LSR7 Board of Education Work Session - 08/05/21

001okay we're going to call the special session to order here because it is 4 30. if i could have everyone please stand for the pledge of allegiance okay i appreciate everybody who is here uh this afternoon um and anybody who might be watching online so thank you for joining us here and we need to move to 1.02 and have a motion to adopt tonight's agenda i move to adopt the agenda as presented second okay we have a motion and a second to adopt uh tonight's agenda is there any discussion on tonight's agenda okay all those in favor please raise your hand and say aye aye all those opposed motion can carries unanimously we are going to move on to 2.01 this is going to be our discussion in relation to not only yesterday's announcement but

002how we are going to proceed to start the school year with masks and i will turn it over to dr buck miss linda the clicker is not working that helps all right so we'll start in presentation we do have some some guests from jackson county health department who speak a part of this as well so um what do we know now so in person learning is the best learning format we all know that we had about 140 days of in-person for k-3 about 120 for 4-6 and about 70 plus something as far as 7-12 in person is important we had some people had their kids had quarantines for you know three sets of quarantines that's a month and a half of quarantine so some of the change you're going to see later on by the

003jackson county health department will help with that if we do have mask on with our quarantine rule change so you'll see that those are their rules not our rules on quarantine we followed them in the first semester we had about 600 plus cases and only about five or six percent of those were spread at school that is not the delta variant though it was pre-delta variant those tend to be in special programs one particular building which also had high density housing in that certain tenants area and then winter sports were very much hit hard as well we had around a thousand quarantine isolations in our staff and student body in mid-november which was not sustainable so that's kind of a recap of where we were you'll see this language later on jackson county health department

004but i think this is true for everyone we want to ensure the protection and well-being of students teachers and staff we want to maintain in-person education with minimized disruptions and we want to permit prevent person-to-person transmission in school settings we want to have a successful school year we need our kids here the next slide will show the number of days in each month by the number of cases per 100 000 for 14 days so this is one of the big metrics you see nationally as well this is as of noon on monday i did not update it since monday the numbers will change some usually going up not down as new data gets collected and divvied out to the right spots this does not include kansas city nor independence so independence has their own health

005department kansas city has their own health department so this is out of a uh two a little bit over 271 thousand people in eastern jackson county health area and so this data is backtracked taking independence out all the way back to march of 2020. so if you kind of look on the left side you'll see a column that goes starts off with zero and it goes down to a thousand plus so that's the number of cases per hundred 000 or 14 days all right and so you can see then the second column how many days we've spent in each one of those typical settings so march we had 16 days the first half of march last year with no cases and then we had some cases it took until june before we finally got over

006100 cases for 100 000 or 14 days you see in july we made it to the 200s and then it wasn't until we got to october and we came to october we hit the 400s and you can see november december january when things were really rough especially for us in november and that's why at thanksgiving time we moved to a virtual setting until early january things definitely got better and you can see why in may it was uh definitely able to go back to recommend maths not require mask it was very sustainable to do so we had a good summer school july with delta variant taken over over 80 cases delta variant you can see our county is experiencing a different shift it's starting to look more like it was in october and approaching that

007november number and compared to last july we definitely have more cases per population than we did last july a little bit on delta variant and health department can explain more of this i'm just taking this right off the cdc um right now we're over 80 80 percent of all new cases are delta variant um cases have increased over 300 nationally from june 19th to july 23rd we've also had an increase in hospitalization and dust in the nation more transmissible different studies say different things but ranges from what i could find 40 to 200 percent more transmissible per the cdc data released last friday over 90 of hospitalizations are unvaccinated there's they talk a little bit about a cape cod super spreader i think that number of cases have gone up quite a bit since that

008time you can see quite a few of those were vaccinated that was part of their data release and they talk about viral loads in positive cases being a thousand times than the alpha version or the original version so that was information released last week friday by cdc if you look at eastern jackson county and you'll see this in a different format here and a little bit from jackson county health department you can see the uh the gating criteria the metro area uses that red line is when there's there's see it's too high you can see that november through january time when we spiked high and you can see the current incline here in july where we're heading so we're over 500 now if you look at percent positives again that's also increasing again much like

009it was in the winter i'm going to take over here because the next several slides they created and i think they had that last slide very similar but updated so whenever bridget and ray i like to introduce bridget and ray from the jackson county health department i'll let them introduce themselves and then and after they introduce themselves we'll let them talk by slides and i'll click when they tell me to click so bridget you want to introduce yourself yes bridget shaffer director of the jackson county health department all right good good evening afternoon i should say ray de lugolecki assistant health director at jackson county health department all right so i just want to start off by acknowledging uh what a year or last 17 months this has been and this has really been a

010cova 19 has really disrupted our society pretty significantly and in ways that i had never imagined so i just want to sincerely appreciate the the school board here the administration that we've been working with terry hansen her team everyone that that has helped us mitigate spread of disease within the school setting so just thank you very much for everything that you guys have done um i wish that today i was coming here with a more rosy outlook or a better picture on what's going on within eastern jackson county um but that's not really the case so as you see here on the screen in july of 20 july 27th so just last week the cdc updated their guidance for fully vaccinated individuals given the new evidence regarding the delta variant this guidance says that regardless

011of vaccination status people should wear a mask indoors in areas of substantial or high transmission currently on the on the right hand side of the screen you're seeing a time lapse from june 8 june 28th to july 28th and you can see that in missouri that continues to change where almost 70 percent of the counties by the end of july we're in areas of high transmission and we're seeing that in the kansas city metro area as well you can see the high transmission is anything greater than 100 new cases per 100 000 in the past seven days and as dr buck already mentioned we're well over that 500 mark at this point in eastern jackson county also the percent positive in the last seven days we are at 15 and high transmission is anything greater

012than 10 percent this next slide here is a map of missouri and this is just showing a more detailed level of the state and um for those that know me well they know i'm a competitive person this is not the leader board that i want to be on as jackson county uh on the left side you're seeing that jackson county is third in 117 different jurisdictions in cases per 100 000 for the entire popular for the entire duration of um coven 19 and then in the past seven days we're now third as well so we're seeing this increasing case rate in jackson county um and this is something that we should all be um very aware and focused on over the next um few weeks months for the the duration ahead so with that too

013and i didn't put this on a slide if we go even deeper into the kansas city metro data so that's on prepare metro kc.org you can see that jackson county in the last 30 60 90 days is that number one leader in the metro on cases for 100 000. again not a place that we want to be in as a county or jurisdiction this slide is is um was presented to our school superintendents meeting at our school superintendents meeting on tuesday so this data is from august 3rd the the data from here on out moving forward as dr buck mentioned won't include kansas city missouri or independents it is jackson county health department data and really the highlights from this slide include the seven day average has nearly tripled in the last month of and

014and then the same similarly with that 14-day case rate it has nearly tripled in the last month as well and uh case levels that we're seeing right now or what what we were seeing in late october and early november so that trend just continues to to go up and it's a pretty steep incline as that that spikes as we look at case rates by age group this is showing um those over time so from march 2020 to where we're at now and you can see that the case rates have a more steep upward trajectory starting in um kind of end of june and um in april and may the 10 to 14 year old age groups they had the highest case rates in each of those months and now in both june and july the

015highest case rates are in the 20 to 24 age group as we look at percent positivity things that i want to highlight so our testing numbers of people getting tests per week has been increasing which is is good um although our percent positivity is increasing as well so like i said it's over 15 percent um what is important with this is despite the substantial increase in the number of tests our percent positive is still increasing which suggests that we're not testing enough to find those people with disease and then appropriately isolating quarantine so we're still having uncontrolled transmission in our community and then and then as far as hospitalizations hospitalizations do continue to increase on july 27th the region saw 151 new hospitalizations on a single day this is a level that we have not

016seen at the hospital since january of 2021 many hospitals are reporting being on high volume including children's mercy and demographics of patients are trending to a younger age group as well which we have not seen in previous waves of this illness the vast majority of those hospitalized are are individuals that are not vaccinated as well so it's important to note that hospitalizations have a two to three week lag in behind that case data so as cases continue to surge two to three weeks later we will see those hospitalizations increase even more so this will prolong the pressure that our hospitals are facing as we continue to see this increase tomorrow the chief medical officers around the region are going to be providing updates on what's happening at the hospital level [Music] hopefully you know elected

017officials and others are invited to attend to that conference as well i'm going to turn it over to ray okay fantastic um so i'm going to go ahead and add a little bit to what bridget had briefly reviewed as far as the trends we're seeing and hopefully i can provide some additional context as to what is driving some of these trends and and how we can mitigate it okay so um in short and i think at this point it's really no secret um it's been communicated widely uh throughout um throughout the country the delta variant is driving uh much of the recent trends that we are seeing um specifically in eastern jackson county as well as uh throughout the midwest and the entire united states um in short there's really no sugar coating it the

018delta variant is is and has completely changed the game as far as our response uh and our ability to mitigate this crisis requiring an an appropriate response from us as well so um as dr buck alluded to and i think um this is again quite common knowledge at this point delta is much more transmissible than the original ancestral strain of cobit 19. the r-naught for the original or ancestral strain was identified between 2.3 and 2.7 so that basically means that for every one person who is infected with this ancestral strain of coronavirus on average 2.3 to 2.7 other people are infected as well for the delta variant in particular the r naught is identified between five and eight meaning that again for every one individual infected they are infecting on average five to eight other

019people and so this is substantial um this is actually higher than the common cold flu smallpox the ebola virus even the 1918 strain of the pandemic flu also known as the spanish flu for some additional context it's actually right in line with the virus that causes the chickenpox as far as how contagious it is so for the delta variant in particular the mechanism for infection is not necessarily novel we're not seeing something that is completely unheard of or we haven't seen before with delta we are simply seeing more virus much more quickly and so the implications for this are substantial infection occurs in its most simplistic form when people are are exposed to an infectious dose of viral particles when delta infected individuals are shedding up to a thousand times more virus than with the

