001in session to hear from all of you about your thoughts about reopening and dr. Tsao will talk more about that happy July first beautiful day beautiful so if everyone would please mute themselves that would be wonderful and that will stop any of the background noise so our protocol this morning will be after dr. Sal's introduction to what we were doing and what we'd like to get out of this session we will then break you into groups you will be into in groups for about 20 minutes answering one key question we will be asking you to assign a person to be the recorder for your group on the blue lips sheet that I've shared with everyone and that you can manipulate and use and then also to assign a reporter to your group so when we
002come back to a larger group you can give us your top three ideas for reopening schools so again welcome and I'm going to turn it over to dr. sound good morning everyone we have 233 participants we also have board members on board and they thank you for being here board members we know no one more important than you to get information from regarding the opening I'm sure you've read the guidelines although it's two months away the guidelines are specific about creating a plan which engages all students on a returning to school model it also calls for call a hybrid in case they need to go to another phase of the return which would be hybrid of less students than normal all returning to to school and then the third model they call enhanced DL so
003in order for us needed to think about approach this we need to know your your thinking you know whether we agree or not with this safety your safety student safety is the highest priority for all of us so as we develop these plans we that will be our central focus I do intend on writing a commissioner in the governor allowing us a little more flexibility and we'll see what develops from that however the plan will have to take place does have to be submitted by the 24th of July and hearing when you have the say relative to how the day would go there are things of how do we do lunch and how do we do specials you know if you read the governor's comments or even the guidance they call for six feet apart
004but only if possible we have to define that and still create a safety safety net I've engaged an architect work with us who was laying out safety plans throughout the district for for spacing utilization of cafeteras have been recommended and other such venues but in fact we believe if we have to move furniture out and about the only places we have the move furniture on the belt and where it's not a fire hazard so I just always would be into some of these largest venues so a lot of think iDEN spread out to us but without clear ways they explode ways of doing but hearing from you is a priority for us today and we will start with that I'm not sure I know we have cabinet members on board as well so an with
005that makes the next phase great so Kara if you can go to our question there's that well let's go to the breakout protocol first the Google document is open to anyone please put your ideas in it and that document is I'm going to leave open after the meeting so people can fill in other writers over the next couple of days that might come to you or that if you're listening to other school districts and what they're doing and have some good thoughts that would be great to add it to us in your group you're going to choose one person to be that recorder and you'll be in your groups for 20 minutes about at the 17 minute mark if you can decide in your group that's top three Pro to discuss when we come back
006into the larger group that would be wonderful hey and I'm sorry to interrupt you I just think there's a little bit of confusion of where the Google Doc is okay so the Google Doc right now is in the beginning part of the chat so if you go to the top of the chat box in my opening remarks you can access it there Thank You carat great question and can you repost the link because for those of us who came in late we cannot see your thank you yeah as Anne's doing that you know aside from this there are some surveys that we've taken and we've also had time with with parents that will go into our thinking we have to conduct another survey gardening um it's a choice on on the office and parents in
007terms of choosing certain venues but as you think about this and I should have mentioned it the social emotional well-being of our youngsters is a very high priority so that needs a play into also our thinking it's well pleased okay you know we're ready to start we are you can move to the next slide so our question today is very similar to last night so please partake in that venue too but we want you to think about what are the top priorities I'm sorry there's a spelling mistake enough that the district should consider when planning a safe and effective school reopening and so at this point Kara is gonna break everyone into groups you'll go into your group for 20 minutes at that 17 minute mark if you would please assign a reporter and come
008up with your three top priorities you will be returned to the larger group and you'll be able to report out okay you ready then we'll separate out okay my head you please that would be wonderful so I reported from Kara first off how many groups soon we will end up with you're muted I think we had 12 12 groups both groups okay so if we could have group number one this group d'amour know that group number one number one okay let's go to group number two room number two ok that's us so our three top concerns were the sanitation and minimizing contamination throughout the building how are we gonna do that what does that look like within individual classrooms the kindergarten classrooms at elementary level looking at all the specials and how they share everything
009moving up the middle in high school how are we going to consistently keep that clean even though we're sharing all of these products and ideas the next one is teacher feedback is really really valuable at this point and what does that look like are we going to have more surveys how are we gonna get that feedback and also even breaking it down this is wonderful because it's a whole group entire district but even breaking it down into elementary school level middle school level high school level Sevilla schools and then even by buildings so making sure we have all of those taken care of for feedback ideas and then the third thing that was really important well there's two one was the masks which goes back to contamination how are the kids going to be wearing
