughter's orthodontist appointment for 3 20 because i know that i can pick her up at 3 o'clock and get to the orthodontist by 3 20. don't do that because i think we all need to be aware and we've talked about this as parents and amongst friends it's not going to be perfect it's going to be a little hectic it's going to have to get worked through so please do our parts as parents not to be in a rush and i know that's hard hopefully we don't have too many places to still go because nothing's really we can't do anything and just please don't be in a rush if you're if you're a returning family particularly at the elementary level the first week or two of the school year
130inevitably always has delays we're sending emails the first few days of school homes saying we're delayed a half an hour that you know this dismissal was delayed so i mean we're going to have those bumps along the way as well i wanted you just said something about staggered pickups so if i could just uh build onto that a little bit the remote schedule that you shared for mondays and when we're totally remote that's not necessarily the same schedule that would be tuesday through friday so when you said the high school is nine to two tuesday it's back to seven o'clock correct yes i think that there's some confusion yes and even even if you're even if you're a parent who's selected remote only for their child because we're not going to have fully remote sections
131by student it's going to be based upon class some classes are going to you know we may be able to get remote only some you know there's probably going to be quite a few that we're not going to be able to get remote at all um other than the students are going to be attached to the remote only portion of the hybrid schedule and they're going to have to follow the the the traditional 7 to 2 schedule so for even if you are a remote option student the schedule tuesday through friday will still be the traditional building schedule so plan to be online at seven a.m if you're going to tune in to a first period right if you're gonna have a first period class yes you'll be online at seven o'clock in the morning
132um i have one child in the high school that is requesting remote learning and one child out of district that we will be using the hybrid model will this be allowable and can my son still use transportation for the out of district hybrid model the answer is yes yes yes you can certainly do that why do kids need to wear a mask while sitting at their desk if if they are six feet apart so i'll address that so i'm just going to briefly read a couple of passages from a document from the american academy of pediatrics that addresses this issue really well i think so a significant number of individuals with covid19 have no symptoms and can transmit the virus through respiratory droplets these droplets are released when coughing sneezing loudspeaking and singing a mask
133acts as a barrier and can decrease the amount of respiratory droplets released into the air while it's not a perfect barrier it is one of the best tools we have to prevent the spread of kovid 19 along with social distancing in order to make the indoor classroom seating as safe as possible as safe as we possibly can mask wearing is advisable at all times it may sometimes be difficult for children to stay six feet apart masks can help prevent the spread of the virus in respiratory drought released when coughing and sneezing in addition mask will also prevent children from spreading germs by touching their nose and face schools and teachers should structure in times when students can take off masks and have a mask break these breaks can occur hourly ideally during quiet reading time
134or study time when students are not speaking children may also remove their masks while eating playing outdoors and during gym activities requiring physical exertion um provided they can remain six feet apart so i think that's a very good sort of explanation of you know why we're requiring that and why it's a recommendation from the uh american academy of pediatrics and we we we're going to add that to our handbook um i had spoken to carol and we feel that that's a really good document so parents can reference maybe they have a question may i say something yes okay so this would be directly to the younger ones like a kindergartner one you know first grader so this is really going to be difficult for them coming into school wearing masks right and you talk about
135social emotional and now you've got the child that is very nervous and very scared and now wants to hug the teacher or is upset what is what's going to happen with that situation or he has a runny nose so she has a runny nose and needs assistance with helping with wiping the nose or they decide that they have this will not decide but they may have sensory issues and can't wear the mask we're not sending them away we're not sending them home we're not going to call parents and say you know little johnny took off his mask four times what are we doing and how we're going to approach that so it's it's actually the next question but but let me let me say a little bit about that one of the things that we're
136going to have to teach our children especially the younger children is how to wear a mask how to appropriately wear a mask actually today carol was doing a video uh and we're gonna be have having videos for our students how do you how do you wear a mask appropriately and how do you wash your hands um so there's a lot of teaching that's gonna go on right i think that the important piece is that the adults will be wearing a mask so there's a barrier for them um to go on to the student whose nose is runny or they need something we're still human you know and there's still a part of us we have to be careful but but let's not forget that there's what we're doing is is we need to be human
137on how we approach our students our teachers because the things that we basically need haven't changed how we do it it might be a little bit different but i i'm pretty confident that our our teachers will know how to do that instinctively they just have to be careful so that comes with a question that i have from a parent who reads from what i've read students with special needs that can't wear a mask can be exempt from wearing the mask how will that work so one of the things i shared in my video yesterday is i said if there's a child for a specific reason that cannot wear a mask they need to reach out to dr sassy their building principal let us know and we'll make accommodations right because to say that everyone 100
138of the time will be wearing a mask you know is not true and we will have mask breaks and we will do everything that we need again these knees guards are really a great thing to have because it really creates a barrier between me and anyone else so there are going to be exceptions we just have to know who those children are and we have to be prepared for them um i'll see you guys like that would that be what the speech teachers are using yes because they need to see their lips correct and we also have masks that are clear so we we've also ordered masks where the student can see the mouth you know one of the things that we note is that those of us who may have difficulty hearing or a
139little bit older um we we need to be able to see someone's mouth to kind of read their lips too so again we're we're looking at how does that how does that look like and how do we make sure that our that our students are you know able to understand what we have to say so yes these are for our pps um you know the related service providers who will be doing work so teachers will be wearing the clear ones not all teachers not all the primary teachers may be wearing clear ones because remember when you're starting to teach children how to read or pronounce or they're gonna you know make sounds you they need to see your lips so yes they will they will have clear ones um the next question let's talk about
140ventilation malls are recommended to have updated hva systems mirv 13 filters now gyms are also why not schools so we've we've addressed this a couple of times and um we'll address it again so in an effort to increase fresh air circulation at the high school the hvac system here will be evaluated by the train corporation the manufacturer of the chillers and the air handlers here the goal will be to recalibrate and rebalance the system to bring in and circulate more fresh outside air furthermore new air filters are being installed with the merv 13 value so that's the recommended filter to capture droplets and aerosols and things merv stands for minimum efficiency reporting value and basically it's simple the higher the value the more effective the filter is so we we're also going to have trane
141evaluate the indoor air quality here at this building so this is our newest building it has air conditioning it has a you know full hvac system what are we doing at the the older buildings that do not have that so um we are you know considering working with what we have it's primarily unit ventilators in a lot of the classrooms we're opening the damper which is essentially allows fresh air in to somewhere around a 40 level which is much bigger higher number than uh what is typical the typical setting is more like 10 percent so you know this is if you think about it particularly in winter that kind of thing or if it's humid out you don't want to bring in cold or humid air you want to sort of regulate that how much
