8/4/2021 Special Board of Education Meeting

001all right so it is uh 502 which makes two of us late but for that i apologize we are going to open with the flag salute and if you would stand pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all so with that do we have any announcements from any members of the board or staff okay oh actually does eileen have anything elaine did you have an announcement you'd like to make i did not thank you okay i'm sorry dr kaiser i do have an announcement i apologize uh chico unified sold uh its last uh measure k series bonds uh in the amount of 52 million dollars and we also refunded 22.5 million dollars of

0021998 bond issuance uh related to the refunding i think when we talked about that originally we were estimating a savings to taxpayers of about 2.5 million we actually accomplished over 5 million dollar savings on the refunding and on the new on the measure k we achieved a 1.54 debt to principal ratio so just as a comparison a typical 30-year bond and again this is interest only is a two to one ratio so we are accomplishing a significant savings again for taxpayers compared to that standard and we had a lot of interest in the market as a matter of fact we had almost 300 million orders for our 52 million dollars worth of bonds which speaks to our credit rating and investors are very interested in putting their money with chico unified so it's one of

003the best sales i've been a part of we are taking advantage of very low interest rates in the market right now so it's excellent for issuers like chico unified and that will allow us to move forward with our facility master plan so i just want to let the board know in the community that very successful sale that's a wonderful and of course you didn't do fireworks because of the dixie fire but other than that sounds wonderful all right tom i would just like to take a moment if we may to you know think about our friends and relatives who are out there in uh chester and greenville it's a really scary time up there and i know we all wish them well i'm concerned about those communities many many people have been impacted uh okay

004and that actually calls out for a salute to our firefighters who have been phenomenal so maybe if you see them in a restaurant which they are locally you might buy them a dessert or some other recognition okay so we are anybody else though with the announcement no we are moving on to our discussion calendar then and ed services and so jay marchant and before jay jumps in i just want to recognize this is a really highly controversial topic facial coverings and we are here tonight to discuss it and i look forward to that conversation but i do want to ask that we all demonstrate civility and respect to each other and especially to those who may have very differing opinions i want us to be a model for our students and our community in how

005to have difficult discussions that doesn't mean that we don't have those discussions i'd just like to see us do it respectfully so with that mr marshawn if you can get us started that'd be great thank you miss staley okay that's last board meeting we passed on the reopening plan and then we decided to have the re uh the mask update and protocol emergency board meeting tonight so tonight i'm going to be going over the protocols for you guys to discuss and make a decision on on if a student refuses to wear a mask in inside doors so i'm going to kind of go over that tonight again on july 12th this the cd ph um sent for their guidelines on the reopening which says that all students will wear a mask indoors and then the

006governor came out literally hours after that saying that he will give local control over on what the protocols are will be if a student does not wear a mask so that's what brings us here tonight the guidelines issued on the cage 12 as i told you we're face covering when indoors both vaccinated unvaccinated adults and k-12 school settings are required to wear a mask whenever sharing indoor spaces with students recommendations at the at first cdc came out saying the recommendation um was if you could keep them three feet apart and people were vaccinated they did not have to wear a mask since then they have changed um their guidelines to saying all indoors for k-12 education should have a mask so that's been changed since the last on-board meeting we had again i've just what

007i talked about earlier it gives us the board how we go about enforcing the mass protocols through the cdph and butte county public health a couple good things to talk about tonight first the cdb cp cd ph has said that we do not have man mandate physical distancing requirements do they recommend three feet yes and most of our classrooms we can meet that three foot mandate in class but again it's not mandated that we meet that three foot also face coverings are not required outdoors so at recesses in between classrooms when students are outside or at lunch after school they do not have to wear a mask only inside the classroom yes after-school program students if they're indoors they're going to have to wear a mask so for some kids are in after school programs

008i mean how much cumulative time is that that they're in the class during the day again i would have to ask them but again they have different homework times but they also have break times where they can go outside that's one of those things that we're going to be talking about we will be encouraging breaks for our classes and we will be doing the same for after-school programs to get them outside so they can take the mask off and take a break again students and staff are required to wear facial coverings when riding a school bus it's the same school buses are considered the same as a classroom so if when a student gets under one of our buses they do have to have a mask on am i correct on that mr baltimore that's

009correct however there is no social distancing requirement on the bus we will continue to keep the windows down as long as the weather allows and we will continue to disinfect the buses before or after the morning route and after the afternoon round again our goal and our intent during this copied restrictions is that our goal to have all students have access to a safe and in-person instruction in a full instructional day setting again we're going from our am pm model at the end of last year to a full day model to start school year and for the protection of our students staff in the district it is also our tent to comply with the local state and federal requirements facial protocols further guidelines chief unified students must wear a facial covering while indoors unless they

010have received an exemption we briefly talked about this last board meeting if a family gets from a licensed medical professional um documentation from a licensed medical practitioner to be exempted from the face covering we have on tonight's presentation on an example of that form that they will need to get filled out by by their medical professional and then also the process but if a family comes in and they have a note from the license i want to make sure i'm saying this medical practitioner into the office with that they can immediately go into the classroom without a mask previously when we were taking these mental exemptions we would give them to our nurse that would double check with with the doctor to make sure that this is happening correctly um at this point we will

011be allowing the student to go directly into class without a mask then we'll have our nurse um check on the on the form to make sure it's filled out properly and just to clarify on that um the reason that we previously had the time delay is that many of the requests that we had for medical exemptions were very complicated uh they were health issues they were food allergies and they were things that we had to make sure that we could do and do absolutely correctly for the safety of the child we think this one will be much simpler and the form certainly is not as complicated as some of the others perfect yes um thank you um mental health professionals licensed mental health professionals um are they qualified under this too that is correct face

012covering protocols continued to extend possible this is during cafeteria recess and pe to the extent possible physical distancing will be maximized while unmasked for the purpose of eating and drinking and especially indoors outdoor spaces will be utilized for meal time to the extent possible and students will not be required to wear a face covering outdoors this including during recess and ppe while indoors students will provide an opportunity to step outside of their classrooms to remove their math so they can ask their teacher to take a break to go outside and take off their mask students without math will provided to a mask to wear when while endure so we will have masks available when when students come in the classroom if they do not have one students experiencing discomforting wearing a mask will provided a

013face shield to use as an alternative to the mask so if a student is having an uncomfortable with a mask again again we will have face shields available for them to wear so the requirement is a mask or a face shield while they're indoors when indoors an exempted student without a facial cover will be requested to put one on a mask will find it if needed unacceptable students who decline to wear a mask or a face shield indoors will be moved to an outdoor area to work independently school-sized staff will contact the student's parent or guardian to explain why facial coverings are required one more time and if a student continues either that day or on successive days refuse to wear a mask the site administrator will call a meeting with the parent and student

014to offer alternative to in-person instruction such as oak bridge or our online academies at the high school again if a student does not wear a mask in class or a face shield we do have outdoor settings for them to go to we will have outdoor settings they'll look differently on every campus because it depends on well where they'll have them available it could be right outside the classroom it could be under an overhang with supervision but those will be available yes mr tims is this a good time to ask about what practices teachers might use um i'm thinking of the younger grades a lot of my thoughts on this topic are directed toward kindergartners through third graders for speech teaching and things like that is this a good time to ask what what how that

015might be utilizing outdoor settings for some of those lessons that might involve mouth you know dictation and this kind of thing a couple things that on grade levels can do at that level they could work with their grade levels to see if there is an outdoor setting for them to share that they could go out and do those types of lessons but also a teacher could put on a shield so their mouth will be showing during the lesson okay again scenario i'm just going to go and go over a scenario one one more time so if a student comes to a classroom says i don't feel comfortable wearing a mask the teacher or doesn't have one the teacher will offer them one secondly they will offer them a shield if they don't do not want

016to wear a mask the third thing would be to offer them an outdoor settings for them to do their schoolwork the next two scenarios would get to talk about can they get a medical exemption for not having to wear the mask and the fifth one would be to offer some type of independent study at oak bridge academy or one of our academies at our high schools again if it continues we talked about before we we will have our administrators set up some type of school-based intervention um team meeting just to see how we can again try to accommodate our families so we invited butte county public health to join us i do believe they have a short presentation we did not receive the slides in advance so we will do our best to make sure

017that we can get those slides if you can get those to us but i'd like to introduce nan starr who is joining us via zoom from butte county public health hi nan hi good evening everyone so i i guess i was just given one specific question i'm happy to um take more um is there a specific part that you wanted me to chime in on here i'm sorry i'm coming in a little bit late sure we had to ask that butte county public health share with us some numbers where we are currently as a county uh what that means what you're seeing in terms of public health concerns and then i do believe there may be questions from our board regarding the current guidelines from the california department of public health sure so i'll go

018ahead and share um just some uh case a little bit about case information a little bit about delta which i know is on everyone's mind um and then some information about vaccinations and i'm also happy to take questions and if i don't have an answer i can definitely get back with you and i was given the one question also about cdc and also mandate so i'll cover those as well so for the cases the number of new cases and these are total confirmed cases as of august 1st 13 523 in butte county our new daily case count which is also all this information is posted on our dashboard our case count is posted like today our case count that we that we uh have on the dashboard is for august 3rd that's the closeout time

