Family Start Time Town Hall

001good morning everyone this is superintendent mike morris and thank you for joining us for this morning family start time town hall really appreciate you starting your day with us you're starting part of your day with us we're going to kind of what we're going to do is just do some introductions we'll go through some slides but the bulk of the time we'll say to end by 10 if not a couple minutes earlier we'll be really focused on q a and getting questions out so i'm mike morris i'll turn it over victoria to introduce herself hi my name is victoria stewart i'm the athletic director for the high school in middle school and diego hi my name is diego sharon and i'm the principal at the middle school and mickey hi i'm mckeeker mackey assistant principal

002at the high school and derek good morning everyone my name is derek shay i'm the principal at crooker farm and sam hi i'm sam cameron er the interim assistant principal at amherst high and marta we're just doing quick introductions hi this is marta guevara director of student and family engagement and and uh i'm going to have these guys fade into the green room for a bit because we're going to do some slides but before we do just the way to put a question or comment in the chat is the lower right hand corner you should see that there's a little empty box and you can put questions or comments in there so just so everyone feels comfortable if or if you do feel comfortable just saying what i'm finding is once people can put something

003in there once then we don't have to deal with technical challenges later what's your favorite ice cream flavor i know it's weird to think about ice cream this time of year but people put in their favorite ice cream flavor i'll do so myself this one at flavor is really good i think it's called oh i'm going to blink in the name it's been a couple months since i've been there but if you are able to put some comments in the chat then we know that you can put things in your chat not everyone's in the mood for ice cream that's okay but just wanted to at least give everyone that thank you very much carrie um not my favorite flavor but i'm glad you're participating so we just want to make sure that everyone knows

004how to put questions in again because much of this hour will be listening and responding to questions much less about presentation one other thing as we're getting organized and going that i'm going to put is the presentation for today it's going to go out um thank you oh now we can see in some other ones pair sorbet that sounds good i've not had that one um we're just going to put the link to the presentation uh also in the chat so if you are looking for um looking for that you can follow along i'll be presenting it but it's it is a public access document so people are willing to access it that way as well all right at this point i'm going to pull some of our good folks off they'll be back on

005later responding to questions but i'm going to put the presentation up and they'll be in the green room during this time and share my screen and there we are i think this will make it a little bit easier to uh to view so again today's topic is about start times uh so i'm going to go over some some background uh some history and then what's being considered this year i think it's really worth noting before we get to the next slide that um this is not a new conversation in this community this kind of comes up every couple of years there was a major effort in 2011 to 2012 with a 50 some odd page report that was incredibly well done and everything that's in the report is still true now there's more data to

006back it uh but there was plenty of data then as well so this is not a new conversation in in this community are many communities in massachusetts it is something that we are exploring for the start of the next school year and we'll talk a little bit about why in a second so just starting with the research and implications of later start time for secondary school students in particular in our district secondary school starts in seventh grade so the first bullet point students are like more likely to get adequate sleep what research would show about two-thirds of three-quarters of the additional time that folks get if we have a later start time that students get will be dedicated to sleep i think there's some uh some myths out there that if you start an hour

007later that the kids will just stay up an hour later and and evidence shows that you know about three quarters of that they'll spend sleeping in about 15 or excuse me 25 percent of that they'll spend staying up later um so it does actually involve more sleep secondly the outcomes seem better few things in educational research are as clear as the benefits of later start times for secondary school students you can see some of the implications there there is a reduction in tardiness and absences which links then to the outcomes and finally there's a reduced likelihood of car crashes this is a very serious statistic and and i think it's worth noting not just car crashes driving to school which said in the slide i saw some some increasing evidence over the weekend about research

008about uh car accidents uh later in the day or even in the evening as students have been up for an extended period of time uh the link that is in the chat um if you click on the research the reason it's in green at the hyperlink there's about eight or ten research articles for those of you who like to read academic research i find it really fascinating on this topic and then there's a cdc chart that also kind of talks about some of the other well-being implications about physical activity social emotional health and others uh this is uh was a slide put together by a colleague of mine um on the cape and coming from research this really fascinating piece about the circadian wake up time you could see that as students get older they

