001i'd like to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting of the colonial school board directors please rise for the pledge of allegiance i'd like the meeting lasted approximately one hour we also met this evening to this meeting and discuss personnel [Music] uh we are going to have student recognitions dr christian we are first we have dr bakani here our high school principal white marsh along with our black cultural cultural awareness club representatives for a presentation to the board and community doctor doing great thank you dr christian thanks for the coronal school board directors for having me here this evening uh i'm fortunate enough tonight to recognize six clinton white marsh high school students who received awards to the college board national recognition program which helps create pathways to students earn recognition through academic achievements in school and
002their outstanding performance on the psat n m each of them the national indigenous recognition award she's next we have victoria griffin victoria receiving two awards the national african-american recognition award and the national indigenous recognition award victoria just got back from actually a cheerleading trip she's a cheerleader for our white marsh high school team radiology at bloomsburg university graduate you also have mckenzie kenzie's receiving the national hispanic recognition award mackenzie's volunteer for a man on maine has participated in minnetonka through event planning and is a member of the national honor society she helps younger children and assists with events in her community like the christmas tree lighting ceremony she hopes and nutrition [Music] make sure um have vincent willoughby um here this evening congratulations vincent vincent received the national african american recognition award vincent participates in
003our inaugural high school international baccalaureate program career program first year so it's congratulations [Music] leadership positions and helped to organize events and camping trips he hopes to study international relations congratulations [Applause] um you um congratulations [Applause] thank you the next group of students you want to recognize tonight belong to the plymouth white marsh high school's black cultural awareness club they're here tonight to showcase the upcoming day of unity an event that started five years ago at the high school level and now is becoming more of a district-wide celebration that our other schools are participating in during black history month we're excited to honor the bca for the work the student group has done over the last few years to help us move forward in areas of diversity equity and inclusion they have been engaged in
004organizing many events and initiatives including reading and teaching traditional stuff to children in at the conshohocken free library visiting elementary schools to share history and culture organizing speakers and special events cleaning up parks on martin luther king day and last but not least christina he's joining us [Applause] you uh thank you to our high school students our college board award winners and appreciate all the time and effort our bca club put forth not only this month but also throughout the year with their endeavors and to help unify not only our high school but our whole school district really appreciate it and the day of service uh was our first one this year helped organize that along with uh several of our groups and we hope that becomes a long-standing tradition here in colonial thank you
005dr connie and mr ascona appreciate it i'd like to ask for a motion to approve the minutes meeting minutes as presented in items 4b through 4f i have a motion chris third second beth is there any uh are there any questions about any of these minutes all in favor thank you i'd like a motion to approve the financial reports as presented in items 5b through 5m for january 2022. thank you is there a second thank you gail any questions or comments on any of the financial reports all in favor and police have a motion to approve the january 2022 treasurer's report beth thank you second jamina any questions or comments on the treasurer's report all in favor great thank you dr christian thank you mr moore before we move on to public comment i just
006want to follow up on the communication we sent to our families and community uh yesterday morning tonight the board will consider a motion to move to a mass recommended level of mitigation in response uh to the decreasing cobit 19 surge that we had in january provided that the district is not in the high level of transmission as of march 9th this is a deviation from the current county recommendations which call for moderate and low transmission levels but it's a recommendation that we have made based on multiple factors including the following one the reported cases that we've received from our families and colonial schools have dropped significantly we had a graph in the email that showed the week of january 3rd 290 reported cases down to 13 this past week we collect those numbers each week
007and update update our information on mondays community transmission is still high but it is on the decline there was another graph that showed numbers in the 1200s or incident rate per 1 000 people and that is down to a little bit over 170 so getting closer to that substantial range the county website the cobit there was i received an email asking where that information is there's a coveted hub montgomery county says on the top of that hub and i've spoken to several parents that it's updated monday wednesday and friday there are different parts of the website that are updated monday wednesdays and fridays but the community transmission and the municipality and school district transmission has traditionally been updated on tuesdays uh so that that is information for satra hawkin plymouth and white marsh uh so
008we will try to update dennis our information as frequently as we see the county updated thirdly vaccine availability is more widespread for those who wish to pursue it we're hoping to host another clinic in advance of this move to mass recommended and the clinic is tentatively scheduled for march first uh we're working with eric's pharmacy who hosted past four clinics for us uh so if there's anybody out there that would like to follow up uh we'll have more information coming out regarding that there are some medical experts also that believe it's time to consider a move to a mass recommended phase additionally our attendance in school especially during cold and flu season the past two weeks has been very strong we've had about three or four percent absenteeism uh which is very good for the
009winter months we sometimes see higher rates because of the different things that can occur uh during the winter months with illness and while our students have been resilient we understand there is a desire of some to move to some of our families to move to a mass recommended phase while that we have received plenty of feedback for people who wish us wish to remain in a universal mass mode if the motion passes we will move to a mass recommended but not required phase for the health and safety plan provided we are not in a high transition level on march 9th this timeline gives us a few weeks to reach to reach that level and reach that threshold uh and it's approximately 11 or 12 school days from now when you factor in some of the
010holidays that are coming up for those who wish to continue masking if we reach those levels the district will continue to procure appropriate mass as for those who need them regardless of whether the motion passes or not and if it does face mass will still be required as was in the communication on public transportation and our buses we talk about close contacts if we move to a mass recommended phase there will be some changes with that the reality is we still need to monitor for students and staff who have positive tests for covid uh if a student or staff member tests positive for covid and they are symptomatic um they can return to school after 24 hours with no fever and resolving symptoms and five days since symptoms first appeared if you have a positive
011test that we are going to ask that you mask then for days six through ten as a precaution if the students without symptoms they may return to school after five days after a specimen was collected mass are required for stage six through ten and if symptoms develop during those five days then we go back and follow the original plan uh of when somebody tested positive so we'll put a whole chart together it's very similar to the charts that have been updated by oph throughout the pandemic close contacts in the school bus and in school we will notify families as we've done in the past and those notifications have gone decrease with the decrease in cases parents will be asked to monitor their children for symptoms and if symptoms develop at school we will offer tests
012this day if with parent permission of course uh and as long as tests are available and we still have uh enough right now to continue our test to stay program and then for for close contacts masking in schools will be recommended not required recommended so and the test to stay will be offered whether you are fully vaccinated fully boosted or unvaccinated uh and that's been some folks have taken advantage of that assurance testing so that is the motion uh before the board this evening later on before new business and after public comment that that concludes my update this is more thank you dr christian now is the time for public comments on items on tonight's agenda i want to start with the public emails sure as people uh line up and we welcome speakers i
013will say uh we did we uh put in we received public comment uh last night after the email and then again this morning what we did with all those emails and i'm not going to read all of them to the community we made sure last evening at the close of business we sent copies to all the board members so they could see them and then again today around lunchtime we sent them and then we had the additional ones that we received in the afternoon but just to make sure folks know that we did receive them we had uh we received several emails for folks who wish to move to a optional or recommended phase of masking including elaine schroll peter janick bud house michael pifer sarah abercrombie and mike piglesi we also received several asking
014us to maintain a universal masking mode including darlene thomas rachel jacobs casey pachetto kristen bowers and amy creighton the board did receive a thank you for their service from liz gold and then we received some additional questions matt delberto asked what website we were using to track the county data which i already explained and then we have received some that are anonymous and which you have to identify yourself uh part of public speaking and then for those folks that ask additional specific questions related to their children or specific scenario i'll make sure a member of our administrative team gets back to you thank you all right those in the audience that wish to make a public comment please come up and state your name and where you live community we don't need your address just
015your community everyone my name is michael junta i live in lafayette hill i have four beautiful children thanks to my wife two currently in white marsh elementary i'm here today representing the children in the school district not the parents as i feel the children have held the burden of the virus for some time and they've yet to be fully considered in the high level decisions taken from the school's community leadership if the option being brought to vote today is indeed given the students a chance to return to school without a mass then me and my wife are fully supportive of that as we'll certainly take you up on that offer i could promise that and send our kids back to school the way that we planned for them to receive their education i can say
016however i'm not in full agreement with the proposal if i understood it correctly school district promotes inclusion the diversity equity and inclusion committee aims to ensure an environment that fosters openness acceptance and appreciation as it's written on the website labeling this proposal as mask recommended is the wrong path if voted in the parents will have a choice to unmask our children for schooling however the label ensures that these students will continue to hold a burden as they'll now attend school feeling as if they're doing so against the recommendation or the rule in place i can certainly speak for my eight-year-old daughter ali who is a complete role follower unlike myself but she's a complete rule follower and she feels out of place if she feels that she's not following the guidelines if if the decision
017is to allow everyone to have a choice why is there a need to label this as recommended as opposed to what it is an option one that should be free from judgment whether a student wears a mask or chooses to attend without one while reaching a new decision to promote an option is progressive attaching this to a measure that includes municipalities outside of our school district doesn't seem to give us the most appropriate data set when trying to make informed decisions for our area if we leave the door open for mass to be thrown back on our children at some stage here in the future we would not just i'm sorry we would not just unwind would we not just unwind the progress we've made in our setting to rid of the challenges and stresses
018this pandemic has caused would we be ignoring what we know about immunity and the fact that cloth masks are much less effective than we've been told and when i say immunity i'm referencing the cdc's estimates that 146.6 million people or total infections in this country and also montgo is around 90 total vaccinated trust is built with consistency and our children need consistency and structure to thrive i ask for you to give them that consistency and our children is a i'm sorry there's a document published by the cdc entitled essentials for childhood creating safe stable nurturing relationships and environment for all children this publication explains that children experience their world through parents and other caregivers and how promoting a safe and stable environment allows children to reach their full potential the cdc describes the buckets in
019three in three ways the first is safety and they define it as the extent at which a child is free from fear and secure not only from physical but also psychological harm in their environment the second is stability defined as a degree of consistency in a children's social emotional and physical environment and the thirds nurturing the extent at which each child's physical emotional and developmental needs are sensitively and consistently met i ask for you to help progress towards an environment that allows these children to reach their full potential by removing that fear please make your decision with consistency in mind not for us parents but for the well-being of our children i've watched the meeting the candidates videos on facebook that served as a get to know you during the most recent election jamina you
020mentioned the need to be proactive instead of reactive with regard to mental health i ask you to stay proactive and allow the parents who notice concerns at home relating to masking in school to have a choice gail when asked about learning and coveted in school you mentioned you'd like to be innovative picking what's old and finding a new way it's exactly what i'm asking for here tonight we've been preaching for flexibility for some time and william you mentioned that you want everyone to do what's best for their family in reference to sending kids back to school as opposed to virtual this rejected just so you know 30 seconds two more sentences thank you please do not treat this issue in a different manner please stay true to your promises you've made the people this community
021thank you all for your time tonight steve nicholas n-i-c-h-o-l-a-s a resident of conshohocken my daughter goes to ridge park elementary the super bowl was a couple days ago and i don't know if all of you are some might not be able to remember but do you remember leon lett he got excited rant put his arms way out when running onto when running toward the end zone and don bibi ran and swatted it away we cannot celebrate prematurely we cannot be leon led in this situation i would love the virus to be over just as much as the gentleman before me and everybody else in this room but pretending that it's over does not make it over uh i looked up the numbers just before i got up here nationwide over 2 000 people a day
022are dying from this that is a number that a year or a year and a half ago would have shocked all of us and hearing some of the standards i must say that i find it very concerning that it goes significant if we're going to do this that much whether it be at the lower the moderate level and also dr christian in your presentation you mentioned that vaccine is available the vaccine is available but how many people are taking advantage of it i know i don't know the figures for each and every school district that i know nationwide of children ages 5 through 11 are fascinated i will repeat that age 5 to 11. even if we triple the national average that's 60 percent which is still much lower than the levels of community vaccination
023that are needed to cover the children some people might give it and not even know it they might be one of the lucky ones who are asymptomatic but they might give it to a child who won't be so lucky and who was asymptomatic so why so again i would love for this to be over i really would but the only way that it can be over the only way that we can spike that ball in the end zone is if we actually get into the end zone so let us continue to look for safety and let us not celebrate that we're lower than an already verified the already very high level let us celebrate when we actually do get to the low level to where this is a little more than oh we're already on
024omicron pi rho sigma might not be like omicron they might be closer to delta and i personally don't want to find out when we what happens when we run out of greek letters so let us continue on the path that we have followed and let us think of the safety so that when we're ready we know that we're ready and there will be no debate thank you [Applause] my name is ronnie keane and i am living in conshohocken currently like my friend before me said we need to think on a world view with this thing because what did the world do this summer we thought we're getting vaccinated covets going down we're cool right we're going back to school with no mask what am i wearing right now a mask because we looked before we
025left or we didn't look before we left and we ended up going to an extreme or we ended up um going out partying because we thought we were done we were not done and right here is another example of thinking we're done how do we know for sure that uh just because the cases are going down they couldn't spike again i don't want to see another greek letter come up and be twice as bad as omit twice as contagious twice as bad as hell we need to look to the future here and i'm not saying wearing masks for another year i'm not saying we need to go home virtually we need to quarantine i'm saying we need to be cautious here even delaying the mass mandate making it optional to a month like may or
026april would give us so much valuable time to protect ourselves and build immunity um and i would also like to address the use of diversity equity and inclusion uh to reference the mass issue i don't think that's what it's targeted at and i think people make a big deal out of this piece of cloth on your face i can't speak for elementary level but i know that people aren't being persecuted or wearing their masks below their nose at my school some people not wearing their mask at all doing this all around it's not a jewish star they're not being segregated they're not following the rules and nobody is penalizing them so by making something recommended you're not opening kids to bullying or discrimination you're ensuring that we move forward safely and i think that's what
027we need to consider here so by extending the mass mandate for a short period of time once again i'm going to repeat not a year not another quarantine by extending for a short period of time we can ensure that we better our safety that we can take more precautions to reform and get this covert thing out of here because do you think i like this do you think anyone likes this and you've all been doing an amazing job so far i think so you with kids it's hard ronnie address the board please you have to address the ball the board's receiving comments you've all been doing it amazing [Laughter] that was that was bad timing on my apartment but like i was saying um we really respect everyone respects your perseverance and if you could
028just continue out for a little longer we hopefully won't see what happened in the summer time and we can end this thing because what nobody wants to see is a perpetual pandemic and what nobody wants to see is indefinite duress caused by a stupid virus so if we just take the time to extend it a little bit more i think we can really make some big changes here not not looking before we leave not jumping to conclusions taking our time because great things don't happen overnight you can't get rich quick you need to take the time you need to be billy thank you for coming [Applause] anyone else want to speak sorry all right rebecca gigliotti plymouth meeting as a high school teacher for the last 17 years what i've seen among some of my