019would be 12 new episode cases and i'm also happy to um send additional information about that but let me try to break down really um hopefully this is a little bit clearer episode date can always change so for example someone can get tested and then they come in let's say toward the end of um of their symptoms and so then we find out later on what their episode date is and then that time actually gets changed and so um i'm i'm can give you additional information but that's why we have 12 and i'm saying that because that that number definitely changes frequently and you'll see on our dashboard right underneath where it has the infographics where there's one that's a daily um case count if you look underneath there's a graph and that graph actually

020shows those episode dates so you can watch over time i also wanted to share that delta is increasing and as you all know it's increasing across the state from 53 in june to 84 in july according to the results that have come in as of july 29th and there's always different results coming in there were 10 butte county residents that tested positive for the delta variants so that number also changes and we're also happy to give you updates as we learn more delta new data from cdc indicates that it is highly infectious amongst vaccinated and unvaccinated people the vaccine is effective at prevention of severe disease hospitalization and death and that's specific to delta and we're just continuously trying to stay updated on that and on frequent calls with cdph to learn more as well

021for vaccinations within our county there is 46.5 percent of our county is uh reported to be fully vaccinated and 52.8 at with at least one dose and that includes the 46.5 and that was reported as of the close of last week i'm going to share just some good news because there's been a lot of um i think worry and concern about it but i will say that for example yesterday we had a mobile clinic at chico high and 75 people came in and got vaccinated and you compare that to the first time we had our mobile clinic at chico high there was seven to ten and that was july 13th so that's just in a couple weeks so we're seeing a lot of increases in people that are getting vaccinated getting ready for for the

022school year chico state also has um frequently had vaccinations vaccination clinics and they vaccinated over 1500 people um so i i'm gonna answer the direct questions i was given and then i'm also happy to take more questions the question that i was provided was when did the cdc put butte county in the highest transmission category and is there a known plan well that's the second question so when did cdc put you counting the highest transmission category i actually don't know when it very much where it started the specific questions that you're asking is regarding the cdc's website and so you can actually google covet cdc gov tracker and it has a lot of information you can break it down by county and they update some of those data points they update daily and some of

023them weekly and they do a comparison change so i even noticed from yesterday to today there's some counties that change so that's frequently being updated the second question that i was asked is the plan for you well it said butte department of public health to mandate the face coverings we do not mandate these coverings at all so what we do is butte county public health is we get the information that is given to us from cdph and cdc and we share it with butte county as part of a public health entity and i'm happy to take some questions i know that chico state just put out their change in their requirements so that every single person on campus indoors must have on a mask and that's a very significant change than they had before what

024before it was just athletes and people staying in the dorms now it's any indoor building thank you for your being here tonight and for your presentation do you have any information about how delta is impacting hospitalizations here in butte county and mortality our deaths i'll share with you the information that i do have regarding mortality i don't um i know that it's i have actual numbers because i thought you might actually be interested in it so i'm gonna get those when i'm sharing with you a little bit um we know that delta is actually that's the part that i already shared we know that delta is increasing we know that we're seeing more positive cases within the hospital but because it's also new and there is a lag in some of the data that is

025given and that's just because somebody has to go get tested and then it has to go get results and then the results have to be reported that's continuously changing but our dashboard has information about that including the hospitalizations i guess i'm referring you back to our dashboard i don't have it open right now um madam president vice president excuse me madam vice president yes eileen thank you um nan in the chico enterprise record uh two days ago it was reported that um since july 27th until the cut off and i'm not sure if it was august first or second there had been new cases reported in butte county why is there such a discrepancy between what was reported in the newspaper and what you just reported to us and i'm sorry i'm sorry about that

026i was delayed getting unmuted i'm actually pulling up our website right now so i'll tell you uh just before i pull up the website one of the reasons why we see delay frequently and i also know i am the resident of butte county is because there's different data systems that are doing there there's actually multiple reasons so i'll give you a couple so one of them some of the information is data that's um shared at the state some of them goes through um calradia some of them go through cal connect and that's something that it's definitely not we're not gathering our own numbers we're getting these numbers from these government software programs and constantly linking and making those changes um and that's why you're seeing daily updates so we went from having weekly updates and

027as of this tuesday so as of yesterday we're doing those daily updates because of exactly what you said we're learning more as we move forward um and i guess i'll take another question but i'm going to pull up our website right now i don't think i can share anything on here actually so if you our dashboard is actually the place where you're just going to find any information that i'm going to be able to share with you now and it is updated frequently we're looking at it we have a cova division that is working on it so we have a question from uh tom landau hi nan um the 46.5 percent of buchanan residents who are vaccinated i just want to double check does that include uh the uh under 12s who can't be vaccinated

028yet or is that only of eligible uh citizens it does not include under 12. thank you um mr tennis i'm looking at the dashboard right now um nan and it says that there are 25 current hospitalizations does that sound right yes and i guess the well i won't say i guess uh let me be real really clear you'll see numbers frequently change and so for the dashboard for the numbers for the hospitalizations we're updating that weekly um and i guess i'm going back to the case number and going back to and i'm sorry i can't see exactly who was speaking this is not tennis i'm sorry my apologies matt tennis yes um the numbers changing also because of what i was explaining at the beginning episode dates change when people are going in to get

029tested changes and that changes all of our numbers and we really want to be able to accurately keep track of two things we're interested in when people are going to get tested of course we're interested when people are positive we're also interested when people actually had covet and sometimes people don't go in until way after they've actually had covid and so it takes time for us to get that data updated and to make that link especially for with our numbers and we're not the only ones this happens for every single county across the state is working on this and constantly updating their numbers so i am happy to send you our link after this fall for those that are interested but yes i think you might have just muted yourself nan oops there you go

030sorry you guys i think what i'm trying to get at though is there can we see if hospitalizations are up with delta to what extent they're down there's no chart um on the on the dashboard showing where that how that number's moved over time it just says there's 25 current hospitalizations i'm wondering if you're seeing an impact from delta in terms of hospitalizations yeah and actually i like to share so a little bit information we are seeing an impact and it's the same way across the state so we know that this change is something that's expected it isn't something that's unique just to butte county but there's definitely an increase in currently we are not not i shouldn't say we all tests are not showing whether or not they are delta or a different variant

031so there's two different types of testing and because we don't have all the information we can't say for a fact that it's from delta we think that it is from delta based on what we know is going on with the virus right now okay and a follow-up question to that one regarding a delta also from matt tennis i'm looking at the confirmed covet 19 deaths by date of death in butte county 2021 chart and i don't see frankly much activity from delta in the realm of deaths can you comment on that yeah uh the reason why is because when someone is assigned a reason for their death it's often that i'm going to speak in my layman's terms because i'm not an md i have a master's in public health um but people when the

032corner when people sign off on the reason why the person died it's not necessarily from covid so even though we hear this conversation and i know that anecdotally i have people in my life that have been hurt and know people that have died of covet it doesn't mean that the death certificate was because of covet so there's no proof that it's actual covid that is the cause of that person's death and it has to do with the way that deaths are reported there's other things that that kavanagh influence that can cause someone to die i thought that makes sense yeah but i've got to follow up on that one and i'm not meaning to drag this conversation out any longer than necessary honestly but um i thought that anytime kovid was was in the mix

033so to speak of immortality that it got recorded as a covid death is that a urban legend that i've been taking i'm not gonna be able to answer that directly i'm actually gonna have to go talk to some wonderful people that know more than me um that i work with to get back to you about that answer because i thought that you just said that somebody could die with covid and it would not be registered here in the county data as a covid death is that correct well no because i people what makes somebody die and this is going into details i think we're going off the school board but what makes someone die isn't actually necessarily coveted for example if someone ends up dying from a stab wound they don't always say a stab

034wound they'll say a puncture to the spleen so that would be an example that i would give so it doesn't say on there a knife killed them um and that would just be that's a really raw example that i'm providing ad hoc right now but i can give you more information about that if you like no that's that's great thank you tom hi nan thanks again um just because we have kind of wandered away and our discussion today is about facial covering protocols i just want to start from the very beginning facial coverings are an effective way to stop the transmission of cobot is this correct to decrease the transmission yes thank you so does anyone else on the board have a question or administration i guess i'll have one more question mental health is

035a concern to me especially in the wake of what our community has been through also i a lot of you might not know this about me but i was a communications major at chico state and we studied non-verbal communication a lot and i'm concerned that as very young children in particular i'm thinking of kindergarten through through third grade but even beyond i think these kids as their brains are forming i'm concerned about how having all these face coverings in the academic environment for a majority of their waking day is going to affect their their mental well-being not seeing smiles and facial expressions which i learned in college are more impactful many times than verbal communication is the does i'm sorry but if you interrupt the speakers then that becomes a negative aspect and their ability

036to communicate so please stay polite to each other go ahead matt does the butte county department of public health have you guys had any conversations looked at any research about how masking might affect the social emotional health of children at this time as a counter point to whatever benefit you know may or may not exist out there to masking these these children i needed myself thank you for asking that question i would actually um i think the very best response is to say we're looking at lots of things we read lots of different articles that are coming in that are well published but that is something that i would go to behavioral health about not for not for our public health department because we're looking at slowing the transmission of the virus right now so