142of that air you're bringing in so we're going to be bringing in more fresh air to be circulated throughout the building when feasible and everyone knows this we've said this a million times we're also going to have windows opened as much as possible when it's hot fans can be used with some new restrictions and caveats the cdc is recommending that we don't have a fan that blows from one person onto the other because that could spread you know aerosols and droplets and things so we're thinking is we could have fans that are drawing air out of the room you know in a window or into a hallway or have fans that are pointed into unoccupied areas you know so those are some of the things we're working on again we're we're we're trying to be
143flexible we're going to evaluate how things are going and make adjustments as necessary thank you the next question is what is the quarantine protocol if someone tests positive i think i mentioned this the last last time so we work very closely with the orange county health department and they determine protocol so if a student or a staff member tests positive and we are informed either by the child or adult or staff member's doctor or we get a call from the orange county health department then we begin what's called contact tracing and contact tracing is in conjunction with the orange county health department they will not tell me the student's name they will tell the school nurse the student's name and then they will work hand in hand with where was that student the last time
144they were in school then they will be reaching out to families and letting them know that one of the students or a teacher tested positive and then they will be monitored one of the questions that i've been asked is well does that mean that school will be closed the answer to that question is according to the orange county health department the school will not be closed if a student tests positive or a student comes in with covet-like symptoms we certainly will shut down a classroom and we will disinfect it and then give it 24 hours again we have to make the assumption that just because someone has a runny nose or um is not feeling well that they are not necessarily covet positive the other thing is is that information is not going to be
145shared from the school district in other words if you call up um a building administrator and say to them you know i heard that eric hassler was uh covet positive you we're not allowed to give that information there are laws that dictate that we can't share that information what we will share is if someone came in contact and again i go back to um safety precautions it's important when we're in schools and we're in the classrooms that everybody's wearing their masks and that students are staying six feet socially distant the other piece that i shared and i and i know that a parent wrote an email and was concerned is that according to the orange county health department we will not be shutting schools down unless we have nine percent of an infection rate and
146that is they're they're the ones that we're going to work with so we don't arbitrarily decide we're going to close school down they will work with us and they will tell us when when that's necessary um that's nine percent in the school or nine percent in the county nine percent of the county at the region the last time yes nine percent of the county yes um and so which means that we are the infection rate is going up tremendously i think right now we're under one percent so we're hoping that that will maintain that way but but i just have to be honest and transparent with parents that this is what i've been told and we have to work uh hand in hand with the orange county health department and dr gellman is the person
147who dictates what we do and not do as far as health protocols but thank you for for making that point because it's nine percent in the in the county they call it the region but i call it the county um i think this is the last question will transportation be provided to students in out of district placement whose schools are physically opened during the first two weeks which monroe would will be teaching remotely the answer is yes any student who is attending an out of district placement they will have transportation to whatever program or school they'll be attending and with that we are concluding our q a piece okay thank you so much um and i think at this point we are going to take a quick five minute break thank you i had a
148sports coat and i said i'm not taking it because it's always hot good evening we are back from the break and there was no board business that took place we're moving on with the agenda to the overview of department chairs and district coordinators presentation by dr hassler and mr kravitz okay thank you to the board of education so at our last board of education meeting the board asked for some additional information regarding the department chair and coordinator positions that we have in the district and the hiring process that we go through and filling those positions so i'm going to start with just a kind of a brief overview of what the positions are what the roles and responsibilities are in in our school district we have district-wide positions which include um the the music coordinator
149k-12 library k-12 health services k-12 physical education k-12 uh art k-12 we have a grade three through eight gifted and talented director we have a k through five computers department chair at the high school level we have department chairs in science social studies math english business special education and guidance at the middle school we have department chairs in science social studies math special education and guidance and we also have 712 coordinators in technology education health family and consumer science and world languages the roles and responsibilities of these individuals include developing a budget for their develop for their department at their building level they run the monthly department meetings of their department they assist in the organization of professional development for their teachers they assist in the development of curriculum they regularly attend building council meetings
150at the middle school and high school as well as district-wide committees they assist in filling staffing positions with administration the assistant scheduling they conduct observations in accordance with our appr plan and they also are required in doing that to be lead evaluator certified one of one of the questions that i've been asked by the board is what are their roles during this shift in scheduling regarding school closure and the hybrid model and things like that their their responsibilities remain very much the same they're still responsible for creating their building building level budgets um they still are required contractually to have monthly department meetings again they assist in professional development over the summer we had a number of different summer curriculum projects that the department chairs worked on we still hold regular building council meetings and
151district-wide committee meetings we still have staffing positions so all of these responsibilities are still the case last year due to the full closure the the state granted a waiver to all school districts for the appr plan however that is not in place for the 2021 school year so we are still planning on conducting observations the way that they've been outlined in our in our plan uh matt's gonna speak a little bit about uh the the hr piece of fill in the department chairs thank you so for those people who are brave enough to take on the roles and responsibilities of a department chair or district-wide coordinator typically we post our positions for example those positions this year were posted on may 15th interested candidates apply by submitting a letter of interest to human resources i
152then forward it to the the building principles if there are multiple applicants for a position interviews are held oftentimes we've had one applicant for the position so typically that application process or interview process amounts to a discussion between the applicant and the principal about roles and responsibilities and expectations the department chairs are recommended by the high school and middle school building principals and the district-wide coordinators are recommended by by eric if if somebody if no one applies for the position what we would do is we would re-evaluate and determine the best plan of action to support the curricular needs of the teachers and students in a particular department um and then you know once they're they're recommended and they're board approved then they go on and take on all the roles and responsibilities that that
153eric had discussed i have a question thank you i was going to say any questions i have a question so is there a minimum number of staff in a department that would necessitate a chair so is there so you say social studies has 12 teachers another department has two teachers is there a minimum number of staff that would require a chair like the answer to that question is no because the for example the the k-5 computer department chair doesn't technically have staff teachers that they oversee so that that's that's really a department of one but she's still in charge of organizing computer instruction at the k-5 level but there aren't any computer teachers at the at the k-5 level but she helps and she helps the the directions of all the teaching assistants and all
