001foreign okay hello everybody thanks for joining us i'm not sure how many people are gonna end up joining us so we're just gonna get started now and again happy that whoever is reviewing us is here with us hopefully after this show we get outside and get some fresh air it's a nice day i just wanted to kind of welcome everybody and run down what we're going to cover today so we'll talk a little bit about the 4x4 schedule and you'll see it for next year for next school year and you'll see in there the new start time and then we'll also talk about um the return in person this year and update on some sports stuff and we'll definitely have time for y'all to ask questions so right now i'm going to hand it over
002to camera and mr mackey to start us off sorry for the delay here we go okay so the first topic that we're going to talk to everyone about today is what next year's schedule is going to look like i know there might be a lot of questions about coming back in person in early may but the first part of this presentation is going to be about your schedule for next year go ahead and miss camera yes it's not advancing it does this it's having a delay i have this problem in a school committee meeting as well um all right miss stucker let's see if i do this i may need to turn this over to ms stocker who's got another version of this that's yup it won't advanced we're still having that problem that we
003had okay so miss camera i'm gonna um if you wanna bring your screen down and i will pull up pull up the slide deck on my computer it'll just take me a minute so fill the time with some witty banter for everything yes i know it's fascinating this worked we tested it a few minutes ago and it worked just fine so it's just not working now yeah for the for the most part what we're doing right now is we're developing the program of studies and this year actually it won't just be a booklet you're actually going to be able to go online to a website that miss della marco is setting up for us where you'll be able to click into each of the departments and read about all the courses that are being offered
004so this year and you know that it's kind of a different schedule it's this three by three so next year we're gonna go with a four by four which means you'll have four classes in the fall and you'll have four classes in the spring since most students have their five core academics which are math social studies science english and world language for a lot of students um we're building um an extra block for more electives for students because we know that that many of you missed out on some electives this year um you know depending on what you are taking so next year we're actually going to do some quarter electives and so i know they have the the slideshow back up so basically the the background and rationale for why we're talking about this
005new schedule for next year is to actually limit the number of classes that you have at one time um we know that while we hope that we're on the other side of covid that it's still going to potentially be important to um for students not to have seven classes at one time and interestingly we've gotten a lot of feedback from students telling us that they really like having fewer classes to focus on at a time so if you're in 9th or 10th grade you know this is going to be the schedule for next year and then and 11th but then the following year we're going to actually look at that in the fall and determine whether or not that's the schedule that we're going to go with um so you'll have input about that as
006well so i think i had mentioned that the program of studies is being developed there'll be a version that you can print as well as one online and then um i think we can we can advance to the next slide so i just noticed that the slideshow that was running was for the family forum and so the student forum one is a little bit different so we're gonna okay we can just yeah we can continue through that i think that students right now would probably want to see the times this is the right one now so she's got it she's okay sorry about that everyone so you can keep going to the um the times because i do think the students are going to want to see that um this was just explaining that we
007looked at several different block schedules and we ended up with the 4x4 so i'm going to turn it over to miss camera right so the good news is you all are are becoming more and more familiar with the block schedule so this shows what the teacher day is um but it also shows the student day so teachers will be working um between eight essentially 8 and 8 45 to collaborate and do iep 504 meetings have some faculty meetings department meetings and again these are estimations the estimations are only estimations because we're working with transportation to sort out bus schedules so take a look on the left side you'll see there's a two lunch option and a three lunch option the two lunch option um is just a tiny bit different and we will have more
008direction on that as time moves forward um from desi and so one of these has more people in one room um at a time than the other as you can imagine given two or three lunches so we're trying to figure that out we don't have an answer yet as to whether or not we'll have one or two lunches um so there are going to be you know if you're on a sports team you may need to miss some of d block and so it's going to be your responsibility to speak with your d period teacher um about those absences but you'll have you know time to plan for the absence and time in class to talk to teachers the athletic director is also going to be commuting with communicating with local other athletic directors to
009see if we can start games a little bit later so we put together some questions in advance you might actually have some of these questions so i'm just going to get started so if you're someone who is in a music or dance ensemble um you might be wondering how that's going to work if if you're going to have to use one or two blocks for that so next year we actually are going to run the music ensembles every other day and then on the opposite day you'll have one of the other courses that you've chosen i started to talk about this earlier so electives are actually going to be offered like they are now which is on a 45-day basis so for each block you'll be able to get two 45-day electives two different electives
010and um for those of you that were in the high school last year uh you know that directed studies was something that was part of you know a lot of you had directed studies when we move to a block where you only have four classes at a time we actually don't have directed studies the hope is that in an 80-minute block you'll be able to get extra help and support within your class and there's also not a good reason to necessarily give students a quarter of their day as a directed study so instead you will actually choose those eight blocks so um what about academic skills um for folks in special ed programs um individual teams are going to need to determine the services that you need and how much time do you need will
011you require a full block or you may require less than a full block um so we will offer academic skills in 80 minute blocks but some folks may decide that they need a little bit less than that so that will be determined on a sort of case-by-case basis another question is will some courses run year long in this block schedule and the answer is yes there will be a limited number of courses that will be double blocked which just means they run for the full year some examples of that are algebra one integrated math one topics in math a b and b c calculus as well as ap physics some courses will also run three quarters of the year um the last point which is you know an interesting question can you double up on