037public health does not concern itself with with behavioral health at all we we have a lot of relationships with behavioral health the question that you're asking specifically it and it's a really really great question i think that's something that i would want behavioral health to answer because they're more of a specialist i'm not trained in that field and so have i read articles myself absolutely i'm sure a lot of you have too but i'm not i'm not the right person to answer that question thank you all right we really really appreciate your availability and i think you mentioned you would share links to the dashboard how would that happen i've been in contact with some of your great staff and i will forward them some links in the morning all right thank you very much

038and i can forward it as well okay thank you nan appreciate your being available yeah thank you all right so um do we have a speaker's list yes are we moving to public comment well i think we're right we're at that point madam vice president yes dr kaiser i have some additional questions um i could wait until after public comment um but they're regarding the mandate that has come down from the state for facial coverage at what point would my questions be in order on that topic were you intending to ask uh nan representing butte county no no if if you want uh questions to go that she would respond to mine would not be appropriate now okay i think that then we ought to probably wait because otherwise we're keeping nan that we're keeping

039her on line longer than necessary so um community input or questions okay thank you so we ha most of our speakers are in person we're going to start with kimberly snyder and kimberly will be followed by amber brown vice president kaiser would you like to remind every one of the parameters right so the parameters are that each speaker gets three minutes we ask you not to repeat another speaker's comments if they've already been made in order that everybody gets their three minutes how many speakers do we have on the list i believe we have 12. so normally we only do 10 so in order to let all 12 have their chance that's why i'm strongly urging you to once one speaker has made your point that you not you know repeat that over and over

040again that way all 12 can get in so our first speaker would you give your name please hi my name is kimberly snyder i have two awesome kids going into first and third at shasta let me tell you if we didn't love the teachers staff and principal we would have jumped ship like so many others i'm going to make this short and sweet you guys already have made your minds up on how this is going to go your political agendas are loud and clear masks should be parents choice not yours others in california are doing it so can you i ask if my child or i ask if my child is more likely to get struck by lightning than diakovid should i never let them leave the house i want everyone to know if you

041wear a mask or not i support you vaccinated doesn't matter i support you either way let's come together for the kids caitlyn i already knew you wouldn't be here from your facebook post calling in your troops kaiser your endless email responses are rude and unprofessional tom your last quote basically calling anyone who doesn't agree with you dumb is uncalled for and wrong you have already robbed these children of so much please don't rob them of their smile i asked my 92 year old grandma before heading to missouri a delta variant hot spot if she was still okay with going she said i have this sign in my front yard that says live with faith over fear so that's what i'm going to do i think we should all try that thankfully there is a recall

042going on right now and every family in chico unified can show their displeasure with your leadership by visiting www.chicoparents.org and learning more about how to help this recall campaign lastly i ask that you save chico unified school district half a million dollars and resign now it's time to have people on this board that fight for our children's education fight on parents and shame on you board okay next we have amber brown followed by pat jones i did fail to mention that you'll get a warning sign from mr hanlon when you have 30 seconds to go okay thank you hi my name is amber brown i know most of you know who i am you've read my emails i've spoken the past i recently sent an email today asking miss dalby mrlando miss kaiser miss robinson

043and miss stanley to please resign you have failed our community you are not the right leaders to make the decisions that we may we need to have made i read this the other day and i thought it was perfect and i understand that i already sent this to you but i want you to understand how important that it is it is my duty as a parent to research and question everything for the sake of my children not blindly trust doctors are not the authority teachers are not the authority the government is not the authority i am mass should be parents choice if you don't if you are not if you are not strong enough to make this decision then like i said resign i have not heard anything tonight that changes my mind at all

044the coveted deaths have stayed the same for months my children are not at risk this is political theater and not in the best interest of our children my kindergartner is going to start school with the mask on how is she supposed to learn to read how are the many parents that i spoke out there with their kindergartners getting ready to start learning different languages how is that going to happen with a mask all i sit here and hear is all these extra things you're going to do to make sure my child complies how about let me be the parent and you guys be the teachers and the administrators please give us mass choice that is what we're asking for and nothing more thank you next we have pat jones followed by catherine p well i

045know you're sitting there and you have some hard decisions to make hopefully you make them smartly are you aware that there have been many tests and studies about masks if they help if they keep people safe not one of them has been proven there are no there have been a lot of studies that say that they don't work but there's not one that says masks do work so right there and then you should be really thinking hard about requiring little children to wear masks it should be the parents right to decide if the child is going to wear a mask or not you're putting so much fear in these children that they're all going to need mental health by the end of this next year if something doesn't happen and it's up to you to

046make it happen do you also know that orange county board of educator the school board is suing governor newsom because of his mandates maybe you guys should get on that lawsuit with them if you all stuck together maybe then you would take control of the schools instead of letting the governor mandate to you what to do why do we have you up there and why are you doing if you're only going to listen to the governor we don't even need a school board now i think that the vaccines or shots are an important part of the mask because the next step you're saying if they don't have a vaccine or shot they're going to need a mask dr robert malone he's the inventor of the mrna it's really bad for children to get this vaccine

047it causes heart inflammations in children and there's been cases of that locally that i know of and it isn't just children and it did cause a death and it wasn't a cova death it was a vaccine or shot death the other thing in these shots is something called graphene oxide graphene oxide if you put it simply is the lead in a pencil how many times you tell a kid not to put the pencil in their mouth because they might get lead poisoning but instead we're injecting it in under their skin i mean this is really dangerous your first allegiance should be to students and not to the teachers union it's up to the parents and the parents vote for you so please make a great decision and don't ask for masks for everyone and also

048you can be held personally responsible if kids do get sick because of the masks our next speaker is catherine p followed by anja hi everybody i'm catherine posey um thanks for all your attention reading and responding to emails and questions related to the mask policies i'm a pb high and chico state alumni i'm not a parent i teach at the college level and i'm a curriculum developer in the area of holocaust and genocide studies i've taught middle school english and been an elementary school librarian just to give you a little bit of background about myself i say all that because as i share information with you today to consider i'm particularly aware of the need to evaluate sources of information including potential biases and the currency of the information so i've got three points for

049you to consider point number one children transmitting the virus so in july 2020 the official journal of the american academy of pediatrics published a piece that concluded that children infrequently transmit covet 19 to each other or to adults and that piece based their conclusions on a study published in an issue of pediatrics as well as four other recent studies that examine covet transmission by and among children and i'll email you all these citations point two relates to the data we have on the risk of cope 19 to young people so over this year's season cdc data revealed the flu was five times deadlier to children age 14 years old or younger than covid19 the risk children is so low the new york times recently noted a child is 10 times more likely to die in

050a car accident than cobot 19. so um the risk to children it is 0.0002 percent even less than vaccinated adults there were 335 deaths in the u.s due to covet and those younger than 18 and all of those cases had other underlying conditions my third and final point relates to the fear of what happens with no restrictions so i would argue that we shouldn't be requiring masks based on fears that aren't supported by the data for example how many schools were open with no masks no social distancing that had super spreader events what happened in sweden for example at the beginning of everything in spring 2020 they kept their children in school with no mask wearing no social distancing and no testing there was more cleaning than normal and children who were sick were sent

051home despite those lack of restrictions none of the 1.8 million children in swedish schools died in conclusion i share these three points in the hopes that you do vote for mass choice for the parents of the students in the school district similar to what districts like orland and clovis near fresno have chosen to do thank you our next speaker is anja there's no last name anja followed by mary murphy hi um first of all i was curious that the children are going to be required to be wearing masks i don't see anybody wearing masks in here right now i mean the idea that whatever threat is happening is not a threat right now but it's going to be a threat in the classroom it's not a threat at wendy's burger joint but it's a threat

052over a taco bell this is theater and it's theater of the absurd my comments are um over the course of the covet pandemic the cdc and who have clearly stated that communicable diseases uh disease prevention by masks and distancing is not based on science and are therefore not recommended outside of medical settings okay that was we were told that throughout medical settings and now all of a sudden it's other settings if in fact viruses can be stopped any kind of virus and it doesn't matter what virus i don't care if it's novel or not any scientist will tell you this if viruses were transmitted by aerosol in the air and could be trapped by a flimsy little mask a little cotton mask we would have been wearing them for the last few decades did you

053see anybody wearing any masks no and you should be asking your public health department why is it that if viruses were so contagious hospital staff didn't even wear masks until this year why aren't you asking these fundamental questions how dim would one have to be to not ask really good basic questions and why is it that they're running in the county cycle threshold on the pcr test of 45 cycles that is a tantamount to looking at a spec on the moon and saying that's dangerous and that's going to cause covet on earth it's that ludicrous we're talking about exponential numbers of amplification of a viral particle not even the full virus and on a test that says on the product insert cannot detect infection and this is what all this theater is about that virus

054test the coveted swab that you guys are going to be mandating soon enough for school children that test cannot detect infection and the public health department knows that and it's on the test cannot detect infection the inventor of the pcr test has said so multiple times so i would really urge you to do your due diligence and take care of the children in this county and in this city chico which is your that's what you're here for you're not here to carry out orders from on high you're here to take care of the children in this county and you better look behind the the curtain and find out how much of a scam this is being run because the lawsuits will come they will absolutely come and you guys are going to be very surprised