009are naturally going to wake up later we're having a student town hall by the way on wednesday i'm going to try to get some some quantitative data as well some qualitative data from our middle school and high school students on this topic i'm really curious what they tell me you could see that ideally we can't start school at 11 o'clock or i we can't meet that ideal start time for our older students many of you are parents and you've recognized that as students as typically as students get older they do need to sleep later and so what we realize is that with the wake up time that we have in our current situation uh for our secondary school students they're not only losing a little bit at the end of their sleep cycle their sleep

010cycles literally being interrupted five days a week that if they're naturally going to sleep till eight or nine o'clock and they're waking up between six or seven uh that's that's rem sleep that's high quality sleep that our students need that they're not getting so our current situation is that prior to the school year our drop-off time was about 7 30 at the regional schools and class first bell ring 7 45 our first bus pickup is 6 37 to make that work we have seven buses that have a first pick up at the regional level before 7 a.m and all there's buses bus stops in each of our four towns at the regional level that start before seven in the morning it's not just shoots bear and leverage at the elementary our bus drops are about

0118 30 and we have five buses that start with pickup time before 8 o'clock the current school year with the covet impacted schedule we have this 9 o'clock start time at the secondary schools and one of the reasons frankly we're having the conversation is that i can't have a conversation with a middle school high school student where this topic doesn't come up uh often in the lens of are we really going back to a 7 45 start time next year because of the implications that they're experiencing uh with the later start time so just some quick data we have more of it but i didn't want to overwhelm with the number of slides last year the 113 days that school was in session uh at the high school seven percent of students were the average

012average on an average day seven percent of students were were tardy daily uh i think it's also worth noting that that was increasing throughout the year in other words the month of september that number was a lot lower and as we hit winter that number was steadily increasing so i think it's almost under reporting uh the level of tardy but seven percent a lot of students to report on a daily basis additionally anecdotally staff and students report lower engagement in those eight period classes the first period class of the day and that's true at both the middle school and high school so we have a couple options for next year one is we could revert back to our prior schedule start at nine excuse me instead of starting at nine go to 7 45 for

013the secondary schools and same schedule for elementary the other option we're pursuing is to flip the time so that means the elementary before the would be before the secondary schools and that would mean buses arriving around 8 10 at the elementary level so that's about 25 minutes earlier 20-25 minutes earlier than uh currently they currently do and secondary school is about 905. uh we did look at pushing just the school schedules back but our partners in the shoots baron levered at those elementary schools it's not feasible for a whole host of reasons to push their schedule back so really we have these two options that we're pursuing and school committee does expect to you know gather feedback and make a decision for the next school year the first week of march so why are we

014talking about this now if it comes up all the time there's certainly not a short supply of other things to work on a really good article about gel meadow last month in the new york times again there's a hyperlink to this in the document that's in the chat but one of the things that we're recognizing is we've already made tremendous adjustments this year to schedules to start times and we're more flexible than perhaps we thought we were and we've learned a lot you know some lessons of what's working some lessons frankly what's not working one of the things that we are hearing is that what is working at the secondary level is having a later start time and so we think it is an opportunity to pursue that it is a short timeline to make

015that decision but it's that we have now data back uh mostly qualitative we'll get quantitative next week about how this is going and how it's impacting our students on a daily basis other communities are doing the same um i see those questions i'll probably get to those in the uh after there's only a couple more slides um in northampton they made this change uh for the next school year they voted um last month and you can see proposal a and proposal b are flips to their start time schedule or their schedule with the elementary starting first and this was the overall results i think this is all on their website over i i it's a public document every single stakeholder group in northampton uh advocated for having the elementary schools start first given the data

016and what they're hearing from secondary school students and so this is the aggregate data but it was true among students parents guardians as well as staff members and and they opted for proposal a oh i should say um i can do this while this slides up um that um there's eight metro west districts who also made similar changes of pushing the start time of their secondary schools back the year before so that we're not the trend setters or the the only people looking at late start times again across the country many people but within massachusetts we've seen a shift to this in the last two or three years here are some of the local implications on logistics in the schedule so the elementary schools it means we'll have earlier bus runs probably again about 20-25

