11/18/2020 Board of Education Meeting

001to speak before any okay we are going to be going into closed session i'm going to call this meeting to order and my understanding is that we have someone who would like to speak to us prior to starting our closed session so is that going to be in person or by phone we received a speaker comment request from matthew christopherson and he said he would be in person i do not see any person in here we do have a phone number and i can call him now okay thank you because there's nothing on that hello is this matthew christopherson his reception was not very good no would you like me to try again i guess district we have you at the board meeting having submitted a comment for closed session i'm going to go ahead

002and put you on speaker okay okay um well what i want to talk to you guys talking about is um [Music] see what's going on with the uh okay this is um the the time to talk about that is actually during our meeting [Music] if you were if you were wanting to make a comment about um whether the schools are staying open or possibly you know closing or going back to online so we can i don't know what the list is of people who have signed up do we have a list i couldn't hear you at at all okay um we're having trouble hearing you too but why don't why don't you go ahead if we can find a way to get your uh what you're saying um a microphone to it so that we

003can hear you we'll go ahead and listen to that since uh it sounds like you're having even difficulty getting through here so okay um if i hold this up it doesn't eat better hang on all right let's see if i can hear a little bit better now i'm sorry about that okay you have um matthew you you have three minutes then to express yourself please uh go ahead um so my my my main concern was um you know what what's going to be the uh the boards or at least the uh the school district approach because i have a son that's on the autism spectrum special needs and i know with like most special needs kids they they have a hard time like tran you know but you know unless it's on a consistent basis

004um it kind of really messes with them like my son in general he would end up crying all the time just because you know he missed like that was that was just his damn you know he loves going to school and so like i i know that you know i maybe not every kid obviously not likes people that much but my son is definitely one of them that does i'm just kind of curious to see where that's going to go and what that'll look like for him so matthew are you a student as well what's that i'm sorry are you a student too hang on uh sorry i i can barely hear you there's like a really bad echo i was just asking if you were a student also no no no i'm i'm the

005father i'm the parent oh okay of one of your students yeah he goes to shasta he's in heidi lawson's class and you know i i know that like uh at one point in time with that kid like you mentioned school to him and he would sit there and just start falling his eyes out because he meant like he really legitimately missed school like he was around it you know for a lot of kids that may not be that the typical scenario but i know for a lot of kids that's also that you know their escape i'm just kind of curious to see like what's going to be the you know the school's call well well matthew we're going to be discussing that tonight and i'm sure we're going to have representatives from um different types

006of of classes and and whether there'd be people from the special education department uh or you know children with special needs so i'm sure that will be a part of our conversation too uh how that will be impacting those students okay and then am i am i able to attend the uh the meeting tonight because i know that i i still got a speaker's card like you had mentioned but um i'd like to just kind of state a little bit of a case for something like that i have i kind of wrote something out that i would just like to the entire school board to just kind of hear and okay well we are allowing at this meeting um a limited number of people because of the covid situation so if you did want to

007come down to the center for the arts at pleasant valley high school and be in the audience when the time came up for us to have speakers from the public you certainly could raise your hand or come to the podium to speak thank you matthew thank you yeah yeah um it is it is in the information about the meeting that it is limited to the first 40 people that do come to the center so that's the only number that we can accommodate okay thank you we are going to go into our closed session right now okay i'm gonna call in what you know my spouse okay six okay yeah yeah all righty okay uh it's my clock here says six o'clock so we will begin the meeting i am going to call to order this

008meeting this is the regular meeting of the chico unified school district board of education we have been in closed session uh prior to this meeting but there is nothing to report out from that meeting if everyone would please stand we will say the flag salute i 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 okay thank you everyone for joining us from home and also we do have some people today in person we are going to begin with announcements if there are anybody who hasn't any announcements okay i am not seeing any at the moment uh from the audience are there any people who have announcements okay not seeing any all right we will

009move on then to items from the floor items from the floor is a part of our agenda where a speaker can come forward to speak about a topic which is not on the current agenda and the speaker is allowed three minutes and i actually have uh three people who are signed up to speak two people in person and one person via remote the first person if she is here is a misloser i believe is how you pronounce it if you would please come forward to the podium okay and i will warn you when you are close to having your time up thank you thank you can you hear me okay a little louder please good evening how about if i move this down good evening my name is kami loesser i'm a parent of an

010eighth grader at marsh junior high thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak i'm going to jump right in i recently sent each of you an email regarding my son lucas who was failing four classes and i thank you for those who responded my initial outreach was to his counselor and principal i was looking for resources to address my son's failing grades i was told there was no homework jam no saturday academy and the only thing that they could suggest was that i get a tutor for thirty dollars an hour after that i spent two days contacting charter schools and homeschooling options i was going to pull him out because the am pm schedule model is not working the failing grades and reduced attendance of hundreds of kids is proof however miraculously a week

011ago the credit recovery program was created and lucas started that this last monday here's what's great about it the credit recovery program is three hours in the morning and combined with his pm schedule lucas goes to school from 8 a.m to 3 p.m a full school day every day at least for now i am excited for him life feels normal again and i've seen the difference in his attitude his esteem his motivation and his grades in just three days school provides routine and normalcy and for some kids a safe place to be we need to create more normalcy for our kids the am pm schedule is hectic for kids and parents especially if both parents work and there's no grandparents or tutor or after-school resources to help on november 4th you eliminated the ab alternating

012full day schedule as an option for the spring semester please reconsider the routine and normalcy is key for cr kids success in the lcap your own survey showed that 70 of parents preferred the traditional full day model and even more recently the results from the school waiver survey showed that over 55 to 70 percent of parents would send their child to in-person learning that's your ground swell and where i come from it's a majority in addition 50 choose the a b full day schedule versus the am pm i'm almost done am pm schedule you said some parents asked you not to change things but 50 won't change so i am asking you to reconsider at a minimum the a b full day schedule as a spring semester instructional model thank you okay the next person

013uh okay for the um items from the floor is a i believe it's katie risinger that's correct thank you for pronouncing it right um sorry gosh i'm nervous when i speak in front of people i don't know i'm katie i just really want to take the time i i did write an email and i did get a response so i kind of understand where maybe you guys will answer back to me um i am katie rysinger i'm a mother of a very sweet nine-year-old he is known he's at hooker oak he is known by all of his friends he's very vivacious and friendly but he is struggling in school and he is in the two-hour in-person learning um and i'm just going to go ahead and read the email that i sent to you guys

014um because i'm going to get off topic here and i also want to thank you i know you guys didn't ask for this spotlight to be on you right we were supposed to be here discussing new schools and getting air conditioners for hooker oak not not people's lives and i want to thank you so much for your participation because it's hard year and having to make life or death decisions and i respect you for that um i just want to say so i write to you today as a mother to a nine-year-old that attends in-person learning at hook rook elementary school his name is henry cooper and he's a pretty special little dude he thrives on friendships and laughter something that has been hard to attain and retain this year he's in a vast sea

015among many other children in our community that need in-person learning to really be educated it's like being in a dark room with a flashlight lights are still not on it is not learning zoom learning is not learning now that he's experienced a couple of weeks back in the classroom he is struggling to catch up he is definitely a hands-on learner his teacher is doing an awesome job catching him up with the whole two hours she gets to do it in one major component of childhood education as you all know is play and boy does he miss that part of with his peers his best friend has had to go on anxiety medication at the young age of nine because of the erratic change of pace every couple of weeks in this school system as a

016mom and with a little bit of childhood education research i have done i know more than anything children need a foundation and a lot of consistency i played with the idea of yanking him out of public school and putting him in private school i even considered moving to a town where in-person learning would not be compromised we have been through a lot in butte county our children have been through a lot our own family has spent more than four months out of the last two years evacuated from our own home but even through that i never stopped the most important thing i know to be for him going to school and keeping consistent with his education making sure don't feel like education is an option and not a right for them is something we cannot

017toy around with i urge you to do your research i can provide articles if you would like on how europe is handling the need for education in their countries our country often forgets this is a worldwide epidemic and the world is struggling through the most hard heartbreaking decisions right now but most first well thank you very much katie the time has elapsed thank you okay and i just please urge you think about children and not your political views this is for our children why we are here tonight and they need an education and they need their schools thank you katie our next speaker can be contacted by the phone [Music] um me meet my friend because i don't want any leave it um hi everybody this is caitlin dolby calling in um i just i'm

018sorry it's really hard for us to understand what you're saying take into consideration from thanksgiving moving forward um with our school operations i can't hear her we're we're having difficulty it's sounding pretty garbled shall i shall i call back from my cell phone can you hear me no not really um can you understand me yeah yeah go ahead please are you can you hear me yes please go ahead okay um all right so i just wanted to address um first of all really quick um just the feedback i've been getting from a lot of staff members and staff members are also teachers um or sorry parents uh basically what a lot of um people are saying that are working at the school sites is that they're they're worried about safety and um the level of

019um safety precautions being taken um not being adequate and uh for at least at the secondary level with such um so many different changes of different groups throughout the day and this is something that we should really be thinking about as we uh consider making changes um between now and christmas break um so some comments i've gotten are for example um these are not my comments but um somebody mentions to me that they were told that during their staff meeting online enrollments are growing because families cannot necessarily accommodate the asmpn skip so you probably are going to need to look at that which i know it's an agenda item later on i'll be calling back in to talk a little bit more about those changes um somebody else told me we have parents sending quarantined

020kids to school parents are refusing to get kids tested three out of four [Music] let's say four out of five people in an office space on a campus our quarantine and um because somebody else that they work with has covered um and they can't have a list to prevent quarantined kids from coming to campus so even if kids are quarantined teachers are under the impression that there's not really a way to um make sure that they're not actually coming onto campus even if they're supposed to be quarantined um i was asked if i could ask if admin and the district office pushed for us to stay online from thanksgiving until winter break because there are so many kids talking about their traveling plans traveling on planes teachers are really really nervous about what's going to

021happen after thanksgiving break we are seeing now with the most up-to-date research even coming from the cdc that kids are transmitting the virus our staff members are very concerned about their own health and the health of their families and their students views so i guess the general theme here um is just that it doesn't seem to be adequate safety precautions being taken into account especially now that we're going back into the purple tier so um i'm going to be speaking a little bit more later about how how a lot of staff not everybody obviously there's a split in thank you for thank you for your comments um i understand that you will be speaking later you have put your name on the list for later and depending on how much time we devote to that

022agenda item we will be calling you back however it was very very difficult to hear you and to understand what you were saying so i'm not sure if that was because of the phone connection or i just i don't know we had a little difficulty with someone earlier so um we'll try to work that out where we we get the better connection um thank you okay we're going to move on um i just want to remind people that items from the floor is really to not do with anything on our calendar and we are going to be discussing um you know school and how school's been going so anyhow we're going to move right now on to the consent calendar oh i'm sorry negotiations jim do you have an update yes just a very brief

023update because we haven't met in a couple weeks but we're meeting tomorrow with cta our plan is to clean up the purple red and orange ammo used so that regardless of what decision is made by the board we're ready to go and we're basically fine-tuning those those animal use they're they're pretty much written it's just the details and then csca we meet on december 11th so we should be in the same situation with uh csea also and ready to go depending on what the board decides tonight in the next meeting thank you jim alrighty now we will move to the consent calendar uh does anybody on the board wish to pull any items from the consent calendar linda did you need to pull anything no i don't okay um i don't see anybody here needing

024to pull anything is there anyone in the audience who needed to pull anything from the consent calendar okay uh what item are you referring to okay that has to that has to do with um minutes okay um if you'd like to come forward we will pull um we will well yeah you're going to be given time just like you were last time so if you want to jim is going to give you the opportunity to speak and you have your three minutes go ahead please hi again i would like to recommend that the board pool item 7.1.1 for consider approval of the minutes of the special board meeting on 11 4 for further discussion the november 4th meeting agenda item indicated that the board would be discussing modified traditional am pm model update and educational

