001greetings good evening everyone and welcome to the regular meeting of the board of education of the martinez unified school district it is just a pair after 6 30 p.m on the 28th of september we are reconvening for the regular meeting of the board as we had a closed session we have nothing to report and so we're on agenda item 7 which is our pledge of allegiance madam superintendent would you please do the honors of flying the stars and stripes please alex has it right there alex if you could do do the honors please and julie senyard would you do us the honor of leading us in the pledge of allegiance as is our custom absolutely thank you i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america america and to every republic for
002which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you very much agenda item 8 approval of agenda madam superintendent do we have any changes to the agenda this evening no changes thank you thank you and agenda item 9 our approval of minutes we are approving minutes for the special meeting of september 2nd 2020 and uh the special meeting september 11 end of the regular meeting of september 14 2020. do we have any public comment on the minutes for these three meetings i don't see any hands raised so we move on to approval of the minutes can i get a motion from the board please move to approve the minutes second i have a motion from member janelli and a second from member mclaughlin and i'm so sorry do we
003have oh robin is here wonderful student representative how do you vote i and full board those in favor aye aye those opposed any abstentions the minutes are adopted and speaking of student representative agenda item 10 are comments from this from the student representative take it away robin the school reports for the september 28 2020 regular board meeting are as follows los juntas's highlights from the week getting into full swing with distance learning and the routines that come with it thank you all for your hard work our pta fundraiser started this past wednesday thanks for supporting lje excited for the mrc mef run kickoff this weekend upcoming events elac meeting september 30th at 8 45 am via zoom school site council september 30th at 2 pm via zoom pta meeting october 6th at 6 30 pm
004via zoom john muir's highlights from the week we are back and loving the new building a huge thank you to our community for making this possible we can't wait to show it off to our kittles virtual tours have already started with classes upcoming events pta meeting september 29th at 6 30 pm via zoom john sweats highlights from the week students and teachers are doing an awesome job with distance learning and getting into the swing of their daily routines our pta reflections program has has kicked off with the theme i matter because upcoming events there's a pta meeting on october 13th at 7 pm via zoom morello park up highlights from the week school site council election will be held this week our first meeting will be thursday october 8th at 2 p.m our second elac
005meeting will be november 19th at 8 45 am students teachers and families are doing a great job with distance learning martinez junior high's highlights from the week progress reports were posted on thursday for all mjhs students the mjhs staff will follow up with grade level meetings this week to collaborate around grade level success and needs moving forward in distance learning our library is actively taking book requests pulling books and open for pickup for our bullpups school site council elections took place last week and our first meeting will be october 8th at 2pm our teachers are celebrating our students great start to the school year with nominations for bullpup of the month recognizing the characteristics adaptability for august and positive digital citizenship for september upcoming events our ptsa fundraiser is live on the mjhs ptsa webpage
006buy some bulbs to support our bullpups and thank you for your support remember bullpups get involved bullpup lunch club monday through thursday at noon instructions to join on our webpage and instagram academic success we need help with organization schoolwork or peer tutors wednesdays at 12 30. check out our counseling webpage for more info alhambra high school's highlights from the week alhambra was excited to launch our new wednesday wellness program for our staff with grab and go burrito lunch last week each wednesday we will have a different activity to help lift the spirits of our hard-working teachers and staff senior pictures with covid have been sensitive and socially distant success we only have a few seniors left to be at complete ahs leadership is starting fall fridays to help build school spirit each week virtual homecoming
007week will be october 23rd through the 30th with a virtual community shoebox parade to maintain our community tradition upcoming events ahs will host our virtual elac meeting on thursday october 1st the alhambra ptsa will meet virtually on wednesday october 14th by senate martinez brione's independent study and martinez early intervention preschool programs highlights from the week congratulations to martinez early intervention preschool program speech pathologist marianne bode for securing a grant to purchase speech language assessment materials that will allow for more thorough assessment for our preschool students and that will result in better recommendations for services mei pp vicente and briones are planning activities for the great shakeout event on october 15th teachers will be providing activities that students can do with their families at home to prepare in the event of an earthquake upcoming events vicente
008and briones are gearing up for a wasp mid-cycle one day visit in the spring we are currently recruiting parents and staff members for our school site council martinez elite fitness is hosting their second annual 5k fun run on october 24th 2020. the run will be virtual this year and all proceeds will go to our martinez early intervention preschool program martina's adult school's highlights from the week we held our first virtual career training program open house via zoom had a good turnout and five new students entering the programs one of our optical assistant training program graduates who also came through our esl program was hired by a contractor who provides support to the refineries as a safety eyewear specialist and starts at 45 dollars per hour upcoming events fourth week of the drive by food pantry
009every tuesday from 3 to 4 p.m adult school parking lot we are resuming our his et testing high school equivalency first monday and second saturday of the month and that concludes the school reports for the september 28 2020 regular board meeting thank you very much student representative greatly appreciated up next are employee organization reports do we have any reports from mea or csca this evening not tonight jonathan thank you yes i do okay the floor is yours karen martinez chapter 99 would like to welcome our new superintendent and look forward to working with you we have also been hearing quite a bit about reopening schools and we would like to remind everyone that we are still in the purple zone as the union president i have serious concerns about opening schools our concerns are according
010to the cdc the virus infection rate among adolescents between the ages of 12 and is approximately double the rate of children 5 to 11. a recent study analyzed over 270 000 confirmed covet 19 cases in school-aged children in the u.s between march and mid-september we're also concerned because recent evidence suggests that people under the age of 19 could be playing an increasingly important role in community transmission we're concerned because parents are pushing their pushing to get their kids back in school but we've not even made one step down numbers we're still in the purple zone we're concerned because we're whether or not people can keep up their guard we can see it every time we watch tv large groups meeting without masks and no social distancing we question the choice that would disrupt student learning
011and routines that have just recently been learned by having half of the students here and half at home and then switching back and forth how can you possibly teach like that if i were the parent of a student i just feel it would be easier and safer for all concerned to keep them home we're in the groove of distance learning until we can come back fully let's stick to distance learning thank you for that karen next are trend item 12 comments from pta do we have any comments from the pta this evening seeing none no there's one i thought oh there is oh i'm so sorry todd navarro i will allow you to speak go ahead todd you're able to talk great thanks jonathan um on behalf of the uh martinez council ptas we'd like
012to thank helen for all she's been doing in the absence of a superintendent and stepping up um in addition to taking time out of her extremely busy schedule um and spending time with the council and providing updates on the school district and overall prepared preparedness for when we do re-enter the classroom we appreciate the time that she took with us last week thank you todd up next agenda item 13 staff board acknowledgements announcements reports before we move to 13.1 do any members of the board have any acknowledgements announcements or reports i have a couple here should i make them here john or at the end i'm sorry for for um board comments or reports helen why don't you just go ahead with uh 13.1 i was i was actually before we move on oh yes
013please hi it's deidre i just wanted to remind everybody that the 18th annual martinez education foundation run for education kicked off on september 27th but because it's done virtually this year it is you still have the opportunity through at least the end of the week to sign up and obviously if you just want to be a generous donor martinez education foundation always uh would welcome that as well but i did want to at least make sure that we address the run and to let people know that they can go to martinez.org to sign up for the run for education or uh to acknowledge all the great sponsors who um have supported uh the run this year jonathan i have a couple of announcements yes please um the first one is that the dsa department of
014state architectures approved the las huntes project today so we'll be good to start that project in the next two weeks with fencing and demolition of the designated portables the next announcement has to do with bond as well where i've heard from iceland brothers and we are preparing for the sale of the next series of bonds a little bit early but we want to take care of the low interest rates so we can sell them now and get a better rate for our community in the repayment of the bonds and it won't impact the future bond sales or our project timeline so i thought it might be a good idea to save a little bit more money for our community members with that being said we will after starting that process we'll be bringing the john
015sweat elementary designs to the board for approval and modification and then a budget so that's coming up in the next few months as well and my last but not least announcement uh last thursday amber love snyder our martinez unified school district teacher of the year was honored in the first ever virtual celebration if you did miss this awesome celebration you can view it online the link is on our front page of our website and you can find her at about an hour and 16 minutes in if you um have the time to listen you can enjoy the the chorus from liberty high school and contra costa college if you want to listen through the whole thing but again congratulations to amber and uh that's it from me tonight thank you helen so no seeing no
016further announcements from the board let's move on to 13.1 summer school esy report lori o'connor great hello good evening david can i help have helped with um powerpoint i'm sure you should be able to share your share your powerpoint presentation or do you want me to put the presentation that's on the agenda up for you could you do that that would be great thank you absolutely awesome hold on just a minute okay thank you well thank you um so much um for everybody being here tonight i think we have a big crew tonight because we have an exciting um exciting job um discussion tonight um so hello and welcome to an overview of martinez unified school district summer session 2020 i'm lori o'connor principal of alternative schools and special programs next slide please the summer
017session took place on june 10th through july 8th and we offered three programs we had a credit recovery high school program extended school year program for our preschool through 12th grade students eligible for esy through their iep and we had an eighth grade summer math camp that was a new program that we piloted this summer next slide please we had a phenomenal summer session teaching team our teachers went above and beyond every day to serve our students and families and their dedication and commitment was commendable i would like to thank our extended school year team danielle adler sierra vadsky jennifer belleville susan ziggy anne rose krantz and kathy walsh and i would like to thank our high school credit recovery team monica higgins paula marchese kakamo and elaine winkett and elaine also served as our
018eighth grade math camp teacher next slide please as far as participation went we had 225 high school students who participated in our credit recovery program and they completed 272 classes through edgenuity online coursework students were either recovering a failed grade or taking the class for a better grade 51 students participated in our extended school year program there were 112 students eligible however some families did not participate stating that they really needed to take a break from the distance learning and at home instruction and nine students participated in math camp recruiting eighth graders to do math over the summer is no easy task next slide please and our summer 2020 session was full of firsts of course we continued into the summer session in the distance learning model most students and families were already accustomed to
019this format so most acclimated very easily and then having taken on the new role of principal of alternative schools and special programs in december 2019 this was the first summer that i oversaw the summer session in this position we piloted eighth grade summer math camp working in collaboration with martinez junior high school and alhambra high school we developed this math camp it was meant for students who could benefit from an extra boost of math support before starting alhambra high school in the fall we also provided an extra week of high school credit recovery to students whose 504 plan accommodations listed extra time on assignments and we provided extra time to any student who needed it and finally we develop surveys for our parents and students to provide some feedback about credit recovery and 8th grade
020math camp next slide please some of the highlights of our survey we had 68 parents and 56 students respond 93 of parents reported that summer school communication was effective 72 percent of students reported being successful with distance learning and 70 percent of students thought that summer school should be kept in a distance learning model in the future years next slide please some of the recurring comments by parents and students were very favorable including that the program was organized there was great communication there were feelings of support due to the responsive staff there were overall positive experiences and many parents appreciated the progress report that was emailed to them daily and there were suggestions such as extending the summer session making the summer school day longer and allowing students to take more than one class at
021a time next slide please looking forward to some to summer session 2021 we will develop a survey for the extended school year program so that we can use feedback to improve the program and from what we learned about 8th grade math camp we will start recruiting efforts earlier in collaboration with njhs and find incentives for students to participate since only 9 of 25 students invited actually participated we will continue improving the enrollment and registration processes and begin communicating with families and students about summer programming just after spring break in mid-april and of course we will consider the comments and suggestions from our surveys next slide please overall the 2020 summer session was a great success many students made up classes in our high school credit recovery some of our 8th graders solidified math skills in
022the 8th grade summer math camp and our students with special needs who are eligible for extended school year receive services thank you so much and i'm very much looking forward to the summer session and we'll see you here to report back are there any questions none for me but thank you for the very thorough presentation lori and thank you to all of the staff who worked so diligently to make this year's extended school year a success thank you so moving on to 13.2 district panorama fall survey results amy black hi thank you good evening good evening president wright and members of the school board this evening i'm going to be bringing to you a high level representation of our survey results from a few weeks ago that checked in with students in grades 6 through
02312 with our staff as well as with families um to get a sense of how the launch of distance learning um has gone so far this is gonna we anticipate this is one of several surveys that we will send out throughout the school year to do check-ins with um these three groups so i'm going to go ahead and launch presentation just bear with me okay so um this year we had the opportunity we're really excited to partner with panorama education and what's so fantastic about partnering with panorama is that their platform is designed by harvard education college and they have researchers that develop survey questions as well as help with the analytics so in the past i know that we've used google surveys which is nice to get a quick snapshot but it's difficult to
024tweeze out specific data and looking at specific groups when we want more information to help inform our programs so with a partnership with panorama allows us to dig deeper and really cross-reference and do some more data analysis not only at the district level but at the site level as well um just to give you a snapshot of the categories that were covered in each um survey and i'll actually go through the results within each one but our students the larger categories they were asked about distance learning engagement their distance learning environment experience their distance learning relationship experience as well as their current distance learning needs families were asked about possible additional assistance that they may need communication with the school the learning environment for their students and then there was just some background information to
025get a sense of the demographics of our family population that is responding to the studies and then the staff i need to move my where i see you guys um staff were asked about their experience with family communication their professional development needs at the beginning of the year with distance learning their experience with student engagement and then student support okay we're going to look at students first i was actually really excited to get some student data i know um sometimes that's a category that we'd always get a lot of information from them so i'm going to start with our students so we serve like i said we surveyed 6th through 12th graders we had 618 response so not too bad for our first survey and they didn't realize that it wasn't spam so i'm pretty
026happy with that um so in terms of the percentage when you look at the survey results this is a summary of favorable so when we think about these categories how students responded whether what is the percentage that responded favorably within these categories so you can see learning engagement is high 78 percent as well as the learning environment and we'll tweeze out the specific questions in a minute um this isn't surprising but obviously concerning 32 with their relationships and then needs with distance learning that asked them about like their internet and connectivity so this gives you a snapshot of just also the breakdown um by school site so giving a pers because like i said i'm sure i'm showing you the overall um district percentage and then after tonight i'll be pushing out individual results to