010the masks especially when it's hot and there's no air conditioning in many buildings are we going to be able to handle that so that was another one of them lunches was also a big deal but that's for sorry no that's fine Thank You Christy for reporting out on that number three room one is also here whenever you're ready okay let's go back to green room one in room wasn't like our major ones were planning for online learning and for traditional classroom learning and that would be particularly challenging at all the levels because we gave parents the option to either come back or to stay on the distance learning model and one of our thoughts there was that maybe we could have teachers separated as some teachers will do the online distance learning if they are
011uncomfortable coming back or unable to come back and then teachers who were comfortable in the classroom could do only the traditional classroom planning teaching all of that stuff another one of our concerns was cleaning the classrooms in between classes at the middle school and high school levels a suggestion that we had was that kids can carry a small pouch of disinfectant wipes and kids can wipe down the chairs and the desks when they leave each classroom since they will be moving more than the students would at the elementary level and another one of our big concerns was the way staff is split between buildings particularly like OT PT speech that sort of thing and the way that students would either be able to go to specials or our students who receive resource services how they
012would be able to still get those services and be able to participate in specials while while we're trying to keep the cohorts together because then it immediately opens up to another set of people exposed to that classroom or exposed to those students great wonderful thank you for those that feedback will go to group number three now Group three or room three I'm not sure we picked a person the person okay so we um the first thing that we talked about was as has been said cleaning sanitizing bathrooms filters like for AC units who is doing what and are we going to be told exactly what's clean with the bathrooms how do we know how many kids are in there at one time like to be have to be careful about that social distancing our number
013two was professional development for all models of instructions and also with the professional development like training on new procedures somebody in our group brought up the fact that servers at restaurants how to get trained for how to deal with the virus and just serve people correctly are we going to have something like that and I think the biggest concern that we all have is a social distancing at all levels how in the classrooms do you keep kids 6 feet apart we talked a lot about the fact that not everybody has desks people have tables how do you work with that miss that other things so those are our top three and if I miss anything from group three please chime in okay wonderful thank you for sharing that room for please you're muted room for
014do we have someone from that group all right we'll move on to room five that's us an r8 go ahead you wanted to get do us I think Donna was going to Donna over there and you wrote it all down though okay let me pull her up so we came up with many different concerns and ideas and thoughts but it came down to for real specific ones one is the physical health of both the students and the staff and how that will be protected we also talked about the social-emotional learning we have many people that have gone through trauma have not been able to bring closure to things and so how will those things be accounted for and embedded in the learning so that students can learn and then lastly is that whole logistic the
015space the funding the rollout what training will be done how are the buildings going to be cleaned documented so that staff feel confident in coming back we did talk a little bit about working with legislators and getting them on board and how our plan danbury's plan as well as some of the larger districts needs to be customized to our particular needs and not necessarily what might work well in the district that only has a few fewer fewer students great all right and room six high in room six again as I look through everyone's comments listening we felt very had a lot of the same concerns one of the things that came up right away always was the health and safety of teachers there's you know I've listened to mr. governor LeMond at length I read
016as his document and really we're talking about this not being a children's disease and that the one thing we're not talking about is that it still is an adult disease and what's happening to the teachers that are high risk what is their options again teachers that are you know going home to families that are high risk they themselves are high risk so you have to have a comfortable teacher in a comfortable classroom to facilitate good mental health and emotional well-being for the students another would be if in talking to the governor there is sort of some sort of dispensation of okay Danbury is sort of an outlier it isn't a 100 person district the idea that the high priority students are coming back and first that could be our ELLs it could be our special
017ed it could be our elementary students on the students that really need more hands-on so if we could stagger that would seem to be our area to really focus on and we talked a lot about masks with the plastic cutouts or Plexiglas to be able to put around the youngers aspect and and our ell students if they really need to be able to see us while we're talking and so you know in a classroom that might be a solution I don't know if it overrides the mask-wearing but maybe it could be used you know we could take it off so that when the teachers instructing they can see the teachers mouth and then one other thing we just talked about was the sick time I know I'm going on four I apologize but this idea
018that if we are going out as teachers and we have to be out is that coming out of our sick time or are we getting kovat sick days the way businesses because it's more often than not we're gonna have to be out on multiple times and therefore now where we're worried about subs and sub plans okay thank you for those thoughts and we'll move on to room 7 so our room 7 I'm similarly that Jen just shared did talk about like the procedure even around exposure for Co vid so if somebody in your classroom has been exposed you're expected to quarantine what would that look like I'm explicitly at the elementary middle and high school level especially with students moving across the school at the high school in addition what was a resounding kind of