029most seasoned co-workers over the course of this pandemic is illogical in my opinion some of them have put up plastic barriers that look like shower curtains between themselves and the students while also behind plexiglass barriers in addition to wearing both a mask and a face shield while many of these extreme mitigation measures have been taken down at this point the fear still exists and if placing if clay heating teachers like this in fear of litigation are the reason for the continued masking which i believe they are then you need to tell us that you need to be honest to the public and let us know that you're serving the teachers and not the students of the district if colonial school district doesn't end its mass mandate it continues to fail students the political science of
030the issue is changing that seems to be what the board is following and it's time to change your position on the masking parents now have the availability to vaccinate their children and if they want to continue to mask them and they feel that's the correct decision for them great considering the forcing the masking on all is draconian as the child policy lab is said the numerous the death the documented numerous negative effects the children have experienced as a result of covert mitigation vastly outweighs the risks of children getting severely sick or hospitalized with covet i'm assuming you all know this but yet there's some other reason for refusing to do what's best for the student body let me give you some background which data stems for the through right to know requests on or about
031june 15th of 2020 the central bucks department of health sent their county plan to all school districts in bucks county saying that school would reopen with in-person learning in that plan it addressed masks and i quote with respect to face masks the county plan provides that students are not required to wear masks wearing masks will not be required of students while in school but will be optional extended use of masks often leads to discomfort distraction or mishandling slash misuse triggering a child to touch their face more frequently and causing contamination and or rendering the mask effective ineffective mass also make it difficult to speak or ask questions in a classroom setting end quote why do i bring this up in response to this plan mr sultanak colonial school district solicitor not a medical doctor then
032facilitate facilitated a webinar on june 25th of 2020 that was titled protecting the school workplace how do we have been saved and addressed employee concerns in conjunction with the pa association of school personnel administrators and invited school superintendents where he criticized the bucks county health department reopening plan while not telling nor including dr damsker the director of public health for bucks county at the webinar at six minutes and 20 seconds into the webinar mr sultana addressed mass wearing and says i put having had to wear one most of the day on monday in warm weather in a courthouse i will tell you it's uncomfortable and i don't like it but i think it's very important that we do that not only because not only to protect ourselves but to protect others around us and it
033sends symbolically the right kind of message organizationally that we want to have end quotes there it is the mask is a symbol concern here is not for the parents or students at home but for the organization fast forward to january 15th of this year my husband and i sent a letter to mr satanic dr christian and the school board addressing our concerns about colonial's continued masking policy stating our interpretation of the law that colonial school district does not have the legal authority to require masks i also included a legal i also included a direct quote from the december 7th 2001 surgeon general's advisory discussing the current mental health crisis for children which has been exacerbated by covet 19. the response was telling not surprisingly mr sultanak did not agree with our legal argument but he
034never acknowledged the mental health issue instead he closed his response to discussing the continued spike of covet cases in the community and in the district it's obvious to me that the spike occurred both in our district while masking 30 seconds without asking it did not discriminate but it's over and cases are rapidly dropping colonial continues to match students to placate irrational teachers that fear covet at this point more than the well-being of their students and protect the organization from litigation please unmatch the kids [Applause] here's the time plymouth meeting dr christian and many board meetings and a numerous emails over the past two years you've referenced child policy lab as your source of guidance they are one of the main reasons cited for keeping schools closed as long as we did i'm sure you're i'm
035sure you're aware of the latest guidance from top on masking they're now recommending that schools can safely transition to a mass optional policy regardless of case counts in the top policy lab published on february 3rd they state that schools will recognize moments when more flexible policies are possible and schools can permit choices for families who themselves are weighing their own concerns about the risk of infection from the virus against the competing risks to their children and from other challenges in their lives dr rubin the director of the top policy lab says it's been a long haul and for families kids with learning issues he's with mental health issues or isolation those issues now become more paramount he goes on to say there's a lot more weighted to the concerns about the continued risk of significant
036restrictions that prohibit movement of kids through schools or take choices away from families in terms of what two years of masking and required masking schools may have been please notice the use of the word risk when it comes to masking and other restrictions last meeting many of us spoke about the mental and physical health risks that masking for eight hours a day imposes it's now very clear and backed up by statements from medical experts that for many of the risks of masking outweigh the benefits also notice the use of the word choice dr rubin whose advice we have been following for two years emphasizes that the choice should be returned to the families what dr rubin does not mention is some magic case number at which it would be safe to take masks off this
037metric that you have come up with was handed to you from montgomery county and has no medical basis to support it i find it very interesting that now the top doesn't align with montgomery county we don't follow them anymore we're listening to politicians over doctors and it's very clear that you do not care about the safety of our children you care about the political and monetary gains you get from doing what you're told and if for some reason you insist on using case numbers as your metric why wouldn't you look at the case numbers in the district there are three cases in the entire district one student there are no cases in any of the elementary schools yet those students sit three feet apart masked all day what we're asking you for is the freedom
038to choose freedom does not come with conditions what you're proposing is not the freedom to choose it should not depend on some arbitrary metric of case counts also remember that the freedom to choose means that anybody who wants to wear a mask can still wear a mask there is evidence now that proves that wearing a mask protects the wearer dr sierra duran an epidemiologist and director of anti-microbial stewardship because we've reached the point in the pandemic where it's become unsustainable to depend on others for protection joseph allen a coveted and ventilation expert at harvard because if your vaccinated it and wearing a well fitted n95 or similar indoors your risk is extremely low there is not much else in life that would have a low as risk as that again we're asking for freedom to
039choose parents now have access to masks that protect the wearer it's unnecessary and cruel to force a child who suffered from mass wearing for the past two years to continue if you don't want to listen to the parents in this district which is pretty obvious by the fact that half of them are in the auditorium i don't know why this meeting couldn't have taken place where everybody could have taken part but that's very telling you don't want to follow the advice of dr rubin the us surgeon general who's warned of the mental health crisis or the other experts look at the data that is right under your nose bucks county has been mass optional for most of the year and their graphs of cova 19 prevalence between mass districts and unmass are exactly the same
040i would like to remind the board that you're in a position to make this decision you alone have this decision it doesn't matter what the superintendent recommends what county officials tell you to do it is on you to make the decision i hope that you have done your research we all in this room have done research and emailed you all of our research 30 seconds please so i hope that you have taken the time to read that and if not then shame on you this is a very important decision and i hope you have data to back up whatever decision you make tonight um last but not least i do hope that if we go um to mass recommended or mass optional this school using images of superheroes wearing masks needs to stop that is
041brainwashing this is that wearing a mask means you're a superhero implies that not wearing a mask makes you some kind of villain and that needs to stop [Applause] um so instead of standing up here and telling you all my grievances on why i think mass could be changed to optional um instead i'd like to hear i think from every school board member individually on what is your opposition going mass optional the board will discuss that during the when the motion is made this is your opportunity to make comments well i'm going to use my time i want to know exactly like you guys are making bold decisions i'd like to know exactly what those bold decisions are based on that they will that's not an unreasonable thing to ask they will discuss it when the
042motion is wrong i've heard your votes before and you guys yay or nay and you know and then that's it we don't hear an explanation buddy we're going to discuss it we're going to discuss it when the motion this is the part in the meeting where it's where it's for con you guys have the opportunity to decide so right now it's not the time when the motion is there as dr christian said we're going to discuss it we're going to talk about our opinions we're going to talk about why we're making the decision we are and we'll do it no one's hiding behind this this is your opportunity to talk about your opinion we will discuss it when it's when the motion is there the motion is not on the table yet that discussion will
043happen in public at this meeting tonight so it's not like we're going to go to a back room and discuss it we can't do that i know but i'd rather hear in detail because i'm not going to hear detail you guys are it's going to be a quick thing turn around and then and then we're out the door but okay if that's the way you guys want to go so what i do want to say is mask i've heard you guys say over and over again that you can't satisfy everyone in this community but going mask optional does just that how does it not it satisfies the people who want to wear the mask and the people who don't want to wear the mask if the masks work then the people wearing the mask should
044feel safe there's no reason to hyperventilate because your classmate isn't wearing a mask if you're wearing one so making your mask optional just satisfies everybody and i just don't see why it's we have to go through all this to get there it's like pulling teeth like we it's it's it's a lot easier that we're making this more complicated than it has to be making a mess optional satisfies everyone makes everyone happy and to the parents who aren't okay with that well that's i'm sorry that's just too bad we had to follow by the rules that we didn't agree with for the last two years we could try to do it our way for a while and i'd rather keep it masked optional always i don't care what the case numbers go to in april or
045may or next year this is a decision for the parents at all times you got the school board the superintendent never had the authority in the first place even make these masks mandated so do the right thing [Applause] my name is steve legrady i live in lafayette hill i currently have three children all in white marsh elementary uh every one of them loves school which is more than i can say for myself at their age um but they look forward to the end of the day when they can tear that mask off i'll tell you that right now um i would definitely appreciate if you went to mass optional i think it's ridiculous to make everybody go by one uh round of whoever thinks we should wear a mask um i don't know how many
046of you have kids in these schools but i mean do you think that your kids should be in masks i i i really don't understand why anybody would want to put their kid through this uh but that's i just wanted to get up here and say that uh i'm for mask optional and uh i hope that we get there very soon [Applause] hi my name is jamie kaplan i live in lafayette hill today i went to the montgomery board of commissioners meeting in person to discuss their outdated and absurd transmission metrics that you cling to so dearly a few interesting things happen that i thought you should know about first not everyone there were a mask including one of the commissioners and the security guard didn't bother anyone about it no one match aimed or
047scolded people if their mask slipped below their nose while they were speaking it's a shame that you do not afford parents the same opportunity when speaking up here it's also a shame that you chose to hold this meeting in such a small room when not everyone that wanted to participate could join second sheriff who started the meeting with a coveted update she talked about how cases were trending down and touted the county's 94 vaccination rate for people five years enough chair arkoush also said that the manco office of public health had been receiving questions about recommendations for masking in schools she said and i'm quoting first i want to reiterate that there are currently no county imposed mass mandates in any montgomery county public school masking policies in montgomery county public schools are under the
048purview of the elected school board commissioner gail then spoke stating that he has gotten a lot of emails from parents in montgomery county who are fed up with continued force masking of children when most of pennsylvania is now mass optional and when most of the country is not optional he said quote i want these families to know i hear you loud and clear and i understand the negative impact on the social development the psychological development and the educational development of our children is a great harm due to the mask wearing he pledged to try to do something about it then maureen calder first assistant solicitor informed everyone in the room and everyone online that while the public could comment on topics germain or relevant to monco business and that the determination of what is domain
049is relevant is decided by the county's attorney she continued and i quote comments regarding masks in school are not germane to county business as this board takes no vote on this issue these comments are not appropriate at this meeting and should be shared with your local school board can you imagine a pre-planned carve out by a county solicitor that tax paying citizens can talk about any topics they want regarding montgomery county except masking of children because not it is not germane to montgomery county sarah cush's five-minute statement about vaccine clinics and case counts is germaine but our children are so irrelevant the parents are barred from speaking about masks in school before the commission i spoke anyways i spoke about their transmission metrics and how absurd they are and how you are voting tonight to
050tie your masculine due to them and how it makes no sense other moms called in from all over montgomery county crying pleading that their superintendents have said they cannot act without montgomery county's blessing and ask them to change or do away with these outdated transmission metrics that their superintendents have reached out to monko for guidance or changing guidance have been met with absolute silence as they say actions speak louder than words maureen calder interrupted almost every parent that spoke and told them they could not talk about force masking of children eventually she shut the public public comments down i encourage all of you to watch this video mongo's silence on kids and masks and their silencing of parents today on this topic is astonishing if the children of this country are so unimportant to the
051monco board of commissioners that we can't speak about what's happening to them every day with masks why do you have to use their metrics the cdc issued non-binding guidance in 2020 when we had very limited testing and limited understanding of cobin the cdc later issued masking guidance and monko adopted it and has repeatedly stated it is non-binding yet most schools in this county appear to be bound to the guidance when people ask rachelle olenski about the guidance she says it isn't binding when we go to monco they say it is not binding and this is not relevant to us and you were forbidden from speaking about it during our board meetings when we go to the superintendent and the board you say that you'll just keep tying the mask mandate to it these metrics regardless
052of whether the metrics are achievable or logical given the nature of the disease today the extremely high vaccination rates in this area and regardless of very low coveted rates in our schools this is a sick and twisted game and science is sadly not a player here this is a ponzi scheme of deniability and our kids are suffering this is so obviously about politics why are the people in charge of this county putting kids last why in february 22 2022 do we continue to blindly follow the nine binding recommendations of people who have been so wrong time and time again why do our children have to suffer like this so much longer than other children in this country have suffered for those children that have a small amount of childhood left why can't we let them
053have it back i don't think any of you are bad people and i know you all think you are doing the right thing but by continuing this mass mandate whether tied to substantial or high or anything from that absurd outdated chart you are perpetuating evil 20 20 seconds please time they will see who made the right decision when the information came out about masks and the longer you cling to this mask mandy the longer it will be your legacy [Applause] hi everyone my name is monica salvia i am the parent of three children at plums elementary and i'm a resident of tennis meeting i actually want to start by congratulating bca and the college board national recognition program award winners i think that was amazing and i was really proud of them they did great
054work um so hello to the board administration and i want to say thank you on behalf of many parents for putting our kids first as a community i agree that we're moving in the right direction but covert is not done with us i am concerned about our numbers but i'm not afraid my family is vaccinated i believe that we are likely safe from severe infection and from death but kova does not treat everyone the same there are many who are vulnerable in our community and i wear my mask for my family and i wear my mask for them the hospitals are still somewhat overwhelmed in our area this matters i support the continued mitigation efforts of masks good clean fresh air space vaccinations the vast majority of public health officials agree with this so at
055this point i just want to say thank you to the board and to dr fishing for taking a very measured approach for caring for our kids i believe that the new policy suggests it is reasonable and measured and i want to say that i am supportive so thank you other comments sure tracy maker white marsh township my son is eight years old he is in third grade at white marsh elementary school at the start of the year his assigned seat was in the very front row of class my husband and i thought that would be a good thing as he tends to be easily distracted fast forward to parent teacher conferences in december when we found out he was turning around a lot to check out the rest of the class at times much more
056of a distraction together with the teacher we thought it would be best to move him a couple rows back so he could view his classmates a nice compromise a few weeks later his teacher called to ask me if our son had ever had his vision tested he was straining and could not see the board i was shocked by this call as just a week prior we had we had him bring his new glasses into school as he did in fact need them for the board our son told us he was too embarrassed ashamed he's also shy to tell the teacher that every time he put his glasses on they fogged up because of his mask who can blame him i called the teacher and the principal as i had hoped for an accommodation to simply
057adjust his mask and bring it down just a bit so his mask didn't fog his lenses and he could see properly i was met with in no way you're not permitted to move the mass at all followed by we will have to move him back to the front row the place where we had just moved him from because it was a distraction to his learning are you seeing where i'm going with this do you care do what what exactly do you care about when it comes to the children you were elected to represent you have failed our kids how do you sleep at night how do you sleep knowing that you go out to stores and restaurants that are all mass optional yet you punish our children with this breathing restriction this academic restriction this