012math or world language and we're going to try and accommodate that right so you will be allowed to request additional blocks and we'll do our best to accommodate those requests so the last two points i i spoke to this for next year we are doing the 4x4 block and then for the year after we're either gonna go back to the seven drop one or we might maintain the four by four that's going to be up to our students our families our faculty and staff to determine whether or not you think that this 4x4 is a better schedule so we will have a process next fall we'll probably do forums like this to to get feedback and see what which schedule we're going to do for the 22-23 school year and then for those of you
013that are interested in learning more about the 4x4 block locally northampton high school does the 4x4 block and also if you want to go online and read more about the block a school cambridge ridge in latin out in the boston area that that school also has a 4x4 block and they have a lot of resources online so we've included a link for you to get more information about that all right hello everybody i'm going to talk to you a little bit about the return to school this spring so last night the school committee approved the may 3rd return date so on monday may 3rd all the schools in amherst k-12 the plan is to have us all back in person five days a week of course for those families students families who chose to be
014back you can see on the screen it says say friday april 30th we're going to have an orientation day for the ninth graders and folks new to the district who've never been in the building before only been in very briefly to get some supplies earlier in the year so we'll be actually looking for some of y'all to give tours to those students and we'll figure out what that day looks like and as it gets closer we'll get more information but i'm going to send this out in an email at the end of the week as well asking people who are interested in giving tours and being part of that orientation to get in touch with either me or you'll see the email return email address on the email that i do send out i mean
015there's a lot of stuff that has to go into getting the building ready to for all you all to come back and then for teachers to be back teaching in their rooms so that does take a lot of work and we do have students who are currently in the building and many of those students will be here in the building and right up until april 16th that last day of the third quarter and right before the april break starts and during the april break we're going to continue to do more work in the building you'll see there'll be signs on the floor you have one way signs distancing signs there are hand sanitizers in all the classrooms we have air purifiers in the classrooms we're trying to make sure all the windows work we want
016to take as many precautions as possible to keep everybody safe so once that work gets done in the following week that week of april 26 the first week of that of the fourth quarter when everyone's back you'll have a day or two of asynchronous learning why teachers are going to come into the building and work on getting their classes all set see i think that's about it for that slide thank you so your schedule is going to be the same obviously you have to get up a little earlier for those of you who are coming in person to either catch the bus or get a ride or walk or ride your bike or however you get here but the first class will start at nine o'clock eight block is still nine to ten twenty b
017block is still 11 30 to 11 50. and when we do lunch before you get here you'll know exactly like which cohort you'll be in we're gonna do two lunches they're gonna be two cohorts so at noon when the first one or 12 11 50 when the first lunch starts if you're on cohort a you may you'll go to lunch and then chances are you'll be getting your food from the cafeteria you have the option right now we're thinking the options will be eaten the cafeteria and we'll have it set up so that everybody will be at least six feet apart in the cafeteria we're actually hoping though that most people will be eating outside right now the plan is to use the courtyard for those of you familiar with this school you know like
018across from the lunchroom outside the lunchroom there's the hall and on the other side of the hall there's a courtroom a courtyard there's also picnic tables outside of the um the cafeteria as well and then we'll may also have you may also have an option of eating in your classroom we're still trying to finalize the plan we're going to work with the food services folks who've been great delivering meals to the community figure out how much they're going to be doing that and then what the capabilities of are of having remote lunch stations and what they'll all look like but there's a lot of planning that has to be done but it'll all be sorted out before y'all get here so you know exactly where you're gonna go and where you'll be eating your the
019options of where you can eat so if you're not in cohort a you know cohort b that is when you'll do your dpi class you'll either be doing that remotely or some of you maybe even be doing it in person a lot for those of you in the building you still may be doing dp remotely or you may be with your d period teacher that all remains to be seen and for folks who have academic skills same thing they'll be if they're in person is when they will have their academic skills during that lunch block and then c block is 1 220 and then 2 at 2 20 we're asking everybody to leave the building at that time the classes are 80 minutes long you're going to be expected if you're in person you're going
020to be expected to get your questions answered during those 80-minute blocks and have any little conferences you need to have with your teachers and at 220 you're going to need to leave the building and something else i should have said also so some of you are going to be getting to the building you know 8 40 8 45 we're not going to open the door unless it's like thunder lightning until 8 50 because we'd much rather have you all kind of congregated outside than congregating in the hall so at 8 50 when the doors open that's when you go to class and so the same thing after school we don't want folks hanging around in the school [Music] being close to one another if you're gonna talk to your friends or wait for practice or
021whatever we're gonna ask that you do it outside because that 220 to 250 time that's when teachers are gonna offer extra help to the folks who are still remote because again if you're in person you're going to have a much better chance of getting your questions answered by the teachers be in the classroom with you and most teachers are coming back i'm going to talk a little bit more about that as we keep going go to the next slide please all righty all right so similar to the 404 block we thought of a few questions that y'all might have and i talked a little bit about the lunch so same thing when i try to make sure everyone's at least everyone will be at least six feet apart during lunch now in the classroom we
022cannot guarantee that we'll be able to set up the classroom where everyone will be six feet apart the average class here can hold 16 people spread six feet apart so chances are we'll be able to accommodate the six feet distance but and that's where our goal is but if a class has 20 people who show up everybody's going to be in the class small 20 people are going to be there in the classroom and we'll space you out as best we can and of course everyone who will be expected to wear masks of that nature and again the physical distancing you'll see the signs out in the hallway when you're in the hallway moving from one class to another when i ask that people are going to keep moving that don't get congregate in large
023crowds you don't want people to be safe we want you to have the interaction be able to see your peers you'll be able to do most of your socializing if you have breaks in your classes or during lunch time or maybe a little bit before school if you hear a little earlier a little bit after school if you're waiting around for sports but really in school you can walk and talk we don't want large groups of people gathering i did also talk about deep period how that's going to happen during the lunch block and a lot of this i tried to cover as i was talking about the schedule we all were going to add enter the building 850 and leave right after school all right hit the last thing it's the last slide [Music]
