10/7/2020 Board of Education Meeting

001if there's any way we could post um on our website that the live stream is down we've halted the meeting until we can get that back up i think there's some confusion out there kelly erica just posted it wonderful the new link or posted the information that it was halted the information that was halted oh perfect of course she did she's awesome president griffin i might encourage you when we do come back up to kind of start from the very beginning at that point and yeah sorry about that okay i understand that we're ready to start again okay so what i had started to explain was what our process is and and just to be clear we did ask people to sign up in advance and i believe that mr shepherd has the names of

002people and he's going to be letting people on and we do allocate for each item we we generally allocate 10 minutes but if we need to gather more information we can vote to expand that time frame mr hanlon is keeping time yes ten minutes in three minute blocks and we also try to alternate people who are pro and con on a particular subject because we don't want all the time eaten up by one side we try to have fairness in listening to that so the other thing is you will note that there are no items from the floor on this on this calendar since it is a workshop we listen to the information that's presented by staff and we talk about it and then we open up questions for uh the the public to to

003call in um anything else kathy so did the announcements that i made go out dr kaiser they did not okay so i just have to do that again okay well we did vote and i think the vote is still good but yes kathy please repeat your announcements okay so everyone is very aware and concerned about the upcoming election butte county will be voting by mail the league of women voters is a non-partisan organization that is focused on people having the correct information before they vote and then actually voting so i have two signs on here one is to actually vote your vote counts dramatically and the other one is about where you can find again non-partisan every candidate had an opportunity to put their content in on the facts before you vote and that's voters

004edge the league of women voters has already conducted the candidate forum for the chico unified school board and that is now originally it was recorded and it's now posted on the league's website the next aspect is that the census was restructured to go back to the original timeline of october 31st butte county is still below 60 response rate um and so we are strongly urging you to do your census you can do it by phone you can do it on your computer um you can you know do it by paper the reality is that every person in butte county on april the 1st contributes 10 000 over the 10-year period to our budget the last one is that on october the 8th at 6 pm again a a live presentation the league will review the

005pros and cons of the ballot measures and so if you have questions about those you can watch that and it will again be on the league website so i just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that and thank you okay and eileen yes i'm sorry about the technical difficulties out there folks i i did previously thank everyone who has sent in emails over the last few months and mentioned that i've read everything that got into my inn basket before 4 15 today and wanted to thank the interest from the parents the community and students in in what's happening with our schooling and let you know that the input is so valuable because it lets us know if what we're contemplating with the advice and information that we get is going to meet the needs

006that are being expressed i know we can't meet everybody's needs but the closer we can come to um to getting everyone's needs at least significantly met the the better i feel as a board member making these decisions and hopefully the community is going to understand if they only get part of what they need it's you know it's it's the best the best best we can do and we'll continue to make improvements what we decide now and put it into place it takes a while to iron the bugs out so we've got more bugs but um we're doing the very best and thank you to our amazing staff for all that they're doing as well okay thank you eileen uh so we will begin and i believe i mentioned before this is largely for the staff

007to provide information these issues that have come up having to do with covid with the online learning with the potential for reopening school for you know all of these are very complex multi-faceted and there's a lot of moving parts so for people who are out there watching i really hope that you listen carefully i know there's a lot of emotion behind what you know is going on out there but but please try to listen for the background uh issues and challenges that are faced and those are going to be discussed so first of all we have a consent calendar to go through and um i would need to know if anybody would like to pull anything from that calendar linda no no i do not okay tom no okay kathy no no actually i'd like

008to move the consent calendar okay motion by kathy second second by eileen all right we're gonna take a uh because officially we didn't really i guess we did have a we'll take a roll call vote just to be safe uh javi i lando landa eye kaiser griffin i robins and i okay that's unanimous so our consent calendar passes uh we will now move on to the educational services information which is our october workshop and our objective is to examine online learning to evaluate the program including an emphasis on the social emotional and mental learning impacts and is that mr marchant yes it is thank you ms griffin all right so every year we uh sit down with the board and talk about what different workshops that we want to maybe look at to go over

009for the school year the first the one that we're going to be going over tonight is the online learning update our agenda for that is we're going to give you our delivery timeline our curriculum and instruction our professional development our social emotional learning support and future considerations and next steps so i just want to let you know again when we are putting this together things that you'll see in our timeline have continued to change along our way so we're again and that's what you'll be seeing tonight as we go on first if we can look at the timeline that got us here again on march 19th the governor announces the closure of in-person instruction so that's where we started all this and then we had about 48 hours to put an online program together at

010that time our teachers did a really good job of of putting together a curriculum in such a short amount of time but and our community thought again was very thankful that our of our teachers but also that our community had sought more input for next year for us about this school year and how we were going to complete things so as you can differentiate our school ended on june 4th then also we come down we were planning at the time for bringing in options for reopening schools at the time and we at that time the board on july 15 voted to go to an am pm instructional model then soon after we were put in a different stage to where it only allowed us which we call the purple stage now to go to online

011learning completely so then we turned our planning together to put a curriculum together and everything to get ready to open our schools with online learning and that's what we're going over today some of the considerations we looked into when we developed our program was our lcap goals that we always have to follow so our five outcap goals so we wanted to look over our local control accountability plan to make sure we're meeting the needs of that our major care acts funding that's federal funding that we got for coven we spent a million and a half these are some of the big spending we obviously had other little ones but i'm just going to go over some of the big ones a million and a half dollars were spent for oakbridge teachers that's our online school

012that we gave the option for parents to choose to just go to there instead of one of our their traditional school we spent 500 000 for curriculum digital curriculum for for our elementaries and secondaries to be ready we spent another three million dollars in technology to make sure that we had the technology in place for all of our students and our teachers and then we spent another 280 000 in professional development to make sure our teachers are ready to go at the start of the school year we also looked into our community feedback from last spring which said that again that our teachers worked extremely hard but they wanted a more consistent online learning model for their students again we had senate bill 98 which we'll be going into later mr carrots will be kind

013of explaining what that was and what the things we had to follow for the senate bill and our rapidly changing mandates and conditions and we need a platform flexible in in-person and online instruction so if we did able to go back we had a flexible program and again our technology at this time i'm just going to have mr sullivan kind of go over what we did for our elementary curriculum so just following up on what mr marchant shared of some desire to have a little bit more of a set kind of daily schedule of things kind of what's up here now is kind of a sample of a typical day day for elementary students they roughly have about three hours of morning kind of zoom interaction and once again that's not that they're sitting on

014the computer for three hours but there's three hours of teacher-led activities instruction support happening during that time and they follow up with about an hour a day of asynchronous or kind of a homework or course coursework expected to be done in a home setting that can be done anytime really around the family schedule with those kinds of things so all of the schools and all the teachers follow a schedule similar to this slightly different starting ending times but it's roughly in the elementary world about a three-hour synchronous time like live in-person kinds of opportunities followed up with about an hour of asynchronous or kind of coursework to be completed at a future time teachers are also working a full day available for supports and kind of parent-teacher talks and all those kinds of things as

015well so the next page with it as mr rashaan shared also we knew we had to buy a different curriculum what we have currently is just not a really good fit for an online world so we started talking with dlc and starting to talk with a mix of other teachers to kind of get some feedback on what might be a better option for us to use so we went out and we purchased wonders which is an ela curriculum and it's really we have treasures currently this is an upgraded version of treasures and it's just a much more online friendly version of things also we've been using i ready math as kind of a support program anyway so a lot of teachers are familiar with it so we went out and bought their math component with

016it as well so we bought ready math to go along with it and we bought some other science it's called mystery science just a much more online friendly science program it's kind of very standard driven as well with a lot of videos and kind of independent work possibilities with those things another big push our junior high has been telling us for years they would love to have our kids matriculating over the junior high with better keyboarding and computer skills so we saw this as an opportunity to put some uh asynchronous or kind of some of those homework based time practice time in place for that so we bought keyboarding without tears and we have studies weekly available also which is a social studies curriculum also that lines up to it as well okay mr solo

017i just want to make sure that everybody knows that ela stands for english i'm sorry english language arts and our dlc is our district leadership sorry if i'm using acronyms yeah thank you for that because um yeah i know we we know a lot of things but some of them are thank you for coming to people and really we wanted to have a teacher check in with you and i've been lucky the last couple weeks taking some time to actually just drop in zoom conversations and watching classes happen and so i asked one of our teachers who's been doing a bang-up job and i actually dropped into mouty's class a couple days ago and kind of watched for about a half hour so i asked maddie lopez if she would share for about five minutes

018here of kind of what she does what does her day look like but also a big component is we know our kids are not getting kind of um peer time together they're not connecting with their friends because they're in they're all in their own place so i want to ask them how do you share a little bit of like what are you actually doing so kids can have some time together with each other in this online world so i think she is on there and she's ready to share maddie you want to introduce yourself and share hello good evening i my name is maris lopez marty and i am a fourth grade teacher at rosedale elementary um a typical day in my classroom consists of a quick um 15-minute check-in when they when they first

019log in in the morning and we go over our daily schedule and i just check in with the kids to see how they're doing then we go on with english language arts which i use the curriculum wonders we then have reading groups um and then we have a 30 minute or a 25 minute recess and following with math after recess after math that is the end of our asynchronous time however i allow the kids to stay on if they need additional support on their homework which is that work that i assigned during asynchronous time some ways that i keep my students socially connected to me is i have created five minute power chats every other week where i chat with the kids during this time i just we go over data or we talk if

020they have any questions they can ask and this is also a time where i'm able to know them and build the connection with them um several of my kiddos are shy and they they will turn off their cameras during instructions so during these five minute power chats it's just them and i and it's a great way to build a connection um i also tend to start zooming for my zoom meetings 15 minutes early to chat with my students and this is also a great time the kids love this time they come on and they share their toys or they just socialize for the first 15 minutes of class um i've also done 10 minute power chats with parents um if and and students if they want to join for questions as well to build a

021connection with families um some ways that i keep my students socially connected um is by creating breakout rooms during recess so during their 25-minute break um they are able to go into breakout rooms and they they chat with each other they play games i've been able to join them and they're playing charades or drawing um and this is during their break i do encourage them to move around and leave the screen however they miss their friends they still have that social time during their recess i also have created breakout rooms during math and elatem and i know many teachers are doing this where they are able to collaborate um these groups were based on a student choice survey so that they feel comfortable sharing with their peers so i created these groups based off of

022a survey that i share with the students um they have also been able to write narratives with friends during our writing try one as narrative writing so they've been able to to write with their friends and i know that other teachers are also doing that and it's it's been great um i know the students are loving it they are also able to create flip grids and these are just short little videos and they're able to comment on each other's videos and i know that the kids have really enjoyed those flip grids i try to make a weekly flip grid for them for fun some students also stay socially connected through a classroom chat that i created in google hangouts and this is a way where kids are able to stay socially connected during asynchronous time

023so when they are not with me live on zoom it's a chat with my whole class and i send reminders or they just ask each other questions and if they need help with with assignments they they're able to chat with each other through their google hangouts other ways are once a week they i provide interventions and those kiddos that aren't in interventions are able to play um prodigy which is a standard based math game and they're able to play with their friends and i know that a lot of the kiddos have been enjoying that as well and they've also had on fridays we have fun fridays which is just for the kiddos that have completed their work for the week during their asynchronous and class classwork they get a 30 minute free choice every other

024friday and i've been it's great time the kiddos are playing they play prodigy which is that math standard based game i've been in there playing charades jumping around i've encouraged videos it's just a great time that happens every other friday and something that's in the works for me is study groups i know other teachers are doing study groups during asynchronous time and i know that the kids have really enjoyed doing that as well those are just some ways that the kids have been socially um connected with their teacher myself and themselves as friends so thank you i think there's a couple questions for you maori also thank you for sharing okay kathy uh marcel um i just wanted to get clarification i think i understand so your power chats the five-minute ones this with one

025individual student and their family or just with the student correct yes correct and that was so that i could stay connected with my students um it's hard to get them to chat sometimes they may be shy to turn on their cameras so those five-minute power chats it's just myself and the student and if the parent wants to join they they can um they share their sub they brought in their pets it's just a great time to build connections with my students i have one of those shy ones so that's great thank you okay yes and it's great to get to hear them it's it's been one of my favorite things it is during my lunch but i i i'm okay with that we could also do that during asynchronous time i just choose to do

026it during my my lunch okay any other questions for mari thank you maddie very much for sharing with us thank you thank you thank you so really that's really what elementary centered around like i said if you ever get a chance if you ask any of your elementary principals they can share a zoom link with you if you'd like to drop in and watch a class in session for a while too really is a it's it's incredible honestly when i've watched i've been dropping in almost daily the last couple weeks here and every time i drop in i'm i'm pretty wowed by what's happening with them i think liz and i are more than dropping in we are drowning in it okay just like to remind the board of the uh secondary synchronous and asynchronous

027timeline and the schedule that we have built what i really want to highlight here is that asynchronous time that's going to be ongoing in the in the schedules that we're considering because that asynchronous time you're going to see some data soon that is going to support our encouragement of using that time as we all know edgenuity in itself has been a challenge in some ways and i'm going to have a teacher mark kessler come on and talk about that in a second but one thing we can do definitely do in the future is make sure we use that asynchronous time in other ways so i would like to turn this over to mark kessler he is a science teacher at chico high school we i'll use this word recruited him from a neighboring district a

028couple years ago and he's fantastic mark uh hello everyone uh thank you so much for giving me this opportunity and thank you board members for your service to our community i was asked to give a candid assessment of successes challenges and hurdles with online learning um and uh when someone says give candid you know it's brought with disaster so i'm going to do my best here to be both honest and constructive i also made an effort to survey other teachers when john asked me to do this i i talk to other teachers and make sure that i'm not just representing myself but i'm representing some others of course i don't represent all teachers and that's not possible so some may have different perspectives than i do i also was thinking about this because when we

029started i was asked to do this we were all online and there was no talk yet about going back to in person and i thought about it a lot and it talked with some teachers and we realized that regardless of whether we go back in person due to our circumstances we're still in an online learning environment because we can't hand out papers we can't hand out textbooks it's going to be very difficult to do labs in science with eyes touching microscopes and hands touching test tubes we can't do our usual group um discussions so in many ways even though we're going in person we're still going to have students on chromebooks separated from each other it will be better but it is still online learning so how we approach our online learning will be the

030measure of success for the school year um so share some things that i learned this year about online learning i've learned that it can be effective under the right circumstances so more to follow on that i've learned that students and teachers are more adaptable and more resilient than we think i've learned that all of the systematic systemic problems in education and society are magnified in an online learning environment for example we know that lack of support at home can be a problem with in-person teaching with online learning lack of support at home is nearly catastrophic and these things are magnified so these are not new problems they're not going to go away either when we come back but they are more difficult with online learning and that goes with equity and and all those issues

031i've learned that despite all our technological advances it is still difficult to contact parents and that in the end the only thing that really works is a good old-fashioned phone call i've learned that teachers for teachers online learning turns a regular school day and school week into a 24 7 job teachers receive dozens of emails a day and concerning issues that need to be resolved immediately so at saturday morning at 9 a.m if you get an email and you can't respond to that student they can't move forward in their learning and so it really becomes a situation where i i'm zooming with students six o'clock in the evening i'm answering emails all weekend and most teachers are as well it's it's so if there's a greater load on the teacher with online learning this next

032one i don't think this is very new to you and this is the candid part so i have learned that a scripted pre-recorded program like ingenuity is one of the least effective ways to do online learning it delivers this large quantity of low depth of knowledge information [Music] unlike a teacher these programs are insensitive to students academic pace and their emotional needs you know we we had some emotional events here at chico high and the scripted programs were unable to respond to that and teachers would have been um it really it further isolates students because it it makes their teachers and fellow classmates irrelevant in fact i had students sometimes say uh can i leave now because i i don't they basically didn't need us when we were in an ingenuity situation it makes teachers

033and this word was uh used a fair amount by other teachers so uh despondent by eliminating their main purpose for teaching and one of the biggest issues is it really doesn't assess well and one of the problems is all the answers on ingenuity are available online and i don't mind saying this publicly because i think the students already know and that those those answers have been haven't that questions haven't changed in four years at least and they're readily available and the students taught me how to find them and i was able to get an a on every quiz using that method so it's not giving us accurate assessments and so one of the frightening things for a teacher this far into the years we really don't know what our students have learned and because we

034can't really trust the assessments in ingenuity a couple quotes from teachers my students are responding they learn from more from me in 20 minutes than four hours on ingenuity one i got from a student is mr kessler i'm getting an a but i'm not learning anything so what i learned is that students actually care about learning not just grades they actually care about their learning and that's and maybe they didn't know it but now they do they know the difference and that's that's something we gained from this experience um and they are so eager and so excited uh to get instruction from their teachers again that the buy-in is amazing now i've learned one of the main challenges for teachers with online learning is finding a way to assess student learning and i really appreciate

035board president griffin's comments in the er yesterday about the importance of assessing student progress this year because it's a huge issue and it is possible to create secure assessments but teachers need training on how to use tools like google forms with a locked browser on a district chromebook i recently helped a teacher and it took about two hours to train them and they were already very proficient in tech tools so this is something that needs to be addressed we need to have uh accurate and secure assessments in order to get data that we can use to drive instruction i have also i've learned that with online learning it's better to teach less and teach it well and try to cover all the standards i've learned that professional learning communities are an essential part of the

036educational success at chico unified and at dropping poc plcs from the schedule this year when we have so much to learn and discuss made a difficult situation even harder now i always like to close with a solution because in a past life i was a board member and a school board member and i always appreciated when the public included some solution with their list of issues and i just feel like in order to have good quality instruction it's important to invest the time and training necessary to allow teachers to develop the necessary skills if we want to be successful this year my recommendation is that regardless of whether we choose the am pm model or the ab schedule is that we make one day a week an advisory slash teacher collaboration day so that we

037can have time for professional development led by district teachers and time for extended plc's each week you'll work on curriculum and assessments my thought is and i'm to say i didn't invent this durham unified has this system um and uh i thought i conferred with the teacher there and they explained how it works but in other words each week would have two days of instruction and one day of morning advisory class the advisory class would address the social emotional needs of students give academic support and give us an opportunity to reinforce copied protocols if necessary the afternoon or the rest of the morning would be devoted to weekly professional development and plcs office hours and student support it would give students one day a week to address academic and emotional needs it would give teachers

038time to learn online tools collaborate on curriculum assessments in their plcs it would give teachers time to make phone calls to parents and students it would give teachers time to schedule office hours and one-on-one zoom or in person support and i also think it would just on the side would be easier for working parents because their students would be going to school the same day two days every week instead of alternating if they're going to try to figure out drop off and pick up it just seems to me as a parent i would want the same days every week instead of a mix in general your teachers are willing your students are eager and all that's necessary some planning time for teachers a commitment to continuous professional development and online learning and an emphasis on

039excellence okay mark thank you and as i just want to make sure that that i do appreciate mark's candid um responses that we are always it's always requested of us to be transparent and clear and take as much feedback as we can so thank you mark mark has been also one of the teachers that's been working with us all summer and all the different monday and all the monday meetings so just to clarify a couple of expectations we had over this over the course of this online adventure we do have classes that are not using edge annuity and i've got some listed here i really want to send a shout out though to our to our special ed teachers their aides and diane olson's team of all the groups they may have had the most