025update and indicated that it would be exploring the addition of site-based online learning options for students ultimately the discussion evolved and resulted in eliminating the site-based online learning option but also eliminated the potential for the a b alternating full-day school schedule meeting agendas must contain a brief general description of each item of business to be transacted or discussed at the meeting per the brown act discussing and subsequently eliminating the a b schedule was not described on the agenda isn't that a violation of the brown act in addition although the board conducted a lengthy discussion among themselves the board did not open the item up for a public hearing and solicit comments from the public the minutes confirm this isn't that a violation of the brown act even if no one was present the board should

026note that for the record lastly the board had indicated that they would wait until december 9th to determine the spring semester instructional model on november 4th under that agenda item you determined the spring semester model already which was to keep the am pm schedule and eliminate the a b alternating full school day schedule all without public notice appropriate notice or public input that's a violation of the brown act the november fourth meeting agenda did not accurately reflect the topic that was discussed and voted on had you indicated that you would be discussing the spring semester instructional model and you would be eliminating the a b schedule from consideration the public may have been more involved i know i would have been while the minutes reflect the motion the action and the friendly amendments made the

027decision does not accurately reflect the item that was on the agenda given that there are multiple brown act violations that the agenda did not one that the agenda did not accurately reflect or summarize the item being considered and two public input was not adequately solicited the board should pull this item for further consideration thank you all right someone like to make a motion for approval of the consent calendar was that the only person that was going to speak to the okay i move approval of the consent calendar i second okay we're going to take a roll call vote linda how do you vote i'll be i robinson i'm sorry robinson i kaiser griffin i i just want to be clear this is a motion for the entire consent calendar or the consent calendar less the

028item that was pulled uh it's the entire consent calendar eileen tom i believe just for clarification the minutes of the meeting are hours to own we are it's not being pulled by a board member so it's it's can be approved um as part of the entire consent calendar because it wasn't pulled by a board member well i'm curious about some of the points were raised there [Music] so for the sake of my conscience i'm going to vote no on that okay we have the motion passes we will move on to uh our discussion action calendar which will be first topic educational services an update on the am pm instruction at chico unified schools thank you ms griffin we're uh again we're going to be giving you an update um as we have the last few

029uh board meetings on the educational models we at this time were we thought at this time last on november 4th we thought we'd be giving you an update on more information about the orange tier and going full day but since we've been moved back into the purple we've moved uh more of our conversation along that lines in the red and the red tier model so first i'm going to call up also i believe we have i don't know if america can let us know if the butte county health department is also available okay perfect so we have them available too if you have any questions for them during this presentation um so we're going to call up miss tina king she's going to kind of go over administrative protocols for covet related information and then

030we'll go over our community dashboard right thank you good evening john vincent or jay do you have the clicker to click on the administrative protocols link please on the second bulletin or bullet great so several weeks ago knowing that we were coming back into am pm and knowing that our community was having coveted cases as positive we did want to help keep the well and not keep but build the protocols and build upon what our school nurses had started on the health end of the covid 19 positive cases that would come as our nurses work with public health the administrators on the school sites really needed a protocol of steps that they would take if a positive case were to come onto campus and we were able to put together this step sheet of protocols

031to help because again the school nurse really works with public health very closely to determine the health pieces of the case but then also the school nurse does pivot a little bit to help our administrators on the campus the administrators on campus really work on the communication piece to their school community including their staff members and students parents and then also they they work on the contact tracing with the nurse so that's where this covet 19 administrator duties step sheet really came from we have embedded links in there that give in spanish and english the letters that need to be disseminated for close contacts as determined by our nurse and public health we also have the minimal risk exposure for perhaps other people in the area but not considered close contacts and we have put

032this into play already across various school sites and it has been the feedback has been helpful we've taken their honest feedback of how we can improve it because again this is this is a brand new world we are navigating and want to keep enhancing the protocols but so far it is moving pretty smoothly on the administrative side working with the nurses so i wanted to share that and then if john vincent could exit out of that piece and move to the community dashboard go back one slide john there we go it's the second link cusd community dashboard perfect thank you so if you scroll down just a little bit here this dashboard is part of our covet 19 resource page on our website it has become a very important piece of the website as it

033has timely information and full clear description of cases positive cases as they appear on our campuses one important thing to note with this dashboard is that only confirmed cases by butte county health are located on here it was initially we've we've kind of had a couple of of shifts in it recently because initially when it was first born at kind of the beginning of the school year it had the it was tracking the numbers week by week that was in order to be alongside what public health has and also to track any positivity that might expand in a weekly or 10 a 10 to 14 day period of time the feedback that we got on that was that it was a little tricky to read it that way and it would be much better at

034a glance to look at the numbers there and the positivity rate so we made that shift it i know from where i'm standing out here and in the audience that's probably a little tough to read but it is live on our website on the kovid 19 resource page community dashboard and i encourage people to to take a look at that and familiarize yourself with it any questions on those two pieces yes dr kaiser no so oh i'm sorry so the questions that i have gotten from people uh some panic responses from friends and family who get the broad statement to a school site that there's been a positive case and i've had to reiterate that if their child was actually exposed they would get a separate email so there seems to be this you know

035i would say almost panic response the other question i'm getting appears to be along the lines of an assumption by parents or teachers that there is some enforceable quarantine if someone leaves the county or leaves the state and my understanding and perhaps butte county health can reiterate their understanding that this is a strong recommendation but it can't be a requirement is that correct i can address your first comment here quickly in the panic response you know this is a brand new world we are all navigating i am a parent much like most people here tonight and i understand that we're all we're all learning a new protocol we're all learning a new language on what this is and i certainly certainly know how that that coming out of the blue a piece of information does

036concern people so the more we can build in sharing that communication on our sites with the steps that that we go through knowing that close contact means these things happen and minimal risk means these things happen and we follow that every time on the sites i think will help become what we know as kind of a new situation that we are all in and consistent so that was the hope with that protocol step and it just i think it's going to take a little bit of time to to see how that plays out each time and i'm certainly open to questions if anybody at all has any questions about things they can absolutely call and i'm happy to to share the protocols or they can also talk to their school administrator as well because it's

037a district-wide step process that we're that we're putting into play and the second one yeah i think county health might be a better better person than i am about the enforcement of the quarantines outside of the area yes this is monica soderstrom from butte county public health thank you for inviting me and dr linda lewis is also on this call this evening with you as far as the quarantine advisory travel advisory that was sent out by the state that is just what that is it's an advisory it is not a mandate it is not a recommendation even it's a travel advisory so with that our public health director danette york said it's what you know for for people to consider as they're leaving to visit relatives or travel over the holiday even out of state

038not just out of country that they consider that there's there actually is truly um an advisory by the state to self quarantine for two weeks upon return they have been talking about decreasing that to seven to ten days and linda might have some update on that uh but but that is an advisory it is not a mandate and it is not um even guidance so and linda did you have an update on that yeah there's been no change to the 14 days i i really doubt we'll go down to seven um the incubation period just doesn't really speak to going down that low yeah um there is just so you all know um and you may want to share this with parents you know i i don't know what uh quarantine may be in other

039areas but cdc does have a site that you can look at for domestic travel or international travel to see if there are quarantine recommendations or requirements when you get to your destination but yeah there's there's no enforcement of quarantine when people come back to california or back to count i really appreciate that because that was a point that was being raised by several individuals as a as a i would say a heightened level of concern but the other aspect there have been some comments not very many thankfully about people who think they can't afford to get their kid tested for covid and i thought that if someone couldn't financially cover it that it was covered by the state so maybe you can clarify that yes the um the optum serve site which is located in

040chico at 900 mangrove avenue is free you do not need to have insurance if you do have insurance they will ask for that to try to bill it but it is not required at all you do not need to even be a documented citizen they do right now it's quite impacted so it had been allowing walk-in appointments but now it's fully scheduled so you do need to make an appointment they do see children of all ages there the other option for people in chico would be the ampla health clinic and even if people do not have insurance they have a sliding scale in california has put things into place to allow insurance medical and medicare to cover coveted testing so and they have a sliding scale for people without insurance also even though it's a

041bit of a drive over in orland in glen county there is another optum site and it is run the same as ours in butte county so it is no cost and so if people needed to get tested and couldn't get an appointment in chico uh they likely could get an appointment at the orleans site um in glen county that is tremendously helpful for i'm sure many people thank you good you're welcome and i would like to if you don't mind um uh the the chart that you're showing uh that you did you referred to earlier that is shared on our screen about the positive uh cases um and the percentage um that is a marvelous uh tool to have and linda and i i know both are very happy to see that the one thing

042i will caution is when the state guidelines looked at when a school might need to close and they were needing to track the number of cases among students and staff at a particular school the five percent threshold that looks at a possible need to close a school is that number of cases within a 14 day period so the one thing about having this all the way back to august it um you know it's like a rolling 14 day period so that would affect i wouldn't want people to look at this and think oh my gosh we're approaching a 5 when those numbers could not be current i i can't add one piece to that and this is where this has been a little tricky at a first glance and and certainly at the public health

043you can probably understand this john vincent can you scroll down just a touch to see to the a little bit okay it's good stop right there oh gir there you go yeah we have them yes we couldn't see that one before it was scrolled so you've got that covered terrific that's wonderful yeah we've got it both so yes thank you great great okay and then the i will just mention um when someone brought up there being a panic in response to any school-wide broad communication of a case on campus that is something that we discussed this summer with the bcoe planning group and with the school nurses the superintendents etc um as more people hopefully become educated they will understand there's a difference between receiving notification that your child or you know your your person

044on that campus has been a close contact versus just a broad general notification that there's a case on campus and we certainly understand your desire to be very transparent with your school community and you know just like us at public health sometimes too much information is uh you don't understand it's too much until you have that panic response but we always try to weigh you know how much information will be helpful for people to feel like they're being you know apprised of the situation so i'm sure that as the school year rolls out you'll find that happy medium of you know who to contact when and and how often to send out that type of notification and who to send it to yes thank you thank you very much yes thank you tina i had

045one more question one's already been answered on the positivity rate thank you miss odestrum um my on step seven when we you were talking well step six and seven about written communication are we also including when the need is there among uh language letter for the families at home yes so if a close contact is determined in the contact tracing with the nurse and administrator looking at seating charts and having discussions with teacher and staff in the classroom within close contact that means within six feet over 15 minutes over a 24 period hour that family will get a a phone call a personal phone call from the school administrator and then followed up with an aries communication of it written down one of the and we did both of those for the close contact because

046feedback and again i understand this as a parent you get a phone call from the administrator that you're not expecting about a positive case and your child is in close contact and you may want to have the information written and share that later on with your spouse a family member a friend because it is a lot to take in you know we know that this is a it's a it's a very serious topic and and we want people to be able to have information that was not only shared with them in person but also written down and along with some other things to look for such as symptoms reminders of things and such so we do have that in english and spanish uh we do have bilingual hmong uh targeted excuse me targeted case managers

047um one of the things that can be sometimes a problem is the hmong language in writing is very different and hard to communicate whereas a hmong speaker could be much more informational for the parents so i would encourage us to utilize that resource as well because absolutely yeah thank you yes absolutely tina can you remind me of the date that this goes back to it started with the first day of school it does august 17th okay thank you yes also tina can you it is our understanding that none of these cases have come from um being on our school site um is that a true statement so the nurses have a a possibility of of one situation that could have very early on but it uh we don't know for sure but the majority have