027school sites so principals will be able to have some time to analyze their specific school data and share that with their staff as well but i wanted to share um the district data with you first this evening before i did that so you can see the cut scores within those categories and then this just gives you a quick look at where you see categories of certain schools scoring higher than the average and some that may be an area to look a little bit closer at if we look at alhambra high school at 30 percent but then it's it's not it's the lowest but not too far off from what have the junior high responded um and then briony's was high okay so the questions that we asked within engagement for distance learning um some of
028the questions were how much effort are you putting into your classroom into your classes kids are responding that they feel like they're putting quite a bit of effort in their classes these are pretty high um you know that they're joining their classes which is fantastic because i know in the spring we were receiving feedback from teachers that they felt that kids were disengaged or not showing up or turning in work um when they were asked about how much time they're spending completing their work and we'll talk about this because this has come up also with the parent response they feel like they're spending quite a bit of time or they feel that their workload is pretty pretty heavy um and then uh how often do you stay focused i don't know i'm sure if you
029ask this even in in real time face to face it'd be interesting to see the comparable percentage uh face-to-face focused as we're as well as virtually um so we'll be taking a look at that number and when we survey again and see hopefully that we see some increase over time and then how challenging um asking the kids how challenging has their schoolwork work been and so you can see you know they're kind of you know kind of we're somewhat average or somewhat challenging into quite challenging um and some extremely so just getting engaged like i said it'll be interesting to compare this over time throughout the school year to see how that that number adjusts so looking at the learning environment are you able to access your schoolwork those numbers are high 96 percent that's
030fantastic um how confident are you that you're able to complete your assignments um that's for sixty-five percent um looking at how if an adult helps you um at the secondary level we're reporting that you know they're not getting a lot of help at home um with their assignments i think that might be pretty typical though uh and then how easy it for you to use your tools you know google calls the sites and our our students are saying it's 65 favorable uh somewhat is a little bit of an outlier but um it'd be interesting to see if there's a way for us to kind of figure out if there's certain tools that they prefer maybe that's a future question looking at uh their relationships and this was the category that was 30 the lowest 32
031percent uh how often have you talked to your classmates almost never once in a while it's a really overall 24 how often does your teacher reach out to you individually 14 uh how helpful have your teachers been in supporting this is a little bit higher so it's good 59 favorable um and then even i would look at that somewhat helpful number um you know as that could go either way favorable um or unbelievable it kind of depends um and then if your teacher needs to get in touch with you what's the easiest way and they overwhelmingly felt that email is the best way to get a hold of them and then needs how concerned are you about the health of your family we have 50 percent feeling like they're okay feeling okay about their family
032um and other half of our students have some concern uh that we asked them about their food so this good night we have a high percentage um and then you know a number of students that uh would you know i don't think we can think about this helen as i look at you about tweezing out getting a sense of how to identify students i know we have a really fantastic lunch program and offering we'll talk about that with the parent survey but thinking about how we can continue to do outreach for our students to make sure that food isn't an issue for them and then during the day are they taking care of anybody else we have some percentage of our students that are in fact taking care of others while they're also going to
033school and distance learning do you helen do you want me to go through the whole presentation and do questions at the end right or in each section questions at the end thank you okay so families uh we had 993 responses from our family so i think that was a very very favorable response again uh with a brand new survey and a new kind of format with the email the categories are a distance additional assistance 68 favorable communication with the school was really high 85 percent that's great and learning learning environment 73 again this is just a quick snapshot of looking at the way the percentage breakdown is by sight so you get a sense of where some scores maybe score some schools scored a little bit higher in categories and lower than others sorry i'm
034gonna speed up my talking in my slide um this gives you a little background so you get a cut score of who's responding and it's pretty equivalent across the grade level in terms of feedback from parents so that's always nice to see a little bit higher in the lower grades but often times our secondaries totally drop off so it was nice to be able to see that parents um from the secondary level did give some feedback uh and then we asked a question just about um language and then if students had an iep so we get a sense of who's who is answering our survey so additional assistance what uh best describes your child's typical internet access um and we have 75 percent reliable i have asked panorama to give me a more detailed um
035breakdown of who might fall in that 2 since we didn't attach it to specific families it's going to be really difficult to tweeze down exactly who that was but we could um tweeze it down by the school site and even the grade level and maybe do some targeted communication so i'll pass that along um to dave and work with him around how we might be able to be more targeted in our communication and identify those families we want to make sure everybody has access and it's not an issue um does your child have their own chromebook to be able to work yes but we just still have some families that are representing that they don't so again trying to tweeze down at least to the grade level in school and do some targeted communication whether
036that's phone call robo calls um so it's not always a internet or online communication to reach out to families how concerned are you about managing your daily schedule with your child's current school schedule um like 61 you know not concerned you know overall favorable somewhat concerned slightly concerned does your child participate in the lunch program a majority of our families are not uh if the school so this was a question we added school was to reopen face to face and parents had to select one so you can see over overwhelmingly a majority of our parents would like to see their kids return to school in some capacity whether it's one or two days or full time you can see the percentage breakdown communicating with the school overall this was really favorable they felt that their
037communication with the school's been really helpful they're feeling comfortable to communicate with the school so that's really great how how much do you feel like the school values your opinion 80 favorable and then how satisfied are you with the frequency overall parents are really satisfied with the communication you have a handful that wish that they would communicate more frequently but 77 overall is very favorable um how difficult is it to contact your teachers 92 favorable so parents are feeling like teachers are really accessible and that was some of the free response comments that i'll share in a minute um they feel like it's easy to get a hold of their teachers how satisfied are you with the teacher's responsiveness 82 favorable that's really positive um and the best way to communicate teachers or teachers to
038parents also with students is email so people like email um learning environment how satisfy are you with uh how it's structured 77 responded favorably in the free response a number of the parents said we want kids back in school um so that i think that's why you'll you'll see some of the somewhat satisfied score at that number how difficult or easy it is for your students to access it and their different tools they sport they us rated it 72 favorable and then how confident are you with your ability to support your students with online learning um 70 um but i do know in this is related but not in this conversation but we'll talk about it a little bit later when uh for the lcp that was something that parents had asked and requested especially
039in our dlac committee of having some more direct parent training or um courses on how to help with technology okay so we did a number of free responses i'm not going to go through all of them i'm just going to give you some of the highlights so what's working well and so the way that the free responses work is that it's very much like a wordle and it'll pull out the most frequently used words um and so basically what's working well some of the common themes from families is that they really like the structure they like that they have a daily schedule kids have face-to-face time every day with their teacher they have a routine and i know that that was very uh different than what they had experienced in the spring and and parents
040are feeling really um happy with that they like that they have more teacher contact time and you could see that in the favorable results that they can access their teacher and they really like that they like that they can access the assignments in google classroom that they can see it they can see what their kids are doing they can access what assignments need to be turned in so they're really um happy about that and then just overall their teachers communication out to them they felt that that was really uh that was rated very highly challenges that they're seeing um i don't think these are surprising amount of screen time um and then distance learning see how big that is distance learning is very challenging um the screen time not not being able to see their
041friends not being able to see their teachers at the high school particularly or in the secondary level and there was a number of responses around the concern about assignment or homework workload being very excessive or very heavy for students so they're working hours beyond the school day and into the evening and there were pretty significant responses around that uh and then um they just kind of said we just want to be back at school so that was that was something that um which you know overall shared by parents that was communication so staff we're gonna uh try to breeze through this pretty quickly we had 220 uh staff response this could go to certificated and classified a majority of the responses were from our certificated staff um the categories you can see their feelings about
042communicating with families is 59 favorable uh their professional development needs 38 favorable student edu sorry engagement with distance learning 64 favorable and student support 65 favorable again a quick snapshot of where you're seeing kind of the highs and lows broken apart by schools and we'll do a deeper dive with our schools later in the next week or two so family communication so they uh they were asked about how often are they communicating with their families in various different ways and they responded 59 favorable in communicating with families which is interesting because families felt that they were um commuting their that that percentage was much higher in response from families compared to normal situation how much more are you communicating how much more do you communicate with parents and you can see that they're feeling like
043they do reach out significantly more a bit more and that's 60 favorable and then during this period how challenging has it been um to reach families and we're kind of like split um this is somewhat challenging or slightly so there's still some work and maybe connecting with some of our families professional development needs with distance learning it wasn't surprised to see this um it's very difficult to try to differentiate instruction and launch a whole new program in three days with a team of two so uh we um the teachers felt like they're uh they didn't feel like uh the technology tools how common are you feeling using technology tools in your school um they're feeling somewhat confident or getting there i would think that over time if we were to survey our teachers in a
044couple months that we would see these numbers go up how confident are you feeling at providing rigorous instruction that number is relatively low again i think over time as they feel more comfortable and getting in their routine that we would see that number increase how confident are you that students can complete the work that's being assigned they're not feeling super confident that their kids can complete the work and i think that matches what the parents also say that they felt like the homework load was pretty intense right now or classroom work and then during the period of distance learning how valuable do you find the school professional development um they didn't really feel like the professional development was very favorable or very um helpful so um professional development needs what uh how confident are you
045to help your students um and support them in the distance setting their uh feeling not super confident um how confident are you that you can help your students with special services and that's an area that we need to support our teachers in so this is all really valuable information to help inform what we need to do support our teachers and how confident are you that you can help your most academically advanced students in distance learning and that scores a little bit higher about them feel like they can and then how helpful have your school leaders been in resolving challenges and it's about 50 50 and feeling like uh leadership is helpful and not helpful so kind of the big again we had a number of open responses for our teachers around um you know responding
046to the various questions we asked them what additional professional development uh did they need and uh overwhelming overwhelmingly the common themes were just more time to learn about what's already been shared with them so a lot of things have come at them in a short amount of time and they just really need some time to process it and learn it they also talked about working more time to work with their teams to develop these new tools and strategies um they also express once and more and versus video support more live um one-on-one support to help them and then there was a number of comments around hardware just feeling some frustrations around the wi-fi and their computer and the connectivity and just feeling like the hardware available to them could be improved and then what professional
047supports or resources have you found most valuable they really overwhelmingly like to google and zoom trainings a number of teachers mentioned youtube videos that they're using has been really really helpful just learning from their teams and their colleagues which is fantastic there was a number of our secondary teachers that took the katlin tucker training or online course and they mentioned that it was being really uh valuable and then a number of teachers mentioned the simple k-12 platform of having the flexibility and freedom to go in there and do their own professional development they appreciated and then biggest uh barrier um oh this was one of the biggest barriers they talked a lot teachers talked a lot about is that um because we we don't um are we're not requiring students to go um you know
048online like they can turn off their screen they feel that that is difficult to be able to gauge their um the students engagement or communicate with them um so they felt like uh that was something that they would just want kind of some more uh help with engaging their students and then they also just mentioned the technology is sometimes a barrier like it's glitchy or they get kicked out of meetings or um just the screen itself is a barrier to be able to connect with other students which is actually not surprising um so what they talked about student engagement they felt that how many students uh have they communicated with that's really high percentage um 79 how many of your students are consistently participating 81 again that's really favorable we were hearing from teachers in
049the spring that kids were not engaged so i'm really happy to see that number how engaged were students in distance learning at the beginning um at this period and they were you know we have 50 50 there and in the past week um how have they been engaged so at least we're seeing in kind of a consistency reporting we're not seeing that number drop so it'd be um interesting to watch that question and that number over time to make sure our students those numbers aren't dropping over time and then from what can you tell how many students have an adult home monitoring and that's about 50 percent student support which of these concerns have you heard your students talk about the most um their kids are concerned about being away from school not with friends
050they're concerned about distance learning and then we have kind of this great category of unknown how many students currently have uh consistent access to their internet um that's what they scored it pretty favorably 87 i would love to see that 100 um from what you can tell how many of your students have reliable access to meals they said 99 favorable but half of our teachers don't know um you know if that's if they they have it or not and then from what can you tell how many of your students currently have reliable tablet um they scored that at 98 is pretty reliable okay so i went through that really fast there's a lot of information you may have some questions i also know we have a very long meeting and multiple people that are sharing
051basically our next steps with this data is to share um out like i said at the beginning of the presentation share out with school sites their specific data i'm gonna ask principals to um really look at their responses see if there are some trends that they're noticing that are favorable that we can replicate and then if there's areas of concern and how do we address those concerns by school site because every school site is gonna have their unique needs and then also just based on some of the feedback do we have overall kind of global district recommendations um and that would be something um done through work with um possibly when we look at our opening plan or if there's any adjustments that need to be made and that would be part of a longer
052conversation okay sorry questions so much so much at you any questions none for me except to say thank you for that very very detailed report it's greatly appreciated so seeing no questions or comments from the board we'll move on with our agenda we're now at agenda item 14 which are public comments under government code 54954.3 members of the public have the right to address the board on any matter within the board's jurisdiction however the board may not take action on any non-agenda item individual speakers will be allowed three minutes to address the board 20 minutes have been allocated for this portion of the agenda additional time is allowed at the end of the meeting if there was not enough time to speak during public comments i will add a couple extra admonishments one is that