040difficult position they were in the most difficult position because they had to not only take courses they weren't familiar with but then accommodate modify and customize those courses for individual students within individual courses so it wasn't just modifying a course is modifying specific student pathways and they were able to do that to satisfy most of our parents so i just want to send a shout out to that group we did add a couple of technology support teachers to be sure that our staff had people sitting in their shoes or in their seats and looking at things through their lens to support them from a technological perspective oh thank you john but before we move on to anything else i would just like to ask um mr kessler is there a possibility you could stick around

041for the rest of this meeting certainly um i'd be glad to we we are going to be discussing some some additional topics and i'm not sure if if mari can do the same too but um it would really be helpful um to to get some feedback from from both of you so i i know it's busy i know you've got a busy schedule tomorrow and i i hate to ask you that but um it would really help us i think um if we could go to you for some further questions if they arise um i'm sorry john so i didn't mean to interrupt i hope they can stick around so just our last slide here for secondary well now it's not secondary anymore it's k-12 our oak bridge academy has expanded i just want to

042show you the enrollment as of september 24th was up to 528 students we did ask rhonda odlum the administrator in charge of oakbridge to add a slide deck here specifically describing the k5 curriculum that we will be bringing to the board in two weeks for adoption so it is linked to this presentation we're not going to go through it right now because we will be going through it later but i wanted to make sure people had access to that we did add some staff sev we currently have 17 general ed teachers two special education teachers and we added a registrar okay i'm going to turn it over to tim carras sorry about that so the people in this room can't see right now what's cut off the the top of the titles this is elementary

043all-day attendance and this is the rate for this year and i'm going to ask for the purpose of our meeting if we can move the uh the panel over there we go thanks so jay referenced sb98 earlier and we've talked about that over the course of the past few board meetings but but but just to clarify how attendance is taken differently this year as opposed to previous years per sb 98 students are marked as engaged or not engaged each day they are marked engaged which would correspond to present if they attend any part of their classroom zoom meeting or complete work at home okay so the way it works is teachers take attendance on their zooms as normal the next day attendance clerks go in and check their online work via reporting out of one

044of our systems okay so then if the student does show that they do sorry completed work that previous day the attendance clerk then changed it to engaged okay so uh because it's so different uh it would be not uh not not advisable to look at this year's data compared to past years data what we're really looking at here is the equity question and who which student groups are falling behind the all students number and which students are not uh you'll notice that the student groups are the exact same student groups that you find on the california state dashboard with one exception and this exception is for both elementary and the secondary side you're going to see in a second and that is socioeconomically disadvantaged is not there we had a glitch in our nutrition services

045data system that's been just got cleared up this afternoon not in time to update the slides but what we do see is uh the homeless students uh not attending um then we see really see across the board um kind of a smattering of of above and below the all students number of 95.5 attendance rate 95.5 attendance rate is right around where our attendance rate is normally as a district okay this is the secondary slide secondary again under a normal year with a given that attendance is taken differently runs about 95.5 percent okay we are looking at 88 so that means by period the attendance rate is 88 across the board since the beginning of the school year so that's a significant concern for us on this slide also with the secondary we see more of

046a discrepancy between the english learners foster foster youth and students with disabilities and then again homeless from down from the 88 for all students so we do see more of a discrepancy here for our students in high needs student groups any questions on the attendance slides before we move on one question do we have the socioeconomically disadvantaged numbers now even if you're not on the slide i haven't run them yet but that's next on the list okay so we'll move on what you can't see cut off at the top is this is uh zoom meeting average minutes for our certificated staff we as a ed services team were particularly interested in how teachers were using their asynchronous time in the afternoon uh so the classroom teacher data on the left hand side only counts for

047ace is only counting asynchronous time so keep that in mind that's not their class periods but that is the average minutes per teacher per day that is spent on zoom the numbers are are low definitely but i also want to go back to something that mark kessler just said is that a lot of teachers are manning their their computer answering emails making phone calls so don't want to present this as this is all the only way teachers can reach students during asynchronous time but it is the only data point that we have access to and it would give us an idea of like what kind of like small group instruction might be going on in the afternoon that would necessitate a zoom meeting over a phone call or an email also note on the on

048both sides of this slide is that our staff is not required to use zoom we do have staff members that favor google meet and that data is not included here so on the right hand side the certificated support staff that would be title 1 teachers counselors psychologists etc so certificated non-classroom teaching staff on the sites you can see and this is all day long because they don't have periods of kids coming in in the morning like a classroom teacher so this is all day long so we see overall the numbers are significantly higher with the exception of the psychologist and the district-wide staff group the district-wide staff group includes like fine arts specialists pe specialists and music specialists that are itinerant and travel around from school to school okay actually questions on that last slide

049before we move on a couple of questions if you don't mind um do the one do we know why the the psychologist numbers are are so small are they meeting with people by uh phone calls or i'm not sure and i'll defer to any other ad services team members if they're working on ieps they could be meeting in person also and that was one of the provisions if they're working to get ieps put together they could be meeting with students to be assessed or some of those kinds of things as well okay um and do we know whether any of the district-wide itinerants are doing things like posting recorded pre-recorded videos instead i know a lot of the elementary folks are doing things especially the pe folks have been doing those kinds of things because

050they've tried to make it accessible for any time of the day where families could just almost like a uh i'm part of a fitness club now and i've got lessons posted and i can zoom in and watch those or i can watch the recordings of it also so i could do a pe activity at eight o'clock in the evening if they wanted and that makes a lot of sense i just want some context for some of these lower numbers because i know our teachers are still working all the time thank you yes please don't take those numbers as you know like i said earlier all that teachers do because we know they're working like 24 7 in a lot of cases like mr kessler mentioned earlier so i think the next slide here is just

051really geared for when we flipped and knew we were coming back in an online mode kind of some things we did professional development wise to get ready for it so throughout the summer kind of leading up to it though we've been meeting with a group of anywhere from 75 teachers every monday for an hour or two just kind of getting feedback about things as they were kind of unfolding with it and we're still continuing to meet with that group this week even and we'll continue meeting with them i think the last week or two it's been down to about 35 or so but incredibly helpful with with just a lot of input and helping with decisions and giving us a lot of their thoughts about what we should be doing as we got close to

052making a decision between online or amp and with some of those kinds of things also so ted were those the dlc people are those an expanded group it was expanded it was dlc plus i mean it was kind of opened up to a wide range of folks from different levels different courses different rsp non-rsp whoever it was just a pretty open group that was meeting certainly with dlc encouragement to join us also okay because i know the dlc is a group that it's the how are those people designated how do they get to be on that on that on that group so elementary has one teacher that we fund to be released a day a week to be part of the teacher leadership group in elementary we meet two or three times a week or

053excuse me a month on fridays typically secondary has a slightly different version of it and i'll let mr shepard talk a little bit about that for a moment sure you can see you can see on the slide that secondary is broken into english language arts math and then science subcommittees and then once a month we get together as an all secondary group and then once a month we get together as an all dlc so that you have elementary and secondary together and one of the reasons the num i believe the numbers dropped a little bit from the summer to the into the school year is we're also still meeting now we're meeting with dlc with these subgroups and with the elementary group whereas um and also holding the monday meetings so people they they weren't

054if you're a dlc member you weren't attending both the monday meeting and the subgroup meeting okay and but the the dlc they are chosen by the principals by other teachers how do they how do they how does that work i think principal input is big but it's also kind of like they want to make sure they take a respected staff member and i'm using that term loosely they want to have somebody that when they come back and report out or doing the work that when they come back and talk to the staff that they're gonna have some respect from the staff also you know well thought of on that campus okay so that it kind of that goes into it but that but the other people who participated in this were not of that they

055were just self-selected they were people who were interested and wanted to correct i think initially we just put out a note to principal to the principals and said if you ask if you have five six seven teachers that might want to start joining us and it was just kind of an open via that mechanism first and we had several people just asked to join and it was kind of like anybody that's interested is welcome to come and join in the conversation okay thank you so as we flipped in then we organized three professional development days geared around kind of getting ready for online instruction we took august 5th 6th and the 11th and we paid teachers our daily rate to come back on those days and just kind of a mix of trainings everything from

056curriculum specific kinds of things to online strategies how do you operate zoom how do you do things in google classroom we kind of try to take a lot of feedback again from dlc to say what do teachers need to know so they can walk in and be feel like they they're off to a good start with things that are going to be happening in an online world with it we took the august 12th day which is our all all staff development that's a kind of the typical staff development day we have anyway we certainly use that for that same follow-up purpose as well getting ready for online with those things uh going forward there's been a mix of kind of weekly sessions kind of one or two hour options that are put out there we're

057paying teachers to come and participate with those i think they're kind of generated by dlc once again they go back to their site they ask what are some things people are wanting more of we come back and i we kind of try to find some people that can facilitate those sessions and we put them out there and if people show up we've been compensating to come and join those and there's a lot of interest also with those sessions we are continuing as as we mentioned before the monday meetings are continuing i think we've been appreciating the feedback we're getting from it and it's definitely been very helpful with as we look at a whole range of different things to be considering right now with it as well as mr shepard's shared dlc is back and

058operating we've been meeting weekly in elementary right now which is a little bit more than we would meet typically but there's so many decisions for us to be making and talking about everything from modifying our report card to modifying assessments to modifying writing rubrics so just going back and forth and getting a lot of feedback about is this the right time to do that should we be paring this down should we be changing the the kind of indicators on the report card and they've really been the driving force elementary with making those decisions right now okay and lastly i just want to talk about the district-wide staff development days that we have we usually have four every year and the first one this year was really focused on getting us started getting us ready to

059go and at the time we had planned to bring in a panel of uh rep representatives from our community who represented some targeted student populations our bipoc black indigenous people of color population our students with disability population our english learner population and our foster and homeless youth population and so we have rescheduled that panel to join us on october 13th and it's it's a it's perfect timing for this conversation even though folks may really be focused on a schedule change possibly we think we can't lose sight of learning loss so the focus of the conversation is going to be laser-like on learning loss for those targeted student populations as you can see from the data it's timely we need to have that conversation so that's where we are with professional development so mr shepard before

060we move on i want to make sure that we understand that the secondary professional development on august 5th 6th and 11th and then again on the 12th was about getting them ready for ingenuity and the ones that had to do develop classes that were not an ingenuity that we had secondary teachers trained under those okay great and thank you earlier in the slide that's where that 280 thousand dollars of professional development goes um again uh we are able to use care dollars to get our teachers trained in those days so we were very fortunate to have those dollars for that as mr kessler said we there's never enough professional development we need to do them as much as we can so we're going to jump into the next bucket and we'll start with time sorry

061about that um i mentioned sb 98 uh earlier in the context of student attendance sb 98 also calls for monitoring of student engagement and making contact with parents and families of students that are not showing up to school so and amongst other things but um i will be showing data on uh targeted case manager and counselor outreach which are prime our primary ways of reaching out to families regarding social emotional needs um this year we are also implementing kelvin district-wide and we haven't done that yet this year due to due to overload of new systems for our staff essentially we will be doing a soft roll out in the very near future teachers will have very little to do with that they will be trained that we are going to be giving the survey and

062that's about it right now because we don't want to overload anybody at this point but we do want to start collecting that social emotional data more robust social emotional data which that will allow us to do another big support we've had in place has been care solace which for those listening that don't know we have a contract it's a company that is able to match up social emotional kind of health providers with families or with students or with staff even depending on their insurance carrier or not insurance carrier or whatnot we've had a great success with them matched up a lot of folks to help make sure they're getting the supports they need with those things we have tcms our target case managers if you think of social workers at each site and they are

063reaching out and touching bases in a whole range of ways with families about what's going on in their family dynamics right now what supports do they need and last one we have a foster homeless liaison in place this year and he has been doing a great job kind of working with our foster homeless populations and i think mr kanji is on here with us now and wants to check in for a moment and share a little bit of what he's been doing and really kind of gearing around some of those numbers you saw mr karis sharing before so ratash are you on here yeah sure uh thank you mr sullivan um yeah i was just you know thank you for allowing me the time to come in here and and share a little bit of

064what i've been doing with with some of our foster and homeless kids and students so really um one of the things that i've been afforded is a chance to wear multiple hats with this position and one of those hats that i've been wearing recently is kind of being in charge of the the hot spot and comcast vouchers for students who are having difficulty logging onto their internet to stay in touch with their distance learning so one of the things that we've been able to do is offer and provide hot spots or comcast vouchers for over 250 minutes now and then i'm hoping ritesh are you still there sorry i'm not sure what that was i don't think that was for me i'm not sure what that sound was apologize for that if it was on

065my end go ahead um yeah so like i was saying we were able to provide um hot spots or comcast vouchers for over 250 students um you know to keep them connected to school another part of what i've been doing is helping facilitate registration and attendance into our into our homeless foster and at-risk supervision program and we were able to enroll and have over 42 students homeless and fought currently designated homeless and foster students who are registered and regularly attending um and they're able to keep up with their schoolwork do their distance learning homework and even make up some some missed or late assignments which has been some great great feedback that we've heard from from some of those advisors and those teams another thing i've been able to do is regularly attend cft meetings

066and cft stands for child and family team meetings with child services children services and that's been a great opportunity to work with teams and families and students to to help them develop plans for them to be more successful and some of the things that i've been able to help out with them is various things from transcript great issues connecting families and students to school counselors referring students to pbis for s-fit programs at schools referring them and setting them up with tutoring services through school ties answering iep process and program questions and even getting students enrolled into school who who have you know not been able to to get to a site to enroll um we've been able to enroll since well who have kind of been disconnected and which is which is great another thing

067i've been able to do is reach out to the community i think collaborating with community members is a is a huge thing that's going to benefit our our community and our students so some of those community partners such as boys and girls club um hand up supportive housing chico housing action team and torah shelter um they've been a huge boost to our community and just helping families throughout and you know just being able to collaborate with them and create that um create that relationship to further solidify the success of our students i currently have 32 families and students on a weekly schedule of check-ins and that list is ever growing as they as they come across my my radar and we we discuss various things such as their housing their home life their school life

068their their social emotional well-being um and then i'm able to to refer them to to the people that can that can help support them if if i'm not able to answer their questions immediately um some of the challenges that i've had is meeting all the needs of all of our students um you know it's just a huge population and you know just making sure i i address everyone um and all their needs and another challenge um was initially to to build relationships with families just requiring that time um and that challenge quickly became a success once i was able to build those relationships and you know building that trust with the families and you know it's just been a beautiful thing thanks ritesh any questions for ratash while he's here now i just want to

069mention that i probably am the happiest person in the room right now because of our hiring mr kanji since i've been trying to have that happen for probably the last 12 years understanding the importance of having someone who is focusing entirely especially on foster youth because they just slip through the cracks they move around so much and it is just so difficult there's too many moving pieces in their lives with social workers changing and schools changing and homes changing and i am just so glad that we have you now mr kanji i've only heard wonderful things about you so thank you for being here and thanks for finally hiring mr kanji i think it's fantastic i think we've all swallowed the two legs so thank you yeah it's been a great addition i just wanted

070to um let earlier that mr carrich showed some of the tenants rates for our foster and our homeless but they have gone up especially having those 42 attending all the time and he's done a great job of getting them there and the success of their school work has gone up amazingly from their teachers so that's been another great positive so those numbers will only continue to go up with him working with them so just a few more things on this slide we mentioned the asynchronous time before that's going to be a major focal point for us moving forward regardless of what schedule we're in because there is some time there that can be utilized better than it has been in the past for all of us and we know that the synchronous academic time has

071been a major focus since the spring but now that we have a better idea of what we can do during that asynchronous time as we heard from maddie we can use that so there are some secondary asb activities happening right now we've got schools doing drive-through um breakfasts and socially distance in their cars and so there are some things happening we have um virtual groups getting together not just your typical csf and you know the ones that have been happening in the past but but new ones as well so we're excited about that obviously that opportunity will grow if we're back in person in any way there'll be there'll be some stronger connections made and then lastly i just want to remind the board of the shift from only high school wellness counselors last year

072to having that opportunity for our middle school students as well so we are excited about the work that they're doing okay back over to mr karas yeah so this slide displays uh counseling contacts uh for the 2021 school year uh so again the the title's cut off for those those of you in the room but this is counseling contacts and this includes contacts from counselors and counseling assistants okay k12 this is different than data it's a different look at this data than i've shown the board in the past so i want to take a moment to explain this is displaying the rate that students are contacted and in the past we've we've shown you total numbers of contacts but what i wanted to do is call out see okay are certain student groups getting contacted

073more often than others as we would expect okay and so as we would expect you know per our conversation uh with retest just now um we are seeing our foster youth and homeless youth being contacted at a higher rate by our counselors we see our english learners being contacted at a much higher rate and then students with disabilities one thing to point out with with that number which is right around the all students number of 0.25 contacts per student is special education students per their iep have a have a support team built in with that iep that are also making contacts so other folks are checking in with them this is our targeted case manager contacts you can see the overall number for all students is .12 contacts per student and that's lower than the

0740.25 we saw for counselors and the reason for that is likely because we have fewer of them we have much a much larger uh counseling team that we do with our targeted case manager so more outreach is happening but we do see the same trends with a high need student groups being contacted at a higher rate quick question just i want to make some understanding the data correctly is this over the course of the year so far yes so what you're saying is roughly one out of every eight kids has been contacted by a tcm so far correct thank you any further questions about these so we've tried to make sure we put some emphasis on social emotional supports also so in the elementary world we certainly are using our counselors and elementary counseling assistants

075and they're reaching out still we're in this online world they're continuing to deliver the typical curriculum that we have in an online format or version of it also with those kinds of things all the schools have wellness teams so if you think of kind of a cluster of staff that gather together on a pretty consistent if not weekly basis and kind of talk about students that they are having concerns about maybe missing school maybe having some ups and downs the wellness team is the group at that site that has that conversation and talks about putting a plan in place to help make contact get get in touch with help get that student back on track in a way that's going to help them be successful certainly individual and group counseling has been happening tcms in

076particular and counselors are doing things with virtual kinds of sessions as possible as well see um each school is trying in process of developing kind of a wellness page on their website as well to kind of make people aware of where they can access some of these things and we actually have a group from sierra vue here to share for a few minutes kind of what they've been doing to kind of help parents as well kind of a support group to make sure parents have avenues to kind of check in and be connected as well so i think kim rogers jackie and g are here from sierra review hi i'm kim rogers the principal of sierra view and i brought with me to members of our wellness team my targeted case manager my counselor they'll

077introduce themselves here in just a little bit but we're here to share with you what we're doing to support the social and emotional needs of our parents and our students especially during these challenging times so i'm going to go ahead and pass the mic over to my my targeted case manager and counselor and if you guys ask us we'll just click through the slides that you have when you ask us to perfect thank you kim um so again i'm jackie russo i'm school counselor at sierra of u if you could go to the next life for me please so my role as a school counselor is of course i do the counseling and then i do the fourth and fifth grade social emotional as well as running friendship group we also have debbie herrick who

078does our pop and pal programs so pop is the power play which is one to one children driven play pals works with two students and is child driven again and then shayla lewis she does our social emotional for kindergarten to third grade and as well as friendship groups the next slide good evening everyone i am g tao lore and i am the targeted case manager over at sierra view elementary school and my role here is to gather resources and provide support to students and their parents in addition to that i am also bilingual and i also act as interpreter to meetings iep and what so you know what when i need it in addition to our team we also have sarah pardini and her job is the student teacher support and the district liaison she