154those buildings right dr hassler what is the reduction in their other responsibilities if they take this position you want to talk about that the the schedule how the the formula for the reduction it's based upon the number of staff that are within the department correct sorry my computer's about to sign out so i'm i'm waiting for is yours happening too okay oh it's about to sign up so i'm sorry the question again the question is um they're taking on additionality how does release period is based upon the number of people within a particular department so for example if you have a department of 20 teachers or 21 teachers you typically at the high school level you typically have two periods that of release time um so you would teach three periods the other two periods
155would be used to meet with those teachers observe those teachers do the the you know other the other things that a department chair would need to get done on a daily basis thank you for the clarification it's calculated on the number of staff in the department absolutely any other questions okay moving on to overview of an advanced placement exam presentation by dr hassler sure and i'd like to invite up to the stage mr cassidy the high school principal as well as mrs arroyo one of the assistant principals from the high school [Music] thank you yeah it said it couldn't be updated and you could take those waters too everybody good yes okay go ahead so thank you very much to the board of education for the opportunity for mr cassidy mr royal myself to speak
156to you about the advanced placement program as well as the advanced placement opportunities that we have in our high school as well as talk about some of the the implications that the closure in the spring had on the ap program and the ap exam process so just to kind of a very quick overview of the ap the advanced placement program basically ap exams are standardized exams that are designed to measure how well a student has mastered content and skills in a specific course traditionally the ap exam consists of two parts two sections section one is a series of multiple choice questions section two is a section of free response questions which has traditionally been an essay the exams again the exams are standardized they're scored scores range from one through five and if a student
157scores a three or four or a five they could potentially earn college credit the college credit is granted based upon the institution and that varies from college to college and i want to very quickly just clarify the difference between college-level courses that are being offered at the high school in comparison to an ap course that we have we have many college-level courses at our high school that are run in partnership with various institutions an example would be calculus bc at the high school is offered through suny albany if you take that for a full year you can earn up to eight college credits through suny albany if the student chooses to pay the fee the tuition fee to suny albany and they successfully complete the course they will get eight suny albany credits at the
158conclusion of that course students also have the option to take the college calculus ap exam or the student could just take the course to become more uh better educated in uh in calculus in the event that they pursue want to pursue mathematics down the road so there's a couple of different options that we offer in the high school for students to be able to to get college credit the the ap programs that we offer currently at the high school uh there's quite a few of them biology calculus chemistry computer science english language and composition english language and literature environmental science european history physics one physics c electricity and magnetism physics c mechanics us government and politics u.s history and world history modern history we also offer opportunity to our kids to if they choose they
159can take only an ap exam without having to complete a course for example later on we're going to speak about our ap results students can just choose to sign up and take an ap exam we had a student this year who took the chinese ap exam and scored a five on the on the chinese ap exam and we don't offer chinese at our high school so uh mr cassidy and mrs arroyo are going to speak a little bit more about uh outside of the 2020 school year what the traditional ap exam process and exams look like in greater detail so as you can see before the covet hit us the advanced placement used to be a spring daylight for registration one of the things that has also changed in the recent past with that is
160how we collect the payment we used to have the students provide us checks but we now use the rev check system to pay the uh a college board for those exams the exams were scheduled in may and we would get the results in july and the students it was in person we would set aside classrooms uh for the two weeks that the ap exams were being administered uh students would go into those classrooms or uh the cafeteria to take those exams and we would also assign our proctors usually it would be our school counselors that would proctor those exams um and then in there they weren't able to use any resources it was just like a regents exam you couldn't have your calculator or anything else in those rooms with you so obviously this year
161because the the exams were traditionally given in paper in person when schools were closed across the country the college board had to shift the way that they administered these exams so now we're going to speak a little bit more about what what did the the process in the exams look like during the covet closure so beginning the 2020 uh 2019-2020 academic year there were some changes that were slated for the ap exams a payment and registration was slightly different there were the deadlines and the timelines changed for the ap courses the full year and semester one courses you had to register and pay for them by the the november deadline and for semester two courses there was a march deadline that was regardless of the covet 19. however once you know we were thrust into
162this remote learning the the exams went from the in-person paper model to the exams being online every student received an e-ticket to access the exams they received that via the ap classroom and via email the exams were shortened um [Music] so like dr hassler stated previously the the traditional way was for the exams to have a two-part model with multiple choice questions and free response questions as after covid we went we moved to just the free response questions which were the essay questions students had to write a short essay that essay was to include supporting facts and details that they could use notes they can use uh electronic devices textbooks and the internet however the answers and the responses had to be original several methods were used to prevent and combat cheating they had they
163added anti-plagiarism software student responses were sent to the ap teachers for review test tests on test day students received a verification code that they had to use in order to enter the exam and start exams would be administered on the same day and time worldwide that was to prevent and combat any students from sharing information students who were caught cheating would not be able to use to make up the test or to take any future exams the college board also offered several opportunities throughout the closure for students to review information practice in addition to speaking with their teachers and and doing video conferences to review the information that was going to be on the the exams mr royal when you're speaking about these you're talking these a protocol put in place by college board not
164monroe woodbury correct correct correct so because schools were closed testing was done remotely in students homes and due to the you know the online nature as well as to the method in which the exams were administered there were a number of different challenges that arose due to that type of testing environment so now we'll speak a little bit more about those so we uh during the testing um throughout orange county uh we heard that students were having difficulty uploading their information uh so they were able to then you know um once they once they set their perish up they ran into these issues uh so uploading their answers some of our kids actually took pictures and sent them to their teachers before they uh submitted their answers so we had those as well and we
165hope that we could use those in an appeal process which will come up in a minute if you were unable to upload your exam or they didn't receive your information and you contacted them they gave you the opportunity to retake the next exam there was an appeal process for scores of for that of students who received only ones and twos uh what happened there was teachers were able to go in and see the students exams and they were then using the rubric that was in criteria that was provided they were then able to prevent to present a case in order to help the students uh earn the higher score uh here in our district and this was not just our district it was in several districts uh there were some teachers that could not get
166into the system to appeal we contacted the college board and then the we were instructed that the teacher had to reach out to the college board to work on getting that system fixed and then there is no appeals process this year for students or their parents uh and because those are only based on the multiple choice questions in the past i can say you know as we were hearing that the students were having difficulties with wi-fi issues and things like that we were providing guidance to our students and families that when their child was taking the exam to shut off all the other devices to make sure that their child had the dedicated wi-fi line in order to hopefully upload their answers without any issues i'm sorry who was giving that advice while the live