048been traced to not uh spread within the classroom thank you all right thank you um and i hope that uh mr trump is still here forgive me if i've asked this before i'm trying to figure out exactly what the process is so let's say heaven forbid a student uh gets a positive test result from say optimum serve who communicates with who to notify the school that that someone's been been so diagnosed yeah so that's a good question so typically a parent what we've seen so far is parent get the notifications first and many times you know our nurses will if if they were here standing next to me they would tell you that they have been in close contact and communication with a lot of families that may not be feeling well might be testing

049might be waiting on results they are working overtime and triple time and doing a wonderful job and our families are doing a wonderful job communicating what's going on in their own lives so the parents may send the or call or send the notification of a positive they might call the nurse they might call public health may call us that has happened too but we do look to get that confirmed positive case because we certainly don't want to cause any distress if it's not a confirmed case who's it confirmed by it is confirmed by public health so optum communicates states often is the site where the test came in sure optim communicates to the family and to public health and yes that that's my understanding public health has the database so somehow and our friends at

050public health that are on right now can probably say this a little more eloquently than i can but i know on our end it's they go in tandem so the testing location and public health kind of go in tandem and then work with our school nurse so the reporting so at some point we get a phone call from public health saying hey we've got someone who how do they connect a positive test to one of our sites so our nurses get in contact with public health a nurse at public health and they specifically talk about the case yeah so they talk about the contacts close contacts they get information so public health can follow up on their end as well with uh close contact tracing but how does that how does our nurse find out

051we just assumed that the parents are going to tell us that's where they they have to show us that confirmed piece i'm again i'm not trying to be difficult who shows the second firm piece the parent does that that might receive it or they yeah send it to the nurse if we don't have a confirmed piece because we have had some that the parent has alerted us that has confirmed but we haven't received it yet due to some time lapses on the health care providers section for various reasons so we can call public health and public health can confirm due to their with their database so what you're seeing tina i think what tom is trying to ask is if a parent does not call and let us know that their child's been tested positive

052we will get the information from the pew county health department correct yes yes this is monica from public health thank you yes we um in the state of california all labs and health care providers are mandated to report positive results for communicable diseases to us so we get those reports and you know most of them don't say oh and this child is a student at this school right it just has it's a lab report so once we have a case investigator calling and talking to the parent and learning about the child's situation and asking what school they go to we would reach out to the school if we haven't already heard from the school but tina i will agree that i'm really impressed with our community thus far almost all parents have been johnny on

053the spot calling letting their school nurse or principal or teacher know that their child or their family member has tested positive for covid they want to let the school know and then the school nurse has reached out to us and linda and i are both the ones who answer the after hours call line for public health which is 24 7 and we take calls at night we take calls on the weekends we have contact tracers and case investigators working seven days a week and as soon as we find out about a student on campus throughout the county we try to work with the school nurse and the principal and our teachers to identify when the child was on campus during their infectious period and who maybe was a close contact to them while they were

054on campus conversely if we find out that a child maybe didn't wasn't because of being partly distance learning maybe and it's a weekend maybe they weren't even on campus during their infectious period so then we can relay to the school that although that child has tested positive there was not a risk to the school community with that exposure thank you that helps a lot i guess my last question on that note would be is it possible for a student to test positive in the school not to find out it may be delayed if depending on if there was a delay in the report getting to us and maybe a case investigator getting a hold of a parent and getting the whole story so there is that possibility but i think in the long run you

055can be you know reasonably assured that your schools will be notified if the parent hasn't notified the school that public health will as soon as we can thank you i am indeed reasonably assured thank you okay kathy did you want to ask this uh this may be uh i'm not sure if this is on the outside of what you can confirm but i think that because of the very sudden move into the purple jumping over a couple other layers the concern is does that then mean that a school that is currently open in some kind of modified in person can stay that way that's one question and then the second question is could a school that's in purple expand its in-person educational presentation i.e go full-time i know of schools already that have done the

056reverse and have reverted back to online very good question um when this school planning to reopen um was beginning over the summer the guidance from cdph uh discussed all the measures that they were recommending in their guidance for schools to be able to be open on-site and different ways to achieve that safe opening at school were included in that and different schools have adopted different ways to achieve that safety some of those were as you were talking about earlier the am pm schedule or a mixed schedule some distance learning some on campus the goal was that when children were on campus they would be able to be socially distanced in their in their learning environment wearing a mask having different mitigation measures in place to protect staff and students it was determined that if a

057school opened while they were in the red tier or lower so orange or yellow and then later their county went into the purple tier they would be able to remain open if they so choose chose to do so if they hadn't yet opened like if there were any schools in butte county while we were in red or orange who decided to wait and now we're back in purple they could not now open but if they're already open they may remain open and that's a decision that the school can make if any school wanted to re to close or to to pull back that's certainly their option but they're allowed to remain open unlike some other sectors of businesses that then have to go into the purple tier guidance that decision was made this summer with

058cdph and the california department of education because they didn't want schools having to ping pong back and forth between tiers they understood how difficult it was to put all these mitigation measures in place and the different learning models in place and they thought it would be much too much of a burden for the schools to ping-pong back and forth so they said if a school was meeting those mitigation measures that were needed in order to open once they got to red they felt that those would be sufficient to keep them safe in purple they did say that more testing would likely be recommended and then of course we talked about there actually could be school closure if the school case rate got to a threshold of five percent thank you so much for your clarification

059you're welcome just one more question tina sorry all the students that we've had to put in quarantine that have been found to be near somebody that has tested positive have anybody um of that group that's been quarantined tested positive sense uh not that we know of i mean there's one that could be a possible the nurses say but that would be the only one thank you may i ask a question yes of course liz yeah certainly so i actually wanted to speak back on uh what kathy had asked kathy had asked a two-part question and this is for miss slaughterstrom the second part of dr kaiser's question was can schools expand their program now that they are in purple tier or do they have to stay where they are well i think more than whether

060they can expand their program is do the programs that they intend to have still meet the cdph guidance that's in place so again there was a menu of suggestions that schools could adopt while they were preparing to open their school for in-person instruction this school year and many different schools in butte county have adopted different models for that so i think more than the question can they expand is what can they do that still adheres to the cdph guidance for schools being open and as long as those measures meet the guidance they are allowed they have that freedom to do what it is that meets that cdph guidance very good thank you very much you're welcome okay are we going to do we have more yeah john can we go back to the slides please

061one of the i'm sorry one of the uh board goals this year was uh parent support for our families that we wanted to make sure our parents had a way of getting support during all these different modified educational models on that link and we won't open it tonight but that link is available for you to see what we're doing at the elementary and the secondary level for those parent support services also if i could get um mr vincent can you give us a laptop update from behind the counter curtain yes so um so our team has been working on the laptops um it's in green right now i'm good so um we had the laptops come in last week we did an all-call got our whole team to come in to work on those and

062so we'll be distributing laptops to our teachers to 10 schools tomorrow morning computers classrooms will be delivering those and then the remainder we're going to try to get those out on friday so we should for sure be able to get those out before thanksgiving but we're really trying to get those into all the teachers hands before uh before the end of this week so john one of the reasons we purchased the laptops because it would be more effective to zoom is that correct that is correct so these will these are powerful laptops they can handle the the load that zooms puts onto uh to the to the machine and also turns into a tablet so allows them to write directly onto the screen of the laptop and have that show up as a whiteboard for

063the students thank you you bet okay next i believe this is mr shepherd yeah you want to click forward or j so they can okay so we talked about some of these ideas before and we just want to keep bringing them back because we don't think this these are ideas that we're going to be addressed you know in two weeks between board meetings and uh so i just want to re re reiterate with the board and with our community that we realize as we're changing and adapting to different mandates and different environments that we're going to continue to do everything we can to support our students everything from gathering grade data data to analyzing attendance data disaggregating that data trying to get a better idea of how our kids are um are succeeding and what

064is presenting some challenges to us so we know when we're going to be having that you're going to be having that conversation soon but we just want to reiterate with the board that as these changes come across our desks we're going to continue to really focus on student needs and that's our goal we realize that the needs include learning loss and their trauma and social emotional needs with the holidays coming up we know it's going to be a challenge you know it's always a challenge regardless of of the of any pandemic or a natural disaster so we're going to be stressing the importance of connections with kids with our staff because we realize we're going to connect with those kids and we also after disaggregating some of the data so far we're realizing as we

065have always believed but it's showing up in our numbers that the student teacher engagement is the crux of the grade it's the crux of it and if we can improve that no matter what modality students are learning in that's going to help our kids so we're really going to focus on engagement during the second semester one of the things that concerns the ed services team is during the holidays it's usually a happy time for most most of our students but it also could be a very stressful and trauma time for a lot of our students also that do not have the family engagement that some do so when people are talking about what they're doing for thanksgiving or what they're going to be doing for christmas or hanukkah um in new year's a lot of

066our students don't have those same opportunities and normally they would be on our campuses for our counselors and our wellness counselors to be checking in on them so we're going to have to do a very good job this year if we're at home doing online learning to make sure we're checking in on those students because it's a very stressful time for them all right mr carrots going to talk a little data on for us yeah i'm going to present to you uh attendance data for our students receiving site-based online instruction as well as our students receiving in-person instruction before i get into that i want to point out that i've added an attendance report to be included along with the enrollment report that is part of every regular board meeting and that so that is

067part of you'll find that in the agenda above for tonight as well so first of all uh secondary period attendance and this is for students that are receiving site-based online instruction so they're zooming in to class likely from home in most cases and these are students that are receiving site-based online to this day and it it's looking way back to august 17th at the from the beginning of school but it's limited to those that are still uh receiving site-based online instruction uh and what we see for all students we see an a period attendance rate of 86.6 which is much lower than we would like to see typically for our all-day attendance rates azure the board is well aware we're looking at a number around 95 percent so this is significantly below in addition we

068see some of our higher needs student groups significantly below the all students percentage uh my next couple slides are for all-day attendance and these are for only for students that are currently receiving in-person instruction at elementary we only take all-day attendance and so this is going back to the beginning of the year for the kids currently receiving in-person instruction and we see for elementary we see that number right up around 95 typically we're a little bit above 95 around 95.5 um all students are at 94.8 and we do see in particular our homeless student group significantly below that looking at secondary all-day attendance and this is for students that are currently receiving in-person instruction going all the way back to the beginning of the year we see a slightly lower all-day rate and i'll remind

069you that all-day attendance is students get credit if they're take part of any part of the school day so we see 94.3 which is about a percentage point a little more than a percentage point uh lower than we would see on a typical school year and we again we see some of our our higher needs student groups falling below the the all students percentage any questions for mr karis on the attendance um less a question than a comment i am uh i'm concerned about our homeless students especially in secondary um and i just uh just put it on the the public record i think we're going to bring hopefully having a discussion on the next board meeting about other ways i would like to have this discussion about ways we can serve our homeless students

070especially over the holiday break and especially during covet and what other services we can provide to make school a place where they can get more of their needs met so they're prepared to attend and learn yeah and tom i would be happy to provide uh trend data on homeless attendance um given that we would have a agenda item dedicated to that appreciate that thank you okay we just kind of kind of go back over the tier stages again purple tear being stage one safety and preparedness making essential workforce and environment as safe as possible the red we've seen all three three of the four tiers already this school year so we've been in purple red and orange i just want it again and then there's a yellow i just wanted to to show the slide

071once again because we're going to be discussing a lot of this tonight stages of reopening we have um if we can open that up that would be great john thank you again this was back earlier in the year when we first discussed when we went from the stages back to the colors and so if you scroll down again we had different but the board had voted on what what we'd be doing during those stages and then we had the schedules built in for these are again just for you guys to be able to look at so you can see the schedules for each tier what we were going to be doing and again thank you and that was the am pm schedules and then the purple steer and what would we be using for our