017minutes earlier than what they were previously as stated earlier we are looking and engaging with our after-scare programs about additional hours and perhaps additional demand because this missile looks about 240 245 again basically the elementary level everything pushes up about 20 or 25 minutes both in the morning and the afternoon at the regional schedule we're looking at a later dismissal again around 3 30 our transportation department's working on actively get it fine-tuning these numbers but this is where we are at this point we are looking at revising the schedules to reduce transition times in other words keeping the same amount of instructional hours but reducing the non-instructional hours to shrink the length of the day so students can get a get out a bit earlier part of that is looking at our bus schedule i

018will say that we are looking to reduce pickup locations and reduce the number of bus stops primarily at the regional level but we've dug in and we're looking at the elementary level as well what we notice compared to our partner districts is we have many more stops for the same number of students and many of these stops involve three bus stops each 200 yards away from one another with no crosswalk or no danger no excuse me cross street uh or no dangerous pickup our school committee policy lists how how many miles we can ask students to walk to a bus stop which is i believe two we're nowhere close to that and we are looking to you know three reasons one it'll reduce the time between the two runs the elementary or on the secondary

019run the second reason is it's consistent with our local peers third reason is environmentally when you start and stop all the time that's adding a lot to our carbon footprint and finally we look at equity and we look at students living in high density houses and how long they have to walk versus single family homes and right now what we've discovered is we have some inequities that we need to address in that regard as well so we are looking at pickup locations which would contribute to perhaps shrinking that time between the runs certainly athletics is a huge deal as ms stewart can attest to and all of us on the line can attest to and high school in particular is looking at some dynamic schedules where the end of the day might have more flexibility

020where right now athletics don't start before before three o'clock and we think we can either maintain that or adjust it a bit where athletics might have to start a little bit later but not as much as what we originally feared not as much as what we thought about in 2011 and 2012 when this came up so we we do think there'll be a low impact on athletics and you know many thanks to sam mickey talib and others at the high school who are actively looking at kind of more creative schedules and how to make the end of the day have more flexibility the way the beginning of the day does now right now so students typically get there at 8 30 classes start till 7 45 can we build in some flexibility at the end

021of the day at the high school to make that happen we believe that we can we also are concerned about staff schedules we want to make as minor changes as possible to make sure that we can offer instruction and safety throughout the day so we are actively looking at what that would mean and we had a staff town hall last week and i continue to receive feedback on that topic so we are looking to engage the larger community for those who don't know i'm not going to read the whole list but cpac is a special education parent advisory advisory council bpac is a bilingual parent advisory council um pgo's parent guardian organizations we are engaging our partner districts in shootsbury and levitt we care deeply about their input on this i'm not the superintendent i

022don't work for those communities but they partner with us they share bus runs which saves everyone as a to everyone's financial benefit um so we are having town halls like this we are having some focus groups with some of the groups i mentioned earlier uh we're having some surveys i'll talk about that in a second and we're looking for this engagement to happen you know essentially let in the next month so it's it's a big push at this point in time but we think it's the right push this needs to be updated a little bit uh which i need to do this morning but you can see that we have a date schedule for a focus group with cpac we could get bpac and some of the other groups on there i know marta is

023working with the pgos and the family center advisory group but we are continually doing feedback cycles with staff with the community and we'll have a survey out on wednesday afternoon which tries to get quantitative and qualitative feedback from all stakeholder groups students secondary students families and staff members about this idea and about why they think the way they think and what are potential barriers to either of the options that we're looking at and finally these are five professional groups who are endorsed at 8 30 or late start time for secondary school and you what you'll see again in the in the presentation which the hyperlink has is the link to their position papers um so this one i will read because i think any time the american medical association the center for c disease control