058social restriction how do you sleep i can tell you that all of us don't we don't because we're sickened by all of this by the power trips that you hang on to so dearly our kids deserve better and they will have better once you're all unseated in due time board members like kathy paduzzi all out mass policing a fellow parent while they were speaking at a board meeting several weeks ago all while many of us here have seen her at a local restaurant not wearing a mask amongst a room full of unmasked patrons and you want to tell me that my kids need a mask to be in this building it's gross hypocrisy let's not forget our own superintendent mike christian whose photo has circulated not wearing a mask while coaching basketball indoors while others
059around him were wearing masks and you're telling me that i don't have that option when it comes to my kids gross hypocrisy lastly please stop calling our kids resilient and okay with wearing a mask because they're not okay [Applause] have you stopped to ask a child what the reaction would be if you told them no mass ever again have you not seen the countless viral videos on social media when that statement becomes a reality like it has for so many in this state and others the kids lose their minds in excitement they rip apart their mass they stomp on them it's the most genuine consistent joy i've seen in a while having said all that there's great news you can all push a button and end this tomorrow we won't ask for apologies we won't
060ask that you admit you've been wrong for two years we'll let you be the heroes overnight imagine that you stunted the growth of endless kids but you can actually take a victory lap by making it all stop right now [Applause] all right hello i'm cheryl kiefer uh lafayette hill uh for two years all of us we've all been stressed we're all struggling with this okay however remaining in masks indefinitely is not going to bring this pandemic to an end we all know that hope is not going away we know that we need to take the steps forward all right allowing our kids to be without masks during the day at school rates are declining cases in our school buildings are astonishingly low all right if not now when i know some have mentioned concern over
061vaccination rates in children um but i have an article in my purse that dr paul rubin stated we can't wait for everyone to be vaccinated there has to be an exit strategy so here's our exit strategy let's do this let's move on drop the mandate thank you [Applause] good evening colonial school board my name is rita montemayor i'm a resident of conshohocken and i have four children in the district and you're not even gonna believe this but i'm not here about masks although i am uh pro mask optional just a side note uh first i'd like to thank you for your time and your service to our community and to our students it is appreciated um but i'm here really to bring to your attention what i think is a uh gross pandemic level safety
062concern um specifically your test to stay policy for those who don't know the test to stay policy targets unvaccinated students who may have been identified as a close contact of a confirmed coven 19 case they are required to either miss a week of school and education or be subjected to repeated nasal swabs and covet tests according to our nationally recognized health experts cdc nih and iaid the who we know that it is scientifically proven that those who are vaccinated can also contract copin 19 and can also spread copin 19 regardless of your vaccination status we also know that these vaccines are safe and effective they are effective at decreasing the severity of symptoms so those students that are vaccinated in close contact are less likely to show symptoms and continue in school spreading covenant on
063contrary our unvaccinated students are more likely to have symptoms in which case parents know to keep them home if your intent is to protect the students and the staff and the teachers here at colonial school district your test to stay policy is fatally flawed it is like locking your windows and leaving your door wide open however if your attention to protect the most susceptible to cova 19 those at high risk with multiple comorbidities please reconsider this policy however if your intent is to discriminate against individuals who for whatever reason are not a candidate for this vaccine you are being very successful there are some individuals with medical conditions and discriminating against them is against the ada and there are some individuals based on their sincerely held religious beliefs that preclude them from getting this vaccination
064when you discriminate against them that is against the civil rights law the civil rights act i am asking you to please take a look at this policy make decisions based on the science make decisions based on the safety and in fact if there's a target audience for those who you want to test for copen i think it's maybe you're vaccinated just to clarify uh over the winter break right before the surge of the latest variant we did offer test to stay for all students vaccinated or unvaccinated originally in november it was front vaccinated but we opened it up and we went to chop and we went to oph and asked for that your website still states for vaccinated and partial or unvaccinated and partially vaccinated i appreciate you bringing that up please send a communication
065but i do appreciate you bringing that up thanks for your time thank you [Applause] hi christine raptor plymouth meeting i have two students in the district i was planning on coming up here and listing all of the districts that are or will be mass optional in the coming weeks but it's clear that that information is not of importance because if it was you would be sharing that information with all of us and you're not as of recently 64 of the 67 counties are mask optional for those who are struggling with this concept optional means you as a parent are able to do what you feel is best for your child and i am as well as we all know montgomery county is one of the 64. with someone coming to our area know that without
066having done the research yes they would it would be evident in families playing games at local parks students playing sports both inside and outside children attending birthday parties and families gathering without masks now would you find some people there with masks sure and that's the beauty of the term optional we can no longer use phrases excuse me such as masking is working because if that were true then what was happening when the cases were on the rise in december and months prior was masking working then currently as of this week and in the next week more area schools will be masked optional st phillips being the closest in location to our schools which means they are not using the metrics to guide their decisions proving that the metrics do not have to be our sole
067guide post other districts with similar metrics are optional there are zero factual grounds to continue masking at this time just to be clear none of us came here tonight to be heard none of us came here tonight to vent we came here because we're not stopping here the old phrases and methods of trying to appease us is no longer valid there are science and data to back it up we are here for action real action and we will no longer be silent [Applause] ing plymouth meeting i read the district-wide email sent out by mr christian yesterday regarding the school's update to masking requirements i appreciate the admission that the advice from medical experts on masking in schools has evolved over the last two years yes the argument on whether to universally mask is no longer
068widely accepted what you failed to include in your email is that many experts in the medical community are also saying that mass are doing more harm than good in much of the united states adults have the option of returning to life essentially as we knew it before the pandemic however children continue to experience disproportionate restrictions and the costs are mounting protecting the mental social and emotional health of students should be a top priority it's dangerous to assume that mass aren't harmful just because their impact hasn't been measured yet there was a recent article in the atlantic authored by doctors marjorie smelkinson gene noble and leslie bennen entitled the case against mass at school what stood out in this article was how the authors point out the most fundamental principles of medicine the article stated that
069imposing on millions of children an intervention that provides little discernible benefit on the grounds that we have not yet gathered solid evidence of its negative effects violates the most basic tenet of medicine first do no harm the foundation of medical and public health intervention should be that they work not that we have insufficient evidence to say whether they are harmful continued mandatory masking of children in schools especially now that most school children are eligible for vaccination fails this test can you honestly say that mass mandates are doing no harm to our children to reiterate what others have said the cdc the u.s surgeon general and the american academy of pediatrics all agree that the state of our children's mental health is now at a low level of national emergency as both board members and parents
070this should be alarming surgeon general vivek murphy issued the following statement on december 7th 2021 mental health challenges in children adolescents and young adults are real and widespread the pandemic further altered their experiences at home school and in the community and the effect on their mental health has been devastating we have numerous national health agencies across our country sounding the alarm about the overwhelming mental health crisis among our children on february 5th 2022 dr jennifer nips published an article in time magazine entitled it's time to end mandatory masks in schools she states masking kids negatively affects learning and causes significant social and emotional harm masking impairs verbal and nonverbal communication between teachers and students and limits facial identification excuse me identification visualization of the entire faces crucial importance is of crucial importance to social emotional
071and speech development children long for their formal lives back and they need to see the expressions and reactions on the faces of their peers and teachers she goes on to say as with any medical intervention risks must be weighed versus benefits and there is no proof that universal masking in schools is beneficial we need to take into account the lack of evidence for mass efficacy and re-evaluate our policies and procedures we know much more now than two years ago the virus is likely shifting from a pandemic to an endemic and we need to shift with it parents should be able to follow the science properly evaluate risk and have a choice to unmask their children even our beloved child policy makers are taking a stance on ending the mass mandates and shifting the choice back
072to the parents on february 7 2022 nbc 10's randy gillenhall spoke with dr david rubin policy director of chop during the interview dr rubin says restrictions on kids like masking and retro learning can be harmful and may no longer be needed dr rubin also stated that this is a moment to start begin talking about removing the scaffolding and trying to reduce the restrictions that have been placed on kids because the risks in terms of their mental health in terms of continued learning loss are now far greater than the virus itself dr rubin continues later in the interview by saying i think as we hit february here we're going to see an increasing number of schools now moving to more of a mass recommendation than a mass requirement i think we have to start recognizing that
073these choices have to return to families the district has been following the recommendations of chops since the beginning of the pandemic there is no reason to ignore what their experts are proposing now i appreciate the steps you are taking to mass mass to make mass optional and fully supported return to having our children resume a normal learning environment i urge the board to listen to the voices of this community and do away with all mandates indefinitely the time and energy that staff are spending policing mass queues is far better spent on teaching and supporting children our kids have sacrificed a lot to protect us now it's time for us to give them their childhood back thank you [Applause] danielle berman lafayette hill in august of 2021 a small group of us came to you for
074answers we spent hours upon hours compiling available information and working on coherent speeches that we presented in a respectful and meaningful way some of us brought our kids who also pleaded for your understanding of how this board's restrictions were negatively affecting their spirit and mental health should i pause don't oh my god bud we came with the belief that if elected officials were presented with solid information we would be heard and considered in the decision-making process the experience was eye-opening there was no deliberation no response to questions no rationale provided for decisions we have watched national leadership push responsibility to state leadership who then push responsibility to local municipalities who then seemingly base their decisions on some outside force again pushing responsibility to somebody else now we have very little if any expectations of being
075considered when we come to these meetings i no longer bother spending hours to write a speech that will fall on deaf ears to people whose body language conveys clear message that listening to parents concerns is a nuisance [Music] i'd like to know how elected officials chosen to represent the community make their decisions without ever actually speaking to the community they supposedly represent i can't even get eye contact for most of you when we're here let alone who is talking to the actual community the metric that has been in place since the beginning of spring of 2020 from the county is completely antiquated seemingly random and completely unachievable as anyone with even a minimal understanding of basic math can clearly understand and yes i know that the recent email blast attempts to circumvent this metric in
076some way so let's take a look at the math behind the proposed new metric there are approximately 34 700 people in the three municipalities that make up our district using this metric and basic math this translates to the low category being less than four cases moderate being less than 18 substantial which is what the email was about being less than 35 and the high range being above 35 cases this means that even by the proposed new standards conshohocken white marsh and plymouth meeting would have to meet a two-week period where all three combined municipalities only had less than 35 cases on a rolling weekly basis people don't understand those numbers why are we basing decisions about our children on community cases rather than like people who are actually in the schools let's put this in
077perspective there are three moderate to large nursing homes within three minutes of my house there are several more within this district right now just one of those nursing homes has six cases just one that one nursing home already puts us in the moderate range yeah these are people who are never leaving that nursing home they're there so i don't know why they're figured into our numbers if we switch to using only school data if the switch is using only school data doesn't happen we'll never be able to to reach and sustain that proposed case level less than 35 cases total a quick review of data from the monco site that you referenced in the email and all of you should be looking at it's not our job to be looking at this stuff that's readily
078available this clearly shows that none of the music municipalities if you look on the site have ever ever fallen in that range ever so what are we looking at here something that is never going to happen do board members actually look at this data i know i recently saw that our schools are apparently struggling in math proficiency does this extend to the adults as well the only answer to these questions that makes sense is that the data is not being considered at all 30 seconds what is guiding the decision-making process fears of losing funding fears of union issues fears of litigation make it make sense and do it fast because people who have been silent for fear of social consequences are starting to speak up our small group has grown and our lack of trust
079in the people who supposedly represent what's best for our children will be clearly evident at the voting booth [Applause] thank goodness someone talked about the metrics because i mean i cannot believe like a lot of people were excited to see that email yesterday and friends of mine and then i said wait you have to look at these numbers 0.099 percent there's 18 000 people in conshohocken so more than 18 cannot have kovid and if they do masks go back on this metric has to change when you think about it it's unbelievable yay we go optional march 9th but your kids may be back in masks in april if the board does not change that metric we do not have to follow montgomery county they obviously don't don't have our kids best interests at heart so
080what i was going to say is i'm here for my son brody who was a kindergartner at rich park like many of his classmates he's not fine and he's not resilient and should never be at the age of six years from now i hope that he looks back on his early childhood and he remembers things like the eagles super bowl parade amazing and that one night that his mom stood up for him and his well-being and i pray that he forgets that he was in a mask eight hours a day five days a week for two years but studies show he will remember and he will most likely have side effects from all of this he has actually had covered not once twice he's still forced to wear a mask why for what protect himself
081he survived the runny nose not once twice protect the vaccinated teachers protect the nurses in hospitals that aren't overwhelmed anymore protect the thousands that just had omicron variant and have natural immunity you see my son has a rare disease it is one of the biggest reasons we chose colonial from a long line of catholic goers we knew you would give us reasonable accommodations and that you'd have his back he sees the nurse every day to drink medical formula and if there's a party he can have one of his special cupcakes that they keep in the freezer at ridge park he cannot however ever eat anything from the cafeteria like his friends he can enjoy snacks at the classroom parties and he cannot participate in ice cream socials should we cancel all the cafeteria food should
082we cancel all the ice cream socials and shut them all down and the school parties no mandatory masking of 5200 students is an unreasonable accommodation for the few who still want masks [Applause] you are unable you are able to provide them however reasonable accommodations by supplying them with a mass that protects them by spacing them out maybe or just meet with them on an individual basis and come up with a plan that makes them comfortable on january 19th of this year vinay prasad a hematologist oncologist and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the university of california published an article that i'd like to quote really think about this masking is now little more than an appealing delusion it arms us with this visible symbol that communicates our commitment to minimizing the pandemic's damage it makes
083some of us feel empowered by giving us something we can do in the face of a largely invisible threat to a certain extent this is understandable but most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity of this virus the loss to children remains difficult to capture in hard data but will likely become clear unfortunately in the years to come but less forgivable is the decision we've made as a society to shift the anxieties of adults onto the youngest members of society who count on us to defend their entrance interest before our own they count on us it is thanks to the nature of the virus not what americans have done not what institutions that have done that covet has been relatively impotent against
084children the majority of kids who have been infected recovered with ease and yet we continue to impose the most harmful restrictions on the youngest among us 30 seconds please when the history books are written though insisting that kids and toddlers wear masks for hours on end year after year without ever testing this policy with controlled trials we will look ignorant cruel fearful and cowardly we might even look worse than our primitive ancestors who when faced with great legs engaged in all sorts of bizarre superstitious behavior yet rarely did they include making kids suffer most [Applause] amanda corkes plymouth township when i first became a mother and was navigating through the challenges of being a new parent people would always tell me don't worry just trust your gut mother's intuition at first it seemed silly but
085more and more i found myself relying on my maternal instincts it seems that oftentimes i would find myself right and everyone else wrong but only with respect to my own child no one knows a child better than their parents especially their mother there is no one who knows what is best for my child better than me her mother certainly not a group of strangers a school board why do you feel that you know better when it comes to my child than i do why does my child have to be suggest subjected to the harmful physical and mental effects from constant mask wearing five days a week because you say so i have to listen to my child complain almost on a daily basis about her frequent headaches and sore throats she gets from constant mask
