9/16/2020 Board of Education Meeting

001b perfect go ahead okay is all our check okay what is that or is that okay is is can you hear linda can you hear up there i can hear okay however the picture is blurry okay all right we'll let them know that thank you welcome okay i'd like to uh call to order the regular meeting of the chico unified school district board of trustees for september 16th to 2020 i would request that everybody please turn off their cell phones that are people who are taking part in this meeting here and we were in closed session prior to gathering here and what i would like to report out is that a vote was taken during closed session on a request for payment of attorney's fees from rex road law firm of 9 200. a vote

002was taken uh in favor of the payment was lando javi robinson uh against payment was griffin and kaiser so the motion passed and that that took place um if you would please join me we are going to stand for the flag salute i pledge allegiance [Music] and if everyone would please continue to stand this week we lost one of our dear teachers janiece kuhn the choral instructor at chico senior high school so i would appreciate if we could all just have a moment of silence [Music] thank you very much i'd like to begin this meeting then with announcements and i would specifically like to ask mr doug williams if he is on the zoom uh to please let us know how things have gone at chico senior high school we understand that some help and

003some assistance was put in place for students and teachers as well yes thank you school board and uh chico unified school district staff and people uh tuning in to the meeting um it's been a very rough week um obviously this event started uh on the weekend and at that point we didn't have much information but we sent out some information on sunday night the last three days have really involved around creating support mechanisms for students and for faculty alike so we have had three different levels of virtual therapy occurring in this coveted environment the first round in the morning we obviously called every student in mrs coon's class and talked to them and that was done by our counselors bcoe counselors and counselors shared who are professional therapists within the region and within our district

004i'd like to thank all those people who basically joined in a communal effort to come to our aid in addition i zoomed every one of her classes the first two days and basically um took control kind of of fielding questions from the kids and and tried to ask them in an appropriate way to the best of my ability um and in those meetings with me were also other licensed therapists every day we have had in the first day it was a one o'clock zoom therapy link that our assistant principals emailed out to every student in her classes to join and we had quite a few students join and some parents as well we also had former students that uh contacted me and and wanted to know if they could join those therapy sessions and of

005course i opened those up to those individuals as well miss kuhn was a a comet of an individual she walked in a room and and and everybody had their eyes on her she just spread sparkle and joy and and her influences across the globe really um after those virtual meetings now what we have going on is every morning at eight o'clock an ongoing zoo meeting um takes place for three and a half hours and different therapists come in at different times the reason we've done this is so students if they feel more comfortable could contact fellow students and say hey let's join today at nine together so they can feel some kind of companionship in those meetings um also in those meetings uh thank you mr tim karis mr brandon kessler we're able to provide

006breakout therapy so as the students join we ask them if they would like to to go to an even smaller zoom breakout one-on-one with a trauma counselor or with a group of three of their friends and that's been taking place and of course we're logging all this information and then we're going to respond back to the families to see how we can improve and and also if they need further follow-up from uh other support systems within our county um today we also did a moment of silence which is very difficult uh on our quad for our staff our staff has been unbelievable but our teachers are hurting as well uh and so that was at 11 45 today i said a few words and we had a moment of silence for miss kuhn in front

007of our school there's kind of a grassroots um goodbye to miss being chalked on our sidewalk with flowers and red lipstick that reminds us all of her um however i think the impact of walking by that daily by our staff is is going to be significant so we are going to set up a chalk wall uh next to our marquee with a message to ms kuhn and to the community and if people would like to go to the grass because it's outside of the closed campus and write on the wall something appropriate or a message they remember about miss um or set down something we're gonna have a standing uh area there for a week or so as i get information from their family because i'm trying to be very respectful of their families wishes

008because they're going through obviously a huge trauma as well and i know people want information but we also have to be respectful of the family and and their privacy um i will leave you with this um two things i heard in a meeting the first one is just what a joy it was to be around miss kuhn the second one was a teacher excuse me a student that said ms kuhn always used to say if you're struggling to find the right words in class or you don't have an ability to complete an assignment or your voice is shot and you can't participate you can at least try to be the nicest person in the room and i think that has such an impact that as we go through this trauma that i would just ask

009everybody to be kind to themselves and be kind to others because that's really a message that that she lived through so i appreciate this this opportunity to talk if anyone would like to talk to me in person or come by to school and find out exactly all the other levels of therapy and support we have i'd be happy to talk to anybody anytime and i'm going to put together an actual for lack of a better word an action item menu to post as well on our website so people can access resources but also see what's going on uh daily uh thank you very much and hopefully that your prayers and kind thoughts or whatever positive energies you choose to use will continue to come our way thank you very much thank you mr williams obviously

010our thoughts go out to the family and all of the friends and loved ones i also want to thank chico high for doing an absolutely fabulous job in the worst of circumstances the entire school is hurting our students are hurting the staff is hurting and yet they've rallied to be there for our kids so thank you doug and your counseling and administrative team and all of the teachers who uh have rallied to be there thank you um for another announcement uh dr kaiser yes so um the census has not yet been um changed in terms of its deadlines so the deadline is the end of this month everyone who was born and physically located in butte county on april the first counts and the estimates are it's worth ten thousand dollars a person over the

011ten years so if you haven't done the census yet please there's websites there's phone numbers we want to urge you to do that however right now we're facing local elections the league women voters of butte county is setting up the candidate interviews everything will be on zoom but we're setting them all up and you can submit questions for the candidates three days before their presentations so i wanted to make sure that you knew that the first set of interviews will be for the chico city council candidates now remember this is the first time that we've had district based elections so it's very different than before so you can send your questions in they are the interviews are going to be posted on monday evening september the 21st so uh we need you to send them

012to the league of women voters bc with your questions there are ten candidates for the four seats and the votes are in districts one three five and seven so the interviews are going to happen this thursday and friday and all interview questions will be given to all candidates and then like i said they'll be posted the second part of this is that we will be as a league arranging interviews for the paradise town council for all the school districts that are having elections and again these will be sequential and you can send in questions to the league that you would like to ask be asked of the candidates we are also doing a voter registration at the farmer's market so if you haven't registered yet that's a really critical thing the last part of this

013is as everyone knows we've had another dramatic crisis with huge areas of our county burning people being evacuated they may not be able to go back to their homes there may be no home and the post offices in a number of those areas have been closed so it's very very important that if you're going to have a mailing address different than the address that you were using to receive your ballot in the mail which are going to go out in october early october then you need to contact the hall of records butte county and get your mailing address corrected so that's the critical part of this so that your ballot will actually get to you so that's it thank you okay does anyone else have any other announcements i do yes so we are once

014again facing frustrations with our zoom so we had a call-in line set up for our speakers from items from the floor and speakers on agenda items the audio on the zoom is not coming through so we have posted new directions and we want to encourage everyone to go to the chico unified website chicousd.org we are going to call we will call the people who submitted speaker cards the phone number if you want to announce the phone number that will be coming to them so that they know what to be looking for thank you superintendent staley the phone number we'll i'll be calling from is 530-774-5429 again five three zero seven seven four five four two nine the speaker cards we have so far are mark owen ryan crosby and eric oberle for items from the

015floor we have from the elementary waiver matt tennis heidi dausman jody taylor and lcp thank you for lcp we have matt tennis kelly mcgregor and aaron isherwood so those folks do not need to do anything we have your numbers and i'll be calling you so if uh there is time and we certainly hope there will be after we hear from the uh speaker cards then we will go to those people that have submitted their name to staff and staff announced where they submitted it to to public comment i don't have my chico usd up in front of me submit your name the item number you would like to address and your phone number and we will call you in order as well so that's go to chicousd.org and submit your name phone number agenda item

016you would like to address thank you okay one announcement that i want to make is that um this week we've been hearing a lot of kind of disturbing news and and there seems to be a lot of swirl around social media and plus with students being home a lot um you know i i would think there's even more of an uptick in use of social media and i just wanted to make parents aware that there are some resources out there if you are concerned about your students social media use or the impact it might be having on them or their mental health there is an organization called humane tech and it's humanetech.com and they have resources to help you possibly impact or limit the social media or understand what the possible impacts might be on

017your teen or your adolescent and there is also an excellent video that can now be seen on netflix called the social dilemma and that explains a lot about what the impacts on children are and possible effects on mental health so i highly recommend that i think in this time when there's a lot of people indoors and not being able to see people there's more reliance on that and there are some dangers associated okay uh so we will move on now to our consent oh excuse me we will um have an update um did we want to do this uh do we want to take the items from the floor do you want to give some time for people to okay okay before while you're in the process of doing that let me just remind you

018of the rules that we have regarding this items from the floor are very specifically items that do not appear on our agenda tonight so if you are speaking to something that is on our agenda that it this is not the place to discuss it you will discuss that item at the time that we'll allocate for that particular item so the conversation under items from the floor needs to be something not on our agenda and and we are not able to respond in any way to items from the floor and that's three minutes each speaker we will have 10 minutes and then i will check in with the board to see if we're going to go further with this so anyhow okay we can begin okay mark owen you're you are unmuted go ahead all right

019my name is mark owen i'd like to thank the board members for their volunteered service i respect the time and energy you've put into our schools here in chico i know all of you are doing what you feel is best to bring a good education to our children with that said ingenuity is not the best we can and have to do better i have two daughters enrolled in chico unified schools a sophomore at chico high an 8th grader at bidwell for the past few weeks i've watched my daughter struggle with ingenuity the poor replacement of an education system has taken my honor roll students to failing students i've watched one of my daughters go from completely self-motivated engaged in her classwork to lackadaisical and not engaged at all another daughter who has always been a