024and again so yeah 220 out of the building so clubs and these clubs will still be happening virtually but your club advisors may organize some activities for folks in person but it's still going to be mainly happening um virtually we do want to also arrange some sort of social activities for folks after school again reminds me seeing where it belongs the things that we're trying to do we do want to try to create ways for y'all to socialize if you don't play sports or if you're not in clubs but you still want to get together with some of your friends of course you can do that on your own but the school we want to help facilitate some of that as well we have a few good ideas many good ideas from y'all and we're
025also picking up some ourselves and we'll come up with a list of things in times that you all be able to get together let me see what else i have okay for students who remain remote will there be options in the fall to support them with their transition to high school yeah so similar to the orientation that we'll have on april 30th we'll definitely have an orientation in the fall and it's gonna be more than just a half a day thing so we're gonna we'll have a lot of welcoming back events and we want to try to because in the fall it's looking like right now the center for disease control and the massachusetts department of public health and the massachusetts department of education are saying that they want all schools back full no remote
026option for the fall we'll see how that all plays out but we're planning as if everyone will be back full in the fall more people will be vaccinated and hopefully the covert numbers will be way down by then and so we're planning on having one everyone back in the fall so we'll do a lot of welcome back events at that time let's see okay for students who remain remote whether it be oh did i just say that okay many teachers will return in person yet so most teachers will be back we're not exactly sure all who all the teachers are because things are going to change between now and may 3rd some teachers more teachers will be getting vaccinated and they will be back but not every teacher will be back but again most of
027them will so for the teachers who aren't going to be here they will have the google classroom it may look like the google class will be projected onto the whiteboard there'll be another adult in the classroom assisting the students that are there and they'll be on the teacher teaching remotely it'll be almost like the reverse of that for the teacher or the in person the teachers are in person we'll be teaching obviously everyone who's in front of them but they're also going to be running their google classroom for the folks who are remaining remote it's going to be a little tricky so you're going to be patient with us but everyone's working hard to figure out how to make that work very well for people only person and for the people who are remote and
028right now it does look like about two-thirds the people who filled up the survey are saying they want to be in person that's the number we kind of thought we would get and that's definitely where we're at right now there's still about 200 or so of y'all who haven't filled up the survey so if you haven't filled it out we will either be sending another survey to you or giving you a call because we want to make sure that we know what every family's intention is for the return to school now if you're thinking yeah i kind of want to go back but i'm not sure my suggestion would be to fill out the survey or let us know that yes you do want to come back in person because if you come back and
029you don't like it you can then switch to remote because that's an easy fix you just go back and you just join your google classroom remotely and then you know like if you're sick or if you had a travel or something you could potentially even you know still access your google classrooms but if you say no i want to be remote then that's it you're locked in to the remote version for the rest of the school year it's much more challenging with transportation and again trying to figure out how to situate the classrooms and getting everybody fed the contact tracing all the things that go in that we're going to have to worry about and focus on when people are in here so we're asking that if you choose remote that that we're telling you
030that that's going to be your final decision but if you do choose in person you can switch to remote hope that makes sense all right i think that's it for that slide that might be all the slides i'm not sure i can't advance that's all the slides so if you do have questions see there's a bunch of them now there's like two chat features and i wasn't looking at this one okay mr sadiq i wonder if we should start with questions um regarding the 4x4 block we should have probably paused um so we can answer those questions first and then move to the return does that make sense it does okay and i think miss stocker is going to go ahead and highlight the the questions for us um in order to answer them great
031[Music] this might take a minute because there are lots and i also just wanted to pop on screen and let folks know i i want to just highlight um something that jacob brought up which is really important which is that some folks were being locked out on their school chromebooks so sorry i'm showing my comment on jacob's comment and um said the same thing um we are going to this is recorded right now so we will make this recording available to students so anyone who was unable to watch the live version will absolutely be able to watch the recording later so i just want to make sure that's clear to folks before we dive into more specific questions on the 4x4 okay there is one question that i just want to that i'm seeing i
032just want to answer really quick because sure the answer the question is we don't know yet and the question is are we having mcas the answer is that we don't know yet we're still waiting for the state to tell us what if we have to have mcats or not they've given some information to the elementary schools and middle schools about it but they haven't said anything yet about the high school so as soon as we know we will let you know awesome okay so let's start off with this question back-to-back questions is the 4x4 already decided yes for the fall of the 21 22 school year we will be running the four by four block but as mrs cremacki mentioned in the fall or early next fall we will be surveying students and families and
033our faculty and staff to decide what the schedule will be for the 22 23 school year but because of the uncertainty of covid we thought it was and we have to get everybody start to make schedules for next year so we had to make a decision on that that's decided and it was it was also um a directive that came from the school committee superintendent so um this is not something that we as a administration just decided on our own because i see a number of concerns about the lack of input from you all and we do really care um about your thoughts on this because it really matters it is indeed for you but unfortunately we were handed a directive on this one so i'm just going through the comments here to make sure
034we're not missing anything major so here is a good one about the um let's see hang on this is all 4x4 next year just making sure we're getting here we go next year it's a good one from lucy about will we have to miss class every day during our sports seasons um hi lucy i'll answer this one guys um no the answer to that uh question is not every day um some days yes uh lucy i know you're a swimmer i'm not sure what else you may do but it does depend on what sport you do play we're gonna try to get later games practices will start um a little bit later so you should be able to make it work but you will not be missing class every day um here is a question