086wearing this is not okay you are causing harm to my child and to many other children after my child's mask exemption was denied i reached out to dr christian and the principal regarding mask breaks i told them about my daughter's frequent headaches and brain fog the principal said he would speak with my daughter to see if he could help the next day i asked my daughter how their talk went and she had no idea what i was talking about turns out he pulled the wrong child out of class and had to talk with them but i don't blame the principal i guess it's pretty easy to mix up kids when you don't even know what their face looks like we were told at the first meeting that masking is what we needed to do if
087we wanted in-person learning and we were assured that mask breaks would be built into the schedule that was a lie we were told that once vaccines were available for kids and those who wanted to get it could we could move away from masking that was a lie it has been two years when is enough enough my daughter actually said to me a few days ago mom why does it seem like this is just us kids who have to keep wearing masks it's like we were being punished or something that broke my heart to hear her say that and it's absolutely true we cannot continue to hide our children behind masks and isolate them we are raising a generation of children who are fearful and anxious the bottom line here is that these are not your
088children and you do not know what is best for them or their health their parents do there are a lot of mothers and fathers in this room that you have marginalized for the past year rolled your eyes at us looked at your phones while we poured our hearts out to you for the sake of our children labeled us as crazy and not following the science we know that masking is no longer appropriate for our children we know it in our bones in our blood and in our hearts we are advocating for them just as mothers around the country are doing and we will continue to do so because that is what mothers do yet you continue to deny us the ability to follow our mother's intuition and do what we know is best for our
089children this is wrong unforgivable and it must stop now [Applause] josh kaplan lafayette hill dr christian when i moved to this district a year and a half ago i was impressed with your professionalism and resolve but over the past year you've refused repeated calls to explain to the community the evidence that you relied on to make your recommendations and you've shown no empathy for the students who are struggling so greatly under the heavy burden of forced masking last month he proposed a masking plan tied to arbitrary metrics that our district has not met the entire school year and might never meet your revised plan is a little better and ties mask into a metric that our district has only met three weeks the entire school year each day we hear about a new country or
090state or city that is dropping coveted restrictions and returning to normalcy yet you seem to be stuck in a 2020 mentality you seem to have forgotten that forcing children to cover their faces was supposed to be a temporary and drastic measure in response to extraordinary circumstances your plan flips reality on its head and creates an environment where masking is the norm and we need to meet extraordinary milestones to allow our children to unmask your plane perpetuates a state of emergency but there's just one problem there is no emergency for kids omicron is like a mild colder flu from the majority of children many of our children now have natural immunity to virus and many others are vaccinated we know from lived experience that mass mandates are not necessary for schools to operate safely western europe
091never masked elementary school kids much of europe never amassed older kids except in extremely limited circumstances much of our country has been mass optional the entire school year your plan is out of touch with reality and it's out of touch with science your plan is cowardly it's shameful but even worse your plan is incredibly cruel it's unconscionable to set forth a framework that can allow our kids a taste of mass freedom after two years only to have that freedom yanked away from them a few weeks later if a few additional people in the community test positive a plan tied to an arbitrary metric is an invitation to indefinite restrictions we need to enforce masking now and forever dr christian i'm sorry to say this but if you believe that it's acceptable for our kids to
092go in and out of masking indefinitely you should resign [Applause] members of the board i had something written out to say to you but i'm not going to look at my paper because i want to look at you directly no i was very angry after the last meeting and i was prepared to come ream you out tonight for not caring about our kids but but the thing is i know that you do care about our kids and that's what it's so hard for me to figure out what's been going on how it's gotten to this point if you care about our kids how is it that you haven't explained to us at all your decision-making process how is it if you care about our kids that you don't want to listen to the parents who
093are telling you about the struggles that their kids are facing the people who are here tonight the people in the overflow room who weren't allowed in because you're distancing the chair six feet apart like you're right next to each other tonight they're not here because they want confrontation they're here because their kids are struggling and we want to end that suffering for our kids and the only way to end that suffering is to give us the choice to allow them to remove their mask we're not asking to tell everyone else what you do i would love for everyone to stop wearing masks but that's not my call what my focus is on my child and what's best for my child and to be clear this plan that is proposed tonight is not a plan to
094go mask optional this plan tonight if you vote for it is setting the kids up to be masking indefinitely potentially forever you've told us before that you can revisit the the safety plan at any time but the problem is we don't trust you now because you've never explained to us how you're making your decisions you've never explained to us why you think masks are necessary you talked about teacher safety at the last meeting you're my neighbor we have neighbors that are my friends who are teachers in this building i care about teacher safety but how could you just raise teacher safety without also talking about we know europe was mask-free for almost two years we know that most of our country has been mass free almost this entire school year and what's happened with the
095teachers nothing there's the same level as safety as the teachers in math schools so safety of our teachers is not a concern and for the students we get people can quibble about the data and asking okay someone i can show you a mountain of evidence someone else can show you a tiny pile of weak evidence of cherry pick data but that's fine 30 seconds mr kaplan we can look with our own eyes what has been happening in the world why why can't our district be like so many other districts in this state why can't our district be like the entire state of florida that has been mass optional since the fall why can't we see like millions of other districts in our state have been mass optional why can't we be like europe that was
096mass optional never masked for two years you owe us answers you need to vote down this plane tonight and vote to go optional pass optional immediately [Applause] my name is ryan paolini i live in plymouth meeting um i was not going to speak tonight i came purely to support the other parents that feel the same way i do but um [Music] years from now i want to tell my son that i did something to help him but i stood up when it mattered my son is seven years old he goes to white marsh elementary he has cerebral palsy speech has always been a really difficult thing for him he wasn't even able to say his own name until he was almost four years old masking him makes it next to impossible to understand him because
097he's already hard to understand but you know what i've done what i'm supposed to do all this time i heard a parent mention the super bowl and i wanted to comment on that because i watched the super bowl and what i saw was a stadium packed with tens of thousands of people next to each other filled with celebrities who have many times yelled at us little people for not wearing gas not protecting each other not wearing masks and then i had to wake up the next morning and put a mask on my seven-year-old to go to school it didn't make any sense i'm sure you know it doesn't make any sense there's no reason that our children need to be wearing masks when the rest of the country doesn't have to and for the people
098who want to put their kid in a mask and feel that that's safe and that's best for them fantastic go do that no one's telling you you can't what we're saying is we want to choose for our children i want my child to understand what everyone around him is saying i want everyone around my child to understand what he is saying and that can't happen if he's masked every day and i know that some of you know my child and know the struggles that he has been through he didn't walk until he was three and a half okay and i'm done letting other people make decisions for me as a parent [Applause] hi my name is dr sarah dersterius and first of all i just want to clarify that every single board member up here
099really does care about our kids but i know because i came to board meetings long before they were cool to show up to okay a lot of these ladies sat back here with me on this side and we fought for this district okay so they do care but i also know that i am pro mask optional and there's a lot that needs to be said because tonight there was a person that said that our hospitals are overwhelmed my family works in our hospitals er my brother-in-law's a doctor my husband's at einstein my sister-in-law said chester crosier you know a ton of my friends are at temple and fox chase i mean we are in the medical community both my husband and myself and our hospitals i want to clarify are not overwhelmed there was a
100point [Applause] there was a point where mass made sense okay there was a complete and utter time where i would have stood up here and said our kids need to stay in mass okay but the scales have tipped even dr rubin at the chop policy lab you know what he said i sent you the news clip he said now the risk and the benefits aren't there and i'm going to tell you as a medical professional my job is to take risk and benefit okay for every single patient i see and i have to treat them or do some kind of thing for them what's the risk what's the benefits that's how we weigh it and currently the risk of keeping these kids in mask any longer far outweighs the benefits okay our kids are suffering
101my son tonight wanted to come here he's in second grade and i told him because he knows about the meetings because they show him everything he said to me please at least if you go tell them i just want to smile at my friends our kids are hurting it is time to unmask our children and there was a time where it made a lot of sense but it doesn't make sense anymore thank you [Applause] uh my name is ashley junta i live in lafayette hill i have a second grader and a kindergartner at white marsh i stand up here tonight as a concerned parent my children have not had a normal year of school yet these are critical years in my children's lives where their personalities are molded into who they will become one day
102they're missing out on important social interaction and social development they've been asked for too long now they need to see their teacher and their peers faces the developmental and social delays that have harmed our students may impact them for the rest of their lives i took a look at the board docs from the curriculum update on february 14th parents that haven't seen them you should take a look it's very clear to see how our children are suffering academically as well pssa performance from 8th grade math went from 60 proficient and advanced for the years 2018 and 2019 down to 37 percent for 2020 and 2021. ussa performance 5th grade math went from 78 to 59 sitting in a mask for eight hours a day is giving these kids headaches brain fog difficulty concentrating and simply
103difficulty hearing everything the teacher says if we're going to continue on this track we need a more reasonable metric we should be looking at our schools specifically to see how many cases are in each class building and the district as a whole it doesn't make sense to look at all of monco's numbers who have quite a few nursing homes when there may be zero coveted cases in our child's entire school we've been at this long enough to be able to look at the data we know that studies have shown that cloth masks that our children wear are not very effective we knew from the beginning that that in order for a mask to work it had to be worn properly which is not the case in most young children we can look to the schools
104in other countries in other states who have never matched their children these numbers have been similar if not better than ours so why is it that we're doing this to our children we're only hurting them at this point mentally emotionally our children are exhausted we've asked our children to protect the elderly who are at a high risk of having serious complications from covid we've asked our children to just hold on a little longer until students are able to be vaccinated we've asked our children to just to to protect the younger kids who aren't eligible for the vaccine yet when is it their turn when do they get to our children have carried this weight long enough it's time to start thinking about their mental health there's a reason why mental health is a quick quick
105link on the s on the csd home page our children are not okay [Applause] mr douglas speakers from zoom at this time this is more thank you uh dr christian if you'd like to give the superintendent's report uh please uh superintendents report motion to approve the personnel report and extracurricular contracts as outlined in 9b and 9c award action is requested for the recommended personnel changes appointments for promotion employment or transfer are subject to the presentation of valid credentials employment verification documentation and state mandated requirements is there a motion to approve the superintendent's report chris thank you third second sharon thanks any questions or comments for dr christian on his report all in favor thank you uh now is the time i think why don't we let you guys go and then you can leave tomorrow
106and then when you're done [Music] then you're staying all night go ahead emma [Music] [Applause] that's okay we're good go ahead emma good evening dr christians school board members and community thank you for allowing us the opportunity to provide the monthly schools students report students at white marsh elementary school recently celebrated what makes each of them unique by creating a garden of strengths each child decorated a flower and wrote about something that makes them different the garden of strengths was the last activity of a larger project that included a read-aloud of sony soda mayor's book just asked be different be brave bu and a discussion about what it means to be brave especially when talking about people's differences winter parties took place in on february 11th the students had a blast celebrating with their teachers
107and peers each classroom completed an activity game or craft during their party the kindergarten team at white marsh elementary also celebrated their 100th day of school on february 11th each classroom completed a number of activities surrounding the 100th day of school including 100 day pizzas 100 day beaded necklaces and 100 day hats which they proudly wore all day long bridge park completed their first no place for hate project every classroom read the book all are welcome which focused on the themes of diversity acceptance and celebrating our differences at school and in our community students completed a variety of follow-up activities the great kindness challenge was january 24th through the 28th the entire school community joined in promoting kindness through various activities in literature every student contributed kind messages or drawings for the great wall of
108kindness teachers incorporated this into morning meetings each day rich park also collected and donated winter hats gloves coats socks and other essentials to aim high studios front porch pantry in norristown beginning in february ridge park has its annual food drive initiative throughout the month students will bring food in for the colonial neighborhood council plymouth elementary school will participate in many activities to celebrate black history month during february 2022 the school ride activities have a focus on local community members celebrating black culture and appreciating diversity in children's literature plymouth elementary is taking part in the read for the house community service project this project allows students to record reading time during the month of february to raise donations for the philadelphia ronald mcdonald house the students and staff led by our third grade spirit team continue
109to spread kindness and help the community during the month of february students have been creating kindness cards and crafts for individuals in our school and or any building in the district including nurses secretaries principals teachers and bus drivers plymouth elementary students celebrated their 100th day of school during the month of february kindergarten children displayed projects showing 100 of their favorite items and to commemorate the special day during the week of january 24th through the 28th conshohocken elementary celebrated the great kindness challenge conshohocken elementary students were invited to participate in our kindness tunnel and walk around the kindness loop in the schoolyard children received a kindness checklist full of kind acts to complete throughout the week the week culminated with a pack party where all students created a cup of kindness card to be delivered to
110fines coffee shop a local business in conshohocken on january 25th under the direction of miss jen walls conshohocken elementary third grade chorus presented their winter concert to their families the concert was focused on the seasons of the year and was held in the conshohocken elementary gymnasium families thoroughly enjoyed this and i'm sorry enjoy the show and the students did an excellent job colonial elementary students are focusing on black history month during morning meetings each week a notable african-american will be highlighted such as rosa parks pamela harris serena williams and thurgood marshall the students are also learning about the civil rights movement the emancipation proclamation and racial segregation in public schools as always kindness towards one another is an underlying topic colonial elementary is proud to be embarking on its fourth year as a new place
111for hate school this year they are focusing on diversity and inclusion through a variety of school activities such as our october morning meetings which focused on acceptance and anti-bullying in addition they had a new place for hate kickoff assembly in december where the fifth greek student ambassadors were able to share what new place for heap means to them and all students were given an opportunity to sign the new place for hate pledge they will continue to work as a team to build a community of respect acceptance and inclusion colonial middle school student council is looking forward to organizing the second annual black history month book drive to benefit colonial school district and our local community libraries including conshohocken and william jeans libraries they are super excited to expand to the community libraries this year after
112having so much success last year they are currently gathering book suggestions this week and hope that colonial school district families would like to share book titles with them as they explore options for their wish list after 20 years of musicals colonial middle school put on annie on february 10th 11th 12th and 13th in honor of their first musical and music program shared the event was a great success and the casting crew should be commended for their phenomenal work at plymouth white marsh 655 students achieved distinguished honor roll at pw for the first semester and six of those students have been selected for recognition from the college board based on their academic record as we saw earlier in the meeting congratulations to those who have received these incredible awards multiple members of pw's future business leaders
113of america club have qualified for the organization state competition good luck to all of those who are competing finally winter sports are coming to an end and many pre-seasons for spring sports have begun spring sports will officially start as of the 28th of february and we're all excited to see a few more championships this year this is the conclusion of our february 17 2022 student report thank you all for your time and have a nice evening thank you just want one additional uh you guys reference it but just one special commendation our girls basketball team is simply [Applause] they are 25-0 and i've seen them play multiple times and they they play well as a team they're not only excellent players they're great people and they care for one another and uh the talent is