055because you're not you're not paying attention thank you our next speaker is mary murphy followed by nathaniel hart good evening and thank you for letting me speak pretty much everybody said everything that i had hoped to say i did send an email with with my i did send email with many references and what concerns me is people keep going back to as a public health person said the cdc and again all their quotes were in relationship to the current testing and as the woman before me said those tests are invalid so all these numbers that keep getting quoted as to the numbers of positives are not are invalid if a test is invalid then the test results that people are getting are invalid so unless somebody comes down with actual symptoms your data is incorrect

056so if you're basing this on data which is science you need to look at the actual science reports that have been in peer-reviewed articles and i again i urge you if i didn't send it to you guys i i did try kathleen thank you very much for responding that you received it and really take a look at those are hard scientifically reviewed journals with the exception of one which i stated is in the beginning of the peer review process but there are no scientific studies that have shown that there is that the masks the cloth masks are stopping these viruses so thank you very much and please allow these parents to make these decisions for their kids our next speaker is nathaniel hart and then i will be calling katie vanderwaal cook hello my name

057is nathaniel hart i am a concerned parent of two young kids that go to johnny mcmanus elementary school they're going into second and fourth grade my son trying to learn how to read and write and everything like that being in first grade for only two hours a day has really i think set him behind a little bit thank god my kids are smart and i talk to them like real human beings and they actually um you know have learned a little bit more from us than frankly the school system my main reason that i'm here tonight to speak is because my son kept getting headaches during school when he had to go back to school and you know you're only wearing a mask two to three hours a day but he kept getting headaches the

058teacher would call me he'd go down to the nurse's office i took him to the doctor twice tried to figure out what's wrong the teacher came up to my car and you know this whole time i'm thinking to myself it's because he's breathing in his own co2 and bacteria all day and now he's going to be breathing that in for eight hours a day including the bus so how's that going to stop my kids headaches and stuff from from his own co2 and bacteria it's ridiculous and nuzuma is recalled for a reason this being one of them and you're going to be next and i am a concerned parent because it is ridiculous i mean if you can smell everything smell everything through your mask what's going to prevent the virus from getting in your

059mask it's ridiculous this is completely asinine more facts about it like that like that professor said very smart lady she's made some good points point zero zero zero two percent kids died from this virus you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning like the other lady said so now i'm just repeating stuff but i'm a pissed off parent and you guys better recognize what's going on and yes lawsuits will be coming and one of them might even be mine [Applause] i'm calling katie vanderwaal cook hi katie this is the chico unified school school board you'll be addressing the school board if you hear a bell it means you have 30 seconds left okay [Music] okay go ahead thank you [Music] hi this is katie cook thank you for taking my call i'm speaking

060with you tonight due to my concern for our students and staff going back to school on august 16th although i feel we absolutely should be going back to school in person full time i do also feel some very serious steps must be taken to prevent the spread of this very serious and very real viral disease currently we have 48 covic cases in our county of children ages 5 through 17 and our overall vaccination rate hovers at 46 i adamantly believe all students age 12 and over and as well as cusd employees and volunteers should have to be mandatorily vaccinated as well as obviously masked i realize this may sound extreme but keep in mind two children under the age of 17 died this week of cobit in memphis tennessee and locally nursing staff at enlo

061are being offered a 400 bonus per extra shift they accept due to overwhelming patient totals at our local hospital the thought of students not being masked in cro in crowded junior high and high school hallways is unacceptable there is simply not enough fresh air to safely move amongst those crowded halls mapped safely firmly and consistently warm as worn excuse me as well as vaccinations for all students over age 12 and for age 12 and over is the only effective way to keep our kids in school full time long term without a leg and learning progress thank you very much our next speaker is claudia d followed by jeannie cutberth claudia is in person good afternoon i want to speak thank you that's fine a recent study shows that children have experienced great harm from the

062measures imposed on them during the covet epidemic the study used data from germany's first registry recording the experiences children were having wearing masks the registry was used by twenty thousand three hundred people including the parents the doctors and others reporting for the children using this data researchers found 24 health issues reported with the following symptoms irritability 60 headaches difficulty concentrating 50 less happiness 49 reluctance to go to school impaired learning 38 percent drowsiness and fatigue 37 shortness of breath 24. 26.4 percent shortness of breath this is 17.9 percent this is the damage that is done to children now there was another study published posted last month looking at the death occurring in children in the uk during the first 12 months of the the kovid epidemic it found that 99.995 percent of the children diagnosed

063with survived so how much is this death rate so that number oh and in the u.s there have been 335 children dying of course with a covid diagnosis on their death certificate and that includes that the number includes all who died of other causes with a covered diagnosis now a study was performed by university of warwick in the uk it looked at children absences between september 2020 and december 2020 looking at the number of students and teachers staying home from school sick with covered well thank you for listening okay our next speaker is jeannie cutberth followed by james bishop my name is jeannie and sitting out here and watching you people realizing that most of you there is one gentleman that i believe that might be on our side worried about our kids you up

064there are all in lockstep letting other people tell you what you need to do for our kids these people out here should be making the decisions not you this is serious this is serious what's going on in our country and for you to say that these kids little kindergarten can you imagine a kindergarten having to wear a mask for i don't know six hours four hours every single day they don't want to wear a mask none of us want to wear a mask because we're free we're americans and we should be able to make up our own minds not let people like some of you tell us that we have to put masks on our kids to go to school and learn i'm ashamed i'm ashamed of all of you and i'm disappointed in the

065human race i've got i've got a lawsuit here that i want to drop off to each one of you that's going on across the country and by god if you guys don't make the right decision you're all going to get one of these lawsuits because sitting here listening to you you're all do you only you have kids do you have kids put your hand up if you've got kids and this is what you want to do to your own kids what a disappointment that is that you that you went yeah this is what i want to do to my kids well i don't want this done to my kids or my grandkids i want us to be free to make up our own minds if somebody here wants to put a mask on a three-year-old

066go for it but don't tell me that the rest of us have to what a disappointment and we elected you well guaranteed we got that petition out there that we're signing by the hundreds to get rid of you for this that you are doing to chico so i'm going to leave these so you can all read it because this is what's kind of going to come to you if the decision you make to say that you're going to put masks on kindergarten through whatever chico state adults i'm embarrassed for you i really am i'm embarrassed you're just a disappointment to all of us our next speaker is james bishop followed by holly nielsen hello um so last summer i sent you guys easily enough research to conclude that last summer i sent you guys research

067that you could conclude that children did not need to be kept out of school or mitigated in any way if they went back to school and it included i won't go into all of it because um people have actually brought up some actual science tonight um but the icelandic study that came out right out of the gate in april they sequenced the rna of everybody in iceland and did not find a single instance of a child infecting their parent so they don't wear masks when they're with their parents and they don't social dissidents so the the research since then has been overwhelming in support of this so i also pointed out last summer that the l.a county teachers union released a white paper where they stated that kids would not be going back to in-person

068education until charter schools were closed and the police were defunded so this was an overt just making it clear so we don't really have to debate about it they were in the position of being willing to exploit the suffering of children that the cdc was being very clear at the time children need to go back to person education or they're going to suffer grave harm that's a quote and they they were taking advantage of that in order to expand their power if you don't think that's a fair assessment i'd like to hear how you would interpret it um since then um studies have shown things like the incidence is lower in school for kids under a certain age it's not hard to interpret so i'll leave that the american federation of teachers and the unions

069constantly claimed that they wanted schools open but also created criteria so that they would never be able to open the schools it was really growingly obvious to everyone i think when when wolinski was appointed to the cdc directorship um she the cdc all of a sudden started kind of echoing this rhetoric of the teachers unions to become suspicious maybe there's some relationship between the two well that was confirmed beyond doubt with a freedom of information request a foia that pulled all the email traffic between the cdc and the aft and showed that the cdc had been poised in the january february time frame to issue guidance which would have allowed all schools to open but instead they inserted some language about community spread which closed 99 of school so they went from 100 open to

070one percent open and it turns out that that language was a direct quote from a request through email that the aft made to ins to have this language inserted and the cdc complied so really i would just want to ask you guys do you think that this is a political power play that our kids are being subjected to or not if we all kind of agree on that then we should do for god sakes just about anything we could think of to resist right so i think you know i don't i'm not concerned about my kid wearing a face shield okay i don't think that a face shield is going to harm them particularly i think that forcing my child to do anything that has no basis behind it for some kind of an authoritarian

071reason that's connected to all kinds of political stuff is as horrific as you can get right so if we all agree on this and i have a feeling there is some agreement let's figure out what to do about it okay i'm figuring out what to do about it in my community but i would love to partner with you to figure out what to do about it because it's not okay we need to stop this we need to resist in any manner that we can think of okay i hope this is making sense to you okay our next speaker is and our last speaker holly nielsen hi first off the board's presentation talks a lot about the california department of public health mandates but you know doesn't mention that masks are only authorized under federal law

072the emergency use authorization act which explicitly states that individuals can opt out that means mask choice it does not require anything to be filled out by any medical practitioner and also just to make a comment now now you're going to turn teachers into the mask police as if they don't have enough to manage already i i'm i'm shocked i'm frankly shocked i'm an associate marriage and family therapist i see a lot of adolescents and children in my practice many highly traumatized butte county highest ace scores in california maybe maybe the nation um during my graduate studies in psychology i was a student of the neuroscientist stephen purge's polyvagal theory which is a sort of a universal theory of the etiology of trauma what his theory and related research basically says is that most of the