079oversees the school-based intervention team providing support to our parents teachers and students next slide please so this is our wildest team we meet weekly and also as needed when situation or crisis arise our team respond to our family immediate needs such as providing resources counseling home visit checking in with students and teachers making attendance phone calls and etc our wilderness team works together to best provide support to our students and families and of course parents so this is our counseling what's our our website page and we try to this was given to teachers to show um during back to school night for parents so we try to be as parent-friendly as possible with our step-to-step guide um and then on the corner you'll see our sierra calming corner website link if we could click on

080that if possible so this is our wellness team resource center web page um we have a student check in um student resources lessons and videos and if we can go to the parent resources tab on the top yes um so this shows uh different mindfulness activities um there's a little quick link tabs to help with tips and then going further down we have a form where if students our parents were struggling with creating a schedule online they can fill that out um it's yeah right there it's the on family schedule and then the tab next to it we have coven 19 that talks about the disease itself as well as different preventions how to help keep their family safe and then we have again our contact information and so we can go back to the

081next slide the side and over at your view we have a crv eagle parent support group and our goal is to provide a safe space for parents to share their concerns support each other and receive resources our wellness team will provide a forum for our parents however parents will eventually facilitate these meetings once we get it going um our team will be available to answer any question as needed we are going to have we are going to have our first parent support meeting next thursday october 15th at 6 00 pm via the topic will be meet and greet other parents that see review we have two scheduled in the coming month of november and december next slide please as you can see on this slide these are the results that we have received from the

082parent survey that was sent out a couple weeks ago these meeting topics are parents driven and we're going to start with three topics that parents have the most interest in supporting online school curriculum will be second um in november and the nurture heart approach will be coming up in december as of right now and based on these surveys our goal is to have the parent support group once a month and i want to reach reassure everyone that we will keep it going after the new year 2021 and update parents on aries communication and on our school website about upcoming dates and topics so another thing that we're doing is lunch bunch and fun with the wellness team this is our tier one response on to the distance learning so what that means is all students

083are welcome to attend our lunch sponge and what fun with wellness team if it's in their grade level so our goal is for students to have a safe space to interact with their friends and classmates students are able to build relationships with each other and the wellness team lunch punch is provided to second to fifth graders and fun with the wellness team is provided to kindergarten first meetings are 25 minutes once a week so with this we've had parents you know call in saying that their students are missing that social piece and so this is our way to provide that for students to have that interaction as well as build additional relationships with staff members like our wellness team next slide so our additional support so as mentioned before all of the schools um are

084doing the social emotional lessons our wellness teams for kindergarten to fifth grade we are also doing a storybook reading for all the grade levels with different lessons again our pop and pals check-in counseling social connection groups which are friendship groups we have a protocol in place for absent students so if a teacher has a student that's chronically absent they have a form to fill out for us so that we can then start reaching out to those families and then over here on the right hand side you'll see our responses to the recent fires so since um with all the smoke in the air and everything going on we know that a lot of families were feeling a lot of extra stress and trauma from the past fire from paradise fire and so we wanted to

085reach out we made sure to reach out to all those families that were affected at that time we sent out resources to parents to the teachers we created a video with coping and techniques for the students and just reminded the teachers that we were there and reminded the families um well that concludes our presentation but it it by far doesn't do justice to what our wellness team is doing and working with our entire school community and they've done an amazing job responding to um the challenges that we're facing in our community and um i'm very thankful i mean we all are very thankful that we have these resources that we're able to tap in too and i i'm sure that the other school sites are feeling the same as what um is what i am

086right now and this kind of stuff is taking place across the district so thank you for these resources and um thank you jackie and g for being here yeah i just want to thank jackie and g also do you guys have any questions for them i'm just wondering um you mentioned that there were 30 are there 30 people who are the parents engaged in the in the group so far those were responses to our survey we haven't done the group yet um our first one is on october 15th and we're going to be doing it as a meet and greet um so hopefully building those connections between parents okay great thank you okay thank you sir of you so as usual the elementary folks oh sorry i just just wanted i i hope the sierra

087view people are still on the line i just wanted to let you know that my lack of a question does not indicate a lack of support the work you're doing is just amazing and just wanted to say thank you so much same i'm really thrilled by this program and the program you guys took place thank you and as i started to say as usual the elementary group are always raising the bar and setting the bar i just want to remind the board of our mandated trainings that we are providing this school year those have not gone away they are being implemented suicide prevention bullying human trafficking is more defined this year than lgbtq awareness so i do appreciate again diane olson for making sure we included the educationally related mental health services that have been

088expanded to um to to more groups our students with ieps and specifically i want to highlight the opportunity for our students with 504s oftentimes those accommodations and modifications that need to support those students aren't at the forefront and i want to be sure that we highlight that that is definitely something that has been a focus for this year erica smith and her and her team has always made sure our web page is updated and i wanted the reason we included this last definition emergency response team unfortunately we had to we had to mobilize that team this year and i was extremely impressed with the collaboration amongst this different school sites to be sure that one of our school site staff was supported so then that staff if if they're able were available to support their

089students so that team was critical this fall so again coming back to oak bridge we were able to add some counseling time we added some targeted case manager time because of their numbers it's not that we didn't feel like they needed it but the numbers in the past hadn't warranted mainly because of the the conversations the teachers were able to provide to their students but because of the numbers we did increase some of our staff and the elementary counselors as you've already seen they're they're right on it they have developed the oak bridge wellness page for their website okay next steps so we had some other um things planned to talk about tonight on next steps where we are at uh purple that at the time when we were making this presentation for you we're

090in purple now we're in red obviously for the modified traditional schedule so we're going to kind of go over that in a presentation right in a few minutes but next steps after red goes to orange then yellow i have not seen our numbers yet for today i'm yesterday we had six i believe in butte county which would have put us in the orange for that day but then we want to continue our communications with families about our preparation for full or in-person return so that's our would have been our next steps but we're going to be talking about that again tonight about in-person sense we've changed since we started these conversations for this workshop any questions before we conclude no but i do just want to thank the staff for all their work and putting

091this presentation together but all that they are doing for our students it's pretty amazing seeing all these different steps it's appreciated very much i do believe miss griffin that we have three people um that turn in cards for comments okay um we do not actually have a decision to make with regards to this and so these uh whatever comments are made would just be for the sake of you know people providing input which of course is always welcome but we at the end of this we are not going to be making a decision with regards to this topic so um yes we can go ahead then with uh speakers who want to speak on this topic okay i'll be calling matt tennis hello is this matt okay matt hold for a second and i'm gonna

092put you on speaker okay matt you are addressing the chico unified school district great thank you good evening everyone matt tennis a parent of four kids here in town three of whom are enrolled with chico unified and one of whom is only two years old and also representing chico parents for in-person learning i thought that was a great presentation and i'm too appreciate the work of the staff and i appreciate it also in the context of the fact that we're in a big crisis right now with a global pandemic going on that no one wanted um me and my coalition we think that the virus is real and not something to be completely ignored or disregarded but we want to value in-person learning to the degree that it needs to be valued and i think

093that the report tonight was a little bit of a of a chico unified's greatest hits and it's a definitely an album worth owning um there are amazing things being done by all the presenters we heard tonight um and the teachers are working very very hard to try to make this bad situation as good as it can be but i think that we need to remember all the little square pegged students out there and i always remember those because i was one of those when i was a kid and i've got one or two of them living under my roof and for those kids zoom school is a terrible situation and and they're missing uh just a huge chunk of what they hear these kids are up and down in and out of their seats all

094the time i'm not just speaking of my own children i'm speaking of the the students who i'm hearing about from their parents who are members of our coalition and you can read some of these stories in your public comments which if you're watching this this presentation i think that anyone should go and read the public comments presented because they are um they're the other side of what we're hearing tonight they're the bad experiences so that said um i understand you guys are under a lot of pressure but i think that we should realize that this is not a great situation so anything we can do to see how the negative aspects would be good like like maybe if we could see how many minutes students are spending on zoom if we can get that information

095that would be good because i would bet that a lot of there's a lot of uh kids or there's a lot of zoom zoom time that's that's not taking place with kids who are getting full credit for attending but they're not on their zoom calls um and that concludes my comments thank you so much okay we will move to our next caller okay i'll be calling jc merritt cudney hi is this jc hi jc just hold for a second i'm going to put you on speaker thank you john okay jc you are you are addressing the school board hi thank you i'm calling as both a parent and a teacher in the district i'm calling and i actually have okay thank you hi thank you i'm calling andy speaker i think that the teachers have

096done amazing i am a resource teacher in the district so i go to multiple zooms a day i have seen some amazing work that the teachers have done they have built relationships to echo what ted said they have built relationships in this online environment so i'm calling to ask for a third option for students to be online and still connected to their home school i think that there is a big group of parents in the district who don't feel comfortable sending their students back quite yet but who really want their kids to be connected to the school that they have built these relationships with i think that my own son's school has done an amazing job my own son is he is on a health 504 he does have one kidney so i feel like

097the option between pulling him from those connections that he's made with the incredible features that he's had to make them leave that and disrupt them in an already disrupted year is punitive that it that there should be a way for him to be online but still be connected and as a teacher i feel like that's completely doable um i do feel like we can still do a hybrid model where we can address those needs but still teach both online and in person and that's that's it i also believe that that would solve some of the secondary issues with reopening the space issues because i do think that a lot of parents would choose that option so there might be that might open up that so that there could be more social distances i do also

098think that um it could help with the ability to clean in between classes so thank you okay we'll take our next caller for three minutes i'm going to call lindsay munn lindsay munn i received voicemail was there another person who was on a list for this she was the third and last okay that concludes our presentation then unless the board has any more questions any questions no questions okay well i guess we can move on then thank you very much um for all of the hard work in doing this and i think tom you were the liaison and was there another liaison linda linda thank you both for helping out with this as well our next item here is the elementary school waivers and cohort updates so thank you for letting me share a little

099follow-up information so we met about three weeks ago and we were kind of charged from the board to go out get a little more information and see what interest there was out there to look at cohorts or even waivers from school site levels so all the elementary schools went out and re-surveyed their families they sent them out typically most a lot of them did it from actually a classroom level with classroom follow-up calls so results range anywhere from about 35 responses up to one of the schools actually at about a 97 response rate so they definitely did a whole bunch of follow-up calls trying to really get a sense of what are families looking to have happen as far as a waiver possibility or even a cohort possibility and i'm going to kind of you

100know it's site by site john can you pull it up or john vincent and it is a mixed bag of information to put it mildly with what schools are interested in and what they feel like they could put in place and get agreement to also with a waiver i think there is a lot of interest i would say much more interest in cohorts in general and actually some of them have started their cohorts already and if you think for the public listening we have the ability to bring students back in small kind of targeted groups for different levels of support everything from students with ieps are coming back currently some students at different sites are coming back some of our transitional kindergartens have started cohorts or starting them next week because there's a real desire

101with the younger kids i mean i think if you ask anybody a real strong belief that it certainly is hard for a four-year-old to be doing things on zoom versus in person so a lot of the tk teachers in particular were really desiring to start bringing them back in a cohort manner and they were able to do those kinds of things so a couple sites have actually started that now lots of school sites have been bringing cohorts back meaning kind of small groups of students for targeted instruction with their um what we would call rti or response intervention kind of like small tutoring support group for those listening that may not know all the school acronyms and there's some that have interest in waivers but i would say nothing on a site-wide basis so there's

102some grade levels that we're very interested in doing things at certain sites some k1 possibilities at some sites that are interested to come back like that and we would be open to moving forward with those kinds of opportunities some grade levels in particular some individuals were interested i think definitely more interested in cohorts and moving ahead in that capacity though of things i would say you know the sites are still in progress right now i don't say we've stopped this discussion because we kind of need to see what next steps the board would like us to be moving at this point so i think but once we kind of move to red status i think a lot of the processing and planning kind of i don't say it's pause because you're still definitely having discussions

103and those things are happening but i think we're kind of waiting to see what next steps the board would like us to be taking from this evening as well so i think um like i said there were some that were very hectic our cuta bargaining group was very supportive helping us kind of process those through because we wanted them to take a look at them and make sure it matched up what their members were looking for as well so i think mr hanlon mr moretti did a good job kind of putting together a very um abbreviated version of what a waiver might look like and kind of opening up some flexibility to help those things process through really quickly and i'm trying to think let's see we've got about about eight or ten sites having

104different cohort groups coming through currently and i think there's about three or four more that have been sent back in the last day or two that have been approved and they're hoping to start in the next couple days also actually there's about a dozen more issues more okay they're trickling their hearts have been trickling through very quickly now yeah they're much easier than the um than the the general waivers so so um many of the teachers and groups have been choosing the cohort waiver instead and i would say just to remind folks listening also for us to do things and be able to bring students back via a cohort is a much less cumbersome complex process as far as kind of the negotiation end of things and kind of processing through all the state requirements

105as well they're able to do it in a much more timely manner kind of site driven by teacher interest with it and parent interest with those kinds of things so i think it's not that schools aren't interested in a waiver process they're just kind of um they could move a lot quicker with a cohort process to get students coming back in i think you ought to give a definition of what the cohort waiver is because we weren't really discussing that the last time and people may not understand so for folks that are listening a cohort schools have the capability to bring back a group of 14 students and with kind of some social distancing requirements and some health precautions in place and if they can meet those requirements they have the ability if they're interested

106and open and comfortable doing those kinds of things they can bring that cohort back and start providing instruction a lot of a lot of requirements on that cohort also they can't kind of cross mix with other students they're really it's a very solitary unit and that's kind of an odd description for it but they're not able to they a student can't be in a cohort with their title one teacher getting small group instruction and a cohort with their classroom so it's a it's hard to kind of mix and match those things they really can't that's one of the rules about cohorts they can be in one group to come back and kind of receive some in-person instruction so mr sullivan just want to emphasize too that teachers cannot be in more than one cohort as

107well correct teachers and students so it's to do it in a cohort there's certainly some complexities but like i said expediency wise they were able to do those things a little bit quicker without kind of some of the i always call it red tape necessarily but all those conditions and requirements at the state had put into bringing students back in person so there's several that have expressed some level of interest in waivers and i think they are still kind of having discussions at their site as far as how that may look or how it may work with grade levels interested in doing some of those kinds of things so i think we're just nothing to bring forward now for a vote particularly but i think uh depending on direction we had tonight you may be

108having some come forward at the next board meeting october 21st so questions and i i'm not trying to be vague but it's really like i said it's really a wide cross-section of interest and results and information and it even varies even within a school site that some grade levels were interested but others were not um even class by class interest with some of those things well and that was the reason why we did it this way is because that's what we assumed is that there were going to be these distinctions and some people would want it but those might be very you know specific type type of groups so that's that's really not surprising but but there are so many that's that's what's really interesting is they really you know embraced this i think if

109you ask teachers they're you know families out there we're hearing from are strongly desiring to be back in person for all the kind of the information you've been hearing leading up to this teachers are equally desiring due to those things you know as long as we as long as they feel it's in a safe kind of secure kind of manner with those things and those that have been interested have really kind of been taking advantage of this cohort opportunity and maybe more control as well yeah they're really kind of driving the boat if they're coming back in that cohort manner and having a lot of control over the conditions of it and putting in place in the way it's going to work for them and for their students also and i wouldn't interpret the lack

110of the waivers coming forward as lack of interest because about the same time we're having those conversations we're moving from purple to red and the waivers are quite paper intensive and then there's another approval level at the public health right department so so i think when we started to move into red they kind of put those as ted said on the back burner and just kind of waited where the cohorts were literally sitting down and you could complete it in a day and then it goes on to see the cta for final approval and that's it so it's pretty pretty sort of fast track very fast very fast track eileen yeah my question is you've worked on how to continue the cohorts if we go to the am pm um elementary ma well they'd all

111be ampn but if we go to opening on the 19th we've figured out how to make it work some of the like one of the tk cohorts in particular that started over at hookahoric already has kind of been started with that in mind that that may be coming the next step with it so they would be able to continue with the structure they've got put in place now okay so as i'm considering what to approve i can just rely on the fact that the other stuff that's already worked on and figured out won't be significantly impacted i would also say um on the 21st sorry mr hanley that on the 21st i think that we put the waivers on the agenda in case we want them on to be approved just in case there's a

112movement one way or the other and that we have the waivers done and if the board sees at that time that they want to approve those to move to the um to the health department butte county health department if we move into purple or if there's some reason we have to go back on to online that that is available for the county to approve or not approve us so i i yeah i would just think on the 21st that we might be prepared to bring if we have some schools available to go yeah i would like to have it on the agenda for the 21st kind of pending the direction from the board at this point that makes sense i'd like to interrupt too that superintendent staley does have her hand up i just wanted

113to make sure that we answered uh mrs robinson's question i don't think that all cohorts can continue if we come back in an in-person model so so i've been had my hand on all the cohorts um so i can answer that many of them in fact all of them at several schools had the amp model in mind and so that they could easily transition into them and many of them are special ed um and um and targeted other targeted groups who simply wanted even with the change the possible change over to ampm indicated that they wanted to see their students sooner rather than wait for a board decision that could possibly happen or not on october 19th or around that time so a lot of them were were designed within mind of the am pm

114but also they just wanted to see their students immediately because they were concerned about those targeted students falling further and further behind so with the 21st in mind and and if we go and get that other waiver and it does it help us keep those already established cohorts in place so the cohorts even if um even depending on the board decision the cohorts will be in place they're approved so if you're going to am pm they're kind of a moot point at that point but they're there um to be to fall back on if we fall back into red purple everything's purple and yes and the board makes the decision to close the schools back down again yes any questions i think we're i mean there certainly is a wide range of interesting and what

115if i may answer eileen some won't like at the secondary level the teacher wouldn't be able to continue the cohort in the amp model could already be teaching that period at the elementary level a lot of them will be able to continue and i think that's what kelly was shooting for so many or most may continue some it just wouldn't be feasible unless we go back to online thank you kevin okay any other questions kathy tom so once again this is not a it's really a discussion item at this point there's really nothing forward right we uh yes we do have some calls for this we do we have two speaker cards okay and as mentioned before we do not have to make a decision we're not going to take action but we would like

116to hear these people so give us the first okay i'll be calling matt tennis hey matt just hold for a second i'll put you on speaker okay matt you are addressing the school board hello again matt tennis with chico parents for in-person learning and i have to confess um on behalf of myself and also my coalition we're disappointed with um with the lack of leadership that has been demonstrated by the board on this issue as of gosh almost two months ago governor newsom through his administration made available this opportunity for schools to pursue waivers for elementary schools so that kids who might be having a really tough time with online zoom-based format could get back to in-person learning um early on when we here at chico unified started surveying parents and teachers and classified and

117certificated staff there was a pretty pretty good consensus that uh going back to elementary schools under a waiver was a good idea and you had all that information but you guys did not take any action to not demonstrate any leadership to try to touch how to scramble and come up with good options you know maybe just two or three that that could be more universal in their application maybe submit something to the county all you guys have done is basically just kick it back out to school sites you know sort of repeatedly just kind of keep throwing it out to the school sites and part of me wonders if maybe you wanted this waiver concept to just sort of uh just sort of struggle and die and i think that was not a very good

118decision i don't think that served your constituency very well and i really wish that this current board would would not do nothing as president griffin has already indicated they're not going to take any action interesting that she would know that but the bottom line is i think that somebody should propose some kind of action under the waiver because we don't know what the future holds nobody has a crystal ball maybe when chico state students all come back we could have a big resurgence of cases maybe we'll move out of orange into red or maybe we'll move from red back into purple a waiver would give elementary schools the protection to operate at a time when we are so desperately need them and for this age group that is so naturally and physically and scientifically protected