114uh is amazing but the type of kids that are is even better uh so we wish them they just won the sort of suburban one championship they start districts uh next week and uh and hopefully a pathway to uh pia state state finals so we wish coach and the girls all the best in their pursuit [Applause] you two are welcome to leave it's a long night and at this time um i think we're going to take a quick uh break this is sachin you want to say something just very quickly i want to welcome emma friedman so that's the first note this is her first meeting and i don't know if all of you now but she's the grand niece of our beloved mel brotsky so welcome please please give your uncle our great our
115best regards um all right thank you two very much and we'll take a two minute break and we'll be right back oh okay could everybody please take their seats okay thank you all for indulging in that quick break we've been in meetings since a little after six so we needed a little break um new business please uh chris okay um motion to approve the changes and revisions to board policy 802 school organization on a second read basis is there a second to chris's motion thank you beth any questions or comments on policy 802 in a second read all in favor thank you uh kathy academic calendar yes um this is the motion to approve the k-12 academic calendar for the 2022 school year as presented is there a second to that motion well any comments
116can we pull it up so everyone can see what it is okay so the first the first day of school is after labor yeah the board already approved the first i know i just yeah start dating i just thought since we were talking about it that maybe to show it would be good sure we're starting after the tuesday afternoon labor day correct and we're going to tell when let's go scroll down june yep is the last day of school it is uh on board docs if anyone needs wants to look at it we'll post it on the website we'll post it on the website as well thank you um we have a motion and we have a second any comments or questions on the calendar is presented all in favor f this is a motion
117to approve the memorandum of understanding between colonial school district and colonial education association regarding james brooks as a teacher on special assignment it's their second thank you sharon any questions or comments mr brooks is going to be the teacher on special assignment as the assistant principal at plymouth elementary correct for the rest of the school year correct correct okay any other questions comments all in favor thank you [Music] go ahead beth this is a motion to approve the memorandum of understanding between colonial school districts and colonial education association regarding health insurance duplicate coverage as presented is there a second second thank you kathy any questions comments yeah mr sebastian can you explain what that is for michelle there's a provision in the uh the contract that was not addressed during negotiations which the language was
118duplicated from four years ago which uh reverted the dollars paid to any employee opting off of our health insurance that they would get what they got four years ago this is correcting that and correcting it going forward at the act one index instead of the uh five percent that was in the previous contract we did an mou with cea yes okay thank you any other questions all in favor this is a motion to approve the administration's recommendation to ratify the agreement between the colonial school board of directors and teamsters local union number 384 effective july 1st 2022 through june 30th 2026. so a second any comments or questions i'd just like to thank our um beth do you want to do that you've done yeah i would like to just thank uh our teamsters negotiating
119group and um our administration for putting this together and having such a mr lally um mrs o'reilly and uh mr zablasky for putting this together in such a timely quick and relatively easy uh manner so thank you for all your hard work and to the teamsters as well uh jamina oh no we didn't vote all in favor thank you that's why you're there um conference request jamina this is a motion to approve the conference request for uh plymouth white merch high school college counselor beth lynch to attend the university connecticut's counselor forum from april 18th through the 20th 2022 this request was reviewed at the february curriculum committee of the board meeting there's no quest to the district is there a second uh thank you gail and are there any questions or comments all in
120favor great this is a motion to approve the revisions to the colonial school district's 2021-2022 health and safety plan is presented and that the superintendent is hereby granted discretion to implement modifications to the district's 2021-2022 health and safety plan consistent with the intent of the board as expressed in this motion specifically colonial school district will recommend but not require masking while indoors for all students and staff as of march 9 2022 provided that the district's covered 19's rates are not as hot at the high level of transmission a high level is defined as positive cover 19 cases greater than 100 per 100 000 people or positivity rate greater than 10 the district will require masking if the transmission levels return to the high range for two consecutive weeks and that is a motion and is
121there a second okay now is the time for comments and questions from the board i'd love to start if that's okay sure um i know this is a i didn't write some notes down so because i don't want to lose my train of thought i know this is a very emotional issue um it's about our kids um it's about their day-to-day life their progress their um happiness their health both physical and mental um we all get that mr cop mr kaplan um mentioned that we never explain our reasons for our votes and i feel like when it comes to these bigger issues we we do i feel like we have our recommendations that we have we discuss the motion we talk about things i've argued with fellow board members up here trying to get to
122the nitty-gritty of things we try to our best of our ability explain our reasons um we don't have ulterior motives we don't have any ulterior motives and the fact that people come up here and stand there and belittle us for a job that none of us thought we would be doing anything like this when we signed up except sharon god bless sharon none of us i just it's really heartbreaking to think that members of my community people that i've drunk with ate with um had good conversations with would belittle us to the point where i almost got up and walked out and resigned myself because all i do is care all we do is care and we're not perfect we're not perfect dr christian's not perfect sue moore's not perfect no i'll go all the
123way down the line but we freaking care and we try and um hold on see this is why i have to look at my notes we serve everyone somebody came up and probably belittled us the most but we don't serve the teachers we serve the students the staff the teachers the community we do taxes for people who don't care about this meeting so we serve them as well so when you say oh you serve the teachers not the kids that's why this job is hard we serve all of them and yes the students are the number one of course it is the essence of education of course but our unpaid volunteer job that we don't sleep about is about more than just the students someone said how do you sleep you know what you don't
124and to say you saw me at a restaurant i need you guys to understand something the reason why this is paduci we're all given the opportunity to speak without it being interesting i i guess that was not direct to the people that was a saying i i apologize as i said it okay we all need we all need to use i apologize it's hard here's the thing when students are in classes around the same people all day long it is different than when you go to a restaurant for an hour again again we let you all speak right so when we speak you can comment at the end right this is padoozy speak when we went through our original masking however long ago it was those were the things that we were educating ourselves about
125from people who were smarter than us from whether they were scientists doctors whatever it was and they said because you were around the same people for so long it was different than walking in a wawa when you're only in there for a few minutes okay that is different now now that now if you let me get to my point without yelling at me well now when the rates are so low things are different so now you can be around people for longer times what i want to try to get to is i want to hear we always want to hear what everybody has to say we hear it whether it said um in a kind way or not we hear it okay we listen to it and we try to do our best to um
126use what we know what we learn because yes we do our research yes we've seen the data yes we share it amongst ourselves without deliberating outside we know things and we do our best so with all of that being said i want to share my thoughts that there are risks every day and we have to learn to live with risks the risks now are much lower the risks now as you see the trends are going to the point where odds are we are going to be in a much much safer place and it will become an endemic i enjoy reading dr mcbride i enjoy reading the chop policy lab i do not believe that we should be mandating our kids to our masks so when i read this proposal from dr christian i expressed my
127response to him with regard to the date and with regard to the transmission and his response was this is where we talk about it so nowhere you know we know decisions have been made and this is where the nine of us are going to have discussions on do we agree with the high transmission rate do we think hospitalization rates should come into play is it should we not listen to montgomery county or so um this is where we start talking about a date do we keep march 9th do we do tomorrow do we do june so we are we are here to have these discussions openly and from a man who kept saying we don't explain our points we try to but then we get yelled at for it so i will just say i
128apologize for saying screw you it was something that i was feeling and it wasn't to anybody in perspective it is a feeling of frustration that i think has been bubbling up for the last two hours and so i apologize if i offended any of you it did not it was not personal it was just please feel that angst okay um no no no no we're good okay does anybody else does anybody else want to comment other board members yeah i'd like to speak go ahead germain um first i thank everybody for your comments um and for your passion and for coming to advocate for what you believe is best for your children i understand that um this has been a long time for the school board members that were on the board before i get
129two weeks um okay for the school board members that were on the board before me so i understand how long you guys have been working at this along with dr christian and his staff i also know that there are a lot of families that are not represented here in person that have opposing views to all of us um what i i guess i have some questions because i would like to know if the march 9th date is the the best option for us right now if that can be um altered and moved up in any way and what exactly when we get down to specific numbers because i think metrics um when we talk about high range and the like can be confusing compared to numbers how many students across the district of course our
130area would we not need when we say that as long as we're not in high what does that look like in specific numbers compared to where we are today the high transmission is is greater than 100 cases per 100 000 individuals or a positivity rate in the community greater than 10 so that's what the motion have to be under that the motion does not specifically include what our cases are within our schools exclusively it's tied to the community rate if the if the board wants to amend the motion to include something tied to cases in schools then you would have to propose an amendment [Music] um just just for clarification to jamina um i looked um it up and as of the 2019 census information that we have our community has 43 549 um people
131in it so if that's helpful so um [Music] 549. it would be um to get into the low range we'd have to be down but when you get to the high right so the high range would be [Music] currently sorry yeah yeah did you say that can you say that so it can be heard by everybody please what is that number one second one we have forty two thousand forty three forty three hundred pesos so that's for the high range and you want us to have a thoughtful conversation this is the first time we are able to discuss this with each other so please please have the same respect for our board members as we had for you when you spoke and we have not been able to debate this as a board and that's
132what we want to do so that we can make the best decision for all of our over 5 000 students including your students we want to make the best decision for your students the people watching at home and and we need to be able to discuss this without being interrupted and and as we're figuring things out please we're trying to do best by you please let us have that opportunity right and and just to clarify if we're talking about a positivity rate of greater than 10 percent and there's 43 000 in the community then 4300 would be 10 so that number is actually not incorrect except that it's of the people that are being tested at that time so i'm just about in terms of what 10 or 43 000 is it's still 4 300.
133it's and it's not end it's or either can be achieved do you mean are you done is that all you i don't have any more questions at this moment i'm still processing okay um who else would like to speak dr christian um we talked a little bit about um vaccination rates and i know that we don't have um we can't require everyone to share but can you give us a little bit of background on how many of our students are vaccinated that we know of in the district uh we have more accurate data at the middle school and high school level it's an option for parents to share not a requirement at the high school level it is in the 73 to 75 percent range middle school level is in the 60 to 65 range
134and we are still collecting uh the elementary data uh sending out reminders to parents um we know that we had over 1100 students at the elementary level participate in our two vaccination clinics prior to the winter break uh and there's probably there's approximately 2 200 elementary students so there's 50 percent right there and i'm sure there are additional families that have gone on their own if they chose to do so to have their children vaccinated um and i know a question that i got from someone prior to the meeting was um about quarantining and if we do move to mask recommended what that looks like for students if you can just reiterate that a little bit uh sure i went over it a little bit earlier right um i think i don't know so students
135positive they still have to quarantine for five days until symptoms resolve closed contacts will be notified recommended to wear masks um so we'll send a general notification to families on the bus and families in the classroom like we have been doing but really when you move to matt if you go to mask optional mass recommended uh contact tracing does decrease it simply does um you know you think about the high school you go to how many different classes in a day and how many different classes in the middle school and uh trying to you know you'll have some kids who are wearing ass who will not be wearing this so that makes it more difficult because teachers need to focus on teaching so about that but before i get to that if if we and
136i think we talked about this the other day if if somebody tests positive now we do the contact tracing we try to figure all that if we go to the recommended if a kid tests positive are we no longer gonna then do the contact tracing and call the families that you know like around are around that kid is it like what changes it'll be a classroom notification okay so it's kind of right and this is like the analogy i used before is it's kind of like a kid gets head lice we'll let the class know but we're not going to tell anybody johnny who sat next to your child just tested positive for coded cobit it's a general notification for example in elementary school mrs jones's class has a positive taste of case of covid
137but the families aren't going to know who it was is that right correct okay so parents need to understand that right it's like they're gonna get that there's there's no longer this okay my kid was one seat away my kid was six weeks away so it's a general notification correct okay and i want parents to understand that my second question is there seems to be a lot of angst about the word optional versus recommended and so why would we what is our this what is the recommendation as of using the word recommended versus optional and do we think it really makes a difference in the grand scheme of things if it makes families feel better to tell their child that it's optional what is our concern with that word yeah i i appreciate our first
138speaker mr jensen's opinion on that i thought he raised some good points certainly not the intent to make anybody feel bad that's why i'm asking um i think in terms of just whether you're requiring mass or not requiring is is has its specific definition and i think recommended i recommend it recommended optional or synonymous but i understood his point so what could we consider using the word optional certainly okay i have a question to tag along with beth's with respect to the contact tracing um what information are we required to submit to the county currently in terms of if the child tests positive or we do we tell the county who the kids were that are around them and if that is the case now no we don't tell the county we know that in
139detail we provide numbers that are reported to us and in the county i don't know what formula they use i'm sure they also collect uh information from you know hospitals testing sites things like that of pcr tests you know a lot of information we find out is from originally maybe an at-home test and then it's followed up with a pcr uh we appreciate when parents share that with us and then there is uh when their accounting information is uploaded there is a site where the nurses can check uh to see if the child's have it but we don't we don't we keep a list of the close contacts uh just so we can help inform parents but we don't that's what we have done but we don't inform the county event any other questions go
140ahead guys i have a commenting question so uh my question is in regards to transition if we are to vote mask optional what does that transition look like um and my statement is coming from the perspective of right now where maths required rate and you and we've been mass required most of the time and so since the kids been have been back in school there is a transition to moving to another phase and from students and it may look different for elementary um than some of the other greats what does that look like for them because you can't remove one form of what some may call mental english to create another one and what i mean by that is um opening up the door for potential bullying um i'm sure that our um our policies
141that one bullying and other things would still be in effect um but just want to understand better what does that transition look like from a communications perspective to the students um teachers and staff first the board has to make a decision and select the date and of what what we require what we're going to require or recommend if we were to move to a mask optional or recommended state we would certainly put together communication communicate with families about being and i think our i believe our families and our parents and guardians would help with this about being respectful of what students are doing in class just like we we're respectful and do things like the great kindness challenge and focus on you know the positive things that are going on in school um so we
142certainly would put together communication uh emphasizing um what the new recommendation is and uh and how it'll be handled in school we don't tolerate bullying we try to do a lot of uh as many proactive things as we can morning meeting is very popular in our elementary schools to introduce topics for kids and [Music] our teachers do a very fine job with that so and we would administration will follow through with whatever the board decides and my follow-up question uh dr christian is around you know going forward so i'm not we're we were in a pandemic we're still in a pandemic technically um for two years and within this you know pandemic it's we're not going back to pre-pandemic um the world is not going back to pre-pandemic like it was um and so what
143does the new normal look like and i'm stating that is as we go forward into the next school year what does that what do we start to look like so that we're not having to sit here for many hours um having the same conversations because there are so many other issues that are going on with our students um that we need to be discussing at these meetings and so what kind of plan or what kind of uh things are you thinking about to move forward and i'm giving an example and this is just it's something off the top of my head as an example of what i mean um in terms of hey we know because we have data and we know that the high transmittable um transmission is happening during certain loss and so
144would a a plan such that mass may be required in certain months versus other months so that that's the plan for the year we have the plan and obviously if there's an exception we would have to come back and have that discussion um so my question is is that something being this being thought about certainly thought about it and i think we would have to put together multiple options i mean think about how quickly the last variant uh emerged right and we were in the area the country was rampant with cases particularly the first couple weeks of january in the last week of december so you would have to come up with multiple options make sure that we communicate them with the board with the community we don't know if there will be another variant