073higher functions of the human brain the mammalian brain are dedicated to what he calls a social engagement system our entire nervous system is literally wired for connection and this wiring is entirely mediated through the face and the voice what creates trauma is not necessarily that bad things happen to us it is when our nervous system signals that we are alone when bad things happen to us people heal from trauma when they are connected with others as mediated by engagement through the face and voice which then creates a resonance and heart biorhythms in which our nervous system signals safety connection love so what happens to this system when we're masked up the social engagement system goes offline our nervous system cannot read one another's faces and our voices are muffled social engagement as it is understood

074by our nervous system in the face of another is not present at all our nervous system believes that we're alone our cortisol adrenaline are increasing we become stressed and for children the sense of being alone is enough to traumatize them it's literally creating trauma in our children for children masking is especially detrimental and will have long-term effects on their physical mental and emotional well-being as i said most of our higher brain function is dedicated to the social engagement system children's forebrains do not even mature until they're 15 or 16 years old healthy brain development in children is completely dependent on their social engagement systems ability to consistently connect with others in their environment in its absence you have trauma you can see that in some of the statistics that already have coming out in this

075year of masking and social distancing increase in cutting and self-harm behaviors i cannot tell you how common this is in our kids today it is a crisis you're creating a crisis children are at very little risk from covid you know people who need to you know they're going to compromise older they can take the vaccine protect yourselves but the rationale i'm hearing here that supports the masking of children goes something like this children those dirty little germophiles are spreading the virus and endangering others you know since since when are we okay with sacrificing or you have the red sign for stuff for the common good ends justifies the means never means are everything all right so uh i'm going to go back to eileen eileen you had some questions that you wanted to present yes

076ma'am uh thank you dr kaiser for recognizing me under board discussion um i'm going to start with with 600 000 and just remind us as i remind myself that 600 000 americans are dead because of the covid and now that we have new variants um you know the numbers have increased this is this is not pretend in my opinion this is real and um these the uh acquaintances that i've lost were were here and now they're gone back to what we are about here tonight the cdc has at this point said that in order to get everyone back in school full-time which is the number one desire and mine as well that masks are what will keep us safe indoors at schools and they are mandated the governor's authority under that mandate and the authority

077that he has under a health emergency does give him the authority to mandate the masks the governor then said at the local level for schools we get to decide not if we're going to mandate masks but when we mandate masks how we will enforce it so the concerns we heard tonight from very concerned parents were that they wanted parent choice and that that has been heard loud and clear so the district has made sure that parent choice following the same forms and guidelines that we have parent choice for other medical issues in the schools is available it's a simple form that will be highlighted i understand later in the meeting so we have we have given the parents that are concerned the method by which to get their kids back into school full-time without the

078mask mandate if they have the waiver under the proper form now the the next issue that i have is is very much a concern about what we have negotiated with our unions and how the effect of that memorandum of understanding that that says that the teachers will follow the directives of the state department of health that says that when a child comes into the classroom they have to have a mask on as well as the teacher and the age and anyone else that's in the classroom they all have to have masks but um what if a teacher does not say to a student that walks into a classroom and the teacher is not aware of an exemption and does not say anything to the student what kind of liability does that teacher present for themselves

079by not dealing with an unmasked and to the teacher's knowledge unexempted student coming into a classroom i'd like um you know either mr gant or mr hanlon that handles our labor relations with cuta to answer that if they bite so when we negotiated the the mou we did not deal with any liability issues so i'm going to defer that to our attorney paul gantt but if they do not follow the agreement they're open to disciplinary action by their administrator so you know as far as that goes um we'll have conversations about that with with teachers and go through due process but um i'm going to leave the liability issue to mr gant paul i believe you're on do you want to give a response to that well uh thank you madam board president thank you

080members of the board and members of the public um board member uh robinson the there's several areas in which legal liability could be faced by the district if it if you do not have a policy in place that is um directed to in provide a reasonable approach to implementing the mass mandate that has been issued at the state level one of those yes is a potential issue with regard to your collective bargaining agreements even though it may be a teacher whose actions or inactions are the immediate cause of the mask not being um not being implemented in a classroom ultimately a teacher is under the supervision of a principal is under the supervision of district administration and the union to the extent that you have um obligations with the union to follow the guidelines of

081the public health the california public health department if you don't take reasonable steps to do that and then employees fail to act because you're not implementing reasonable enforcement steps implementation steps then that could be the basis of either a violation of your mou it could be an unfair labor practice or it could be a violation of your duty to bargain fairly with the union and that could also lead to potential liability in that sense the other sources of liability and are of course if there was an outbreak i and that outbreak could be traced um to a certain location such as a classroom or a site and that site was not implementing the mandate of the state then um causation would have to be proven by the person injured which would presumably be individuals who

082contracted covid and ultimately liability could attach in that circumstance i will tell you uh i think it's important to remember that as it is always a big issue with regard to all businesses and public agencies you rely on having adequate insurance coverage to cover you in the event that a lawsuit is filed for personal injury or that personal injury damages may come to pass the most of the carriers for school districts throughout the state of california have stated that an intentional failure to implement the direct mandate from the california department of public health unknowing and intentional failure to implement that directive could very much place in doubt whether your insurance would even be in place meaning you would bear the cost of of defending a lawsuit and the cost of any damages would come from

083your general fund as opposed to having that backup from your insurance company uh as an attorney i know that that's a very significant concern i would never want to have a client lose coverage because just the expense of defending a lawsuit even one that where ultimately you may succeed is so overwhelming and obviously would drain resources from the district that you need for other and much more important purposes i would say the most direct source of liability in terms of when we talk about a legal action that could impact you soon and that could result in expense to the district would be a legal action in the form of what we call a petition for a writ of mandate and there a pub member of the public says the state has ordered all school districts

084not just chico unified that you will implement a mask mandate it's outside the board's jurisdiction in the district's jurisdiction to refuse to try reasonably to implement that so if you took a position that says we just won't do it we don't agree with it and even though higher agency has the authority and the right order us to do that a member of the public could take you to court under one of these petitions for a writ of mandate in order to get a judge to order the district to comply with the established law there is little doubt that the governor under the emergency order and the department of public health under the direct supervision of the governor and under the health and safety code has the authority in a public health emergency to to wreck

085to direct subdivisions of the state such as school districts to implement these policies and even though you may disagree with them failure to do so could subject you to a lawsuit of the sort that i explained the law provides that you would have to not only pay for your own legal fees and costs but likely the legal fees and costs of the other side the member of the public who brought the lawsuit and their attorneys and i assure you there are a number of attorneys and groups out there that are anxiously awaiting this opportunity they we you would have to pay their legal fees i see this particular type of lawsuit as your greatest risk because i feel that a negligence lawsuit a lawsuit that says an injury was caused by covid will be difficult

086to win and it will take a long time to get there i don't think that's your most direct threat it's a possibility but i do believe the writ of mandate possibility and i also believe that the issues pertaining to your collective bargaining units are also very significant and all of those would run you at great cost to defend i hope i've answered the question primarily that you asked thank you paul very much dr kaiser i'd like to add one more thing regarding negotiations um it's been reported in in the the different news organizations about the reluctance of teacher unions to open schools and and be pro-mask nationally i just wanted to state publicly that in negotiations with our local union we were able to open on october 19th because both unions worked hand in hand

087with us the district in order to open it when 80 percent of the state remain closed for the remainder of the year in the spirit of negotiations regarding masking our conversation with them has been centered around the issue of when we when can we take mass off not um are we going to make everyone wear them so when we were having those conversations we had to choose at that time some way to i guess in a neutral fashion where one group or another couldn't mandate that everyone else were a mass if it was safe to take them off just because they were afraid of what could possibly happen and that's when we we agreed to let that fall in the health department which we were mandated to do anyway and we agreed with that that

088that would be the the organization that would allow us at that point to do that and therefore no teacher group minority group could um make everyone else wear it just because they continued to fear covet so i just wanted to put that out there that that they were very positive conversations and discussions and that was the spirit of the agreement that we reached with our teachers union so whatever's happening out there in at the state and national level it was very positive at the local level in getting our schools open and and as soon as legally possible concerning what mr gantt just said is when whenever we can get those mass taken off they were in support of that thank you mr hanlon i think that's a really good clarification i do want to go

089back for a second to eileen robinson uh did you have your questions uh answered yes dr thank you i had had both the concern about the um the liability of the teacher the district and our um our fiduciary responsibility to follow the law and they were all answered thank you i'd like could i ask a question of um mr gann mr ganner you i'm assume you're aware that there are some districts in our area and then very notably clovis unified school district um has produced a form online where not only a medical professional but a parent could also get on and essentially certify that their child was unable to wear a mask and this district clovis unified is about three times the size of chico unified maybe a little bigger i know i assume you're

090not representing them and i mean you wouldn't tell me if you were i guess i would let you know right away and i would plead a conflict of interest but no i actually i do not represent clovis yeah um that's what so do you have any sense as to how these other districts are justifying uh their decision in light of what you've said you've painted a very doom and gloom scenario for um basically i think that you're essentially saying that because of various areas of liability it's unconscionable that we would you know um empower parents to decide that that a mask created an unhealthy situation for their child well i you know i'll be very honest i cannot speak for the other districts but i that have implemented um different policies i i can say