020original strains it changes the game as far as exposure and context so there is some good news here obviously and the good news is that the vaccines still work against delta vaccine effect effectiveness against hospitalization and death it remains high for all of the variants that we have right now unfortunately emerging data is suggesting lower effectiveness against confirmed infection and symptomatic disease particularly for the delta and the upcoming gamma variant i will note in this context however that even though people can become infected the vaccines still offer some protection as far as milder symptoms than what would have previously been experienced if the person was not vaccinated based on again recent research from the cdc it also appears that vaccinated individuals who are infected with the delta variant have the potential to still shed the

021virus which is substantially or which is substantial especially if you have large pockets of unvaccinated individuals that you're trying to protect next slide please so the delta variant isn't the only thing it's not the only thing that we need to consider it's not the only thing that is going to be driving or known to drive the spread that we're experiencing right now so on this slide in particular on the upper left-hand side i know it's hard to to see we actually have vaccination rates for eastern jackson county and it's actually broken down in two different ways just to just for clarity and so um on the top you can see total vaccinated by total population and on the bottom right below that little small table it's total vaccinated by eligible population and unfortunately we are

022still very far away from the 70 to 80 percent that we need to ensure meaningful community protection through some form of hurt immunity we are seeing a slight uptick in vaccinations this is evidenced by the green text that's been highlighted it's in the appropriate or the age groups that we would want it to be so the younger age groups 10 to 14 15 to 19 and 20 to 24 have all seen subsequent bumps in vaccination rates over the last seven days however these populations already had lower vaccination rates we don't necessarily expect that these vaccinations to do anything for us in the immediate term it does take at least a month for an individual to develop full protection from the vaccines so that's two weeks past the second dose which is what we would want

023to see next slide please this is just another way of looking at the difference between unvaccinated and vaccinated populations the reality of our situation is that at this time case rates are being driven overwhelmingly by those who are unvaccinated as clearly evidenced by the differences in vaccination rates so on the top you'll see the blue line that is non-breakthrough case rates so that's basic infection on the bottom it's a smaller line it's a small black line but you'll see that slight peak there that is actually breakthrough case rates so those are individuals who have been vaccinated but are still being infected and so you can see the differences in terms of the case rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations the case rate for the unvaccinated is over five times higher than that of the

024vaccinated excuse me the case rate for the unvaccinated is five times higher than that of the vaccinated next slide please okay so that that brings us to back to school guidance and briefly i want to review some of the key points that we discussed with area superintendents initially last week and then we followed that up with another discussion based on the updates that came in late from the centers for disease control so goals as dr buck had alluded to the goals are the same the goals haven't changed the goals are pretty much identical from organization to organization putting out back-to-school guidance and as dr buck alluded to the first priority is ensuring the protection and well-being of students teachers and staff the second is maintaining in-person education with minimized disruptions and the third is actually

025something that influences the first two which is preventing person to person transmission in school settings which can certainly endanger the well-being of students teachers and staff and also provide substantial disruption to the learning environment so i know there's a lot going on in the slide and i really appreciate it but i think this is really really important so before we get into the guidance i wanted to briefly touch upon risk which drives guidance and also allude to why there's so much attention being placed on schools i know that's kind of a unique phenomenon in that from the beginning of this pandemic we've heard everything about schools and hopefully we can touch upon why we're hearing that and what are some of the implications we need to consider as we move forward so for quite some

026time throughout this pandemic very early on in this pandemic actually we learned a great deal about the factors that influence risk associated with transmission so for instance and you can see on the top portion of the slide there we have a good body of evidence to support the fact that risk increases indoors with minimal air circulation as opposed to outdoors with plenty of ventilation we know that risk increases substantially with higher numbers of people in close proximity for an extended period of time and this risk is not mitigated at all if we do not have people employing mitigation tactics which are the masking the social distancing hand washing all of those things that we've been told to do since the beginning of the pandemic and lastly we know that risk increases and risk of transmission

027in particular increases with high numbers of susceptible populations congregating in a defined setting and what that basically means is if you have a high number or high group of population who are unvaccinated or susceptible to transmission congregating with some of the factors that are mentioned above some of those factors that contribute to increased risk of transmission of this particular virus and so as you can all guess risk fluctuates based on the setting that you are you are experiencing in the community for instance if you go to the grocery store your risk is going to change based on those characteristics that you see on this slide so you're indoors there's more air circulation in that setting you're not spending close proximity with other people for an extended period of time namely 15 minutes mitigation measures may

028or not may or may not be employed and then the amount of people who are susceptible is varied right because there's different vaccination rates within that particular setting the delta variant did not change any of these things are all still in play very much in play the only thing that the delta variant did is turbocharged transmission with this risk as i mentioned before individuals infected individuals are shedding much much much more virus more quickly than they would have with other variants and so this certainly changes that dynamic around receiving an infectious dose so as you can imagine again if you're sitting in a setting indoors with high numbers of people with no mitigation tactics and you have the alpha variant the delta variant that same individual who may be infected is shedding a thousand times

029more virus than the alpha variant the person who's infected with the alpha variant and that changes the dynamics of how you can be exposed to an infectious dose which is substantial because it drives obviously infection so before delton dr buck alluded to this um you know i was actually really quite proud every time that he would come on to the the school superintendent meeting and he would discuss his data as far as what he was seeing in the school setting i was really really proud that we didn't see as much person to person transmission in the school setting and that is truly a testament to the administration the teachers the staff the students who are actually taking substantial steps to interrupt transmission of this particular virus delta unfortunately has the potential to change that so

030this summer over the summer epidemiologists every single day will go through the data and identify outbreaks that need to be monitored and active outbreaks unfortunately this summer we're seeing more outbreaks in child settings than with previous variants and the original strain way back in the beginning of this pandemic so five of the six monitor situations that we are monitoring right now involve daycares summer camps sports teams five of the five of the eight active outbreaks involve uh daycares and summer summer camps the dynamics of this outbreak are changing and we just need to be cognizant of that as we move forward in our guidance and so my final point on this long slide is what is clear is that sustained school transmission has the potential to impact overall community transmission and vice versa a child

031bringing the delta variant home can easily infect their entire family in the same way that a child bringing the delta variant into a classroom can infect the entire classroom the difference the substantial difference is mitigation and how we are employing mitigation how can we prevent a child who is carrying the delta variant into the educational setting from spreading this variant to others and thus mitigating community transmission which is driving the problems that we're seeing in the health care system next slide please so these are just very briefly the resources that were considered in the guidance centers for disease control american academy of pediatrics children's mercy the one thing that i feel throughout this pandemic is absolutely no one has been on the same page it's been maddeningly frustrating but what i can say now is

032it appears everyone is in um in some some some form of block step which is which is good next slide please so uh the guidance starts with vaccination um really vaccination remains the best option for interrupting transmission it remains our best option for preventing substantial strain on the health care system you know we believe that the emergency use authorizations will continue for those five to twelve should be announced in the coming months and we hope hope to really continue to provide protection to the greatest number of people we can including those individuals who are immunocompromised and also maintaining some semblance of normalcy within our healthcare system and also the school setting next next slide please so masking so as far as as far as non-pharmaceutical interventions are concerned the best approach is to layer them

033a single non-pharmaceutical intervention and when i say non-pharmaceutical interventions i'm not talking i'm stop stop or you're going to leave okay so non-pharmaceutical interventions what i'm talking about in those settings i'm talking about masking i'm talking about social distancing i'm talking about hand washing i'm talking about anything that we can do without without drugs without vaccine and for the longest part of this pandemic that's all we had we didn't have vaccine we still don't have effective therapies all we have are none okay hey we're gonna just pause and ask you to leave if you can't be quiet just leave no there's not this is not a public meeting okay we're gonna take a break we're gonna take a break right now we'll take a five minute break this is ray are you good whenever we're

034ready to roll again okay we're gonna we're gonna restart i am gonna ask the audience to please okay we we can't have the disruptions what we're trying to do is to listen we'll ask questions okay um but we were gonna ask respectfully for no more disruptions during this meeting um if we do we will ask you to leave so right we will turn it back over to you of course um so um our recommendations initially to the area superintendents um uh two weeks ago at this point i believe wasn't this week was the week before previously was to follow both the cdc and american academy for pediatrics guidance and so in that guidance and both of that guidance now with the cdc's change there's the requiring of universal indoor masking for all teachers staff students

035and visitors regardless of the vaccination status so based on the skyrocketing transmission rates that we were seeing in eastern jackson county and the dangerous hospital capacity that was being communicated to us by the chief medical officers of the area hospitals in the kansas city region we also made the recommendation to the county for a mass mandate to be put in place for eastern jackson county this mandate will go into effect august 9th and it will cover everyone 5 and older including those in a school setting next slide please so the last part of the guidance that i want to dive into is isolation and quarantine and this is something that dr buck had touched on previously obviously the act of quarantine is a very intrusive and disruptive process it's been reserved for those infectious diseases

036that we investigate at the jackson county health department on a regular basis but this is our full really first full-length introduction to quarantine with covid19 so fully vaccinated staff and students can avoid quarantining even when exposed to positive cases we ask that they self-monitor for 14 days and if a student or staff who is fully vaccinated test positive they still will need to isolate at that time but this should hopefully mitigate some of the the quarantine that occurs through exposure students now can be excluded from quarantine this is unique and this is different students can now be excluded from quarantine even within three to six feet so even if they're within three to six feet of a positive case for longer than 15 minutes which would historically be considered a contact they can avoid quarantine

037if both students were engaged in consistent and correct use of well-fitting masks so with the masks being in place we should see a substantial decrease in the amount of quarantines that we are experiencing at the school setting which is a very positive step honestly in my opinion and something that hopefully will allow us to minimize disruption to the learning environment to the greatest extent we possibly can so in exposure situations where both individuals are not vaccinated and not not wearing masks the normal 14-day quarantine set by the cdc will still apply next slide please okay so getting to the end um as i was mentioning before as far as layering mitigation strategies um this is actually what i was talking about um i was talking about a variety of different strategies all sandwiched together so