024american academy of pediatrician society behavioral medicine american psychological association all come out with position papers on something i think it's incumbent on us to at least explore what we can do here uh and how we can help so i tried to be succinct with that um because i think as i said at the beginning i wanted there to be much more question and answer than uh presentation and so i think we'll have a two to one ratio of that today so that should be good and let me remove this from there and open it up for question uh feedback and comments so i see that there's one here is the 905 the bus arrival time or the school start time what would that look like for the ending time um so again we're we're hoping

025to get that as close to nine o'clock as we can and we are envisioning that we students would head straight to class instead of having that kind of bubble time that they do now and that would be much more on the back end so we are shooting for about a 3 30 3 35 end time again those are things that are in progress um in terms of exploration depending how much we can shrink the bus routes um and we think we we've made some good success of some of our longest ones now i think we have a couple that are this year would have been slated to be over 50 minutes and we're we're all under 50 minutes at this point we're seeing how close we can cut it but you know i think roughly

026nine to 330 is the general uh idea and we'll see if we're able to get there as we redo bus routes [Music] and at the elementary level again we're thinking about 240 245 because we're starting that much earlier so again at the bottom right you can just post a comment or a question and we want to hear from from the community from all of you appreciate you coming in in the morning any thoughts you have that you'd like to share with us or any questions about this we know it's a very large topic that would influence everyone well in giving people time to put in some questions we want to note and acknowledge that the earlier start time at the elementary level may be welcomed by some we know that how late our elementary schools

027start is hard for some families right now and for others it will create challenges and that's the same true at the secondary level there are early birds who are up at six in the morning uh even though their circadian rhythms probably are uh wake up would say different on a medical uh document we know there are students who get up earlier and so we know that it's it's it's imperfect there's no way to solve everybody everybody's sleep cycles but we think this may be worth exploring are the elementary schools prepared for after-school programs will they be free so we're fortunate to have our three providers um in our in our district all of them do use subsidies so it would be extending the day perhaps by 20 or 25 minutes and we would imagine that

028that same the same providers would be working in the same way as they do now and i'm just going to go in order of what i see what is time frame making decision this and how will the union be involved many elementary parents reliance on aftercare babysitters after care programs need to have time to plan that's exactly right so the time frame making decision i think was one of the earlier slides but the school committee plans to vote on this in the first week in march and you know this would be perhaps impact bargaining with our union if we change schedules um and that's why you know again dr kavara is connecting with the aftercare programs for exactly the reason you said to make sure they have time to plan and can build capacity elementary

029dismissal of 245 is really early for working parents elementary school students so there'll be sufficient room and after school programs for those who need it and again that's where uh working with our aftercare programs to expand it is something that's on our list and is actively um in place right now in general the aftercare programs do well the more students who attend the more capacity they have so um we have not had a problem in the past with overcapacity at after school programs the challenge much more is when it's under capacity in terms of their ability to run effective programming i really like the whole idea it makes a lot of sense can you comment on why we require athletics to adjust somewhat to the new schedule so i don't know if mickey sam or

030victorio would want to uh jump in but i will bring them in and then they can choose who uh jumps in on this one yeah i'll take that um so really the only reason why athletics can um needs to make sure require athletics to adjust somewhat to this new schedule um we typically have practices at three o'clock or 3 15 however when we travel to games student athletes need to be there around three o'clock so we normally have to sometimes get out early up 2 20 um right before we normally get out this year so next year would have to be the same you'd have to get out early and leave block four earlier than normal and um sammer mickey would you like anything you want to add on that one okay sounds good and

031making elementary school start earlier make the end of the day earlier parents are offering work schedules around 310 dismissal when employers expect a nine to five workday and then this continues i think uh how are you reaching out to major employers like umass and amherst college to ensure their employees will be supporting the possible change that's a great question i'm going to put that on a list of things to do um to reach out i think we do want to reach out to employers and i think you know that we're you know between umass amherst college and and the districts i work for those are the three biggest employers in town and it's a great idea and we'll take that advice and be able to and put that into place thank you how would the