020good confident student is now overwhelmed stressed and unsure of herself edge annuity is not working besides our children getting a subpar education is also messing with their self-confidence something needs to change face-to-face learning would be best i understand this may be out of your control but using technology like google classroom and zoom with teachers teaching our children and not using ingenuity is in your control i'm not i'm sure i'm not the only concerned parent i thank you for your time okay thank you mr owen we will move on to mr crosby brian hello hi ryan this is john shepard from chico unified school district and i'm going to unmute you and you'll be addressing the school board okay i needed uh my computer so perfect let me know if you can hear me yep we

021can hear you go ahead okay great well i appreciate uh you guys first off um obviously struggling with the zoom thing that seems to be a problem uh across the nation so i appreciate you guys being creative and still getting uh parents voices onto the board so really appreciate your effort there i want to start like man this the information around the teacher i mean uh how sad um obviously kind of a testament to the times we're in i mean i don't know the things around it but um i just want to say that i know everybody involved here at the board with our teachers i know that everybody's trying to make decisions uh they're for the best for our kids and we just we just all have different ways and different ideas how to

022get there so i guess i just want to start with that like i truly appreciate the efforts and the things that you guys have to go through um to try to make decisions for a vast majority of people um so i appreciate it and i truly truly appreciate our teachers um so i'm part of a group uh parent advocates for in uh for for school in person learning and uh you know obviously we were for the waivers for uh the elementary school kids um and and honestly we were looking for some solutions for six through 12 kids um kind of like the gentleman before me said ingenuity you know is definitely a struggle for kids i think the connection problems there's there's a lot of connection problems there's audio corruption um and i think really

023i feel like we're benching our best asset which is the teacher um you know and again we're trying to adapt to the times but unfortunately there's not a ton of instruction now that's coming from the teachers and so i feel like we're benching our best asset really the thing that we want to connect with our students um i think it's hard to control class in that environment the teachers are doing the best they can but it's a really difficult thing and so it's it's messing with the success of the students i think there's too many platforms uh and activities uh one of my sons at bidwell uh you know he does spend till about seven o'clock at night and i know uh mr mckay i think it was or one of the one of the

024principals said you know like just not to allow them to do it um but i think in the end it's we want to make sure that they get a good grade right we want to make sure they're getting the information their understanding material because frankly we don't get this year back um you know so there's body fatigue there's headaches they're sitting you know sitting and watching and staring at the screen for a long time i mean me a big one too is isolation from friends um and i do i kind of feel like there's uh some depression setting in and i think that's happening across the board and i think it's time for us to to really kind of look for some creative solutions um so to me i feel like they're two-pronged approach right

025we have to figure out how to creatively work with the systems we have in place today right how do we get better at that how do we get opinions from the teachers and how that can be improved but i think second is we have to begin to press the state right and that so thinking of creative ways that we can get in front of the state uh with with new ideas of how we could possibly open these schools okay mr mr crosby sorry to interrupt you but um your time is up mr crosby your time's up so i'm going to go ahead and hang up we do appreciate your feedback thank you okay i'm calling eric overly so should i try again we are currently trying to reach eric oberle hello is this eric yes

026is this eric eric if you are watching i think we do not have the correct number for you perhaps is okay we've tried twice if mr eric oberle we do have the phone number that you submitted which we tried calling that did not work we do have another opportunity for comments from the floor so if you could contact us with the correct phone number we'll be happy to put you on during that time because you did submit a speaker card okay so uh we still have a few moments are there any other we we do not have a way to do this now do we they can go to public comment at chicousd.org we've now listed that on our chico unified website right now we do not have any others that have submitted through that

027mechanism okay knowing that that is brand new that just started at six o'clock tonight right okay okay then that being the case we will we will move forward uh the next item of business is a negotiations update mr hanlon so um actually negotiations is a part of the presentation tonight so i'm going to defer until we get into the presentation and i so i won't be repeating myself okay that makes sense thank you very much um next will be our consent calendar uh do any board members want to pull items from the consent calendar yes kathy i want to pull uh under the um i think it's under contracts um yeah because it's it's notification of items i'm sorry it's one two the approval of items donated to chico unified school district 7.1.2 yeah okay

028okay did anyone else have any item they'd like to pull no if not may i have a motion i'll move the remainder of that calendar okay and kathy you seconded yeah okay um item was moved by tom lando and seconded by dr kaiser uh this will be for the remainder of the consent calendar and we'll take a roll call vote um linda how do you vote harvey i okay lando lando eye kaiser griffin okay that passage unanimously we will go back then to item 7.1.2 i wanted to pull this to recognize two particular donations mary j lauderdale five thousand dollars to fairview high school and then the soroptimus international avidwell rancho who donated one thousand one hundred twenty five dollars to fairview high school i think sometimes people see fairview as not the ideal school

029for their kid and yet it has been extremely successful with kids that need extra help and these donations are a validation of that and also a measure of hope so we want to thank them very much and with that i move uh the donations that would be okay that would be item 7.1.2 that was moved by dr kaiser seconded by eileen robinson all those in favor please say i i i don't know if i heard you linda hi thanks okay um that takes care of the consent calendar the next item is number eight under educational services it's going to be a discussion and possible action with regards to the parent and staff elementary covit 19 waiver survey results and that would be mr karis i believe actually i'll go ahead and start us off um

030the board has asked us to move forward with looking at what it would take to get elementary waivers onto our different elementary schools and so we have a little presentation to go over where we're at at this time so first on the agenda tonight we're going to be going over the background the safety conditions the parent and staff survey data and the process that we're looking forward to moving on next okay first a little background the california department of public health back in august 3rd of 2020 announced that a waiver of the state's school reopening criteria may be available for elementary schools however the waiver is not within the jurisdiction of the california department of education or the school board of education but will instead be considered by the local public health officers in consulting

031with the california department of public health therefore the california department of ed does not maintain a list of schools or districts that have been applied for reopening the school waivers additionally only the superintendent or the head of the school is allowed to submit the waiver request to a local public health officer also further the board direction chief unified surveyed the parents of staff to gauge the interest in applying for a waiver and the chico unified teachers association also administrated a staff survey and we'll be going over those tonight great the safety conditions in order to have the elementary waiver consider for approval by the butte county public health chico unified school schools would be required to follow all estate and healthy health and safety guidelines these include consistent small groups consists of small groups six

032foot social distancing facial coverings for completed we also have all the complete of the guidelines that you guys have proved before for the ampm model that would go for any of the different stages or colors that we would go into and those are on our website and it's also in a bit league on here people wanted to look at that at another time to accommodate these requirements elementary classes under the waiver cannot adhere to the traditional full-day schedule so if a waiver gets passed we cannot at this point have 30 kids or 24 or 30 or 34 go to a classroom all day the exact schedule must be negotiated with the bargaining units which we'll be talking a little bit more later and the elevated elementary waiver schedules may closely resemble the amt model that

033we had discussed earlier in another board meeting or an alternating deadly schedule so we could have only half of the amount of students on our campuses outside and remember this waivers are only for our our elementary schools these cannot be approved for our junior highs or or our high schools i'm going to pass over the survey data from tim carrots he's the one that's been working on all the data for us and he does a great job at that and before we go there i do want to again say that if we have people that would like to address this please go to the chico unified school district website and email your name phone number and the item you would want to address which in this case would be the waiver and that's public comment

034at chicousd.org put your name in and we will be calling you for public comment when we get to that part of the agenda in addition attached to our agenda are all of the written public comments that we have already received and that the board has read on this agenda also i want to be able to state that mr karis will be going over the survey data that we provided to our families and then we'll have kevin maretti the president of the chico unified teachers association go over their data after that great okay all right good evening per board direction we sent out three surveys on august 27th and left them open until september 4th one survey went out to parents of all of our elementary students the second survey went out to certificated staff at

035the elementary sites and the third survey went out to classified staff that work at any of our elementary sites so the first set of data set i'm going to go over is our parent survey data but before i go into the actual numbers um just wanted to give you a little uh kind of idea what the what those surveys looked like okay at the top of the survey was information regarding uh the offering by the by the california department of public health to authorize waivers as approved by the local uh health officers it also listed a lot of the information that was in mr marchant's portion of the presentation regarding safety protocols that needed to be in place so we wanted people to really know what they were voting for okay so we gave gave

036them a lot of information all the information we have available currently yeah if you need to it's really hard to start over no it's okay just if you could continue please okay thank you sorry about that so with that in mind we'll take a look at our parent survey data first and we got the title cut off but but this is our parent survey and i want to note for those in the in the audience that this is a little bit of a different look than was put out with the original agenda that that was put out on friday we added the number of responses and the number of total students to the data set per board direction and to give more context to the conversation and the and the meaning of these results so

037on that survey parents were asked a simple question given these uh circumstances for coming back to school in person in a limited manner would you [Music] send your student to school for in-person learning or would you like to keep them home for online learning okay so up here the green indicates the yeses and the yellow indicates the nose uh before we look at the greens and the yellows too much though i want to point out the number of responses 1930 out of total students 5055 for a response rate of 38.2 each student was was granted one uh survey entry so in cases where two parents entered survey data only one was taken we also validated the data that parents entered via asking for a student id so we could check to make sure that those

038students were enrolled in our elementary schools um so we're confident that we have valid data there were some data entry mistakes and entries for secondary students etcetera that were thrown out mr cares also if a family had four students they were allowed to have four survey results that that is correct one per student regardless of how many were in the family okay so overall we see that uh 68.9 of parents would like to send their child back to school for in-person learning in some way shape or form while 31.1 would prefer to keep them at home for online um at the site levels and we'll get more into what's going to happen at the site levels with this data and more data to come later in the presentation but we saw response rates that range

039from 16.3 all the way up to 51 and we saw you know rates as high as yes rates as high as 77.9 percent at some sites keep in mind the sample size is is fairly small and especially in that re that lower range of our schools with the lower participation rates it gets very very small do we have any questions about the parent survey data so just to clarify so at the so of the at okay so you've got 38 percent so uh of the 38 that participated sixty eight point nine percent correct okay that's that's what we're looking at that's a lot exactly i just want to clarify that okay yes i'm sorry elaine i'm i'm on the i'm on the clarification bandwagon as well so for example um at neil dow elementary the