091i've i've appeared before many boards including boards much larger than the clovis uh district and what i hear across the board is very similar in your community with other communities which is a great deal of serious controversy uh points of view on all sides different sides uh with with a lot of good faith uh people with a lot of data that goes in different directions and and and real concern from many different groups and and concerned boards boards who are listening boards who are trying to you know find their way through uh and so i'm i'm very sympathetic to that i try to do with all my boards including your board when asked to provide you with legal options you know options that i believe are defensible sometimes we we have to it's not unlike

092you know the covet exposure issue you know you're weighing risk and you're deciding you know the board's deciding what's going to be of the greatest risk um on the issue of what some have called self attestation in other words what i think it was the primary basis of your question the question of can parents simply advise the district that based on my own judgment as a parent my child should not wear a mask and therefore do not take steps to implement that with regard to my child what the department of public health has said and i don't know if if uh nan is still available but she might be able to comment on this is that that um we're mandating these masks in the absence of a medical exemption and they're very specific on that

093point it's got to be a medical exemption and the reason being is that they are designed to according to the department of health and again there's obviously different points of view as to whether they are right or they are wrong they're designed to both protect the wear of the mask and others who may be at risk and again according to what department public health says as part of their rationale for these rules is that the most protection is when you have a variety of mitigation measures including mass by all parties since that provides some alleged uh amount of protection for both the where and the person who that may be exposed to them so that's what they say and and then they said as a result of that we are we are mandating that schools

094have everyone wearing a mask this has been strengthened in just recent days uh to include all persons in all indoor locations uh in school and they have emphasized that that exemption is a medical exemption so the question becomes should someone should you implement a self-attestation rule that says a parent can opt out essentially based on their subjective decision that that's not best for the child is that going to subject the school district to the same type of risk that i described with regard to a simple across-the-board opt-out of the cd ph guidelines i think that there's a high chance it would subject you to risk because the cdph has identified it as a medical exemption a medical exemption and in my experience in school districts when there is a when there needs to be a

095medical basis for an action or an inaction it requires the input of a of a of a physician in the state of california those can be mental health practitioners by the way i heard that question yes licensed mental health practitioners can be physicians in the state of california whose opinions can be considered but in the absence of that i think there would be a strong argument and a strong basis for that rid of mandate action or other legal actions if it was on a a essentially apparent opt-out basis one of the areas and i think some of your board members had all of you may have some experience with this but sometimes we have to implement special rules with regard to children in the schools based on a medical condition and we have to develop

096in conjunction with our school nurses a health and safety plan that's a detailed plan that says we need to do something special for this child because of it may be a medication they take it may be a condition they have but there are exceptions we need to make for this child or special accommodations they need or we may have to actually assign a staff person to support this child in some way and we have to develop a health and safety plan that health and safety plan generally must be signed off on by a physician so that's just one example there are others but this is typically the rule with regard to a medical issue i i hope that that covers most of the question but i i'm happy to take a follow-up i think uh

097i think that did respond directly to that the format is typically a 504 and and that is with a medical practitioner and it can address a number of issues so um we've concluded our uh public comment and thank you for trying to respect and i think most of you did really well the timing issue so that we could get everybody in i think that's important that they get to provide their input as well and then are there any more questions or discussion issues with the board before we take action on this um i guess i'm fine uh robinson has no further questions okay thank you eileen and tom were you first or uh i didn't see our our parliamentarian's not here but somebody will make a motion correct and presumably maybe we'll get a second

098and then will there be one more round of comment remarks before we take a vote we can do that yes in the parliamentary procedure after the after the motion is when the board debates among itself so would you like to make a motion sure in the interest of of getting to that debate i will move the adoption of the facial covering protocols as put before us tonight i'll second that motion all right thank you so tom lando has made the motion and eileen robinson has seconded it so now we may have further discussion um did you want to yeah it's it's our practice here to make an explanation if we think we're going to make a descent which i anticipate that i will um if there's been some things worked into the policy that i

099think are are frankly admirable on the part of the district i think that the medical exemption expanding to include mental health professionals gives a meaningful amount of leeway to this rule um which broadly speaking i do not support um the thing that really gets me about this this proposal and limiting parents rights over this masking requirement i guess is the very young kids i've thought very deeply about this situation and really if it wasn't for the kindergartners through the third graders i could almost stomach the face masks or the face shields you know with with the coverage on them and just the variety of options i i think the whole the whole thing is overkill from a general broad public policy standpoint some of our speakers we had a number i think of really great

100points that were made from public commenters the most powerful is that for children to suffer mortality from covid is so rare is to be statistically you know a zero percent chance essentially i think it's like i i saw that it was point zero zero or maybe point zero three percent of all covid cases among children resulted in mortality um and that's just kobe being among the reasons that those children died you know nationally that we've heard the number here a few times it was you know 300 and some some peop children total um so to me that just doesn't justify um this just massive change to the way children grow up and interact with one another and interact with their teachers i just really can't can't support it as a matter of public policy but

101like i said the the face shields being an option for people and and the exemptions that do exist i i think are welcome uh caveats for me in this policy but i can't stomach supporting masking you know universal day-long masking for kindergarteners through third graders so for my part if somebody was willing to amend this motion to allow a parental discretion on those kids then then i could be persuaded to to support this i i think we had a very clear answer from our attorney that the cdc has made it really clear that it's medical we have expanded it as you know to recognize mental health practitioners but he was pretty clear about that tom did you have other comments that you wanted to make yeah i have a couple of comments um the first

102is just a general apology i heard a speaker today say that i had called some members of the public dumb and that is completely not true i am so glad that you guys are here and i am glad that you are participating and we do all of us listen everything you guys say and take it into consideration um so that said i kind of want to take this back to the very basics we have a couple things we need to do here right we need to protect us ourselves legally as a district and of course we need to keep the students safe and educated um it's become clear that we are kind of damned if we do and damned if we don't since we've been threatened with lawsuits from both sides so um i'm sorry

103for the disruption so tom if you want to continue thank you um so given that i don't really feel the need to dive into the debate about the science you're disrupting the meeting so you can do that thank you so what we should be looking for is a protocol towards enforcement that both protects our students and all of our students as well as making sure that we all have the most access possible to the curriculum i would be open to some kind of change in either the wording or in our in-school protocols for the k-2 students because i have the same concern i have a kindergartner i'm very concerned about speech and language development among our early speak readers so i would love to hear some some uh spitballing possible ideas from staff about what

104that might look like do we have anything like that i i can throw one out there i visited classrooms last year and um went to kindergarten classrooms and you know was asked it is crucial that students be able to see our face and that we can see theirs especially when we're teaching them reading when we're doing phonics and what the teacher used was the clear face shield and asked if that was appropriate for students as well and that's what he used in his classroom and i will tell you it is an amazing kindergarten teacher that always has fantastic results i think i know you're talking about it would it be possible or feasible to offer face shields just as a first level instead of saying take the mask no okay get a face shield just

105have the face shield there present for any of those students who would benefit from that i personally think that's a wonderful compromise thank you i would uh first of all i had one that just finished kindergarten and so you wait for them to come out and they're all the classes are lined up together and i literally didn't see any issue that the kids were expressing over a mask i actually had to remind mine to take them off when we got out but i think the face shields are a very good aspect i don't know that we need to quote unquote offer them first but they're there and they can be used with the language professionals that we have at each school site every school site has a lang a speech specialist and so again there

106are individual professionals who are attending to the speech needs i do have one that had speech issues and he was in second grade and he didn't have any problem you know after having had the speech therapy um with uh wearing a mask eileen did you have anything that you wanted to comment in this area of discussion uh thank you uh dr kaiser yes i do i had received information that we have a significant supply of the face shields so that using them and offering them is not an issue i believe mr baltimore gave me that information if he could respond to that well i don't have the exact number with me but we have a substantial amount of face shields in our warehouse so it would not be a problem providing those for the start

107of school and then we'll order more if needed so in clarification um particularly with the younger grades that we would make sure that parents and teachers knew they were available yes we have a process that's already in place that office managers can put in their orders and they're delivered the same day if not the next day for both mass and face shields so we would make sure that that process was still ready to go and we had enough of the face shields in our warehouse for distribution um if you remember we when we were first starting out with kobit that's what the board was given we were given face shields to wear so we've experienced that first line eileen did you have another aspect that you wanted to comment on no thank you dr kaiser

108um i i believe my questions um have been answered all right matt i've got a question about about the face shields um and if this more general discussion item is not appropriate let me know but um is there anybody here is the public health still on um okay so there's no one here who who knows the extent to which co2 gets caught in a face shield situation or anything like that i mean i read something about it it says something hang off the bottom of it like like a cloth hangs around the bottom of the face shield or is it more like a sneeze guard sort of a thing the ones that we have in stock do not have the uh drape i think is what it's called right thank you also i believe that

109number is a little over 5000 that we have um in our warehouse right now again under mr lando's point we can um we have a leadership meeting with all administrators coming tomorrow and then we also have a professional development day with all of our teachers on the 12th we clearly can be telling our teachers you can offer either one of those options to the student it doesn't have to be oh you're not wearing it we'll give you offers shielded our teachers are very good about wanting their kids in class also so they will they can clearly offer i can give you either or a mask or a shield okay if if i may and i you know i hesitated in that you are making the policy and you're amending the policy on the spot i