035this is a great question about for future years from audrey about will there be student input for the 4x4 schedule for next year and audrey i'm assuming you mean by that the 2022-2023 school year yes definitely yeah awesome now let's see what else here's another athletics question that i think is important to sort of address which is about whether we are prioritizing sports over school if we are having to miss class during a deep period [Music] i think it's we try to you know you're a student athlete so it's a balance and you know we do all of us do have to make some choices and the plan is and maybe mr kansas is a bit better but to coordinate with the other schools as best as possible to limit the amount of time that
036you will miss class i don't want to add anything let's do it no i think you also said that you said it really well um as a student athlete and guys you know some of you guys may know i did play at amherst regional high school i also played in college and i think high school is to prepare you for college um and your future going forward um even with my job right now right i have to have um strong time management skills and i'm not an athlete anymore but i can tell you that being an athlete it did set me up for this job so i think that will just better you at the in the long run tessa um and all these other athletes as well so here's a great question about do
037we have the choice to go back into school if we are choosing online or remote learning as we've been doing right now um because i can't go back in time vaccinating which might take a while so any answers for 8 in here yes so unfortunately aydian right now the the way things are going is students who are choosing remote are going to be expected to remain remote for the rest of the school year students who choose in person and start to come to school but realize it's not really working for them we'll have the option to switch because it's much more complicated to add in students after we've gotten the classrooms and the transportation and the lunch situation all situated so unfortunately after the fourth quarter people who may not be vaccinated until you know
038the end of may or june we'll miss those last three four or five weeks those after they won't miss it you just have to remain remote okay so here's a question from jacob um will d-period classes take place when will d-period classes take place for people who are back in the building some clarity on that schedule so that during that hour-long lunch block if you're there'll be two courts of students who will basically have two lunches so people are eating first lunch will go to lunch and then the people who are eating who have second lunch while first lunch is eating second lunch folks will be in either d block a directed study or an academic skills class so it will be during that hour long time and you do some of you who are
039in person may be meeting with your dp teacher in person or you may be also still doing it virtually even though you're in person and obviously people at home you'll be accessing dpi virtually awesome so this is a question about um desiring an option for directed study so i'm wondering if we can talk about maybe a little bit more about why we are not having directed studies or why that's the current plan so i'm i'm happy to start so um i i have i came from a school that was in a 4x4 block and um you know we didn't have directed studies i do think that um one thing we need to think about is thinking about each student as an individual and what you need and for most students who take the five core
040academic classes you're going to have two core academics in one semester and you're going to have three in another semester at the same time you know that our administration and our guidance team we're we're very invested in helping you develop alps independent studies community service work study and so for some students rather than just a directed study it might be that if you get all of your core courses in place and some electives that you love that you might choose to to do an alps or do something that you're really interested in that's going to help you as you think about your post-secondary education so i want us to think not so much like oh we're losing a directed study but let's think about ways that we can work together with your counselors to determine
041what you need and then how we can help you achieve that and like i said we're very open to working with you as you develop different ideas and and like i said those um options that i just laid out for you you certainly will still have those options and i can add one more thing so and next year next school year you will have after school help time so that no after school help time is just for the rest of this year so i say you see at the end it says especially won't have any after school time so after school time i'm assuming you're talking about help you may have sports other things you need to do after school but if you do need to stay with the teacher after school in the fall
042of 2021 you can that's not this spring i'm gonna give a follow-up question from the same person which is um will teachers give us more time in class for work and i i think the answer to that is yes but i would love for miss camera mr mac here mr city to clarify so the ia the hope is that there will be more time within that 80-minute block to actually give individual support and then also give time to do work awesome okay so i'm just trying to scroll through them there's a lot of there's so many questions and they're kind of mixed in with each other so i'm just sort of scrolling through i want to make sure we haven't left any major topics from the 4x4 um out of here i know there's a
043lot in here i'm just wanting to make sure we don't leave anyone behind or any topics behind as best we can and there's also maybe i'm wondering if we can maybe clarify that i don't believe students were ever surveyed about the 4x4 is that correct um there's a lot of surveys that have been floating around so i know it's a little confusing okay so let's see maybe this is a good sort of transition question maybe um because tessa is asking about rearranging our schedule to be safer for covid shouldn't it be safe enough to be regular before we go back and this is a good way to transition because this addresses both the 4x4 and our in-person learning this spring so this like this so we're starting school on may 3rd in person because the
044department of education told us what we have to do they and they anticipate that based on their research the data they've collected from schools across the country that there's going to be a risk there's no doubt i mean kobe it may be with us for the rest of our days and just similar to the flu and cold other things of that nature so they've decided that the risk is not high enough to keep folks out of school so they believe now is the time for us to go back and then also start planning for next year with the intent to be them back full person i mean full time they also believe that with mast lawn and hand sanitizer air purifiers and some other mitigating measures we're taking that it will keep the potential to
045spread down really low and we're hoping that there won't be a spread we won't have to go back to remote totally overall everybody's a little nervous a little excited about coming back but again this was something we told we had to do so we're trying to make the best of it um can i also add that i do think that two things happened at once and that was that we were directed to go to a four by four block at the same time that the community was surveyed about a flipped start and starting the elementary schools earlier than the high school and so even if we went back to the old schedule which was the seven blocks we were still ending school at 3 30. so that was a separate decision and like i said
046they just happened to occur at the same time so i can appreciate that that people are thinking that the block is what's leading us to end at 3 30 but it was really the flip start time and then also being told that we had to do the block so i just want to make sure we're making that distinction awesome um i'm wondering if we want to transition just for time if we want to transition to talking about in person more fully um i'm not seeing a ton of other questions that we haven't addressed or that don't address both schedules um unless there's anything else that anyone else is seeing they want to bring up real quick and if not i think we can transition into the spring um which i think oh sorry this is