040responses were 94. did you change the slide yep we're back okay 94 responses which is 29 of that school sites population responding yes okay so i'm reading it correctly thank you and of the respondents the percentages are given off to the side in the colors so let's just take the highest percentage which was shasta they had a 77.9 but they had 236 yeses out of 639 so that's really a 37 of the people in that campus of their students that have said yes that we know of that turned into survey i think there's another aspect to this though mathematically which is if we want to go to eileen's original question so kneel down we had 94 responses but they reflect 316 kids so when we look at the number kids they are answering for you

041know that is and i don't uh remember the total population to kneel down i don't know if tim the total population would be 316. no that actually go to that school yes oh okay all right thank you any further questions here yeah okay we'll move on to the uh certificated staff survey uh we had a much higher participation rate uh 68.3 across the district uh 263 out of 385 certificated staff at sites uh classified is this classified this is certificated i'm sorry so the this data set well the survey was originally sent out to administrators as well we threw out those responses for the purposes of this data display and so it's classroom teachers it's title 1 teachers speech therapists all the support staff and one thing that uh i want to point out to

042you is at on the site column down the left hand side it says district itinerant those are our teachers that move from site to site so that would include our fine arts specialists our music teachers our pe teachers etc if i may um in designing these surveys was there room for comment as well there was thanks have access to those comments later on we will not see those later on at the board meeting i can easily make them available to you though thank you okay so overall 61 60.1 percent favored said they would like to come back and work should a waiver pass and 39.9 said no and you can see the variances down the list of sites any questions here on the certificated data okay classified staff was also surveyed on pretty much the

043exact same survey as certificated staff with a little slight change in wording and you can see there um quite a favorable response to coming back to work and bringing kids back to school in person so 73.1 percent uh favored coming back and 26.9 said no we see kind of generally by sight the rates are fairly high the exceptions there are chapman in sierra view interesting any questions no yes tim uh am i reading correctly that on for example chapman 45 is 11 staff members and 54 is 13 staff members okay thank you okay there's no more questions we'll move on to our uh chico unified teachers association survey data they gave us a similar survey but with more details and uh specific to to their needs so i'm going to ask kevin moretti to unmute

044and kevin i'll flip through the slides for you okay i'm still seeing the title page so the first three questions i asked one was i wanted everyone's name to make sure they were actually a teacher at that site at what site they i asked them all to pick a site and then um well and then what their position was because i wanted to divide this out by uh the classroom teachers tk through five and then all the others uh slps rsp scc because it occurred to me you could have you could make this work if the classroom teachers were doing it you could still have those other teachers doing by zoom in in the in the off session if we were in a am pm because might be a possibility so that's why i broke

045it out this way so um see the first question i had 251 responses and uh you can see the breakdown there i asked the question a little bit differently and you can see it up there if you go to the next sign mr moretti before you move on um what is the percentage of uh responses huh 251 answered this survey and there's about what 700 teachers no no because this is only elementary so yes it's about 3 35 we'll get to that slide that'll show up when i break it out yeah you bet so this so question four was just do you want your school to apply for a waiver right yes or no and let's know you're done okay so if we could go to question five so then i want to know because

046you might want to waiver but but question uh five was would you be willing to add and drop kids from your roster because not every kid in your class if you were teaching a person is going to show up so how do we account for that so the yes this went down from whatever they were before i think it was 117 down to 72 of those and then i and then the other questions were just like these are just what is you know would you still want to do it what if so if you'll go to question uh six please so would you be willing to move to a different grade level because it might work out that you know all the third grade teachers want to do it but none of the fourth grade

047teachers want to do it um and so what would we do in that case so that was this question and question seven is um what if everybody at one school wanted to do it but nobody the other would would you be willing to switch schools to make it happen and and so that's that was the purpose of that question so those aren't real popular popular ones and certainly not as popular as people wanting to get back into uh in the classroom with kids so then i went by hand and broke it all out by school site and then by position either a classroom teacher for lack of a meta word or a sec whatever so that's what this next slide is and this is the information that you're asking for so uh if you look

048at the total at the bottom we had a so this is just with question four so i had 117 yeses and 127 nos and 102 respond uh no responses so if you so 346 was the number you were looking for linda thank you that was the total so this is just breaking it out by side with those two groups broken out into yes and no and then you can um and then you can uh uh oh it's the percent yes over here the percent yes and then either no or no response when is it in the yes kevin when you are identifying chapman other you're talking about the teachers or the that provide a range of services they're not in a classroom right so so so the others on top you go to the bottom

049right there's chapman tk through five so that so other is everybody that's not that so that's the sec teacher rsp teacher the speech pathologist the nurse the um anybody else that's in my bargaining group that's not a tk through 5 teacher understood so that that was that is my part unless you have any questions well i'm a little concerned about the data kevin if you don't mind my saying so just because i'm looking at uh the seer of you other column where you've got yes three no response two but the yes rate came back as a hundred percent oh uh you know i didn't put those percents in i can look at my i can i sent you my original data this is a slide that that um yeah district put together yes kevin i'll

050take a look at that and and get an update to the board that was that was me putting in the percentages okay so uh tom i i sent you the i've got the original uh i'll recheck my email i can find the the other data see if it matches up or not thank you there was some oh just there was a question about how this data might have been different not tonight but i'll address it anyway uh how this data might be different from the districts and and when i sent out mine and people asked me why so many no responses and it could be people got confused they can already answer this um you also why am i doing a survey again might have might have been one one reason some people misinterpreted the

051district's question yes that was in the comments that i got where they thought um they misread the question and i sent out a clarification and kelly sent out a clarification but i sent my survey out after and people said that told me they misunderstood the districts was they were taking it as will you teach in person or or quit is how they interpreted it which is not what the district meant at all so if there was variations that might be um it was a misunderstanding on the teachers that took the district survey and um and then for mine also i sent it out as a blast email it made it have ended up in their clutter folders but mine closed tuesday after memorial day on memorial day i sent out an individual email to everyone

052who hadn't voted to remind him i was closing the next day so i'm pretty confident it didn't stay in there that that would have gone through but those are some things that might explain the difference i think tim can clarify the data yeah i was i'm sorry i was taking a little bit off guard earlier but i want to point out the sierra view other and 100 percent there there was three yeses and zero no's so the percentage is not out of the total staff it's out of the respondents ah right got it are there do you have any other questions for me anybody else have questions no i do not thank you you're welcome okay thank you very much kevin okay so we're just going to go back to the process that we kind

053of talked about at the last board meeting and what steps that we're going through and then so our first process was to help our school sites and our district to send out a survey to all of our parents and all of our classified and certificated which we have done and what you just saw the results also our step two we were going to bring back the results to you guys tonight which we are and then step three we wanted to give steps three and four are negotiation updates and i'm going to kind of let mr hanlon talk about um slides on steps three and four okay so um we have met with cuta we met on september 10th and we are planning on meeting every two weeks with that group specifically on coming back to

054school in some form either through the hybrid model when we move into i guess the red color or a waiver because those things as you'll see as i discussed this overlap um quite a bit and we also are meeting with csea we have a meeting scheduled for september 24th october 15th and the 29th those closely mirror the cuta meetings so that we can coordinate the two agreements we currently have a collective a bargaining agreement where under normal circumstances all the working conditions are laid out specifically for staff and then we also have an mou for online instruction and what we're negotiating now as something different some kind of a hybrid model whether it's in a waiver format or if we come back in some some conditions under under the level red just for some clarification

055under a waiver we're required to consult with our union our unions about their concerns and issues that they bring up with coming back under some kind of a hybrid model but the but the state requires that we negotiate with our unions anytime there's a change in working conditions so if we change the working conditions from the contract that we have agreed to then we have to come back to the table and negotiate there's really not a way to implement a waiver without changing the working conditions for example we're going to be talking about the instructional day the length of the day the starting and ending times possibly splitting up students into two groups or whether it's in a in a morning afternoon format or in every other day so those are all working conditions that

056by law we have to negotiate so yep of the things that i was curious about is uh my understanding is the elementary waivers are site by site they may be yes okay and we saw some very different survey results from parents from teachers and from staff at different school sites so when you're negotiating a union contract and yet there's only a couple of schools who are actually wanting to go for the waiver um how does that happen so we can even negotiate different waivers for different school sites so um with some minor minor changes depending on what um what comes out of that school site so we've had conversations with our principals depending on the survey results that go back to their staff and um and with their parent groups and try to come to

057get to some agreement because again we're changing working conditions so we we want to have some agreement on the front end so that when we go to the bargaining table it's much more effective um and and easier simpler to reach an agreement if we have buy-in from all the all the parties so we know from the data that there are groups of teachers that are interested in doing something at different grade levels maybe and how that will look at each site may be different and i would expect it to be different we currently have mou's waivers for parent conferencing and collaboration that are slightly different from from school site to school sites so this is something we've done before so we can be flexible eileen did you have a question yes yeah and there may

058be most of it probably will be common but there'll be some differences jim i just have a concern that if not all of the elementary school sites choose to participate in the waiver and you've got parents at a site that chooses not to participate can those parents elect to transfer to another school that would be a bigger decision um that that we'd have to have a conversation on because that may um impact some other areas of the students that are already there what do you do with them there's because there are case class size limits also that that's right we only have so many so many spots in in different schools we do have a form 10 process for inner district transfers but that is on space availability and that would apply here as well