119from the coronavirus so thank you very much eileen did you have a comment uh yes i um [Music] i'm confused at mr tennis's statement because what we just presented was all of the action that we took immediately as soon as the process for getting cohorts approved through the county became available to us we've we've had these in-person cohorts functioning at the school sites as soon as as that process became available to us so i i i don't understand a complaint about not moving we moved as quickly as the process was available to us those kids have been in their cohorts receiving the attention they needed the special ed program children have been extremely well covered by the the programs that were developed and the the cohorts that were put together and the the timelines that

120have allowed us to do what we have up to approve tonight weren't available to us before now yes and you just mentioned that the whole reason why these waivers are going to be held is should the circumstances change they will be ready to utilize this is a fluid situation we're not dealing with something that has remained the same over time and in addition we did survey people and the surveys did not indicate an overwhelming desire for all schools to apply for waivers and so you know i realized that this is a political issue and um i really wish that instead of focusing on what hasn't been done you would focus on what has been done okay do we have another speaker we do i'll be calling jody taylor jody taylor hi jody i'm going to

121place you on the speaker and you'll be addressing the board just hold on for a second okay jody you are addressing the chico unified school board okay thank you good evening board members um i just i want to echo mr tennis's comments that the process for the waiver should still move forward so it is in place because like you mentioned mrs robinson i apologize i i mean ms griffin i apologize uh the process still needs to move forward so that it is on file and in place so that we're not bouncing back to distance learning because as you mentioned it is a fluid situation things are changing um and so this gives us a safeguard in place to provide continuity for kids and so it was mentioned earlier that it it's good to propose a

122solution and a suggestion um in in place of just negativity and so i want to do that here's mine given that elementary schools are going to be going to am pm i feel like the solution and the suggestion is for the district to take the reins of this back and to apply for the waiver uh once again just as an entire district let's let's apply for the waiver based on the amp model that's been approved and then add the safety information that is site specific to the application that the district submits as a whole district i really feel like that's the only way to be equitable i have a big concern about cohorts i know it's much more streamlined to approve these and to prove small groups but where is the equity in having site

123specific determinations made if i have a third grader at sierra view whose school decides to form a cohort and they can go back to school but somebody else has a third grader at marigold elementary and they they opted not to do the same thing that third grader is not being provided the same opportunity that that the other child is and so i think in the in the interest of equity and fairness to all of our kids the waiver process just should be a top down a top down thing and i'll just i'll just leave my comments there for now thank you okay we're going to move on to our next item and that item is yes i'm sorry i just want to know is it still possible for a speaker from 3-1-1 who you got

124the voicemail for is it too late for her to we had a speaker on item 311 who for whom we called and got voicemail are we past the point of no return on that one okay just didn't get to the phone in time it sounds like you know at the end of this i have a feeling this is going to take a while if she wants to hang around and at the end of this if she has something she still would like to say we will make sure she has an opportunity i think that's a good solution thank you very much okay so our next item is discussion action item regarding stage two red tier return to in-person instruction in a modified traditional am pm model so we will be discussing that thank you okay

125let's see if we're going to get this pulled up for us mr vincent thank you all right so originally we presented this to the to the board back in july 15 to 2020. now we are again um presenting it to tonight below you can see if people want to follow um the slide that's a bitly and then we'll have this on every on the next few slides so if they want to write it down so the people out in the public want to follow along the slides themselves that'll be on that bitly okay again the timeline that we went over earlier and i'm not going to kind of drum that down but um again we started back in march again on july 15th we believed that we were going to am pm we ate to

126a modified traditional schedule at that time the board approved to go do an am pm model we were ready to move forward with that on our august 14th date and then again we got changed back to into what it's now called the purple status and so we went into online so we're back again now we've been put into the red status of what brings us here today for this presentation okay sorry timeline that we're looking at right now is tonight we're going to present the reopening update to you guys tomorrow the district and cuta will be meeting to do our negotiations which we'll talk about what we need to do that before we move we can move forward we are hoping and and i'm not going to want to speak for miss moretti or mr

127moretti or mr hanlon but our goal is to try to finish that negotiation and get an mou by the end of tomorrow as long as that needs to be taken if not we will try to add more dates again i don't want to speak for mr moretti on that but that's what our hope is and then on uh august 15th and 16th we're hoping to have transition days again this is all pertaining on what action happens at the end of the end of this i'm sorry october at the end of this presentation and this is what we're presenting to you guys tonight so uh october 15th and 16th would be transition days where we would give our teachers and we'll again discuss that in negotiations tomorrow to hope that we can offer them some some

128days to get ready for the transition if the board chooses and then october 19th would be the very earliest that we believe that we could be ready to go back to to school and bring our kids back to school in some type of modified traditional program then we have the october 21st board meeting and we will go over the reopening and then again you see the dates going into winter break safety guidelines i'm going to have mr baltimore kind of go over those for us right now um if you may so as a reminder on in july the board approved the safety guidelines i mean you'll see those here we are going to be asking the board to make one modification to these moving forward the previous guidelines had taking temperatures in the access entry

129locations of all of our schools based on guidance from butte county health and also understanding that that would create quite the bottleneck and really make social distancing almost impossible we're recommending to the board that we take that piece out related to our guidelines we do have over 750 touchless thermometers that have been purchased and are available to all teachers and staff if they see that somebody may need to have their temperature taken so that we do have those available specifically in addressing the guidelines however i want to let the board know that hand sanitizer dispensers are installed in every classroom throughout the district except for marsh junior high school and there are a couple locations um that we're waiting for a back order of those dispensers they were delivered today and will be implemented uh

130this week um hand sanitizer dispenser stands have been purchased and our hope is to post those at every entry point and exit point in all of our schools we are looking at purchasing additional items as well so that we can have those on pe blacktops in those areas social distancing signage will be installed on the ground and all doors that will be done by an outside agency that work will be done next monday tuesday and wednesday custodians will be using the microfiber cleaning system that we've talked to the board about previously and all of the washing machines will be installed as well the elementary schools will be cleaned in between an am pm model by custodians the secondary classrooms however we are unable to get to every classroom during the passing periods so our attempt

131is to have a product for cleaning called hypochlorous or also neutral electrolyzed water that would be available in the classrooms for use by teachers or by students if they desired we're also looking at possibly having outside service provide microfiber cloths that from what we read is about 93 percent effective in eliminating germs and viruses on hard services in classrooms that would be a weekly service that we're looking at right now custodians and support staff will be wiping down high touch areas throughout the day including door knobs light switches and our heating ventilation air conditioning systems also called hvac systems are having their filters replaced this week with merv 13 rated filters typically we do that on a quarterly basis however with the fires in the area we note that those need to be changed now

132and there has been a challenge with getting those in supply so that is our typical process is replacing those quarterly and that would be our goal and we're trying to order them as quickly as we can so that they can be here so with all those in place we think we're going to be addressing the guidelines that the board had previously approved and at the end of the presentation we do request that the board approve the updated guidelines with removal of the temperature checks at entrance points thank you any questions for mr baltimore before we move on i'm sorry linda any questions for kevin about this safety okay thank you oh great um as we discussed back in july um our personal protective equipment chico unified will require protective facial coverings for staff and students

133during the school day that has not changed from the july 15th this includes cloth or disposable facial coverings or facial shields for students and staff food handlers and healthcare staff will wear and require all ppe equipment again i don't know if mr baltimore if you want to talk about what's going to be happening with the signage that will be hap next week we do have an outside company that we purchased signage for all of our school districts so on the ground on concrete and on linoleum and in on carpet as well we'll have the little round dots that ask to maintain six feet social distancing and we'll have signs on all every every door that will also note safety precautions and and washing hands and social distancing as well that will be a standard across

134all of our schools and those will be installed within the three days monday tuesday and wednesday we are providing the vendor the layout of each school with the different locations for those i will say we're not going to get that perfect right out of the gate but again we'll follow up in areas that we need to make sure that we have the correct signage or those items on the ground so that people can designate and see that spacing requirement we'll get that done as well thank you mr baltimore also families recommended to take daily temperature checks before they send their child to school anyone with a fever over 1.4 degrees or higher may not go to a school site anyone with a fever of 100.4 degrees or higher at school will be sent home students

135adults we're asking our families to do wellness checks on their child before they send them school the temperature checks cold cough all the different things that we're looking for we're asking families to do that before they send their child to school students returning will be required to have at least one designated family member available to pick them up at any time should they become ill again for safety reasons social distancing was mr bolton just went over social distancing signage will be placed in high traffic areas as he talked about we also recognize that six foot distancing may not be possible at all times as a result facial coverings will be required at all times physical barriers will be installed as determined by administration and high traffic areas were on campus where social distancing is not

136possible such as front offices and cafeterias which a lot of that's already been done appreciate our maintenance and operation group for that classroom furniture and equipment will be arranged for social distancing to the greatest extent possible yes so when you talk about the physical barriers are you talking about the clear plexiglas yes sorry the plexiglass that's been played displayed in our offices and we have them um on a lot of different places for our speech teachers or special ed and stuff like that also i know some of the schools are not using the plexiglass but they'll be using signage to go one way um on certain hallways i know that they are planning to do that in the yale building here at pleasant valley high school okay thank you all right stages of reopening and

137line and structural models stages of reopening are decided based on the color tier placement of the county chico unified will implement instructional models specifically aligned with the stages of reopening as stages change we will adjust instructional models offered so right now i'll go over that we were in purple tier and as of three weeks ago i think we're in our third week we got moved from purple to red so again when we held this back in july stage one is now called purple again our state has decided to change how we dictate from stages to colors um so we've changed that so families again bear with us when we go from purple from stage one and those types of things understand we are now following the state guidelines when it comes to that we are

138now in the red tier stage two lower risk workplaces modified school programs and child care reopen again we already have and i'll have later we'll talk about our work day child super division orange tier means that we could bring back kids full time all day with the safety guidelines in place remember all the guidelines we showed you earlier are all applicable for all of our stages okay so next yellow tier end of the stay-at-home order return to expanded workforce and highest risk workplaces so that means we would not need on the safety precautions if my understanding if we go to yellow but we would most likely ask the board if we wanted to keep some or all we just want to remind the board of what is available currently it's been available for three years

139now working on a fourth year oak bridge academy is dedicated to serve its population it is a school of choice and it has been serving needs of students so just through this slide in here to remind people of some of the parameters related to oak bridge that they can slide back and forth between the oakbridge site and their comprehensive site um john i have a question real quick i had gotten a few emails about parents who were concerned that if they did do the oakdale model that bridge i'm sorry that they would have to graduate from that if they you know so how do you figure where students have to graduate i thought that with this one they could also take some classes before they could have just taken other classes too at say chico

140high or pv high so how do you determine where they actually get a diploma from so there are multiple ways to make that determination just to say philosophically our goal right now with everything that's going on is to be as flexible as we possibly can be if a student has been at chico high school for example for three years moves over to oak bridge and second semester we're still in a situation and that student wants to graduate from chico high school we will do everything we can to make sure that person gets a chico high school diploma we have multiple generations of loyalty to our schools so we want to make sure we we honor that we do have hybrid schedules where students take four classes at a high school and take two classes at

141oak bridge and vice versa so the ada is the the reason we have a 4-2 split because if we have a student only taking three courses at either one of those schools we don't get ada for either and we try to avoid a single a single class situation because then we get into i'll just say it very generically teacher shopping the student decides he or she doesn't want to have that teacher anymore and they just you know they go to the different program so we can move people back and forth but we are committed to being as flexible as we need to be to meet meet student needs this is a unprecedented time thank you john i have a question as well to piggyback on that from mr shepherd sure so i've been getting some

142emails as well and um there's maybe some misinformation because not only the graduation part is something i've seen but also if parents opt at this point in time to take their student to oak bridge will they need to remain at oak ridge for the rest of the semester that's question number one and uh the other question that i've been hearing or concern i've been hearing if they opt to take their children to oak bridge they're going to lose their spot at their neighborhood school their elementary neighborhood school so i'd like you to address those two things please well thank you for the opportunity because it saved could save us some more fun phone calls and emails so to answer your your first question us because oakbridge is a program of an alternative education independent study

143by edcode we have to move students back to their comprehensive site we try to do that during grading periods so the end of a progress report a semester because that's the best time we've found to do that but by edcode parents do have the right to return to their comprehensive site so i want to make sure parents know that and again we are we feel an obligation to return people to the program that was meeting their needs prior to everything that was happening and i can see mr sullivan nodding his head we have very impacted programs very successful and people want to get into those programs however we are going to do everything we can to to guarantee those students those spots back in their programs thank you including sorry one more thing including form

144tents one last thing if i can uh musabi we do want to emphasize that students who attend oak ridge are eligible to compete in athletics at their neighborhood school very good thank you and linda in the elementary world i i don't see that as a problem right now as far as being able to get students back into their neighborhood school great thank you mr sullivan okay i'm going to have mr carrots kind of talk about the survey data that we have from parents so a parent survey was sent out on uh september 30th uh asking parents if or when we return to school given all the information that they know right now would they like to send their child back to school for in-person instruction or not okay and uh safety guidelines were linked uh

145in the message that went out uh directing parents to complete the survey and we are still in the process of collecting data right now as you can imagine that's a very short turnaround to send something out at the end of last week and and have a complete data set for you but we do have a significant number of surveys returned right now we actually have surveys survey entries for almost 60 percent of our students and so that's over 7 000 families or 7 students have survey entries of those survey entries 85.4 answered yes when in-person instruction begins i would like to send my student back to school 14.6 the remainder said no so you can see the overwhelming uh majority so far is to parents wanting to send their child back to the in-person instruction

146um i think that one of the things we heard repeatedly from public comments and emails was that they many people felt there was a lack of nuance in this question i know some people understood it as if i don't say yes i won't get to stay at my current school site and others understood it to mean that if they said no ingenuity would be their only choice so i'm a little concerned with how much inference we try to gain out of out of this particular survey because i do know there was a lot of concern about parents not knowing exactly what they were signing up for and what they were answering for so you are correct on on on that uh we will beginning after again after this board meeting and what the decision of

147what the board will be making those contact contacts back to our families because one of the things that we will be discussing in negotiations tomorrow and tonight will be the third option that we'll be offering parents um we're hoping and and i believe this will happen but again i don't want to step on anybody that will have an option if families want to stay at their school site on an online version that we'll be able to offer that we are going to work through that tomorrow with mr mr moretti and mr hanlon and the negotiating teams on both sides but we think that we have a plan for that in place so we think that'll make families and again i think what you're trying to say mr lando is that number might change a little

148bit when they find that out and clearly that might happen i know that when we surveyed our families back in the summer about if they wanted to have their child online um or go back to our school sites when we were thinking about am pm and this is they were choosing between oak bridge and at that time on their school site we were about 70 and again our oak bridge model is sitting at about 528 students right now so we know a lot of those families chose that coming out of the shoot because we told them if we're going back to am pm um it's going to be hard to get into oak bridge at that time which we are again pretty full at oak bridge and we would have to add more staff there

149at this time if we were going to go there so we feel that a lot of our families chose oak bridge knowing that they wanted to be online no matter what if even if we went back to npm so do you think there's going to be any migration from from oak ridge back into the schools we recently talked to the um rhonda olam who's in charge of that and she's been in contact with their families we believe we might get some knowing the fact that we have online for them at their school site so that might happen we will again like mr shepherd said that we have to accommodate that if they want to go back to their school site and we will do that again that takes teachers to do that and it's going

150to be a puzzle that our schools are going to have to work through and we're going to have to work through through negotiations but yes just to share a little liz when we started kind of collecting this data there was a huge push like mr lando shared from families kind of communicating us we want to stay connected to our current school site how can we do that how can that be possible we you know we we love rosedale particular or whatever the school might be we don't want to lose we don't leave this program that we've kind of signed up for oakbridge doesn't offer that so i think as soon as staffs started kind of getting that sense of things i mean they started coming to us saying we don't want to lose our families

151we want to figure out some way that we can put something forth to allow them to stay here even if it's in an online structure so there's been a lot of creative ideas they've been floated around by staff and administration also around this i think we're going to be talking about all those tomorrow negotiations and i hope and i think i think cuta the members i've been hearing from are really interested to allow some flexibility to allow those opportunities to be there for families to stay connected and that's our hope is tomorrow we'll come out there with something that allows those things to happen so president griffin at some point i'd like to talk about negotiations yeah this may or may not be the appropriate time but um i do we keep bringing it up

152and i want to give the board an update on where we're at and what the challenges we will be facing tomorrow so at some point when you yeah i think this this probably is a good time because we we know that so much hinges on that and as far as us being able to really consider something we need to know if the potential is there you know for this to actually occur and that could okay okay thank you because it was directly related to the switching in and out of oak bridge sure some of the um the emails and comments that that i've got the concern was that classes that were available at say chico high were not available at oak bridge but if we are able to maintain online at the school site we

153can solve that problem on the switch if the student is at oak bridge are they going to be able to change into those same classes if they want to now return to their home school yes so to answer the first question that's exactly what we're talking about with the third option a great example of that is our ap classes that are not available at oak bridge and we need to be able to provide opportunities for those students and so if we can tomorrow and i think we're going to go into lane in the negotiation conversation here in a second if we can figure out the language that would accommodate those types of scenarios it's a win-win for for as many students as possible so we're really hopeful that we can dedicate our time to that

154tomorrow and so the second question about students having access to the same courses they the courses that are when students shift back typically in a pre-coveted year they shift into very similar levels of courses they may not be the exact same course but they shift back to the same same level and that's how we've been doing it since oak ridge has opened so that's the precedent has been set for that okay okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna go ahead jump on an update because i think these um some of the things that we're discussing in negotiations are going to be critical for the decision you're going to make tonight so let me start with csea so csea we have had a number of meetings and we have exchanged first draft documents with them so while

155i don't want to say we have a tentative agreement we're one step shy of that i did talk with their um negotiating lead today and there are some minor adjustments but the but the bulk of the document is pretty well set in fact we have reached agreement to to continue on the online mou with the major points even if they they haven't gone through their full adoption process because it's a quite lengthy process they have to release it to their members for 10 days before vote and then it has to have a 610 process in sacramento so it's that's well beyond the october 19th date but we have agreed that the major points are going to be carried over into the the new document and they will not grieve the areas that we have um

156agreed on with regards to transfer of people on short notice and working slightly out of your job description those are those are the main points that we wanted and they wanted the major things like um covet protection if they were to get sick for a long term illness and not have um be impacted through sick days so we both got what we wanted and um it's just now we've got to kind of wait to get through the process so csea is is pretty well set cta as has been said we will be meeting tomorrow we have much of much of the document in agreement but there were some major issues there were three or four major issues that we needed to resolve we think we have the answers going in tomorrow to to make that

157happen i've had prelim some preliminary um talks um an exchange of information on that with um cota leadership so my impression is they are as motivated as we are to get this done um and uh and like jay said if um for some reason we don't get it done tomorrow i would certainly be open to getting another date on the calendar very quickly to wrap things up but um [Music] a couple of things um as we want to talk about that third option and we'll be discussing that the other thing is uh that there has been some give and take on is the 50 case load in in a class at any given time we can't guarantee six foot distancing with um students and uh and so cta has come back and asked for a