053if you are intending to speak on public comment tonight on a specific agenda item anything listed under agendas items 15 or 16 please use those public comment times to to make your comments agenda item 14 is for open public comment on items that are not listed elsewhere in the agenda and also knowing that this is election season please refrain from campaigning this is not a forum for campaigning thank you for your understanding i will now check to see if anyone wishes to comment publicly and i'm just gonna read the order off and and how it appears on my screen uh first is craig loves already second courtney masala o'brien third nakeda allen and fourth linda oliveira and then fifth gabriella lazaretti and i will call on people in the order that i just read them
054and i will do my best to do that so bear with me i am trying a different technique this evening so first up craig lazaretti you are now allowed to talk good evening good evening i'd like to talk for a few minutes about the district's initiatives around equity and anti-racism as you prepare to restart high school sports and hopefully other extracurricular activities i'd like to request as a condition of students participating in extracurriculars this year that they'd be required to first attend a workshop on racial and cultural sensitivity conducted by a trained facilitator in these topics many in our community clearly agree as a change.org repetition i created this effect gathered over 200 signatures in the first 48 hours and i will be sharing this petition with all of you i think it's very reasonable
055it's a very reasonable request in light of the disturbing tradition among sports teams at alhambra that came to light a few months ago and i'm glad that our new superintendent is here tonight to hear about it directly as we all now know there was a tradition on campus going back a decade or more of athletic teams stressing up in racially and culturally offensive ways as part of theme days such as quote rapper day thug day and chola day you're all shared testimonials from dozens of current and former students of color detailing the harm this tradition caused them it is not enough to simply say this tradition was ended last year and the issue was taken care of it has not been taken care of as the student comments that were shared with you made clear
056students who were harmed did not receive the reconciliation they were entitled to they continue to feel diminished by the school community and several athletes who took part in these dress-up events defended them as appropriate i know personally of one parent who moved her children out of this district to one she considers more socially welcoming in part because of this issue the only way this will be taken care of is when this community and specifically the students who were harmed receive the assurance that the district was actually addressing through concrete action the culture that led to this tradition and that means doing a lot more than passing resolutions and organizing voluntary workshops in which we all know very few people will actually attend the board and the administrative leadership at alhambra should publicly acknowledge what happened
057in regard to this team up day tradition and apologize publicly to the generations of students of color who were hurt our leadership unfortunately seems to believe that we're all just going to move on from this and trust that those who allowed it to go on for far too long we'll take care of it i'm sorry but you have not earned that trust and from the comments i've seen from students to date they have no faith in your commitment to this issue finally i just want to say this is not an attempt to shame anyone we all make mistakes as a privileged white male i acknowledge that i have said it and done racist things during my lifetime as i think we all have whether we realize it or not the shame is not in admitting
058and owning up to these things the shame isn't failing to acknowledge and own up to them which is what we've seen here the victims here are not only the students of color who were harmed but the students who were led to believe that such conduct was conduct was acceptable because as adults we clearly failed to teach them the proper standards of how white people should engage with historical cultures thank you craig we are sticking to our three-minute allocation for comments this evening thank you for your comments uh up next is courtney miscella o'brien you are now able to speak go ahead courtney thank you good evening everybody i wanted to um bring to everyone's attention in case you don't know yet and perhaps you do that the california department of education announced last week that
059they would have available mini grants for anti-racism and anti-bias education training as part of superintendent thurman's education to end hate initiative and if you haven't already i think this would be a great opportunity and i encourage the district to apply this seems to be in line with the district's recent equity resolution and many of our goals especially as expressed by many of our staff members and community members and students as craig just spoke about so um perhaps you've already applied or are planning to and if not i strongly encourage that our district does so thank you up next we have nakenya allen you are now allowed to speak please address the board hi can you hear me yes please address the board um hello my name is mckenya i am a parent um at this
060school i have i'm a black mom and i have a son who is an african-american as well um i've been doing a lot of research in light of the george floyd and um you guys made some commitments to the students about trying to be a little bit more uh racial sensitive i'm grateful to hear other people speak on this issue um it's very important um in a lot of different areas but a lot of the things that i was researching was the success of the african american students and i really didn't see a lot of efforts to try and bridge some of those gaps um so i just wanted to introduce myself and let you guys know that these are things that as a mom and a member of the community i want to make
061sure that i am a part of this to make sure that those children who are african american even though very small percentage and have someone to speak for them i think that that's also very important not just having um classes that are you know ratio sensitive they're not seeing people that look like them um the habits could still be there to ex you know exclude them um so there's a few areas that i was a little disappointed with and even though he's not in high school i did go to a high school protest for the kids of color from high school and i was very disappointed to hear a lot of the racism that these kids face and it actually made sense when i looked up you guys absentee rate from the board of california
062education site your absentee rate for black students is like twice as much as any other student and they are like only three percent so to me that said that they didn't feel very welcome um i tried to reach out to a couple of different um members on different boards to try to see how like what their plan was as far as the l cap i haven't really heard very much but there's a my point is that there is a lot of areas that are going to have to really be explored in order to bridge the gaps that seem to have been there for like many many years thank you so much for your time thank you and next we will move on to the next speaker is gabrielle lazareti followed by linda olvera and gabrielle
063please address the board you are now able to speak hi this is gabrielle i'm also speaking on the reopening of sports just adding on to the previous comments um i really want to push that you know a lot of people are backing these demands of a mandatory cultural racial sensitivity workshop um due to the amount of hurt that students of color felt from these spirit days and to my knowledge the spirit days have not or the admin has not publicly acknowledged or apologized for the great impact that these spirit days have had on students of color specifically black and latinx students on top of this we also demand more student involvement for future spirit days as well as a signed admin signature so that in case anything does happen in the future there is a
064signature saying that the admin did approve of it um and in future steps we hope to have your full transparency with these next steps and what you plan on doing with your equity work i again at the rally there was not very many uh school district uh staff um and hardly anyone replied to the google form that had 60 plus students um who were hurt and angry over these incidents so i would really love to see more involvement and more transparency with this because there needs to be real action that meets the words in your resolution thank you next is linda of olvera linda you are now allowed to speak please address the board hi uh my name is linda alvera and um i understand that i'm a member of the racial equity committee uh
065but i have not received anything and i would appreciate if you would update us on the web on the school district's website or the board's website on what's happening with that committee because i know you can answer questions right now so that's my request thank you and next we have betsy i don't know your last name so please identify yourself when you address the board which you may do now all right okay hi this is betsy hanna um i also want to echo the previous commenters um related to um racial equity um and i also was part of the um call back in july um where the board and the school district made a commitment to um having more uh transparency and more um opportunity for parents to be involved and i'm i've definitely also
066been waiting for more word on that and would like to um be a part of that um and and also i want to acknowledge the um rally that took place uh my daughter and i attended it and um you know it's it's disheartening to to know uh what she may walk into as she gets older and definitely want to be a part of the solution so um appreciate all of your attention to this matter and um and that's all thank you thank you do we have any more comments from the public this evening seeing none we move on to agenda item 15 which is our consent calendar approval of the consent calendar means that all items listed here under are adopted by a single motion unless a member of the board or the superintendent requests
067that any such item be removed from the consent calendar and voted upon separately madam superintendent do we have any changes to our consent calendar this evening no we do not thank you do we have any comments from the public about the consent calendar seeing none we will bring this back to the board for action move to approve the consent calendar second i have a motion from remember janelli and a second from member mclaughlin uh student representative i full board those in favor aye those opposed i'm sorry is someone voting in opposition and it's just an echo okay again those opposed any abstentions the consent calendar is adopted now we move on to agenda item 16 which are items for board consideration or action and first up 16.1 appointment of superintendent of schools this is an
068action item and if the board would indulge me i would love to be able to introduce our candidate julie sinyard julie it is pleasure to have you here this evening with us and in going through the recruitment process upon reading your application and meeting you in person you were head and shoulders the best candidate it was an absolute pleasure to meet you and to offer you this position julie is currently the assistant superintendent at katahdi roanoke park unified school district she has an incredibly deep knowledge of issues that are impacting martinez unified school district as she comes from a school district with a similar demographic makeup and size and your enthusiasm your energy your intelligence blew us all away and we are confident that you will help us navigate the current storm that we find
069ourselves in in this coven 19 pandemic situation and we hope you are ready to lead us to calmer waters um i i'm just so thrilled to be able to to introduce you and i was uh would like any of my fellow board members to make any any comments as well i totally agree with you jonathan julie you were head and shoulders above the rest and we're very pleased to have you come here to martinez jonathan are you going to make the motion i would love to make the motion um before i do so i just wanted to offer some thanks and gratitude to the incredible workers who helped us through this process first up i would like to thank sally fraser and jim brown from leadership associates uh we we hired leadership associates to help
070us with the the this recruitment process although i often do recruitment as part of my day job um i'll paraphrase i think it's a foolish recruiter who recruits his own superintendent so i'm grateful for the help that leadership associates provided for us and i also want to thank alexander birdsell alex thank you so much for your steadfast assistance with this at all hours of the day um i hope you can forgive me for emailing and texting and calling you based on my own schedule which is unusual so you're an incredible asset to this district into this process and last but not least inter superintendent madam helen rossi as they have uh thanked you in in previous meetings i i wish to echo my own comments you have led us through the most trialling of times
071you stepped up you led you did what was needed and you continue to do so and i know that you will and it's a pleasure working with you again my gratitude i can never fully express in words uh it's difficult not being able to see you because you know me i would probably try and ask if i could hug you and so i'm sending you one mentally right now you are to say you're an asset to this community i just it's it's beyond an understatement so with that if the board will indulge me yet again i would like to make the motion that we appoint julie dr julie sinjard as superintendent of schools for martinez unified school district and i would like to second that thank you and apologies robin since this is a personnel
072issue you're not eligible to vote but please feel free to comment or ask questions of dr senyard should you wish we have a motion in a second on the table uh board members those in favor aye aye aye those opposed any abstentions the motion passes welcome aboard dr sinyard would you like to offer us any words i would thank you very much um first of all first off i would like to thank the board for what an honor and a privilege to be part of martinez unified school district team i am so excited to come and work with an incredible staff again i want to echo the comments that you just made regarding helen she has been amazing and has really helped me can start getting my feet wet already and so i am excited
073to join this community get to know all the staff the students and i just look forward to all the learning opportunities ahead and to leave the district i'm very very excited and thrilled to be part of the team and thank you very very much well thank you again and that brings us uh if if we have no public comment on this item apologies do we have any comments from the public before we made that motion i'm terribly sorry uh we're going to have to back puddle here i see a hand from craig lazaretti and before i unmute you we are timing all comments this evening so craig has already please address the board thank you president right i just wanted to welcome our new superintendent to the district dr stuniard welcome to our district and
074i also i want to echo the comments that were made about ms rossi i'm very thankful as a parent in the community here in our district that we had someone as experienced and skilled and committed as mrs ross mrs rossi to lead us through a very challenging period we lost our superintendent at the worst possible time so thank thank you um as a parent um so dr senor i just want to since you heard from me earlier on public comment i just want to introduce you a bit about myself and my activism in the school district i'm a 22 year resident of martinez i've been paying taxes to fund our schools for 22 years i've been a parent of students in the school district since 2007 i've had students at every level and i'm very
075active and along with other parents and community members on the issue particularly of school safety and we define school safety as anything that affects the mental physical and emotional well-being of our students and i've been very outspoken and active in that area the last couple years and i have uh i minister a local facebook group and now has over 600 members in our small school district um that are all committed to the issues of making our schools as safe and healthy for all our students as possible and so i know you have a lot on your plate as you get started but i just want to make a pitch for the issue of school safety being a top priority and again when we look at school safety we're looking at the physical emotional mental health
076of all our students i originally was focused more on physical safety issues when i first got involved but i've learned a lot over the last few years about the the mental and emotional issues and challenges our students are facing both here and everywhere and this is something i've heard from a lot of educators and i'm probably sure this is something you've seen in your own experience i've heard many educators tell me that in 20 30 40 years in education they've never seen a period where students felt more anxiety more stress than they do today and as we all know success starts with emotional well-being and children and students cannot succeed academically until their emotion unless they're first emotionally healthy so um i'll end it there and uh thank you so much for coming to our
077district and agreeing to lead us and next on public comment we have linda alabeda linda you may now address the board thank you yes dr sineyard i'd like to welcome you too we're sort of both new to martinez if you will and i look forward to to working with you as part of the racial equity committee and i hope that we get off to a good start and that you would respond to my request as soon as possible in terms of updating what's going on with that committee i look forward to working with you through that committee and welcome thank you thank you now that we've exhausted public comment we will move to agenda item 16.2 and i pledge to do a better job of following the normal procedure uh you'll have to forgive me
078i was just very excited to introduce our new superintendent so now that we have appointed superintendent zenyard we have the obligation to approve the employment contract this is an action item and i don't see anyone necessarily presenting it but there's an attachment i'm not going to read through it on the zoom um we'll just start with public comment do we have any comments from the public on the super new superintendent's employment agreement very well seeing none we'll open this up to the board for discussion and action any comments or questions from the board seeing none uh how about we take some action i would like to make the motion again if i may that we move to approve the employment contract for superintendent dr julie sinjard second second we could all second how about that
079everybody seconds it and again robin sorry this is another personnel issue so no vote from student representative but full board we have a motion in a second on the table all in favor those opposed any abstentions the motion passes thank you all very much and i would also just like to thank all of my board members for assisting in this process and jeremy gennelly thank you for stepping up and joining the committee that we formed um it was this this job is always a lot of extra work and this was extra extra extra work in weekends and evenings and i couldn't have done it without you jeremy thank you so much so now we will move on to 16.3 is our second reading of the public hearing and adoption of resolution number 2021-07 regarding sufficiency
080of instructional materials it's an action item amy black good evening thank you uh so tonight i'm bringing forth a resolution for the williams act and so under the williams act we're required as a school district and an lea to provide sufficient educational resources in three categories those categories are instructional materials qualified teachers and clean facilities so the purpose of tonight is to adopt the resolution stating that each of our students in the school district has sufficient textbooks and instructional materials in our core subject areas english language arts maths science and social studies and these materials are aligned with the california state common core standards and the frameworks so i'm bringing this forth to action this evening thank you amy and since this is technically a public hearing uh first we will have any questions or