059and uh that form 10 may be the governing tool because to assess a site that has the waiver as not having room because in order to add more students you skew the balance of the size of the cohorts and the size of the amp pm classes so that that may be something that the district would have to implement is a strict look at the um the form 10 and the impact of accepting movement can we see that now but this would add a lot of complexity to that for sure and parents would have to also take into account we don't know how long before we go into stage two or co or level red or or you know the next stage um it may be a month it may be the rest of the year

060we just don't know so they may be making a long-term decision here for for just a short amount of time and that may not be in their their interest or their child's interest also it's just there's a lot of unknowns and eileen the principles have started going back already and taking a look at the information they have if you think of it almost as a mathematical puzzle to see if the percentages can match up in some way shape or form that'll work for those that are interested and those that are interested to come back in person they've started looking at that and will start actually re-surveying and checking again to try to get a more refined uh accounting what their families want to do and what their staff wants to do also so um there's

061a lot of overlap there's a significant amount of overlap between coming back in a hybrid model that that you had voted on a couple meetings ago in a waiver so we are negotiating those in tandem because the the issues and conditions are very very similar we have a we do have a deadline our current mou for online instruction is only good through the end of this calendar year december 31st for both for both union groups so um we would obviously like to have an agreement well before that um um and that and that's what we're working to that end um i'm gonna take over that okay so where are we at now so we have like i said we had met with cuda we have made a lot of um cota which is the teachers

062union we have met with them once already um we've reached some some some tentative agreements on some very key issues already so just to give you an idea how quickly we're moving um now we can always hit a roadblock with with um anything but um we have we do have a very positive relationship with both groups and so it's been a very constructive and positive process we've reached some some tentative agreements on general areas such as personal protective equipment face coverings hand washing adherence to health department guidelines physical distancing we're really with physical distancing we're talking about class sizes there's no way to guarantee that kids are 100 percent of the time going to be six feet apart but if we have smaller groups it's much easier to to make sure that that happens so

063we're talking about class sizes supervision duties school ingress and egress points and then um not having things big big group meetings like open house in assemblies so we've we've talked about and reached some general agreements on those issues that we still have to negotiate on are instructional minutes health screening testing and notification sub coverage the the cuta members that work in the after school program their coordinators they're part of the the um the association medical leaves coven 19 exposure procedures and then the duration of the mou so we have some work to do but we've also made quite a bit of progress thank you any questions on any of that no thank you for your efforts you your team and and the unions as well thank you so this next slide i'm going to have

064uh mrs staley and myself kind of go through um our proposal i want to make sure i'm not talking out of turn sure so at our last board meeting we said uh laid out several steps that we would go through and at each step we said we would bring it back to the board for approval before moving on to the next step and we had approval from the board to do step one which was survey the school sites we have done the survey we have presented those to you so that is our step two step three is an update on the negotiations actually step three was we would negotiate with the unions uh we are doing that uh step four was the update back to the board on those negotiations step five is where we

065actually now need board action and approval to move forward and um i think i speak for all of us that we look forward and want to have our students back with their peers back with their teachers in a safe environment and certainly we want to find a way for those teachers that want to be back teaching to be able to be with the parents and the students that want to be back and that is the intent of the waiver is to try to match that up there are complexities which we've been sharing you know it is not a straightforward process but each school site has different data each school site has different grade levels where teachers are interested we could have a school site where let's say tkk and one all want to return to

066in-person learning great let's try to find a way to make that happen that may not be the case at another school site so with step five what we are asking is for the board to charge us to go back and work with individual school sites to find out for each school site how do we make this work we know that we cannot force teachers to come back to work when we are in a stage purple or down the color so we have to do this with people that are volunteering we also know we can't force students to come back when we're in a stage in the color purple so it's really going to uh require cooperation to find a way to make this work also i just want to add that we are our principals

067at our sites believe that they can get out of survey we've already given them that that they can get it out all by friday except for chapman's going to take their they would take out a new survey to their parents they believe that they could get a higher number working with their parent organizations and them coming out from their school to get a higher number percentage of parent participation as you saw that was pretty low so we really kind of want to get a true number for that also they believe now that they've been doing uh volunteer staff meetings to talk to the teachers with their union representatives about what this could mean with safety guidelines so they're more clear and we believe that we'll have a more clear number of how many teachers want

068to come back to work versus not to because we had a lot of the schools a third of their teachers didn't even vote either so we want to make sure we can get more of a sense so we think that we can get that done those surveys done by wednesday of this next week have haven't turned in so that's what we're kind of hoping also yes kathy um so i think uh getting deeper into the weeds as you're saying is really really critical and we've had a communications some of them personal about people misinterpreting or misunderstanding or thinking they were answering the question one way to get a certain result so i absolutely think we need to go back and really encourage them to consider what this means for them but a lot of the

069comments that were coming into us had nothing to do with the elementary waiver and so i just want to state two facts that people may not be aware of one is that orange county way way way way bigger than us tried to go against the state regs and it went all the way up to the state supreme court and the state supreme court said no one can go against the state's regulations for reopening schools i.e applying for a waiver so right now there is no question that there are no secondary waivers we are only talking about elementary which for us is tk to five the second is there was a private religious school that was k to 12 and i want to say folsom fresno thank you that tried to go against the health department

070and the judge literally shut them down so we really want to stay i believe laser focused on what we can do and try to do it as best as possible with our parents with our teachers with our staff so i say go good points kathy and if i could just jump in ms griffin in looking at this step slide five i'm seeing at the very bottom that the timeline uh would be the next meeting we would get results from both our union negotiations and the surveys would come back to us at the next meeting next month is that correct i want to be clear on the timeline here because so i i do believe that the timeline may be different for each individual school but the goal is to bring surveys back at our next

071regularly scheduled board meeting correct i see yeah yes we met with we met with the elementary rituals today for about two hours and kind of walked through all the possibilities here letting him know it's going to discuss tonight and just kind of to give them some forewarning about what they might need to be doing moving forward depending on what the board's will is with this so several they're very excited i have a staff that's very excited to kind of look at how they could take those next steps we told them possibly we might like to have them have a update ready not a final draft ready for the october 7th workshop but also that if they could have something in place by the 21st that we can move forward at that point with it also

072if that was the will of the board also very good thank you thank you okay one of the things that i want to stress and i have to say that this was an idea that i advocated for with the superintendent because i really do believe that when people design something they take ownership of it and they want to make it work and having this type of thing is not a top-down type of order you can give your staff that you need to put the word out there that we will do everything to help you and to encourage your cooperation and collaboration but you know it's just like with anything else if you're forced to do it you know you may not have the buy-in than if you designed it yourself and you're the one who

073helped create it so that was one of the main reasons that i thought this was going to be a good way to approach this plus seeing the results of these surveys you can look at the surveys uh in a couple of different ways and certainly there is support there's quite a bit of support for parents coming back however you do have to take into consideration the number of parents who did not respond um having a participation rate of 38 that's just barely over a third you know that participated in this and so we we have to find out what that group of people the additional people are thinking we would not be doing justice to all of our parents if we just ignored the other percentage that just didn't take part in this so another

074good reason to go about with this approach um so anyhow that's just really what i wanted to say and um at this point um you know this did you want to proceed with others or did you want to how did you want to do this miss daley well the remaining steps um you know are would still need to come back to the board so i think this would be a great time to hear from our public people that have submitted speaker cards we do have three speaker cards and i will check with erica behind me to see if we have anybody who has submitted into the website to see if there's other speakers okay then we'll go ahead and we'll proceed with the people who signed up to speak with regards to the elementary waiver

075and mr shepard i think you're okay i'm calling matt tennis hello matt okay matt you are live addressing the chico unified school district board hello uh good evening everyone let me mute my phone i'm not hearing anything on the phone matt so you should matt can you hear me you should just speak speak into your phone don't speak into your computer speak into your phone no computer's been muted terrific we can hear you go ahead on my phone okay um thank you good evening everyone matt tennis is my name i'm the organizer of chico parents for in-person learning which now has well over 300 members of parents and other concerned community members who have recognized the importance of in-person learning and we want to put children first and we want to get them into the

076environment that they critically need and that is a classroom environment where there is in-person school working with the teachers and staff that they know and love so we are committed to that um and you will continue to hear from us on that until that reality is restored for all the kids in the system um i think the reason why a lot of people did not respond to the survey is because we are completely frazzled out here and i hear from my constituents and you've heard from them i've read your comments not a single comment that you guys received in writing against the idea of pursuing a waiver every single one of the 12 comments that i see posted on the agenda it contains heart-wrenching stories about the need to get kids back in school okay

077as far as the survey results are concerned there is a very very broad majority consensus that both or all three parents teachers and staff majorities strong majorities of all those people want to go back to school and some of your guys's comments and interaction with each other there were a couple of members who mentioned how you know it seemed like there was only a couple of schools where people actually wanted a waiver that is actually opposite of the truth if you look at these survey data which i'm looking at right in front of me on paper neil dow and chapman are the only schools where certificated staff did not want to go back every other single school had strong majority or at least a simple basic majority of staff teachers that is who wanted to

078go back and then the classified staff results are even strong more compelling than that even more of those people want to go back and the parents i'll just reiterate again strongly want to go back i'd like to comment on the cuta data and i want to give a little shout out here to kevin maretti because i asked the district for questions one two and three of the survey data and because those were not initially released to the public and he informed me of what those questions were where those teachers they had to identify themselves for purposes of the cuta study that's a problem okay every single one of us knows that that's a problem and that that cuta data is tainted by the fact that it was not um anonymous okay so the district data

079is much stronger and objective more more objective than the cuta data um and as far as why some teachers didn't respond i i don't really have an answer for that but um mr tennis i'm sorry your time is up so mr tennis your time is up so i'm going to hang up thank you for your feedback yeah thank you thank you all right bye [Music] okay we have a heidi dausman i think we do hi hi hi this is john shepard are you are you you're now unmuted and you are addressing the school board okay thank you so much i first off i just want to say thank you for all of our teachers i know that they're working incredibly hard especially in the elementary school level to make sure that these kids are getting