047what i i did there was a question about sorry this is lots of questions to look through for next year for net for in person this spring so sorry guys you're asking so many good questions i just don't want to miss any i'm trying to read them all as quickly as i can okay here's a good here's a good question about just logistically is there going to be a school bus when we go back to school how's that going to work for this spring yes there will be school buses part of the survey that was sent out to families asking if they wanted to return if their students wanted to return in person there was also a question on there about school buses if you'll need transportation or not and so once we get all
048the information from everybody and know exactly who will need a school bus then transportation office is going to design the route the bus routes and try to do as much as they can to keep people safe on the buses with people keeping people you know one person do a seat buses windows windows being open trying to take as many preventative measures as possible to keep folks safe on the bus so here is a question that's sort of a four by four question but it's also a in person question about ap schedules and how they're going to be accommodated in may there's lots of ap questions in the chat so okay so some av classes similar to this year will be year-long classes but they will right now the plan is to do ap classes similar
049to next year they're similar to the way they were done this year with the majority of them well all of them starting in the fall and a few of them like ap physics bc calc and i may be missing one or two others that will go all year long if there's other ones that i forgot to name please yeah some will also go three quarters of the year so they'll end in april which is just a couple weeks before the test um actually there's an excellent question in here about college classes so i'm going to just take a minute and answer that so one thing you probably if there's any seniors or juniors on the call here who took college classes you know how difficult that was in the seven drop one because the schedule
050rotated every day so the same classes didn't occur at the same time so the four by four block is actually better aligned to a college schedule especially when they have those longer classes so you would block out one of those classes each semester or you know either semester for college classes so we actually think that the 4x4 is going to allow more students to be able to take college classes and not have to tie up like in the past there were some students that tied up three of their seven blocks just for college classes and in this case it could end up being just one of your eight so miguel's asking a great question about what will classrooms look like in person this spring i can i can take that one um so our our
051goal is to have six feet of physical distance between desks um the cdc is suggesting three feet but we're going to aim a little bit higher than that um for safety's sake um that it will look different right it will there will be the desks need to face forward which is really different than what we've had in the past and the way we run our classrooms the teacher will be sitting at the front of the class using a laptop and looking at the laptop but also and the folks that are on the laptop again are the remote students so they'll be running the meet and that you will be facing the teacher the teacher will be facing you and talking to you but they will also be able to project onto the board what the
052um you know what the individual remote students are are having to contribute um we're working on the bandwidth and the technology that may be a little bit of a trick for us um but we're we've doubled the bandwidth and we're adding access points and doing all sorts of work on that right now but it is going to look different than what you're used to okay so there was a great question in here about the cohorts and how are cohorts being split are there cohorts or some students coming back but not others just looking for some clarity on that right so the the cohorts are going to be designed around lunchtime that'll be similar to the way lectures have been done before they were lunches first lunch second lunch third lunch we divided up by department
053so it may be like math english and social studies woody first lunch and like helping pe in world language another class with the second life so it's going to be divided up something similar to that we'll definitely have but that's the only cohort division people are can decide if they want to come back to be in person or remain remote and at since net since we've been told we have to be in school five days a week we're not going to divide up in the into cohorts that determine who will be in school at which time it's only going to be around the lunches awesome here's another sort of related question about transition times during the day how do we make sure that students are socially distanced when they're going from class to class and
054sorry if we already answered this but it's always about thank you for asking again this is an excellent question and this is hard i think we're going to have to build a culture of health and safety and respect for each other and certainly we will have faculty members in the hallways certainly we will have people communicating and reminding students about health and safety and so but i think as as 9th through 12th graders we're going to have to be sure that students take some of the responsibility for this and that's tricky um because there are more students certainly than there are faculty but we certainly are going to do our best on that but in terms of walking in the hallways um we do have sort of directional arrows i know that you um haven't
055been in the building for a while so i wonder if mr mr sadiq would be willing to talk a little bit about what the building looks like and um because i think that may answer part of this question right so the things that have changed in the building will be the signage that's on the floors in the wall there's like in the main hallway there's the yellow tape mark down the middle and the one side arrow is pointing down the other side arrows pointing up so we're gonna expect you know people and generally that's how the hallway is kind of how people flow through the hallways but now we're just gonna have arrows to remind folks to also to stay six feet apart whenever possible and also to stay on your side of the high
056highway that your side of the hallway not on the highway yet and again you know as this camera said is we're gonna need the assistance of all of you so it's gonna be a challenge we don't want it to be you know adults come on keep moving at y'all all the time like that but we do have to our responsibility is to keep you safe and so that may mean you know what's getting on your nerves a little bit about asking y'all to keep it moving how to spread apart the more you help us with that the less it's gonna be like a struggle a little more smoothly it'll flow and things will be more peaceful and enjoyable for all of us if we work together to try to make keep everybody safe um i
057do see one question i've lost it in the chat so i'm just going to ask it out loud which is also from jane about masking and whether double masking or just single masks will be required yeah so right now it's my saying single masks are going to be required i know i have a believe most people have they don't match at this point but we will have extra mass in the school for people who if their breaks or if something happens to it during the day and but we will be expecting everybody who does not have a medical undocumented medical reason which there are some so there are some students who have a documented medical reason to not wear a mask but we're expecting that everyone else will have a mask on unless they have