038that you're basically basically canceling out the faults of individual strategies it's kind of like that swiss cheese sort of approach if you look at a block of swiss cheese you don't see the holes because the swiss cheese is all layered together it's the same concept with this so some of those other considerations for mitigation strategies may include physical distancing so if you can at least three feet of distance between students combined with indoor masking is is extremely positive ventilation so working to improve ventilation opening windows or doors making changes to the hvac system where possible or filtration systems obviously there's hand washing and respiratory etiquette contact tracing has been a very very positive positive force in a school setting there's absolutely nothing worse than not knowing who the exposures are and who the contacts are

039and having to do do blind swaths of quarantine that's not effective it's not appropriate we need to be able to get in and identify where the actual exposure occurred and the lee summit school district nurses and staff have done just an absolutely wonderful job of of working with with us to identify who actually is the exposure and who isn't and trying to maintain kids in the in-person learning environment um without that disruption of quarantine the last thing is cleaning and disinfection in general cleaning once a day should be sufficient to remove the those potential viral particles this is a respiratory virus primarily spread through aerosolized droplets and respiratory droplets so cleaning and disinfection isn't the best option by itself but again if you layer it with other strategies it works together and it's a good

040thing um next slide please okay so last last thing i have just to briefly touch upon so we we've packaged all of this together in a full guidance document for schools it's nothing new it's nothing unique it's the exact same or at least very very similar as the centers for disease control american academy of pediatrics children's mercy a lot of those other partners that have already released guidance out into the community we basically just synthesize this this guidance into a single document for eastern jackson county in particular and so we will we'll be releasing that guidance to the superintendents and we will also be posting that guidance publicly as well i think that's all i have today okay thank you for that presentation i know that there probably will be quite a few questions here

041so of course um we will circu circle around to any board members who have questions and i know board member allen you had hit the button quite a while ago so we'll start with you thank you board president i am i guess to start would you mind giving us me your your backgrounds each of you like your field of study your area of expertise um your role in the health department yeah of course um i'll start uh like richard shaffer the director of the health department um i have been the director there for uh gosh um almost seven years um and with the health department for for um over eight i think i can't do the math here um and then i my background is really an epidemiology and data analysis and so i had

042worked at another health department for six and a half years doing epidemiology have a master's in public health my undergraduate degree was in health science and public health as well yeah so um i'm the assistant health director at the jackson county health department i've been here for about five years give or take worked previously as an epidemiologist in another county my educational background i have a masters in public health with an emphasis in epidemiology and health administration and policy and my undergraduate degrees in exercise physiology so yeah i've been in public health for about about 11 years now 10 11 years all right thanks i just thought the context would help um you didn't just fall off fall into this last year i guess obviously um i don't know if these are slides or pages

043or what have you but um slide 24 21 i'm sorry slide 21 page 21 it's this it's the one that um it has the breakthroughs right vaccination vaccination status breakthroughs are those measured yes breakthrough cases yeah i mean is that measured through and reported by doctors offices hospitalizations how's the data gathered yeah so it's it's through the normal epidemiological process so as we're getting reports of positive cases you know i will say and i will give kudos to our staff that they go well beyond the cdc in terms of investigating breakthrough cases the cdc defines breakthrough cases normally in their definition as those individuals who are hospitalized only as our epidemiologists are getting reports of positive cases they're also looking into vaccination status and trying to determine if this is actually a breakthrough case can

044i just follow up on that um just excuse me in terms of if someone is tested and they are they test positive um but they don't need any medical treatment does that make sense what i'm saying then are those types of cases included in these numbers does so they're they're positive but not symptomatic is that correct yes yes yes they are so asymptomatic individuals are also included in the numbers um because of the asymptomatic spread thank yeah you going to keep going sir absolutely all right uh 24 i believe slide page 24 where it says we will be back soon be safe be kind right risk of transmission um basically are these points measured over i mean these points been measured over what sort of time all of last year of 2020 into 21 2021

045you said i mean this isn't just the spring the summer this dates what and how far back yeah so this this is actually a body of research and evidence so the top portion of the slide the risk of transmission that's actually informed by our understanding of transmission of the virus so it's a combination of case studies data from the field and also research in a clinical setting so it's not necessarily something that i mean we we could per se i guess in terms of like our outbreaks um but i don't think we track each one of these individual factors by which but this is a my question is this a body of work over months right yeah yes i'm 18 months it's not just from may of this year through the summer yes so this

046has been updated as we've as we've went and better understood okay if that makes sense yep it does make sense um in addition to that and i've wondered this question sometime and maybe we already know this or don't know this the effectiveness effectiveness of wearing a mask is what i mean i've heard ranges of under 10 or up to 90 i don't know what the true number is what's the true number of of is there a way to understand the effectiveness of wearing a mask to mitigate risk yeah certainly certainly and i i think that an important point here is it's not necessarily it's not just like one number right because you have different you have source control as far as what the mask is preventing so for instance if someone is infected and they

047are actively shedding the virus the mask is acting completely differently than if it was secondary infection control where my mask was preventing me from inhaling aerosolized particles from someone else and so the number is different based on those two acts of how the mask is working so source control is the primary mechanism for how masks work they're the most effective way and of course that depends on what kind of mask you're using right so if you're using like a clinical grade n95 it's substantially better and all the way down to you know just just kind of your basic kind of cloth mask so and there's all kinds of things in between there there's there's surgical masks there's using different kinds of fabric so we have a body of evidence for different types of masks and

048how effective that we think they are but you know i think that the most important point is looking at those those studies at the community level of what happens after we implement a certain policy change around masking in particular we see decreased community transmission and the body of evidence is actually quite large in that in that sense a couple more ryan are you good with that yeah absolutely um not for me to stretch a meeting i guess i have done that a few times haven't i all right so back to this mask issue give me this um evaluation of and i hear this occasionally when i'm wearing a mask i'm breathing back in all this harmful bacteria or or carbon monoxide and that in fact is completely unhealthy dispel that reinforce that is it true

049false tell me what that answer is yeah so thankfully we have a really good body of evidence as far as how masks work and how safe and effective they are just based on our medical communities use of them for years and years and years we know that that masks are not prevent presenting any sort of issues around rebreathing air that you're expelling um that's that's a common misconception there is actually a lot of studies that suggest that there's no really physiological changes as far as wearing a mask so your respiratory rate your blood oxygen level your pulse all of those things are maintained even when you're wearing two masks and there's been studies with with with that and so um you know i think we have a really good body of evidence to suggest that

050you know masks are safe otherwise we wouldn't use them for our healthcare professionals um you know obviously there's there is the element of masks are not fun to wear no one no one wants to wear a mask i don't think i've met a single person that wants to wear a mask um but you know that that is one aspect of this but it's not necessarily the physiological side of how we evaluate effectiveness or a mask's effect on a person one more question ryan i promise maybe more one right now um 27 slide 27 i believe right cdc you mentioned guidance by cdc you mentioned guidance by american academy of pediatric physicians or physicians pediatrics do you know or have the actual verbiage right guidance is one thing recommendation is one thing requirements are one thing

051give me some expand on that term guidance so um i guess in the context of those documents they're providing much like that red statement right there they have their their statements that they're providing as far as recommendations um i don't have the exact language in front of me um but it's very very similar and i'd be happy to to send that out to to show you if there's any differences all right thank you board member hedrick i too have several questions and i'm going to first first go back to slide um i think it's on 7 and 8. sorry i had to you had to go back so far on that one that yeah seven and eight so could you tell me the significance of that red and that yellow line on that in that

052chart and then the one or maybe the same answer may be applicable to both but could you tell us the significance of those please so we can tell you where they came from um that's actually there's a group of professionals at the mid-america regional council it's epidemiologists public health professionals school officials there's a couple other physicians there's a physician from children's mercy i think that sits on that group and um well into 2020 um they identified okay hey we need to sit down and identify some metrics uh that we can all get behind we can get on the same page as far as like what's good what's bad what's what's really not not good um sort of thing and so um that's that's where they came from this is not necessarily something that came from

053the jackson county health department but we include it because it's regional gating criteria everyone agreed that you know regionally this is what's good this is what's not good sort of thing i assumed that because i i did participate last year and from the um cdc they had a person who kind of spoke to that so i assumed those were the same types of numbers so when you say highly transmissible it's any time that goes above that red line or the yellow line or both is that question makes sense yes so um as far as the the yellow and red line since this is gating criteria some of this was being used to talk about do we need to move to hybrid levels of of school learning in in-person school learning virtual learning i believe that

054was how the gating criteria was being used regionally when we talk about transmission levels in our community if we go back a few slides we can look at that cdc transmission there we go just had it and that is what cdc is is identifying as um low moderate substantial and high and that's based on those percent positivity and the cases per 100 000 which is very much um like what those other two graphs were but they're not maybe charted the same way to say what what's what okay um on the slide number 15. and i'll wait for you to get there before i get my question to you so um i think based on my eye sight which some days is not so great the two bottom lines there would be zero to four would

055be the lowest note a lot that's the bottom line and the one right above that is the five to nine would that be accurate yes that's okay and then on this chart the other thing that i think would be helpful information and hope maybe you have the data would be to because this is cumulative cases since the pandemic began i would like to really see some of the data on a day-to-day basis how many new cases are being added in those age groups because i think that's a much more relevant uh piece of information so is that information that you have available or do you not get that data that way does that make sense what i ask we can have our team put that data together for for you all and we can send

056that to dr buck okay thank you um and then i think my last question um is really on slide um 28 i believe 28. yeah on the guidance piece and i think that's one of the things that over the last 18 months we've seen a lot of different guidance and things moving around and so i think it's really in my mind i'm thinking if now for example the quarantine piece um you know where it says both students were engaged in consistent and correct use of well-fitting masks well who who makes that decision does that make sense what i'm asking and so and and what has been done what research i assume has been done to be able to have this guidance in this format compared to what it was six months ago or eight months

057ago or 12 months ago yeah um so you know to your first to your first question um as far as who determines what um i think it's it's really a tandem approach between the school nurse and some of the staff like the teachers for instance in the school setting and if there is a situation where we know um little ray um is constantly taking his mask off and not wearing it or you know trying to whatever then i mean we can make you know just rational judgment based decisions at that point it's not something that's necessarily like the super formalized process as far as you know oh it has to be on this percentage of the time we understand that our teachers are asked to do a million things and so to the best of