110i do feel i have an obligation as your counsel to at least direct you to that rule as you develop the the this particular aspect of it it is relatively short if i may read it to you there is some specific guidance in the cdph order on this point um may i read that yes please go ahead paul okay uh so this is this is in the updated guidance from august 2nd so understanding and some of this is not that new but um this is continuing to be in their specific guidance that was just updated and this is under the masking requirement and it's one of the exceptions that was specifically addressed and as you've been speaking about uh in terms of ensuring that the students are going to be able to be properly educated

111um they refer to that as a pedagogical or developmental reason okay so that's what that refers to when i read that they say under masking section 1 subdivision f of the school guidance of august 2nd they state in limited situations where a face covering cannot be used for pedagogical or developmental reasons for example communicating or assisting young children or those with special needs a face shield with a drape per cd ph guidelines can be used instead of a face covering while in the classroom as long as the wearer maintains physical distance from others staff must return to wearing a face covering outside the classroom now i do interpret that i think a reasonable interpretation is that the face shield with drape can be used by the teacher and the student for those pedagogical or developmental

112reasons but i just wanted to point out that there are a couple specifics there that need to be taken into account and one is that it does specify the drape and it also specifies that it is to be used in combination with physical distancing i would tend to interpret that as three feet but they haven't been specific so i think it's all it's as much as possible with a guide of being three feet if possible and i do believe that in um most if not all of our classrooms we can meet the three foot social distancing one of the advantages of the face shield is again the sound is transmitted you can see the lips and the facial expressions so i don't think there would be the sense that they would have to be so

113close together we actually have the reference to the face shield in our policy so i don't think we have to actually make an amendment it's already recognized that that's a accepted option for uh individuals and for sure um speech is the number one limitation or special need that any school district has that's why we have a speech therapist at every single site so it makes sense that the younger the student the more likely they would be benefiting from being able to see as well as hear the sounds and the movement so yeah so um yes tom i just want to address paul for a moment i think that what you were bringing up was that we our face masks for students do not have drapes and the language in the guidance specifically states that that's

114what needs to be used this is kevin can i add just a point to that the face shields that we ordered and have used last year we applied our own shield or a drape using a in essence a paper towel almost with a tape the reason being you could then dispose of that versus having some cloth that needed to be washed it proved effective and it gave kind of the opportunity to change that out multiple times during the day that's the same system we would use now so i just want to point out what we have for drapes is a self-applied in essence paper drape and we have the time and resources to do that to the 5000 or whatever as they as we know them we leave that up to the individual to put

115this on okay and if there's any doubt then there's always that's one of the uh benefits of having your local health officer if you have a question about hey is that appropriate under the guidelines then my sense is they would be able to give you that guidance to say yes that solution is appropriate and that's acceptable and you and you can you can rely upon that type of interpretation should come to that all right thank you uh any other points of discussion all right well seeing none then i'd like to move to the vote um did i understand there was some kind of amendment or could we have the motion read back please we didn't do an amendment right we just it's the action reference to facials is already included in the document um so

116are you asking for that entire protocol to be read no okay um excuse me um can i make a just to clarify this can i make a uh what is it an author's amendment to the to my own motion just with some clarifying language uh well if it's an amendment it'll have to be second yeah so um i would be happy to um i mean i can make myself a friendly amendment and prove it um i'd be happy to change that language so that we are adopting the presented facial covering protocols with the understanding that face shield will be a first line offering for students in k1 or 2. is that is there eileen are you wanting to see that as friendly i do not believe that's uh i'm not going to second it because

117i i don't believe it's necessary and i support the ability for the students that do the masking really well as kelly said you know that i've observed the same thing i think that the face shield as an option when the need arises or is requested is is sufficient so i do not support the amendment is there another second is there another i'm not seeing one all right so uh that uh friendly amendment dies for the lack of a second and so again we are uh looking at voting for the face covering compliance protocol that was presented [Music] by jay marchant at our meeting it's an entire layout of all the protocols that we do have and so uh we'll need a voice vote so i'm calling on eileen first robinson i all right matt tennis

118nay okay uh oh kaiser i landed i all right so it passes uh four to one no i'm sorry three to one and all right thank you so we move on then to the assembly bill ab104 student pupil instruction and again to mr marshawn thank you dr kaiser this is an information only we just wanted to update the board on this new assembly bill ab104 and i'm going to hand it over to mr john shepard at this point thank you mr marchand so just to move things forward as mr vincent is pulling up the presentation as you'll recall last spring there was some legislation that came out that did adjust the grading and graduation expectations for california students and another round was was passed this summer so i just want to walk the board through

119this presentation just informational only it's our goal not only tonight but as already has happened last week and will continue to happen tomorrow and also next week we want to get this information out to the public because there are some timelines that we need to make sure we're aware of so basically this legislation includes ab104 and ab130 includes three education codes we're going to talk about one ab-130 separately so assembly bill 104 establishes three additional education codes as you can see here the first one is focuses on student retention for grades k through 11 and then an opportunity to change grades to pass no no pass and graduation requirements so most importantly parents and community members need to understand who the affected students are for each of these ed codes as you'll see in this

120ed code this first one 48071 mainly focuses on k11's students ability to be retained fortunately chica unified already has a robust board policy and administrative regulation protocol to address retention so we're covered with this and we feel like we we have process in place the second ed code is directly related to changing grades from a past to no pass as you can see here the affected students are those who are enrolled in chico unified grades 9 through 12 during the 2021 school year and that's an important distinction because some folks might when they received our aries communication they reached out to us last week wondering if their seventh grader could have his grades changed and if on this only affects students 9 12 through the 2021 school year now as you can see here in

121bold it's really important for the board and the and the public to understand that families and students only have 15 days from the operative date of the legislation to notify a school of an interest in changing grades the frustration first for some is this 15 days began on july 16th and will end prior to the start of school so again it's imperative that we communicate with our public we've already done so through aries communication that came out from the district it's going to come out again from the school sites tomorrow and again next week so we can just keep hammering home this understanding that there is a process in place for our for our students to change their grades this is so critical i i really hope that i'm concerned that parents don't thinking knowing

122this school's not going to start till the 16th they may be not checking these kinds of information sources so um i hope our media coverage will uh present this very dramatically because that would be extremely sad if a student simply missed it because thank you dr kaiser if anyone has any questions about any of this please contact me at the district office at 891-3000 extension 20105 because it's important that we get this information out to our public i do want to note it's a small font but it's important to note that the csu has been directed to accept pass no pass yes unfortunately the uc has not and so parents need to consider that talk to counselors talk to the guidance counselors at the universities the california department of education has provided a list of

123schools outside the uc and csu that will accept pass no fail and you can access that on their website so i think it's important that parents understand csu must accept those grades this duc they may and then lastly this affects the the students who are left out of the first ed code for graduation requirements specifically these students who were in their third or fourth year of high school during the 2021 school year so that would be our current seniors and last year's seniors and again they need to reach out to the school site we do have this policy or this ed code covered again in our board policy and administrative regulation if students are interested in retention the purpose behind this legislation is to provide learning recovery and graduation options for students so it's just

124one more step that the legislation took let me ask a question here it says third or fourth student and i've been wondering do we know whether that refers to academic status or years we've had a student who was already say retained at one point so they were in their third year as a say sophomore would they fall under this as well so typically students aren't retained until their senior year um there it's all based on credits once they're in into high school so it'd be their third or fourth year of high school okay so there are no corner cases to which that applies none that i know of but i've been wrong today once okay any questions for any other questions from the board okay so i guess for me the the really the stressor

125is to get this information out to the public as many times as we can because i think this is extremely important information and mr shepard we have sent that out to each individual family at the secondary level correct not just secondary we've sent it out to every student because it does affect elementary students okay yes okay so we are that was just information only it's very critical information for individual families and students so uh we'll move on to business services and we have a transportation update by kevin baltimore yes we want to make the board and the public aware of the challenge we're going to have starting the school year on our transportation department uh covid pandemic really impacted the number of bus drivers we have on staff um as a reminder is we have

126a lot of drivers that this is a second career and certainly the pandemic had an impact so we have bob anaveras our transportation supervisor and john carver and they'll just give you a brief summary of where we stand today and then also inform the board and the public of the steps we've been taking over the last number of months to try and do a better job recruiting and retaining drivers so with that i turn over to bob and john we need your sound higher it's pretty low i think you're not on or something how about now is that a little better all right all right again i thank you for an opportunity to share what's going on in transportation with you uh we do have some significant challenges this year um we actually currently have

12711 driver positions open if there's anybody out there looking for a position we would more than gladly train you and provide you the skills and talents necessary to be a school bus driver we just now have a certified school bus driver trainer on staff we've been about a year and a half almost two years without one which made it very difficult for us to not only recruit but train drivers we're going to reduce the amount of buses that were in routes were going to be providing for this year uh pre-coveted we did eight and a half general red routes this year we're going to do seven uh in previous years we did 17 special ed routes this year we're going to do 16. 16 we have a lower application rate at this time usually about