145it probably will be we don't know what its severity will be or its virulence we know that everybody wants to get to the point where we are massless it's a matter of timing when that occurs but certainly i'm sure there will be discussions unfortunately and i don't like saying this but just the more i read i think there will be challenges in the winters and years ahead but hopefully will not be as as challenging as this past year was can you also dr christian explain a little bit about how um you reached the recommendation of um not in high for the metric it's a combination of what certainly let's met with meet with uh oph and chop on a weekly basis talk to dr rubin after his comments uh on his on his blog and
146on tv oph still uh recommends the current metrics that we're following and then took a look at the specific building data and the significant drop as i articulated in the email to our community and the graphs our specific caseloads in school it was a combination of those too along that line can you please explain where the date of march 9th came from why sure why the delay or why that date made sense to you we were sitting at uh originally 1200 cases per 100 000 down to 171. the march 9th gives us they report out the county data for our specific municipalities on tuesdays march 9th is a wednesday this would give us three more not quite three weeks but three more reporting dates so that we would be able to share that data with
147our community and hopefully see that trend uh continue to decrease um and they also released the positivity rate at that time as well um but certainly if the board wants to adjust the date that's the pleasure of the board i have a question um so towards the end it shows a digital car mask [Music] i guess my question is um so after two consecutive weeks and high uh and you have to return to masking at what point could you go back to optional or recommended whichever return week so i really i would rather not go back and forth but it's possible that it could happen but it would be i would like to go back to the recommended portion within a week if we could but i didn't want it to be one week and
148high because you could have some outliers that skewed the data and so that's why i put in two weeks uh so two weeks and then and then if the data shows you're back under the high you could go sure i mean i think i think everybody's if the board approves this motion as it is you know we'd all be concerned if it was 105 and 10.5 right so you know that's why we put that two weeks in there um hopefully hopefully we like i said continue on this drop and a lot of the predictive stuff from chop and top policy lab seems we're going to continue with this case uh this trend moving downward and i hope certainly i hope that continues i would like to um to talk about also with the metric just
149moving towards um the cases within the schools themselves as opposed to [Applause] and i know it's challenging but um as opposed to cases where we might we we have the community where we do have the um assisted living facilities that get counted into the numbers but don't really affect them but i think the snapshot to us would be more of what's going on in the actual school buildings this is a discussion we're still it's fluid so please thank you um i'm sorry go ahead do you wanna go um so i just wanted to uh first thank everyone who shared tonight um and i just i i everyone has a story and i truly do believe that your stories um are valid everyone's story is valid no matter what they believe and i do believe that
150people are doing this out of love um and out of fear um and they're all valid so i just want to say thank you for sharing your stories tonight um in addition to that i wanted to say i also understand the importance of making decisions with communities and not doing two communities and one of the things that stood out for me was making sure that there was another vaccination event so thank you for making sure that that's at least available if staff or students or community members want to see another vaccination or get boosted or whatever the case might be um the point about the language of optional versus recommended to the gentleman who made that point um thank you i thought that was a super valid point as well um and that's something that
151we thought of so thank you for sharing that um i just want to say in terms of the way to your point chris that the county is looking at this from the whole county perspective i don't think makes sense for our community and for our schools um and i do think that we are doing a lot in terms of other mitigation strategies um and i i do think if a shift needs to be made either to look at the school level um or to as you said in the letter dr christian local leaders and health experts assert that decisions be made at the individual district level um to think about really what are we going to do here as a district that is different than montgomery county because i don't know if it makes sense
152to continue to follow something when we are at zeros for um a lot of our schools for for a good portion of time [Applause] um i agree with what chris and sharon just shared about focusing on our schools and would even wonder if it would be possible to look at individual schools as opposed to the entire district which i know makes the numbers a little bit more challenging but looking at our even our covert rates per school if i'm looking at this correctly we have some schools that have a lot lower numbers that are not in red right now and have not been in red for a while and some schools that still are so i think that even looking at it by school by school bases as opposed to of course the district um
153or at least within specific municipalities as opposed across the district and i also want to just um raise there was a i believe a mom who spoke about not using superheroes as the ones with mass because what does that say about what children who don't wear math so when you do go to mask optional i think that messaging is really important because kids can look at that and think that you know um if i wear one i'm a superhero if i don't i know my child would look at it and would want to be like captain america and if captain america wears a mask even my family decided [Applause] um thank you for bringing that up because those messages is sometimes not heard and seen so thank you for bringing that to us does anyone
154else have any comments to make so if we and this is me being the new person on the block here um if we chose to not vote for the current um motion then what are the options do we default back to where we were can we have a discussion about creating something different like i don't know if i fully understand how that works we can make a motion to amend the motion mr sultana someone can make a motion to amend the motion that i read to be more in line with what you or anyone who makes that motion is thinking either somebody can make the motion or the person who made the motion and the second can agree to um i would like to say this is nothing to do with the decision making exactly
155but i would like to thank all of you um i know this is going to sound weird i know you were passionate you are advocating for your children i get that i think it's important for you to know if you don't i appreciate sarah saying that she knows we care um but she knows that most of us um we all care incredibly deeply about our students um we've been doing i've been doing this a very long time i get paid nothing it's a tremendous amount of my time and as kathy said there are a lot of sleepless nights there are a lot of nights where you know we are angsting all of us over decisions that we have to make but i want to tell you that this past week there were several school districts
156who had to shut down their meetings because their their parents that came were just uncontrollable and um i thank you all greatly for coming here and giving us your opinions sometimes passionate sometimes in tears sometimes in anger but i appreciate the fact that generally everybody was very respectful um we're all going to have different opinions i'd also like you to please keep in mind that although you all came out tonight and i and and i know that's not easy you have kids at home there are a lot of people who didn't come out tonight who may feel differently than you and we all have to um make a decision that's based on the entire community um and i just want you to please keep that in mind that's all i wanted to say okay um
157so i would like to discuss um get because we're gonna eventually have to vote here um my gut feeling is that we [Music] make it so that masks will be optional starting at a date sooner than march 9th my my i thought next wednesday would be good because we would have friday and tuesday for teachers to talk to the students especially the younger students to get them up to speed on what the changes would be so i would say as soon as possible but not tomorrow um and then my metric would then be we would only then require masks if at school levels it got too high if we started seeing like i'd rather not [Applause] i'd rather not have the metric really i would like to just sort of see how things play out
158um and because this will become more like an endemic like the flu whereas we get our vaccinations every year and this is part of our our daily risks of life um i don't believe that masking will be part of our lives for forever because this will become so that's that's sort of where my good is i mean we still have the ventilation in our rooms we still do the hand washing um you know i'm hoping we can remove the cohorting of the groups and really get back to more of normal um you know and but i think as what with my brilliant colleagues mentioned with going to the very school specific that's where instead of saying that's when they can get out of the masks i think we should be out of the masks and
159then just do that if we need to go back into them if it gets really scary so i don't know if anybody else is anywhere close to where i'm thinking on that um so if so like speak up otherwise i think kathy it's important to ask our administrators what it would look like to have to to try to uh work with the numbers within each building and what might that metric look like so yeah obviously there's a lag in collecting data uh from uh from the municipalities that we see on the website on the covet hub in the county um what we do get faster turnaround in is uh the reported cases within our schools so i'm aware of a few school districts in delaware county uh one that has started the other one is
160considering i believe i haven't looked in the past 48 hours but i was looking over the weekend where they're following a two or two and a half percent role per building so if you have a school of 500 children and you have two percent as applied to that if more than 10 students are positive then they will revert back to masking if they are if it's under the mass will be optional um you know that you're relying on gathering uh and we certainly appreciate parents sharing with us parents and guardians when they have a positive case and reporting that you would have to do that on a weekly basis and then notify parents so you do run the risk if there's you know for example we had schools in january as we started to decrease
161there were still a few of our elementary schools that were still experiencing more cases within their built within their schools whether it was originated from outside or was transmitted in schools right it could have been a combination of both so i believe haverford and longford swarthmore are pursuing that option so but to apply the the county the oph transmission levels to school it would be i think very challenging because of the lag and the lag and the the data that we get one of one of the other things that that comes to mind for me is um if my school is mass optional excuse me and um my kid develop is uh test positive for coded and i let the school know my school's now going to go over that number and everybody's going to
162have to wear a mask and i don't want to i don't want to encourage people to not report because that's not good for the other kids in the class and that's a concern i have with um i'm also wondering about so on the bus it's k-5 so how would you distinguish kids at wave martial elementary are also at the 4-5 school so how would how would you even transportation is federally mandated though so on the buses everybody has to wear it regardless okay so here is that weird so regardless see you guys um ces and white marsh don't share anymore they're exclusive busting ces and white marsh what about plymouth and they're all exclusive everybody's exclusive now and they're going to continue that we've been doing it okay all right i think one of my
163questions or concerns is is i've heard a lot of it will become better um chop recommends that when things get when rates decrease and i think you know dr christians presented that we are decreasing and things are getting better i guess for me right now um the concern is have we reached the point where they are better so that we can safely our goal is to keep our kids in school we don't want kids i don't want there to be 15 elementary school students that suddenly now can't come to school because they're sick and have coded so are we at a place where we are highly confident that there is not widespread community spread so that our students can be in school without a mask on and remain in school learning where they deserve and
164need to date and that's where i think this metric that was put out is based on the community because all our kids are going home and living in the community and i think that you know montgomery county wants us in moderate i i think we've all sort of wrapped our heads around that that seems very unattainable um it seems that getting out of high is attainable um you know we're a board that we keep discussing this month after month you know if we reach march 7 you know my feeling is and we're not out of high we have another meeting to then come back and discuss some of these other ideas of what we can do but i feel like there are a lot of families that really are concerned about the community spread still
165and where we stand and excuse me i just would like you guys want us to discuss i'm trying to give you my train of thought and so that when i make a vote it's not that i just voted and didn't tell anyone why um you know i think we all want our students out of masks i'm a teacher we know that that is good for our students i think it's just getting to the place where it is safe to do it so that our students can be healthy and remain in school and learn so i think looking at it from that aspect our goal is to keep our kids healthy and in school i think i was going to say something so as a father of that has actually lost a young one um so
166my decision is gonna be you know i have to have to decide for the way that i felt uh in most kids get sick uh some go to hospital most recover my son was very sick but the the fact still remains that if you make a decision and just say they should just wear a mask um you don't pay credence to what that feels like my son was almost three and again he was very sick and i understand all that um but these are not very easy decisions that we're making um just because you say it doesn't mean it's so um so we do need to take this time to deliberate and it has to be in front of you all um so every time you chime in it kind of just messes up the
167flow we can't just go into me in the back and talk about it and come out with a decision we have to do it in front of you um that's all i that's all i wanted to say um i'd like to follow kathy said and just say that the part that i i really um and i know it'll be unpopular with this i don't see us going before that date in march because i think that we are on a trend down and and if you look at the numbers from week to week it's really plummeting but we're not there yet i think that we need to give our our our administration our teachers our families the opportunity to talk to their kids as uh gail mentioned about what it'll be like when your friend's wearing
168a mask and you're not and and how we treat one another i think that's something we need to do and i think we need the time i love the idea of the time for another vaccination clinic so that anybody who's been on the fence might have the opportunity to take advantage of a clinic um and i think that when you count the days it's not that far off and i know it seems that far off because we've been doing it for so long but i think that the date is logically chosen and and i i like that i like sticking with the date and not doing it tomorrow or monday um so that's the part that i'm kind of i'm i'm back and forth with the metrics but i'd like to hear if anybody else
169has any other comments tonight i was going to just add to it because that was what i that that was what i was referring to when i said transition plan because it is a transition we've been last required for almost two years and there needs to be a transition um in that regard and you know the the pain mental anguish that kids may be going through is not only related to mass so removing mass is not going to necessarily clear up everything that our kids are going through right now if they were in a pandemic something that we as adults did not live through when we were their ages and so just in general going through the pandemic so there needs to be a transition so i'm not i i like having a date that's
170further out um to be able to transition and to give our kids the opportunity to give our parents the opportunity to speak to their children because some parents again you may not see them here for whatever reason they couldn't be here today but equally have the opposing um argument of math keeping mass required and so all parents need an opportunity to talk to their children about what it means to transition to a different state so i'll add um to kathy's point i would be comfortable with 228 or 32 for a couple reasons um one is the sel piece that we've all talked about and the importance of having it in morning meetings i also think it would be amazing if we had families that could did it be in the committee for this transition plan
171that could give input and we could um include and be inclusive of everyone because it's going to impact you know a lot of everyone's kids the other piece is i would prefer to have it done um no this is not scientific obviously but before the middle school transition uh i just think that the students are uh going to be experiencing something new already and so do the transition in a space where they're comfortable right now to maybe lessen their anxiety for when they do the move because otherwise you're going to move them in on monday and a few days later you know it's a lot of new for i think for middle schoolers in my humble opinion um so i would love to see yes a transition plan social emotional learning supports for school for
172teachers and for families about how to have conversations around what does this look like and what does it sound like um when your friend is not wearing a mask or you know you have to wear a mask and so on so i can't believe i'm saying this but i'm i'm thinking about a lot this as we're sitting here um i i still like the later date because i i think that there are probably still families out there who have this sense of protection with the mask and if we say it's going to be masked optional maybe there will be another group that says okay you know what go go get this because maybe that'll make them feel better i want to give family time to do that i really do that being said i'm you
173can't help but think about your own personal experience and all this and you know i said this at last meeting we are parents we are grandparents as william said we all have very personal experiences and i'm thinking about my she'll kill me for talking about her but i'm thinking about my class of 2020 kid who saw the world and that whole class saw the world fall out from under them you cannot repeat your senior year you'll never get it back right they're gonna i mean you know they're in college now those kids and there's you know i mean everybody's got a story kindergarten 12 junior in college first job out of college and we all have a story but the one thing that i've started to think about as we're sitting here is the constant
174fear uh in a lot of colleges when they went back with omicron the first several weeks they had to wear masks again and they went back online and i saw a major shift in uh with a lot of kids with anxiety with emotion etc and although in the beginning i was thinking that i wanted a cutoff where we would say okay if we get to this limit you got to put a mask on as i sit here now i'm thinking that that might create even more anxiety because i don't want to be the child or the family that tips the scale and i don't want to ever if if i'm not if i don't have to put my man if i'm a family that doesn't want to wear the mask and i'm comfortable with that
175i think we're going to create another different kind of anxiety like i can't beat a kid or i don't want to be the friend where my best friend isn't going to talk to me again because i called in and now that's at the scale again i'm thinking you know i'm just thinking about that and so i would like to keep the date but i i think i'm leaning away from even having any kind of um spot you know because at some point like if we got to that position if we get to that again as a county or whatever the commission i mean we were at we were when this all happened we had like we had no control right the county was saying the county the governor said shut down i remember being on