080as much as they can give them unfortunately though i feel like in a lot of ways we've checked off a box for our kids and i don't really think that's fair for them no one deserves to go through life just checking a box and we definitely shouldn't be doing that for our kids they deserve the most that we can give them and unfortunately i feel like we aren't giving that to them right now their mental health is definitely being impacted i have a 7 11 and thirteen-year-old boys who are very active luckily i have them in a couple other things that keep them going but um my seven-year-old melted down last week and he's not one to really do that i held him and asked him what was wrong and he said i just really

081really miss school and when is coronavirus going over the recommendations from the cdc the who and the pediatric association all recommend children going back to school so i see you guys are taking the steps i just want to ask you to continue fighting the fight because quite honestly i'm done with my kids in this program i'm done with them doing zooms i know many other parents are as well and have pulled their kids out i'm on here tonight because i care about my community and i care about the kids in the community and um i could have saved my energy but i know how important this is for our kids and i just want to ask you guys what happens when these students start leaving because i know that we aren't the only ones and

082that there are going to be many others who are following and looking for other solutions so where there's there's opportunity either we solve it for our customer or the competition will solve it so i just ask you guys to keep that in mind that other solutions are coming and people are looking for other ways to continue education for their kids and to give them the best that we can definitely i'm sorry but this this platform that we have the zooms where it's crashing the kids are being kicked out they're being told to email their teacher and they're not being let it back in it's it's just not working and the little ones they can't handle it we were just given information on how much they need to turn in per week for seven years old

083they have to be on the computer doing four i readys two reflex greens and also two ar quizzes a week on top of submitting their work daily through a system this is so much for them to do on a computer at seven years old personally i've been in many virtual trainings and within a couple hours as a grown woman it's pretty daunting but as a seven-year-old child by 10 am they're they're just done they're asking when can i be done so for my children they are and we're taking them out and we're looking forward thank you heidi your time is up thank you okay thank you heidi and we have one more jody taylor i'll be calling jody now hello this is jody hi jody you are now addressing the chico unified school district board

084okay i'm going to go ahead and mute the tv i apologize for that so um i my husband and i are parents to three elementary age students in the district and i like like the previous caller i can tell you that zoom based education distance learning it just does not even come close to replicating the classroom and it is it's not the same i can't really describe the struggles we're seeing in our kids all three of them i won't go into detail on that here but we're seeing social emotional behavioral changes in them that we have not seen before and this is taking an emotional toll on our kids that is very real so sorry i'm emotional about this but turning turning my thoughts to the waiver process so when it comes to the new

085step 5a in the application i have two points that i'd like to share the first is i know the board wants buy-in from families but let's be realistic if a huge portion of families didn't respond to the survey it isn't likely that they'll jump in and get involved in drafting their own school sites reopening plan it's just not realistically going to happen and also i wanted to note that many teachers teachers didn't also didn't respond to the survey so i know you want feedback from everybody and involvement from everybody but you didn't get it on the survey um i don't know that having them draft the plan is going to bring that about either the second point i want to make is that i really feel that the district is abdicating its responsibility here in

086placing the burden of coming up with this plan on individual school sites the district should be leading here with a plan from the district and outlining a path for students and teachers who want to stay with distance learning and a path for students and teachers who want to plan on returning to classrooms and then consulting with the school sites on specific items as needed you know to fill in the details of the plan i'm frustrated as a parent the district did not allow for any individuality from school site to school site when they were planning distance learning it was everybody on chromebooks everybody on the same curriculum everybody on zoom there was no personalization from school to school but now you're turning it over and giving each school site the chance to just completely customize

087their return to the classroom and that feels very scattered and haphazard to me um and and i have a problem with it i feel like you're putting your responsibility of the district on the shoulders of school staff and school families in closing i just want to give a shout out to our teachers though they are working their tails off for our kids and i know that many of them want to be back in classrooms i know our kids want to be back in classrooms and they need to be we just need to make this happen thank you jody your time thanks thank you jody so we do not have any others that have left uh phone numbers for us to call they have left comments which we will attach to the agenda as we have

088the other comments okay alrighty so i guess at this point what we're discussing is approval and determination of implementation of step number five i do want to address you know the comment that miss taylor our last caller said and by no means are we telling the schools go figure this out we met with them today to help with this we will help with all of these safety measures all of those pieces that we go through we will do this side by side with them but due to the drastic differences in the grade level responses the interest that are from site by site i don't see i could be very wrong i do not see how you can have a district-wide plan with such variances of at each individual school site yes kathy so i want

089to urge us to move forward with step five i believe that well for one thing i believe we have extremely qualified and engaged leadership at our elementary schools yes i think they will very much work with our teachers and our staff and those teachers can reach out to the parents and encourage them if they didn't respond the first time or if their opinions have changed people do change their opinions that they can give feedback but just in the context of people saying you know we're taking our kids elsewhere the rules that were given were for the entire county regardless of what kind of a school it was that's why i gave the the citation of the judge who just shut down a private religious school in another county because that school violated the county health

090rigs and that was the end of it so we have to follow those regs and those regs say site by site i'm really hoping that the our we have our district learning uh group that's been very effective and our principles working with our own administrators with ted that we will get strong leadership about what it is that a school site thinks that they can do with their parents and their staff i have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old grandchild i really want it to happen but you know i'm not in the driver's seat on how that school makes their decision the parent was so we live with that kathy or just to give a little more flavor to it part of the discussion today with the principals talked about if this was the will of the

091board to move forward we would schedule some joint planning sessions with all of them together so the updates you would see a lot of comparability with those kinds of things just to make sure we're addressing all of those elements like like superintendent staley shared you would see maybe some slight variation depending on staff interest as far as what they're able to do within the contractual limitations like mr hanlon was sharing also and that's why there needs to be a little bit of variance because we do need to match up to what we're able to negotiate with those different groups at those different places but there's definitely interest there's definitely desire there would be a lot of comparability to it and where we needed to have a little individualization i think that's where you would see

092that happening with it yes tim yeah i wanted to clear up our our first speaker um mentioned that the cuta survey was not anonymous ours was in fact not anonymous either that we sent out it was validated via google so they had to have a google chico usd google account that was used to double check their answers of where they taught what their what their exact position was so we did have validation that that our teachers were at the people answering the survey were our teachers it was behind a password also within that data that um that mr karas has sent out to them today is able to break down every parent's grade level that it came from so our principals now will be able to break it down from what grade level that those

093parents would say when they come back compared to what teachers that we say that we can have come back also and again the district office today was superintendents daily myself director sullivan and also assistant superintendent hanlon helping the principals we've also set up meetings again for next week for us to sit down with them and help them through this process we're not just leaving them hanging out there we will continue to support them in any way we can but they're going to have to be able to know their complexities of their differences from one school to the next or what grade levels for parents and teachers but they will get that information to us this next week so we can help them with the waiver process to bring back to you guys and as far

094as the parent participation question we do have mechanisms better mechanisms at each school site to communicate with parents is that not true i mean we have school site councils we have ptos we have targeted case managers who actually go out and visit families i think the principals are just kind of waiting to hear your guys decision tonight to start trying to put some of those mechanisms in place to get the word out so to speak and get get responses back yeah so it's it's uh there's a lot more participation um we have had our lcat meetings and we have had a good number of parents participating in those as well and um something that they are really wanting to be involved in if this is an issue that's dear to their hearts um and we

095set up the right circumstances and provide things like you know an opportunity then um i believe we will get the people we need several principles shared also with them sending home an email it comes directly from principal allen at chapman so to speak he is much more likely to get a response from his chapman community parents than me sending something to them because his parents don't know me but they do know him and he has a connection with them so if he's sending something out looking for information from them they're much more likely to be responding to him on that personal level with those things right and you know another another thing i just want to mention is you know we had a speaker who indicated that there were over 300 people who were supporting

096his efforts to get people back in school so this would really be a great opportunity for them to participate with their local school that their children attend to help with this effort because um you know they're very interested and and they should be voicing you know their what they what they would like to have happen so i would highly uh encourage them to do that oh sorry eileen no that's okay i was just wait waiting for my turn um i'm not surprised that everybody isn't in the same pattern for getting this implemented i mean that's why our schools are different that's why we have form tens is people pick and choose what fits best so i'm not bothered at all wanting to make everybody the same please no don't do exactly what you've done by

097going to the sites and the principals and saying you know let's let's do what this school and this staff and these parents want i i just fully support the anonymity of um our different school sites are our school site populations i don't see anything on the step 5 waiver process that that i feel a need to modify if it's appropriate and emotion is in order madam president i'd like to move that we direct staff to move forward with of step five with a report back at the next regularly scheduled cusd meeting if that timeline still is appropriate okay so we have a motion by eileen robinson a second by dr kaiser with the specification that um we have this come back to us at the october 7th meeting um any further discussion from people um

098uh linda anything else you'd like to say i have agreed with all your comments and i would just like to see this go forward so we'll get some some more data and make this process move along so i agree let's go okay so i will go ahead then and call for the vote all those in favor of moving forward with step number five with the report back on the seventh please say aye aye aye okay that's unanimous so we will move forward with that and um really looking forward to hearing what all the schools have to say and how they see themselves moving forward with this waiver if they decide to do so madam president may i uh approving step five leads into step six is what we will be facing on the seventh of

099october correct miss steely on october 7th we will come back with an update from each school as well as the survey data from each school site i think that you know that's two weeks away if there are school sites that have plans ready to bring forward we can certainly bring those forward at that point i think the school side for uh looking at their target date was the regular october board meeting okay but we will leave the door open absolutely and you know if you've got people who are highly motivated and they want to move forward with this we will definitely take that under consideration at that next meeting okay okay great thank you for clarifying that eileen all right so our next item is um the public hearing discussion action on the uh williams