019team coming out is there needs to be a different plan at each level k5 6 8 & 9 12 because there are so many different anomalies for each level but a great suggestion was having a staggered start so Elementary might start first k5 you can work out all the bugs with that then 6 8 then maybe 9 12 and then the spacing in classrooms is a the biggest concern especially in some of the elementary schools people are using closets currently as classrooms and and spaces with kids so are we looking into other spaces in the city to accommodate students that are outside our current buildings and then other things that people brought up around the in-person instruction and how your expect to balance any remote learning possibly videoing having students video in during lessons in
020order to remediate that finally is the parent if we do have to move to distance learning model or any even kind of hybrid is we need better training for parents because most students who are not engaged it was due to a lack of the ability for teachers to communicate with parents or parents having the knowledge around how to help students remote in and things like that so using the August time to really train parents up and if anyone else in my group has more great Thank You Cara and we'll move on to room eight please okay hello this is Tracy and I'm we put all our concerns in the document so you folks can see it there if you need to and our some of our top concerns a couple people I noticed mentioned the
021staggered start we mentioned that it as well and I know I think I saw something on the CDC page about that if anyone's interested in looking into it but yeah we talked about space into in individual rooms and schools in general and class sizes and how we're going to maintain a safe environment with small spaces some rooms with no windows and and you know normal class sizes or sometimes larger class sizes we talked about access to PPE for staff and for students especially if it's disposable and how you're gonna get it on a regular basis we talked about monitoring student and family health the governor's plan doesn't mention anything about you know taking temperatures or anything like that but there was a concern about you know if somebody is sick and and they're in school
022so that's a group eight if the only thing I missed please feel free to add in there thank you very much for this opportunity thank you and room nine we'd like to hear from you now room nine I'll speak for room nine great so our three top ones the main thing that we talked about at the beginning was the sharing of resources and materials at all levels elementary middle school and high school you know whether it be crayons and pencils or science lab materials or computers you know how would we go about making sure that each student has their own set of materials and resources throughout each day another large thing that we talked about was the social-emotional learning piece and also making sure that there are resources available to students and families you know
023who have gone through drama or maybe students who are coming back to the classroom very anxious you know any of those things you know just making sure that there's a focus on the social-emotional piece and then the class size piece and cohorts we spoke about you know possibly the state of I'm sorry the city of Danbury has I think Kelly mentioned it you know talk to the state possibly starting at phase two because of the size of our district and possibly having a blended model or different start tying something along those lines so focusing again on the class size and cohorts and making sure that there's a set plan for that to make sure that the health and safety of students and teachers and staff are coming first I think that is the gist of
024our top three but if I missed any Gina thank you so much for doing that I'm and I'm also from room night as well I was more I was mostly telling the group I was like you know when it comes to social emotional learning like our us as school counselors or school social workers and psychologists are we going to be having like PD on ending the staff on that are we having people come in like you know are we going to be like you know teaching this essay l whether it's from ruler or castle like curriculums when it's going back to school so that was just a concern from student services as a school counselor from from our my perspective on that just wanted to add thank you noted that wonderful thank you and room
02510 you room 10 are you there someone there sorry Ann I I have notes for group 10 give me a second so we the group and I we actually didn't nail down just the three but just kind of given what I heard I will share some of the thoughts that are a little different from what I've heard thus far right so so one support for families onboarding new families we talked about the group talked about those concerns particularly families from AOL you know AOL family is also providing distance learning support for those families and social-emotional support for those families another thing that was mentioned was the need for protocols and mentioned quite a bit in Boonton need for protocols for student staff and families to drive the chui implementation of the plan and so you
026know some of the examples of expectations you know what are the expectations aren't wearing the mask all day what are the expectations about walking in the hallway with the expectations around sharing books and materials will there be an expectation of kids are gonna bring in their Chromebooks every day that they were given last year you know what how we go how it teachers are suppose it's assess student safely and so you know the group talked about the need to you know having a big plan is one thing but having those who's those explicit details that's actually going to drive their day-to-day activities is going to be really important and then another and then the last one that I captured was how we addressing the needs of our staff and students with compromised immune systems how