058our ability that you know we can evaluate the individual situation and determine an appropriate level of risk for for a situation and so that that's how we would handle that as far as how this has evolved over time you know i think you know we've learned quite a bit more quite a bit more as far as how transmission occurs and what strategies effectively mitigate risk one of the actually pioneering studies as far as masks are concerned actually came from springfield very early on in the pandemic and it actually occurred with a hair stylist she was actually at her salon she had she didn't know that she was positive she didn't know that she was actively shedding the virus she had a mask on and she worked she worked for hours and hours and hours she

059saw hundreds of clients and the resulting study that actually came out of that was that hey we didn't necessarily see a lot of we didn't see transmission occurring from this the mask is actually helping in this context when we factor in other other variables and so you know that that was that was huge it allowed us to take one step further and to as far as a mitigation strategy start to employ other things that that can really ensure we can get children back into an in-person environment i think that's been the the overarching focus i think the science has is trying to do what's right as far as protecting everyone but we all know in the back of our minds that kids need to be back in the school setting what can we do to

060to help keep them there and so this is kind of the result of some of that pioneering work there were other studies that kind of came on top of that but i would say that's kind of like the foundational piece to build on okay so i'm sorry i do have a couple other quick questions so since this virus is so much more you can infect so much more many meet people and it's does that also mean people who are going to get sick get sick faster than they would have with the original coven 19 does that that is something we are seeing uh with this so on average with the ancestral strain um people become infectious about six days after infection with this one it's about four days on average so they are becoming more

061infectious quicker with a more a higher amount of a viral shed okay and then i this is truly is my last question uh for you all i have another one for us to discuss in r7 but so do you have any research that looks at how long that a mass can be worn at any you know for any one top period of time before they really should be you know changed and you know yeah so so there are there are some some studies that actually look at different characteristics of a mask so like for instance if it is like it's like sopping wet sort of thing like that would be a scenario where we would want to change that mask for it to remain effective and so there's a whole host of different situations and

062scenarios to consider as far as mass effectiveness you know i will say that it usually revolves around the mass getting wet in some way shape or form that seems to be kind of the driving factor but we can we can put together that that kind of complete list based on the literature and i'd be happy to to send that over if that would be helpful oh i'm sorry i do have one more um in terms of the conversations that you've had about students wearing masks outdoors like it you know during their uh recess and that kind of thing what have you guys talked about that kind of guidance and and what are you discussing at this point yeah so i i will say that the ease the easy answer is that cdc didn't necessarily change

063it maintained its exposure exposure definition at the time that they changed their guidance just to be a little bit more difficult and dive into kind of the nuance you know i think the the more complex answer centers around some of the unknowns with delta like we knew we knew before we knew with some of the uh like the ancestral strain alpha strain we knew that you know outdoor settings um generally speaking we saw a reduced risk of transmission and that's that's a good thing that that's that's very good um but that was also not taking into account a variant where an individual is shedding a thousand times more viral particles than a previous variant and so i think that you know to be considered a close contact an individual really i mean it's not it's

064not simple by any stretch of the amount we kind of have this thought process that everyone's a contact if you know let's say i was i was infectious or something like that we have this kind of viewpoint that everyone oh everyone's you know a contact and it's a very specific you know definition right it's it's you know 15 minutes or longer within six feet and so going back to the grocery store example like you know you're not gonna spend 15 minutes within six feet from some random person that's walking in the grocery store and so if we are outside on the playground as far as identifying a contact that would mean that a child would have to be within six feet of another child for longer than 15 minutes just to be considered a contact

065and so you know with the delta variant and shedding a thousand times more viral particles i just don't think we necessarily have the the research at this time to say with certainty that you know we can change this that risk is mitigated and we're fine you know i think that it's something that we're going to closely monitor as we move forward i know the cdc is certainly going to closely monitor it and i personally believe that some of the risk is mitigated by being outdoors but you know again i can't i can't speak to the fact that someone is shedding a thousand times more viral particles within six feet of another individual and say with certainty that that person is not going to be infected just because delta variant is is relatively new as far

066as our understanding of that context right so i'm taking from that you're saying that the recommendation would be to have masks on on the playground as well not not necessarily not necessarily that is not that is not our like the mass mandate does not go into that um we don't we don't touch upon that generally speaking outdoors that's that's a better environment for sure what we're talking what i was talking about was from a quarantine perspective or identification of a close contact i was really thinking more from a risk perspective so i appreciate that clarification gotcha thank you thank you board member campbell i appreciate you sharing this information and i appreciate especially appreciate um the layering aspect of this which i think to dr buck's credit and all of the staff credit and parents

067and students last year it was the layering that was so important and ongoing and so slide 29 clearly kind of lays out what that layering looks like and my question is more for dr buck and and team around we know what we've done in the past many people that are new to our district don't know what we've done in the past and we're entering a new school year so can we walk through this layering and what that looks like for this year i would say part of that's going to be on your vote tonight as far as the mass part but we have a document called safe return does he ask every district in the state call it safe return that was posted up on june 23rd and we continue to look at and revise

068that in fact we have a meeting tomorrow afternoon to look at parts of that so but if anybody wants to see it's on our website and the front page i believe katie correct called the safe return you click on it you can see many many pages that go right through all these pieces yes and all of these factors so physical distance distancing ventilation we know kyle guerrell and his team have focused very much on ventilation hand washing that's going to be in place contract tracing we did that last year we're continuing that going forward cleaning and disinfection that was a lot of the teams working hard on that 7. all of that stays in place right and yeah some of it's changed so what we've learned remember this time last year we were getting advice

069to disinfect surfaces in front of a kid before another kid used the same setting so every hour between class change the secondary we were literally disinfecting the tables or chairs or desk later on that's not the case it's not the uh we're finding out it's more of an aerosol than we knew 12 months ago so now it's just a once a day deep clean throughout so and after jackson county health department's done if you want to ask dr miller or or kyle gorell can come up and speak more to that if you want great appreciate that thank you dr buck i think my next question is because we heard from many parents that may have children with disabilities especially speech related disabilities and i know last year dr mathis shared with us she came into

070the room and showed us the mask that many of the teachers would be wearing in that situation that was a clear covering over the mouth so that the mouth could still be seen are we planning to have those same types of masks and so parents that have children with disabilities can be assured that we'll have things in place to meet each child where they are and meet each child in person as we can that is correct thank you board member fruchi thank you very much um i wanted to go back to the the some comments you guys made about breakthrough cases um and i don't know if i didn't hear you right i think i i definitely heard you that you counted those numbers as they went into the hospitals but when folks get go

071and get tested for coved do they have to say whether they have been vaccinated or not so when you get those results back do those results count as breakthrough so they they do not have to say um whether they're vaccinated or not but our team goes an extra level i guess you could say as far as investigating breakthrough cases just so we really ensure that we have a thorough understanding of breakthrough cases and so we will actually look look at vaccination status as we're getting positive cases in to to see if that is something that we should we should be evaluating so you can cross-reference all of those because you do have the record of everyone who's been vaccinated that that's correct okay thank you and then i have kind of just have another comment

072slash question here obviously you know i think what we've learned since march of 2020 i think we've all learned a lot through our experience and through trial and error and through lots of documentation and things like that but our priority obviously a lot of the government agencies from national to state to county to local are recommending or asking us to prioritize in-person learning i personally think that that's our number one priority is to get our kids back and keep them all in school as much as possible so in order to do that what we've learned from from that date from march 2020 to now okay what's your advice based on what we've learned to order in order to prioritize that in-person learning and get our kids back to school and keep them in school i

073mean i saw your presentation but kind of sum up yeah i i you know i honestly think and probably what i would say is that you know we can't necessarily look at the situation in isolation and so what happens out in the community what happens in different parts of the community as far as transmission of this particular virus will certainly impact others and so we're actually seeing that with health care right so health care is something that we all rely on and if it came to a situation where if if i was having a heart attack or my family member was having a stroke or i you know a family member needed cancer treatments those are all real things that we all go through on a daily basis if it came down to a hospital

074not being able to accept someone or having to defer treatment um worsening those outcomes that's that's something that's very tangible very real and something we can understand regardless of the sector that we're in and so that that's what this is all centered around at this point you know i think it's it's something that has been communicated to us through the chief medical officers um and it's you know we've seen we've seen the news of other cities that have went through similar things you know it doesn't have to be that way that's not a normal path for this particular virus and it's there are simple things that we can put in place to mitigate transmission and so just paying attention i think is is very helpful and and adjusting mitigation based on that right this this

075is nothing is that nothing is set in stone nothing is concrete we can we can be flexible with mitigation like the different things you're employing whether it be um you know social distancing um hand-washing stuff like that's all adaptable based on the situation in the community thank you um unless anybody has any other questions i have kind of a list of questions here for you one of the things that i noted on there is that in a quarantine environment you have noted that students don't quarantine if they are masked however you're excluding adults from that can you explain why a teacher who is masked and a student who is masked would then the t the teacher then would still have to quarantine so this is following cdc guidance as far as their masking and quarantine

076recommendations we are saying that if you're a fully vaccinated staff person and and you're exposed then you do not have to quarantine but that does not that's not an exclusion for for mass do you want to add to that the research yep no yeah yeah i mean i think yeah what it boils down to is you know um for for students that you know there's not especially for those who are 12 and under there's not necessarily an opportunity for vaccination at this point and so the opportunity to give them an out from quarantine is is very important but as far as adults are concerned the opportunity for vaccination which is above and beyond the most effective strategy we have out of everything here as far as reducing illness injury um hospitalization death like that's the

077preferable option and so if you're vaccinated you don't have to deal with the quarantine sort of issues and that's what we would all prefer you to to go president murdoch can i ask um if you're a close contact but you're vaccinated but you start showing symptoms does that then become quarantined or not quarantined yeah if you if you begin to show symptoms you should isolate for the the 10 day period and get tested as well i think i think my my ultimate question there is what is the difference between two 16 year olds who are amassed in a 16 year old student and a 25 year old teacher mast even if they are unvaccinated what is what is the difference between those people in terms of one quarantining and what not yeah i think we're