15850 max case load and that really ties in well with the am pm half and half as we go through so i think we're we're in good shape there child care has been a major issue we have some um some wonderful answers uh tina keane has done a great job on working with card so we think we have some responses there one other thing i one of the things i just want to make the board aware of is that we currently provide child care if we don't continue to to provide some kind of child care for our employees children um they can they have access to the the state has gives a 12-week which is a which is a three-month um basically child care leave and so we need to continue to do that we

159cannot hire teachers in the middle of the year so we if we're going to provide services we need to provide the daycare we think we have a great solution with card they have been very cooperative and and we're going to proceed forward on that obviously the teachers also want that covert protection just so you have an idea we have offered it during since the start of school actually we start we have offered it since march and uh we've only had one employee get ill enough to take advantage of that so while it's a very very small risk for the district it's a great risk for the individual employees so it's it's a great value for that person that if they should get it and get an extended illness they would have access to it so

160kind of the summary of this is given the tenor of the negotiations with both groups it has been very constructive very positive and i'm hopeful that we can reach agreement tomorrow i know that kevin ready is on and he may want to add his perception of of things but um so i'm going to invite him to to speak also to give you some feedback okay kevin would you like to share thank you uh and thank you jim we are just as as motivated as you are jim is is a a glass half full kind of guy i think we can get it done but it is such a long list and it just takes time to go through all that um but uh if he's confident he's got the answers i want to hear then

161so am i so hopefully we can could finish finish tomorrow that is so the point would be that is certainly our goal to uta's goal is to be able to finish if it's possible and and i'll leave it at that kevin remember i know where you live so there's one other thing i do want to address because um in the last week or so a different model has been approached and has been brought forward the a b model we did have discussions about that in the summer slightly different than what has been brought forward now we have been meeting on am pm for gosh since july because we thought we were coming back then we kind of shifted gears into online and then as soon as we got the online mou and we started school

162we immediately shifted back to the am pm model so there's been a lot of conversation a lot of discussions a lot of adding a lot of input from from staff including a lot of teachers and administrators in order to to to guide us in negotiations for the amp model the ab model has some very good merit to it however to to stop and set aside apm i just want to i just want to be real honest with you if we set aside am pm now and we go to a b it's not going to be something we can we can resolve tomorrow that's it's and that means uh the earliest to open is is august 19th i just don't see that as possible there's just too much work to do another option october i'm sorry

163october 19th another option may be to for the board to consider adopting the am pm and then we can step back and talk about a the a b model you know while we're still have kids in school the difference between the two models we talked about a b which is a student will come to school every other day all day long and the new model that has been proposed is that on those off days teachers would live stream so t so students would not um miss any instruction on any given day so it's day for day um the good news is that we're it's kind of back to normal in a sense that it's you have a day for day instruction rather than a half half as much in the old a b model the

164the downside is that you have kids um streaming all day long for six periods and that and and that's that can be that can be pretty tough for some kids i'm not saying that that's um that's that doesn't mean we can't do it but um but but in order to get there in an order you can't just say you will live stream that has that's a negotiated item um that's gonna that's gonna result in some significant negotiations that could take a while to get there yeah and i'm sure like all the rest of the board members uh you know i've been receiving numerous you know emails particularly from teachers who are very much in favor of that model what would just you know what kind of concerns me is that we've gone so far down

165the road with this am pm model and i know one of the reasons that we chose that was so that there'd be consistency between elementary and secondary in case families you know for families who are planning but after reading the model um that was proposed the uh alternating days i do see that there's a lot of merit to that but it would take really a long time i think to go through this whole process again because we know how long it took you to get to this point where you would be able to have an agreement with the union about this because it it has to be vetted with their members you know all the the little details have to be worked out which you have spent since july with these organizations and teachers working

166out so you know but the other thing that concerns me too is if we went with one and then we switched to another it's kind of like we keep switching around too much which also causes confusion so it really is a bit of a dilemma but we if we do plan uh to move forward with opening at least in some capacity and then that's another issue that i know a lot of people have brought up is you know they want the question answered what's the big rush you know we realize we've gotten the feedback from parents that a lot of parents they do feel they want it to happen like yesterday but you know what would be the consequences of us waiting postponing if we do have this very large swell of support from from

167teachers if we were to delay and check out this plan what would be the you know what would be the downside of that that's that's something we have to we have to consider um i'll get you kathy and then tom so um i'm really concerned about um introducing uh another huge factor you know throwing the dice the aspect of what the state has said is if we open by the 19th then we can stay open if we were to go through some extended potential discussion of an option that hasn't been vetted with everybody it was only focused on secondary so i think that's a really really big issue you have you have teachers who are secondary with kids in elementary and you have the reverse so i um i do not want to there's an

168ad on tv right now where the guy has a car and he's whipping through the old-timey sheriff thing you know with the horse and then he rescues the woman on the track with the train and dr kaiser that's like magic dr guys we're just uh getting word that it's hard to hear with the mask piece on so i don't know if you can speak directly to that or okay thank you sure i'm sorry what i'm was saying is that we've been working on a solution about how to return to school with controlled populations for a really long time i don't think we could have any potential of getting an agreement and open on october 19th if we don't open on october 19th then we have no guarantee that we would be able to open potentially

169at all and so right now butte county is in a very good place the data coming in is extremely low our hospitals have lots of capacity and here's i think a very encouraging aspect about health awareness in butte county in the hospital ordered 1700 flu doses had two free clinics and they're all gone and they're ordering more people are paying attention they are practicing better health than they were doing earlier so um oroville hospital is running a free clinic tomorrow for flu what my seven-year-old liked was there was no shot for the kids they can just get it sprayed up their nose so the framework of this is i think we have to continue to take the train down the track and not get off on a side road that might end us stalled so

170um a couple of things i want to address so i apologize if i go a couple different directions one is we are in a good place with our statistics at a county level now that's that's true there's also a great concern that part of that is because testing has been much lower since we have lost we temporarily lost one of our testing sites during the fire my concern about saying get this done now so that we can get back in do we want to bring students back if we believe that there's going to be a jump back to purple at some point that does not seem i don't want kids back on campus because of a loophole if it's going to be dangerous for them to be in groups later on that seems um cutting

171off one's nose despite one's face and if it's going to remain safe and our numbers are good we have time to wait look at other options and make a really sound decision and i urge us to be a deliberative body and not try and rush and get something done on that note i would really like to hear from mr meredith if he's still available regarding whether or not the teachers have checked in with you is there a temperature check on this a b model we've been getting a lot of uh anecdotal feedback do you have any numbers uh what i when i send out my survey to secondary i ask them for the the short answer is everybody is evenly split pretty much on everything whether it's an a b model the straight a b

172model the alternating a b model or the a b day the one thing though that i did got a lot of feedback today that was people said well i didn't know i could vote for the a b day because the district had no i'm sorry the school board had already voted for the um am pm model so uh but they don't want to take any more surveys and anyway it's on if you ask any question that everyone there is no consensus there are pluses and minuses to all the models uh and and i'm going to punt this question to you guys this is going to be your decision that's what we're for um on i would like to say that after hearing from mr kessler earlier um the idea of having a day set aside

173for advisory and sel check-ins and uh professional development and plc work is exactly the kind of educational model that i'm interested in um getting teachers more time to collaborate in a regular school year would be is great and something we should be pushing towards i think having that chance in an in time like this when there are so many emergent needs should be one of our highest priorities frankly yeah i agree with you on that one tom thank you for bringing that up um eileen yes thank you madam president um i i my concern is we know that there's a significant okay let's be exact there's a majority of our population that wants in-person school in any model as soon as possible and we have been hearing from the students at at the secondary level

174of course because they're they're able to say what they think thank goodness if we were to all of a sudden say okay secondary kids you're going to have to wait another month five weeks maybe for us to make up our mind you're gonna have to stay wherever you are doing whatever you're doing no in person no a b i would not want to be in that household when that student got that message we've already got so many kids on the brink of just absolutely coming apart because of the isolation for so long my goodness let's do am pm and make it work as well as we can and not delay a decision yeah sorry i just when you asked a question earlier what are some of the reasons why we would or would not want

175to delay right one as ms robinson just say just talked about we're in a customer service business and our customers are our students and our students that we've been talking about in previous board meetings and their families have been telling us this the emotional toll it's taking on some of them for being in the house all day and not being around is is is adding up and we've been we said back in july that we are ready to go back into an am pm model for us to come back out and say that we are not ready in october um i feel we with our cleaning that we have in place that we're ready um to go with because one of the concerns is are we going to be safe enough to come back with

176the steps to mr baltimore and the maintenance and operation that's taken i believe that that is ready i believe through negotiations um it's ms moretti and mr hanlon has expressed we believe that we can get through that tomorrow or and or in the next day or two i'm we are really hoping on tomorrow and that we don't have to order dinner but we are ready to do so um i also believe um that we have part of that is um that we are ready to go um educationally if we had to because we have been planning for am pm um for from since july i understand what mr orlando is saying about extra time and again but i i worry about us going out to our community and saying that we um are not ready

177and that our students would have to delay to go back to school when the county and the state are telling us um that you're you can go um between october 14th and 19th that will give us a month that we've been in the red so it was first we had to be in it for two weeks before they would even consider it now we're in our second two weeks of being in the red so we would have we had to be in it for a month before they would allow us to go back to school so again i think that we would be ready to go if necessary i think there was another issue too um something about the ab-98 that was another issue that impacted on um the um a b schedule being difficult

178at this time um a whole day right so i don't know john are you the one who can best address that and i'll get tim karis up here too because he's the sb 98 guru we do we are required to provide daily engagement opportunities for students with at least one certificated uh personnel so there are there are ways to do that one other thing one of the ways you'd be able to do that is through this third option we're talking about um to provide students that daily engagement and the the requirement has not gone away there's some misinformation that i've seen in different social media platforms that sp98 would be addressed in just a standard a b model districts that are using a b are having to add an advisory period which then increases a

179case load for teachers okay so so that then ties into the whole difficulty in presenting this to the the union and having that negotiated correct because that's an additional time for the teachers correct correct and or more students or you know it's it's a change in their in their circumstances any change in the working conditions okay yeah okay because i was thinking yeah okay wait a second linda i think i'm gonna get to you linda because i'm sorry i haven't seen you up there that's okay thank you for asking that question liz that makes makes a difference for me um i absolutely agree with tom i had proposed this a b schedule in july when we were talking about it but it got shut down kind of quickly and i'm kind of sorry about that

180but my thought had been to actually phase the students bring the elementary students in am pm and then work towards the ab schedule for secondary but with the change in working conditions that's a bigger piece so i would ask you know if we go to am pm i think it was maybe eileen said you know switching back and forth is not a good thing i still would like to see the a b schedule so if we started with am pm i really would direct the staff or our district staff to work on negotiations to maybe by spring semester go into an a b model i don't know how my colleagues feel about that but it just really makes more sense our teachers have been clear in the emails i've gotten uh that that is their

181preferred schedule um you know cte purposes sanitation purposes there's just a lot of reasons the advisory periods so i don't know i i really would like to direct staff to work towards that a b model yeah and i guess the big question then would be if that were the case could the shift be could that happen is it even feasible that that happened that if you did start with am pm could you shift a few months down the line yeah semester i would think but and then we would be committed for the rest of the year even if we went back to you know yellow tier or whatever we'd still be in that model do you do you have anything on that jim that you'd like to share for a secondary perspective yes i'd have

182to defer to ted on the elementary but for secondary um you're still in class periods so regardless of what model you're in so i think john you've done this too the transition uh would not necessarily be you know easy and and perfect but um it's certainly doable i mean we're still in class periods we don't need to reassign kids um it's really um the transition in communicating that to parents and then of course any of the activities that kids are in after school are are issues if they're in sports and those types of things coming back even if you're not in school that day those kinds of things the only thing i would like to to say i want to back up a little bit to the issue of collaboration and i and i as

183principal chico high school i was i was there when we initiated collaboration and i totally support it the only concern is is that in either one of these models the students are only coming back for 50 of the instructional time now so so if you if you designate a day or a part of a day for collaboration and all those things now you're cutting into even more instructional time so the just keep be mindful that that that decision uh may be a good one in a different time but you're going to be impacting students instructional time so in any decision just keep going and if i can just add to that one thing to consider if we do have that kind of day and we know some districts are considering that we still have the

184daily engagement requirement and it's not just the requirement that concerns us we can build a schedule we can build it it's the concern that kids won't engage if you imagine and i'm not speaking for all 14 and 15 year olds but if all they have to if all they're doing on a friday is clicking in the zoom so the school can get money the level of attendance will probably shrink because they don't have a motivation to attend the zoom so we'd have to be sure that we really strengthened the motivation for that kind of engagement i think we can but it's it's a concern so another another issue though that really requires some planning yes and and some uh you know a process yes kevin i i just want to say none of these are

185insurmountable it's just the time it will take right to figure it out so if you guys are willing to spend that time so are we and we will figure it out it's just you have to be willing to to spend the time to do that so did you have some thoughts on the elementary transition you know i'm thinking that i don't know about the other people but i'm not thinking that we're we're talking about elementary i think we're talking elementary is fine in the am pm yeah okay then i don't need to say anything so it's gonna i was gonna kind of stop you unless other people no i know she's one thing i would share just thinking of building in that collaboration time with elementary i know it centers around a lot of concern

186for parents it's just that daycare situation yes if we do come back in some capacity and we're using a wednesday collaboration day where teachers are off doing this kind of thing which i agree with gym we support it we want those things to happen but it does start creating some some daycare situations for families significant too yeah i think the kit with the little kids it would it would still be the you know the am pm i mean i i don't know but eileen i'm sorry i've been kind of delaying you for a while there no that that's quite all right we were dealing with tom's concerns led into a couple of other things um and and this is related today from associated press this was a release from the california state's director of health

187and human services dr mark galey and he was indicating that they have been doing um the information gathering on whether or not the let's see how many in the state of california they had um [Music] 32 of the state's 58 counties had opened to in-person instruction because they were in tiers that would allow them to do that and that after those counties open to in-person instruction they have [Music] they've been looking at the information and so far they said they have noticed no increase in transmission rates or problems at the schools that have opened i saw that report as well and while that is very encouraging um we have to look at how long those schools have been open the american pediatric association recently released a survey saying that since april the number of cobit

188cases that have been attributed to kids have risen from two percent of all cases in children and school-aged children up to ten percent i don't think we can pretend that covet is not a concern for kids i know a lot of not no one in this room particularly but i know there's a lot of talk especially on social media that kids can't get it and kids can't spread it and i think we need to acknowledge that's not the case and for all the students who are chomping at the bit to return and i know there are many of them and i feel for them we also have students who have immune issues or who have family members with immune issues who are deathly afraid of having to come back and who also don't want the

189edge annuity as a platform i think there's a reasonable concern i will be asking if not right now at some point for us to not to consider not opening until november 2nd to give staff time to a watch the numbers from butte county to see if they rise again after the closure of the testing site and also to make sure we have plants nailed down for this third way i know it's an indicator that we are ready to go if we are really going to put in place a third way in which we somehow offer site-based online learning to students as well as opening in the amt model i want to have that nailed down before i vote to reopen so i would look to you guys for perhaps two more weeks of time to

190make sure we know what we're doing before we do it okay um i think i've already spoken to mr vincent about how that could possibly work as far as the technology and yeah oh what okay um okay well yeah kevin do you want to go first then well i just wanted to comment on something prior i know you guys aren't looking at at uh elementary for an a day b day but just to make this more complicated when i surveyed my elementary members i did put the a day b day on there and i got a lot of feedback from many members i couldn't tell you how many saying why didn't i get to vote on that so there's interest there too so good luck well i think the yeah just second i think though

191that the [Music] i don't know the am am pm for the kids seems like a more natural fit and i think after after having spoken to mr vincent about what the possibilities are as far as having the third option it would seem to make a lot of sense um i'm just comparing it because i am spending every day in this process with an elementary school student and it is working out really well and i'm just thinking how would that work if i did want you know that my grandson to stay at home with me and not expose him to school what would that look like and um mr vincent was kind of telling me what that might look like so maybe you could share that you bet so um so we're very fortunate in that

192we have a very good relationship with viewsonic and so because of that we were able to get 350 of these tvs right here and also we're able to get 800 of those webcams that are up on top and so utilizing those tvs the webcams and the computers that are in all of our staff members rooms it gives them a good platform to be able to utilize that to do zoom meetings while they're teaching a class so if there's a class in place and there's kids at home they can utilize the camera with their desktop machine to show the teacher and they can be writing on the on the whiteboard that's on the viewsonic and that would show up also then on the screens for the kids that are home so it gives a really nice

193platform for those teachers to to give a really engaging interface for those kids and i think you mentioned too another benefit was that it somehow helped the um transmission of the zoom or the viewsonic or something like that and we saw this in an earlier board meeting we had was usonic that was trying to manage the zoom meetings and the viewsonic by itself trying to do everything was brought to its knees so by having two pcs in the classroom now the pc the the desktop machine can manage the zoom it can do the recording it can do all the things that it needs to do and that takes a lot of processing power and then split that load then with the viewsonic to do the screen share so between those two machines it actually makes

194a very smooth a smooth presentation thank you john kathy yes so i feel like uh we're uh jumping around and i would like us to get back on the context of a decision that we might be making and that is that we were in in three were discussion action and the issue was return to in-person instruction now i believe the third rail or framework of reference it's been alluded to but what i believe we've been talking about is the school would be in an am pm model the teacher would be teaching and if there were children for whom either personal health or family health because we've seen a lot of comments in that context very real they could be watching their teacher and their classmates on zoom and with the new screen that you've got

195set up so to me that is a a viable third model i believe we would need to vote first on am pm and opening and then have that be included or do we can we just do it all together because we hadn't really had a lot of sophistication about this but it's it seems like it's really matured in the last at the end of our presentation that one of the slides i believe is is the next is the action steps and we still have some slides to get through to get to get to that i just wanted we did work on some language to try to better define this third option because it could just be bouncing all over so a sentence we came up with just to start the conversation is in-person lessons will

196be transmitted in real time via zoom and or other district approved platforms accessible by students enrolled in the class with the following expectation in place that there be written communication to be delivered to parents of online learners describing the reduction in engagement opportunities so if you picture a teacher trying to manage the 19 let's say it's 50 percent 19 kids in his or her room and manage chat and manage hands being raised that's very difficult for a teacher to do however there is a district in the bay area that is doing this and they've um they've agreed that the last five minutes of each class the teacher addresses anything that's in the chat or any raised hands by the online learners so there is some language that we've started with and we think we can

197we can flesh that out so we should go back so let's um let's let's okay let's tina i think you were going to go through these and let's just go through these and then let's but i think there's a couple of questions that have to be answered and that we've been delving into and and i think it is appropriate that we do do that because we we have a lot of concern we have concern from all different kinds of arenas and we do need to discuss these things so um but let's go through tina's and then we'll come to the question that john referred to i just want to let you know that tina's done a masterful job getting this ready and again she spent the last few weeks developing a workday child supervision for

198an am pm model and that would probably need to change i don't know such we're flexible tina yes you have been i appreciate that as jim alluded to a little bit earlier we have had the workday child supervision going on since august 17th when school started we've served 260 kids of chico unified employees in the model that we have and have welcomed on as ritesh kanji mentioned earlier at this point i believe 45 foster youth homeless and at risk students with capacity for more we also moving forward because this is a big concern to families we you know those of us that have raised kids and worked we all can certainly understand this we are looking at a different way to shift things around for the smoothest transition for kids to be at their school