100textbook sufficiency for the 2021 school year and this comes before us every year it does it does so education code section 60119 requires that each pupil within the chico unified schools should be provided sufficient textbooks and instructional materials aligned to the content standards and consistent with the cycles and content of the curriculum frameworks in the areas of history and social science mathematics reading language arts and science so the attached certification of provision of standards aligned instructional materials states that we are currently sufficient for the 2020-21 school year as such the ed services department requests approval of resolution number 1524-20 madam president yes i move approval we need to open a public hearing oh i'm sorry yes all right okay i open the hearing all right i this one we always kind of it's such a

101unusual little item um i'll open up the public hearing um for anyone to make any comments about this uh the williams act so in the textbook sufficiency no they they have to submit through the website and i i believe we did have a mechanism to do that earlier on and we and i at least there's no speaker request for this one okay so there's no speaker request so it would just be a matter of week we can talk about it and then close the public hearing and then we will take our vote so if you want to comment on it at all yeah kathy so i had just asked this question as a clarification and i i got an answer but i'd like to present it publicly um in the resolution uh in the second

102paragraph to the bottom it says whereas laboratory science equipment was available for science laboratory classes offered in grades 9 through 12. so maybe we just give a clarification to what we mean about that yes thank you i can do that so that the challenge lies in we are in an online learning uh delivery platform now knowing though that we could be shifting to in person so a resolution like this needs to cover all of that so the the system that we have set up right now does have the standards-based labs available to students if we are able to go back in person we also have those labs available so the language and the resolution covers both all right thank you so with that i would second the eileen's motion okay any further discussion around this

103if not i'm going to close the public hearing and we will take a vote this was a motion by eileen robinson a second by dr kaiser um all those in favor please say aye aye aye aye aye okay that's unanimous thank you and our next item is going to be a discussion action with regards to the learning continuity and attendance plan tina keene and before miss keene starts her presentation i do want to again remind our public that if you would like to comment make a public comment on this there's two ways to do that you may go to our website chicousd.org and under public comment at chicousd.org you can submit your name phone number and the item you want to address in this case the learning continuity plan if you leave your phone number

104we will call you back and allow you to address the board verbally or you can leave written comments and we will attach those to the agenda okay before you start i want to compliment tina because with this plan which was a new requirement by the state with an extremely short timeline she has included a translation into spanish and so i really appreciate that that was provided to our families so that they would be able to understand and participate fully so thank you tina good evening you're welcome my pleasure to do that that's important i do have a slide presentation that we'll go over here erica we'll pull this up i am back with the learning continuity plan i was here september 2nd for the public hearing part this is tied to compliance and i'll talk

105about that as we start out but the public hearing is part of that compliance and then coming around again for the final approval at the second board meeting actually the slides this is the plan uh looks like this that's not plain nice no it should look like should look like this one um thank you for your patience everybody no do want me to log in on you john you good job tina this better be really good after all that wait i apologize for that alrighty so again number two round here in the meantime between the second and the sixteenth today i've had the great fortune of sharing this with many of our site councils a large handful and have had more to go to that has been really fun because the the site councils this

106year have had a great turnout of people and it's been fantastic to provide this to them see their input talk and just generally talk with parents and staff so a little background on this plan back in june senate bill 98 was passed and that added a number of provisions to the ed code regarding instruction during the 2021 school year one of these provisions is edcode43509 which among other things requires all districts and charter schools to draft and adopt a learning continuity plan this plan requires a detailed description of the ways the district will address many issues related to in-person and distance learning now i don't want this to be confused with our lcap even though the the acronym is virtually the same typically every school year in the spring we involve a large group of

107folks from our site with including family members staff parents counselors you name it board members and we have quite a lengthy process to develop our lcap plan which contains our funding attached to the goals that we have for our district this year is a little bit different in that we do not have that typical lcap plan so senate bill 98 kicked off this piece of it and it is a very quick turnaround as i said it was approved to have this in june the template that we all have to follow all of the districts and charters as it is a compliance document that everybody must adhere to the template was released august 1st and everything has to be approved after a public hearing by september 30th so a very quick timeline to turn it around

108as we start school and and don't know how long we will be in this mode of covid so it's a little bit tricky that way and to share it with all of our stakeholders to see where we're at right now is it's great and it's it truly is a snapshot of what we have in place to go forward but where we are now and if we need to adjust and move how we do that so to highlight some of the pieces of the plan one of them is how the district will provide continuity of instruction during the school year to ensure pupils have access to a full curriculum of substantially similar quality regardless of delivery method a plan for ensuring access to devices and connectivity and that means for students and staff professional development is

109addressed and the resources that will be provided to staff including technological support how the district will address pupil learning loss that resulted from covid19 during the 2019-20 and 2021 school years i think i did mention at our previous board meeting but it's it's very important to mention it again that this plan actually does backtrack a little bit to march when we were ordered to go into online learning we had to very quickly turn around a um the way that we had instruction then and we know that pupil learning loss started truly back in that time frame and not exactly right as we started this school year and the plan must be approved by the local board by september 30th after a public hearing has been held so there were additions and corrections to the plan

110after talking and sharing with stakeholders and getting input we also worked with jeannette spencer from butte county office of education she is a great resource and support to all of our schools in our county and knows just a little bit more than than i do and and she would probably tell you she's just a little step ahead because again this is something that's come up very quickly upon everybody and we're all doing our best to put our heads together to do this correctly so i have these addressed for you i did provide board members and our superintendent assistant superintendent the updated copy of the plan but what i'm doing here and it's typical that we do this during our lcap when we make additions or corrections we come back after the public hearing and we

111have the changes listed and the pages you can find that so that's just a quick reminder back to last year's el cap when tim and i presented that at that point so in person learning i shifted some of the actions from contributing to not contributing and again these are based on recommendations from the county and our stakeholders what that means is uh in that section on pages 11 through 13 are our funding sources listed and contributing actions and not contributing mean exactly if it if the action the funding for the action contributes to the actual learning for the students or not now an example would be ppe protective personal equipment or personal protective equipment versus versus a curriculum so under jeannette's guidance that became very clear the online learning program there were some pieces that

112were added there we added specific language about aries attendance documentation on page 18. again just to make it more specific and honing in on the details that that were not there before there was added language about professional development continuing based on staff needs previously we talked about the professional development we we have had in the last month six weeks but the importance of continuing forward with that professional development basing that on the needs of our staff as we go through the upcoming weeks and what all that entails there is added language about students with 504 plans receiving support on page 23. we wanted to make sure that was very clear as we talked about students and shifted again some actions from contributing to not contributing in-person learning is one section online learning is another section

113so that's why that shows up in there the funding shows up in both pieces we also are fortunate to have a good relationship with our el lead for butte county office of education and she happened to tune in to the public hearing and contacted me after with some feedback as well which was great so i added more specific language about continuing to partner with bcoe the el lead to share resources for our english learners and added details about faculty and staff meetings to review assessment to determine effective remediation or acceleration on the emotional health and social and emotional well-being section we added the importance of administration and i would i would probably add at this point everybody on a site checking in often with staff for continued support and open arms for our people and

114family engagement and outreach there was the addition of references to each site's re-engagement policy i've been in connection and talking with our principals to make sure that they have their steps laid out or their flow chart whatever it may be but making sure that all of the steps are sequential and an anchor to hold the site accountable to making sure that they follow all the steps to re-engage students if we see that they are not engaging under school nutrition there was an addition of heating instructions and weekly menus available to families those were specifically important those instructions we do know that some kiddos pick up the meals without families maybe with them and those instructions come in handy for them and the last part the increased or improved services for foster youth english learners and

115low-income students there were additional details put in there about how the percentage required will support foster youth english learners and low-income students so those were the additions that have made it into this revision for us tonight and uh i'll take any questions here our next steps would be upon approval the learning continuity plan will be shared with butte county office of education and then posted as approved lcp on our cusd website in english and spanish currently it is on there as a draft in english and spanish yes kathy yeah um i note that um the issue of attendance is if if a kid a student checks in then they're counted and we had several parents who were concerned that the student was checking in and then mentally checking out i mean okay i was here

116there was even a cartoon about it at one point where the zebra just had a a reproduction of its face and would just stick it up so the teacher would see it and then take it down so i know we're we're doing what the state told us but our teacher is able to sort of follow along and and see that the kid is actually disengaging i mean do we have you know a little better than just a check-in i think we do you know ted might want to join in as he talks to the principals or john a little more often than i do but from what i am hearing they are the teachers are really looking at students engaging and not and using the staff on their school site who know the kids and

117who know the families to reach out okay john do you want to add anything to that yeah so just in ted can address elementary for secondary there's there are also multiple other measures of engagement including the asynchronous time so the same day that students check in with their teachers if they need more follow-up they can do that during the asynchronous time and then the platforms that we're using it's not just edge annuity but the other platforms as well also gauge engagement to the data point that we can anyone any administrator excuse me any administrator can pull up uh screenshots of how long students have been um they've been logged in but then within that time how much idle time is is attributed to the student so there are multiple ways of measuring engagement good thank

118you elementary uses really it's teacher feedback and they have wellness teams right now that are kind of looking at how much students are actually interacting with teachers are they turning work in are they showing up for their zoom sessions and if they're feeling like this is a student that is a little bit awol right now they're not as connected not participatory that's part becomes part of the wellness team thing and everything from principal visits to home to check in tcm visits calls all those ways to make sure they're connected or to see what's getting in the way of helping them stay connected with those things i noticed i remember that one parent made a comment about i mean when they do the background and they can see all the kids in there then they get