027will we backfill staff who are sick you know given our challenges with what shortages and subs already will we be administering temperature checks oh and and you know another bigger world we have an isolation room for identified students in staff who are indeed sick so kind of three big buckets for us great thank you for sharing those Kevin and so we're on to room 11 and then 12 pretty much everything that's been said already is something that came up in our discussion as well we did sort of break it down to our top three which was super difficult but the safety the safety around everything that everybody has said the mask wearing you know keeping kids together what about kids who try what about kids who come in sick all of that the sanitizing concerns
028and the number of our bathroom spaces and hand-washing spaces available to us including then also the sanitizing and safety of materials especially the elementary level shared materials shared spaces and then the idea of cohorting you know how are you going to logistically and safely best do this you know different concerns obviously at elementary middle and high school levels but for elementary kids if you're talking about keeping you know small kids in one spot for an entire day that could be problematic some of the things that other people mention that I'm just gonna ream ention the idea of staggered starts we had a long conversation about that as well the training piece that several other groups mentioned we talked about that too and the need to train both kids and parents somebody else also mentioned the
029laptops that was a discussion in our group as well if we're not sharing materials and we're expecting kids to be on their devices are they are we now asking for year olds to be traveling back and forth with a laptop everyday and how long do we actually think those are gonna last that's my two cents worth yeah and I think that pretty much covers anything else that nobody else said but maybe I just wanted to mention one thing that that came up that I never thought about we're talking about cohorting students in school but on the buses they're not cohorted right so that I mean that's gonna be a huge issue yes great bra as well about if you cohort students all day but then they all get on a bus that is not cohorted
030so it was mentioned - yeah thank you for bringing that up Thank You Tracy and Melinda and lastly I wrote 12 good morning in I wasn't able to type in the document so I just told Cara I would just send it to her privately from our group but I'll be happy to share it for some reason I'm not allowed to get on the document okay um it's per group twelve we somewhat that down to around three entry so our first one was you know returning to school in August at a hundred percent work sir that it's not phased in like everything else should be and we're you know overly concerned education should not be the test pilot for going back 100 percent we're concerned with space issues as everyone else is as well as understanding
031the reality of what teacher instruction will look like under social distancing guidelines you know group work small group instruction which is really what we need to best support our students academic needs from what they've missed and also to kind of catch them up and you know apply the rigor to move them toward also the need and cost of individual supplies for each students that have the same materials they need each day to perform at their best our second was PPE equipment you know monitoring when when and when not to wear it you know brakes using masks the use of them the option for different types of masks who will they be provided by and how will they be monitored you know the reusable ones not reusable ones by staff and students we also talked about
032the cleanliness what is exactly going to be clean and sanitized also the frequency and who's actually going to monitor that that's happening on a daily basis and last but not least we had staff issues overall you know what about the comfort level of those returning to work what are the sick protocols look like compromised staff substitutes etc and we also talked about school programs what will they look like special areas sped speech and life skills programs as well as PD days being virtually or in person and last but not least we talked about temperature checks for staff and students okay wonderful so I'm going to ask does Kevin so that concludes all of our groups and all of those suggestions will be taken back and considered by the reopening committee Kevin or sal would you
033like to do a wrap-up yes thank you and thank you to everybody we still have 229 folks understand on this call you know for me as I as I listened all of us as familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you can put him in those category the physiological and then the safety needs that a toupee that needs that we need to provide I listen to all of all of us here I think we all realized that this is not normal that's abnormal and we need to learn from if when we do return that's why the phasing in makes a lot of sense it's that's provided I will tell in this group we will do the best we can to create those safety situations but understand that the communication to us has been clear that
034the chemical disease of the pandemic impacts youngsters at a different level than the adults but for me I'm concerned about the entire school system the adults and the students and the families so how do we come around that in a sensible reasonable fashion that will also provide an educational atmosphere so the youngsters are learning I don't have the answers but certainly today you're going to inform my decisions I could be mindful of Beninese things I will ask for some variant variations but just know that when we do return we will return with the safest plan that we have put together that's best again the best weekend so listening to you today has been really beneficial and much appreciated so thank you and and someone did talk about follow-up well we haven't been given a lot
035of time for this we've been given to the 24th some states actually are going into August so you know we'll be sending out some survey but certainly as someone do you reach out to us you have some thoughts and some ideas from other places don't be shy bring them to us you know maybe it's something we can utilize so thank you very much for this opportunity Thank You Anne thank you thank you dr. Tsao so that concludes this morning's participation as dr. Sal said please continue to send us your thoughts and your ideas because they are important as the decisions are made and thank you for coming go out and enjoy the Sun for a little bit get some of that good vitamin D and breathe and relax and we will get through this so
036thank you everyone thank Sam