199site and then also have supervision at that site which would enable families to be able to continue their work day pretty seamlessly without having to manage movement and change for them and their kids jim said it earlier and i can't speak highly enough of card they have been as flexible with this situation as i could possibly dream they could be and it's kind of an adventure we're on but we are flexible to shifting and moving i do believe we can we can adapt to anything to help our families where we're at it would be about 502 children currently with cards kids that are paid right now ours and are at risk population so so this was designed obviously for the am pm so that's another reason especially for elementary school that that because that's who's

200going to be needing the care more so correct we shifted it to to work for am pm yes and and do are there children that are in um middle school they go to there keep in mind you have high school teachers that have elementary age kids so if they're in a different work schedule it doesn't coincide so daycare will not match up okay see that's that's the other thing is we we worked these things out in our minds back in july and now we have to refresh ourselves on all the reasons why leaving parts that are intertwined right exactly thing that we need to consider on that too if we have one secondary at an ab schedule and elementary is a am pm a lot of families use their older siblings their junior high and

201their high school siblings to watch their their the younger siblings so they would not be on the same schedule in order to do that also my phone's been blowing up from teachers that are telling me on text message we didn't know that we were supposed to be writing emails to support am pm because we thought that was the model we were going into i think miss moretti mr moretti said that very nicely earlier it's split down with his things and he we would have to go back out most likely and i don't want to speak for miss moretti again that he most likely would have to survey his staff again but i think he's true that it would be split on pretty close to either side again teachers are saying we didn't know that we

202should be trying to support ampn because we thought that we are already going to that i'm going to just jump in here for a moment and just encourage the board to make sure we listen to i know we have some staff members that want to speak on both probably am hm and ab so let's make sure we give them a time before we get too far down headed where we want to go and we also should hear from parents as well there may be advantages to av to parents there may be advantages to am pm but let's make sure we hear from them as well okay so we'll let tina finish up hers and then um you know as we said originally we want to listen to what staff has to present and then we'll

203entertain uh comments from other people so i can finish up my section here before john and ted take over in in saying that we are adaptable to help support teachers with their children and also in conjunction with those folks that have been with card since the beginning and are at risk population so this is a sample without times in because we're negotiating those but it'll be roughly speaking you know a little bit less than half a day because we need to be some change over time where you know group a would be leaving group b is not there yet so the classes can be cleaned sterilized and then as that process finishes it would the group b would be coming in so it's a little bit vague because we haven't really fleshed out the exact

204times yet but this was built around an am pm schedule with those kinds of things with a lunch break or you know lunch coming in for the i'm sure i can't talk right now i'm sorry it was designed so that we could be serving breakfast to the am group on site and it was designed so we could serve lunch to the pm group coming on site that way also but also so that when the am group was leaving they would be leaving with a lunch so they could be eating lunch at home and then conversely the pm group when they were leaving they would be leaving with a breakfast so they could be eating breakfast at home before they came to school so we want to make sure kids are fed when they come to

205school we also make sure they have time to eat on campus and certainly build in some time for cleaning to kind of sanitize those areas and make sure that they're ready for the next group to come in as well so it's intentionally vague without times but that was a design of it to kind of see what happens tomorrow negotiations as far as what the length of the day would look like but it'd be roughly half a day minus an hour plus for kind of cleaning in there someplace okay and here is a draft secondary schedule with times removed we still have some things to work on there it is rather busy just because we wanted to portray a student day and also a teacher day we know it's important for teachers to see okay when

206would i be teaching what so the colors are related to the teacher perception and then you can see the the student days so basically we have we have split our schools into quarters and we have students moving through either in the morning every other day or in the afternoon every other day and similarly to elementary the same lun meal programs would be offered we are also looking at providing the same snack to the after-school program students so you want to be sure that they're taken care of as well so this isn't the only thing that's changed here since the summer is the times just because those are still conversations we need to have any questions about this i know it's a busy graphic because we tried to layer on the different perspectives and this is

207just one week so the second week of this would be the opposite periods for the students each monday tuesday wednesday thursday and friday any questions eileen took me a minute there do they in the second week what i guess my question is do they wait a week before they repeat a class no they so in the first week let's say i was in i was a student in integrated math one i would see that teacher three times the first week and two times the second okay yeah five times over two weeks so this slide was a little some of the steps we'd need to be taking to move forward if the will of the board was to kind of determine determined model tonight and put a starting date in place we've certainly been talking with

208that monday teacher group which is one of the first things principal groups have been starting to have some conversations kind of one of those what-if conversations what do we need to start thinking about and planning towards in this area the third bullet down really talks about if we were moving and the will of the board was to come back on the 19th or whatever day we would want to kind of build in some time to give teachers some prep time planning time organization time and do something to the effect of do a quick check-in with students let them know what's happening let them kind of visit their class to see what they're going to be coming to but then do a short zoom let those teachers check out at that point and really get ready

209for the return of students at that point and take a day or two depending on what we come out with at negotiations for that also but but we know teachers haven't been in their class with kids for about eight months now so they're definitely chomping at the bit to have some time to get ready for that we want to try to build in some time to make that happen for them as well um on those two days elementary we have a couple questions about what some of that asynchronous time might be if they're in class a little bit shorter they might have a little bit more of a homework component to have to be doing we want to take some time to talk about that and plan accordingly for those things um secondary i'm certain

210we'll have some other issues that they want to be talking about as well so we're going to build in some time for those conversations and certainly talking with district leadership council about you know what's going to be happening how we're going to implement it and kind of moving forward from there with it could you be a little clearer in the framework of days so if we uh vote to start on the 19th what day date would these teachers have these 10-minute warning check-ins thursday and friday yeah thursday and friday before kathy's like the 15th and 16th so if we if that was the will of the board the 19th we've intentionally started talking saying we need to have a couple days it would be the thursday friday before like that so that would mean i

211mean because i have right i have one too you know that that would mean that he he wouldn't be doing his schooling thursday and friday we would have like i said a kind of a teacher check-in time really kind of introducing them to the class you're going to be coming here walking through some of the expectations for being in class kind of a little prep time via zoom so that when they do show up on that on the monday after they've had a little bit of exposure to the class and kind of the expectations and the guidelines they're coming back to but certainly with the um desire to give teachers some time to be getting ready for them to coming in person also okay so that teacher then would use uh the rest of the

212morning or the afternoon to actually get ready and not be thrust into it exactly okay thank you by the way you haven't met the five-year-old all right if we can click on this this is the butte county public health department guidance so they've developed um a scenario sheets for us to follow this is also on our website um our district website but so every scenario they have it when we go through it i believe that there is sorry if you can see him if a student or staff member the first one either exhibit symptoms answers yes to a health screening question or attempt check at 100.4 the action then again would be student and staff sent home contact health care provider for testing all right the no action needed we wouldn't at that time need

213to to stop school so they have developed scenarios for each type of situation that can come up i know a lot of that a lot of questions have come in emails of different situations they have guided us through what we would need to do um when it comes to which scenario we would have to follow well if there's any i know that i think you guys have seen this form before or not but that is available for people to see in the public next steps okay communicate reopening a school model and conditions with the families this is after you guys take action tonight families register for instructional models again we will be asking them and as mr lando said we might want to ask them again if we come with an option where the kids

214can be on their own campus zooming which we believe that we can make that happen tomorrow um planning for staffing adjustment begins that's that thursday friday we'll be doing some other stuff way this next week or actually friday with dlc we have an all dlc friday afternoon and we'll be talking to them after we get direction from the board and after we have negotiations on thursday we will be meeting with dlc to what they think that we're going to need to go over what model and what date that we are planning on going to fine-tune each instructional model and begin implementing safety guidelines again we will want to make sure that all our guidelines are in place as mr bolton says um we'll have them in place and we believe that they will be by

215next week and our principals are waiting again what we after tonight to try to possibly put different mo videos available to put out online what possibly the enter the of the campuses would look like and those types of things initiate professional development for staff and after we figure out too we want to be able to and we'll talk this in negotiations tomorrow our kinder garden parents we want to give them a day i don't know if it'll be that friday be you know be before we decide that model so the parents can walk their kids to the actual classroom because that's always been a big thing in the past or if we're going to start kindergartner a little later that day so they can no everybody else is in class so those people can walk

216onto our campus with their kids so that first time to go through the gates because we really don't want our families to that first day to say well can't go past the gate it's around the corner or whatever that kind of thing or here's your teacher here for the first time that they're seeing them so we would like to be able to provide some type of day for kindergarten okay at this time i guess we will be opening up the public i believe i know at one point we had 11 i don't know what we're up to before we do that may i just ask a couple random questions linda go ahead linda are you there according to mr vincent she is unmuted there she is can you hear us okay good we got you

217back oh sorry unstable internet apparently i think my husband's watching the baits i don't know um so face masks will we have face masks available for our students or face shields yes we have both in stock and we have a local supplier that can get them to us in just days so we have we have enough to provide excellent the other question was probably on the butte county health department sheet that jay showed us towards the end of this presentation but i i hate to even ask this question i don't want to put it out there but i think it's important if we do have a case of covid who does the contact tracing is that all on butte county health department to take care of that on our behalf my understanding is if we

218go to am pm we have to do that they do not provide contract contact tracing so i probably would follow our nurses okay very good all right the other question i'll ask later when we come down to uh taking a vote so thank you yes sorry when it comes to the mask we are going to be encouraging our families to have have mass for their children but we will have them available if they do forget forget them for that day um again having 12 000 nearly 12 000. that's a lot of masks every day which is why i was asking all right very good let's hear from the public okay so the way we're going to do this is the way i explained at the very beginning we're going to take the first three people

219and then we're going to determine how much time we want to spend with this if it's further i think we've covered a lot of things ourselves because we've referenced a lot of the letters that we've been receiving so i would hope we'd be able to get a good representation of different viewpoints and not just the same viewpoint because if we keep hearing people saying the same thing over and over again you know i'd like to find some way to determine getting you know the other perspective that there's other people out there yeah um tom go ahead on that note um i just want to get a clarification on the rules did we have a rule in the public input talking about uh emphasizing uh getting new speakers before having the same speaker twice well yes

220exactly i did we did it's in there i thought that was in there thank you because um who are our speakers for this next segment so the first three are andrea campos tanner johns and eva eva horvath those are the first three okay okay yes kathy i also thought though we made it really clear and i thought you said this at the beginning that the people who had submitted speaker cards as we had stated so we have i thought 11 of those or have we already gone through some of them we now have 21. okay there's no way that we can do that that would put us here all night it's already eight o'clock they each get three minutes you have to call them so i i want we had originally said 11 and i

221think we just have to go with the ones who initially submitted the speaker cards and i really appreciate you tom that if somebody has already made a comment then i i think we should defer to someone who hasn't so we are hearing different viewpoints so of the people that you have for the cards that were originally submitted are those any um duplicates of people who've already spoken yes and erica is amazing she's already highlighted the the person who has already spoken okay so we're gonna listen to people who haven't already spoken we'll take those and um yes tom it's what's gonna try and formalize that can we just hear from 11 speakers we haven't heard from yet we can make a motion on exactly that okay yeah okay well we're yeah all right so okay

222if i mean if you want to vote on that we can vote on it so a motion has been made that we will hear this the 11 speakers those will not be people who have already spoken and they will be held to their three-minute time limit um that was uh tom proposed that it was seconded by kathy uh linda house how say you do you in favor are you in favor of that we can't linda you're gonna have to mute you need to unmute unmute unmute sorry about that you had great facial expressions but we didn't really understand what you were saying speech with or without words um i i'm gonna vote no on that i think i need to hear a little more than 11. um maybe not 22 maybe meet somewhere in the

223middle i think the public really needs to give us their feelings so i'll vote no okay tom i kind of like this motion i'm going to vote i like it i i i because of the significant number of inputs through email and other communications that we've already received yeah i think we've already discussed a good number of things um okay so we'll get started okay just for clarification before i start i have no way of knowing if they're pro or con and i know that was a conversation before i just want to be sure that the board understands yeah um you know i know um i guess this is really difficult to determine i was thinking about this earlier today that it would be very difficult um because how are we gonna know well i

224guess i guess that's yeah just go with it okay we're just gonna go with it okay okay i'm starting with andrea campos okay automatic voice message system shall i call again thank you tanner johns i'll be calling you next hi tanner's john shepard i'm going to put you on speaker just hold on a sec okay tanner you are addressing the chico unified school board hi good evening and thanks for taking my call my name is tanner johns i'm a music teacher for chico unified school district at bidwell junior high school and i'm just going to read portions of a letter that i wrote and sent to all of you this afternoon with some concerns that i i know i have and many other teachers have as well so i'm just going to jump in here

225so far my family has mercifully been spared by this awful disease that yet does not mean that we have not made sacrifice i have a wife and two beautiful and brilliant daughters ages four and two and we have sacrificed family visits we've sacrificed vacations we have missed birthday parties and summer backyard barbecues with friends we've given up play dates and trips and just to the store in the park we've put swim lessons on hold and ballet classes on hold and my wife and i continue to juggle working working from home and taking care of our kids um the person you know there are sacrifices that we have been making to make this happen the personal and professional balancing act is is challenging so is teaching and learning through a screen there are barriers between teacher

226and student that make personal connection extremely difficult and there are times when technology internet speeds and user error make daily zoom classes hard online platform learning platforms lack the personal care and encouragement those most at risk need in order to help find consistent success and i worry about the students being left behind and i absolutely yearn for the days of in-person instruction and to be around people making music again uh as a music teacher um yet in recent weeks i've begun to see some true successes in my students do the online learning and i know i'm not doing ingenuity like many others but make no mistake that while distance learning is harder slower and impersonal there is learning occurring the decision of cusd to bring students back to school is nuanced and requires a lot

227of planning i think we've heard tonight that there's a lot of evidence that you all have been working really hard to make that happen and i want to let you know that we appreciate those those efforts on some level it's really exciting but there is no doubt that in-person instruction um will help our children be more successful as a teacher it's vastly more more rewarding to work that way hopefully in-person instruction can begin the healing process this awful virus has necessitated it is no secret that this forced isolation is having detrimental effects on our students mental health but the decision to return uh kids to our schools is being rushed um we have all worked so hard and given up so much as a community and county to reduce our infection rates i can't help

228but ponder all the sacrifices my family has made and how in just a couple of short weeks i'll be exposing myself and my family to hundreds of contacts every day what has been the point of our sacrifice every time i open my email there is new information about reopening or a new survey to take and those surveys are flawed they often give you two answers one is yes i would i'm willing to come back or i have concerns and all of a sudden i'm put into a pool of people who's maybe potentially teaching at oak ridge i'm sorry tanner tanner tanner i'm sorry your time has elapsed but we appreciate your calling in thank you i will add that tanner wrote an email that has um a letter attached to it yeah it does and

229it explains further i mean there's no way possible he could have said everything he wanted to say i know and i i read the letters so i recommend you all do yeah eileen yeah we all did okay i'm calling eva horvath yeah perfect hello yeah this is john shepard i'm going to put you on hold for a second and i'll let you know when to start okay okay you are addressing the chico unified school district board my name is eva horvath and i'm an educator at asc cal and fairview high schools first i do want to acknowledge all of the hard work that has gone in from everybody i see the stress on my colleagues face i see the stress on my administrator's face everybody is working so hard to make this work or try

230to work i guess but i think it is incredibly short-sighted and dangerous to entertain the idea of reopening schools it is impossible to guarantee the safety of my students their families or myself and that can barely even be guaranteed now with educators who currently are on campuses who do not practice social distancing do not wear masks or edit or practice any other form of safety precautions on my campus we don't even have hot water for our students to wash their hands or a healthy i'm wondering why cohorts that will address individual needs of students who are high risk and the great at the greatest need would be abandoned cohorts will leave plenty of time for cleaning and disinfecting as it stands now there will not be disinfecting happening between am and pm in secondary classes

231unless the teacher chooses to do so i wonder how my colleagues at the elementary school level will perform the wizardry of potentially teaching both in person and online simultaneously and i'm wondering how any of us will be expected to effectively assist the student with online learning curriculum that we didn't write and don't control while they sit six feet away from us in our classrooms i'm wondering why all of a sudden we are willing to risk the safety of so many based on skewed test results and i wonder why we're deeming it safe to send kids back into the classroom with the knowledge that when numbers go back up we will be asked to stay within those four walls that we usually find so much comfort in of course educators educators want to be back in

232the classroom the students of this community are my life's work i began my career here when i was 21 years old and i can attribute every single gray hair on my head to worrying about these kiddos in my classroom to ask me to even consider putting them in their families in danger as an affront to the craft that i've dedicated myself to i want to thank you so much for hearing me with open minds and understanding that the passion that i speak with is for the precious lives in my classroom again thank you very much thank you eva next caller please okay i'm calling ellie ertle ellie ertle hello is this ellie ellie this is john sheppard from the chico unified school of district board meeting i'm going to put you on hold and then

233i'll let you know when you can start okay okay ellie you are addressing the chico unified school district board thank you for allowing me to speak with you tonight i know that you have a difficult decision in front of you and weighing the many diverse needs and chico unified school district is complex i also know you'll begin to address what i'm here to ask you but i'd like to add my perspective i'm here tonight as a community member and a parent of two children at chico high school i am one of the many people who did not fill out the survey as presented due to the fact that it provided me two choices one to send my children back to school face to face or two to send my children to oak ridge i find

234both of these choices impossible and unfair despite my deep concerns about reopening schools in this early rushed manner i am not here to ask you to not reopen schools i won't try and convince anyone that the science is not in support of going back although it is not i am here to ask you to please realize the harm that you are doing and providing only two options for families at this time my children and many others like them by space with a decision return to in-person school when it's clearly not safe to do so or leave their beloved school drop all of their classes and start with new classes at a new school halfway through this semester this is heartbreaking unfair my senior in high school for example would move both of her electives one

235of which is giving her college credit and her ap classes which are not offered in oak bridge severely impacting her ability to get into the college of her choice she has been working hard all four years of high school and maintaining aids even in these challenging times because she has a dream to go to a particular college she's forced to move to oak ridge this semester her plans are torn apart for her and for all the students like her who can't return to school right now when the risk is still high come up with a third option let students continue with school the way they've been doing it don't end their lives in mid-october as you read headlong into a half-baked return to in-person schooling i know many people who want and need this option

236but you won't see it reflected in your survey results because we didn't know how to respond to binary options or we didn't see the email or we didn't want to pull our kids out of their schools and disrupt their lives even more and we were told it was a commitment so we felt forced to say yes we'll come back you ask family returned in person or go toe bridge unfortunately this is a sophie's choice an impossible decision that requires many families to choose between their health and their children's dreams i know many of you personally and i know you care about our students teachers staff and community to do the right thing figure out a third option it is possible with creativity and technology as mr vincent explained it is possible i'm heartened by your

237plans to negotiate a third option and mr vincent's excellent explanation of the possibility i applied your ingenuity see what i did there and work to support all students equitably and i call on the board of the union to find a way to make that happen thank you okay our next caller sue peterson sue peterson hi sue this is john shepard from chico unified i'm going to put you on hold and then i'll let you know when to start okay okay go ahead sue you're addressing the school board okay hi my name is sue peterson and i have a student at bidwell junior high school and is the sixth grader this year and originally i put my name in to call in to ask for a third option for students to be able to attend school