072education okay thank you john we can go back all right i'm going to pass this off to ms staley yes thank you so as the board's well aware we voted on certain educational options tied to stages and again those are online learning online only modified traditional am pm traditional with safety modifications and traditional similar to pre covered and we have since learned that that's really unlikely while there are still the governor stay at home orders in place i also wanted to bring up that there are possibly other options that we could look at for example we don't necessarily have to do the same thing at all of our levels we have heard and i believe mr lando brought up at a board meeting that maybe it is safer for certain grade levels to come back

073and not as safe for other grade levels so we could look at the possibility of a modified traditional for secondary and a more traditional schedule for elementary when it's safe to do so and likewise we could look at a modified traditional for elementary and an online only for secondary the options are there and it was something that got briefly brought up but really we did not discuss in much detail previously so i wanted to put that out there the board also made the decision that when we moved to purple we would hold a board meeting within seven days and have a discussion about whether or not we wanted to move back and change our instructional model at that time now we did not find out about moving back to purple until monday so uh that

074really didn't give us a lot of time when you're looking at seven days um you know we really didn't have a chance to agendize that as you would want to agendize it to make a very specific change in your instructional model for this agenda we do have the ability to discuss that however if you look at the seven days for monday we're on thanksgiving break so i do think this is a great opportunity for the board to have some discussions about where they would like to see the district head and in particular where we want to be when we return from thanksgiving break to the end of this semester which is december 18th okay kathy well um part of the rationale for me getting clarification from butte county health and it wasn't perhaps it may

075not have appeared black and white to all the listeners but they repeated it twice so i'm assuming they they mean it that you would have to be able to keep all your at least three critical points social distancing mask and sanitation all in effect and the commentaries from my own experience with family children at emma wilson and other kids at rosedale and a kid at chico high is those have been working with our staff working very very hard and our teachers they have been working and i think the relatively speaking low case load that we have reported particularly since there only appears even the possibility that one came potentially i will say potentially from experience at a school site so i think it has been working very well i can't imagine the disruption that we

076would cause to families and to our teachers and staff to have them leave for thanksgiving break some will probably leave early but it would be in two days no matter what and then come back supposedly to school and find that everything was different i just see that as a incredible burden many many parents who have sent emails to us have mentioned the emotional social positive response that their kids have to at least being in school two hours to three hours five days a week so i really couldn't be in favor uh a i don't think we could pull off the social the three markers social distancing mask and sanitation with without even anybody quote unquote officially working during break but much less have an effective schedule for our schools so my sense is we hold

077the course i think we'll have a much clearer picture by the end of finals of where we hopefully are improving potentially of course dipping down even further okay linda did you have anything you wanted to say yes well i actually agree with dr kaiser on this you know it's just been so interesting to me to see the split the decisions on this mr moretti was kind enough to do a survey with our teachers and just by a narrow margin our secondary teachers would like to switch back to distance learning yet by a very narrow margin our elementary teachers would like to stay in the in-person model that we currently have then in addition we have our incoming board members who are split one wants to have in person the other i think would prefer to

078have distance learning so it's really it's right down the middle but one of the things dr kaiser said and also miss ottastrom from the butte county health department said the ping-ponging back and forth is not healthy it's not good for kids we even had a parent say that the consistency in a routine i think is so important so i am leaning towards staying the course as dr kaiser said and i would ask anyone to try and change my mind but that is currently how i feel so thank you okay eileen thank you madam president um i'm on the same bandwagon as dr kaiser and miss heavy i in reading every single one of the emails that we've been sent and we got a basketful it is so clear that of the parents do not want

079us to make any change in going back to online at any grade level the impact of going back even two to three hours a day on the mental health of our kiddos is so significant that there's there's no way i would support going online at this point it just it just makes no sense for the educational and the emotional health and well-being of our kids the only thing that that i would suggest and i i don't get to govern this but um everyone including the parents who observe their kids at school and at schools talk about how wonderful they're doing with keeping their masks on and following the protocols and i agree with the exception of some of the ones that have to walk quite a ways home and they do it in groups and

080i happen to be on one of those walk home pathways and i see at my home by the time they get three blocks away from school there aren't any masks anymore and so if we could make it a point through our staff to talk to the kids about the importance of following the protocols all the way in their front door that that would help tremendously because as the experts say the virus doesn't know whether you're in a classroom whether you're one block away from school or six blocks away from school keeping that mask on helps both directions keeps you from spreading it and keeps you from inhaling the um the droplets so that would be my request just is for us to do a better job of informing our kids because our kids want to

081stay in school and if they recognize how important it is that they be part of the solution i think they will they will do a better job of of sticking to the protocols tom thank you i don't know i'm sorry to roll back the conversation a little bit do we uh is miss sodastream still with us yes i think so monica are you there yes okay um i don't know if there's a question for you or for tina i am curious how do we determine whether we believe a case is transmitted from at the school site we've had a lot of people say hey we haven't had haven't had any cases transmitted you know from student to student or student to staff out of the site how are we determining that that's part of the

082case investigation process when we interview a parent or if it's a high school student and we're able to interview them as well we can really look at where they've been if they've been around anyone that they know has had a lab confirmed case of covet or has been a suspect or probable case has been symptomatic so we look at that we also look at if we have a student who has been tested positive and then there are identified close contacts we monitor all the contacts as well as part of our contact tracing so until that person is released from quarantine we're monitoring them to see if they become symptomatic and then we can start connecting contacts close contacts to that case with that case and we would certainly be talking with the school if we

083felt that faculty you know staff or other students had been exposed to this case and we can't find any other way that they may have been exposed we actually start looking at possible linkages and then outbreaks so that's definitely part of the case investigation and contact tracing component we also are looking at their household contacts if a student becomes sick were there other people in their household that they first maybe got it from do they go to a child care were they at a party uh were they in some kind of a gym or sport event we look at the whole picture we don't just say oh this child goes to the school therefore they must have gotten it at school you know it's it's very much a full investigation and if we found that

084we saw links between students on campus activities on campus classrooms we would most certainly work with the school on that thank you i um i ask because i've we've had a staff member actually uh who wasn't sure how she came by a positive result and uh well yeah again i don't i just want to know what you did in the case of someone saying i have no idea where this came from yeah well there's a lot of people who when we first talked to them have no idea you know how they were exposed because this is remember um highly transmissible in the community at this point so even people who are you know being very careful can be exposed in the community under the right circumstances so often with the children what we see is

085the parent is actually the person exposed whether they're at work or it's somewhere in the community and then the children are getting it from the parents so you know we we really try to work with the whole family to see where a point of exposure could have been thank you very much wonderful to add to that thank you monica one thing to add to it is the use of seating charts so all of our teachers are utilizing seating charts that are updated currently to reflect their each of their classes and that has been a tremendous help in the um in the context tracing between the administrator and the school nurse and public health in terms of close contacts and minimal risk so that's helpful too okay so before we take uh some public comment here

086i have another question for monica uh so monica in the larger community the community as a whole where do we think this upsurge is coming from why is this developing now well we certainly have a lot of theories and part of it if you look at the timing of our surge is after halloween where there were uh reported to us numerous uh gatherings both small and very very large and not many precautions being taken during those gatherings so that is one there's also been because we were as you remember we were down all the way to the orange tier and i think a lot of people let their guard down so people were actually attending weddings and gatherings after a funeral people gathering with friends and family and maybe having more people over than they

087thought they were going to have and you're around you're around the table and pretty soon you're closer than six feet and everyone has their mask off for way more time than 15 minutes nobody could maybe seem to be ill at the time but it only takes one asymptomatic person in an event like that to uh spread that virus to the others with them we also have seen some workplaces where physical distancing is very difficult to do and so again much more easily spread and we have had some of an ongoing concern of ours since the very beginning of covid is cases in our congregate living facilities and that could include skilled nursing facilities other long-term care facilities the jail shelters so we're always very very concerned about covet in those those venues and we work

088really really hard to try to contain the virus and often when we see cases in those settings it's employees who have been exposed outside of work and they bring it to their work and then either you know have exposed their clients or the people they're working with their co-workers so we know that in the past that we could attribute an upsurge before to the congregate living facilities is that really where the vast majority of the upsurge is coming from or is it more widespread now just among the general population yes it's much more amongst the general population so even though we do have some cases in our congregate living facilities right now many more of our cases are outside in the general public and you know the purple tier actually really very accurately reflects the

089community transmission that we're experiencing right now okay thank you very much monica we really appreciate you being here okay i'm going to take some public comments now and in our rules it it specifically says that priority will be given to speakers who have not yet addressed the board and so i'm going to call on is kimber kimberly snyder here okay i don't see kimberly snyder was one who said she was going to be here in person to talk oh kevin i'm sorry i just noticed your hand did you want to say something i i do thank you and thanks for looking at the survey i sent you and all the um the feedback that i know you guys have read and i know our members are split and i want to say all the parents

090that are worried about this that none of the teachers are arguing that in face isn't the best option for their kids that's it but my my concern and i'm not picking a side here it's just the substitute coverage in in that logistical problem and i don't know how we solve it so today at pv they had three teachers out that couldn't be covered and they had to find people to cover them on their preps i've got one of my um bargaining team members that's being told you can't come to bargaining or they're asking them not to go to bargain tomorrow because they can't find some coverage but he's still going to go that is a logistical problem that is outside of what's best for kids if we can't find a body in the room as

091cases are increasing it's going to create some dilemmas that i don't have a solution for so that's that that's a a problem that we need to solve and and that i will leave it at that okay thank you for sharing that okay so um i'm gonna go ahead and move to a few of the people who are on the list who i don't think we've ever heard from before um there's a you would have to call this person um i i do have rebecca konkin yeah on my list yeah and she she has decided to be here in person i understand okay great let's let's hear from rebecca then good evening my name is rebecca konkin i'm a mother of four school-aged children who range from 16 to six years old in addition my husband

092and i are both essential healthcare providers and i'm currently employed as a pediatric nurse practitioner all four of my children were ecstatic the day they were able to return for in-person learning on their school campuses you would have thought i was dropping them off at disneyland for the day you see despite our teachers heroic efforts distance learning did not meet my child's social emotional psychological and educational needs this is no fault of the teachers it's just the nature of the subpar learning model the evidence is already in as statistics are showing that distance learning results in a 30 drop in reading ability and a 50 drop in math skills but as we know it's not just academics the lack of a school community adversely impacts the mental health of our youth and of great concern

093it leaves behind our most vulnerable students i stand in accordance with the american academy of pediatrics and their stance that school is important for the students academic instruction as well as their social and emotional development the benefits of in-person learning are well documented and there's substantial evidence that time away from school results in social isolation learning deficits and mental health problems i've sadly witnessed this professionally with my patients as well as within my own children in the height of the lockdown when much was still uncertain about covid we were forced to implore distance learning in my particular profession we decided to adapt and implement telemedicine to triage and treat patients as time went on though we quickly determined that this was in no way a long-term option in order to safely and thoroughly diagnose and

094treat patients we need actual live contact with them likewise teachers are essential workers and school as we know it is absolutely necessary our schools have worked tirelessly and already have met the stringent recommendations and requirements to return to campuses while protecting our students teachers and staff requirements such as masks desks physically distanced cohorting students promoting hand and cough hygiene cleaning and disinfecting are just a handful of the many things actively happening on our campus to mitigate the spread of illness i have been beyond encouraged and impressed as i've seen our schools working together to create a safe and healthy place for our students to learn at times i yearn for the way it used to be where kids carelessly grab the hand of a friend or teachers welcome students with a hug but i realistically

095understand that this is the reality of where we are in 2020 and we will likely not return to the old way anytime soon the fact is covet is not going to magically disappear if we choose to return to distance learning this will be with us for the long haul it's our task to not hide from the virus but learn how to safely and competently interact with covid as we would with any other communicable virus thank you rebecca thank you very much thank you very much okay um we are going to go can you maybe try calling kim snyder i i hope she wasn't the woman who was here with the child that had to leave because hello is this kim i can would you still like to address the school board we can put you