128this time of year we're up around 300 maybe 400 students applying right now we're at about 110. we've done our best to try to let the public know that we are back in in the saddle and ready to take students back and forth from home to school um but we will be challenged because of the lack of drivers uh we've gone through several things to try to increase the driving staff we've made the the buses much more user friendly by purchasing new buses we've spent a great deal of money on trying to make the the environment either courtyard much better more professional and just yesterday i believe we've passed an mou generated by the district to increase the driver's wage rate which now puts us in a competitive position with the other districts around we're

129going to do our best to try to attract some significant amount of drivers to provide the best transportation for chico we're looking at updating our edge join website information telling the people that we've now have an increase in wages we're looking to reach out through indeed and possibly the edd we've considered going to some of the groups around like rotary and speaking to them to see if they have any people that are interested maybe like do a job fair to discuss the opportunities afforded to them to become a school bus driver and we're doing everything we can to get as many kids as we can back and forth safely to school how long does it usually take for the training it usually takes about a month because you have to go through some dmv then

130you have to go through a classroom with the subscriber trainer then you have to go through written tests with the chp then after that you go back to the chp get some more testing come back to the trainer get some more training behind the wheel and then go back to the chp finally take one more test and then you're certified so about about a month about four weeks one of the provisions in the mou allows us to now pay for drivers as their training so that was we think a barrier right come train with us for and spend quite a bit of time but no compensation as you're going through that process but the mou allows us to do that now okay good does anybody else have any questions on this just two more comments

131if i could this is a statewide issue and actually a national issue of just a decrease in the number of bus drivers the second piece is if you heard bob talk about the number of routes we're still operating that really is a credit to the staff that's out there to make this work as best they can you know even down that number of drivers being able to provide even half of what we did on a normal year i think is a good um is a good effort and we're doing better than that so we want the board to be aware we're not just going to take this as it comes we think the mou and some of the things that bob talked about will help us but we're going to be active as we get

132through the year because we want to be up to speed and home to school as quickly as possible and isn't it true that we have the ability to make arrangements with the city buses that some of our students may use that access point yes that is also true we have hadn't down bus passes in the past to students that we couldn't transport okay did you have something no okay all right mr carver well i was going to say everything that kevin and bob said the only thing that i have left to offer as we with the help of my office staff we created a flyer that now we can based on the mou that came out yesterday we're also going to put those out in mailings and and give outs and whatnot i don't sorry

133i didn't bring you a example but bob did so i'll just leave this up here and you guys can look at it and these are going to go out and mass mailings also all right and i assume there'll be something hanging from one of our old buses as people drive down the freeway that it will almost look just like this thank you all right well gentlemen i know that you work very very hard at this is a critical issue for every district as you noted and we do have to make every effort to get our students safely from school to home and back so thank you thank you all right so our next item is the which is an action and discussion is the approval of new and updated board policies and the first one

134is um it's on 3.3.1 um and we have uh jay marshall again thank you again dr kaiser so we're bringing forward back bringing forth to the independent study board policy we brought to you last week with a policy because we didn't know for sure that we were going to have another board meeting before school started and we needed to have a policy in place i want to let you know that um rhonda odlum and john shepard did a very good job of getting the language that we needed in there and everything that you guys approved last last board meeting is still in there but between that time and this we've had our auditor who oversees our independence study to make sure we are compliant with this board policy and csba just came out with their

135revisions to the board policy on independent studies so we have added their additions to this board policy and i wanted to bring it back to you guys for approval okay so actually i see that the first thing that show oh i see so you didn't did you get okay the details on independent study is actually behind the one on covet medication that's correct i'm sorry yeah so the first one we're doing yeah so does uh do you want to note any the more specific aspects where that was changed moral modes goes to the ed code they wanted to make sure that we had in here so we added all the different head codes that they thought would um just overall cover us on our board policy to make sure we had those in there we

136did not add those ed codes in there before and so we wanted to make sure that we put those in there and just to add um laws get passed and then there is the actual how they get implemented and then how we get held accountable for them and part of that is the auditing process so we wanted to make sure that we covered ourselves so that when we do go through an audit because we will on independent study we do annually that our board policy covers everything that the law requires and the audit process when we brought it forward two weeks ago had not yet been delineated so this updates that good so uh yes so there's been a law passed or laws passed and this is in here because of these laws that are

137that are passed i see that if somebody's gonna do an independent study they they now have to have um a licensed an employee who possesses a valid certification document pursuant to i assume that's a teacher's license or something like that when it comes to their credentialing whereas before you didn't have to have that that person's oversight now you do we in chico unified have always had credentialed teachers that are teaching independent study thanks um do we have uh eileen did you have any questions yourself on this no dr kaiser i was able to review both documents all right i just wanted to state that um i think one of the most uh one of the biggest changes is the change that uh independent study programs now have to check uh for attendance and engagement every

138three days instead of five and i think in a lot of ways that's going to really strengthen uh programs by basically mandating more and better contact with kids so i'm actually all for this i think we had a number of parents and students sometimes teachers who given the rather dramatic shift that we had to make to online that there would be disengaged students and it might be for a range of reasons but now this is a very um strict uh framework of reference that there has to be evidence that everything from assignments to interaction that you're not going more than three days without interaction and given that we already talked about the changes to the grades and past fail i think this will hopefully benefit students who found themselves struggling in that vein so yes

139okay so it's a little unclear would we be passing both of these as one item they're separate components in the past what the board has done is they've taken it as a single slate and pulled off ones that they wanted to discuss further and then voted on those separately so we can do that either way okay so let's then uh look at the 6158 that is the independent study one that our auditor did go over and that has had the changes relating to the law do we have any comments from the public on this okay can i have a motion then dr kaiser i would move approval all right i need a second i'll second that all right so eileen robinson uh moves and matt tennis seconds at the 6158 the board policy on independent

140study which is now compliant with the recent legal activity any discussion or questions okay then let's have a vote uh do we need to have a okay so again uh we need a voice vote so eileen i call on you first robinson eye okay tennis eye kaiser eye land to eye all right so that is four to zero good all right so we move then to the other one which is also um being impacted by uh i believe a leak is an illegal aspect of coveted mitigation so uh this is a policy that has been recommended by the california school boards association as we've already seen the independent study was an example of this is that sometimes regulations laws requirements audit practices change very quickly and they change faster than csba can update the policies

141so what this is saying is that when those things happen and there are discrepancies between existing board policy and current law or regulations or mandates that those mandates supersede the policies that the board has in place which they do anyway but this just clarifies that okay so it is particularly recognizing the issue of mental and physical health in this framework yes the policy goes on it talks about prior to the return to campus that we provide information on processes and protocols we've done that at the last two board meetings um it does talk a lot about the recognizing that the cobin environment has created social emotional mental health impacts and this board has been fabulous about setting aside dollars to ensure that we have social emotional supports in place for our students through additional counseling

142services adding wellness counselors targeted case managers it also talks about the personal protective equipment that we discussed the night and it does state in there that um we do provide reasonable accommodations when we have a notice or a letter from a healthcare practitioner it also talks about sanitization and airflow which we are doing as well as tracking which we did all of last year and we'll start up on the first day of school with butte county public health so um i think that last year we had an extremely viable and usable dashboard the view county health was referencing this a number of times but didn't seem to have it right at their hands but i know tina that was a critical aspect of what you were doing do we have any comments on our own

143expectations for our tracking this is dr cranker dr kaiser oh yes um if is tina uh going to do an update of uh any changes in the protocols for uh tracing um the covid cases and uh if if they aren't sufficient could she let the board know if if we need to do anything to help the nurses yeah this is kelly and we are not prepared to do that at this particular point we have not had the opportunity to meet with butte county public health with our nurses and with tina i know tina is all over that she was in my office talking about it today and she will be ready to go at the start of the school year but because our nurses are not back yet which is probably not a true statement

144i think they've been working all summer but officially not back yet um i'm not going to ask tina to talk about something that really she'd just be having to guess at this point thank you um superintendent staley my query was just tina don't go she opened the door i'm shutting it uh my question was just that we will we are planning to have a dashboard and we are planning to let the community know correct absolutely we worked under monica soderstrom's guidance last year when we finished the school year where she said summertime makes sense to let butte county public health handle those cases because we are out of session erica and i will start up with it uh at the beginning of the year all right so because that is one of the references in

145here that we would do tracking right so believe in transparency and we will do that right so thank you tina for that clarification okay does anyone no one anyone the public trying to all right anyone in the board have a question okay um and just a quick comment i was really excited to see reference to uh parent volunteers back in classrooms because i know that was sorely missed at elementary levels last year so i see in this policy that we will be having parents back on campus so they will be wearing ppe yeah really excited for a little extra help in those classrooms yeah so uh could i have a motion i move approval all right so eileen robinson moves approval this is for vp0470 yes that's correct i'll second that and tom lando seconds

146all right is there any further discussion on this okay so seeing none we can have a voice vote on this one all those in favor of passing bp 0470 on the coveted mitigation plan please say aye aye aye all right um i will be abstaining on this one if you don't want to stay okay so tennis abstains okay all right so we have the that actually was all of our uh official business um is there a board member who wants to request to agendize an item all right seeing none then we will officially close this board meeting and thank you for your participation dr kaiser i will state that we did not get closure on the item that we had forward for anticipated litigation so unless there is a desire on the part of the

147board we do not need to have a closed session this evening then i'm back to vacationing motion to adjourn yeah that would be motion to adjourn from eureka california and board member robinson what did you hear you