081comments from the board and then we will adjourn the meeting and open up the hearing and then we will take action after the conclusion of the hearing so any questions or comments from the board at this time seeing none excuse me i'm having some time okay seeing none i will adjourn the regular meeting of the board of education and call to order for public hearing and adoption of resolution number 2021-07 regarding sufficiency of instructional materials we are open for public comment on this hearing the same rules apply three minutes per speaker do we have any comments anyone wishing to speak on this item seeing none we will close the hearing and reconvene for the regular meeting of the board of education same item this is an action item move to approve resolution number 2021-7 second
082we have a motion for member mclaughlin seconded by member sequenza and let's see student representative i in full board those in favor aye those opposed and the abstentions the motion passes 16.4 martinez unified school district learning and continuity and attendance plan this is also an action item also with amy black oh yes here okay third time's the charm here okay so um the learning continuity uh and attendance plan so um in terms of updates so i brought to you two weeks ago the draft and presented the draft to you as well as the new template and the very short timeline that was given to us in order to complete the plan and provide it to um first our county office of superintendent in the next few days if it gets approved this evening um with
083between i want to just update you on what was done in between the time that i did the presentation as well as bringing it to you this evening uh this past week um i had the opportunity to bring it to our dlac committee virtually and highlighting specific sections that um particularly addressed our english learner population to get feedback from them um and suggestions and overwhelmingly they were very very interested in additional support especially after school tutoring so that that's something that we did put in our plan and we plan to explore further um and trying to identify teachers that could help in supporting our students after school with additional support especially our english learner population and then i reconvened our lcap executive advisory committee from last year we met prior to the covid and pandemic
084shutdown so i brought that team back to do um an overview um and a live meeting session we did breakout groups and looked at particular sec particular sections and got feedback from our committee it was a short turnaround but they also had the opportunity to be able to provide additional feedback not only in our google doc that we kept open and they could comment on any section and give feedback and ideas as well as in our google form um and we did we did receive about 60 comments from parents on the google form that was pushed out and it's available on the website and overall it was there wasn't anything like substantial in terms of suggestions it was more of kind of continuing to support our efforts um you know also communicating that we want
085students back in school there were some ideas that came out around just the mental health and re-engaging students and looking at possible incentives so that's something i didn't put directly in the plan but i do think that that's something that i would like to have a bigger conversation um with our leadership team as well as our staff and thinking about ways that we can incentivize our students and then i did add a couple of edits and additions um within the plan based on feedback from those committees and also included the recently released from our hr director um access to headspace for our staff so i wanted to make sure to include that in our staff wellness because i know that that's an area that um we could do more for um to support our our
086teachers and our classified staff um and our leadership team so those were just a few there were just a few minor edits nothing really significant to um point out but i'm i'm also happy to answer board's questions i know that it was a large a rather large plan and new information and i'm needing some time for you to digest it and i want to be able to respond to any questions that you might have thank you amy are there any questions from the board i i don't have any questions but i wanted to thank um amy and everybody who participated last week in our sessions um i got a lot out of it i i enjoyed our our small group uh meetings i i know we could have gone a lot longer uh last week
087and and i know we could have used more time but but i do want to thank everybody who participated in that i i did enjoy it so um i know it was a lot of work uh and thank to you know make sure you thank everybody who participated at some point so thank you very much so we'll go ahead and open it up to public comment i do see one hand raised brenda liao thank you jonathan um there was one question that i couldn't find in there i was at the meeting last week and it was um what is the amount that was allocated for uh pupil learning loss and what are we going to be using it for specifically that's my question i don't have the plan let me pull up the plan real
088quick brenda so do you i want me to answer that jonathan i think it's oh yeah please go ahead hold on let me pull up the plan david you just had the plan up a second do you have the plan up david or no it can look real quick i can pull it up hold on just a minute you think i'd have it memorized by now right which of the 30 pages would be um honestly i'd have to look hold on okay can i help to answer this question oh yeah would that help because i i kind of have numbers rolling around in my brain so it would be under the pupil learning loss section and i think it's just um right here attached to category like our supplemental categories and our platforms okay people
089learning law starts at page 18. i think gotcha and just and in general in terms of there you go for the lcp we were advised by the county business office to have it more in a lump representation as opposed to specific line items and allowing us to have some flexibility with the funds are you sharing that oh thanks dave um so you won't have seat necessarily see specific like you do in the lcap every like kind of specific uh category outlined you're gonna need to scroll down sorry david page 22 action item and then i can um yeah stop right there stop yeah so you'll see it's um more of a lump sum brenda so licenses we have a 30 000 contribution so think about all like and that's all outlined in the plan like
090the i excel and the fast forward and see saw illuminate like anything that you think is a digital license or tool um would be lumped within that amount um the screeners and progress monitoring that's all illuminate summer school programs so that would be staffing access to edge annuity that could be in there that's also considered part of the licenses and then special education services i believe that's around um and janelle could probably pop in or helen around assessment we um there's a significant need in assessing our special ed students especially now being in distance learning and that's something that we did discuss at our last board meeting of moving forward with one-on-one assessment so we have some funding available to support the high volume of assessment needs of our special ed students how long did
091i miss anything the the total amount of the cares act and learning loss brenda i presented at the 45 day revise was 2.6 million dollars and that money has specific specific um dollars that are associated or specific ways that you have to spend it and that money is currently being spent um on ppe on cleaning and sanitizing machinery on the licensing that we needed for instance on the textbooks that we had to get virtual for our platforms for zoom for esy for all the extra special ed testing kits for the people that the extra psychologists help we have to bring in for the back do testing there's a lot of things in here throughout this whole plan i do keep an accurate record and i have to report every three months to the state on
092the feds on how i uh how we as a district are spending it so i do have those records but i don't have them available this evening thank you i didn't see anything specific so that that helps a little bit um with how that money is being spent i guess because i'm thinking if it's pupil learning loss that we're going to see kids uh being supported in catching up it is and then there's also technology needs that we've spent it on the servers the stuff that allowed us to to be able to have all the students log in all the extra chromebooks i mean there's a lot that it's spent on that's allowable it's also allowable for student nutrition so it's covering some of our our expenses in that area so thank you helen you're
093ready i also saw it come up on basically from pages 19 to 22 there's some very specific pull outs there in terms of strategies you can look at that and there's some specific amounts as well thank you dave okay do we have any further comments from the public seeing none we'll bring this back to the board for action move to approve second i have a motion for member mclaughlin seconded by member fuller student representative how do you vote i and full board those in favor aye those opposed any abstentions the motion is approved next up is 16.5 school of reopening plans this is an information item helen rossi okay can everyone see the screen yes thank you okay thank you okay so tonight this presentation is going to focus on the creation of a plan
094that we're putting together around the guidelines and reopening for the martinez schools and the information that i have used to put together this presentation has come from the cdc and from the county public health services as well as our contra costa county office of ed put out some guidance a document for us to to look at in terms of support for creating this plan so the plan is not created these are the things that we are putting together in this plan we are working with our labor units to talk about these issues as they as we put this all together so i have to work backwards on two screens so i've broken the plan for right now or the the presentation down into six parts which we may or may not have six we may
095have eight when we finalize the plan but right now these are the areas that that i feel need to be addressed and have plans in place in order for us to open we're gonna start with health and safety protocols the reality of what that would look like as schools open before i begin on the next page i did have a meeting today with the county superintendents and the contra costa health services leaders and it appears that tomorrow our when our data comes in tomorrow the case rate will be somewhere around 6.5 which is under seven and so we will officially be in the red and that will start the 14-day clock for the allowance of schools in our county to open after the third on the 13th with or after the 13th with no waiver
096should districts um decide to go in that direction and in in stating that the the contra costa county um superintendent did want us to to to let everyone know that every county every school district in the county is different and every every district is affected by this pandemic in different ways and so every school district has different numbers of buildings and their facilities and different uh places where where they need more support than others so the districts will have to make a decision on how and when to return the students and teachers to physical classrooms based on their situation in their local community so it's not a one size fit fits all and she wanted that stressed out to all of the districts so keep that in mind as i go through the presentation so
097health and safety protocols so um it's quite lengthy so i made notes so if it looks like i'm reading from them i probably am okay so um on-site supplies and personal protective equipment we have installed plexiglas windows or say partitions in every office in the district aside from john muir right now because theirs is coming um actually our maintenance made them and hung them so they're there for protection of office staff we have uh plexiglas partitions for special ed assessments we've um ordered directional signs for walkways messaging signs for floor stickers every site administrator has put in an order of what walked their campus figuring out what it is they need and what it would look like when students return how we're going to make that happen we have purchased hand sanitizing stations for the
098yards and common areas we've got cloth masks for adults and children we have face shields for adults and children we have disposable masks for adults and children we have bottles and bottles of hand sanitizer for each classroom we have gloves which are still hard to get but we do have them in each office and then we will have them in each special ed assessors kit we have disinfecting what disinfecting wipes and thermometer disinfecting wipes for the classrooms and various common areas as well as thermometers in the office and then each individual assessment will have a thermometer as well um protocols for face coverings they're going to have to be worn pretty much everywhere all times except for eating and drinking in the classroom as the students are entering and leaving classrooms on school grounds and
099it says on the bus because we do have some students that do a special ed students that do um take our bus we contract with it with the county for bus service and they also would have to wear them on the bus there are um there are uh face shields available in lieu of masks or some will need both masks and face shields we have all of that um if a student has a disability or a special need and cannot wear a mask we will take a look at those instances and make decisions that are appropriate for that child in their specific specific educational program health screenings we would we would have protocols in our document that would have parents do a home screening a self screening or help their child screen for temperatures that
100are over 100.3 unexplained cough new shortness of breath a new sore throat severe muscle aches that are unexplained not because your teacher told you to go out and run 20 laps around the house that would explain a muscle egg this would be a muscle ache that was unexplainable chills loss of taste or smell if the child was exhibiting any of these through the home survey the parent would keep the child at home and we would recommend that they contact the child's physician on campus we have our staff currently who come to campus do a daily health check survey um we have um [Music] we would limit access for safety precautions we would limit access to the school site for public and visitors we would have a drop-off and pick up uh parents would not be
101allowed to exit cars only the student would be able to come on to campus unless there was of course an individual situation that needed to be addressed we would have for safety precaution hand sanitizers in the mornings that drop off and pick up they would they could be posted out in the front of the school or put out in the front of the school or they could be um done but right by the in the hallways on the way to classroom for coming in from whatever type of recess we figure out we can put six or seven on each um of each of these stations out on the yard to process kids back into the classroom quickly rather than having them a hand washing station which would probably take about an hour and a half
102to pull in one class of 30 with appropriate hand washing they probably do the sanitizing and they have at the elementary the classrooms and soap and stuff in their classrooms social distancing would be mandated like i said we've we've put in an order for um the markers for the grounds and for the hallway hallways and the floors and all of that and the and the classroom setup would have to be um what we'd have to do with classrooms is we'd have to keep our desks four to six feet apart is the is what is written in by the cdc there was some discussion today about six feet versus four to six feet but the rule is four to six but we probably want to go closer to six feet on that we'd have to remove
103all non-essential furniture in order to from the classroom in order to allow for maximum space for students and staff so that we could fit the students into the classroom there are a lot of times in the classroom there are a lot of extra furniture and other items that we'd have to take out and remove so that we could get the students in testing and reporting this does not have to do with academic testing and reporting what happens when so this is what i call my what if slide okay i used to tell my kids all the time when they were young no what ifs because they made me crazy and now i'm writing up what ifs but on this slide we talk about what happens when a student or staff has covid 19 symptoms we
104would send the student send home the student or staff immediately if we had to remove them from well when we removed them from the classroom we would have to place them in a school site isolation room while they were awaiting pickup we would recommend that the parent get them tested for covid school or classroom would ring remain open and because they're only displaying symptoms and we don't know if it's covered there would not be communication sent to the classroom or school community by current guidelines guidelines also say a student or staff with close contact to a confirmed uh kilby clay case would be sent home um student or staff member would be sent home immediately again placed in isolation room while awaiting pickup we would put a time on pick up that that the parent
105would have to come or they'd have to have an emergency person in place to come and get the child within that certain time they would have to quarantine because they were with close contact they would have not with a available case infection we would have to notify the local health department we would have to isolate the student and exclude them from school for 10 days from the symptom onset or the test date we'd have to identify close contacts what they call contact tracing quarantine excluding the contacts could be the entire cohort for 14 days it depends on the situation but county public health would put us would help us through that there would be a recommendation for testing of contacts we would prioritize with those exhibiting symptoms and so on and so forth the school
106would remain open but there would be a notification of a known um case if a staff or student tests negative after having some symptoms they go to the doctor they're not sure if it's coveted and they test no no no test negative the student or staff can return to school after three days after the symptoms resolve just for clarification close contact according to the county public health and the cdc is defined as a person who is less than six feet from a case or a person known to have coveted for more than 15 minutes without a face covering that's what they determine at county health when we call in that's what they determine as a person having called close contact a cohort is a stable group with fixed membership that stays together for all courses
107and activities and avoids contacts with other persons school closings are totally dependent upon the number of cases the percentage of teachers students and staff that are positive and consultation with the local health officer if multiple cohorts at a school or five percent or more of the total number of teacher-student staff cases are within a 14-day period we would close that school all this is going to be in that document when it's created the size and the physical layout of the school is also taken into consideration before a school is closed that closed school could open reopen after 14 days and it was cleaned disinfected public health didn't investigation and consultation with cchs contra costa health services we would close a school district if 24 or more of the schools 25 sorry 25 or more of