096on speaker okay i'll put you on speakerphone just a second okay go ahead kim hi my name is kimberly snyder i spoke about a month ago i just wanted to say that the changes in my own two kids just from going two hours a day is unbelievable um my son is no longer having anger issues he's happy my daughter's happy please don't take away any more from our kids this has gone on too long with a survival rate of 99 but yet the numbers of suicide overdoses and depression has increased you have to question things especially with kids having less cases but yet we're still only going two hours never in our history has the healthy been quarantined we are taking orders from a man that says we can't gather in groups of six or

097more for the holidays but goes to a winery with a party of 14. it's time to step up and live and be there for these children the immune compromised and elderly should stay home and we should go back to school full time gather with family and get on with our lives and i'm just over it so thank you for letting me speak okay kim thank you for sharing your viewpoint um okay we have uh allocated we allocate 10 minutes towards this i can take one more call and then we will have elapsed our 10 minutes and then we will decide if we want to take any more um sorry just getting him set up in case you wanted to who is who do you have is it janine medina okay let's take janine's and then

098we'll we'll probably have to take two more and that'll we'll see if that's gonna suffice any of you there can you hear me okay you're addressing the school board okay great hi i'm janine medina and i just want to say i am completely relieved that there is talk about continuing the two-hour day for the kids in school my kids are doing so much better just being in school with the precautions set in place we feel confident sending our kids to school and we feel it is best for them to receive in-person instruction our kids struggled with virtual learning and are different students in the classroom especially our six-year-old who has the added challenge of a disability it was such a struggle for a six-year-old to do virtual learning and for class for educational support it

099was an additional hurdle for him he really floundered with in-person instruction he enjoyed school again and both of our boys are just really enjoying school i would love to see it extend even more i feel confident that you know chico unified will continue to set you know precautionary measures but just having a place where kids can continue to grow social emotionally as well as in their learning um you know playing with masks and being distanced but still being able to to learn that way and be together i think that would just be just wonderful for the kids and you know my six-year-old still is not able to do math unfortunately in school because it's only two hours and so he really still struggles with math and the teachers are of course doing everything they can

100but they physically are not there with him doing the math and so you know i would just love to see that day be extended and and you know especially maybe have something for kids who um are particularly struggling in some of these areas when they are not in school so thank you for really trying to uphold time in school for these kids um i do want to also mention too they know virtual learning is already an option for families who prefer that route so let's keep that in person learning let's continue to extend it as an option for families too with all the precautions that you know have been set in place um thank you so much okay thank you okay so we have a few more speakers um how does the board feel about

101extending this a little further i i'm for hearing from if we only have a few more i'm for hearing from them i agree okay um we actually uh have four more and um in the interest of fairness i'm going to um call on caitlyn dalby next because i believe that she probably has a different perspective hey caitlin i'm gonna put you on speakerphone just a second okay thank you okay go ahead caitlyn all right thank you hi everyone um i'm going to try to do this quickly there's a lot to say but um i just want to start off with saying my perspective um which is a lot of people's shared perspective is that contracting 2019 is like russian roulette even seemingly healthy people even children are following tremendously ill nationwide across all over the

102world and they're also experiencing adverse long-term systemic effects or even dying it's not difficult or flu and it's not a political issue so that being said professionals are telling us that this holiday gathering is coming up thanksgiving just next week likely we will see further perpetuation of the spread of the virus in our communities just like we did after halloween and there's no way to predict who this virus is going to adversely affect i want to have inside of that teachers absolutely know that what's best for everybody's kids is to learn in person nobody is denying that we want all of our kids to be in our classrooms safe and healthy but we can't do that until you get this pandemic under control so the bottom line is that we as a society have not

103done enough to keep our community healthy we're not wearing this enough we're not social distancing enough we are not staying in our own small cause we are we are out socializing uh and it's showing in the spread of virus um there's a lot of concerns um that students being quarantined are not um we're not quantitating their siblings also our staff being quarantined to have other married staff are also not being foreign staff is concerned that students might not be getting tested they're not reporting their illnesses um there'd be delays and notification as we've heard tonight um from our county uh public health person um and quarantine guidelines aren't being followed so we can't definitively claim that happened on our campuses um there are incidences of students being for the quarantine due to being in close

104contact to concerned cases but then they're being allowed back on campus before the 14th staff members feel in the dark about what is happening in their own work environment regarding potential coveted exposure um the symbolic transition is a huge factor pure people are fearful that they may find out too late that they have potentially exposed their students or their loved ones for the better um even in the antenna model appropriate physical distancing of 60 or more is not occurring inside most classrooms we cannot adequately ensure public health safety guidelines are being followed so we need to make some drastic adjustments um i know a lot of you don't think that we should change things up but if we want to return to any kind of normal anytime soon we need to go to just this

105learning before we end up before the end of christmas okay thank you thank you very much miss dalby all right yes yes um because it was so difficult to hear some of caitlyn's input could i ask just a specific question whether or not she supports staying with the am pm model well i i know i think we're just kidding no i think we're yeah i think we need to get that i couldn't hear her comments yeah i know she also provided us with an email that was very extensive yes and i think we need to refer back to that okay and um that's fine i think that summarizes a lot of what she she is trying to say okay um so let me go back here to miss loser do you want to go ahead

106and speak again and then we'll take the other remaining two thank you for letting me speak again i hopefully will change the topic up a little bit i agree that staying the course meaning if that if what you mean by that is keeping kids in school is critical so i will say state that but i also want to revisit learning loss and have a more a broader discussion about that as a board member of the boys and girls club i know firsthand that our community's most marginalized and disadvantaged kids are struggling academically socially and emotionally and we have a waiting list of over 300 kids that still need help so what's really happening with our covert responses to education is that it's furthering inequity there's a huge gap between the have and the have-nots and

107it's growing exponentially so when you talk about areas of improvement you've had it on your slide in multiple meetings i hope you talk about equity-focused approaches to minimizing learning loss and addressing the needs of our most disadvantaged populations so i just have a few throw out their questions and some suggestions for areas of improvement i know a lot of parents don't like online learning especially edgenuity i think it was a epic failure the classes that my child is getting an f in are all edge annuity classes so i'm hoping that you're considering some altered curriculum and modified learning goals to help kids feel successful the lcap talks about plans and protocols for safety and interventions that supports all of our students it mentions after school safety and enrichment sites and i'd like to know more

108about how they're working because we're sending kids home alone or to abuse and neglect as someone's also already stated mental health suicide and abuse of our children is on the rise what are some of your foster youth liaisons and case managers for low-income students suggesting to help those kids we're putting a lot of the burden on our community organizations like the boys and girls club salvation army and card to pick up some of the pieces and i even volunteered to drop off one of the boys and girls club foster kids every day at school and drop them off at the boys and girls club because the district won't provide transportation to the club only to his home where there's no one there to support him how can we provide greater access to programs like the

109credit recovery program my son will benefit has already benefited in the last three days from that program because i spoke up but what about the kids whose parents don't or won't this isn't rocket science i don't want covid to limit our creativity and innovation our children's educational emotional and social well-being as well as their health and safety is important but we can't let it stop our ingenuity and and we're creating a lost generation so i thank you i know you're in a tough position i appreciate being able to speak i will be here more often to do so so thank you all right thank you for that and we will go next to a phone call to rebecca this after that i believe there's a gentleman with his hand up that would like to speak

110okay when we're done with the people who actually filled out cards then i will have you speak okay i'll put you on speakerphone just a second okay go ahead rebecca hello thank you for taking my call members of the board i respectfully come before you today and beg you to keep our schools operational for our community even as we are in the purple tier chico families are essential workers and most of all our children need their tiny snippets of in-person education to continue and not be shut down once again i read the public comments that were posted this evening they so rarely get referenced during board member meetings but i tallied 62 to 4 in favor of our school's remaining opening open excuse me i'm the mom of four kids a junior higher two elementary

111age and one toddler preschooler we have experienced all forms of the current chico unified system my eldest is doing distance learning through oak bridge my middle child suffered from depression and bouts of anger after the spring shattering of schools we had to find a new solution for him and so enrolled him in a small private school to meet his needs my younger school age children has done the zoom education and then the pm schedule at our local elementary he's my bright child a strong achiever an adopted little boy and one that i thought would greatly benefit from the gate program next year unfortunately the learning loss that i see in him as compared to his older brother who is in private school is quite intense he is getting way less education it saddens me incredibly

112and yet even as we added back just two measly hours which are insanely hard on parents in a logistical transportation schedule i saw his learning increase even though it was still behind what it should be and i saw a little light in his eyes return that had all but died away with hours of squirming around on headphones and a chromebook please please don't take our tiny two hours of in-person education away from our children i was reading a story about melbourne australia and the lockdowns that went in place when their virus toll spiked everything closed restaurants bars they had a curfew they were only allowed two shopping trips and one hour of outside air per day for exercise but then i saw a casual sentence in the article that stopped me in my tracks their

113kids were still in school although in lockdown they valued education more than bars malls and other frivolous things they do their children as part of their important economy and an essential service that needed to be available even though they had briefly to shutter schools they made reopening them a number one priority i want to ask what about europe that's going that second or third wave france is in lockdown spain their schools have been open this entire time they were open back in april they're open now they have treated in-person education with safety thank you rebecca thank you more important thank you uh our next call will be to ryan ryan okay hey ryan i'm going to put you on speakerphone just a second okay go ahead ryan hello uh my name is brian crosby a

114proud father of three strapping young men uh and i have to say i am really really relieved uh to hear oh okay let me turn this down because i'm getting feedback sorry um so um i was really really relieved to hear uh dr kaiser yes hold the course right madame president yes hold the course right to the gentleman and the ladies of the board hold the course a whole generation of chico kids is depending on you right the reality of it is is kobe when it first started we were all afraid right this was a scary disease uh we weren't sure of the mortality rate but now we have experience right the hospital set up an extra tent to house the amount of people that were supposed to go into it right the whole idea

115of flattening the curve was exactly that cannot overwhelm the whole healthcare system it was not intended to not let anybody get infected with the disease the idea is we were all probably eventually going to get it we just had to make sure it was happening at a successful rate now we have experience with this disease a lot of our friends and families have had it most most a majority a major majority they spend a couple days at home and they're done but here's what's real right lots of education when we go to virtual learning kids don't learn right we've heard that over and over and over child abuse mental health right depression suicide single parents trying to put food on the table they don't have time to educate their kids and that's what's required in

116a virtual learning right so what's real is those things and i'm not saying tobits not but you have a great team that's doing everything they can to to and they're doing a great job to not let the virus spread within the schools and if we if we close the schools we lose the option to open them later right if we close the schools and we're in this tier we'll never have the option so again i would say hold the course a whole generation of chico kids depend on you and this is working don't bench our best assets the teachers i really appreciate the opportunity to talk uh and i i just appreciate uh the fact that we've had so many great speakers today and and the people that we've had on the call so thank

117you for everything you guys are doing okay we will take our final caller and then we will get to the gentleman in the audience who wanted to speak uh jody hi jody i'm going to put you on speakerphone okay just a second okay go ahead jody uh good evening board members i'll be very brief in my comments this evening i just want to say that it is possible to consider the risks to look at the science as it emerges as we learn more about covid but still arrive at the determination that having our kids in school is the best thing for them academically physically socially emotionally it is the best thing for their well-being i believe our schools are meeting the mitigation measures required to stay open i believe public health tonight did a beautiful