176that zoom throwing up after you told me because i knew i was going to have to tell my kid that she was going to lose everything and we had no control as a district and as much as it really upsets me that now every political body has shoved has like up not up to us up to a school district with nine members that just volunteered because we love our community and we want to do things now all of a sudden we're supposed to be medical experts we're not we're not um and so i'm i'm i'm shifting my view and i would like to keep a longer date to give families the time but i don't think i'm up for the i'm i'm not up for 10 anymore i think if we do it the quote
177in a board member at some point we got to rip off the band-aid [Applause] let me ask you this um what happens if whenever a week later two weeks later a month later two months later a new variant comes out and everybody and his uncle has it but sue that's what happened and and the big county and the states shut us down but they're not allowed the state's not allowed anymore they've lost their the state cannot shut us down we're not qualified i know we're not and i hate the fact that shut us down what i was saying is that the state does have the authority to shut us down but the supreme court decision said that they took a short circuit decision they did not follow the appropriate regulatory procedures in order to do
178that and that's why secretary beam's order was invalidated it was a procedural issue and the supreme court actually gave the secretary of health additional time to comply with it and they didn't move forward with it thank you for that clarification i thought they with the with the new vote um referendum that if the governor didn't have the power then the secretary of health didn't either the governor's powers are different than the secretary's powers which are different than the school district's powers which is why i'm in business and i guess i'm just going to go back and play sort of devil's advocate here that a little bit is you're right we're not medical experts we're volunteers so therefore we've always looked for guidance elsewhere and i guess i'm still coming back to the guidance and whether
179i personally agree with it or not i feel i have a responsibility for our 5 000 students who and again i think we've said over and over when i look at the emails that i got i got just as many from people oh foreign masking in place until the rates go down as from people who want to be mask optional come tomorrow and i think we looked at the metrics from the county and said okay let's try and come up with something reasonable but still basing it on what the experts are telling us chop is still recommending masks until cases drop further the cdc said they're looking at things again next week so i just think to completely say that we're not going to base anything on anything anymore is really hard to do because
180like you said we're not the experts i said i couldn't believe i was saying it but that's just where i i think to clarify that what chop has said and what top hasn't said is that there were sound bites of what um dr christian do you want to explain because you sit in conferences with him on a weekly basis montgomery county public health is still recommending masking in the current transmission rate dr rubin uh i didn't hear the whole interview i read i saw the nbc report in his meetings with us and i believe one of the members of our public said this he used the phrase it's time to start beginning the conversation to move the mass recommended and that's what he said to um to uh to the superintendents during our meeting um
181and then he was the only one from chop at that particular meeting when he said that dr dr i i i know what what the news reported which was a piece of what he said and i think if you read all of what he said it's not quite as it appeared um but everybody has their own opinion on their their unders understanding of what what he said so does anyone out go ahead chris i so many things are just swirling it's um my concern too just playing devil's advocate kind of taking a mix of both of what you're both saying is that mcoph puts out these numbers right that we are trying to figure out what we're following but even in the high rate of transmission that we are we have no cases currently at
182the middle school we have no cases at conshohock and no cases at plymouth no cases at ridge park and no cases at white marsh elementary so i have a hard time trying to connect those numbers because i'm like a numbers i gotta feel it i gotta see it i gotta touch it it's it's it's challenging because in a way we are kind of forcing their kids to wear masks when they're not being affected at least in this snapshot okay this is just a snapshot for this week so um you know colonial elementary has one case pw has two but yet our numbers are high so if the kids are the masks working to help protect our kids that's where i and the community spread is high our kids are masked in school and socially distant
183so is that keeping the cases out of the questions conversations and i've had an immunologist i know very well tell me that the cases in school are low because the kids are masked and i'm just please just let us please have our own conversations um we're doing it in public uh you know just let us let us i'm just saying that that's that's out there as well by immunologists and doctors that yes your cases in school are low because kids are masked now whether that's 100 accurate i don't know but certainly there are lots of professionals who believe that we've said the multi-layered uh approach so ventilation and distancing and hand washing we're doing all of those things as well for all of the benefits of removing the mask i think that yes masks i
184do believe that masks work but when the transmission level is low um and we're doing all of these other mitigation things right that's why i don't think that the masks are as effective when the when everything is so are the transmission levels low that's my question because if the community levels are still in high so our levels are low in school and so the argument can be made because all these mitigation things are intact i just would hate for there to be outbreaks and kids start missing school when our whole goal was to get kids here and if the community spread is still as high as it is is tomorrow or tuesday the right time so i don't know yet in my head what the right date is to come to whatever we decide but
185i just you have there's so many layers there's like so many layers okay we hear so many things you have transmission and you have serious illness and then you have people that it's they're just getting cold like symptoms right so at some point you know um it comes to the kids if they do transmit it into schools and they have cases there's a difference between having cases and having kids in the hospital so i i there is a correlation where kids really aren't being hospitalized they are having you know um sickness right for the most part we have had you know exceptions to that and there are kids who do get severely sick but if you look at the whole picture they're not they're not getting severely sick and i think we're kind of on
186the cusp of that you know and unfortunately it's up to us to make this decision that we're not doctors we're not immune deal with immunizations or immunity so um you know i i'm just these are the things that i'm grappling with in now i get it right now that's why we're here to have this conversation we cannot prevent children from getting sick no matter what we do we cannot they've been getting sick for hundreds and thousands of years we don't wish for any of our children to get sick okay that's not please don't miss you know have anybody misinterpret what i'm trying to say but at some point we we have to do a transition we have to exactly yeah so but the motion on the table gives us that it that it gives us
187that like that's what i'm trying to wrap my head around we have a date we have a metric to move us out of wearing masks but for how long before the the numbers so if there's another huge surge like there was in december and the first weeks of january i think then we come back and we we sit and we have the discussion but if our goal is to keep kids in school we don't want there to be another surge and we're saying this motion is giving us 11 school days and three more data reports for cases to come down and trend down this to me seems like something that our so many of our families that want to stay masked can wrap their head around and say okay this is based on data and
188science and what is going on it's not we've all sat up here and said we're not doctors we're not experts but yet we're sort of just making up a decision that i'm not sure what it's based on other than we all do not like wearing a mask we all this we all want this to be past us but we have to do it in a responsible way for all of our families and students so i think um if the purpose of the mask is to be part of the mitigation process and if we look at it as such then i think we we have to acknowledge that there's not going to be a cut off right that we are going to live in and out based off of what the numbers are i am still
189very troubled by the idea of our numbers being um the municipality and not our schools because chris said we've had no cases in our schools and i don't know if you said that's this past week i don't know what we had a week before so i don't know if we go back two weeks if it's the same or but if we don't have cases in our schools um i think that we have to make decisions based off of what's in our schools right now unless in the future data shows us that it is beyond the schools it is becoming good right now we don't have that data that shows that it's outside of our schools our schools our kids are fine in school and i think if they're fine in school right now and we
190don't have cases in school right now we owe it to our families um to give them the option i think march 9th is a little far i think um tomorrow's no school monday's no school tuesday is not enough time i think next week is enough time to allow teachers to have those conversations in morning meetings to talk about what does it look like to make sure we don't have messaging in our buildings that say things we don't intend them to say like the superhero thing or if it doesn't have to be a superhero we have cafeterias in some places not in our district but i know in other places where even the tomatoes you know we're mass because it's safe for whatever whatever images we put in front of our children that we have you
191know the right image in front of our children so families can talk to their children about your friend may not wear a mask tomorrow but in our house we still wear a mask or your friend may have a mask on they're still your friend they're great kids we still you know [Music] their family's choices just like they respect hours those conversations are not a one day thing it can take you know needs to take place over a couple of days particularly in our upgrades our little kids will just be fine right but our upper grade children we need a little bit more reminders in middle school sometimes so we spend that time to do that over the course of next week we're not rushed we have time to do that but we also understand that
192there may be a point where we have to pivot back um pivot has become the word of the pandemic i hate it i hear it all day but we are going to have to learn how to be flexible and pivot and if we see another surge then that's we have the metrics and we have the opportunity to go back because it's a mitigation uh it's a mitigation point so when numbers go up you put your math score numbers come down you put them back off or you put your mask on to prevent them from getting higher and that's the purpose of the mask and and we have to just learn to move forward with that but i do think that we should focus in on what is happening in our schools right now there's a
193motion and a second on the floor um we can vote on that motion as is or we can make an amendment is that correct mr slatonic i'm not sure we're there yet we haven't agreed on a date because as everybody has the emotion the motion has a date i understand so we can vote on that and it can fail or it can pass but if everybody agrees with march 9th then we should talk about the metric and then maybe we just passed it we can do that but i don't know that we can separate correctly legal opinion here we you can make a an amendment at this point in time if there's a second you can discuss what the amendment will be and if the amendment fails then you're back to the original motion and
194the recommendation of the superintendent i'm sorry uh amongst at least five board members on what that amendment would look like and i don't think we have that but i i just thought can you um explain again i apologize that i missed it um you responded when originally um jamina asked about using the school's data as opposed to the community data what would it take for the for us to use that data as opposed to the community we collect when parents and guardians inform us of a positive case they usually let their school nurse know and the principal know and then we keep uh here in central office we keep a calculation for each school and we update that when we update it daily we update the dashboard and then we keep the cumulative numbers and
195then on a weekly basis uh we inform oph of our total positive faces of students and staff and they they like us we do it on monday afternoons and so we go from monday afternoon the previous week to this past monday does that answer your question gail yes i'm sorry all right um if we were to go to school data which i'm not going to speak for people but it sounds like there's good conversation around that um is there a specific percentage that dr christian you said other districts are looking at or uh or is the board more likely to say no metric i mean i think that's the conversation i think we need to have is are we talking about a percentage if we're doing schools or are we going to say just no
196well the one metric that that was out there is um i forget who radnor wallingford one of them had um 2.5 which at plymouth elementary would be 15 students would have it in the school so that's that's a number you know a percentage of the building is what some school districts are doing where did they get those numbers the prince where did they come up with those numbers they get that two two percent or two and a half percent is it from the no we don't know delaware county they're still forming they don't have a department of health they thought they they follow they're forming one actually it's not assembled yet i used to work there so i know they don't have a department health so allingford initiated their two i think theirs is two
197percent uh i think it they initiated it about a week week and a half ago for discussing it uh and i believe radnor just announced theirs last maybe last friday or potentially monday uh i don't have in front of me when they're initiating them but i suspect they're initiating them uh at the end of this month does oph have a recommendation or kind of at one point in time oh page had a number or percentage you had to reach before they would quarantine the entire class to close the class is that percentage still out there they've backed off of that they were using three cases in a classroom as as a talking point but they were also taking a look at like what the seating charts were looking at other so it was never flat
198like if eight percent about a hard and fast for the children all sitting next to one another uh were there other mitigating factors where they maybe were all of them at the same birthday party over the weekend you know the contact tracing that they were doing just got overwhelming so that level of detail that they turned it back and they're doing less of that and you know mind you they're not just working with schools they're working with you know 800 000 people across the county so so that i'm clear so if we were to decide that we were amending the motion we need to come up with some metric as part of this meeting in order to amend it doesn't have to be a metric you could amend the motion to just go mask optional
199or mass recommended whatever verbiage you want to use or i guess i i'm asking that question because when we talk about surges and we say how are we defining it if we if we if we say mass back on if we have a surge what the surge people what does that mean because i mean what are we what are we using to make the decision because that's the community but if we decide that we don't want to use the county's numbers what does surge mean well i think also i just have to say i mean i think the administration put a lot of time and effort into coming up with with what they thought was the best plan for our district and i think all these questions are really good like now it's really starting
200over tonight sitting here and so i think you know i'm sure dr christian could try and give us something but he gave us his plan of what the administration was recommending that they felt based on all of his going to meetings talking to everybody talking to the department of health talking to people at chop what was the safest plan for the district so i think there's just something i think we need to remember that this this is the safest plan that our administration came up with at this time and point right but my my problem with this so construction is 8029 people right so all it takes is eight people in conshohocken to have kovid and they're in the high mode and that's it that's high we're we're a group of 10 and i'm a
201non-voting member the administration will implement whatever the board votes on so i appreciate the support and i've gotten support and criticism uh and i appreciate that and i absolutely do have empathy for our children and i think i've demonstrated that and so but we will implement whatever the board decides and we will do it with fidelity so we could change the motion to just change the district to mask optional on march 9th or march 2nd is my preference um period so we don't do we don't have to say if it's in high or not um no no yes of course yes of course this would be our health and safety plan right so we do have the right to represent you have the right to whatever you decide today to amend it next week if
202you want to so you could take an action this evening and go missed optional without a trigger of a reversal but you know it depends where you stand on this issue as to whether or not you want to have as a preventative measure if things go quickly and you can't schedule a school board meeting uh you may want to have the protection built in but that's your that's your call i mean i could we could we it could we go around the table and it sounds like we may have majority to approve a date whether it's the second or the ninth so could we have that we can talk about what we want right it's in public you can have a discussion right now right oh can we could we at least could we at
203least get to the point where we could alert the public that on a date certain it's going to be mask optional sounds like there's much more conversation to be had about is there a ceiling is there not a ceiling is the ceiling the county is the ceiling the school but at least get the community the parents the kids notice now that effective on a date certain it's going to be maxed out except that if we're going to put a metric in place might not be so so to say march 2nd or march 9th we're going to max optional and then we discuss and come up with a metric that we can't meet then then we've just defeated but we're looking at the metric from the opposite side we're deciding today from the things that we've
204read and the you know obviously there's two different ways of thinking but we're saying masks are optional as of right now with the way that the numbers are by looking at our school numbers by looking at the the trends of everything and then the metric is for when to go back when to then require that's what i'm thinking i'm hearing from you best right when you said rip off the band-aid um i don't want to put words in your mouth but i said rip off the band-aid but um as weeds now we still would not be able to go mask optional because but why not school so there's there's still a lot to discuss we're going to be here till 2 a.m are you saying that we voted on the motion as is i was
205trying to i was trying to do a section so can we at least get to the point where we can you could adopt a mask optional policy establish a date and then subject to the board working with the administration and subject to even recommendations from third parties the development of a uh trigger mechanism or a metric to address going back to mass being reward and it would still be everything another vote under the circumstances if you uh don't want to be here until 2 a.m but at this point it would be a vote to go mask optional without any metric attached to it that is correct people feel comfortable voting for that with no metrics attached all right i'm gonna make percentages again right you said two and a half percent at plymouth elementary would
206be fifteen students do we know if we i guess i could do this math of course each building what that would look like because um my number's wrong um if we look at it i'm still back at like school based right like we have to pull away from the county and if we look at the school the high schools our biggest goals so three percent of the high school what would that look like that's the question so for 500 500 students in a building two percent would be ten students okay so plymouth has like 575 i don't have the exact numbers in front of me so you're about 12. about 12. so we'll look between 12 1500 it would be 30. but that number would also have to include staff right so include staff right