108the schools in the district have closed due to covid within 14 days and the local health department would uh work with us for consultation and direction we would reopen after 14 days again after the cleaning disinfecting and all of that all contact tracing is done um with the county public health and communication will be done through our parent link blackboard system with staff and families while maintaining uh confidentially for confidentiality ferpa is our confidentiality regulations our district nurses has been in training for um contact tracing with county health and she's our primary contact for students the director of personnel is the primary contact for staff and they will work with contra costa health services if in known cases to come up both the directors of personnel and student services will supervise and coordinate additional efforts
109regarding communication with families and staff who have been in close contact while maintaining confidentiality school principles are the designated contact for the local health department after beth after our district nurse makes her contact and they need one person to contact at the site it would be the principal so there's a lot of information here and a lot that has to be put in place but we are preparing um to have everything um in the right place for the right time when whenever that is when we open so now we're going to talk a little bit about cleaning disinfecting and sanitizing which is an absolutely huge job and we want to get it right um i was thinking about this and this may be one of the reasons that when we do get direction to come
110back to school that we stagger by by grades coming in start with maybe kindergarten tk and make sure that we have all the protocols correct and handling because the our younger groups before we bring back the older groups so that if we can add services if we need them and we can find out what it's really like before we bring all 4 100 students back at the same day i think that might be a smart idea but i'm not in charge but it was a good idea when i was thinking about it facility cleaning and sanitizing protocols high touch surfaces let's see have to have continuous cleaning the the door handles the hand railings the bathroom fixtures any vending machines or light switches and copy machines those are more you know just a short list
111it's not the every list but the short list of high touch surfaces that our custodial staff will have to continuously clean throughout the day they'll have to take care of our shared common areas the cafeteria the library the main office the staff work room playgrounds would would be off limits to start but when they do open they would have to be taken care of as well in the classrooms we have um let's see in the classrooms we have desks chairs pencil sharpeners and small group tables drinking fountains and classroom materials right now alhambra high school and the new john muir are the only two schools that have bottle fillers with their water fountains and it's the recommendation that we not use the water fountains so i have and brenda you can keep track of all
112of this as to where all that covered money is going we've had to we will be replacing the minimum of two uh water fountains on every site with body filler water fountains so that students bring their own water bottle to school and fill up their water bottle rather than trying to get it on that little nozzle of the water fountain and just ending up drinking out of it anyway so we wanted to think ahead and we we're having those installed over the next couple of weeks um the books have to be cleaned the manipulatives the students touch in the classroom when they come in um have to be cleaned between each student use ipads of course keyboards and mouse mice i should say the keyboard and mouse for any device that they're using and right
113now everybody has a device and and and um that's not a problem but when we come into a classroom um it may be so all of these things have to be taken into consideration um more than likely we're gonna have to hire some extra custodial staff when students excuse me come back to assistant at mostly our larger campuses throughout the day for the remainder of the year as far as instructional program on the student and staff day what is this going to look like i don't know but we have options there may be more options than this when when it comes down to it as you know we've just appointed a new superintendent that's going to help us lead us through this um here and with the rest of cabinet i'm sure we're going to
114come up with with a really good plan to present um to our bargaining units we have briony's which is a long-term independent study we have um distance learning which is right now what we're practicing um for everyone and in the event that we open and stay under the red we would come back in a hybrid in-person slash distance learning model at our comprehensive school sites which one of these programs is right for families will have to decide with the students which one of these programs is best for them will we offer all three i'm not sure it may be just two but it is possible keeping in mind that these three programs are very different independent study that we have now we have currently um more independent study students than we've ever had but this
115met the needs of working parents who could not um help their students on a scheduled morning or scheduled day so these students meet with a teacher once a week get their daily work they can email back and forth but they have to have the the regulatory minutes are listed here as 180 230 and 240 by grade level but mostly their parents help them in the evening or the afternoons with their work teaching them and helping them providing support and then there's that weekly check-in that they would have and return the work distance learning is what we're practicing now where the teacher provides instruction daily has to have live interaction each day or each period and it's a combination of 180 230 and 240 asynchronous and synchronous daily minutes which is live as teaching versus uh
116independent work or a hybrid combination and this could be done i i've only seen three different ways um and this there could be more a combination of in-person and distance learning i've seen it laid out in an am pm schedule where half this because we cannot obviously fit all of our students with class sizes that we have in one classroom together so we'd have to divide each class into half at the very least and have am pm schedules which half the kids would come in the morning half the kids would come in the afternoon we'd still be looking at 180 230 and 240 as our instructional minutes and um there's a two one two schedule where we would divide the school into um group a and group b and group a would come for two
117weeks um or sorry two days and then on monday and tuesday group b would come on thursday and friday and wednesdays could be a a a check-in day and then some asynchronous learning carried over from the other two days which may help with the um the uh workload for the that we've been reading about in our survey could also be um live uh where the teacher is actually teaching and has a webcam and the students that are at home are watching the webcam and participating in the lesson from home and the students that are in school are participating while they're in school in that case you would not have to um depending on numbers you might not have to break into smaller groups it might end up being half and half who knows but that
118is another option so all of these programs and any other programs are under consideration right now there is no decision on any of this these are just options and ideas schedules will be posted after uni union negotiations community consultation and board approval okay special education and mental health special education has been difficult to say the very least in terms of providing services to our students at home in the spring i believe it's about 10 or more assessments we're behind at probably each site that we have to catch up on to be in compliance janelle is working hard to to get those rolling so that we can serve the students that need the service and it's it's pretty it's it's difficult to say the very least um we have to consider the safety of our students
119and staff during this testing each child comes in special it comes with their own unique well every child comes with their own unique set of circumstances but our students who qualify for special ed services may qualify for speech and language only make may qualify to have a full day program maybe with physical and and mental disabilities they could just have a slight learning disability but there's they're all individuals and we have to make sure that whatever is on their iep we are implementing and so when we're taking a look at coming back to school how does that look for our special ed um students on their um related services and their iep procedures so that all has to be um laid out for us before we can um begin to to change our program the
120last section i think this is the last section is um extracurricular [Applause] activities and athletics educating the whole child because we all know that all of these things are important to our students they need the social socialization as much as they need the academics so very simply said this is all of these to me as an educator make up the education of of your child they have their core instruction but they need their electives so that they can grow their interest in and that hands-on learning in in an experimental way they need the pe to to to help them with their life lifelong healthy lifestyle athletics our students a lot of our students and i i know there are some rossi boys that would agree with me um athletics kept him in school all the
121way through and uh it's it it's good for the mind it's good for the body and it and it helps them academically as well by the expectations that are attached to it the clubs um provide uh groupings for students in the in in their who have the same social interests all of these things the three the electives the electives are there but it's it's challenging i i can only imagine what a challenging time the wood shop and the auto shop teacher are having trying to teach their classes right now but the the exercise the electives the athletics the clubs all of these things are important um and they're they're what our our students are currently not getting and we know that they need so we will be starting conditioning for sports um after we go
122into the red should everything align right and we move tomorrow into the red and we stay there for 14 days on october 13th we would begin conditioning for athletics as we did i think it was a month and a half ago before we things started to get bad we were conditioning i did break out our sports and and uh into three levels the high risk the moderate risk and low risk this does not mean risk for injury this means covert risk okay and um the ones in red cross country uh sideline cheer and dance now what sideline cheer is is it's they have to maintain six feet apart and they're not you know lifting each other up and doing all the competitive stuff volleyball water polo football and water polo again um they're in three
123categories but all of those will start with conditioning they will have small cohorts where they will remain six feet apart they will have masks they will not use any shared equipment they will wipe things down before they use them and wipe them after they use them should they use any kind of materials individually they will not have access to locker rooms or classrooms or the inside of any classroom it's very rigid very structured and they know that somebody's watching out and should they break the rules they would not have the conditioning in place anymore because it's not sports don't technically start until i believe december so this is good for kids and we're going to go ahead and and start to bring them back onto our fields that's what i have for inclusion right now
124in the plan i know it's there's a lot of information and a lot of information is missing but it's a plan that has to be developed and i have started in this way and i'm looking forward to continuing the work on this at the direction of the board and now it's open for discussion unless there are any questions specifically from the board about anything i presented now since i'm certain that maybe a lot of our attendees who have stuck around this late in the meeting wish to speak on this issue or possibly the next one i'd like to have these be as structured as possible so first i'd like to open this up for the board to ask questions and make comments and then we'll open it up to public comment and then we'll bring
125it back to the board so board members please ask questions share your comments i have a question which i think you kind of answered in the context challenge is kathy but when you say when we go into the red section for two weeks then we can bring all of our students back not just our youngest but all of our students including when we go we will probably i'm i'm almost 99.9 sure we will be in the red tomorrow and we have to stay red for 14 days after that we no longer need a waiver we can bring our students back doesn't mean we have to bring our students back i don't know of any school districts that are in our county right now but it is an option thank you i just wanted to be
126really clear and whatever we end up deciding i would like to suggest helen and julie that one of the things that was helpful when we first went into this last spring was particularly helpful for the community were the community newsletters that cj sent out on basically a weekly basis because it helped to alleviate the all they didn't fix it but it did help it in terms of the misinformation for instance we had received an email from a parent i believe a parent who was saying that this the county had already given us the go-ahead two weeks ago to open which was not accurate so if we can do the community newsletters rather than having to reply individually to people who have misinformation it might be a little helpful i know most other people that i
127forwarded cj's newsletter to or community information to were very appreciative and it was very helpful in keeping some of those less accurate comments to a minimum and thank you helen for doing this i know it really does depend what we do how we reopen how quickly we reopen does depend on how we need what we negotiate with both of our primary bargaining units mea and csca so thank you i have a question uh this is deidra um it was about the uh sports and conditioning at the high school and i know there's been some community concerns raised about uh our athletics our athletics programs my question was a little more fundamental um as far as the sports moving forward i know some of them are not i are all of them in season and also
128what kind of agreements do we have to follow these rules that we're putting into place about um some of the covid guidelines because i know that some of our coaches aren't actually um staff members of martinez unified so if we have people coming from outside from the public who are normally our coaches what kind of assurances what kind of instruction do we have to make sure that they're following our policies well it's my understanding from matt and pat our athletic director and our high school principal that um there are they have they sent i was just looking for it really fast they sent me a draft of uh what the rules and regulations would be and that they would be reviewed with the coaches and the students prior to them um beginning and that the
129commitment would be made from the families and the students and the coaches to adhere to the guidelines that are put forth by the cdc so that's that's my understanding i just have some concerns as far as um just making sure that the district is protected that everyone has had the appropriate amount of instruction and the appropriate amount of commitment to not only follow the rules but to report things so that we don't run into an instance where people are exposed or maybe we have assistant coaches or parents coming and helping out that that really aren't anticipated okay so the the thing about people coming and helping out it's very strict so if there are 14 students in a cohort that cohort has so there's say there's uh i don't know 100 kids for football between
130freshmen jv and and varsity they would be put into groups of students and those 14 students don't mix with any other 14 students their conditioning group is their conditioning group and their adult with them is their adult with them the adult doesn't get to have a new adult come in the next day or somebody to come in and help this is conditioning and it's um structured so they can't the adults can't switch cohorts and the kids can't mingle with other cohorts and when they started about a month and a half ago whenever it was when they came through i think it was in august i happen to drive by every day on my way home and they're pretty good i think the the weakest area is when they all come and get dropped off and
131and they're waiting for someone they're not supposed to be dropped off until right at that time so that's one area that i have a concern with pat and and matt and that has to be they have to adhere to that rule because that would be congregating so i talked to them when i saw it and it was fixed and i just want to make sure that it it starts out on the right foot this year but i think that with close monitoring by pat matt the aps that we're okay and there will be no parent volunteers or or walk-ins it's simply the coaches we have that are dedicated to that one group and that's all they work with we have field we have a chart with field times they have an hour for each cohort
132in a certain spot that's cordoned off on the field and that's all they have so they have to leave by cohort and come in by cohort in staggered times so helen john it's a couple of thoughts on things i hear through the rumor meal or through the wind you know the wind blows through between us very well um i like the idea of you know we slowly bring this in you know like i like the idea that we're not going to bring 4 100 students back into the scheme of things one of my concerns and i think your chart was great is at the high school level what would happen if we just said you know what we're not going to start high school till spring semester and we're going to really look about the
133timing in the classroom all the different options and one of the charts is is i love the thing where you have the athletics the clubs the arts and we really focus on the spring semester on trying to meet the teenager's overall well-being because this is such a trying time i mean you got testosterone and estrogen and everything going through them and the anxiety levels high enough you add on to this covet thing is there any harm in seeing you know what we're going to really take a step back at the high school and maybe even the junior high and really review are we implementing a program whether it's changing the block scheduling whatever so we're meeting as much of the overall development of our students there's i can honestly say in my opinion there are
134really no rules for the plan in far as insofar as how we bring kids back i think that we can look at our individual needs for our district and make a decision as to how we want to do that and there's no reason that there couldn't be a decision that says we're going to bring elementary back at this time and the middle and high are going to be here but we're going to allow them to to start doing this this and this and outdoor stuff i mean we can be creative we can be in individualized that's just up to like i said we put something together we bring it out to the community we bring it out to our our staff members and we we try to find what works for us we don't have
135to copy somebody else we we we can you know i feel about copying other districts what's that you know how i feel about coffee i know i know this would yes i mean that's just i mean from what i understand the elementary we we roll this out and we i think we got that really down i just think we have a unique opportunity if we just take one step back and we really focus on the junior high and the high school not only can we do it correctly but we can do something really dynamic to develop or try to meet the overall needs of 6 through 12 because to be honest these are tough times in you know i've i've always said you just throw on this pandemic you're you're starting out the day at