078start you're probably starting to peel back some of cdc policy and like um you know what they're what they're looking for as far as outcomes at that point um you know if you're getting if we're getting into the the sense of like if everyone in the community wears masks we don't we don't have any more quarantine or anything like that because everyone's wearing masks we ignore the the really the best solution that we have to not only mitigate this this particular challenge that we're facing right now but also to prevent like other variants from forming and and getting out of this challenge long term and so um you know i think like with the priority of keeping kids in school you know the cdc made the strategic decision based on the evidence that you know

079this is permissible this is something that's important but for everyone else there are there are certainly options to avoid quarantine and it stems from vaccination um and under the cdc's guidance under what is considered substantial and high transmission um you know it lists that we would need to be under 50 to be in moderate right to be in in yellow and then a certain testing percentage what's the lowest that we went here in may in terms of our case per 100 000 i couldn't get that to pull up like i can't tap on it to see the actual number did we ever make it under 50 per 100 000 yes i believe so um i'd have to actually pull up the specific data because i don't have that in front of me but bridget's i

080think pulling it up real quick and seeing if she can but well but that's our that's the number of average cases then down below is 191 and so yeah sorry i can't act uh i don't have access to the internet so it's yeah so because because right the the guidance right now is still based on being in a substantial or high transmission area right and so based on those two factors those two metrics that are being out by the cdc what happens if you fall below one and are still hovering in another what would the guidance of the health department be at that point yeah so i can tell you the guidance of the cdc um from what i've seen thus far is that you're taking like for instance let's say a percent positive drop

081below but a case rate remained high you would still take case rate that would drive your decision making from my understanding of their guidance but um that's yeah i'd have to look through it just because it's relatively new okay i'm just curious because i i i think we've been hovering at 50 or above i mean if we got below 50 was probably a pretty short period of time even in may um one of the things that we know here over the last couple of days and i mean it was nice that children's mercy clarified a statement that they had in terms of their capacity what is driving the rsv infections that we that we are seeing right now in addition to covet infections um i don't no i don't think we have um we definitely

082don't have a clear understanding of that i don't think there's been any sort of evidence or support i i know that i know that a lot of people and i've heard this that you know masks are the cause of this but there's absolutely nothing to substantiate that there's not an evidence base that we would rely on it's it's just we think that's that's what it is but what we would want to do from a scientific perspective is just have a thorough understanding of what what that is and i think you'll hear from the children's mercy professionals tomorrow on the cmo call they'll talk a little bit about what they're experiencing in the hospital system and there there may be some opportunities to ask them as well but i haven't seen a body of evidence to

083say one way or the other okay that's fine um three more questions here um last year you know we had obviously um hundreds of people in quarantine sometimes at a time um almost i think we were actually over a thousand at one point um was there ever any data collected last year especially from school settings of kids who were put on quarantine quarantine then testing positive as a result of quarantines yeah there was some national studies that were done we didn't actually perform any studies here locally though but um we would have to there's one done in the st louis area wash you actually conducted it so um yeah i can certainly pull that up but nothing done here in the kansas city metro area from my understanding okay um and then my my my

084last two here um one of the things that we are seeing you know one of the things that you put up there was a risk assessment essentially right so we're measuring risk and a lot of times we're measuring risk in um the medical terms so is any what what is being considered in terms of risk from non-medical like how how do we weigh non-medical risks associated with mitigation strategies versus what benefits we gain obviously from conducting a mitigation strategy yeah that's a great question i think that there have been um there have actually been quite a bit of um narrative around this um and it's particular to i think the school setting um you know there's a lot of um there's a lot of analysis around [Music] oh what's the what's the word like emotional

085recognition social interaction of younger children and and mask wearing there's there's been a lot of analysis around um you know obviously like speech and development and that sort of thing and so um i think the the amount of information is is quite astounding as far as being out there um you know what i what i will say as far as my understanding um of it uh it hasn't necessarily been synthesized into a risk assessment from my understanding from what i've seen per se uh it would certainly be interesting to see that in included however there's a lot of talk around how we mitigate the situation that we're in right so like if we are in a situation where you know as a community we're struggling with something that is that has the potential to impact

086us all and we're asking everyone to make a small sacrifice as far as like mask wearing right like a small intrusion into their day as far as wearing a mask um you know there's there's different ways to mitigate the fact that we have to wear mask and and you know as far as like the emotional recognition social interaction you know i've seen a lot with the clear masks there's a lot a lot with parents and the roles that parents play as far as developing social interaction emotional recognition in younger children as the children are coming home out of the school setting around mom and dad or the guardian or whoever grandparents whatever um and and how that continues and contributes to the development of the child you know i think that i think that what

087it boils down to is is really um there's just a lot to consider there's a lot of factors obviously um and you know i don't think i've seen anything clear-cut on that um you know one of the one of the things that that we have seen as as essentially mask i guess debates have obviously started again as as we go here into the fall um is we have even some other countries in terms of their departments of education coming out and saying hey maybe we need to look and be careful about doing universal mass mandates you know great britain is one of them right so their department of education has literally said that you need to make it that it should be optional for some of the reasons you just said right because they're trying

088to balance which is better right do we what do we gain from this what do we gain from this and i i just wonder is is it a fair statement at all to just go kind of on both sides we're not sure so we're taking our the best we have in terms of information to make a decision is that accurate or or do you think it's definitive that we know one way or another um we know what ex what exactly sorry i just want to clarify that the benefits of masks outweigh the disadvantages of masks so you know what i would say when we look at it in school children i'm sorry i should have been very very specific for four kids in schools i apologize no i i think that is completely um you

089know fair to say as far as this is a novel virus we're still understanding how what the effects are um and you know i don't know about anyone else here but we haven't been in this situation before for at least 100 years and so there are things that we can take from that last pandemic that we experienced as a country but you know this is a completely different virus with completely different parameters and some of the parameters that we understand as far as interrupting transmission like uk for instance their vaccination rate is substantially higher than the united states and so that is certainly a driving factor that that needs to be considered but um yeah it's i mean we're i think at this point you know with the evidence with the amount of evidence that's

090coming out you know definitely trying to interpret what is coming out and make the best possible decisions considering those things that we listed above and community transmission so it's definitely a both and i appreciate that answer because i was actually going to mention that that i i recognize uk's vaccination rate is significantly higher than what we have um here in the u.s one of the questions that that i ended up getting asked recently was in a county like jackson county where we may have had a mandate in the spring for example versus a non-mandated county do the curves of infection look relatively similar yeah i think if you apply if they do yeah so there have been studies that have been done throughout the united states kansas was actually included in a study and from

091that body of evidence that's actually one of the bits of supportive evidence that we uncovered as far as mass man's masks were concerned universal masks was that there was a difference you know there is a difference in community transmission rates among or differentiating between communities that have masks and those that do not have masks i don't think that there's been anything in particular in missouri um but again you know we have we have a body of evidence from the united states uh to rely on okay and i know it may seem like i'm i'm peppering you with questions i i i don't know i'm pretty supportive of tonight's recommendation but i do think that there's a lot of questions that we have to continue to ask um about this my final question actually isn't for

092you it's actually for joe and so you may need the microphone there if you don't mind um so joe right now um we have a 30-day mandate from jackson county that starts on the ninth so ends obviously in early september right right at the end of that 30 days um there is a question and maybe you agree or disagree and you can share with me one way or another there is a question mark of what happens at that particular point can you let us know what happens at that particular point well it's certainly predicting the future i can i can tell you that the jackson county order is is much like the one that was entered in st louis it's been the subject of the litigation over there and in st louis county the health

093department there and the county executive took the position that the 30-day limit that's in this new state law that we're talking about doesn't actually apply because that state law only covers actual closures or indirect closures of facilities as opposed to mitigation measures like what we're talking about and that's one of the issues that's going to get ironed out in that litigation the judge over there entered a tro prohibiting the health director from enforcing that masked mandate but only until august 17 when they're going to have a hearing when they're going to take up some of these deeper issues such as what applies the situation there is that the county council entered an order trying to override the health director's order and the judge said people are legitimately confused as to which one applies so she's

094going to stop the mask mandate temporarily while they sort through these issues but one of the questions is whether a mitigation measure measure such as a mask mandate is in fact limited to 30 days or whether it can be entered for a longer period of time certainly i think even under the most generous reading of that law for instance the the county council their county legislature in jackson county could enter an order extending that that mask mandate that's certainly my understanding even under uh i think the attorney general's interpretation of that law and then the follow-up question to that would be um is there anything even if the jackson county health department would for example decide to not extend a mass command or anything like that is there anything that limits the school district one

095way or the other no no i think i think you always have the authority to take into account your own circumstances what you're seeing in your environment having a health department behind you with the statistics certainly helps but i think under missouri law you you have the authority to make the best decisions you as a board think are necessary for the protection of your students and staff okay i'm done so i appreciate both of you being here sincerely um board member uh sparks i actually have questions for the administration and so i was under the impression that we were supposed to ask our guest questions and then allow them to leave and then that's entertaining i just wanted to so i'll come back to you okay absolutely anybody have any other questions for the health

096for the health department sorry board member alan go ahead thanks sir just a quick question or maybe two do we have a account i guess or statistics to know how many kids or age groups are hospitalized is that what the one slide is to indicate slide number 15 cumulative cases those aren't hospitalization cases those are just cases of diagnosis correct yeah so i don't think in the presentation we included any data on hospitalizations in youth but um that is certainly data that um you know we have we can pull it together what i mean do we know what those are we don't know what those are no not off the top of my head i'm sorry all right and then um this emotional recognition social interaction those kinds of of um considerations um it's a

097balance and it's a discussion around you know one versus the other and and um president murdoch i it's a tremendous question risk versus reward i guess are there considerations for uh taking a mask off during the day for a period of time obviously when you're outside you're saying kids can um every other kid for a little while i mean i i'm just curious if there are ways to take into account emotional recognition right social interaction some of those things that may be um limited during the day if somebody has a mask on the entire day yeah yeah so i mean i think like the body of evidence that we have there's really no there's really no data on that um there's really nothing that we could rely on with a scientific uh support that would