032support affect course offering scheduling i'm concerned with the current situation where we only have math and language arts language one semester versus across the whole school year it certainly could um it's a related but different conversation and and some of that is really around covet and looking at cover the reason we went to a block schedule at the high school this year wasn't around a larger question about the schedule it was about how do we reduce the number of exposures possible exposures that kids have we don't really know at this point what vaccination rates will have for students under the age of 18 as many of you know the vaccines aren't going down that young right to the people that young right now and we don't know what that's going to look like in the

033fall so we may be in a situation we want to explore the block for a whole host of reasons northampton for instance does have a block schedule has for many years and has had they've had a lot of success with that i'm not ready to make that determination but i think you know well i'm optimistic around vaccination um you know the fact that there are trials going on for children under 18 is fantastic we don't know exactly where we'll be when we get to fall so there's some of it's the general schedule and some of it's actually around covid and understanding what the implications of running a schedule are and what are potential exposures that need for quarantine so we may still be in that world in the fall sorry to be pessimistic perhaps on

034that but that is that is part of our thinking does the condensing of the middle school high school affect a time students have to eat lunch i've heard you're considering allowing only 20 minutes for lunch is that healthy for students so i've not been part of any conversation in which we're expect we're considering 20 minutes for lunch i'm happy to disavow the rumor uh but i'm glad you brought it up that um it's really around transitions how many transitions do we have during the course of the school day if we are still considering a block schedule that's fewer transitions than if we're in a seven drop one schedule throughout the day and those minutes add up so it's i've not been part of any conversations about lunch um already had one situation this year where

035school committee voted on something parents started planning and everything changed with union negotiations no question just sharing the concern thanks for sharing it how can you can you speak more to athletics to be affected especially winter sports how would this affect children's ability to attend after school help and athletics so um perhaps i'll get our um uncle diego in this um our team here um and if you if there's more to add you know particularly with the 3 p.m um start time for athletics now and what potentially it looked like in the in the past yeah so right now students are typically affected on by this so they aren't penalized though if they have to come to practice um late uh so they can still stay after school during any of those times as well

036and just let their coach know that they're gonna be late just so they know where they're at mickey sam anything you want to add in terms of some thinking that is currently going on about on this topic so i'll just add that the flip start time is one factor but the schedule that we're in next year would um we're mapping out both types of schedules a seven drop one and we're mapping out a four by four block which is what northampton's using and with the four by four block we actually get all four blocks in by three o'clock which allows the flex blocks that often exist in block schedules to occur between three and three thirty which would allow flexibility for students across the high school whether they're athletes or whether they do out or

037they do which is our alternative learning program where we really promote experiential learning internships uh classes so with the block we do get that extra half hour from three to three thirty if we go with the seven drop one and again this is just you know the covet certainly has implications for this but um the seven drop one would actually require all six classes to meet and that sixth class wouldn't end until 3 30. so there are more implications with athletes who have to leave school early that in the block they would you know if they have to leave at three o'clock they wouldn't miss an actual course and so those are just some of the factors um that certainly contribute to this entire decision yep and uh really good clarification by ellen thank you

038and i should have been more clear in my comments that vaccines one of them i believe is is available for students 16 and older however high school has a wider age range than that so we don't exactly know what the fall will look like with that but it's a really important clarification i don't want anyone who has a 17 year old thinking that there there's not any options in the future in terms of vaccines so thank you ellen for that my apologies for uh not being clear all right we'll give um again we we have plenty of time on this topic um and so give it a couple [Music] a little bit of time if anyone has additional questions that come in while people are thinking marta do you mind just speaking to i know

039i spoke a little bit to it but if there's anything you want to add on the after school programs or aftercare programs i wondered if you're able to comment on that because that is a very real concern for elementary families yeah so we are fortunate that we have our that we work so closely and so well with our providers we already have a preliminary meeting with current providers and we're meeting again today and so uh we're we're really uh very positive about the possibility of being able to support as many students as need be and so we have to consider many different other options so it could be you know by our option and and other matter so we're excited whichever way the community and the school committee obviously you know vote for this and