13625 more stress right and i just think so that's my two cents is i really would like to review and examine what we could be doing at the secondary and i love that chart you know what can we be doing to make more extracurricular activities available and enhance the overall well-being of our secondary students okay thank you other questions from the board or concerns or comments yes i john i like what you said i really think that that addresses some of our concerns around our high school students but i would like to say that we also need to look at bringing back sooner rather than later our kids with special needs because i think they're suffering the most from the lack of in-person teaching so i think i would sort of put them in a
137slightly different category and um look at them coming back but i do like the idea of not doing certainly not doing all grade levels right away i think looking at our kids who are elementary k-6 make sense to me but then after that i think we have to look at our high school our secondary kids and i would say probably for the spring or the the next semester um and i know that's probably not a really popular statement but i do think that we need to look at doing this in an incremental way so that we don't get caught you know there's so many studies that have come out that show that kids high school students are in fact spreading this virus very broadly in other states so we really do need to look at
138that as well um and i you know some somehow or another it seems to me like some people think kathy you're muted kathy you muted you did all through what i just said thank you just just the last 20 seconds oh good i don't need to repeat it i just do think that we need to do this incrementally and we do need to keep our kids with special needs at the top of our thoughts okay other questions yeah jeremy any any thoughts or questions well the only the only other one question i have is is helen you mentioned this at our last meeting if the county moves into red but moves back into purple and we have not reopened right we cannot reopen under purple without a waiver that's right if we do reopen and
139the county goes back into red i mean back into purple then we can reopen after we've put more um precautions in place and testing we did under if we're in red we're not required to do employee testing um but if we're in purple we are so i haven't have another question um and one thank you for the report and clearly we've got a lot of work to do still um it's with our bargaining units and and our community members but hypothetically speaking let's say we move into red we vote to reopen schools but we don't put anybody back on campus right until we have our protocols and we have a reopening plan in place that everybody's happy with and then the county slides back into purple since we've technically voted to reopen do we still
140get the benefit of i don't think so because we haven't reopened okay but i will check i i didn't quite hear that come up in in in the meetings today but that's a what if and i can check so the only reason i ask that question is it buys some flexibility depending on on what we want to do so right i know that there i've received some communications from others um superintendents that they've put out to their community one one superintendent said we're going to open on october to our tentative date for opening is october 28th and that's the date that they settled with their their club their teaching staff and their classified staff but if they don't make that target because they're not ready they may bump it back a little bit but they
141wouldn't open prior to that date i also have a communication from another superintendent that said nobody's opening in this until january 12th um no grade level so i think you can do you can push the date out you don't have to say we're opening tomorrow i think the date is is is what it is but i have to find out if you vote i will ask that question tomorrow if you vote let me repeat it if you vote to open schools and you don't actually open and we move back are we still under the same requirements as if we didn't open so i would ask it a little differently if you vote yeah if you if you vote to reopen but you don't actually put anybody back on campus is how i would that's how
142i would ask it got it jeremy you mean students correct correct but no students on campus just like that district that says october 28th do they go to go and do it yeah and so i i only ask you just to see if that's an option i think we still have a lot to do in order to get to having students back on campus but it was a it was a question that popped into my head i will put that in the friday update helen this is deidra i have my i have my camera off i'm having some connection issues but um just to follow up with jeremy's question uh is it is it any student so if we were able to get a small cohort group uh moving back on campus does that still
143keep that door open uh if the county were to move back into that purple zone well that will be the second question that i ask unless somebody else knows the answer on my team or julie do you know the answer i'm afraid to say anything in case our counties are different so that's um because i know things are kind of specific county wise um i my best guess for that one would be if we had a waiver in place already to do a small cohort and we went to red and we went back to purple we'd have already had that cohort approved probably keep that cohort and then we'd be okay but i don't want to i don't want to misspeak because i'm not that makes sense to me but i will check it will
144be the second day what's that we don't need a waiver for cohorts so i just want to clarify that right yeah we don't need a waiver for cohorts keep that cohort or can do all okay i've got them both other questions that i can or cannot answer there's no questions from me at this time it is 8 44 so in the interest of sorry helen good i have one um one um public comment on this that i have to read so don't forget me okay i will not forget you uh we will move to public comment i currently see five hands raised i'm gonna oh boy a lot more people have raised their hands okay folks so hoping that zoom helps me keep the order in which people want to speak beginning with tina sherwin
145tina you are now allowed to address the board hi my name is tina sherwin i'm a clinical lab scientist and i have my masters of public health from uc berkeley and infectious diseases i know that when planning this school year we've come a long way in terms of the prevalence of copen 19 from this summer until today on july 20th we had our high of 291 new cases in one day compared to today where the number is around 90 cases for the county the high percent positive tests in july was 6.7 versus today where the percent positive is below 4 for the county on july 30th we had a high of 110 covet cases hospitalized compared to de der where there are only 31 coveted cases hospitalized in the county on august 18th dr farantano
146the health officer of contra costa county said we feel like we've reached a point where it makes sense to consider requests for elementary schools to reopen he said this based on science because the benefits of in-person learning for 2k through 6 outweighed the risks of covid in this age group at that point in time since the state began accepting waivers 669 waivers have been submitted and most were approved in our county 26 waivers have been submitted and they have all been approved the state health officer tells us that once we move into the red tier for two weeks we can reopen schools without a waiver for tk-12 we should be moving into the red tier on tuesday based on being below seven cases per hundred thousand and percent positives well below eight percent for the
147last two weeks again the state says we can reopen based on science because the benefits of in-person learning for 2k tk through 12 outweigh the low risk of covet transmission during last year's flu season in california there were 11 deaths in children below age 18. compare this to the two deaths there have been in california from covid among ages 5 through 17 and zero deaths below age five and zero in our county below age 18. in our county we've had 1989 cases in the age group of 5 through 18 which is school-aged kids this is 11.9 percent of cases and zero deaths in our county there have been 3986 cases in the age group of 19 through 30 and this is 23.9 percent of cases and zero deaths the majority of cases have been in
148the elderly there have been 2138 cases in ages 61 and up this is 12.8 percent of cases and 173 deaths in this age group or 83.93 percent of deaths in the elderly there have only been three reps of martinez and this number has remained the same for many weeks the county has had 206 deaths the largest portion is in seniors the science and the data support reopening once we are in the red tier for two weeks the unions need to listen to the science and stop dragging their feet and preventing reopening thank you for the timer david uh tina we do have a lot of people needing to speak so thank you for concluding your thoughts uh next up is nikenya allen please address the board hello my name is nathania allen and i also
149studied infectious diseases um in contrast to the last speaker there has been a lot of studies where basically all kids are just as likely to pass over um the covid um they are kids just because they're smaller are not any less of a risk and kids just because they're teenagers actually pass it just like adult to adults so um it is also a fact that young people are dying and that's kind of important to know because i think people are still assuming that we're still under the same um ideas about covet when it first got here but there's been a lot that has been learned um i want to go back to uh the school plan um i've been i don't follow the american cdc um i have not found them to be very reliable
150i literally follow the who and as a lot of friends of mine are scientists i go to journals as well and and um and get as much knowledge as i can about this outside of us so when it comes to opening schools this is not we're not inventing the will there are literally across the planet schools have been trying to be opened and there has been issues it only takes one and even in georgia not too long ago on the first day of school kids were already positive so i wanted to make sure that if you're going to open schools we should make sure that we have a tight system where we could catch small um positives before it becomes a whole outbreak in the community it really won't take long so one of my
151concerns is like you know for example if all kids are going to be going back to school great is everybody going to come in with a um a test on record that was recent so that we don't have to wonder um and also you know there's al the integrity issue we cannot rely on other people um to make sure that my you know that my baby is gonna be safe my baby has special needs he has special medical needs and he's one of your special um children but i just don't feel like the plan as far as that is concerned is uh where it needs to be in order to be comfortable sending him to school because let's keep in mind him being dead or in a coma is also going to be affecting his
152social life and also killing the rest of his family members because those kids will bring it home and it'll spread from there so i am asking for you guys to be a little bit more ambitious when it comes to some sort of plan of action thank you next up we have erica meadows apologies if i mispronounce your name you may address the board hello board can you guys hear me yes please address the board perfect so first helen thank you for putting that together i i actually um i am not a teacher at a tk 12 grade level but i am a teacher at the preschool level so just i to kind of echo some of the the things that have already been said i do think that we need to go in with um
153an abundance of caution but it sounds like that's kind of the direction of this plan so um but in my experience and we have a very small school we have two teachers with 12 students and the hand washing the sanitizing all of those things are really big jobs um that's where i i really want to applaud you in your idea of staggering a re-entry back to school i think it's a really smart idea you don't know what you're what you're in for until you actually start it's it's a bigger job than one thing's again like i said at our small little preschool we have a desert one person designated to sanitize and disinfect throughout the entire day um so with that thank you for for um having that idea thinking outside of the box my
154children are in i have a 7th grader and a 10th grader um and contrary to the last speaker and studies that i've actually read through like ucsf show our younger age like below five to be uh less prone to passing the virus um it's really our our children 14 and above that that pass it more like adults and that middle school age group is a little more so having to do with some type of ace receptors i don't know i'm not a doctor i teach preschool but um and the other thing that i wanted to say was um to speak to diedrez question about um the cohorts of the um sports groups i guess that are happening um deidre i would say that martinez community swim team has been operating pretty successfully since i think
155we went back it might have been the end of june early july um with groups of 12 to 14 i think with their own coaches it's been a really successful um kind of venture for for that program i see i envision the sports clubs or cohorts or conditioning things to be equally successful so um thank you guys for all you're doing with this up next we have excuse me just a minute up next we have jeff sherwin you may now address the board hello i'm jeff sherwin i'm a parent of a sophomore at alhambra high school and although distance learning this fall has been much better than last spring i still don't feel like my son's educational needs are being adequately met academic rigor has been lacking the school day is excessively short my son
156has social deficits which aren't addressed through distance learning we have been supplementing our son's education with online classes but it is disappointing that this is necessary at the last school district meeting it was stated that we could not reopen even if we were in red tier which we should be tomorrow because we do not have adequate funding to pay for additional safety measures first 2.6 million dollars has been allocated to our district for cover 19 relief through the federal cares act part of this money is allocated for ppe and other needs associated with reopening second if we need more funding to reopen our schools safely please consider asking community the community and our local businesses for help with funding and volunteers just saying we don't have funding to reopen our schools when appropriate is unacceptable
157to me i also noticed that the school district has been providing free lunches for all children regardless of need at this point and i wonder how we can afford to do that but we cannot afford to open our schools safely it seems like reopening the schools when we meet the criteria set forth by the state should be the priority as everyone agrees distant learning is not ideal there are children in the district who are economically disadvantaged have learning disabilities or lack parental support at home and as a result there is a widening educational gap developing due to the shortcomings of distance learning this gap will only increase the longer you're in a distant learning model i would recommend the school district estimate any funding shortfalls for reopening uh so temporary funding can be uh secured
158now before we reopen this spring i believe the district is proposing some funding measures but i hope the school district does not condition reopening the schools on the passage of these measures because that will be tantamount to holding our kids educations hostage i believe there will be more support for these measures if parents in the community feel the district is listening to the needs of children and parents and reopening the schools when the state determines it is safe in conclusion i understand reopening will have its challenges however i believe it is the best interest of our district our children our families and the teachers to return to in-person learning when the state determines it is safe thank you very much next we have excuse me technical here todd navarro todd you may now address the
159board thank you jonathan first of all i'd like to thank helen for the amount of time that she's put forth in developing a very thoughtful plan to re-enter our school campuses it's objective and it's fair and helen thank you so much for the work you put into this i would like to share and i don't necessarily agree and i've addressed the board several times since the beginning of the summer i'm not sure what it is each of you is looking for with regards to a guide post or an implementation plan to get our kids back to school but beginning tomorrow part of that decision has been made for you so i think it's important that you share with the executive committee including our incoming superintendent what it is exactly that you'd like to see that
160will allow our kiddos to come back on campus we've had surveys we've had a multitude of data shared with us over the last few months and i'm going to highlight i have two kids at the high school there is a problem brewing at the high school with the demands that are being placed on our children 35 minute day classes and hours of homework being placed on their backs on a daily basis is not meeting their social and mental well-being and holding them off campus until january is not likely going to be the answer you have data you have information from the community you have information from your students that they want to be and they need to be back on campus putting the burden of this time on their shoulder squarely for whatever it is
161that can't be met through our bargaining units is not fair and it's being taken out on the students thank you up next we have craig lazaretti thank you i just want to echo what kathy said earlier that i definitely believe special needs and special ed students should be the top priority they are definitely the ones suffering the most from distance learning or struggling the most i don't think it's it's a no-brainer it's not even debatable so i think that as you move forward i think they should be the number one priority and i think you are moving in that direction which i'm glad to see i think when it comes to extracurriculars i think i think resuming outdoor activities is a good idea i think since we're moving another red tier we're at a point
162we can do that i would just ask that you do whatever you can to make sure the same type of opportunities are afforded to art students music students drama students that are being afforded and granted to student athletes in the sports programs but there are particular logistical reasons why you can start with sports now but you can't do these other things i'd love to hear what those are and there may be very well be legitimate ones but i'm just very curious about that because it seems to me music can be done outdoors um drama can be done outdoors a lot of things can be done outdoors i think actually basic education learning and especially at the lower levels elementary levels can be done outdoors um and when we talk about being creative i think looking
163at um outdoor options as many for both you know for core curriculum as well as extracurriculars is something we should definitely do um i do think you know as as much as i agree um that distance learning has its drawback for most students not all students i think some students are doing fine or actually doing better but it does have its drawbacks for all for most students we also have to be careful and trust the data and follow the data and follow the science on this issue we're heading into the fall and winter season and that's going to be a big wild card in terms of what impact that has on covid and this is all you know let's just be honest about it we don't have the national leadership on this issue that we