098say like yes this is the thing to do this is not the thing to do just because a lot of the studies are focusing on you know masking across a community or masking in a particular group of people and it's it's centered on the control of that particular variable and you know it's exercising masking to the greatest extent possible we know it's not perfect we know that you know masking is not going to be perfect but it's an overwhelming majority of individuals partaking in the activity and so i just couldn't necessarily speculate i guess on what would be the appropriate response and that and that and that vein so to speak um you know i think we have the cdc the cdc is quite clear we have the american academy of pediatrics we have a

099lot of recommendations children's mercy that are explicit as far as what their recommendations are we just don't have anything that really differentiates between activities sure all right just thought i'd ask i i appreciate that i mean okay thank you thanks for being here board member sparks you are the health professional so i thought i would ask one question it is very clear though that if we as a community choose not to wear a mask then most likely our kids would not be able to stay in school with the data that we currently have the question that i'm asking the health professionals is it is very clear though with the data that we currently have is if we choose not to mask our students then most likely will not be able to keep them in school

100i i think that if we choose to do nothing so that's really you know the option is not to not to address the situation um you know i i couldn't even necessarily speculate what the burden on the health care system would be and how that would cascade down into other sub sectors you know it would be a very difficult position to be in because we would have to make substantial choices between access to health care and kids being in school and a whole host of other challenges that we do not want to that do we we do not want to face again and i'll say that i do not want to i don't want to go down that road again so i think this is our best bet to avoid all of that in the

101least obtrusive way we possibly can any other questions for the health department and then we'll do a discussion obviously with administration and members okay i think we yeah if you guys feel free to thank you all for your time all evening with us so thank you dr miller do you mind stepping up to the mic and talk a little bit about some of the safe return and i'm gonna walk these two out okay thank you you know last spring we worked to revise our safe return in-person document so we actually visited with a group of stakeholders in the community to update that document and we know the circumstances from june to where we are right now have have greatly changed so one of the things we plan to do we have a meeting scheduled tomorrow

102with our building administration and so again on a routine basis and we know that we need to do this as circumstances change we will be working with our building principles and one of the things about this document that i think is important for our community to be aware of it requires the input of operational leaders instructional leaders everybody has to have eyes on in regards to their specific area of expertise so that it's a largely concert contributed document by several administrators again we want to make sure that building principles have clear direction what that means from a building level perspective so that's an ongoing discussion that we plan to have as things continue to morph and evolve and i'm happy to answer any questions that you might have so what i would like to do

103board members here to make sure that we are following the agenda appropriately here is go ahead and do the motion emotion um and then we can have discussion and then either it passes or it doesn't but that's really where we need to be as we start asking questions and have discussion among administration and members and we have it broken down as you probably saw in your packet it is in two motions so um 2.01 re is in regards to masks and 2.02 is in regards to when we would re-evaluate any decision should 2.1 2.01 pass board member campbell did you have a question regarding that i do because i'm not sure and i'm just asking that we got down to the slides with i know we got to the end of the jackson county i

104think there are a few more slides well we have we have the kansas city ones that if we want to is that what you're talking about no slide 36 and 37 with the legal and on 38 and that kind of thing 37 is the last one with the superintendent recommendation right so we did end up i mean we can have dr buck if you would like go over that here in just a second if you'd like to wait for him um on that but at the same time we actually could uh even if you would want to do that we could actually do a motion and then even do those those last couple of slides too if you want but now that he's back perfect timing we'll have them go and address those last can

105you address the last two slides uh in the presentation so are you talking about starting here well you can if you want to start in kansas city but all right so kansas city health department does have a mandate that starts monday we do have one elementary building in that uh area and that's summer point elementary so we will have to comply actually i'm sorry i started last monday and now we do since the slide was created jackson county does have one starting at 8 9 21 so we must comply so that includes the rest of our facility so we do already have a mass mandate for all people indoors and our school facilities so that makes this vote a little bit different in that respect as far as starting it with a mask requirement if

106you will kansas city health department shared this data with us this week so i'm not going to speak to it but just show it here's their cases when you're looking at positivity rates new cases per week they're seeing the same types of increases as jackson county is so there's how many tests are given they're given more tests yet their percent positivity rate goes up that's usually the mix just explain a few differences this year compared to last you already heard joe hatley talk a little bit about the new law and how long an order can last but two things we had amix last year so it was a statewide you could move to shutting down a building or a district and move to virtual if cases got too high quarantines got too high and we

107kind of had that 20 of our buildings in quarantine level if you will and so that is no longer there so if we get a really high level quarantines we are still in person at this point so when you are quarantined it is a home medical homebound that has always existed and there's three different ways we can address that we can we've gotten permission from the state so we have those ami days those alternative method of instructions for snow days if you will does include this as well so we could have up to five days that we could move to virtual but that's the max we can as it currently sits with the state so just showing you there's a little bit difference in the levers you have as a district going forward the cdc

108aap the kansas city medical society jackson county health department kansas city health department children's mercy our local medical panel and many many doctors who have reached out over the last week all recommend universal mask wearing indoors to school i haven't had one medical doctor and i haven't had one medical association say don't and as board members you're elected officials you're invited to the kansas city chamber meeting with chief medical officers tomorrow the chief medical officers also recommended a couple weeks ago for universal mask wearing indoors for school so with that it's kind of hard to go against all the experts who live it uh epidemiologists doctors see um chief medical officers so my recommendation um was to have uh or universal mask wearing then of course the order came out so that part is a

109little bit moot so i think um ryan and megan worked on a recommendation you see 2.01 and 2.02 so it's two different recommendations now um the first one on moving to a mask universal mask mandate and the second one is when to reevaluate it um so i'll open up for questions for me or an administration as you have them i do want to add earlier you're asking about um research on if you're wearing masks and and in close contact and testing positive so cdc did come in the saint louis region i think included st charles county as well as springfield region and did a two-week study intense study um and that was released on march 26 on their weekly morbidity and mortality weekly report mmrwr about that study and it showed a two percent if

110everyone's wearing mask only two percent of close contacts tested positive which is much lower than the percent rate in the outer community in the same study time all right thank you for uh summarizing here right here at the end on the presentation so now uh board members i would entertain that motion and then we'll get into discussion just so you guys know i've i'm gonna trip all your buttons back off so that i know actually who has questions and stuff as we go forward okay so wait till after we get done with the motion here so okay so um we do need a motion and like i mentioned to you to all of you we did break this into two because we needed to discuss when we would reevaluate the motion and we can talk

111about that here in just a second so we need a motion for 2.01 i move that the board of education mandate universal mask on doors at all lsr7 facilities beginning august 9 2021. second okay so we have a motion and a second for 2.01 now we can get into any questions that you might have so only because i know he had pushed it even prior dr hedrick um so board member sparks thank you president murdoch i know that we've had a lot of talk about the health concerns of wearing masks not wearing masks the concern that i believe that all of us as board members for education are concerned about is what would the learning gap be if our students are not in school learning and so i would like to hear from the administration

112dr buck or whoever you would like to delegate that answer to that question too so i'll share this i had a parent talk to me in may whose child had three different quarantines during the school year and another three times end up turning positive so that's six weeks of school that they were doing virtual while their classmates were in person because it was an older kid so usually didn't have whole classes go out but they were wearing masks so if this new quarantine rule were in place last year they would have zero days they would have been quarantined and so i think by having mask on means we have a higher rate of kids in person with the quarantine rules which we do not have discretion on so it is very advantageous to have the

113mass requirement thus we'll have more kids in person just as a follow-up so would we clearly state that kids not being in the classroom not having the instruction from a educator it is hurting a student and their learning ability i think the data is clear nationwide that in-person learning is preferred and has a higher impact teachers matter thank you board member hedrick yeah i just have a couple of questions um and one hopefully and i really didn't think about this until our visitors were talking but do we have any data from last school year in terms of the contact tracing that we did and being able to trace any cases back to ridership on the buses i know first semester i don't think we had any transmission that i know of on buses i don't

114know about second semester christie barger may know that answer and it's probably going to be somewhat of a guess for her first semester really was we had one particular building we had special programs throughout the district and then we had winter sports teams so it's very much the first semester i can't give the statistics i can tell anecdotally that i was part of a contact tracing situation in which there were multiple positives on a bus but there was difficulty in ascertaining because there were siblings there were classes together and so i don't know that we could attribute it back directly to the boss but that is where the contact tracing started in that particular incident okay thank you just in terms of the quarantine issue and i and i know i brought this up last

115year but i i really am concerned for um students who have to be in quarantine um what their education day looks like and i i think we need to continue to make sure that they have the best experience possible because being out of the classroom if it's 10 days or 14 days or whatever it is that's too many days for them to be out of the classroom so i don't know if we've done things technology wise that can help with that but i do think that is something that we need to really get identified in terms of being able to provide a very similar education for those students during that period of time so that's why you know that you got a thumbs up so me too uh well and i guess my next point

116would be i think we also need to look at every um strategy mitigation strategy that we can to keep our student get our students in the classroom and keep our students and our staff and our teachers safe as safe as we possibly can so if that means you know whatever that means i don't you know trying to social distance more whatever i think we need to look at every option that we possibly can and then my last question really that's a question is does this motion mean that on the playground there would be mass would be optional okay i just want to clarify thank you board member alan thank you um a few questions dr buck i think you talk faster than i do and i didn't think many people did that so that being

117said uh will you roll back a little bit to um discuss this ami days these ami days individual versus groups so to speak and amix days and what that does to dr hedrick's point about kids being at home in quarantine and um what they're available what what their available resources to be in class as best they can and then i have a number of other questions but i really want to drill down on that because i had a discussion with another school board member in a different district um that that somewhat it's a challenge flat out so enlighten me so we had one building have this happen twice where they had 20 over 20 of their population was in quarantine or isolation and that was very difficult then if you had three kids in person

118and 17 kids at home how do you do both at the same time as the teacher um so at that point we moved that whole and plus there was transmission happening within that building um so both times we took a two-week break and moved it entirely virtual when we came back we were very successful several months later we had it happen again we took a two-week break came back we're very successful so the is probably harder instructionally when you have half classroom virtual half class not than anything else and so that that that was our ability last year that's not going to be our ability this year it is not our ability so how do we address that so we can use up we can save our snow days those 5 ami days where we