167testing was going on the students were reaching out to the school to say that they couldn't get on so yeah we reached out uh we were hearing as the exams were progressing that some students like who took the first exam had a difficulty maybe uploading so then we were providing information out to our teachers and anybody who contacted us uh to make sure that you were only having the one device going on so that that maybe you wouldn't run into that difficulty so and i know you said orange county you know throughout had you know connectivity issues but specific to our school do you have information on the students that had issues with technology and submitting and also the the ones that are appealing for one or two so i received only two emails from
168parents concerning the difficulty uploading a device and the second part was about the appeals second part was do we have a lot of students that are submitting an appeal or a review for their one or two score i can answer that question the the challenge is because previously the way that the way that the in in the traditional model the way that the appeals process worked was that there was a there's an initial appeal window but then the student could file an appeal to have their tests rescored through october 31st however the rescoring in the traditional model was for the multiple choice section but because there was no multiple choice section in this what the college board said to us was now the student doesn't have the ability to be able to file an appeal
169for that so right now we're in the middle of conversations with them to discuss this because we have a number of teachers who were not locked out of the because it's you know it's it's technical now everything is through the system there were a number of teachers who were able to get in they were able to look at their students scores and they were able to say this doesn't look you know accurate with regards to a student's score because they got our one or two i think that they should have gotten something different and they could file that appeal we currently have five teachers that have been unable to do that and quite frankly it's unfair to the students because the teachers are locked out that the students don't get the benefit of having the
170same appeal that all other students thought so we're currently in the process of working out how that's going to unfold because one of the issues that i had initially was we were under the impression that the kids were going to be able to appeal but that multiple choice appeal there was also a fee attached to it so because this is information that was being brought to them pre and post the july 31st deadline it's unfair to the kids also to even say to them that you have to come up with 30 in order to be able to file this appeal so we are still in the middle of we are still in the middle of working this out with with the college board in terms of how this is going to unfold fairly with our
171kids okay and you'll give us an update when you have yes absolutely and also the appeal is based on the teacher so the teacher would read all the the exams and match it to the criteria if they felt that the criteria was met then they would do the appeal if they felt it wasn't met they would agree with what the uh a college board had said the teachers didn't uh reach out to us so i don't know if your question was how many teachers wrote appeals for students but that is probably something we could reach out to teachers to see what that was about and the challenge is technically speaking the college board doesn't even really want to hear from administration because technically the teacher is the one who's supposed to be doing the appeal
172they don't even really dig down into individual students issues with administration because the teacher according to the college board the teacher is the one who has the knowledge of what the typical performance is of that student therefore is the one who's most equipped to file the appeal they won't allow us to appeal on their behalf right right i'm just saying just from you know global picture of how our students fared with this online platform of the ap test it would be helpful to see how many scored lower than their teachers felt that they deserve right we we have we have a decent-sized list of kids so i'd be interested in the outcome yeah definitely i agree typical for only ones and twos to be appealed or is that was that just put in place for
173this current well part of this system was also you know if if i go back when they they talk about the the different procedures specifically to this exam this is also an opportunity for them to identify kids that they potentially think didn't get a score that was higher or lower based upon the typical performance of the students so they were relying partially on the teachers to help them screen through does it look like this kid may have gotten assistance based upon their performance of their score and their traditional functioning within the classroom but that being said if the only method of appeal still is driven by the teacher the teacher should be able to appeal on behalf of their kids right but what i'm saying is if a student received a three and and they're
174looking at colleges that only accept fours and fives as a right as a acceptable score for credit that student would not be entitled to an appeal was it previously they would previously the deadline of october 31st to file an appeal by a student accompanied by a 30 fee could happen any student if if the student is like you know what i i want to have my exam looked at they could file the form say i want them to rescore my exam and the college board would do it but for this year they they knock those out right because the the appeal was through the multiple choice side they would rescore the multiple choice portion since there was no multiple choice they did they did away with that was there a fee for the retaking if
175you had technology no no no they waived all of the fees right there's very good of them right so just a a quick overview of how the how the students performed this year so for the 2020 academic year we had 267 students take exams for a total of 508 exams 30 of our 30 of the exams scored a one 130 scored a two 176 scored a three scored a four and fifty three scored a five and if you look at the bottom row it'll tell you the number of students for each score so for number 401 there were 28 students total who scored a 1 105 for a 2 103 for a 3 95 scored a 4 and 46 scored a 5. and obviously the the number of students is less than a total number
176of exams because there are quite a few students who took multiple ap exams um i i received the question about highlighting some of the accomplishments of our kids this year so we had 43 students who scored as ap scholars this year which means that they they got at least a a three or higher on at least three exams they took three exams and they got at least a three on three so we had twenty two we had 43 students who achieved that we had 25 students who were scholars with honors which means that they had an overall average of 3.25 and they got a three or higher on at least four exams and we had 17 students who are scholars with distinction which means that they averaged a 3.5 or better on their ap exams
177and they got a three or higher on at least five exams i have a question yes two questions so i see the exam data over five years but that doesn't really tell me the whole picture so if i'm looking at the 2020 exam data right where we break down the ones through fives i i is that indicative or aligned with what's happened historically or was this year being in the remote environment right so so we haven't fully drilled down to that and part of the reason is the only exams that we are able to look at that are based upon the the number of students who took specific exams and the challenge is because we don't require all kids to take the ap exam at the end of the ap course it's not 100 reliable
178for us to be able to identify cohort to cohort if the performance is consistent because it's not standardized does that make sense the way that i'm saying it so you know this year you may have a calculus bc class with 25 kids in it and 20 kids take the ap exam next year it may only be you know five kids so it's it's difficult to be able to compare you know it's not the same as the presentation that we do for the region's exam where all kids are required to be able to take that okay and and those students that were recognized as ap scholars and their various designations how would they acknowledge the monroe woodbury that's a really good question it's a great question in the past we really have not acknowledged that um
179but we will find a way as always but we should start especially this year when it was under such you know continuing circumstances i think that a student that received a five and or any of these ap scholar designations really pretty spectacular yeah deserves a recognition 100 agreed thank you thank you any other questions uh is there any talk about what's going to be happening for this year or they're holding off on making any sort of determination not a word i mean this i i will tell you that this unfolded very rapidly you know we went out in march this process unfolded very very rapidly between march and may obviously in march this was not the intention or the direction of the ap exam so um you know we haven't heard a peep in terms