164should have it's been a colossal failure at the national level and as long as we're lacking national leadership and getting this crisis under control every school district in this country is going to suffer and every school district in this country has to be careful hopefully we'll finally get that leadership in a few months but that's the reality and so let's be careful be cautious go gradual go slow at least until we get through the fall and winter uh and see what the the spring is holds for us because this this whole thing is still a total wild card thanks up next is steve w steve again if you could share your first and last name you are now able to address the board thank you steve w please address the board steve w i'm sorry
165i'm going to have to mute you again and you can raise your hand we have to move on to other speakers we have very limited time up next is megan nicolela you are now able to address the board good evening everybody uh helen i want to thank you again with that presentation that's probably brought the most comfort between being a parent and a teacher in the district um in a long time but there's still some questions that are kind of constantly swimming around in my head so i did want to bring them to you guys and to the public tonight number one how far into the future are we making plans for teachers staff students and everyone involved to feel prepared as a possible return uh return sometimes seems closer than one would first guess
166with the numbers trending down in the county at the end of the summer break teachers still had no idea what the possible schedule would would be until governor newsom stepped in and drew the line saying some schools will not open in these areas leaving a mere two weeks to go and flip our classrooms into a digital platform number two how can teachers expect to be prepared with limited time frame situations similar to the start of the school year upon opening back up three how much additional prep time will teachers have to prepare their rooms and materials and not just stays pulled from other work days professional development days in the future teachers are asked to expect teachers are asked and expect our students to think outside of the box every day and we accept expect
167the same from our school boards members to help their fellow teachers out to ensure a positive learning space is provided number four how can so little communication about said plans be shared with those who will still be experiencing great schedule changes on a daily basis number five how does the school district plan to financially handle all the additional protocols needed to open in any given hybrid or cohort basis the district cannot handle such fiscal endeavors that leads me to number six why is so much time being given to this information item and the time shifted could rather be discussed in developing enhanced distance learning schedule and situation for that we're all dealing with it's brought comfort seeing the protocols necessary for the one-to-one testing on campus but it leads me to my final question for
168tonight number seven how does that actually work with groups of 12 and those groups moving around campus for as long as we've been hearing all the information about possibly returning and trying our best to problem-solve on the fly with the various daily issues with distance teaching and learning i feel many wish that there were a lot more possible solutions and answers offered and answers offered to us as we head into our ninth week of school thank you for your time thank you and i'm i'm now going to ask my fellow board members for some direction here and uh and but we we usually limit public comment to periods to 20 minutes at a time we've we've been engaged in public comment for far longer than 20 minutes uh should does the board want to continue
169conducting public comment should we cut it off at some point and i'd like some uh assistance from my fellow board members it's getting late um i would say that we have five people who have their hands up and some of them probably had them up towards the beginning of public comment i would like to cut the public comment off at that point i don't know about other people but that would be my preference because we can't uh i mean we're hearing some of the same information from each person so that would be the other request that i would make to people speaking is can you limit your comments to something new or different or just say yes i agree with blank thank you kathy any other thoughts for members of the board before we move
170on i know we got some time concerns but i i think we should hear the rest of the the five people that have their hands up now those are my thoughts great those are my thoughts as well john are you okay with that that's fine okay so we will limit public comment to the following speakers bj thompson maria donna amy benz linda oliveira and steve w and per my esteemed colleague cathy mclaughlin if you have a comment that echoes other commenters please do your best to limit your comments if you have new information do your best to engage in brevity we have other agenda items and other people wish to speak on those as well so that said excuse me dealing with okay up next is bj thompson you may now address the board hi
171how's it going um first and foremost thank you to helen for hard work she's doing a great job um i'm here to ask you to move along with opening schools as soon as possible my son is in kindergarten and is on and off with his teacher for about an hour and a half a day with work packets in between those teaching sessions my five-year-old shouldn't be learning through work packets he's not retaining information due to distractions associated with online distance learning it's your job to educate our youth right now you're not allowing that to happen i encourage you to consider opening soon with or without teachers union consent if they don't want to work like the rest of us then so be it find someone who will keep in mind there's a 99.95 survival rate
172for under the age of 60. thank you bye up next is maria donna you may now address the board maria donna you may now address the board you've been permitted to speak maria donna you may address the board i'm sorry i'm going to have to take you off the list up next we have amy benz you may now address the board good evening um thank you so very much for the time and effort you've been putting in the extra meetings all of the the extra time that you all endured um again thank you helen for all the research and all the time that you've spent in meetings and um the really thorough and well done powerpoint um so i am a teacher in the district for those of you who don't know me i am
173also a parent and we are struggling the amount of homework and work that has been pounded on my junior who is 16 he's giving up and it's frustrating to watch him teach himself pre-calculus i cannot help him um and it's hard to find a tutor when you're in covid times um the fact that you're thinking of t not letting them go back until january is mind-boggling um we are spending he got homework on sunday night that he had to do um we're losing our dinner times together he's not even playing sports right now and he has no time um my eighth grader again is locking himself in his room he's pulling it off but we don't see him they're sitting in front of screens and we've always limited our screen time we're an active family
174and sitting in front of blue screens all day with blue light glasses on and films in front of our computer so that we don't get headaches is getting difficult and the fact that we can go back please reconsider and not make the high schoolers and junior hires wait longer i'm constantly talking to children in the community and the seniors are losing hope they're seeing the class ahead of them not able to go to college and staying home so they're not even thinking about college right now they weren't able to go to their junior prom they didn't have the end of their junior year and now it looks like they may not have the beginning of their senior year they worked all of these years in martinez to get to this pinnacle and no it is
175just the beginning of a bright future for all of them but they are frustrated please talk to these kids take into consideration what you read on these surveys and think about if we're going back they need to all go back thank you so much for your time and consideration up next we have linda olvera and again last two we have well yeah maria donna we're going to let you try again but linda oliveira steve w maria donna if you have something unique and wildly different from what other folks have said please share it otherwise you're welcome to echo the comments of previous speakers we have very limited time linda o'vera let me address the board pardon me folks technical that's my problem linda o'vera you may address the board yes i just got that opening
176right now and jonathan i really didn't raise my hand just so you know i don't know where you got it but oh you've been on my speaker list so if you really didn't have your hand raised can we move on to another speaker absolutely i am in favor of opening the schools thank you okay understood now steve w okay hopefully you can hear me this time yes thank you all right um i just wanted to thank i'll be as brief as possible um i really wanted to i am steve willis i'm a parent of a first and third grader at morella park elementary um i really wanted to thank mr aussie for the great presentation i was very happy to see that we had a start on a plan towards getting our kids back in
177school i really want to thank the teachers and administrators particularly those at morello park elementary they have created an interactive learning environment for our kids that is significantly better than last year and our kids are learning some and they are making the best of a very difficult situation particularly mrs benz who just spoke i also want to echo what um todd navarro said um it's really hard to hit a target when you don't know what that target is if the board could share what targets need to be hit in order to open that would be super helpful as well um to echo some of the other statements as was abundantly clear from the survey results uh that were delivered so eloquently by amy black it's not only the parents who want their children to return
178to school which i think i heard um from one of the people speaking earlier tonight but teachers and students want to return as well i think that was abundantly clear um also just to counteract some of the the negative uh information that was given out that i heard um as other states have opened their schools there's not been an increase in the infection rate particularly among those kids under 17 especially under 12. as long as proper protocol is in place in fact most states have showed a continued to show a downward trend as a school board your foremost job is to provide our children's education in a safe and nurturing environment by following those contra costa health recommendations our children and teachers can return to school safely we do not have to lose an entire
179year to covid once again i implore you be a leader let musd be a model for other schools to follow thank you so i'm sorry whoever biology 9-1-1 dollar sign is but we will not be taking any further comment on this issue as we discussed as a board um thank you for your presentation excuse me so uh we have much more uh business to attend to on this meeting there will be open comment on the next agenda item which is a similar issue so we're back at the board and i wanted to see if any board members have any further questions or comments yes jonathan i do this is kathy i am a little bit concerned because it's totally separate from what we're addressing i understand the city is offering parents an opportunity to have
180child care from three to six three days a week and i want to be sure that we coordinate with them because if they're in a totally different cohort they could in fact it could in fact impact some of our kids who are in a different cohort if that makes any sense um meaning so we're trying to keep the kids in cohorts if that's what i understood and if they're now in a totally different cohort with totally different adults i do have a little bit of a concern about are we expanding the possibility of problems i just think we would should be talking to the city and asking them to help coordinate with our schools thank you good point kathy any other thoughts or questions oh yeah sure go ahead yeah i just i mean i
181know we're going to continue to move forward with this but i think we have to bring back the question again as uh i mean are we going to have the capacity based on our staff to actually man the classrooms uh we've we've talked about many of our our teachers uh many of our other staff members either of a our particular age or of a particular health risk where it really wouldn't be probable knowing what we do about um the lack of substitute teachers out there is there even an ability for us to to start any of our schools even in a hybrid based on our current workforce and i think for me that's that's really where that's the question that i need to know because as much as we may all love to put the
182kids back in school now that we may do it based on the county guidelines is it actually something we can do and i don't know that answer i'm not sure if we do yet either jonathan did you want me to respond to that oh yes please helen um deidre we would have to we have not taken a specific survey and say who with our staff on who's going to come back and who's not going to come back because we haven't had that hard line we have surveyed them in a variety of ways would you be able to would you you know so on and so forth but not for saying are you you know can you come back for to teach should we open in hybrid and we'd have to get that number exactly of
183teachers and then that number exactly of families because as the survey said there were i don't know if it was 50 or 60 percent i can't remember we'd have to figure that out and then we'd have to match up um this the grade levels and the students like the elementary from the secondary because their credentialed differently and see how we could do we had to do the same exact thing at the beginning of the year with the independent study in the distance learning so we'd have to do the same exact thing but only take those staff members that can return and and match them up with the students that parents want them to return to sites so we'd have to get a hard yes or no and then that would be it we'd have we'd
184have those numbers to work with and we don't have that right now what do you need from the board as far as where do we need to be um to in order to get that kind of direction um because i know i know this i mean we're going to continue to explore this but it was one of the one of the things that didn't you know we haven't pulled yet and um i know the communications that i'm getting in the community both from parents uh in the community are very different than those uh from the teachers who have reached out to me that are very you know are still very concerned with having exposure to hundreds of kids coming on to school sites and you know at some point as a community i think we
185need to to have that meeting of the mind somewhere right and i would i would need direction i would think and julie you can step in but i i would think that we would need direction to get those answers and to look at what the reality of the numbers mean for the district so if if we have a hundred elementary teachers and 25 of them or let's say 20 percent of them cannot return for medical reasons we would have to have you know matching numbers so to say on the student side to be able to match them up correctly and then we have to take a look at if if they they aren't willing to send their student to school are we offering independent study or offer are we offering distance learning or are we
186going to a model where they can do both so we need we need as a district team to decide on our models and we need from the board direction on telling us that you want us to go out and get this information and try to pull it all together by what date do you want us to do this that's what i think is that does that sound right sounds right okay ellen could you bring and and and julie because it will be your first meeting uh at our next board meeting could you bring those data if available we can do our very best i know we all do um this is kathy in addition to what deirdre asked for i think we also need to find out about our custodial staff are we going to
187have enough people available to do the kinds of deep cleaning that needs to be done so many times a day yeah jared and i have been talking about that and and i've talked to karen sloper from csea about it as well that there is possibly a need to hire for the rest of the school year additional custodial staff and maybe juggle some of the pm to the am depending at this point we don't have facility use but once they open up athletics for competitions um that's going to change the custodial schedule because we have to have a custodian here at night later than seven o'clock so unknowns are there but yes we will have to um find a way to to put more custodial help in but remember we have do have an overflow of
188other positions that might be able to help us as well so we're working on it thank you so much oh sorry john go ahead you know just real quick and i'm gonna try to be as quick this we just need to stay focused on the positive of this community this isn't a union issue this isn't a school board issue this isn't a kids issue everybody wants to get our kids back in class we want to do in a safe positive manner and we want to make sure everybody is protected the information changes day by day but we can't turn on each other right now everybody needs to know we're all working towards the same goal i realized my idea wasn't favorite that's fine but we can have the honest dialogue without turning onto each other
189because this is really a full community member that affects kids from preschool to seniors who are to our teachers who are over 60 to grandparents who are living with their grandkids so everybody's coming at is a different time the information is different but let's recognize we're all trying to do the same thing educate our kids in a protected environment so that they can continue to grow all set john thank you um and helen it's it's gonna be my turn for a potentially repetitive question but thinking back about contact tracing and what we're going to have to have in place as far as our ability to test and track who exactly is going to do that work and how many people do we have available to do that work the contact racing runs through our district
190nurse and our site principals and our student services and personnel department and it's based on on cases that have been reported so far we contact county health they we we get the information from the infected party where they've been what they've done and remember contact is considered more than 15 minutes without a mask less than six feet apart identify the people you've been with and we turn it over to county health and and our district nurse and the contacts are made through that department thank you so it is 9 25. i would love to see this on our next agenda as we have uh adopted as our custom so we'll be bringing this back on the 13th and we will need to give more clear direction should we be in the red at that point
191for more than two weeks then we begin then we can begin to take action and i would ask my fellow board members to consider the options that they would like to support and and to echo what john fuller just said we all want to get kids back in school we all want to end this frustration we all want to to end this shelter in place and we all want everybody to be safe and no one wants to cause harm at least as far as the board and all district staff are concerned i don't think that we should ever trivialize anything that's potentially fatal to millions of people when over two hundred thousand americans have already passed away so that's the the intention that i'm operating with we are trying to solve multiple problems operating on