238online because my daughter has an immune condition and we started out at oak bridge this year we had a wonderful teacher who we loved but unfortunately we only got to talk to that teacher once a week for about 20 minutes and my daughter was really feeling isolated and struggling in that setting so we switched back to bidwell which is our home school and the last two weeks since we've been there have been wonderful and so i was calling to ask for an on-site choice of virtual learning for the students who do not have the privilege of having the health to be able to take the risk to go back i think shasta county demonstrates the risk that we're taking to send our back our kids back to school right now there's 13 schools with infections

239in shasta county and for my daughter that's a risk that we can't really take but i since listening tonight i really feel like i need to voice my concern about sending anyone back to the classroom where a teacher has to be like the teacher who spoke earlier and they don't have the choice to make that stay-at-home decision that we do unless they switch out of the classes that they love they might be teaching things that aren't available at oak ridge and at oak ridge they're only going to be able to talk to students on a very limited basis so i've really changed my opinion and i hope that you will take the option of at least waiting until the november second date to see what happens with our cases after holidays like halloween happen and

240after we have opened up and exposed people to a lot more cases i think it's only fair to our teaching staff our teaching faculty in the district that we allow that to happen before we send them back to a classroom with children who might be exposed at home and exposing them to take that disease home to their families so i urge you to wait until at least that november second date and maybe even past the holidays when people are gathering thank you for listening to me and i hope that you can make a decision that protects both the students and the teachers who are working in chico unified okay before we before we move forward um i neglected to do something which i had arranged before and that is um gina snyder who is the

241person who created the uh explanation for the a b schedule and has been um you know kind of uh vetting that and um and promoting that um i had explained that she could she could speak and she was going to i was going to call upon her when that came up but i forgot to do it so she's been waiting and i'm going to allow her gina i'm very sorry having gotten caught up with the discussion with the people who are here i fail to recall that so um but i i am only going to be allowed to give you the three minutes so we we did discuss it to some extent here so if you'd like to hit upon maybe some of the things we may not know uh that would be great so

242um if you would gina i did she i will call her i don't believe um oh yeah i have i have her phone number here and she is within the the people we were already going to call so she was within that number oh she was okay well if you could get her now i just want her to yeah i just want her to be able because she was concerned we weren't going to get to her at all hey jim just hold for a second and i will let you know when you can go okay gina you're addressing the chico unified school district board and gina just so you know um if you could speak slowly and um more closely to your microphone that would be great okay is this okay can you hear me

243okay right like this yes that's that sounds good thank you okay because i kind of get feedback so i'm trying to mute my computer to help okay oh three minutes but slowly you're funny um okay well there's a lot of discussion going on here and i think it can be super productive i appreciate that you looked at that ap schedule and for people who really aren't hearing the bigger picture i'd like an opportunity to explain what i propose especially parents at home and there's some nuances here that i think are not insurmountable like we've said in the past but a basic form of an a day b day is the idea that kids go to all their i don't have a fancy like schedule up there like you saw earlier but half the school will

244go to all their classes all day the other half are at home then that switches the next day the other half of the school comes to school all day for all their classes and the other half of them are now at home so it's just this back and forth okay not a terribly hard concept however um in making this document it was really in the spirit of compromise and in this compromise notion the idea here was to take in all these stakeholder holders and i feel like av model gives people an opportunity more of an opportunity um and and i think what the board has done now and i'm not the board i'm sorry the district is done it's kind of cherry picked some of the ideas out of here which is fine and i

245might even say maybe i'm a little flattered but before we go on to what their third option is and how that is being presented to you i think you need to know a few other things first of all there are some amazing benefits to an a baby day schedule first of all if you hearken back to kindergarten when you're dropping off your kid and picking them up three hours well now we're doing that twice within the day right you're dropping off and picking up and then you're dropping off and picking up our community will be inundated with dropping off and picking up i couldn't wait for kindergarten to get over so now we're asking you know these families to do that if you just look at book pickup it was a challenge for students and

246parents and grandparents to make it to the school to pick up books between 12 and 2 in the afternoon on a wednesday so i'm just saying you know that that kind of hectic drop-off pickup is not an ideal situation for families in our community and additionally the main benefit one of the main benefits of an a-day b day is we only have half the kids on campus at any given time whereas in an am pm you have a 100 percent of the students on campus in the morning half in the afternoon equals 100 right but in an a day b day you only have half of them um all day so but one of the main elements too that i think the district picked up on and liked and is using for their third way

247or whatever you want to call it um their third option is one of the big benefits of a baby day that am pm will not allow in a rotating am pm you cannot zoom with students at home while you are teaching it's not possible and the benefit of zooming with your students who are at home is to keep curriculum moving forward at a pre-coded pace like on a daily pace okay gina gina gina i'm gonna gina i'm sorry but i i do have to stop you because we committed to to having x number of speakers and i know you covered this very thoroughly in in your email but um what we are also discussing in and i think further we still need to discuss is the possibility that this will be considered at some point

248so i'm going to have to move on to the other speakers but i will as i as i mentioned with with tanner ask that people read your email carefully so they know what what you haven't been able to express in this brief time so thank you for that and we will have to move on to our next speaker okay our next speaker is brian teal hi brian i'm going to put you on hold and then you'll be addressing the school board okay hold on a sec okay go ahead brian okay thank you board members for allowing me to address the board a quick background about myself i have a daughter who graduated two years ago from chico high i currently have a daughter who is a sophomore in the special education program at pv high

249i have a master's degree myself in biological psychology and specialized in research and presented my own research i'm a moderate politically and aimed to be as non-partisan as possible but since my daughter has health conditions related or having down syndrome which makes her up to ten times more likely to die from covid i have done vast amounts of research in uh through peer-reviewed journals and non-biased sources so i'm worried about the potential outcomes of reopening schools and that we are the most opportune time to be re-opening these schools i passionately want schools to reopen for in-person learning but not at this point so what would be the best way to reopen maybe to continue with the current or remote learning model through the end of january through the winter break along with providing specific education

250to parents uh on the mandates of effective coronavirus management that of mass usage social system quarantining social tracing and access to testing which is reduced right now um complete additional research on hybrid models of learning as they aren't seen as much more effective at reducing transmission than in-person full-time instruction and the timing for reopening the best case if schools begin october 19th we have five weeks for students booking in classrooms together then taking thanksgiving vacation where they will be attending family gatherings and additional intended exposures well mostly asymptomatic if they're covered positive this can foster another significant increase in new cases and adults in the elderly who are more apt to be hospitalized and potentially die from the chronovirus same could be said for christmas vacations so there's a lot of vacation time coming up

251reopening towards the end of january provide additional time to quarantine the new cases from holiday readings and allow asymptomatic students to move through the infection without infecting others according to a study using eight thousand confirmed student cases in a typical classroom a non-math class has a 91 chance of someone contracting the virus if all students wear a basic mask that's reduced to 23 percent if all wear and then 95 masks properly it drops to 4 and using hepa filtration it drops even more but this is team class best case scenario so california as tom mentioned has the highest number of report cases in corona virus and nation for zero to 17 year olds at 84 000 which is 10 of all confirmed cases in the state and the next case is florida at 41 000.

252so basically um regarding special education my understanding is that modified curriculum is not provided through oak ridge which doesn't allow equal access to education for those students so i just like to have them have access to that education if they have any kind of health related issues i strongly advise wait until the end of canada reopen the schools we have time to determine if holidays will bring around the second wave i'm sure all students and staff are negative for kobe 19. thank you for your time thank you brian next caller please okay i'm calling kimberly snyder hello kimberly i will put you on hold for a second and you'll be addressing the school board okay okay go ahead kimberly okay hello my name is kimberly snyder a born and raised chicoin i have two kids

253one in kindergarten and one in second i have chosen to speak on this agenda but want to quickly say that regardless of tear i think we need to have the waiver passed in case the numbers do rise i speak for a lot of parents and i'm screaming at the top of my lungs this is not working my son who is above grade level in kindergarten and first is now falling behind he is having behavioral issues that weren't present before my kindergartner is doing well but she is not getting the experience you deserve my kids joined this cusd pod for kids with bad internet monday at usd school i heard a boy tell his sister to suck it my kids told me there were kids cussing on their cell phones and allowed to watch the movie

254it needless to say i pulled them out the second i heard that i have a friend whose son says he would rather die than be on zoom he is depressed and not doing well he is on the spectrum and not having the routine he was used to and the in-person support needed is causing anxiety what about the fire victims that just went through a tragic event and want to have a normal life back what about all the children that don't have any parental support school is their only safe haven are they okay do you really know it's been seven months since they've been in school where they feel safe and have comfort in knowing that at least they will get to eat that day or escape a toxic environment for a little while these teachers

255are the protectors of these kids just the thought of what some of these kids are going through is absolutely heartbreaking it cannot go on any longer i'm not sure how many parents have said this but i am not good i am not okay i am struggling more now than i ever have in my life my mental health is not good and it is affecting my family as well i am supposed to love my job as a mom i am not a teacher the anxiety and stress are at an all-time high in every family i've spoken with we spend the whole time while they're on zoom redirecting them back to the screen over and over we're doing the best we can and it isn't good enough please open up full time but i'll settle now for

256am pm with siblings in the same time so we parents can bet get back to being a homemaker or better yet to work to help chico's economy rise again and not crumble the numbers we need to abide by to reopen are absolutely ridiculous and unreasonable the parents kids and teachers have spoken loud and clear and it's time to listen look into other counties cities and states i have and they are open and thriving why can we send kids to private schools full-time with no math pay for card shop at walmart go to the gym but not go to school play sports or worship with a full house things need to change and it needs to be now no tom landa we do not have time thank you so much for letting me speak okay next

257caller please okay the next caller is mark owen um voicemail okay let's move on to the next one next one is nilly you diese correct nilly eudis i'm sure she'll correct me or he i knew this is john sheppard from chico unified i'm going to put you on hold and you'll and i'll let you know when you can address the board okay thank you okay go ahead hi thank you for your time um boy i feel for the woman who just spoke and i know that she represents lots of people who are struggling in this time and i want to share that while i recognize that some are really struggling in this moment i don't believe going back to school is the answer i don't believe that solves the problems that are representative of a

258pandemic that is affecting our entire nation and the world i sent an email to all of you sharing my concerns for going back to school and opening up i won't go through those again with you my hope is that you read that email but i do want to share and reiterate what is happening in shasta county our neighbor that did open up for schools and is now going into the red i believe that happened today and is on par to move into the purple there are many students and staff that are ill i i was one of those people who did not return the survey who has not been represented because i don't feel that either of the options that we were given were viable for my family and this meeting tonight really does prove

259that that's true there is not a clear consensus of what the children are even going back to the teachers are split 50 50 on what they want to be doing so how can we as parents say yes i'm going to agree to this model or this model for me the pace is too fast i agree that we should be waiting until we have a clear plan of how we're going to support our children i also feel for the women who spoke and others that are struggling and recognize that you may need to make a decision to go back to school before my opinion feels like it's ready and if that is the case i urge you to consider that third option for us we started two new schools this year my youngest child is in

260second grade and started new at hooker oak his teacher has worked so hard to help him build friendships with students online and it would be detrimental for him to switch and move to oak ridge model where he loses all of that work that he's been doing for the last few months building relationships my older son in middle school is a student with an iep he receives three resource classes currently and occupational therapy and without those services at oak ridge i'm concerned for his ability to continue to move he is currently getting a's in all of his classes and my children are thriving i recognize our experiences not everybody's but i think you're hearing a little bit tonight that the loudest voices aren't always those that are wanting schools to reopen we feel strongly and there's

261lots of us who did not return the survey who do not be are not able to be represented in what we have seen so far and i just appreciate you all and recognize this almost impossible decision that you have to make and i thank you for working hard for our families and for being heard thanks so much thank you next next caller please okay the next speaker is duke hello is this duke hello i'm hello i'm going to put you on hold and i'll let you know when you can address the school board okay okay go ahead duke first of all thank you so much for doing this and for all your effort a special thanks to all the teachers for the hard working on behalf of many families of a district we are strongly

262support the third option for high school students that is some students still stay at their own schools with their own teachers but they don't physically come to the school set is that they take the same class online with their own teachers for example while a teacher is teaching a class in person some students can be synchronously with the class but online this way the students will still take the class with the same teacher it seems to me that oak bridge online choice is making some students change their teachers at the middle of the semester some classes are not even offered at the oak bridge of course the third choice details will be up to the schools and teachers the purpose of the third option not only to reduce the risk for teachers students schools and

263everyone but also to increase the learning quality and effectiveness and by the way this is being done by many schools nationwide as i know some elementary schools have been doing surveys regarding this third option please also try to give this high school students third option and uh and also after today's meeting i even would like to say let's wait waiting and watching probably are better your understanding serious consideration and support are deeply appreciated thank you so much and that's all thank you okay um at this point we've heard nine people there were two people we weren't able to get in touch with and there was the additional person that had called or was put on the list earlier so let's just give a quick call back to these two people first of all let's let's

264take the person tom had who who that person was from the very first segment we had let's try that person first and then maybe these last two who we couldn't get to okay i'm now calling lindsay munn okay then let's let's just go back to um andrea and then try mark owen again and then that'll be the end of this [Music] thank you miss griffin i respectfully ask if we don't get a hold of mr owen to perhaps um get two more people that were on the list to speak um i think the majority of the board is not in favor of doing that we've already voted on that i have 11 so that's why i'm asking yeah i think we've um reached our limit voicemail will get on that one okay um okay so

265uh what i'm gonna do is um i'm going to open this up to us to discuss because we do have to come to some decision here uh as as kathy mentioned uh we've already been working on this for quite some time and um there is a limit to our productivity if we you know just keep spending a lot of time on something we we do need to just get focused and make a decision here so yeah kathy then tom oh oh i'm sorry i didn't look in that direction all right eileen first then kathy then tom sorry thank you i i understand i think the emotion and the judgment behind everybody's position i think i've listened to and read those people that have reached out so eloquently however i don't think that they understand those

266those that are hesitant understand the lengths to which this district has gone to make coming on to our campuses and into our classrooms safe it it's it's almost like a hermetically sealed you know environment well beyond anything you're going to find in the community and i understand for those that have not been out in the community who who have in fact been at home for seven months they may not feel that that that's that that's the case but for any of us that have gone into a grocery store or to pick up packages you know we are going into situations that are not at all as as rigorously planned for cleaning and planned for [Music] safety as as what our our maintenance and operations department has a and our cafeteria department as well have put

267into place i i just um feel that we are in a very good as well as good as you can get situation to bring kids safely back onto campus and for those that just can't get through that barrier like the several families that spoke of significant health risks i think that are having the third option of being able to be in classes at the schools that what is your your home school is is going to help with some of those needs i worry just as everyone else does about having led people to believe that we were going to be able to do this and then not do it now and i don't think waiting another two weeks it is at all going to be helpful if you listen to dr fauci and and others at

268at the national level because of of how even rolling out a vaccine isn't going to begin to provide protections well into next summer and i'm sorry but waiting to get our kids as safely as we can back into school with teachers for those that can is not okay i want to get our kids back into school on october 19th with all of the things and all of the work and all of the planning that our teachers and our staffs have done i trust us with our kids and our employees and um even though it's scary because this novel corona virus is has a lot of unknown things that could happen to people that that have it and and and get over it but may have lasting [Music] other health impacts from it i get it

269i get all that i am however in support of opening our schools on october 19th with the two days before to give teachers and kids a chance to make contact and prepare and make the adjustment to the health and safety protocols that we need to to let them know that the thermometer checks and things will be in the classroom or in the nurse's office and not at the front gate and that we have we have in fact worked with the health department for contingencies if we have an outbreak on one of our campuses we'll handle it we have done an amazing amount of preparation and i can't judge whether or not districts that are having problems just didn't do this kind of work i don't know but i trust us i think kathy you were

270next and then tom yeah so um i uh regret at the time that we did the initial decision about am pm we hadn't actually third thought of the third option and from the emails that i looked at and a number of the comments tonight um absolutely families with 504s in their children or issues and in their homes that third option i think offers them what most of them seem to be echoing i want the same teacher i want the same classmates i just want to be safe and that third option would allow them to maintain what they say for them is working and yet let other children have the actual physical experience of a classroom uh seeing a teacher that they can talk and hear to in real time and i do think that all

271of our staff teachers and our other staff have done an enormous amount of work prepping for this there is no perfect answer it's not called the pandemic for any any reason other than there is no perfect answer but i am strongly in favor of getting the children who are physically and emotionally capable back in school on the 19th in the am pm model we have a kindergartner who's never gotten to go to kindergarten except on a computer i have a second grader who fell far behind with the initial closing and is catching up but it's taking one adult full time being with him while he's on the computer for him to be able to pull that off so i uh i believe we can do this as safely as possible it's not a hundred percent

272nothing is and i think the third option which many of our emails and our some of our speakers have referenced is the way to protect families who have an unusual amount of risk so i'm in favor thank you okay tom thank you i do have a kindergartener and i would not be comfortable asking him to go back on the 19th there are a couple of reasons for that one of course as i said and no one has addressed the numbers we're going by are from a period of time when we had less testing than normal there are about 275 tests per day in butte county that's including repeated testing of essential workers who get tested over and over that's nothing we simply don't know the actual extent of this virus in our community and i'm

273a little frustrated that no one is taking into account that we don't have accurate testing right now i do not want to be on this board when we let kids back in and someone gets sick and someone gets seriously injured i understand it's never going to be 100 but i'm asking you please for two more weeks to make sure now that all our testing is back again that we actually are as safe as we think we are otherwise we are buying into a fantasy because we want to get in before it becomes dangerous again which is terrible logic to say we're in now and then it goes to purple again but it's okay our kids can be in danger now because it was safe two weeks ago that is not a position i want to

274put myself in or any of you ask for the third option which i think is a wonderful idea we don't know exactly what it will look like yet you cannot just say i'm going to take a camera and a big tv in the classroom and it's going to work this is my job i teach kids on zoom every day i cannot do that job and also manage behavior of 20 kids in the classroom at the same time i cannot manage the spacing of students and physical distancing which we have to do now as well as everyday classroom behaviors and also look at a chat and deal with a kid who has a connectivity issue andy was the kid who's saying something inappropriate on social media watch on goguardian at the same time you are asking

275teachers to do two jobs and that is not fair and the people who do it in the bay area and other districts the teachers are burning out you are asking your teachers to do too much if you ask them to do this without much better planning and much better prep teachers will leave we can't hire teachers in the middle ear we will have to and i wonder if we shouldn't take some more time only because when you take this to the union tomorrow saying hey do twice as much work how many of them will push back we need to know that before we move forward with this having two days of prep time to do a whole new pedagogy is not realistic we did two days over the summer we still had teachers who are

276coming in completely unprepared for the little things that go wrong every time you make a switch we needed more than two days a summer we need more than two days now i feel very very strongly for the parents who children are having a hard time having a hard time with kids at home i live that too my wife lives that and it's not fun but if we're going to do this we need to be smart and we need to have a really solid plan right now we don't we have ideas and they're good starts we need i mean the words we're using on these slides are what communicate register plan fine-tune professional development in two weeks a week and a half just slow down use the cohorts on the options we already have to reach