119can forgive snow and doing virtual we cannot do that and save them for emergencies and situations but it won't be two weeks right um so we could try to make three day weekends or something like that and then after that we're just gonna have to you know to use the homebound method and the homebound method has three variables one if we have the staffing available but when we were hitting the fan in november we didn't nearly have a staff for this do five hours of direct instruction two zooming somebody in or google meet someone into the actual class and they participate in class virtually we had some huge success stories in places there um continue to grow it certainly isn't universal and then three would be more of that ami look of a day where

120they are given assignments and it's asynchronous just like our online students had was asynchronous substitutes and all the consideration for some of those things and what i mean granted that's still dollars in budget maybe non-allocated who knows but yep so september and october um our sub-fill rate was still in the in the mid-90s we hit november we dropped below 70 percent fill rate so we also had a hard time just having the staff just even supervise alone and struck students last november because of quarantines and isolations not only within our staff but also within the sub staff um last year it seems like we were very successful uh with our employees being vaccinated what what's our rate so it's voluntary for them to tell us but i can tell you we hosted clinics right and

121based on that or people telling us we don't need the clinic because we already got our vaccination we were over 90 um last year vaccination rate amongst our staff huge number yes um a little bit of a tangent here but what percent of our what percentage of our student population i realize it's difficult because you'll have higher rates in different settings but generally speaking what's our percent of students who have medically fragile conditions who would be much more susceptible i know it's yeah nice i know i see your facial expression even with the mask on but it's a hard one because obviously we'll have a much more delicate situation um in certain classrooms than we will with others but um there's you know consideration to where we may be able to mitigate risk with a

122mask for those who may be medically fragile correct we we have them throughout the district i do not have a number off top of my head sorry michael that's fine i'm just curious and don't take this mike ellen it's not wearing a mask thing as some political statement i just didn't put one on everybody else's mask my my my vaccines okay so i'm sure somebody's out there going well he's not wearing a mask he must be in favor blah blah blah so don't take it more than what it is i haven't had my mask here i'm just too lazy to put it on and after i put it on then it becomes another whole story but um one other question about our process of and what we've done to ramp up um our hvac systems

123for example or materials for cleaning or sanitation or sanitizing i should say kyle or emily which one of you want to come up here i can tell you that kyle has a double um filter system which is probably above and beyond what most place uh places do so because they talk about layering and that's very intriguing and sounds very successful so i'm curious where we are in that okay with hvac um our current systems meet the the ashrae 62.1 standards for outside air so that gives us ventilation rates that that meet industry standards we do you know what we can with filtration we have many different types of systems so i can't give you categorical statements on how how air is filtered but we do we use mirv 8 and merv 11 filters in our

124units that provide good air flow there is a balance and we've communicated this and educated in the past there's a careful balance between filtration and ventilation with current units the more you filter the less you ventilate because it restricts air flow so we're always trying to make sure that we have that right balance giving people the right amount of outdoor air changes while still filtering the air effectively outside air is is an important important component because that's when you're you're truly exchanging and bringing fresh air into the space we're very fortunate in the district to have a district-wide control system and we can very responsively adjust outside air levels in our units within probably just a few hours time get all the units in the districts the district adjusted so for example last year we

125had a period of time where we doubled outside air ventilation rates and kept it that way for a long time and monitored space temps to make sure that we were able to maintain temperatures is that okay on talking to the doctor wednesday i think his point was the masks do what they do but hands to the mouth hands to the eyes washing hand sanitizer i mean those are huge mitigators they're huge risk reducers so are we stocked full are we able to do those things and then i have one more question and i'll be quiet mr president we may want to have krista come up talk about what she has over there she is uh definitely well stocked and then um if you want terry can also talk about the education pieces they do in

126hand washing while she's coming up i just want to ask another question and that is we have choir rooms in elementary schools we have choir rooms in the high schools i'm sure in the high school middle school we can space a little bit better maybe than in elementary what is it 200 kids in there a week or whatever i mean those are high numbers of kids higher than you may be able to space in a classroom cafeterias um band rooms you know trumps have spit valves for a reason right so we're gonna have band i mean those are issues that are pretty big issues with the large number of kids moving through those spaces um buses cafeterias libraries and especially buses and cafeterias that we only have so much space what was uh nice as

127far as cafeterias last year as i don't think we had one transmission we could go back to what's happening after you i don't know it's because you're not exerting yourself while you're eating i don't know um you're not co-mingling you're sitting in one spot but we did have band and choir successfully last year we're going to try to do the same thing this year i realized last year was alpha and this is delta variant so we'll monitor but we're going in with very similar strategies we had last year so regarding sanitation cleaning and disinfecting we are prepared to maintain the same procedures that we had last year and that is fully cleaning and sanitizing all touch surfaces every single day and so um you know there's uh there's a strong push by children's mercy we've

128been in very close contact with them um to promote cleaning with more soap and water they've done some testing and feel that the mechanical action of scrubbing with soap and water even on surfaces just like it does with your hands um that that breaks down pathogens and and does a good job and so we're looking at all options and we'll continue the procedures that we had last year i'll let christa answer the supply question well i would say that we're in a much better position than we were at this time last year we are fully stocked we have all of the same supplies that we had that were approved by our risk manager and the nursing staff and everyone else and so i think we're in a good spot we've got plenty of everything and

129we've even had some donations by local companies that have provided us with some personalized hand sanitizers to to hand out to everyone for the start of school so we're in a good spot could i could i ask a follow-up question to the ventilation while he's while kyle's still looking absolutely um so in your opinion um any kind of a portable device that would be in the classroom for cleaning air moving air whatever not needed we need that something we should be moving towards what what's your professional opinion regarding that topic we we've done a lot of research on on portable devices and without getting into to a lot of detail the the first thing you have to ask you you're looking for the effectiveness of it how much air can it move how big of

130a a unit is it and so how truly is it effective at cleaning um an entire volume of air in a space and to we we've looked at some units to size units to do an effective job of turning over and cleaning the air in the room they turn out being really large units the small little units you see the the desktop type things they in my opinion have a very low rate of effectiveness when it comes to treating an entire classroom's worth of air and so it um you know if you're going to do something you just want to know that it's really going to make a difference and those little small units don't really turn out the the cfm that makes a huge difference so some of the larger changes that people try

131are more system related cleaning methods thank you you're welcome uh board member campbell so i appreciate the questions boardroom hendrix board member allen again focusing on this multi-layered approach so it's not just although our decision tonight our motion is around masking we clearly are seeing across our district all of the layers of protection that we are continuing and adding to and putting in place to ensure the safety of our students and our staff to ensure that we can keep kids in school and learning in school we heard from dr miller operational leaders instructional leaders are engaged people are going to be meeting ongoing to make sure that we've got act actions taken that are flexible with the coming waves of what may be coming all true statements right i think one thing that was touched

132on maybe that we haven't touched on and dr buck i'd like to ask you and your staff is the social emotional part we heard a lot about that last year about how we were helping our students with the the challenge of wearing masks with the challenge of living in a pandemic so can we speak a little bit to that for our parents and and folks that are watching so we just had our and chris you can come up and add on to this if you want um we just had our district leadership uh meeting last week and we had a guest speaker um come a medical uh a doctor who now works for blue valley school district who uh focuses on mental health and talked about the metrics increasing over the last 20 years and

133the pandemic just had a little bit of steroids to that that's something we've been concerned about even going into the pandemic and it continues to be something we're concerned about so let's continue we look at not only what we're doing now but we're also looking at an rfp for a a medical clinic for students only and provide more resources as far as that goes we went out for one last year and we didn't get responses because everyone's so short-handed staff wise now that's probably the biggest challenge for us it's also a challenge in nursing world and terry's going to give a big shake there so we're going to continue to work that with that anecdotally we saw some people thrive being and being online we saw some people who really struggled being online um you

134know that that was the interesting piece to that for some parents some parents would have one kid who did better online and one kid who did worse online in the same household so um we definitely want people in person though the majority the vast majority kids do better in person and that's why we're offering that but we still have online as an option i think we have a little over 160 kids something like that somewhere in the mid hundreds of our kids have chosen to be online all day at the elementary level that's much lower than it was last year we're almost 20 starting the year online but for some families and some kids that is the preferred method and they felt like they were successful last year so we're gonna continue to offer that

135in fact we're approved by the state where it's only about eight or nine providers in the entire uh that are offered to the entire state so kids in other districts can choose our online elementary now so there isn't very many choices actually for elementary majority those providers only do secondary so actually we'll probably be educating kids and all across state of missouri with our online piece again we know that for few people that is a better option but the vast majority the better options in person great and thanks for overviewing that so i hear that we've got social emotional pieces in place we've got work that'll help all the kids that are going to be here in person we've got a choice for the people the students that want to continue with online that's an

136option as well excellent that's great thank you board member hedrick yeah i'm just going to go back i and i'm really not trying to be a pain but i am really concerned about our students who are on quarantine and five hours of homebound instruction in my book is not sufficient and and and really when you think about all of the long-term impacts and this is not going to be the last pandemic we deal with we need to get this figured out in today's age of technology we need to get this figured out for the kids who can't be in the classroom good board member fritchey yes i would second what judy just said um because that's one of my main concerns too um are kids who do have to quarantine and we will have those

137kiddos who will have to quarantine and you know i know that we always say we're going to we're going to do our best we're going to do our best but i you know i last year we talked about the possibilities of google mates and some people said well some classes you can some classes you can't but if we have the majority of our kids in class the majority of our teachers teaching and we we prioritize in in school instruction i just really think that i don't see the problem in most cases of having the teacher's computer on and a google me going unless they have to be using their computer for another function at the same time you know what i'm saying so i don't know what other things that you guys have planned uh

138dr buck do you have other other things planned to help the kids so we continue to work that all year long and the rate of google meets or zoom-ins increased throughout the year and then we're going to continue to do that i can tell you with this mask quarantine wearing mass and the quarantine change if we have a mass requirement our quarantines are going to be very minimal which is a game changer compared to what we had last year good good okay my second my second comment and question that goes along with that first of all we've received hundreds of emails from out there from folks weighing in on this issue and many of our emails well several came from actually medical personnel who all have encouraged us all of those medical personnel who are