058talked to the teacher and in the designated break mask break area whether that's a part of their classroom or outside or of course during lunch and during lunch is the time when we know most people will be unmasked can't eat through a mask obviously and so we're gonna have we'll put extra caution to try to spread everybody out as much as we can and keep people outside as much as possible and some of your classes will be outside as well we don't have like a exact schedule of which classes will be outside when we just know that the main goal is to have lunch outside every day as possible awesome so i'm seeing sort of a related questions that write back-to-back which is will there be staggered passing periods to reduce people in the hallway
059and then a related question was will we be rotating classrooms or just staying in one room and the teachers moving so those seem like related questions to me yeah so we can't stagger the dismissal and you will be going to all of your classes and that's the reason why we can't stagger it so the teachers are going to be back in their classrooms the classrooms that they were in for the most part before we left last march with you could be in an algebra class with 12 people and those 12 students may need to go to 12 different classes so if we staggered the dismissal and say we dismissed the second floor first then maybe the third floor would still have a lot of people in the hallways because they wouldn't be able to get
060into their classroom because there's still these there could be students and they're waiting inside the classroom waiting to get dismissed and if we our plan before we were told we had to come back five days a week was it going to be something similar to having students and like learning centers in the school but we expected a lot fewer folks to be in the school and we would be able to do that but now with at least two-thirds of the students in the building we have to run it very similar to the way it was before the shutdown except we'll have mass you know the hand sanitizers the air purifiers more windows will be open the signage in the hallway everybody will be more aware and trying to get one another everybody to stay a
061little bit further apart and things of that nature but in terms of moving through the hallways and all that that's gonna look really similar to the way it did before we shut down last march so there was a great question in here about traveling this spring i'm gonna see if i can find it here it is it's also from grant um if students travel out of state for whatever reason during the last quarter will they be expected to quarantine before returning to in-person learning i think that's a great question the answer is yes if you travel to a place that is on and it'll be determined by obviously where you go and what the restrictions are based on where you travel so if you travel to a state that the expectation is when you come
062back when you go back to your home state because of how high their numbers are you need to quarantine then you just access your your learning remotely for the time you're quarantined and then you'll be allowed to come back in to the school to join us in person great question all right so there's some other good ones in here lots of good ones i should say um there's some great questions about vaccines and whether or not um students will be expected to get vaccinated if they are eligible which we know not all students are but if you are eligible yeah that's totally a decision that you and your family have to make there's no the district is not requiring anybody to get vaccinated so again if you and your family decide and you have the
063opportunity to vaccinate and you want to do that that's up to you it's your decision awesome let me see here here's a question about testing while we have access to testing in person we are working on getting pooled testing up and running the district has been talking about it for a little while and we're trying to figure out how to really make that work and if we do get it up and running everyone's family will be sent a consent form and for those families who want to be involved in the testing they would sign a consent form and then we would set up a system to periodically other nurses here periodically test folks but we will have for people who are showing symptoms we do have i think it's called the binex text test is
064what i think the name is and it gives results in 15 minutes and we will have like a medical waiting room for anybody who does start to show symptoms then the nurse will be alerted they'll be taken in there you'll be talked to by the nurse your family will be contacted and there's a whole procedure in place for people who are showing symptoms during the school day and then there is also right now for the students who come their families get a text or an email and they're asked questions about you know if if you are have a fever if you've been exposed in the presence of anybody who's tested positive in the last day because every morning we'll have something similar to that for this spring and then i'm not really sure if we're
065going to continue that in the fall or not all right i am just scrolling through here to see if there's any other topics that we haven't covered i know there's many many questions but they some of them are covering the same thing multiple times so let me just make sure we're not missing anything major miss stocker i just want to offer up that you know everybody's circumstances is unique and so if you're thinking about next year's schedule and you're really stressed or concerned or want to talk through what that could look like please reach out to any one of us in addition to your counselor because i really would like to work with you to make sure you feel like you have a schedule that you really love for next year and um so just
066you know please consider doing that that's awesome um i think i can speak for everyone else in this call and say we fully agree with you and i'm sure other teachers would point you into one of us if you had questions they couldn't answer um there is a question about and i know we've talked about this a couple times already but i think it's worth reiterating which is if you are choosing to go back into school but you are not vaccinated yet and you want to wait to get your vaccine could you just stay remote until you are ready to go back in even though you've chosen remote or chosen in person rather on the survey even if i got that wrong if i misinterpreted your question please tell us [Music] that's that that's a
067good question so we're we're going to be planning to accommodate all the people who choose in person and we know some people will be absent for a variety of reasons and we'll have to play it by ear i'm hoping that people try to you know abide by whatever decision that they make if but you're gonna have to do what you have to do but again we're gonna go by the list of folks that we have who are we see who have chosen in person and we're gonna make the appropriate accommodations and adjust kind of around around that list mr sadiq do you mind if i add a little to that please do yeah um so the one of the challenges with this aiden is that um we're managing transportation routes um and that's very complex
068and so the bus routes are complicated but also we're managing in the in-school space um and so we can only accommodate approximately 16 kids per classroom um if we're trying to keep the six foot space and so if people decide to come in who hadn't or who get vaccinated and want to come in it may actually be that we don't have the physical space and it's really tricky to plan for that and so that's why we're asking you to decide now so we can plan for it in advance does that make sense i hope i hope that helps all right i'm just going through one more time there's about you know we're reaching 55 minutes of this meeting so i want to make sure people have a chance to get outside and enjoy their half