040and we will be ready thank you so much dr gilbert just positive piece of feedback so for your high school folks oh and i'm sure we'll get a lot of feedback on this when we do the survey as well um just about the impact of that schedule so thank you um mr shea since you've been quiet and we're waiting for some more people to perhaps ask questions any thoughts from the uh elementary lens that you have um or any lens any lens you'd like to offer you've worked at both the the high school and at the elementary level so you've got a good um good thought on that yeah i well i hesitate to offer my bias on the high school piece given that i've got two children who just barely struggled to make it

041through 7 45 starts for the last four years it's not an easy thing for um young people could be up at the crack of dawn and then heading to school um but in terms of elementary school look our buses arrive right now anywhere between 8 25 and 8 30 and so i hear you say that the buses would be arriving closer to 8 10. we certainly have teacher meetings in the morning but i think those teacher meetings would perhaps switch to the afternoon and i agree with dr gabara we have a very healthy strong after-school program uh here and i certainly believe in and would hope that they would be interested in um if they needed to add further students to the to the after school roster thanks um just piece of feedback about the

042middle school the way the middle school schedule has been shifted this year for um i wanted to share and so we'll give another minute or two um certainly if there's more questions and we may get a bigger crowd in the evening because for those who don't know there's a 6 30 uh same same kind of thing different link but the same slides everything else will be the same about it also this link that everyone's on on the youtube is good indefinitely so if someone missed this session and you want to share uh this link and you found it helpful you know please do share either the link to the presentation or the link to actual this live stream we'll go for another minute or two i know people still um perhaps finishing their coffee and

043other things so give people a second um and see if there's any other comments that come through thank you thanks for that comment and um you know i think what we found this year in addition to all the other things that make the paper perhaps more often is that um having a little more focused time and fewer classes is making a difference for our students and we imagine that would be true in person or in the current virtual format that we're in so really appreciate all the work that um staff members those on this call those not on this call teachers who contributed to the drafting of those schedules um you know i think it's obviously a hard situation this year i don't want to minimize that but i do appreciate the thoughtfulness of our

044educators to come up with the best possible kind of schedule design given the situation um just another comment i'm not going to read them all but um yeah um yeah it's interesting about the sports i mean i will say that some places uh and i'm cautious of my word than this but i think i want to be transparent about some places have for certain sports uh who have made a flip uh some of the sports do happen in the morning you know based on availability of um facilities if they're not using our facilities at the school um and you know i guess that is an option you know for those students but i think the big thing for me is it's an option you don't have to play a sport and i'm saying this as

045i played sports in high school and college i care deeply about athletics and making a huge difference but when i think about all students um you know the reason we're engaging in this is because we think it'll have an impact on all students and for students who wake up early you know great maybe they're doing some of their homework in the morning instead of staying up late at night but you know the evidence is pretty clear on this one all right since i don't see additional questions or comments coming in again you know i'll put my email address in here please feel free for those of you who are more comfortable sharing confident you know feedback that's not uh so public please feel free to shoot me an email if you want to shoot the

046school committee an email i'll put that email address on here well or questions you know please keep them coming we appreciate you starting the day with us um again if you think of other questions you can shoot that email you can also join again we'll be here at 6 and hope everyone has a great day um thank you very much um oh that's one more comment uh thanks renata but thinking about math and language yeah that's exactly right and that's something some of the conversations we're having about does that work for all students and how do we do the math and um and and literacy my question above was not addressed um sorry i'll go back if i missed one oh sorry kerry i missed that one um it's our way to do a four

047by four block that allows for math and language across the years problematic students students can go fully without math they only have fall and then the spring so i will defer to our particular high school folks sam and mickey on that topic if you have anything you'd like to add yeah i can i can speak to this there's several different ways to do a block schedule um one version is an a b block which does allow for all courses to meet all eight blocks all eight blocks to meet every other day over the course of the year that's certainly a schedule where um if you know if there's strong if you know if what community values is having courses all year then very often that's the block that people go with if instead um the