118job of clarifying what those measures are and i think our district has done an outstanding job of implementing those our kids are happily complying with that they're happy to go to school they're happy to be there it's working and as a parent i'm comfortable sending my kids to school every day with the protocols that are in place and i can't say it again how much happier my kids are what a night and day difference i've seen in them in these past five weeks i believe kids should be in school for a full day i believe the two hour window is extremely difficult as soon as it's responsible to do so i would love to see that happen but for now at a very minimum please do not send our kids back to distance learning we

119should stay the course i think our case counts and our numbers within this among our students bear that out let us do what's right for our kids thank you alrighty uh the gentleman who is here if you would like to step to the podium please um you will have three minutes please provide your name all right my name is matthew christopherson and uh i had called earlier but unfortunately was unable to hear anyone yeah yeah um get close to the microphone a little bit and if you have to adjust it that okay okay that would be good thank you thank you so um like i said i had i had a hard time hearing anyone that i had had the phone call with earlier but i had something prepared i left it at home so

120in a short um my i'm i'm the father of an autistic six-year-old soon to be seven-year-old i have three other kids that were in the you know that were going to school uh they were doing the online learning and everything and they did all right they didn't i'm not gonna say they excelled but they they did pretty good one of them actually graduated early because she had met all of her credits um my my six-year-old though on the other hand you were lucky if you got him on the zoom meeting for more than a minute to two minutes at the max and that would be the end of his you know his learning and i've noticed since you know he would it got to a point where literally you would say the word school and

121he would sit in the back of my van just start bawling his eyes out because he missed his friends he missed his teachers the first zoom meeting that they actually did he literally looked at the screen and i saw this kid with the biggest smile on his face in a long time since the whole shutdown happened um ash after he started going back to school like the first day i dropped him off i you know it was even a bigger smile just to see him you know realize where he was going to school and he was excited to go and even just with the two hours that he's doing it's absolutely amazing to see how he's already progressing and you know i i would just you know even just the two window difference does make

122a difference and i just you know i i i very highly agree with what everyone is saying about keeping the course and just keeping everything open and you know i just i just hope that that's something that we can all really consider because you know my son he absolutely loves school and i'd hate to see him broken-hearted all over again just because the school wants to close and it was hard for me to see then it's still hard for me to see now even the possibility of going back to that and i just you know he doesn't understand he's on the autism spectrum so when the things get taken away from him it totally throws him off a course unfortunately so i i hope that you will make that decision to keep the schools going

123the way that they are thank you okay thank you for coming forward okay it sounds to me like from what was going on before the discussion we had formed pretty much a consensus from what people revealed about how they were feeling and if unless anybody's feelings have changed since we had input from the public yes kathy um if the sense is that we need a formal motion i can do that yes actually let me let me clarify there for a minute because this goes back to ms lozier's point from earlier so when we agendize this we were not yet in purple did not know we needed to have this meeting right so what you would need a motion to do is if you wanted to bring this back to make a decision we would need

124to have a special meeting as we said we would do and at that point that agenda item would be the decision to change what we have if you want to stay where we currently are with an am pm then we don't need to do anything and we don't we don't need action but it was really important to have the discussion and make sure that's where the consensus is but if there is a desire to change from where we are then that would require action and we would need to bring that back as a very specific agenda to action item so no i do not wish to change where we are i felt like that the information that we got today was overwhelmingly in support of the school's ability to continue our current am pm [Music]

125you know the issue of the five percent threshold threshold is out of our control and it's set by the health department so thank you okay so just to be clear at the next meeting there's going to be discussion about what happens in the second semester in the second semester correct so basically by not acting at this point we are saying we are going to stay the course through the end of the year and then but we will revisit at that meeting in december what's going to happen because you need to have a period of planning in december in order to make whatever you're going to do happen in spring correct or january whatever okay okay um okay is everybody clear on that linda are you clear on that okay all right so we will not

126take a vote and we do not need a motion unless the motion was to do otherwise okay so um kevin is and i may need to turn to erica to ask for clarification here um but the motion that the board made before was that you would bring when we moved to purple you would bring it back for discussion correct i think we had discussion yeah okay so that was yes and and i know we covered the points that we wanted to cover which were about how uh the current status how it was the coveted surge why where how it was happening and we examined that and spoke to public health and examined those type of issues yes anything further kelly so we're just going to add to the confusion here you know our current model

127that is adopted by the board does say that when you go to purple you would go to online so that discussion would be when you made that move um my understanding of the board's decision before was that we would bring it back for discussion at that point but you had voted to go to am pm but it is your model that was adopted way back at the beginning of the year was purple were online you know red so you know it it is confusing yeah i eileen why don't you speak but i also think something changed there go ahead yeah i i believe something did change i thought that we modified that original decision to say that if we went to purple we would at that point meet to determine whether or not to go

128online that it wasn't a predetermined decision the decision was to meet that's my understanding as well that's my understanding right because yeah we very specifically did that because we at that time too initially when these stages first came out we did not know as much as we do now and we did not know that once we were in red or orange that we would then have the option we thought we would automatically have to go back and subsequently we found out that we can decide to stay in school if we examine all the you know circumstances and decide that that's what we want to do and that we are meeting the what the department of education has established as the guidelines that we have to meet to do in person which we have clearly met

129so i will read the motion the motion was made that if the county moves back into the purple tier that the board will meet to determine whether or not to adjust the chico unified district in person versus online delivery status the board discussed the timing and schedule of this decision two friendly amendments were made but not accepted a friendly amendment was made to clarify that if the next regularly scheduled board meeting is not within seven days of the county tier change to purple tier the board will call an emergency meeting to discuss the particulars and then make a determination if cusd will go back to online instruction at the time based on information the friendly amendment was accepted so may i step in here for a second sure it sounds like so the motion was

130that we would determine at the next available meeting and i think what we're holding held up here is does a determination require a motion for action of some kind and my understanding would be no i feel to me like if we choose not to move anything at this point and simply move on and to stay in the plan we are in we have made a determination if you decide not to choose at all and i just think you need to be very clear about that that's clear thank you yeah so i think everybody agrees and uh and certainly everything we've discussed and everything everybody has said as far as their feelings go uh everyone is on board with retaining the status quo for now and then this will come up again at the december meeting

131correct and so so i am clear i will send out communication tomorrow that chico unified will remain in the am pm model uh through the end of the semester which is december 18th thank you okay great i would like to say if you don't mind there there were a lot of really good points brought up in the discussion here which we will certainly circle back to hopefully we'll address a lot of those at our next meeting regarding how we can help some some of our students other access to programs and whatnot i don't those points were raised and we will address them when we can okay and one thing that people need to understand as well is how things get agendized for this board people have the board as a whole has to vote to

132agendize items and the majority of the board need to uh if somebody has an idea that they want to bring something forward they can bring it forward and the the whole board decides though whether that's going to be something that we turn over to staff to investigate to research to you know develop you know whatever policy on or things like that so just just to clarify that that's that's how agendizing works people you know are just not come up with ideas and it automatically happens the whole board votes on whether something is going to be considered yeah eileen oh thank you madam president on the not on that subject because i agree that's our process but i would just like to um again thank the two representatives from butte county depart health the the information

133that they provided tonight as well as their working relationship with tina and our nurses have clearly added to our understanding of not only what we need to do but our being able to evaluate whether or not what we thought we needed to do is being effective i just am feel so much better after listening to their input and walking through our procedures that what we intended was to be as diligent as possible to make sure that when we started in person again that we were doing everything possible to make school the safest place for our kids to be okay now that we've covered this topic i think we should move on our next item is mr sullivan i believe notice of instructional materials declared obsolete thank you for your time this is a bit more

134of a mundane topic as we have materials that become obsolete old not used anymore by school sites part of the process is to bring them before the board and get permission to kind of move them through that process of allowing them to be offered to their school sites or up for sale at some point with it so we were at that point i think chico high and like it was rosedale had a bunch of materials rosedales are more geared with the new science adoption coming in so they're moving out the old ones to kind of make way with that chico high had a mix of just very older outdated kinds of materials also so they are looking for your approval to move forward with that obsolete process okay kathy some of these things are older

135than i am what took so long i i think teachers are pack rats to some degree and they're afraid to give things up until they know they are getting something uh in re to replace it with so i think that's just kind of the way of the teacher is to hold on to things i moved to pass the action item okay that would be 8.2 yep okay we have a second okay um motion by dr kaiser second by eileen robinson can i make a personal comment some of them are older than eileen as well okay we know you're both the same age i just had a birthday they're they're giving me a bad time okay all righty we'll take a roll call vote on this um just because i think we did we do one

136we didn't have to do one okay we don't have to do one that way i am uh are you there um out there still um linda are you still out there i don't see your face i'm here i'm here i don't think i used to do a roll call vote because tom uh voted no on the last oh that's right okay i knew there was a reason in the back of my head that i had to do that um how vote you on this one i okay robinson robinson i kaiser griffin lando i okay got that straightened out thank goodness all right next is business services uh this is information only um conceptual maybe it's i don't know if we're gonna ask be asked to do something here conceptual design development update for inspire school

137of the arts and sciences julie are you out there i am can you hear me hello yes wonderful thank you for your time this evening this is just an informational item and john vinson is going to pull up the conceptual designs for you we'll just run through these slides real quickly i know you have a very busy night this first slide is describing what the board of education for chico unified has already approved for inspire so i wanted to just revisit this so you can have another look at it it includes a seven acre parcel on the canyon view high school site and the um the color-coded buildings are showing um different areas of education for instance the humanities area arts area administration science and math are all color coded a little bit differently there

138and then you see a concept of some sort of outdoor gathering area and the parking lot john if you'll move to the next slide the next slide is showing kind of an iteration of the concept where we all know and very aware that inspire high school is has a huge following for their performance arts and that in time they will want to have a theater on their site so this was sort of a first run-through of what a theater might look like on the site and um it is exceptionally large as you can tell in this drawing so we we needed to work on it a little bit more it was infringing on the parking lot which we all know high schools need a tremendous amount of parking especially if you're going to have a

139theater like this where you'll have people coming to see your great shows so if you can move on to the next slide john you can see um the concept is changing a little bit we brought back the parking lot if you're looking on the right side of the drawing that is the edge that would border can you view high school in the future and the left side borders the um the public there there's an apartment complex on that side so we've added a staff parking lot on that left side of your screen and reconfigured the buildings a little bit to create a nice drop off there in the front of the school making more of a front of campus that will kind of coincide with the way that chico unified likes to configure our campuses

140with a single point country for safety and we configured the um administrative buildings to be right there in the front as well as moved the arts the performing arts classrooms closer to the future theater and the potential outdoor gathering space that could be a future amphitheater if you move to the next screen there this is showing a concept a rendering of the site that coincides with the last plan that you looked at in this view it's showing all of the buildings a single story the one that is a little bit taller there toward the big white building to the upper right hand side would be a permanently constructed building for their dance department dance requires a higher ceiling for them to be able to fully perform the things that they want to do so that's

141showing that feature there next slide please next slide is showing an option for a two-story building a two-story classroom building that would house ten buildings if you see the left side of the screen you see um five blue uh classrooms that are sort of outside of the plan that's the upper story that's how they show a second story and that would slide over and fall on top of the coinciding five blue um squares that are on the left and most side of the of the drawing there in this option as you can see toward the upper right hand side it frees up a bunch of space on the site the footprint of campus that would allow for more growth in the future which we think would be a great benefit to the school to be

142able to have some room to grow within that five-acre parcel that the district is allowing inspire to to occupy if you go to the next slide john you'll see the rendering that shows the two-story building and then you can see that nice open space in the upper portion that would be room to grow the next slide this shows the main front entryway in the single story option and then the next slide will show this the main entry with the two-story option and i think everyone would agree that it looks a lot more attractive they're a little more mature of a campus for high school students go on to the next slide please and then these slides here are just showing different views of the single story and and two-story option uh if you want to