069day and not just remain glued to their screen um but i want to make sure we also aren't missing anything big so i'm just scrolling through carefully mira is asking us a great question mira thank you it hasn't quite come through yet to the chat but she is asking on youtube what will you do if there are more than 16 students who choose to return for a class here it is so they will be in the class and we'll try to keep you as distant as possible that's why we're saying we can't guarantee the three feet distance i mean the six feet distance but that's our goal is to have six feet between everybody but we're not gonna if 17 or 18 or 20 students show up for a class we're gonna accommodate what those
070everybody's gonna be in the class together but so the folks in that class just gonna have to have to be a little bit more mindful of keeping their mask up trying to stay as distant as possible right now the guidance from the state and the cdc is they only expect us to keep you all three feet apart but we want to try to keep you all at six feet apart whenever possible awesome thank you for that clarification i think that's a great question um and then this is a good one i think to end on because it is really pointing to the fact that students are being asked if they will get the survey to go back if they want to go in person or remain remote and i think it would be a good
071time for us to replug that survey and focus on where their parents or adults in their household can respond to it yeah so i'll say we've been sending it to families because we thought we sent it to the families and students and it may get filled out twice and it would not give us accurate data so we've been sending it just to families hoping that y'all talk to your families and let them know or they've talked once they got their survey that they asked you and consulted with you and let you know what was going on and figure out what is the best decision for your entire family for you and everybody in your house there is a i'm seeing a couple questions about mask wearing in school that i want to highlight because there's
072quite a few of them right in a row so um tessa is asking what would happen if the student who has their mask below their nose or is fooling around with it and then also a follow-up question from mira which is will students be asked to go home if they aren't complying with math squaring guidelines or i presume other social distancing measures that we have in place so it when we see students who aren't like following the rules you know our approach is going to be to try to find out like what's going on and maybe that there's something else happening with the student and this is kind of how it's playing out again you know as this camera said we're trying to we wanted to really develop a culture of health and safety and
073respect for one another we know that covert is not a game there's nothing funny about it so we're going to be relying on the maturity of a lot of you to abide by the rules and so it will start with a conversation but the expectation is that if you do if you don't have a medical exemption you're supposed to be wearing your mask unless you're outside on a break when you're eating lunch and that those times you're going to be expected to be at least six feet apart from everybody and if you can't do that then the conversation may if it gets extreme enough will have to lead to if being in person is the best choice for you we want people to who are going to be in the building want people back in
074the building who obviously you want to learn you want to see your friends not going to be able to socialize the way you did before which is unfortunate we want to provide this opportunity to as many people as possible and if people are not having their masks on and the spread happens then no one's gonna have the opportunity to be in person so we're gonna have to stick by those rules and it you know not a lot of wiggle room one conversation hopefully that will take care of it if it doesn't then we'll have to take next steps with maybe connected family and seeing if in person is the right place or not excellent answer there's also some questions about hand sanitizing and other sort of measures and there are hands i can testify i
075was in the high school about a week and a half ago and there are hand sanitizers all over the place so in every classroom yes and we will be asking um students to sanitize their hands before and after eating and then also if they are eating inside to to clean the desk that they've eaten on again we're hoping to have students eat outside as much as possible because it's much safer but in general we're gonna we're gonna be careful about this and make sure that people are awesome well it is 1 30. i'm just looking at the chat now i'm not seeing any other questions coming flying in but there are a few questions about just in general like some other sort of social distancing things including a really good one from grant and from
076andre actually back to back about bathrooms and in person limits on bathroom use as they're often a place where students congregate which we know to be true that is a great question so yeah i'm thinking that we're going to have to have some sort of limit how we're going to enforce that we will have hall monitors campus monitors as we did before and a lot of this is gonna be an opportunity for a lot of y'all to be really mature and work with us we're we're gonna have to all work together to make this to make this happen to be able to keep the school open for the rest of the fourth quarter so people who want to have the in-person option have it if people start you know taking their masks off and not
077following the rules that just increases the chances of school having to go back to full remote and you know people getting sick we don't want that that's the last thing we want so we're going to really be expecting everybody to take this serious and to be mature and to work with us and you know we'll have guidelines and clear expectations as well about the limits of folks who could be in the bathroom or in certain places i do see a really oh yeah vulture asked a great question i just i saw that this camera answered it in the chat as well but um students will be able to log into their meets whether if they're in person depends on what your teacher is doing obviously for class but that is our hope is that students
078will be able to still keep their classroom communities oh here's a good question from jane about after school or outside of schools issues so if someone is not social distancing outside of school will they be asked to return to remote learning i think they would only be asked to return online like if they were symptomatic or if they tested positive if they're asymptomatic like we couldn't we can never control what people do outside of school so but there if when things do happen outside of school that impact the school day then is when the school gets involved whatever that may be like cyberbullying or something crazy going on outside of the school but that will also now include um people who are like if you know you've been exposed if we find out that you've
079been in a presence with someone who has covet well when we find that out we would ask your family to keep you home until you are you follow those procedures that are set by the department of public health before you come be allowed to come back so there's a great question from sarah here about will students be able to leave during lunch if they are uncomfortable eating inside and the weather weather is not suitable for eating outside that day just for the hour for their half hour lunch break we're not gonna if we're not gonna have an open campus like that the students like if you get dismissed during the day you know we're asking that that would be the end of your day at school and of course there may be some specific exemptions
080to that but generally speaking students are not going to be allowed to leave during the half hour lunch block um and i will there's two question questions in here that i think are good hang on i just lost my last night please with my mouse um so um oh mirrors we got answered but mira asked about basically is our wi-fi capable enough maybe this camera maybe you can amplify your answer here yeah so we're doing an assessment of that right now and so we have to do individual classroom assessments as well as hall assessments in terms of the access points um as well as the additional drops so our hope is yes that the bandwidth will be good enough and if not we have lots of ideas um about how to do how to deal