048community you know the majority and you have to choose like what's your value and what are you creating because every schedule has strengths and weaknesses and so the four by four block that runs in a semester format that's exactly what you lose is that continuity but but if you're trying to reduce the focus at one time for students then schools tend to opt for the semester so those are going to be the conversations that we have to have it also when you look at key float and you look at how many students a teacher has it once variables that that stem from those kinds of things this is and there's a lot of literature now that you can read about studies on the blocks and all the different kinds of blocks there's also four by

049four blocks with semesters where school districts will choose um high need courses both at the ap level and at more of the remedial level or level where students might be somewhat behind so for example they might year long block uh ap bc calculus and they might year long have like an algebra course or ways to do that and that's going to have to be a conversation when we choose next year's schedule that will have to also involve stakeholders thank you mickey that's a incredibly helpful answer and one that i definitely couldn't have said in the level of detail that you did so i appreciate you saying that and i think that brings up a really good point to perhaps end on is you know we started engaging this conversation late this fall uh we are

050going to um school company's gonna have to make a decision before every bus run is created we don't frankly know exactly who our students uh are going to be next year so it's hard to like really have firm bus runs when we don't exactly know who's going to join us we don't know who the kindergartners are and we don't know the transients in and out but we're trying to get see if we have a general sense with these general parameters and we will have to work out details like mickey talked about over time and engaged stakeholders throughout um do we know how teachers union feel about this that's why we're having you know we started our first engagement was with teachers with educators last week and so we'll continue to do that um if you

051see look towards the end of the slide deck there's additional engagements with each school staff uh starting next week we'll have survey data so we're gonna have a tremendous amount of information about how teachers feel about this and we'll continue to engage that that question i think give you a second i'm scrolling down to see a couple comments um but um i think time will tell when we survey folks um where where how people feel in the community and that includes teachers i want to thank everybody for joining us this morning again back at 6 30 if there's additional questions or other people couldn't make it this morning um mandy joe this survey will be up for all secondary students to complete so seventh through twelfth grade students we are trying to think about a

052way to engage upper elementary students when we get down to the primary grade levels just developmentally it's a little hard to engage students in this dialogue but we are trying to think actively about ways to engage upper elementary students but the survey itself will be for seventh through twelfth grade students and all staff members and all families in the district um sorry if i wasn't clear about that before it's a really really important point we have engaged too mickey and sam um i don't know if sam you want to mention some of the engagement you did on the front end because i think that's helpful to you are you talking about student groups student groups yeah so um we have a student advisory council that we've been consulting with and then um a poku group

053that also we've surveyed and so we're getting a lot of feedback from them and their thoughts and superintendent morris will follow up with them as well so we're gonna we're gonna keep working on that for sure yeah so carrie i see electives sacrifice for a degree in the block schedule i'm going to make this probably the last question you know um but i'll you know my short answer and mickey and sam can expand on it is we've had a block schedule this year and we've offered you know the same similar elective we've had even more modified block schedule than we would have potentially into next year we've offered uh the slate of electives that we typically would mickey sam anything more that you want to say on that topic i just want to mention that

054um the electives will be broken into quarters no matter what schedule we go with and so in a block schedule you actually have eight blocks instead of seven um so depending on the five core academics and whether or not some of them need to be year long or not it can actually increase elective offerings for students thanks becky thank you uh very much again thanks for joining us for this call um thanks for our folks who are really busy for uh joining the call us at derek marta sam uh victoria diego mickey appreciate you being on this call and uh you know be on the lookout for our survey wednesday afternoon we i think we're giving folks a week to do it it's actually it's a very short survey uh this time around hopefully that's

055enough time we are doing presentations um in spanish it's being dubbed so something that will be like this will be sent out uh the slide deck is already available in spanish so we are trying to send out all this information and hit as many stakeholders in a busy time um and an unusual time as we can uh but the more you can engage have friends say oh is was interesting if you're around at 6 30 you might want to do it it would be cold it's not not a good night for the bonfire or whatever else people are potentially doing at night i'm not sure what that is these days uh please please do help us with that and we'll be in touch with that data all the data we collect as well as these

056videos is always transparent it's always shared with the public and really good feedback and some next steps for us to to do based on your ideas have a good one thanks so much