277out to our most needy students and make sure we do bring kids back they're safe please okay uh linda would you like to share please sure sure thank you tom i really feel your passion on that one there is no easy solution to this problem that's going to meet everyone's needs that's a fact um you know covid does pose some real risks for our families and for our staff there's a lot of stress involved with that but i do think our district has worked hard to put safety measures in place to help mitigate those risks i really believe the social and emotional health of the children that can come back to school is important um you know our hex health experts are deeming it okay to do this and you know we always talk about

278believing in science and listening to the science and uh you know i feel really strongly that we need to get our kids back in school i do as i think dr kaiser mentioned really want to direct district to work on that third option i think that's important and uh i would like to see that happen before the 19th of october i don't know you know if that will but let's shoot for that and the other thing i would just like to say is i do really think the a b model for secondary is the better way to go i think at this point in time we can't do that unless we decide to phase in secondary later but i again would like to see staff work on that with teachers and perhaps put that model

279in place in the spring and so with that i would like to support getting our children back in school thank you linda okay so [Music] i'm just trying to struggle with if there's any way to split the baby here because um it is a very tough decision when you have people who have such strong feelings you know and and uh you know i was just writing today all the different viewpoints i was hearing from people in the emails you know their concerns about different things and it's it's just impossible it's mission impossible what we're doing right now is trying to really please everyone because there's no way we can do that i agree with linda that we definitely should consider for future the alternate day a b option because there are a lot of really

280strong you know it it has a lot of advantages but it hasn't been vetted yet and and we really need we cannot we cannot do that right now even though it does sound very promising as far as the secondary schools i'm more perplexed about them and concerned because their students are the ones who i think would be more likely to spread covid and to contract kovid because of their behaviors and their belief that they're invincible so i would like to know if with secondary if we were to do this third option will teachers classroom teachers actually be able to teach or will they just be standing there with you know ingenuity and overseeing the edge annuity will we have that ability to have them actually be teaching as duke who last spoke um was asking

281us about yes i firmly believe the teachers will be able to provide direct instruction to in-person students and also via zoom mr lando does bring up the point of contention that it is it is difficult to maintain engagement with students in chat and students who are raising their hand via the the blue button and so that's something that will have to be considered but the we have had teachers from different schools not all in one school encourage this mainly because of what mr marchand said earlier that some students will not be provided the access to classes they're currently taking without it and that's the focus is on those on kids so the the students who need to have or want to have and this was explained by a couple of people say they're ap classes

282they they can't do that at oak bridge they aren't able to get that at oak bridge that's my understanding when we shift back if we shift back to an in-person model uh no those classes will be there will not we won't continue this the ap classes or some of the ct offerings at oakbridge so you know being able to provide those i know those are very very important you know to a lot of students too to to be able to to have those but more importantly to just actually be able to have these teachers who are so talented be able to teach instead of them receiving this information this instruction ideas over a computer so um i really wish there was another way that there was you know having the ability to even have smaller

283cohorts um developed instead of putting everybody back at once people have mentioned phasing in things phasing in the high school versus you know starting out with elementary going back and then phasing in the high school after we've had more of an opportunity but then again you know as eileen said we've been preparing for all of this and we have those things in place so [Music] you know as much as i feel that you know we have to respect those people who do not feel comfortable with sending their kids back if we can get the teachers to buy into that knowing that like what you said tom i i know i've been there too and i i know how difficult it is to try to engage students and and control all the other stuff that's going

284on in a room and it's it's definitely not easy i know in a lot of schools i know my son my grandson's uh classroom there's an aid and there are not numbers of aids that are there to help out in a lot of the classrooms in the you know title one schools so that's a big advantage so you got a couple people but to better help that is there any way we can provide more people to to do that or we you know is is that a possibility ted i don't know so i think one of the topics we've been talking about is if we can if we come to an am pm model and start with that putting additional aid time you know if if the a group gets two hours of aid time

285the b group would get a time also that's one of the things we're talking about and i and i wonder if uh if well in high school be really hard um and i wonder if parents would rise to the occasion too especially these parents who are clamoring to get back into school would some of them be willing to serve as uh you know assistants or aides in the classroom one one option to there is a concern that by adding more adults into a room you know you have more people in the room but there is an option for students to be designated to monitor chat and to monitor hands being raised and so someone in person could say you know mr shepard mr mister my buddy ted is raising his hand so there's some there's

286some creative ways to handle it but undeniably um that there's there are there's multiple factors now that may not have been in place before but there are some other options and and do we have information about how some other you know somebody mentioned bay area schools do we have any information about how how these are being handled these these type of situations that we're considering as option as the new option the information i've delivered to you tonight is as much as i know i'm getting information from principals who are who are brainstorming because they're receiving all the same emails we're receiving and and they're in the same corner with these ap type classes so they're trying to figure out what other just what their friends are doing but the information that i've expressed tonight is

287as much as i know so far but that you know the conversation has just started it's not even a week old about the third option yeah can i just say a couple things so i just want to remind the board that to have teachers do both things as tom was saying is um is going to be a matter of negotiation so if you have them zooming while they're teaching that is a change in working conditions and i'm not even sure without agreement we can require teachers to to zoom in the classroom while they're teaching however there are other ways to implement this with just the data we have here about 15 of the the folks choosing um the other option they're really not excited about oakdale but they want to remain online and we're hearing

288from a number of folks that they still want to remain as part of their school the master schedule can be built in a way where certain periods of classes are offered entirely online so a teacher may be assigned an online class of you know im1 math while they're teaching ym1 math in person in the other periods so there's ways to build the schedule that um we can assign that that's that's part of your assignment um it's just the instruction is is a different way so even if we can't come to some agreement on the requirement to zoom in a classroom we can build a schedule in a way with enough kids that are opting out and it sounds like we have enough to do that it's more complicated it takes a little more time but

289but it's certain certainly something we can do and address the the desires of the the families that just can't um yeah and i think i think somebody else mentioned and i'm gonna get eileen i'm gonna get you kathy somebody else mentioned that you know you know okay you don't want to just stick a camera in there and you don't want to do that but if you tell people that this is this is really at this point what we can do and they they go into it knowing that then you know you're otherwise your option is is is oak bridge then you know i think full full disclosure would be appropriate they may or may not have the teacher they had um but um but the the class will be offered and it's essentially the same

290curriculum it's just delivered online delivered via zoom or something okay i'm going to go to eileen and then i'm going to go to kathy thank you um two things you well we've all talked about phasing in and i think that that if we're looking at well not think that we've asked to look at the a b schedule for later that could be if that could be worked out to begin in the spring that in fact is phasing in it's making a significant change from what we're we have in front of us to approve tonight i also want to point out that the technology that this district has been able to build up over the last five years with the construction of new schools new science wings new everything is putting us in an amazing position

291with capacity to do some really good things with technology that many other districts do not have we know that um so i i you know i i again i feel very comfortable that that the decision has kind of risen to the top like turning over the eight ball and waiting for the answer to appear okay kathy so uh there is no perfect solution but i want to complement all of our administrators and staff that have worked so so hard literally now for months to come up with the best possible protection and the best possible legally i mean there's a legal component to this that we can't ignore prop senate bill 98 is not saying you might it's saying you must and so i think that we should move forward with opening on the 19th and

292the am pm schedule at the same time strongly encouraging the hard work that's already been done that you guys can firm out develop flesh out the third option so those parents really i feel really strongly you have a kid that's high risk no you know or if you have a family member that's high risk so that we can let them have the emotional social support that's what they're all going back to i my kid loves my teacher they see these classmates they want to be there they don't want to be shuffled off well we're not trying to shuffle them off and i i do believe with a time framework with negotiations with all the safety stuff that we are having delivered that come the 19th there will be a third functional option and we have

293so much concern we had an soro officer who wrote about the real fear and concerns that they are seeing about the kids that aren't being touched by the safety of school every day and it's very very real so for me that's the driving thing the safest place for kids the vast majority of kids is actually in school yep yes oh wrong way i'd like to make a motion that we adopt the safety guidelines to be modified to drop the thermometer checks at the entrance to schools second okay we have a motion made by eileen robinson a second by dr kaiser and this had to do with what uh mr baltimore the safety guidelines yes uh set about not doing the on-site for every child coming in uh the temperature checks so um we'll do a

294roll call vote um i um i'm sorry linda i don't know why okay griff and i robbins and i okay that passes thank you um i have yes another motion madam president sure go ahead i move that the chico unified school district start in-person classes on october 19th using the am pm model in both elementary and secondary with the intent that the third option that we've referred to will be ready for implementation by that same date second okay we have yes tom what if it's not i don't think we can come up with a what if not i'm going to depend on kevin and jim and jay and john to to work it out i i think that cota is as committed to making this work with everybody's needs being met as closely as possible

295i have faith so just to be clear we're moving to approve a plan that we don't know the details of yes that does not seem like a wise course of action okay we may need to be more specific um about about that um yes jim do you wanna do you wanna explain how that might be how that might work um because i know you cannot commit to something that hasn't been achieved yet you can't say for sure and so i guess if we if we have to be negotiated and then and then voted on or the fallback position is the current contract which um you know is a is a working a full day now whether or not it's traded off day to day um i mean we that might be the fall back position

296well the fall pack position meaning like right how it exists right now worked there no they were the still uncharted territory yeah the way i see it is um they would work a full day a normal day we could we can switch kids in and out and it's just it's truly an a b the other way that's the fallback position because we're not changing the work conditions all we're changing is the number of kids in the class and um and they're they're they're teaching in their regular schedule without any any changes that that would have to be the fallback so if i get clarify this yeah if i'm correct so if we vote to pass the modified traditional amp and model and it fails negotiations we would be in the we're gonna have to fall

297back to the contract that we have and i i don't know i don't know if kevin is still on b eight the a b model um kevin are you still here or did you go away i think that is that would be the only option because the only thing we're changing is the number of kids in the classroom on any given day the schedule is all the same the start and end time is all the same uh the periods are all the same everything's the same yeah so i think that's so i think there's motivation on the part of cta to to not go into that model it's not it's not the optimal model especially when we worked on moving the a and pm forward together and they have a lot of buy-in from a

298lot of their staff okay so i i'm not sure erica can you read back what eileen um said in her motion do you have that and board with intent that the third option will be ready for implementation by that same date seconded by vice president kaiser okay well that's with the intent you you said with the intent with the intent with the expectation um yeah kelly did you want to share something or linda i like the the word expectation expectation okay so rather than the word intent with the expectation that the um we will have a third option which would be uh that the students who are currently in the class could if they did not feel comfortable attending in the classroom they would be able to uh virtually attend virtually i'll accept that would

299you accept that modification right yeah that's right would you accept that if kathy agrees okay so that's that's the modification and um all right so um and and then there's a third well okay i'll wait because there's a third motion i want to make okay so are we ready to vote on this motion any further discussion on this motion we're going to take a um take a vote uh okay all those in favor of the motion eileen just posed please say aye aye aye you said all in favor say aye aye okay any opposed okay so we have one opposed uh which is mr lando and uh the other four board members approved this so the expectation is that we are going to take to negotiations with the union the idea of a third option

300and hope that that will help those people who are finding it difficult to have their child attend in person but that will provide them the same as far as at least contact with fellow students and the opportunity to be in contact with the teacher at least okay so then i want to make another motion believe it or not the president can do that it is written in the rules um that we examine we direct staff to examine and discuss with the union the pros and cons the ins and outs of the ab schedule for secondary schools with the intention also the expectation that they could develop a schedule which would enable teachers to have a meeting time or an advisory period for collaboration and that would be one day a week as mentioned by mr

301kessler i think that was a really good idea so i would like to see that explored and i'd like to second your motion okay thank you linda so here we go again so we will have to take a vote um anybody else want to discuss this further since we've already kind of discussed it um we'll take a roll call vote linda hi yes yes i'm sorry eileen i have a question sure uh as part of your motion would you imply too that uh meeting the um sb 98 criteria i don't have a choice that's law yeah we would have to we would have to abide by law and um i know that that that's exactly thank you for bringing that up though because we would want to make sure that it did comply with that

302but i also think maybe we need to put a time frame on this um so for potentially maybe starting at the first of the year spring spring semester when we get back from break yep so we would want to have this information um through the process so we can vote on it by then yes is that do you think that's feasible jim okay because i know there's yes january 21 yeah that gives us a few more months and to think to plan to get it all out it sounds like there's a you know we've already got a lot of information but there are the details the devil's in the details okay so we'll take a roll call vote um javi aye lando i think taking time to plan is a very good idea hi kaiser

303griffin i i got that tom robinson i okay great all right so i think those are the two things we absolutely had to uh vote on we actually do have a couple more things on our agenda so let's think right then before you move yes yes i there's an elephant in the room that i think we need to discuss as well okay and it has to do with what if we start school in on october 19th and on october 21st we uh our county moves back into the purple tier what do we want to do well the way we have things right now is that we would go according to the um state the what do they they call that stage the stage the stage if we're in the stage then we go back to

304right distance learning however we would have the option at that time to con convene again as a board and decide whether we want to change that going into it the x because we already voted on it that's the status quo right now but we can decide because there's other factors to consider they they have now given you the option once you're in there you then have the control you can have the option of saying whether you are going to go back to distance learning or not so if we wanted to have the option of saying we want to review all of the medical statistics hey we're you know we want to know exactly what is going on in the county you know what we we saw before with the big upsurge we saw college students

305causing the problem we saw we saw um elder care homes you know creating a lot of the covid cases the jail yeah exactly so we would want to at least have the ability to know before we just shut down schools again um is this something that's really going to affect us or you know what is the reality of these cases versus just speculation or or whatever so we can take a vote on that it's not a right now we can't delve into that that's going to be a whole other thing to delve into and it may not happen but that is what the plan is that we will come back to us to decide what we want to do because when we made that decision originally we didn't have the option we didn't know we

306had an option so now that we do have an option we can go back and we can say you know so but we're not going to tackle that tonight because it's just too much to tackle not on the agenda but right yes okay yeah but that's bring it up because i think it needs to stay in the forefront right and that's yeah that's a good thing to bring up thank you for bringing that up that's right it i you know yeah okay so um we are going to move on yes time oh eileen what no no we're moving on i'm moving on okay uh we're moving on to business services tree removal in cohasset yes thank you yours isn't quite as exciting i'm sorry to tell you do you okay but we did receive a

307phone call from butte county fire safe council and we are land owners up in cohassen they received a grant to do tree removal and provide a safe barrier for the community and so we're being requested to allow them to come onto our property and remove trees i we do have jim hautman who's been online very patient and i don't know if he is still on oh we should have pushed this up on the calendar agenda at the same time if jim wanted to add anything briefly i'd like to at least make it available to him to at least address the board about this issue so jim thanks for your time we appreciate it oh my is jim here jim are you there i wouldn't be surprised if jim wasn't there anymore jim yes i'm here

308oh you are there okay thank you for hanging in there had we known you were hanging in there i didn't i had no idea i am so sorry we would have pushed you up to the front of the agenda when i confessed i kind of set my computer aside and watching the evening news okay okay good for you [Laughter] all right what was the question so jim i just i i just want to give you an opportunity to address the board on this you contacted us regarding this grant and included in this as a permission slip from the district to allow butte county fire safe council to remove trees on our cohasset property so i just want to give you a moment to address the board if you had any clarifying questions thank you very

309much and i appreciate the time you guys are taking too let me talk to you um the butte county fire safe council got a grant from cal fire to do thinning we have about seven of them in butte county one of them was in berry creek and i spent 18 months doing secret documents that's in environmental impact review to get the project going and then we went out to bid for the project september 4th and then there's nothing left there so that kind of prompted us to make sure that we did our due diligence to make sure that the first thing that we did was reach out to all the um the green parts of the county that hadn't burned yet and make sure that we could do everything we could to make sure that

310those communities were safe um cal fire and the butte county sheriff's office has determined in their evacuation plan that cohasset school is one of the evacuation zones so that was the first thing we did is went up there and inspected the area and kind of made some recommendations so what we'd like to do is do some thinning on the school property itself ties it into the cohasset community association property there's another property south of there that is a private landowner we're going to be doing work on his he has a little over six acres and then that ties into the cal fire station that's up there as well so in all what we're trying to do is create about a 25-acre safety zone area that will hopefully reduce the fire when it comes through there

311so that it gives people a place to go and provide them some shelter if they can't get down cohasset road since cohasset road is their only exit way out of the area all of us free to the two guys it's part of our grant to do that and we have licensed contractors and foresters and licensed timber operators doing all the work and they all carry all the insurances i think you guys would need yes kathy so jim i was giving kevin a lot of credit for this but now i realize it's all you you and the fire so i think it's a phenomenal idea it's a half a million dollars and the whole community will be so much safer so thank you with that i move business uh the cohasset tree removal okay do i

312have a second a second that's sure okay a motion by dr kaiser a second by mr lando any further discussion i have a question i'm sorry yeah go ahead um and then i'm going to go to kelly go ahead linda so uh oh oh she's frozen yeah she's frozen okay kelly are you okay can you talk yes can you hear me yeah linda you froze wait a sec linda are you on frozen now i think i am unfortunate okay yeah you're unfrozen let's go to linda then you kelly sorry unstable internet so mr helpman my question was um can you give me a sense of the scope of the job at cohasset school will you be cutting down heritage trees will you be clear cutting are you just thinning so what we are for all

313of our projects what we look for is about a 20 foot tree spacing leaving about 70 of the canopy and what we've done at the school has looked at trees that are either too close together or dying already because they're growing into their canopy and we just want to kind of reduce the fuel loading there there's also some dry vegetation on the ground that we would be weed eating take care of the trees would be falled the brush would be chipped and then anything of any size like firewood type things would be left for the community to take and that's what we're doing with all of our projects up there excellent thank you so much thank you kelly i just wanted some clarification on how we have communicated with the cohasset community um as some

314of you are aware we had trees removed previously and i think there was a communication problem at that time and i just want to make sure we are not there again [Music] kelly i think there's two responses to that one is that this is a larger scope amount of work versus what occurred 10 years ago or so or it was just on our school campus and the second is i did reach out to supervisor tammy ritter and she was already aware of this and and they talked she had talked about communication that had already been made up in the cohasset community and with all the fires perceptions have probably changed too but um it was actually 20 years ago when we did remove trees from the cohouses campus and it was not a popular move

315at that point and so we're working with a local fire safe council up there as well and also the community association and we are we have been out in the community in the last couple weeks um getting people signed up for the rest of our fuel reduction project that we're doing up there so we're doing mostly all of cohasser road and then vilas road as well and we're trying to get as many people as we can signed up to do the project to do both the festival space around their homes and also evacuation route thinning okay um great so let's take a vote all those in favor please say i all right so that passes um thank you jim thank you jim appreciate it have a great night okay and then next is measure e

316safety and security funding update pv high school fencing uh yes uh measure e a portion of those measure e dollars were earmarked for safety and security and we provided you a list of all the work that has been accomplished and we have exhausted those funds and so at this point in time we still are in process at pleasant valley high school providing a perimeter fence around this space and we'd like to finish that project keep it out of the budget out of measure k and so we're requesting that the board approve us to finish that project for an amount of 198 967 dollars to be paid out of fund 42 which is the pass-through redevelopment dollars which we talked about previously of which you passed a resolution allowing us to spend those dollars in any

317area that benefits the school district i move the measure e safety and security funding update in pleasant valley fencing i think it's critical that we secure that site oh second that motion okay motion by kathy kaiser second by eileen robinson any further discussion needed all those in favor please say aye aye aye that passes okay that's it i'm going to adjourn this meeting thank you everybody for all of your participation and president griffin i believe we could stay in