119really you know they get a chance to at least say something or send something uh i know my kids uh his the teacher would let them share something you know a small group uh and then others were saying the kids were turning that off and i think she said then her daughter was the last one on and so then it was so i didn't know if that was showing up with other kids or actually i was just talking to the teacher from roseville today and she actually is built into her day a five-minute check-in with like five students a day where they just have a time to chat with each other for five minutes every day and it kind of rotates through and that's one of the ways that she helps them to kind of

120keep connected with each other keep connected with school and she just felt it was a great way for them to to be in touch with each other still i just think the more ways we can distribute and encourage that that kind of personal touch you know i see you i hear you i like your mask whatever okay was that yes tom i just because my comment kind of rolls uh out of kathy's um dr kaiser sorry um are we we've talked about uh making sure building into the secondary system more ways for direct instruction over zoom and some and flexibility for uh teachers to move away from engineer edge annuity and use some of their own content to engage with the students in the actual process of education where's can you tell us kind of

121where that's at i would love to i'm so glad you brought that up oh i always will thank you so last week we developed we finalized a process to to regain for teachers to regain some of the autonomy that they so cherish right now and we've heard it from parents we've heard it from teachers we've heard it from administrators and we've heard it from kids in zooms speaking with kids so and we heard it tonight as of this afternoon i've received 34 course course online adapted proposals and those have been approved um that was again it was finalized late last week people worked on them over the weekend so the process is for teachers to um to create and it's a systemic process we do not want to go back to where we were last

122spring where it was just all over the place even though teachers only had two days for the shift and then those proposals go to their department chair for high school and department lead for middle school then go to the um to the principals then to ed services and we have yet to not turn one back around within the same school day so the process has been expedited and implementation is is happening i want to add part part of that process is driven by sb98 and the the requirements that we have for accounting for instructional minutes as well as daily syllabi so that so that form is actually very detailed um and the reason for that is twofold number one to be compliant and number two to ensure that we are have course alike teachers on

123the same pathway moving forward and i do want to add while it is very detailed we do have many coaches that are coaching teachers through that process so as i said we have yet to not turn one right back around even though the form is detailed and we have some requirements we must meet we are turning those right back around i would like to add one last thing and i appreciate your comment and question tom because that's one of the this is one of the frustrating parts with this timeline is that we don't have a lot of time to get a plan see if it's working adjust if we need to based on feedback and and get it going so this is a perfect example of you know you put a plan in place and

124then you you make changes and shifts as needed to support folks so just a little piece to keep in mind with the september 30th deadline of a of a um an approval there are still obviously kinks that we're working out to better what we do ted will you step in between john and tim no don't go anywhere i want you all to give each other a high five right now that was amazing that you are got that together tina high five him hit him on the back if you have to because we've had so many parents and students have wanted some evidence that we were being innovative by this strength and the power of our own teachers and you just showed it and on that note um one of our pleasant valley teachers invited some

125of us to watch uh miss bainard's i believe ib english 12 i want to say and it was it was great um the kids were really engaged i stepped into a couple of the small rooms the small breakout rooms with them they were engaged they seemed happy to be there they were talking with her it was a really a much closer facsimile of what a classroom model looked like and it was really inspiring to see so shout out to her thank you very much for that okay thanks for that report um that was good to hear okay so before we take any action on this we do have some speakers who want to make comments yes i believe that we have four speakers uh mr oberlis and it's an updated phone number and we will

126we have mr tennis miss mcgregor miss isherwood and mr oberle okay so i just want to clarify and all these speakers are aware that they are speaking specifically about this item they're speaking to the learning continuity plan okay because i know mr oberli called about the other thing so superintendent stated my understanding with mr oberli was he would speak during item number nine items for the floor okay so that's okay that's important to know so we will wait until that but he's still speaking on something that wasn't on this agenda okay we'll go ahead with mr matt tennis i'll be calling him now hello mr tennis yes okay you are addressing the chico unified school district board thank you so much again matt tennis chico parents for in-person learning um i want to acknowledge the

127work of ms keane that you did in putting this together and i understand that we are in extraordinary circumstances uh right now and that's the whole reason that that you and staff are even in a situation where we're having to scramble to deal with um the kovid pandemic which is a serious thing but there is a gaping hole in this document regrettably that i think makes it almost totally worthless and that gaping hole is that there's no commitment on the part of the school district to report um publicly and you guys just in general in this lcp process or without this lcp process we are not getting any accurate or timely participation data on how many kids are actually participating in their zoom calls the standards for participation actually are are incredibly low by comparison

128to the old days when you know kids had to actually be attending school and not cutting class and stuff like that in order for you know for the school district to get get paid i'm not an expert on how that works but but it was important that people actually be there now if a child in my reading of this if a child simply calls in at any point in time during the day they are they qualify as having participated we need to at least know what the level of participation of kids is on an ongoing basis because i have a theory that a lot of families are steadily not participating at all and are increasingly dropping off the face of the earth secondly i think there needs to be a application process publicly available for

129the workday child supervision program that you speak about on page 24. so if that program is available there are the protected classes of kids who are in great need and we know that they're getting hit the hardest by this debacle so we need to make them available to them an application process and i think that you should also amend it to say that you will commit to making participation data available to the community as soon as possible we need transparency so thank you very much okay next is kelly mcgregor hello this is kelly hi kelly you are now addressing the chico unified school district board all right thank you so much mr shepherd thank you for the opportunity to speak today it was after conversations with many students fellow parents and respected teachers that i

130decided to share my thoughts with you my two sons a freshman and a junior at pv and i were thrilled when we heard that not only were teachers being allowed to adjust content and ingenuity they were being given the opportunity to fully teach their own courses then i learned of the requirements for the teachers to move out of vegemite a list so far reaching us to make it nearly impossible for many teachers to achieve if not impossible at least it has proven to be very discouraging the number of 34 submissions certainly illustrates this one teacher referred to it as being given a free trip to new york city the only caveat you have to walk there i fear these actions are an attempt at saving face with the parents at the expense of the teachers

131i hope you revise the requirements using an equity lens please do not require teachers to provide exhaustive evidence of their teaching plans to be allowed to move out of ingenuity when this wasn't required of teachers who never started in in the first place and it was not required of elementary teachers who in my opinion have been quite successful in their zoom classrooms as evidenced by the experience of my fourth grade daughter and marigold please use the purchases of a wide variety of new technology referenced on page 15 of the learning continuity plan to and i quote support teachers who are being asked to deliver high quality and engaging instruction entirely online use the future professional development trainings mentioned on pages 22 and 23 and budgeted on page 25 to bring teachers up to speed in

132online teaching pedagogy and techniques please make this process easier for teachers to teach their own courses support those that need it you have the resources our teachers are qualified not to mention award-winning professionals they are being paid to teach they want to teach if they think they can meet student needs better than edgenuity they can i would bet on them every time and i hope you will too thank you for your time okay thank you and we have aaron isherwood hello this is aaron hello this is this is uh the chico unified school district where you are now addressing the chico unified school district board thank you very much and thank you for your time everyone um i have two children in the chico unified school district my son is an 8th grader at marsh

133and my daughter is a junior at pleasant valley high school i understand completely that we're in a unique position with education right now we're all trying our best and have honorable intentions however the district's learning continuity plans usage of edge annuity should not be approved tonight your community is begging for a better solution i disagree with the most recent three minutes ago high fives on the success of customization of edgenuity even with those recent modifications and customizations my 4.0 8th grader and 4.2 gpa junior they're still struggling and experiencing learning loss i can't imagine what it would be like for a student who has a hard time with school in general ingenuity is isolating our students from their teachers and peers at a time when they crave and need personal connection the most ingenuity is

134causing my formerly motivated children anxiety depression discouragement and stress i know this is similar for a lot of children and not just my own i understand ingenuity was a response to the community's request for more continuity and rigor from the spring semester however using agenuity was an egregious over-correction unfortunately the comment in the previous board meeting on september 2nd was that there were no complaints with edge annuity with the oak bridge student population let me be clear comparing oakbridge students with pv and marsh and any of the secondary schools is a false analogy and a hasty generalization oakbridge students do not learn the same way as our students do the expenditure for this program is a gross misuse of state funding that can be better used to enhance google classroom and zoom learning experience where

135our kids can learn from their own teachers and not a stranger in a video as of right now the petition asking the district to get rid of edgenuity has close to 2000 signatures and it's growing still daily this petition is over two weeks old and you're still asking for help even with recent customizations those high fives were premature you're not done yet thank you for your time okay so that was uh the group of people who had signed up to talk did any staff want to respond to anything that was brought up okay because at this point then if not we will uh yeah i'm sorry you didn't ask if there was board response i'm sorry i yeah okay um one of the callers was talking about um the monitoring and verification of attendance and

136engagement as as being missing from being uh you know available to the public i do not feel that's a correct analysis of what ms keene presented in conjunction with what ted sullivan also presented that there is a tremendous amount of attention being paid by teachers that are monitoring those very issues and if there is a problem found there are supports in place at the school sites to involve other staff on the site the targeted case manager the principles at the elementary level especially and that the the ability of a parent to monitor this issue through the use of aries and going online to look at what the teacher is reporting about course completion and assignment completion and stuff that that ability to monitor by each family is there within the system so i don't feel

137that our um lc lc um ap er is in need of anything beyond what we're already doing i think we fully um well fully you can't fully in the circumstances we're in that that's not what i mean but to the extent possible we are making that effort knowing i mean for years our focus has been keeping a child in school and engaged because the loss otherwise of even a couple of absences a month can equate to you know missing a whole school year at the end of their education so that has been a focus it's a focus of our teachers it's a focus of our administrators and i believe our report represents that pretty fully thank you eileen tom thank you i share the concern of some of the callers about the use of ingenuity