143just thumb through them you get the picture there's quite a difference very big difference yeah nice and yeah that one shows the the open space in the background that you would have with the two story now if you go on to the next slide the spreadsheet there sorry we're not through them yet oh i'm sorry go back to the one before this one here shows the future theater it's it's just sort of a a white blob structure right now because it's it's way in the future and we're not sure what that's going to look like but we wanted a placeholder to be there but what is nice and i want to mention is the this view shows an outdoor gathering area potentially a stage with recessed concrete seating so that they could gather their entire

144school population in one place which we know they don't have the opportunity to have right now on the chico high campus and it's really important even though this won't really work out for them in inclement weather we have pretty good weather in chico and it's much better than you know the opportunity they have right now to meet uh with their whole student population if you look real closely on the face of the stage you'll see some purple there and that's a an artistic design with feathers on it and a feather is is part of their their logo and this is a way that they are hoping to raise funds they have many ways out there that they're raising funds this is just an additional way where they're going to sell these metal feathers that will

145be applied to this wall and you can find those on their foundation website i thought it was a really clever idea and it will look really nicely but if there's members of the public who are listening that would like to participate in that fundraiser it would be it would be really nice to go on their foundation website and do so the next slide john if you could take us there shows us a real small summary of the cost of the project and the funding sources so on the top portion it shows that the known funding sources as of right now a million dollars which this board has approved for infrastructure contribution to the project and then the remaining measure k dollars that inspire has in their account uh for matching funds and a pre-approved state

146loan in the amount of 5.5 almost 5.6 million dollars and then there's a blank spot because they are currently actively trying to raise money to one bring their own funds into the project to lessen the amount of the loan that they have to get which is really important um because it's a long-term agreement that they will have to pay off and also to just supplement the project with funding and be able to eventually afford that beautiful theater that they want to have then you see the estimated costs down below that are separated by option one and option two option one is the single story and option two is the one with the two story ten classroom building as you can see the overall balance of funds that are needed on the once the single story

147is around two hundred thousand dollars and then the two-story option would take them up to having to fundraise for the million uh 61 000 almost 62 uh the inspire board did take this under consideration last week and they passed um you know with their board they want to go to the two-story option and i agree with them very highly agreed that that is a great idea i've always thought given that they have such a small parcel of land that going with the two-story option giving them the room to grow without over you know over-burdening the site would be really good so um i think i have one more slide to show you oh it's a close-up sorry a close-up of their dream of what the outdoor amphitheater might look like with a performance area outside

148this slide also shows that that really clever feather donor wall below and it does outline the cost they're very rough cost estimates at this point for what the amphitheater will will cost and those i must mention are not included in the spreadsheet that you just saw so this is something that they would have to fundraise for in addition and that is the presentation uh we're really excited about our progress on the project we're we're heading into design development with rainforest growl architects and we are hoping to get those drawings to the division of the state architect sometime this winter are there any questions no it's really wonderful i'm really impressed with the drawings as well thank you for the presentation thank you yeah thank you julie um i guess the next one is yours too

149about chico high's ag career technical education project bid pre-approval for the ag greenhouse yes thank you uh so we have divided this career and technical education project into two separate phases the first phase is going to be bid tomorrow afternoon at two o'clock and that is for the the new greenhouse and the utilities that go with that greenhouse the pad that would be underneath it and the pad that will be under their future shape shade structure and we're asking for your approval a pre-approval so that we can get started on it within the budget outlined on the lead sheet which you've already approved this construction budget for the project but i'm asking for pre-approval for this first phase of bidding that we'll be getting tomorrow so that we can enter contract and get started on

150it right away we will bring you the results of the bid and uh for ratification at the next regular meeting i move 2.2 okay i'll second that okay motion by default motion by dr kaiser second by tom lando any further discussion yes eileen just to clarify um what we're proving is the uh the old uh within the budget but no more than type of concept julie yes and um this first phase is significantly less expensive than the second phase so we'll know how much money we have left over for the second phase after this bid comes in okay thank you no more than 500 000 ah thank you okay i believe we're ready to vote all those in favor please say aye linda you said hi okay great thank you all righty that one passes

151passes unanimously i like how you raised your hand that was good i could definitely tell um all right so that one passes we move on to the next item is a discussion action safety project one tree removal at bidwell junior high school uh yes we have john carver on the line who will be addressing the board on this issue i will just remind the board that if we find a tree that is dying and needs to be removed because of emergency which we did have at bidwell junior high on the back side of the campus less than a year ago then we then we've taken action on that this is a tree that we believe is dying however it is at the front of the school is very prominent and so we felt like this

152needed to be agendized and the public needed to be able to weigh on it if they so wished so with that john do you have anything to add well evening board how are you tonight good and um sorry that we have to bring this to you tonight but this uh this is a camphor tree that we've estimated or guesstimated to be about 80 years old camphor trees grow to about 50 to 60 feet tall and they live between 50 and 150 years old this particular camphor tree got a disease called a verticillium wilt back in uh 2010 2011 and in 2012 when i was in management we had a tree company come out and try to save the tree by cutting back and cutting out the verticillium wilt but i i know you guys have

153a picture that was provided for you tonight that shows the areas that were cut back back in 2012 and they are still there but the rest of the the branches and the leaves have now died off the issue with this is the more we let it go the more dangerous it is and the branches are going to start falling so out of a safety concern what we're asking for you tonight is go ahead and approve us to go ahead and remove this tree so moved to three and having had a student at chico state die next to my office from a broken tree branch yes okay do i have a second i'll second that motion and i recognize that tree one of my daughters climbed that tree so she didn't have to deal with paul

154carris who was principal at the time that's funny that was a while ago um okay so we have a motion by dr kaiser second by eileen robinson any further discussion yeah i think i climbed that tree too back okay just for the sake of clarity do we have any uh speaker cards or anybody requests to provide input onto this topic thank you okay thank you for checking on that okay uh let's take a vote then all those in favor please say i okay thank you um all right that passes unanimously um next up is we're going to have to have a public hearing on the 2021 budget overview for parents and that's jackie i can see your face down there at the bottom hello jackie good evening board so in front of you is hopefully

155a document that you recognize we incorporate it with the lcap every year that is presented to the board in june however given this covet environment we didn't actually put together and put forth before the board the el lcap the local control accountability plan but what we did provide tina at the helm with our services team was the lcp the learning continuity plan that the board did approve in september but what the state said was that's great that you had the plan but now we need a budget overview for parents to help them understand the dollars that are at hand and the dollars that are spent on the services so this document basically has two parts the first three pages talk about the current year the 2021 year and the dollars associated not only is a

156total budget but also specifically related to the learning continuity plan as well as our high needs students which are identified as foster youth english language learners and low-income students and the second part of our budget overview is page 4 which says that's great that we're moving forward but we also need to reflect on the prior year how did we do on the prior year so i'll kind of go through it briefly the first three pages talking about the current year so we are projecting revenue at this point of about 160 million for the entire district and of that 113 million are total lcff funds or local control funding formula funds those are generated by our average daily attendance and then specifically within that 113 million there are 10 million that are called supplemental and concentration

157grants so it's 10.2 million it's kind of in the middle of the document in the pie chart and those dollars are specifically generated by foster youth english language learners and low-income students and they are to be spent on increased and improved services for those three subgroups so if you go to the next page john thank you so tina provided our total budgeted expenditures in the learning continuity plan when she presented in september and it was just shy of 6.6 million and that was expenditures that we were going to be um spending related to learning loss mitigation specifically out of the federal cares act dollars and of that 5.6 million 5.8 million plus were to be spent on these high needs students and so you can see that with our budget of 160 million plus we've

158only identified six seven million dollars here so the remaining covers essentially all the other services that it takes to run an entire school district and those are listed at the bottom i'm including our core program which is our classroom teachers transportation information technology our grants our hr department payroll basic administration etc so we are expected in this next erection the current school year to to receive just over 10 million dollars of dollars to increase or improve services for our three subgroups we have identified those services and they are largely in the learning continuity plan as well as continuing many of the services that we historically have and they've kind of been talked about this evening you know clearly our nurses and our health aides as well as our vital targeted case managers and much technology

159not only for our students but our staff and getting hot spots out to our families who don't have connectivity or have low connectivity as well as our site-based computer technicians so i just want to speak on the last page john the um reflecting back to 1920 which seems like eons ago but we did at the beginning of the year i do want to make a correction to this form that when we bring back at the december meeting we'll reflect it so we originally budgeted which would have been in june of 19 14.5 million dollars for expenditures and services related to our high needs students when we actually closed the books last year we spent 14.6 million um so there's a variance of about 75 77 000 um that we actually spent more than we anticipated

160and that was largely due to in may and june and we're establishing the budget there are many vacancies and so we have to estimate what a teacher's or a classified member's salary is and then when we actually hire them sometimes it can be higher and sometimes it can be lower and in this case it was slightly higher than we anticipated um the other piece was that our learning our renaissance learning contract was slightly higher than we anticipated also and that contract covers accelerated reading and star reading so that's the budget overview for parents this evening it does require a public hearing and then it will be brought back at the december 9th regular board meeting in conjunction with the first interim budget report for approval by this board are there any questions any questions for

161jacqueline okay if there's no question okay i'm sorry no i don't have any i don't have any questions oh you don't any questions i'm sorry i heard you there okay well in that case you do yeah just just a quick one sorry jaclyn i think i may have just misheard um you said that we had budgeted a little over 14 million and i thought you said that the increase was only about 70 000 but it looks like 600 000 on this chart yes correct tom so there was a king error so that the blue chart um on the screen of 14 million really should be 14.5 million ah thank you i get it all right so i will correct that when i bring that forth um at the december board meeting so the actual discrepancy

162was only as you said about 60 000 or so yeah i was like 75 000. okay perfect thank you so much good catch there okay um i'm going to open them the public hearing and if there's anyone in the public who wants to contribute to this discussion please come forward any card submitted okay then i'm going to close the public hearing and then as you said jacqueline this will come back that is correct it will come back for approval in conjunction with the first interim budget report at the december regular meeting okay so we don't need action correct that is correct other than fixing what tom caught very good tom okay thank you very much jacqueline uh alrighty then so we are going to move then to number three human resources and this is an

163informational uh item for mr hanlon okay so this is regarding surveillance testing of staff back in the summer um time there was a lot of things coming out of cdc and they had they issued some guidelines not a lawful mandate but some guidelines for surveillance testing of staff so that we over a two-month period [Music] sir basically test our all of our staff over a two-month period for covid because of the the large number of asymptomatic folks that are out there about half of the folks that get um covid are asymptomatic and uh since we work with uh children um that was one of the guidelines that was put out there although it's not a legal mandate we have strongly recommended that with our staff and our legal counsel has also recommended that we comply

164with the guidelines so we have set that up in conjunction with butte public health and optumserv which was spoken about earlier before it's the um kind of the makeshift clinic off of mangrove 900 mangrove avenue so um the um although we cannot require it we sent an email out on november 6 to all staff and we set up a schedule of different schools based on size of staff so that we didn't inundate the clinic all at once we have a around 1500 staff and they can do about 156 tests a day so we didn't want everyone going in at once and and kind of over overflowing them so starting on november 9th and until december 18th when we go we go on winter break we have had about a six-week window to get everybody in

165so we broke that up into six groups and uh we started um the week of november 9th through 13th and then we are rotating through next week we enter our third group that goes in there and so the the information i'm receiving at this point is that and you heard it before there's a lot of our folks going through so even though it's not required we have a lot of people complying with it and we've already have two of our staff members that didn't know it that tested positive and so we've sent them home and they're in quarantine for two weeks they they're both asymptomatic so they would not have known otherwise so that's kind of where we're at at this point um our plan is to um then pick that up again and re