207so okay so then right now your current your current cases are are below two percent they're well below two percent it doesn't sound like there's a lot of room below two percent but when you consider there's yeah how many in this building you've got nearly 800 kids so you've got another 60 or 70 staff members so you'd have to be you know you have to have over 20 cases right now ces i don't believe has any cases that are reported but can i put a motion on the floor am i allowed to do that you want to make a motion to amend the motion yes i'd like to move them in the motion and your motion to amend is i move that we amend the motion as presented so that colonial school district will move
208to mass optional on february 28th as long as the building positivity rate is less than three percent if the school goes above three percent the school will return to mass for two weeks to reduce back down below three percent and that would be on an individual school basis is there we need to second to that you need a second from the motion to amend their second okay and the way the vote on the motion to amend will be if you vote yes the underlying motion will be amended and then we'll have another vote on the amended motion wait a minute say that again all this all this does all this does is change the wording of the underlying motion so you're changing the recommendation that was made by the superintendent and then if that passes
209then we will then vote on the amended motion okay okay just be good because theoretically theoretically yeah i mean theoretically you could vote for the amendment and not vote for the motion all right so right now we're going to vote whether we want to change the wording of the recommendation okay all right so all in favor [Music] but the motion you put emotion on the table of february 28th and 33 percent yeah and that three percent includes both students and employees in the building it's not just the student number i think that's true that will replace if though if you vote yes it will replace the underlying recommendation that was on the agenda today and then you can discuss it again we need a second i assume i assume we should do a role call
210here mr satanic uh maybe on something that's important yes but can't we discuss it real quick but you can't can't we discuss that real quick you could say all this in favor aye if you want to no but i'm just saying the three percent and the february 28th i'm asking the february 28th and the three percent like could we have a discussion on that super quick or no we have to vote you discuss it when you vote on it you just deciding whether you will have another amendment an amendment okay roll paul miss clay miss epstein yes ms mourinho this more i know this patriot no this doozy yes this plant yeah recycling no mr winchester yes mission carries there were three no's and four guesses wait and five yeses six to three right it's
211late i'm dead it's 10 23 so now okay so now now the issue is that is the motion that is before you and you can debate it you can debate your hearts out the only thing that and then my point was i was trying to save it so from possibly doing another amendment that was my only reason why i was pushing so february 28th administrative wise it's a monday as opposed to middle of the week do you have any suggestions is it easier or harder to do something on a monday or a wednesday when it comes to the students does it matter sure just fresh on a monday okay i know this is in the administration i mean they gave the recommendation we're changing it they'll do what we ask just as dr christian said
212so my personal feeling is that february 28th is just too soon for us to accomplish what we want to accomplish so that's why i voted no to this we talked about vaccine clinics we talked about giving families time to go out and get boosted we talked about you know all these other layers of putting them into place and if we're going to just not base it on a community metric i think we need to put the date at such a place that those that aren't going to be comfortable with us still being in a high potentially stage i think we need to make sure that people can get boosted people have time to get vaccinated if they were on the fence and give our community a little bit of time and i think march 9th
213makes again still makes a lot of sense it's not tied to anything now i think if that is a compromise it's not tied to metrics um if that's the proposal i think march 9th still makes a lot of sense especially for those families who are going to have a hard time with this and i think you need to keep in mind that the date of february 28th gives our administration four days four days when is a vaccine clinic to make sure we've held we found four vaccine clinics actually five uh we're hoping for march first uh we haven't started registering yet so i don't think you can base it on when we can we can schedule a clinic you can get vaccines can be attained at a variety of places we certainly want to help
214facilitate that and i think we've done a good job of that over the past over the past year so i i don't think your decision should be based upon when we can get a clinic up and running right so i apologize and i think that's i don't want to speak for her but i think when we wrote voted we were just now we were confused i thought we were just voting that we were allowing the amendment to come in not necessarily agreeing so i don't agree on the date no we haven't agreed okay okay i i agree on the three percent part of it but not the date i would prefer march 9th so as we say can it do we have to amend it again we would have to which is what i want
215to talk about you could either uh amend it again or in the alternative who made the motion who made the second the amended motion and if both of you agree to change that we can we can save an additional vote you want to change but that's not going to affect our decision anyway yeah and again okay they don't have they can't pull it out on tuesday because and and i know it seems maybe abstract in some ways but for students who are going to be making a transition into a new building as excited as they are it's still new and can still cause anxiety so my thinking is allow them that time before the middle school transition to be in that place where they're already comfortable and go through this process just from those first
216couple days and then make the transition i just feel like if you're i know again it's about track but i feel like if you're doing one big move and then another big thing like two days i just think it's a lot for um i was going to say that it is i'm thinking and we really do want there to be a transition and our teachers have curriculum that they have to teach and now they're going to be putting this in and our teachers are amazing and they're fabulous and they can turn around whatever we want them to turn around and they will do whatever this board asks them to do but i think respecting their time a little bit and and and we want this especially for students that it's going to be a transition
217we've all agreed that the mental health piece of this needs to be worked through and i just don't know why rushing it to february 28th seems really really quick in addition to that i think you need to give the families time because this decision is going to be um way heavy on some some families and they have to deal with the anxiety that their kids may have with switching 11 days but 10 day period is warranted for families to be able to have that discussion with their children at all levels um whether or not the sort of fact that this is changing and it's a transition so i think it's warranted we've been in it for two years i think giving them only four days is not fair to families all right please if we
218could keep it down so that we can hear one another up here it's not as easy as you think to hear one another um we have do we have a mo uh are you amending your motion i'm getting really good at this amending thing um i move that we amend the motion as presented so that colonial school district will move to mass optional on march 9th as long as the school district positivity rate is less than two percent if a school i'm sorry sorry i said three percent if the school goes above three percent the school would be turned to mass for two weeks so that the number goes second she i had trouble hearing it also okay i move that we amend the motion as present am i i'm amending the amended motion well
219it's there's no longer an immense motion that is your motion oh so it's just emotional okay you just meant a motion to amend the motions that's on the table okay i move that we amend the motion on the table so that colonial school district will move to mass optional on march 9th as long as the school district positivity rate is less than 3 percent if a school goes above three percent then the school would return to mass for two weeks so i don't know you first i know it's a school district the first time but then i'm looking at schools individually i don't know does cat happy made the second does she have to do be the person to make the second or can someone else somebody else can make a second assistant yeah thank
220you discussion i don't like it you added the metric that we have to be under that percentage to go mask optional so that was the difference between your first amendment and your second okay okay then i should have seconded the first time all right um does anybody have any i want to have any conversation about what three percent looks like i mean you okay with is everybody okay with three percent what is that in the high school dr christian that's uh staff and students about 35 i'll put together a table we have 1525 kids so a lot okay all right so there's motion on the table on a second about 45.50 it's about 45 or 50 people bodies at the high school three percent is about 45 or 50 people staff and students combined just
221so we have a school transmission versus the original motion which was county-wide at ten percent yes there's no connection to the oph guidelines the recommendations it's based on reported school cases in each of the seven colonial schools and we track that now what's reported to us yes and i could i i can i could go with with tied to each building the message was mrs clay's motion was for each school correct yes i i don't think it was worded that way i i thought it was okay so your recommendation is that effective march 9th the district will go to mass optional if each school building and the school in each building that is below three oh okay that you so you could theoretically have buildings that are masked optional in this uh and are not
222at nest optional under that wording okay so it will be a building based determination based upon uh the number of how many what percentage three percent so in the event that the number is below three percent the current health and safety plan will be amended to go mass optional in that building what dr grubet greatest or miss great guys what so i just want to go through this i'm just trying to understand this so white wash guess what's what's the population how many people are is that in each school 400 and that's what i was figuring 430 kids plus another 40 staff members 35 40. and this would have to include all staff members whether they're contracted that supports them okay so you're talking about marshall it's like 17 people total right what about plymouth
223elementary how many people are in limit there's 575 kids plus another 50 staff members that's 18 foot that's the 19 kids people all right i'm comfortable with that okay i i i have to say just in our discussion of this that that number some of those numbers sound really high to me um they do see i was thinking i mean if you have 50 some 50 some people at the high school but at the elementary school you're talking 18 people again we're trying to keep our kids in school and learning and we're trying to keep our teachers in school and teaching our kids so according to this the moderate rate is five percent or above so and that moderate is when the county i thought said it was okay right so why don't we do
224five percent but that's that's for the whole county that's not for a building i understand but it's still about a community of people yes we will the rates are low is this okay okay this is on this is on the amendment right now correct the the new amendment so tell everybody what they're voting on okay what you're voting on is a per building amendment to gomes optional as of march predicated upon a three percent uh level inclusive of students and all staff members in the building and where did the three percent how did you get to three percent right we heard another school did it somewhere in the air beth i haven't some districts one district has two and a half one has two okay roll call miss clay this was yeah okay kathy didn't
225agree with the same two people so yes this is just on the amendment [Music] i was just saying that because i was wondering where the three percent came from and you know yes radnor you know two and i was looking for something that we could tie it to and then mrs paduzi talked about the five percent that is the moderate range for the county and so at least when we're asked how did we come up with the number you know if we're tying the five if we're tying the moderate to the county which is five percent overall we're saying we want it by school but at least we're tying it to a statistic like a percentage that's not random um that feels a little more the five percent is the positivity rate it's not the
226actual number of cases i know i know but she's but she's saying three percent positivity right now no she's she's three percent cases i was supposed to be out of here six months ago okay it's three percent of the total the point okay so it's three percent all right three percent of the building population everyone included staff custodians students everybody in the building three percent is what jamina has on the floor roll call his clay ms epstein yes this marino ms moore yes mrs petruno yes miss paduzi yes this plant yes this is such one mr winchester okay now we have to vote on the motion that was just approved the motion was approved amended the amendment was approved now we have to vote on okay um do we need mrs clay to make her
227motion again dr clay to make her motion again no okay yay all those in favor raise your hand [Music] okay all right thank you thank you all right now we're going to see how fast we can fly through the rest of the agenda well watch how fast they leave and the ones left in the room yeah right stipulation to settle uh he said we can approve the rest of the agenda in one fell swoop we've all looked at it is everyone okay with approving the agenda until oh all right um motion to approve all except oh i want to hold off so is there a motion to approve everything on the agenda tonight as written and as in your board docs that everyone has gotten to see so no one thinks we haven't given this
228some thought uh we've all looked at it is there a motion to approve it chris is there a second beth all in favor all right oh um this is a motion i am making a motion to reluctantly accept the resignation of best sexual and effective february 18 is there a second to that motion any comments or questions from anyone i am really gonna miss you beth i just want to say um best spent eight years on this board and resigned because of work obligations she was um begged which is why she said it was my call begged to come back and run again because of some things that need we felt needed to change and she did and she put her heart and soul into it a second time and a new job came along
229that has her traveling the country um and so unfortunately she can't fill out her term and i will just be eternally grateful for everything you've given the school district thank you so much and i just want to say thank you you've taught us all a lot and you really have shown that you always put the kids first and that you really believe in um every vote and every decision that you make and the kids are at the forefront of that so thank you for setting such a great example for all of us thank you i i i appreciate all that as sue said i i did resign i didn't resign i didn't re-run again because i was working and it was because of my love of this district uh that i felt compelled to come
230back and do it again and i said this last month i have wanted to leave for a while because i couldn't get here and i didn't want to be the board member that wasn't here and i was so excited to see so many people who came out to fill the open position and at that point i said to sue like you've got people that want to do this for the right reason um and uh and so i'm i think this board is great i'm actually i'm saying to jamia i'm actually kind of sad because this is uh it's been crazy since we got back on with tobit and everything but hopefully you know we're turning some corner and it was a lot of fun and it's it's great at the end of the year to
231sit there and watch it is all about the kids and to watch them graduate there's nothing better than sitting there in june and watching those kids watch across the field there's nothing better and i can't wait for you guys to experience it um and that's really what it's all about and uh this was a crazy meeting but thank everybody and thank you all right um as a business note the committee reports how about we will we will um move them to next month um just because it's a late night and we do have to give a public comment does anyone from does anyone from the public want to speak i apologize again before this week i'm sorry for losing my cool earlier stephen mcgrady again from white marsh um i'd just like to thank you
232all for what you did tonight um i know it's seemed like a lot at times a little ups and downs uh but i think that it's definitely a good step towards the right direction i just like to thank you all for what you do even though it seems pretty thankless for most part have a nice night [Applause] anyone else from the pope there's somebody else uh david vernacchio of plymouth township uh it's gonna be reiterate what he said thank you for what you did tonight i wish it was a little bit earlier uh we always did say kids were resilient we didn't have much notice when the kids had to put the mass back on in september i think we could have we could have did the march 2nd or february 28th but i guess
233this is a step in the right direction and just another side note um i know frustrations were high at some point people said things um but you guys you're politicians you ran for office you got elected politicians have to be able to take being criticized talked to in a certain way you're held to a higher standard than the rest of the regular public that's why you're sitting there and we're sitting out there okay again thank you for what you did i hope we can move forward in the future and get better thank you [Applause] hi eileen de torre from lafayette hill i will not keep you i know it's been a long night um i just wanted to reiterate what lori had said earlier and i'm really happy that jamina recognized that as well the
234signage needs to be taken care of because my son looks at a sign every day in his classroom that says classroom goal is to mask up so maybe we can change that to be kind to others rather than having signage up kids are very visual they see they see when they walk past an office and a teacher doesn't have their mask on but they don't get a chance to do that so i really think that this sounds like something so minor but i'm really glad people recognize that so thank you for everything tonight thanks hi anybody else uh any other comments from the board do you have a comment i'm sorry mr bugley yes please state your full name place of residence please state your full name place of residence hi my name is danielle
235horak i'm a plymouth meeting township i have children at y e or w what is it white marsh elementary now and um middle school i just want to make sure for some of those children who have um anxieties over this whole covet that we will have in place like support systems for you know to be around kids that aren't missed or you know just trying to remove the mass themselves and be comfortable with being in a classroom without a mask um i'm sure that our administration is working on that as we speak right okay thank you for your comment thanks and thank you for everything you've done drew anybody else yes please state your full name place of residence please state your full name in place of residence please state your full name in place
236of residence hi uh tj purcell from conshohocken just wanted to ask about the everyday activities for the kids in regards to lunch time and recess and how this is going to affect them moving forward are they going to be moving back to a normalized schedule routine or will this still be a [Music] kid separated sitting at the lunch tables and whatnot we'll get to work on that asap thank you please state your full name place of residence [Music] they must have walked away from the computer try again please state your full name in place of residence please state your full name in place of residence hi my name is david grillo of plymouth township okay we can hear you dave okay um i just wanted to you know realizing that the things are going to
237happen and changing the master coming back it did feel a bit like mr grill are you there i have to give him a call tomorrow okay is that it please state your full name please residence go back to david please take your full name place of residence we can please state your full name place of residence okay thank you um anything else from anyone if not this meeting is adjourned