180of what they're planning on doing now knowing this is a possibility for this year is there any thought to changing how teachers prepare the students for the ap exam since it's no longer the multiple choice section which would be recall uh it's now more of essay writing well one of the one of the things that we have to wait and hear is that they also made some modifications in terms of the curriculum that they were going to expect on the ap exams the reason why they changed it to just the essays rather than the multiple choice is because they came out and they said that the students the students assessments on the exams were going to be through the extent of where the teachers should have covered through the may or through the the march
181time frame because that's when schools typically shut down so i think that that's sort of an annual decision that they made last year that was brand new because when school shut down they knew that the the remote learning methods of schools vary greatly across the state and they couldn't hold kids accountable for curriculum beyond that if schools were not fully in person the way that they were right but an exam like this benefits a student who's a superior writer writer right versus a student who might not be as good at writing but has a very good memory for the subject matter yep and now and now the teachers know i mean you know now the teachers know that in the event that this is something that they duplicate what the skills are that they need
182to practice in the classroom in order to be able to equip the skills the the kids with the skills to do that is there anything accountability on the end of the the teacher that you know like what do their numbers look like do we have a breakdown by teacher as to what their ap scores are for their students i mean we have it by course but again because it's not it's not the same as if you're taking a if you're a regents teacher and you're required to prepare kids specifically for that eight that exam and we can look at your region's results historically because every single student in your class it varies in ap because not every student is required to take that exam so it's hard to be able to draw definitive conclusions if
183you're not you know right but the students that are taking the exam we can see if they all got ones in that class or twos or agreed yep i have one last question from mr cassidy i've had a couple of high school students ask i know it's a little off topic when schedules are coming out and specifically the ones when so next week day 28 august we we're planning to have them out by the 28th yeah maybe at 11 is mr truck what's the deadline five o'clock it's gonna be uh four or five eight maybe by eleven nine pm on the 28th pm is this opening session for mr cassidy all right okay thank you very much i also just want to make a note that um don beatler had been joining us remotely but
184he had left the meeting at about 8 15 correct okay so he is no longer joining us remotely moving on to the presentation of the 2019 2020 high school and middle school yearbooks um presentation for the high school yearbook by mr cassidy all right where [Laughter] no we have it here yes we have i'm sorry i don't have mine do you want to hold yourself i'll say okay yeah thank you we actually i know under normal circumstances we always love this moment because um the high school yearbook staff and everybody come and actually present the book to us obviously this year things being a little bit different but we do want to acknowledge all of them thank you so much um the book is phenomenal and gorgeous and uh so thank you mr cassidy you're
185welcome it and you know the yearbook staff asked me just to thank you for your support for the yearbook and all that they are doing it was very difficult in these times completing your book and they already are planning on what we're going to do if the school year ends up the same way it did this past year one thing though that does occur with all that was going on that there were some mistakes that were made and the yearbook staff has apologized for all those and have amended as many as they can i just wanted to just bring one to light that we emily williams was in the top 25 we there was a miscommunication on our part uh internally that had the wrong picture put in there and we have rectified that and
186with her book as well as all the remaining books we had by uh requesting a sticker from herff jones which we then placed in all the yearbooks going forward but she well deserves that picture in there i just wanted to mention that here at the board meeting that we do apologize for that uh error thank you thank you very much and the presentation of the 2019-2020 middle school yearbook by the middle school principal mr masano good evening everybody i just saw i do have a statement prepared by the yearbook advisors that i want to read on their behalf but i want to make quick note if you look through i mean the theme of the yearbook is finding our way and i don't think that could have been more relevant to the year that we
187experienced if you start off on page two i believe you've got pictures of all the smiling mask-free faces there on the first day of school during tech mcgettin and then we quickly go to by page 15 you're looking at the remote learning situations from around our building so it really reflects the evolution of the year and the challenges that we faced and i think they just did a terrific job in capturing that throughout the yearbook so i'm very proud of the advisors and the students involved in creating that a lot of credit is owed to mrs kiernan and mrs roman who are probably home watching this they weren't able to be here tonight and i want to read this statement that they've written on their behalf the 2020 yearbook is one that we will never
188forget this year's theme is finding our way the artist we worked with created a map of the district for the cover of the yearbook we have had a great group of students this year who were part of the yearbook club they took pictures from the school day they stayed after for sports and clubs and went to special events put on by the school and pta we also had many teachers and staff submit pictures we are grateful for everyone who helped us this year in making the yearbook and making sure that it was completed on time unfortunately due to the circumstances we were unable to include spring sports this year in its place we were able to include pictures of students teachers and staff working remotely from home we were happy to see everyone working so
189hard and still having fun although we were so we were faced with a difficult situation this year we were able to complete the 136-page yearbook with pictures that captured the indelible memories of this past school year thank you for everyone who helped us along the way including your support of our supportive administrators innovative and creative students and amazing and helpful staff and faculty we get to work with thank you everybody enjoy the books and thank you i know a lot of you had reached out to me and said that you would like to donate your copies i really appreciate that they will go to very very happy students and if you'd like to do that just let me know and we'll take care of collection thank you so much moving on to the approval of
190minutes can i get a motion to approve the minutes emotion second all those in favor um committee reports reports by board of education members um wants to start crest policy the policy committee will be meeting monday we're going to be uh discussing some remote learning acceptable practices whether it be the platforms that they'll be using in the school also we're going to be looking at the rules and etiquette and procedures while you're on the computer to solidify that everybody is at home abiding by some etiquette and rules whether it's the teacher or the student and also the attendance component will be part of that i believe also so we have some work to do before the school starts hopefully this will be done right away and uh it'll be implemented and you'll be able to
191roll it out like at that first two weeks of school so everyone's aware so we're going to get on that monday thank you dawn visitation this past week we visited central valley and we completed our visitation rounds of the district buildings uh as well as our buildings and grounds while we were at central valley as part of the visitation we also you know had a chance to look at some of the classrooms like ms mcclary was talking about before with respect to the social distancing and the placement of the deaths and um again it's it's all changing as they work through the numbers but the hope is that before school starts the visitation committee will make a full round of the district buildings and classrooms to uh look at all the signage and the and
192the placement of the deaths lunchrooms and all the other areas that were i think the last school we have to do with sapphire correct i'm sorry yes you have sapphire left to visit and um we apologize to miss caldwell we got tied up in our visitation at central valley sapphire will be our last stop i think next week we're looking to do that thank you and orange county school board has not met our first meeting is september 2nd and i'm sure it's going to be a very interesting second okay um i know don is unfortunately not here patrick do you want to comment on anything with facilities uh well i think facilities really is not much to report since the last meeting was two weeks ago we haven't had a meeting um so there's really