138uh having taught both an independent study such uh context and in a regular classroom context they are very different groups of learners and we as one of the earlier callers said have a great resource in our uh teachers they're they're experts and i would like to add some kind of language to this that uh identifies our goal or a goal of moving as much as possible away from ingenuity and toward that i understand that we need to keep a baseline and then we need to keep uh a baseline of equal access for everybody and that ingenuity represents that in some ways but i do think it is important that we agree and make a statement that our teachers are the best educators we've got for our students not a genuity i have nothing against the

139use of ingenuity as a an umbrella or i say a floor perhaps um but i'd like to see some language that specifically directs us to move towards more uh customized and teacher-led instruction and and i don't think we disagree with that at all um you know when we when the board voted on july 15th our whole momentum was moving back to in-person learning combined with online instruction that was teacher driven and then when we had uh you know two weeks before the start of the school year we had to have something because we heard from over 4 000 parents that the zoom and the instruction where they might hear from a teacher one day a week and that was it read the chapter answer the questions they might hear from a teacher five or six

140times a day getting emails and instructions really that wanting to connect that there needed to be some continuity and that was the attempt here i will tell you i don't think any of us thought we would be here this long we really had hoped we would already be back and able to do am pm at best be back in that stage two um so that we could be seeing our kids providing those emotional supports providing the academic support the things that our teachers are trained to do but not all of our teachers are trained to do to deliver instruction via technology and it's and it is very frustrating for our kids for our parents it's frustrating for all of us when you listen earlier zoom is failing us they're crashing um you know my kid

141can't access it so you know i think the idea behind ingenuity was certainly to give something that was accessible a steady platform and now that we are going to be in it longer absolutely that's the work that mr shepard has been doing let's make sure that we still have continuity of education which is exactly what this plan is requiring us to do but yes we want our teachers that feel comfortable and want to do that presenting and sharing and working with their kids absolutely so the one uh comment that was made about uh all of these steps excuse me you have to take in order to be able to adapt your lesson plans and so you know to get away from using ingenuity 40 steps or some amount what validity is is there in that

142so there are some steps that teachers who are going to completely shift from an edgenuity based course to a google classroom based course for example we still need to ensure that the standards that were embedded in the course when it was originally board approved would still be in in that course moving through the rest of this semester and next year so when the form when you when people look at the form they see that requirement but what's explained to them when they start meeting with their administrators is it's not very difficult for them to identify the standards which we provide links to they really just need to provide a link to the standards and then describe in their form how those standards are going to be delivered so it can visually i could understand how

143it can be it can be daunting but once those conversations start i received one today that had a link to the standards for ap calculus and then they just described how they're going to deliver those standards so so it sounds to me like maybe a little bit more information should be put out there in the way of communication from the principles or however that you know this is it it may look really onerous but there can be you know there there are ways to tackle this which are not so burdensome because you you have gotten a number of people who have mastered this and have turned these in and it's it's certainly progressing you know along um but to get more people on board you know i i would say anything we yeah just to

144reinforce too that our speakers um wouldn't know that there's a frequently asked question supporting doc that goes out with it um there's there are links on that document that go out and so people wouldn't know that and i don't know when the speaker talked with the teacher but we've been responding to those needs as well for example originally we said we need a year-long plan because we want to be sure that two teachers teaching the same course who had addressed standards differently regardless of how they addressed them differently that all the standards would be included within a year-long course but in the last three days we realized that we can actually step that process in we can ask teachers first to individual we can talk with them about getting that first semester in and then

145working through that second semester not knowing where we're going to be second semester not only that but isn't a lot of this mandated by sb98 absolutely i mean this isn't something we invented and that's what i wanted tim to address that a part of this is we do have to account for the amount of time spent both asynchronous and synchronous um time so do you want to just briefly give some of the d yeah sb 98 came out over the summer and about i think about three weeks ago now cde came out with their suggested way of meeting the the requirements brought about by sb98 regarding accounting for instructional minutes accounting for course content taking attendance measuring uh engagement etc etc and we as a as a group i think we all agree that that

146cd guidance the the original guidance was would be we're trying to light it would be a horrendous load on on teachers and so what we're trying to do in our systems is uh meet the requirements of the law but put as little as we can on our teachers and as an example that the cde document that came out a few weeks ago had teachers doing this all on paper writing their class roster documenting their lesson plans every day of the week etc etc every week that we're we're engaged in in distance learning we think that um it's better better product if we get if we get that planning up front and we have that documentation um from the get-go so teachers aren't you know we want teachers teaching and thinking about teaching and not recording

147things as much as as we possibly can as they work yes kevin well just a clarification as a reminder uh funding is not driven by attendance this year our funding is based on our prior year so this is really a compliance issue and certainly is a challenge related to compliance because we'll still go through an audit and there's still potential for penalties if it's not done correctly but i just want to clarify to the board to the public it's not onerous for the point of trying to generate revenue that's been established in a different manner okay thank you but that's correct we don't know what penalties may be applied if we are not in compliance i would like to add one more thing sure real quickly if i could and it kind of expands a

148little bit on what superintendent staley had mentioned about the the word continuity and one of the things i've learned in this process is through our county lead is that this plan should really for everybody it should reflect the movement from in-person learning to online learning and perhaps back to in-person learning because we don't know which way things are going to go and we certainly don't know how long we will be in each of these kinds of learning pieces so so with the spirit and flavor of in-person learning what that looks like as we had thought in our hybrid model would be to online if we then go back and forth hopefully we do not go back and forth hopefully we're on the the positive way out of this but that piece of the continuity word

149is what this the cde meant okay gosh there was such a long discussion i sort of forgot where we were in this but i guess we're okay so tom your your main concern was having i would like some acknowledgement of and i'm looking at uh top of page 11 here in the plan where it seems we could add some language uh to just say something like uh you know teachers will be encouraged and assisted to transition to direct instruction over zoom with the understanding that is the preferred method of building community and maintaining emotional and social health within our with our students some language of that effect that indicates that we are aware of that and that is how we're moving uh i would support that would that be a very difficult thing to to

150add in at this point tina no not at all okay i think that's very appropriate um it's just really acknowledging that we all what's something we all are you know behind and we do want that to happen and it's just we want to make sure that we are doing everything that we need to do i i just think we need to be very clear that not all teachers will feel comfortable um or pursue that we do have some teachers that are very comfortable with ingenuity and like that flip classroom approach we have other people that have had very bad experiences um you know even some verbal abuse on zoom and so that is not where they want to be we're trying to provide other resources but i do think you know the goal we we

151want teachers teaching kids absolutely and that's why the preferred language would say something like encouraged so i'm certainly not going to lay down a fiat that says you have to because again teachers have different levels of familiarity with the company process okay so tina do you have an idea of of sentence that you could possibly add that would reflect what what tom is suggesting so i think i captured it but please add more teachers will be encouraged page 11. yeah teachers will be encouraged and supported in moving toward more involvement or i would say encouraged and supported in developing a teacher teacher driven teacher teacher facilitated instruction i'm just trying to get them is that capturing what you're thinking that every single one developed in curriculum and instructional methods i think we need to include

152not just the the delivery but also the development of the of the curriculum because that's really what drives that teacher okay so let me see if i capture this teachers will be encouraged and supported in developing teacher developed curriculum and delivery methods okay does that work for me does that work kelly do you think that meets the okay all right how how does everyone else feel about that because um i think we're at the point where we should be voting on this and if and if and if that's the only um change then we could approve it um on the basis of with stipulating that we would like that inserted at that point so i would need a motion okay do we have a second i'll second that thank you okay so we have a

153motion by dr kaiser is second by tom lando and unless anybody has something else to say or contribute we'll take a vote um all yes kelly so i i was worried about this so uh mr oberle did reach out and say what we're talking about right now is what he wanted to address and since we did try to contact him earlier i do think we need to give him that opportunity okay let's do that okay i'm calling him right now erica is linda still i'm here she's here hello hello mr oberle thank you for your patience uh you are now addressing the chico unified school district board okay go ahead okay thank you very much i wanted to um i wanted to address the edge annuity thing i know you guys are i've already sound

154like you made up your minds and stuff and yeah it's a difficult situation for everybody but my experience is i have two kids both in chico high school i'm going through a lot with the loss of one of my daughter's teachers as you heard earlier in the thing and just it's a difficult situation for everyone and i completely understand that um i've been a teacher for 27 years now i teach at butte college i used to teach at the high school level down in southern california and just my observations on edge annuity are nothing that hasn't been said before it's just i have two honors students who've never gotten anything less than an a they're really hard workers they're really good students in class and they thrive of course in the face to face as

155as we all know i know that's not a possibility right now so that's not what i'm saying um but the quizzes in there are tedious they're too specific uh the ideas do not flow from one idea to another there's no connection made and i understand completely from the teacher's point of view why they would not want to go through the process that was outlined by you and i understand you guys have you know some t's across and and eyes to god as well um but i think you know the online format you know was not ideal in the spring i get that i get the concern that parents had in the spring but you know we did you know the teachers didn't have any training and stuff and that's probably what summer would have been

156good for us kind of train on google classroom google me or whatever and hopefully um with you know this kind of an out that some of some of my kids teachers are not going to do just because of the stress of the paperwork involved um is not acceptable so i i just i want our teachers to teach and edge annuity is just it's sucking the life out of my kids love for learning and that's just as an educator i'm very upset about that and just i just want to leave you with the quote um education is not the feeling of appeal it is the lighting of a fire and that's what our teachers provide edgenuity does not thank you very much thank you okay thank you for participating uh okay so we're ready now i

157believe to take a vote um so this is once again approval of this plan with the addition of the sentence that tom suggested so all those in favor please say aye aye okay that is approved um all right so the next item we have is i believe because mr oberle was the only one who called in for items from the floor that that takes care of that any other announcements that people might have okay i'm not seeing anyone so it appears that we are able to adjourn we are adjourned thank you