081with that and it could be that you'll have to leave your chromebook at half mast while the teacher is teaching it may be that the students in the classroom will have to see the remote students just on the projected on the board um it may be that we have to coordinate synchronous and asynchronous um time between departments so there are a lot of ways to to mitigate that concern and we're working on it awesome so i wanted um lots of people asking to have jacob's question addressed which is about people are partying or traveling after school affect the school day waiting until someone is symptomatic or they get tested seems like it might be too late yes i agree jacob but it's really hard to keep track of what people are doing outside of school
082so we hope that people have been taking precautions all along and not partying people travel and hope they're cautious and follow the guidelines set by the department of public health we're going to be expecting and hoping and wanting people to do the same if like if someone's posting pictures of themselves online at a party where no one has a mask on that's one thing but we can't go by like rumors like we you know we have to we can't just tell someone because we heard that they might have been at a party that they can't come to in person when they choose in person we're trusting that people are going to be responsible and realize that their actions do now more than ever maybe affect other people so um yeah i don't really know what
083else to say if all your other you want to add to that one yeah all right so i think we'll take two more questions um just i want to be mindful of everyone's time um so there's a couple questions about this um about sort of before and after school social time or just social activities in general and after school activities that i think would be nice to emphasize for students yeah so i mentioned earlier that if students do get here earlier some students will get dropped off by the buses at 8 40 some will arrive here however they're gonna get here before 8 50 and you can socialize outside at that time and again if you have if your class is on the first floor you know it's going to take you two minutes to
084walk to your class you could stay outside you know until like 8 55 or so and then walk to your class have a little time then if you don't take a bus or get picked up right after school you can socialize that after 2 20 when you first leave class and we do we are still working on ways try to organize some activities for students who aren't playing sports not in clubs so you can socialize with one another a lot of that is based on student input input we've had a meeting with the senior class on the student advisory council to get some good ideas now i'm in the process of trying to organize that along with just bringing you all back to school and getting ready for next year and a lot of other
085things we're trying to organize there's a lot happening but we're thinking about it awesome so i'm gonna sneak in one extra question just because i think it's a good follow-up to jacob's question just a minute ago from mira which is what should students do if they see their peers doing things that are not safe yeah i think that you should so depending on who it is i know not everybody feels comfortable by you know advising telling their their peers like yeah you shouldn't be doing that but if you do if you please tell them like please don't do that doesn't have to be a rude jump on them calling them out type of thing but just a general reminder or let an adult know again this is not it's not snitching because now the the
086stakes are so much higher now we just don't we don't want anybody to catch covet ever especially not in school because somebody else is being careless and we just don't know how what people's home situations are if they catch covet and they bring it home we've heard all the terrible stories so we're really hoping that number one people are getting responsible again i'll go back to what this camera said with the culture of you know health and safety and respect for one another it's gonna be more important now than i think at any other time and we you know we're gonna ask that y'all remind each other we all forget everyone needs reminders and that you don't take it as a joke and that you you know are respectful awesome thank you so much i'm
087just seeing mira's uh have some funny hashtags in the chat i highly recommend looking at them i think a good last question is just as from kimberly that i said from a few other folks about maybe just giving us one last sort of overview of what the day will look like for both in-person and remote learners um and then i think lots of thank yous from folks about giving us the time to do this we really appreciate hearing from all of you so um uh so the day again the classes are gonna be happening at the same time some of it honestly i mean i have in my mind what i'm hoping the day will look like but it's you know we'll really see once we get here all the classrooms are going to be
088set up a little bit differently teachers have different styles on how they're going to do things we're expecting that remote learning will look the same for everybody well basically the same you may not really see as many folks in your google classroom you may see them through the teacher's camera in the class it kind of remains to be seen on what we can really figure out and make happen but in school some of it will look like it did before coveted shut down in terms of moving from one class to another fewer classes in the movie too i'm expecting just about everybody except those who have medical reasons not to everyone wearing a mask you'll see the signs on the floor flowing through your day and then you'll be leaving right after school when some
089a lot of people were used to kind of hanging out in the halls and in a rotunda after school that's not going to be happening this spring we're going to ask that if you want to hang out that you do it outside and do it right out in front of the school still expecting you to you know have your mask on or at least be six feet away from everybody else but yeah i also just oh go ahead go go ahead no i just also wanted to um say that you know to the extent that they can come in our guidance counselors and other support staff will be available um you can actually schedule appointments with them right on your computer like you do now so even when you're in school and um you know
090we're talking to the counselors about having some space for some support groups having opportunities for informal groups outside and um and they will you know they will find a way to meet with you you know whatever that's going to look like um so you will still have access to that support as well and actually the counselors are doing a coffee tonight with the pgo um with families and so if you're interested in more information about that you know please encourage your families to to sign on to that coffee tonight yeah that's a great great reminder and i think um with that i think we are ready to sort of end this this meeting i i want to just thank everyone for joining us um your questions are so good and it's it's really very moving
091to me as a teacher to hear from all of you and how invested you are in you and your peers safety and um the quality of your education so i'll let other people close off but yes thank you i'm so glad you're here we miss you all we're sorry we can't see your faces but it's good to see your your comments and your questions we look forward to seeing those of you um that come back but also those of you that are remote and in google meets which is also again both are great choices you'll need to make the decision that's best for you i said yeah hopefully everybody take care and get outside some fresh air bye everyone have a great rest of your day and let your friends know if they want to
092watch this later we'll make the link available