193really nothing to report in that area okay i was going to mention the audit committee yes please i was that was going to go to that next services did you want to no go ahead you can say um okay well we had a first audit committee meeting of the year uh last week on tuesday and we always have that prior to the actual external audit which began this week so we have about four auditors with us for the week everything's on schedule uh looks like we'll wrap up by midday friday probably and um you know so far so good i mean just just in terms of the audit in the financial area one thing that affected the audit and happened at the end of the last week is new york state came out and um
194decided to hold back of the aid from the 2019-2020 year which is we booked that as a receivable every year there's a portion of our state aid that is owed to us they held back 20 of that so that was something we talked a lot about during the budget process that you know the governor had alluded to a cut up to 20 so they have now withheld a portion of the aid due to us from last year and we had to actually make an adjustment uh we we do a state aid receivable uh a calculation we had booked that on friday thursday friday and and then that occurred so we're actually going to have to um adjust that receivable downward a little bit because we don't know if we'll get the 20 or when we'll
195get it and if you don't know and you're not going to get you know the the receipt within say 90 days you usually have to um not book it that way as revenue so um going well and um you know we'll have another meeting a post audit meeting as well so thank you um emily report by board of education representative student representative so tonight i'll be sharing a short summary of a project i'm going to be working on as the new student rep i've been a student in the monroe-woodbury school district since kindergarten and if there's one thing that stood out to me over the years it's how amazing the education system is i've had tremendous support from teachers and educators who have all put in their best efforts to pave the way for successful
196life after high school however despite an outstanding gpa and a multitude of extracurriculars there's one component in a student's college application that can either make or break all their hard work the sats upon observation i've realized that the majority of kids in our school don't prioritize the sat whether it be from personal choice or the bigger issue financial insecurity one of my main initiatives as the new student representative is to increase resources for those who lack financial support or who simply don't have enough access or knowledge about these resources i want to ensure that everyone receives equal opportunities no matter where they come from the first step of my project is to organize the sat review preparation class slash program in our high school this it this idea came to me when i realized that
197an overwhelming number of students in our school are already put at a disadvantage in the college admission process when they lack the ability to access heavily funded test preparation programs in comparison to those from elitist or private college prep high schools i'm still in the process of crafting the specifics of my plan details such as if the class would only be allowed for those who lack financial support whether the program will be held in the form of tutors or class if we will branch out to the acts as well or how many sessions will be hosted will be established once i get more input from staff members and students i have been studying for the sats for about a year and i've had more than enough resources to guide me therefore i hope to group
198together a similar group of kids with these experiences to help additionally i was in school last week with the lead mentoring club and i briefly talked to mrs sherman our lead advisor and high school librarian about hosting a book drive for used in old review books which are decently expensive and might further aid those who lack these resources as the school year transitions to the new hybrid and online format i think students need more help than ever to ensure that their school year is as comfortable as possible i am very grateful that i've had the privilege to never feel deprived of resources or supplies to this end it is that privilege and experience that i feel now guides me to help my fellow students to ensure that their academic potential can reach its fullest thank
199you great job thanks very much emily we look forward to the progress throughout the year thank you yes i wanted to just say something thank you because i don't think enough people know what they're entitled to especially if there's some students that are free marine talking to your microphone i'm sorry for your reduced they their sats are uh waived as well as uh college applications are waived many of the students are not aware of that yeah not a lot so i i'm trying to make sure that enough students are aware of the opportunities that are just right in front of them because i feel like not enough know about it nope thank you thank you so much moving on to personnel matt all right good evening before i ask for approval for the items listed
200under personnel um i just want to point out two things first of all we're really excited to welcome a number of new staff members to the monroe-woodbury community and one other thing is you'll see that fall coaches are on the agenda for approval tonight and as of now the the training for the fall season is is still tentatively slated to begin on september 21st however the new york state public high school athletic association has petitioned the governor for a start date this month and the governor stated today that he'll be offering guidance about high school sports as early as next week so as a result we wanted to appoint the fall coaches now in the event that we're able to get out onto the playing fields and start training sessions so what happens is typically
201um coaches train with their with their uh with their with their athletes all year long but um so we want to get them on the agenda tonight just in the event that was going to happen um but i do want to point out i know a number of you have asked me or called me um coaches get paid they don't get paid for the off season workouts they get paid for the time within the um the actual season so okay thank you so with that i'd like to sorry request go ahead for the items listed under personnel uh stacy yes i'd like to make motion to separate out item 13.1 c to be voted on separately from the rest of the personnel okay so do we have a motion to approve all the personnel items
202except for item 13.1 c motion do i have a second all those in favor aye aye okay so i would like to take a roll call as to each board member's vote on the item 13.1 c please call your name and state yay your nay anthony yay chris yay dawan yay dan nay michael hey suzanne yay lorraine um i don't see that on here what is it 13.1 c 13.1 c why am i not under department chairpersons you know i'm going crazy under personnel section 13. yeah i see you have to 13.1 13.2 okay and i my vote is yay me all those did i hear lorraine right she abstained she abstained lorraine all those in favor that was it that was the vote so that was the vote motion passed all right thank you
203moving on section 14.2 for the bids for business on financial patrick yes sir excuse me 14.1 first the contracts and then the bids right so i would respectfully ask for the approval the items under the business financial section so it includes and i'll do this quickly for contracts for special ed related services award of contracts for bids associated with the school lunch fund approval of meal prices for students with no increase for next year and then finally a resolution to approve the tax rates and i would call this a re-approval there was a um a very small error in the taxable assessed value with what what you did on monday morning and it turned out that there was a parcel from the town of woodbury that was coded as being in the cornwall school central
204school district and cornwall noticed that we did not we would have no way to notice that but they noticed that there was this single parcel that was not part of the towns which make up their school district they notified the county we corrected uh the tax rolls and it results in a very small decrease in tax rates it's the third decimal place but i thought it made sense to actually approve the final tax rates um you know for the for the school district tonight uh we've proceeded with the county to process the rolling bills so that won't make those uh late that was one of the reasons that we did it on monday so that's what that is thank you can i have a motion to approve motion second second all those in favor hi
205committees on special education and preschool special education lotion second all those in favor aye aye okay last is reports by borden central office um before i start going around with everybody um you know unfortunately i'm going to make an announcement this evening that christopher delorenzo has put in his letter of resignation from service to the board of education effective september 1st and i'm going to give it to chris first to speak please uh well i'd just like to say that i i like to commend elsie in the cabinet and thank you on your presentations today i know that this time is not easy for you guys it would be nice if we had a blanketed procedure to go through for all this school openings and whatnot but the public needs to know that every district