192multiple parallel tracks simultaneously and we're all doing truly the best we can and i have every faith that our labor partners will continue to work with us as as the district and and district negotiators are being instructed to continue to meet diligently and and work towards creative solutions and i'm confident that we will do so but personally i am not in favor of having our students be guinea pigs so i want to approach this in the most methodical thoughtful way possible and ensure the safety of all students and staff and their families so i'm president and my prerogative i get the last word on that one folks thank you for indulging me yet again so moving on to 16.6 small cohorts this is information and possible action item chanel yet good evening board i'm going
193to share my screen with you so hopefully you can see the presentation oops and sorry janelle i have to pause you just one moment board members it is 9 27. it is our custom to vote to extend the meeting past 9 30. i would move that we add another 15 minutes to our meeting i have a motion and a second to extend our meeting uh let's just say until 9 45 student representative excuse me student representative i whole board those in favor aye aye thank you thank you janelle sure um good evening board this item is being brought back at your request in order to provide you with some additional information to supplement what was shared two weeks ago regarding the new um california department of public health guidelines related to small cohorts as a
194quick reminder on the california department of public health released cohorting guidance on august 25th which they then have since updated on september 4th and essentially this guidance applies to groups of children who can be served in supervised environments um on school district campuses this is a different avenue for providing in-person instruction than the waiver process as we discussed at the last meeting the cohort groups have been defined as stable groups of students with no more than 16 individuals and that can be any mix of adults and supervising adults and students as long as it does not exceed the maximum number of individuals in a supervised environment these cohorts are stable so meaning that they stay together for all activities throughout the day and don't mix with any other cohorts i've linked both the august 25th
195guidance as well as the faq provided on september 4th as a reminder of which groups of students we are specifically talking about is a phase one return to school for small cohorting groups seven different classrooms there are two classes um at our johnswood elementary that serve our students with autism we have one intensive special day class at our preschool program that also serves students with autism our counseling enhanced program at john sweat and three functional academic classes one at the junior high school and two at alhambra one being the high school level class and one being the secondary post-secondary 18 to 22 year old student program as an example of what a cohort schedule could look like for one of these small groups given the guidance that we have received from department of public health
196one of our classes for example has seven special education students enrolled in that classroom and we would have five supervising adults assigned to that room we would have one special education teacher three pair educators and one of the students also has a one-on-one the guidance allows for specialized services to serve students in the cohorts through a one-on-one pull-out setting so services such as behavior speech and language occupational therapy psych services those can all be provided to students in the cohorts in a pull-out one-to-one setting at the request of the board we sent out surveys to the students who are currently enrolled in those seven classrooms we've partnered with panorama education and sent out both a staff survey and a family survey to gather specific input on returning students to small cohort groups in terms of
197the staff survey again this staff survey was sent to all staff who serve the program so classified and certificated staff which includes the classroom teachers as well as all of those specialized service providers we had over an 87 percent um response rate which was great and we did have some basic background information in terms of um what programs the staff members serve and what their role is you can see 36 out of 41 staff completed the survey and this is how the responses were broken down um we had a majority of our teachers respond and um also a majority of our related service providers responded as well so the first question was during distance learning how many students on your caseload experience difficulty accessing the remote instruction and you can see that many of the
198students have experienced difficulty anywhere from one to four students on their caseload and these teachers case loads range anywhere from 8 to 15 students so some of the teachers are experiencing up to four teachers for students having difficulty accessing remote learning the second question was if if in-person learning is provided for students through small cohorts how concerned are you about the health of someone in your household and you can see that many um of staff indicated some degree of concern if in-person learning is provided for students through small cohorts and the appropriate safety and cleaning protocols are in place these would be all the things that helen just reviewed do you have a personal medical reason not to return to work um the majority of staff said no they do not um with a small
199percentage nine percent indicating yes they do have a medical reason not to return that represents three different staff members the next question if in-person learning is provided for students through small cohorts how concerned are you about accessing personal protective equipment for your classroom 79 of staff indicated some degree of concern um but i want to assure um everyone that based on what helen just shared all of that personal protective equipment would be provided for all of our staff but staff do have a level of concern about ppe in their classrooms if in-person learning is provided for students through small cohorts and appropriate safety and cleaning protocols are in place how comfortable are you returning to school and this i think in part gets at what the question deidra was asking um 47 of staff um
200indicated um that they are um somewhat comfortable returning to school so it's pretty split um in terms of staff feeling comfortable returning to school um and and if in-person learning is provided for students through small cohorts how concerned about are you about your own physical health um 75 percent indicated some degree of concern with 44 indicating that they're quite were extremely concerned about their own physical health so those were the the questions specifically i wanted to also capture some of the themes from the free responses that staff submitted as part of their survey there are a number um we had over 25 staff write in um responses on the survey and there were many commonalities um among those responses that i wanted to share with with you and with the public um one of the
201concerns is that both students and staff can be asymptomatic carriers who would transmit kovic 19 to another member of the cohort there was concern about students who require one-on-one support hand over hand support diapering and or behaviors which make physical distancing not possible within a classroom setting given the proximity that staff need to be in in order to support students learning and safety employees also express concern that their own children are participating in distance learning at home and therefore they can't return to work while their own children remain at home on distance learning and so there were concerns about the availability of substitutes to fill those individuals roles in the classrooms there were concerns about cleaning protocols on campus specifically bathrooms and how those would be cleaned before and after student use the availability of
202touchless hand sanitizers on on with on campus and in the classrooms and other general protocols that needed to be in place when students returned to campus concerns about students not being able to physically distance or wear masks staff also indicated concern that there is not currently a covid19 vaccine and flu season is coming and so there is a preference for school to remain closed until we um move through the flu season as they were concerned that children would be sent to school unwell or symptomatic and as a final highlight staff also expressed concern about the access to sensory equipment needed for students within specific programs so those were the highlights from the staff survey and i also want to share the results of the survey sent to families we had a fewer families respond to
203the survey we had 51 percent of families respond that reflected um 25 total completed surveys you can see the breakdown of the programs that these families represent um you can also see that families majority of families are reporting that their children are participating daily um in the live instruction provided through the distance learning program the specific questions we asked the first one was that assuming appropriate safety measures are in place what is your preference for returning to school this year they were given the option of all in-person learning a mix a hybrid model or all distance and the majority expressed a preference for all in-person learning if in-person learning is provided for your student through small cohorts how comfortable are you returning to school you can see that 62 indicated a favorable response of being
204comfortable in returning um to school and that percentage actually does increase if we add in the somewhat comfortable group as well the next question was if an in-person learning model is provided for your students through small cohorts how concerned are you about his or her physical health 27 percent of families indicated they some level of concern about their child's physical health assuming appropriate safety measures are in place in a stable small group of students with appropriate staffing ratios would you choose to have your student participate in in-person instruction when it is available and far favorable response of 81 percent of families said yes they would have their child participate in in-person instruction we also asked the question about face coverings as this had been um a concern expressed um so is your child um able
205to wear a face covering and a majority of families indicated yes they are 85 percent of families um with one family reporting that their child has a medical exemption um similarly i would like to highlight some of the um free responses that families shared on their survey results um and these are ones that were repeated multiple times as themes my child is totally dependent on me for distance learning she cannot log in mute unmute without me she misses classes because i have to work my child needs to be in school to get the most out of his iep he has lost three months of learning and i worry he will fall behind even more my child has underlying health issues and i'm not comfortable sending him to school for any in-person learning and that was
206the primary reason families did report um not being comfortable with sending their children in person learning was that their parent their child had had a underlying health issue such as asthma or health heart condition for example distance learning is no replacement for the structure and challenge of in-person instruction my child is not able to sit and attend to zoom google me or video the lack of social interaction is detrimental to his mental health and learning he is regressing in his goals and finally we need in-person instruction our child is getting very little from distance learning and is regressing and the issue of regression was a common theme throughout the parent responses so i wanted to share some possible um scenarios for the board and this item is being brought for possible action tonight um and
207so of course one of the options is that we don't change anything at this time that we remain in distance learning if the board would like to consider moving children into small cohorts there's a few different ways that could happen all staff could return to the classroom to support and run these specific programs as one scenario a second scenario would be that classroom teacher remains in distance learning children return to the classroom and classified staff support students in the classroom in person in order to support their access to the distance learning program provided by our classroom teacher remotely and i'll third alternative is that students returned in person instruction and the full program is operated by non-public agency staff there are there is at least one local non-public agency that is running these types of
208pod or cohort programs in neighboring school districts fourth scenario as a possible return is that we only provide specialized services only such as occupational therapy speech therapy academic instruction on a one-to-one pull-out basis only so those are some possible scenarios for the board to consider as this item is being brought back for possible action are there any questions not so much a question is a concern sorry i have a concern okay and that is that 50 of the parents responded so if you're talking about 81 were favorable of the 50 who responded you're not talking a majority of the parents who responded it's hard to it's hard to quantify it appropriately with with the response being down at the 50 percent level um and i hear their concerns um and i do have some concerns
209as i had a couple weeks ago with the various groups that you were talking about and specifically my concern is about kids with autism who are on that autistic spectrum and as i understand it i don't think it's changed um spectrum center has not returned to in-person learning is that accurate you know correct so i mean they're getting paid a fortune to actually provide what would normally be in person services and i admit that they are the most disabled of the kids that they uh the kids that we would be looking at but kids with autism are the most um what's the word i want the most unstable in the sense of you know being able to to have faith that they will consistently be able to follow the protocols around masks and cleaning and
210everything else so if we were to look at putting kids back to in-person learning i would want to really look specifically at which programs we would do that with rather than look at the i i would not want to look at putting the kids with autism back that i i would fear for the safety of our staff and for the students uh deidre go ahead if you were gonna comment yeah sure i had okay i had two questions um janelle this one's uh can you expand a little bit on the number three option that you listed students return in person uh program operated by npa staff and my question is going to be is that something we could even afford number one and kind of what does that look like and then my other question
211was going back when we were doing the surveys of the of the teachers and one of um one of the statements were that they were they weren't feeling very safe returning is there something that we can do to make them feel safe uh was there was there anything expressed uh in that in that avenue that maybe we could help assist um because i just i just think if we're going to be moving forward in any direction trying to get kids in the classroom which i would like to see at some point when it's safe um is that this we've got to figure out a smaller group um in in some way and um and i think that this would be a great way to try and get these students that we've been talking about who
212we've identified really need um really need to get into the classroom sooner so um those are my two questions if you if you know the answers sure so the non-public the first question being scenario number three with a cohort run by non-public agency staff there are a few different agencies that we would be able to contract with directly to provide a credentialed special education teacher and their necessary related support staff like para educators or behavior therapists to staff the classroom adequately to ensure safe ratios and they would fully run and operate the program and implement the students ieps um the money that helen has been referencing the 2.6 million part that money is for learning loss mitigation and that money would be used towards um that would fund this um scenario so um the second
213piece around the staff response to not feeling safe i think that um the information shared by helen tonight that kind of specificity is helpful for staff in um reassuring what the protocols are and having those things in writing so staff are fully informed and aware of what the expectation is around cleaning and safety and how ppe is going to be provided and what the expectations are i think those are all things that help around that feeling of safety and comfort so folks it is 9 47 we had made a passed a motion to keep the meeting going until 9 45. what is the pleasure of the board at this point we've knowing that we've heard this item before we've received more information and had numerous discussion on on this uh two weeks ago and now
214tonight and on a related issue um i have the same question that deirdre had when you were talking about the non-public agency staff would they be taking all of our students or are we talking about certain of the ones that you had listed janelle only only programs that we identify as wanting to return in cohorts so so potentially these seven classes for example or if the board directs us to consider other groups of students but it would be whatever um students that we believe should be prioritized and returning back so then who are we what agency are we talking about so one potential agency is named maxim and they they've put to put together a very comprehensive cohorting pod staffing model that other districts um are using and are they using them for all seven
215of the programs that you mentioned seven types to tell you the truth jonathan i don't feel i feel like we still have more i still certainly have more questions and janelle you've done a great job of getting all of this out but again it keeps changing and as much as i think our kids with special needs should be the first back i also know that this is probably the most complicated group of kids to serve and i want to be sure that we do this in a responsible way that in fact is safe for the kids and our staff as well and i don't feel like i could make a decision tonight jonathan thank you kathy i appreciate the candor deidre john jeremy how are you feeling i would like um janelle to bring back
216more information about the number three and i would like just to explore that one maybe um yeah i'm just going to leave it at that thank you john can i ask clarify john are you specifically wanting like financial information or more specificity around how it would be staffed just so i know i'm bringing back the right information those two and then um the union thoughts on it thank you you always know how to write ask the right questions jeremy and deidra jeremy i'm with kathy and john i think we bring it back um for our next meeting hope we didn't get cut off their jeremy it sounded like you were you wanted to bring it back for the next meeting is that right i i'm sorry yes i think i understood you through the digitizing
217uh deidre your thoughts that's fine i'll support their uh request to have it brought back all right uh same with me and janelle i would like more information about option number four okay like exactly which programs the number of staff involved and uh how many students at which locations and thank you for your incredible work on this we understand that the rules and guidelines and information are changing all the time um so we are excuse me folks sorry it's late um i'm not going to use number 17 can we all agree to skip comments uh number 18 just because it's so late and for many people it's a school night and i thank you all for your hard work i did want to indulge the board one more time this evening i had a request
218from a member of the community uh our martinez uh unified community asking that we adjourn in the memory of sister ann welts who was a founder of the bay area crisis center and sister ann passed away last week and so i would like to adjourn the meeting in the honor of sister anne welts may she rest in power good evening everybody thank you all be kind to one another and pray for our neighbors in the north yet again take care