166redo this whole thing over again once we get back in january um we're kind of cramming a lot of people through there very quickly we'll we'll break that into two week segments we just needed to get everybody tested um before the winter break we can loosen that up a little bit after we get back because we have a two month window so we can take two week segments instead of one week segments to get that in so um time will tell if folks continue to go in because again it is voluntary so that's where we're at okay well thank you jim all righty um once again we have um items from the floor and since there's nobody on our floor i don't think we do any items speaker scheduled here for the surveillance testing oh

167we do stuart i didn't see that okay give him a call hello stuart i'm going to put you on speakerphone okay all right are you there stuart yeah are you still interested in addressing the school board no it isn't we have just we just um arrived at the surveillance testing for all chico unified staff do you still want to address the board okay i'm going to put you on speakerphone i'll let you know when you can start you'll have three minutes okay okay go ahead stewart yeah thanks for calling back i i thought the meeting was already adjourned um okay so yeah i was just going to talk briefly about just my thoughts on uh returning to school either full-time am pm or going back to zoom so i guess my tsar on this is

168that all all jobs pose an inherent risk when it comes to working in person you know hospital workers utility employees food and ag companies and you know so many others that have returned to work to ensure that supply chains are not interrupted or disrupted to ensure society you can continue to function and operate so i recognize the concern and returning to work um i do i think we all you know pretty concerned about that but ultimately i think that you know a lot of us have had to kind of accept that risk and go back to work uh you know to places of business or to walmart or targets or restaurants or whatever and so i would just like to see that same thing happen in schools you know i'm happy that we got back

169to am tm i know i have two kids that go to rosedale and they've been loving being back in class and the teachers that were wonderful and i heard others talk tonight just about the amount of progress that's been made just in the last few weeks that they've been back versus what they were doing there on doom so i'm excited about that but i do hope that we can at least maintain that which i understand did pass that we're going to stay in class until december 18th and i just hope that we can maybe extend that to full-time you know in january when we come back or whenever but i just one thing i wanted to point out is that i talked to several teachers just uh you know in passing through you know just

170throughout chico from varying political perspectives uh and you know some of these teachers are a large percentage of them want to go back to work and their reasoning is basically saying hey these kids need us um the risks that we are exposed to are minimal especially when it comes to students a lot of these teachers go to grocery stores they go to gyms they go to walmarts and costco and targets and parks and and really uh there are greater risk of attending those those activities and they are in their own classroom and kids too i think that kids go to grocery stores and gas stations and all that as well so i think that it's just interesting to see how somehow the classroom full-time participation is more dangerous than uh all the other public activities

171that we engage in every day and so i think you know for those reasons i would love to see us kind of move on past it and recognize that we do have to exercise serious precautions the viruses is real i think that we all understand that and that there is definitely uh inherent danger that comes with um meeting in in small or large groups or classrooms or going at ease but i just find it you know ironic and almost hypocritical that uh again i was at the gym the other day i was talking to a teacher who told me they did not want to go back to school they were fearful of their life yet they were working out at the gymnasium um it just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me

172and so i would just hope that we could move on past that i think that politics obviously shouldn't be a determining factor and something as important as school as mental health for our kids and as education so i always love to see teachers move more toward logic and pragmatism and less toward a political agenda i think that i heard a lady mention tonight that the kovid is like russian roulette i don't know if that's a really accurate analogy roulette usually involves a revolver that has six rounds and there's only one pole at a six versus the coronavirus which is seven thank you thank you for sharing the time has elapsed thank you very much so we appreciate your input thank you so let me jump in here and clarify a little bit i think what's

173happening is um when they're having to do the speaker card they have to identify which item that they're going to address and i think sometimes there might be some confusion in the numbering of those items so maybe what we can do on ones that um you know it's real clear when there's ones that there's a lot of comments on like the am pm tonight but maybe on some of these ones that are you know only one person we can do a double check and make sure that's what they want to speak to okay alrighty i'm assuming there's no more calls okay we concluded that so we're going to recess and do yes i'm sorry tom before we do uh we spoke earlier about the process for identizing uh future items it would now be an

174appropriate time to bring one of those forward yeah we actually this was years ago you know and actually i was the one who did it i was in the same position as you are now where there was an issue that i wanted to get on the agenda and i was trying to figure out how do we do that and it was this really confusing thing because wasn't it where in order to bring it forward to agendize it you are actually people actually then started discussing it yeah and you couldn't do that because that was against the rules so i think uh it has to be something where now i know you've mentioned before about wanting you mentioned this earlier about wanting to discuss more about the homeless and your concerns about attendance with with the

175homeless and if that would be something i guess sure i think just to clarify if uh tom wants to you know ask the board they're interested in agendizing an item on the homeless if you know the board has agreement with that in the past it's just been a very brief i want to agendize this then work with staff to make sure we get you the right information um and it's been a simple you know second agreement and and we will go do that i guess it would have to be what your objective would be so that clear direction can be given and so that clearly the board would know what it is that you wanted to spend time focusing on and you know that type of thing but we couldn't have a discussion about it

176because that would yeah we would be discussing the motion not the not the topic of the conversation yes um given that i would like to move that we agendize a discussion at our next meeting regarding homeless services for unsheltered students that would potentially increase attendance given their potentially increased issues around attendance in the code environment i'm not sure what that would look like i'm looking to staff for some recommendations perhaps about what we could do okay okay so eileen yes yes i'd like to second that with a friendly amendment to uh emphasize in the report the um interplay that our new position has in in helping with those issues if ted oh is ted gone yeah that i was so impressed with what we're doing with that position that i think if we're going to

177discuss the issue that would be a good way to fold in the role of that position absolutely okay so that was a motion well i'm a little confused are we literally making a motion or are we just giving direction to staffs we have to take a vote on this because okay because this whole this whole idea of agendizing got very murky yeah i know and it in it and so the cleanest way to do it is just like tom's doing it right now is where if somebody because otherwise people don't get things put before yeah that they want to have addressed and it's it's just gotten kind of you know it's been too murky so it the cleanest thing is to have a well formulated uh subject and topic and then present it and say

178this is you know this is how i want to do it and then have somebody and then if three people agree at least then at least the you know admin knows yes we're going to put that on the agenda we know that there's certain things that have to be on certain agendas on certain months you know things have to be taken care of so it may not you know we can't dictate exactly when it's going to be but that was my you know the the timeliness of course for this because of the covid and our concern about the low attendance of these kids obviously is going to be important so i will do yeah i think we have clear direction that's good okay so we'll take a vote now and linda do you understand what's

179what we're doing i do but i'm kind of with kathy wondering is it are we okay in making a motion and doing an action on an item that's not on our agenda we'll see that's giving clear direction to staff but that's a catch-22 because you can't bring up putting something on the agenda without bringing it up i know so i know so basically i remember this discussion because we've had this before a couple times but i'm fine tom can bring it up i think as an item from the floor because he's still [Music] i mean that you know i think right but we would normally not take action from an item from the floor that's what i'm saying potentially moving moving forward would we need to add a like a a section to the agenda

180of where we just plan future agendas we have done that before as well and certainly during the planning meeting the december reorganization meaning we could do that okay that's i think right now there's enough consensus without having to quote unquote take a vote i agree an item of great interest given our a report that we had on attendance and the discrepancy and right and the discrepancy in the different groups so really the board's not um taking action on anything that is going to impact the future what you're deciding is something that you want us to bring forward which at that point you will make a decision on and take action so i'm clear as long as the board is okay i i'm clear that there is direction from uh the majority of the board on

181adding an agenda item and we can do that well if it gets on the agenda without my motion and then we don't have to worry about any of this anymore but the thing is okay and just you know i mean i've been doing this for 12 years this this has been a problem because people cannot like yourself sometimes get something on the agenda that you really want and so having a process that is clear is very important and we do because we tell everybody and this is a fact is that not one individual of us can act independently we do have to have a consensus before we move forward with something like that because we're taking time from staff and we're asking them to do something and we have to agree that that's what we're

182going to do you know if any one of us just willy-nilly said oh you know hey kelly i want you to do this or kathy says i want you to do this we can't have that so we have to have a consensus in order to make that happen so that's why i think we should take a vote and you know i'm not going to be here to make this happen at the next meeting but you know putting something on a place a placeholder on the agenda in the future so that people can bring something forward okay call for the vote then all those in favor please say aye right it aye like eileen had something else potentially though i'm i you know i'm with liz those of us that have long gray hair from being

183around a while remember how difficult this issue has been and and i was one of the board members one time that had an issue that i thought was extremely important and i brought it up and i was the only board member that thought it was extremely important um and uh it it's just like liz mentioned it takes up so much staff time that unless the entire board feels it's an issue our majority the board feels it's an important issue for us to take up administrative time to investigate and bring it back to the board we don't we we um you know we just go home but the key is you is not discussing it i'm not a stranger to follow my procedure they have a clear formulation in their mind of what they want to

184do because you can't have a lot of discussion that that is against the rules okay so we're going to take a recess and we're going to do the did we did we move on the previous item yeah we just did oh we did it we did it we did i said in the end i remember that now yeah it was 30 seconds ago yeah yeah so we're going to go ahead and open up this uh what is this it's a meeting of the board of directors of the financing corporation for chico unified yep we do this every november you are not only the members the board members trustees for the chico unified school district but you are also board members of a corporation a financing corporation that exists in case we need to issue debt

185as a school district because as a government agency we cannot issue debt so we do that through our financing corporation i will report to this board that based on your action a year ago we retired the remaining debt that was left which actually saves us about 38 000 over 11 percent of the interest related to a certificate of participation a cops that was used to finance solar panels at little cheek chico creek school so with that there is no debt the only item left is the approval of minutes it is important though i would say to keep this corporation alive because at the time we do need it it would be good to have it active every year so we'll continue to bring this to you okay so we need a motion to approve the

186minutes is that correct iso move to approve the minutes of the board of directors of the chico unified financing corporation oh second that motion okay motion by dr kaiser second by eileen robinson any further discussion all those in favor please say aye aye okay that passes so we'll come out of recess now and end that meeting and uh this next step is announcements and okay kathy well this is the last formal meeting of two of our very experienced and distinguished board members linda huvey and elizabeth griffin and we are unable to salute them at this current time and the way that we would like to but i certainly want to congratulate them both on their very long and quite dedicated service to this district and with that i'm applauding you linda i too would like

187to say thank you for 20 combined years of service thank you very much for that uh thank you linda um okay one thing though i want to make an announcement about is that in december you are going to have an organizational meeting and i was just looking back up in the governance handbook and way back and i think it was 2011 because the people on the board at that time were andrea jan yes eileen kathy and myself and we designed a protocol because the election process was confusing and so we had all these things laid out as far as uh you know how things are supposed to go to avoid that confusion and we also had a leadership matrix for the board president which asked the questions that had to do with can this person

188who is being proposed as president actually really take on that job and so the matrix is uh it is stated that the board president leadership matrix shall be used by board members as a tool in determining qualifications and one of the items that's on there uh is has the board has this person completed the board president workshop and right now that's a pretty difficult thing to do because of covid so you know somebody actually does have to have that training in order to successfully be a board president because it really goes into depth about all the things that you have to do and be aware of and so i understand also it's going to be difficult for the new board members to even actually get the training that's required for new board members and i

189think ms staley will back me up on that so alternative plans are afoot right to make that happen yeah the new board member training is full with csba they're going to be offering additional sessions um so we're going to have to do additional of that and then board president trainings um are yet another thing that are going to have to be offered remotely and look at the timings on those as well so covert's taken a toll on all of us so starting out yeah next next month and so anyhow these these uh rules and the protocol and the matrix are going to be made available to the new board members so they're aware also of the governance handbook and what it requires okay that's all i wanted to say about that so unless anybody has

190any other announcements i'm going to adjourn the meeting and we'll email that to the new board members you