206is different and we're a very large district so it does take a lot of work and change so i want to thank you for all your work in the last couple of weeks that you've done as you said is september 1st i will be resigning from the broad event i'll be moving officially out of the district i would like to thank the community for believing in me in the last five and a half years with assisting in the decision making that has impacted this district for my fellow board members i have been a pleasure to work with making this board we all have different personalities and views and i appreciate that we had good conversations and we had other opinions in that we used both that were good and bad but we all worked together
207uh to make a lot of uh plans and they all worked at the task that was at hand uh if we start on opposite sides we listened and we did come together as a group always so i appreciate that i'm proud of the district and i'm glad i'll be able to say i've been a part of it i would like to commend lcnner cabinet for me personally feels that they go above and beyond my initial expectations of how the board of ed works from day to day they really are amazing individuals every day seven days a week not just five business days i'm sure elsie won't miss me calling impulsively inventing or flipping out about social media trolls that have nothing better to do but start trouble with the parents in the district me not
208being politically correct and saying exactly what i was thinking during discussions and maybe you'll miss that uh again i would just like to say thank you for the opportunity to serve the community and i will miss everyone i want to wish all the students faculty cabinet board and elsie lots of luck with our new school year and we all should just work today today i've said it before we should just keep moving forward so that's all thank you uh donna i just wanted to say congratulations well we're going to miss you chris thank you good luck with your new new event adventures i guess um i want to say congratulations to dr vias on his accomplishments and also wish suzanna happy birthday thank you you're welcome that's it good night thank you anthony uh best
209of luck chris in uh all your future endeavors i remember five and a half years ago we were together when we uh you me and mike came on board i remember having a conversation with you when we were putting our applications in and you were sort of like well i don't know if i'm going to like this and i don't know if i'm going to talk too much and if this is really for me and here we are five and a half years later and you've been really one of the best board members i've ever seen in your uh passion for it and all the things that you do to help the community and help the kids is really really appreciated and we're really going to miss you it's been it's been my pleasure to
210work with you thank you and uh to the elsi and the cabinet and all the teachers and administration i'm just really thankful for all the work you do and for the task force to put in all the work to give the community a a hybrid option where the kids could actually go to school a lot of a lot of communities across our country are not really offering that they're just taking an easier way out and i understand why but they're saying um we're just gonna offer a remote for the first couple of months and see how it is so i really do appreciate and i think everyone in the community does all the hard work that it's taking to make a hybrid opportunity or a model that you're offering to the community so thank you
211for all the work you've done and thank you um and congratulations to dr vales on your accomplishment and thanks to everyone for all their presentations tonight thank you dawn well i i feel everything that anthony said about chris and then some he's been definitely a mentor to me and and a tremendous asset to this district and i'm going to miss him tremendously so good luck on your your new home and thank you for all that you did for us um to speak a little bit about what you said about the llc and the cabinet and the administrator is working 24 7. i can definitely attest to that i mean i am the board member that texts them and emails them and calls them at all hours and days and they're readily available to answer every
212question that i have and i see how much they're putting into this entire reopening plan and really have been non-stop since since march so i do want to recognize them for that and i want to talk a little bit about the sel program that mr rodriguez and stacy talked about i just want to share my appreciation as a board member to christine ricker for all of her support with coordinating everything about that there's been a lot of work that was done on her behalf and she's worked really tirelessly to bring this program to to our district and i'm very grateful to her thank you for the yearbooks i especially liked the middle school that they included the remote learning pictures i thought that was awesome thank you to mrs arroyo and dr hasser and mr
213cassie for the ap presentation i i personally asked for that i thought it was important to recognize the students for the ap work that they take on especially during this this time um congratulations to to dr villas he's in good company with dr hassler emily thank you for for your piece that you spoke about i'm highly connected to what you speak about and i look forward to your work on that as well and i'd like to welcome the new staff to monroe woodbury you're in a great place and that's it have a good night thank you dan i got to attend the summer school high school graduation uh extremely nice very different than our usual summer school graduation but congratulations to those uh handful of students who stuck with it to make it through the
214summer and i really want to say uh chris we're gonna miss you you know you made the meetings a lot more fun a lot more exciting and uh you know it was it was it made it good to hang out with you and you were we could talk about cars nobody else does but i wish you good luck and uh you'll be missed thank you thank you suzanne i'd like to start by saying i know what a huge undertaking scheduling is because that's what i do and i have a deep appreciation for the work that was put into forming the schedule for this coming fall so to everyone who took part in that really thank you you did a great job i'd also like to congratulate dr vice on your accomplishments and chris it's been
215a pleasure working with you not only on the board but in the policy committee and you will definitely be missed and i wish you and your family the best in your future endeavors thank you michael i just want to take a moment to thank chris for his years of service to the district it's very much appreciated volunteer jobs usually are thankless jobs but you really made a difference in the district so we really appreciate that and hope you have a great time on your new adventure i also want to take a minute to thank the um lc and the cabinet i think there's a ton of work you know i run a business where we have a lot of work to do in this environment as well and i couldn't imagine that this could be
216pulled off without a really strong team so you can see the amount of work that has gone in the amount of thought and care and process so i really appreciate that as a parent in the district as well and that's all i have thank you thank you lorraine i guess i'd like to thank elsie in the cabinet this is a work in progress and i can't even really imagine i mean we're up here and we ask all these questions but i'm sure this is a lot of pressure and a lot of stress so my hat is off to you and you have my support even though i may seem to be a pain um congratulations to bargo uh thank you for all the presentations um suzanne happy birthday thank you they know it was your
217birthday and um i want to just say to chris you know good luck to you in all your endeavors i really enjoyed working with you um there were times across even in public you know i wanted i was probably eyeballing you and probably annoyed at some things but i totally appreciate everything that you've done here and i really enjoyed being on the policy committee i'm going to miss our heated debates we had plenty of those but you know when it all comes down to it was always for the interest of the students and so i appreciate it and i enjoyed um definitely working with you good night thank you emily um i just want to give a really big thank you on behalf of the entire student body i know that this is a tough
218time but i hope you know that we're extremely grateful for even getting to come back to school and we're going to adapt to anything we're i know that it's it's really tough and i just want to say that we recognize your efforts and we really appreciate it so thank you patrick yes so chris best of luck to you and your family in the future um it's been it's been great working with you you've been a good invaluable board member and a valuable member of the facilities committee i know you put in a lot of work and we're an important piece we're part of that committee getting the field work done and we're going to miss you and i will miss you thank you thank you vargav dr vias chris uh pleasure working with you thank
219you for all your support and guidance to all of us um we'll certainly miss you and good luck to your next adventure tomorrow will be the last day for um our device distribution for the summer um as of this afternoon we have distributed about 5800 devices um so it's it was a daunting task we will be doing the distribution again on september 1st 2nd and 3rd more information to come on the website but i do want to thank all the administrators security officers translators buildings and grants folks summer support team and the mcc team because distribution distributing close to 6 000 devices a daunting task in socially distanced environment and do efficiently it's a whole different level so i really thank all the team support that we received throughout the process this week also we
220started working with our tech coaches and enl teachers what we call as the families in technology and training we have a few sessions to provide the technology support and and going the overview of the different solutions that our our teachers will be using but helping our students and parents there are some sessions still available this week and next week so i encourage all the parents to take the advantage of this training and some of the sessions are very small so it becomes almost like a personal training and they are after hours available so take the advantage of that a couple of other things summer graduation was phenomenal and mr peterson did a good job at the end of the school year as well thank you matt i'm gonna echo what everybody else says thank you
221to everybody who presented tonight um chris you you'll be missed you're you know i had a chance to tell you the other day we've a bunch of us have been here for a lot of years and seen a lot of different board members come kind of come and go you're one of the good ones and not just because you know what you're doing as a board member just because you're you're one of the good ones so thank you bhargov i'm proud of you i'm really really proud of you and i know it was not easy and i'm just really happy for you congratulations and lastly obviously we're excited to welcome our kids back but any staff we've had a lot of different questions in our office from staff members about what this year will look
222like for them in particular please please please make sure you reach out to me in my office if you have any particular questions so we can help with the start of the year thank you very much have a nice night thank you dr hassler i echo what everybody else has already said thank you to chris also i think it's also congratulations congratulations on you know you're you're going to have a little bit more time available to yourself so that's that's a good thing i need more time right big congratulations to bargoff uh not only is it a a massive accomplishment to do it this year of all years of starting the school year the way that it did and now ending the school year and still defending your dissertation congratulations very very impressive emily super
223excited about the work that you're doing i mean that is fantastic to hear that work because i think it's going to benefit a lot of kids in the district thank you to the dozens and dozens of staff who have assisted in the the the planning for our our reopening um i mean just my little slice of this i know that i've you know worked closely with dozens and dozens of people and thank you so much to everybody's input and assisting with this i mean if you look that from even august 5th what we presented to now you see the evolution of things and that's the result of a lot of hard work of many people thank you mr cassidy mr miss arroyo for putting together the information for the ap presentation thank you to mr
224mcelroy and miss edwards allen for not only for summer school graduation but remember that was a remote only plan and and that came on the heels of school being completely shut down and not only was it you know the handful of kids who were able to graduate by us maintaining that program it also assisted dozens of kids in maintaining momentum in their own progress even though they weren't necessarily ready to graduate yet but still maintaining that momentum in their progress through high school so thank you very much for that work thank you also to mr peterson who again similarly that we you know we offer our summer crusaders program every single school year and and this year we had to offer it remotely but thank you so much to mr peterson and his staff for
225also you know putting together a great program to support our kids and the end of the year celebration was fantastic thanks thank you i'll see so i want to say happy birthday to suzanne but we also have a happy birthday to caitlin caldwell happy birthday caitlyn i think we're going to sing though right we are yeah we're going to sing to her at the end we're going to sing to you at the end so just wait i know this is exactly how you wanted to spend your birthday both you and suzanne wanted to get this i appreciate everyone thanking us for this presentation but i i would be remiss if i didn't say this is this is a collaboration of the entire district i keep saying this in our mind this is like a puzzle
226so i am so grateful to the teachers the administrators the board members cabinet members our custodians everybody who is working non-stop to make this happen and i i the most important thing is what emily said which is the students are so appreciated we're appreciative of coming back to school this is why we do it we do it for you so that's important chris you're looking at me thank god i have a mask that is you're amazing and i will miss you i just want to say one thing about chris everything he did he did for our students thank you um just so i can get through that piece before i address everything else um i just i've been fortunate for the last over 15 years to call cress a friend and i'll still continue to
227do so that part of our relationship won't end but i think what's important for the community of monroe woodbury to realize is that in the span of his six years of service the amount that he's accomplished as a board member um really just goes to his true character then and elsie is 100 percent right that everything he's done um even behind the scenes with the bantering and and the heated debates that we've had and probably driving laurie hawk crazy on the facilities committee has all been for the benefit of our kids and that is something that's a true passion that we will be at a loss for because um if he does something he does it to 110 percent and whether that's uh a fault i'm not sure but i know that we're appreciative as
228a district to have had him for this time so thank you chris and as far as the rest of it i don't have to worry because i'll talk to him tomorrow so um i want to say thank you to all the custodians and the administrators and everybody who's still been working behind the scenes even for the teachers and the faculty who are home planning what this new school year will look like it has not been a summer vacation i don't think for anybody and i think that's important to recognize because even in our short trip last week for visitation there's a lot going on every day in our buildings and on the weekends and to say that about not only the cabinet that's sitting up here but everybody who's still here in the audience and
229who's watching us live it it doesn't go unnoticed and i think um i think we're appreciative of that and i agree 100 that i'm appreciative of the efforts because we're doing it for children like emily and students that we have we want to be able to give everybody the best possible year that we can given the circumstances that we're under so i'm appreciative to everyone who's done that a special thank you goes out to those who have been very proactive in kind of getting us to the point that we're in as far as being able to go one-to-one with devices ordering ppe equipment the infrastructure that we've had in the district we're in a very good place right now that we are at least ready to get ready to open minor minor details and things
230might have to be worked out but a lot of the things that some other school districts may be facing as a struggle we're actually ahead of the game so i appreciate the fact that there was some behind the scenes forsythe with that so that's been great i want to wish suzanne and caitlin caldwell a happy birthday i do sincerely apologize as this is now my third meeting my first meeting was a record in time i will note that but my last two have not been and i apologize but i do feel that it is important that with all of the reopening plans and then of course we have other business that we're still conducting as far as some of the presentations which were appreciative i think it's important to us that even though we are
231under the stress of the reopening plan there is still other factors that go into running the school district and we're appreciative to the time for the ap presentation and the department chair presentation so thank you to that we appreciate that congratulations dr vias wish you all the best it's great news for us i too want to reiterate about the graduation for summer school it was excellent congratulations to those students and to the faculty and staff that put that together it was a great experience and for the esy we got to go i don't know if it was called a trunk or tree or what it was called but it was phenomenal and i want to say thank you so much to all the teachers who took the time and and decorated all of their trunks
232i'm sure we have some photos that will probably make their way up onto the website but it was really great they went all out and i think the kids really loved it so i want to say thank you for that ends with that i think that's it you're going to lead us out in songs oh yes no not me you do that i can't say i can't sing either elsie happy birthday to you happy birthday we really need the chorus kids back in here for that so can i get a motion to adjourn motion second all those in favor meeting adjourned thank you