139not on our medical panel these are other physicians and nurses etc who have encouraged us to make sure and mask our children because they too are seeing the overwhelming effects of what's going on in addition to that though there are your parents who really want to know how's this school year perhaps going to look different than last school year in terms of school activities field trips concerts things that parents traditionally love to come to attend to see their kids in action and they really weren't able to we weren't able to fully do that last year what is how's the school year going to look different for us so last year the order included gathering size and such it does not include that this year so we're going to try to make school as normal as

140possible our kind of guiding focus is can we do contact tracing um so we'll have you know meet the teacher nights and and everything else but we're probably not going to put everybody into a giant assembly format have all the parents come into the gym and talk to them before they go to the classroom because it's hard to contact trees so that's going to be our guiding principle we're going to go back to as many normal things as possible because there's not any event size pieces on there and i'm glad you mentioned the medical panel so just let you know when we visited with them this week they're saying they're telling us they're seeing more young and under 12 even kids being taken by ambulance to the emergency room for respiratory issues because of coveted

141cases than they did last year that was just unheard of during summer and they're seeing them this summer so they were very adamant and they wouldn't want me to pass this along to you so i am they're very adamant you should do a mass requirement in their medical opinion thank you board member sparks i know so often we get to hear from dr buck at the administration but i don't believe that we give dr buck the kudos that he deserves with leading our district we don't have a small district we have a large amount of staff that he has to manage and i'm not here to micromanage dr buck that's not what i was elected to do however i was elected to make sure that all of our kids are safe and so i first

142want to say thank you dr buck for what you're doing continue to lead this district and i'm behind you 100 percent to make sure all of our students remain safe and our staff i am a parent first and so just as many of our other parents want to be at football games track and field and all of those other events i want to be there too but i don't want to be there at the risk of hurting someone or someone hurting my child through this delta variance and so i'm encouraging you to continue to lead but also lead out front by making sure that all of our kids and staff are safe thank you board member campbell did you have another question you good i did just want to i'll follow that remark board member

143sparks because i agree i think um for all of us as board members we um definitely have the focus on our students and our staff and their safety and their education and knowing that the weight of 17 604 students current enrollment right as of yesterday morning 250 young learners at great beginnings knowing the the weight of that is on your shoulders dr buck and and we back you around that i think is is really telling as a parent i have two and sometimes the weight of being a parent of two is heavy but the weight of decisions around the safety and the education of our students and having students in person is just really critical to the success of this school year so again i'll second that thank you dr buck i would do that

144too but i actually have two more really fast questions i apologize um when we're contact tracing as a district um and we get the i'm not sure if they were a contact or not do we quarantine or not we engaged the jackson county health department we break out if it's on a football field we break out video and and just in the last uh eight hours we were involved with jackson county health department on a a question where we had a clear quarantine on a few kids and we had questions on more um and and they work because it's their rules um we're trying to follow their rules and sometimes there's i it's surprising how often terry and christie will say this because they were hot and heavy with it last year as well how

145many times there's a new situation that we hadn't seen before um so um there's many people over the jackson county health department that we interact with quite a bit and like i said when there's video we use video quite a bit as well so on a 5050 case it becomes their call right i mean ultimately if it's not clear-cut and we can't tell we engage them and i wouldn't say which way or other it depends on each case case by case okay and then my second one is if a student is required to quarantine this year but let's say chooses to not engage in homebound right so they're just going to accept a 14-day quarantine what kind of attendance issue does that present for either us as a district or the student as an individual

146if they do not complete homebound it's considered an absence so my follow-up to that is going to be we just said that it could be difficult for us to staff homebound right so what if it would be difficult to staff the first of three options of stake given this for homebound and that's the five hours now and small numbers it's not um when we had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids quarantined we there's no way we could have got enough staff to go do that because we were short staff in the buildings at the same time too we didn't have enough subs so that's the state is has given us three different options if you're considered homebound only the first one is a five-hour piece um and then you know so for some kids

147you think about it if you have needs that are more severe or you have a situation where they have a hard time having access or they're too young and they can't there might be some situations where that makes the most sense majority is going to be either we zoom in or it's going to be treated like ami and asynchronous one of those two pieces okay i appreciate the clarification i do um board member alan thank you sir um man you call me i was thinking of your conversation over there but um one of the things that um maybe i want to reiterate from roderick sparks over there is the fact that we do receive a ton of emails and letters from doctors um um medical practitioners the like um one thing i'd like for you

148to do if you would is give us some um kind of unpack this letter from the kansas city medical society that's part of our packet maybe throw that up on the screen what that group does and who it is and that kind of stuff as well [Music] i don't have studying epidemiology i'm not an md our role is education i'm not even quite frankly not the biggest fan of even have to take this vote but we're elected officials we gotta vote but leaning on medical medical professionals or jackson county health department i i had i can't fly in the face of what they're saying it seems to me that medically and physicians that are behind the information our role is to deem what is medically consistent and get as many kids in the classroom as

149possible not not to interpret some sort of political issue some hidden agenda which just is astounds me i won't even went on time for that but um unpack this letter a little bit tell me about that and thank you for your input so the kansas city medical society i believe it was 200 doctors that signed off on this if i remember right i'm sorry i can't put up because it's not attached to my computer the presentation up there one of the authors of it is a local doctor um every single doctor who's reached out to us as well as on our medical panels or in agreement with what you're seeing in front of you every chief medical officer um two weeks ago and i'm sure you're going to hear it again tomorrow is going to

150say this and what's interesting about this first vote is regardless if you vote yes or not we have to comply with the mandate so we have a mandate already and for summit point elementary and as of monday we'll have a mandate for for the rest of the district so we will have universal masking next week throughout the district um regardless if you vote for this or not um because we have to um when we put this agenda item we didn't know there was gonna be a mass mandate that was uh announced uh i think i got a notified at three o'clock and it came out at four o'clock as a press release so three pm yesterday when i was notified we're gonna have a mandate um but yes every health professional is saying they're seeing

151more cases younger cases the icu beds are over in the state are over 600 the last time it was the high point in the winter was at 650 beds of icu i think filled in the state we have hospitals no longer taking transfers from outside the area um they are they are taxed and they also have staff members that they lose the quarantines in situations like this so it is uh the hospitals have uh definitely we've met with them throughout the year it is definitely an urgency to last three four weeks compared to what we'd heard before from them any other any other comments or questions oh it was hidden behind my computer i apologize board member campbell no worries um something you mentioned uh board member alan um reminded me of a question that

152i had ahead of the meeting and i appreciated mr hatley you running through some of the legal concepts around mass around our decision making a question had come up about closed meetings and so i wanted to just kind of review with you um the difference for us as board members of what a closed meeting means and what can be discussed in a closed meeting well that's all governed by the missouri sunshine law and the sunshine law generally requires that your meetings and your business be conducted in the open in public but there are 20 some exemptions under the sunshine law that allow you to go into closed session the most common ones are for legal advice to discuss litigation personnel issues student matters that you have to deal with and to go into closed session

153there needs to be a proper motion with the language reciting the basis for it roll call vote and then once in the closed session you're limited to discussing the matters that are within the scope of the closed session motion so for example this mass discussion that we're having this is an open session and it's discussed in the open so that the public can hear all the discussion and be and be up and be listening to to everything that is brought up closed session is different and that's defined by missouri law not by kathy campbell or anybody else right so for instance if the school district were to be sued over some action and you wanted to get legal advice we would probably do that in a closed session but the general discussion tonight about a

154policy measure which is ultimately what this is is an appropriate thing for an open session in an open meeting great thank you appreciate you reviewing that and we have training that helps us know that when we become a board member we go through training that helps us know that difference and and what can be discussed but i think it's important for people um across our district to really understand what that means as well thank you i'm going to jump in real quick joe don't go anywhere so essentially if we were to take this mask discussion into closed session you would call us to the carpet and say uh that's open meeting discussion correct because it generally is unless it happens to affect personnel real estate discussions dollars and and and manipulation of real estate and

155or legal issue correct right basically those three right for instance if someone wanted to real get a detailed legal opinion for instance on on some aspect of it that i felt would be more appropriately addressed in a closed session i i would tell you that there were a few questions tonight that came up that where i was asked legally for instance how long can the order remain in effect and and i think that's simply a matter of what the statutes say and what the courts in st louis are dealing with and i didn't have any problem discussing that and telling you that openly because i think that's important for people to know because there has been in my view anyway some inaccuracies in what's been out there in terms of what that law does what

156it covers and and how it's being applied over on the other side of the state so i think it's important for people to understand what it does and what it doesn't do thanks any other comments or questions on 2.01 board member sparks sorry just for in the spirit of transparency what are the ways that the community get to engage so we kind of just talked about what are the things that we as a board no between a work session board meeting and obviously closed session but what are the ways that the community get to engage with the board when decisions are coming down and then also how is the community told about the things that we're talking about in work session um like this open format and again i know the answer i just think

157that it's good for the spirit of transparency that we talk about i think you're kind of asking yourself the question there um sorry i couldn't help it um so yes so obviously there's there's a link to contact us on the uh on our website and you guys get a lot of those emails i think i had a couple hundred on this topic i think you guys probably had similar because i get uh i'm a different link on there and as well as you get your regular emails so um so we get quite a bit that linda is your board secretary so she gets calls on on your behalf and and portrays things to you as well so yes there is many ways to engage you obviously the meeting notices are how they know when we're

158going to i apologize yes yes so then um you know a work session special session obviously is just a little different in that we don't have public comment um in in a session like this whereas typically we would have public comment that we would allow um as well i think a lot of us probably get a lot of phone calls too in regards to this which is perfectly acceptable um as well preferably not at midnight or something like that but and then the agendas and stuff that everybody are able to get a hold of as well and then linda works on the minutes of it and sends them out to you and posts them off pretty darn quickly after that and if there's any decisions um katie bergen and her department send a mass communication

159out to everyone okay any other questions or comments 2.01 mrs mark can we get a roll call vote please board member allen aye board member campbell aye board member fritzy aye board member hedrick aye vice president marshall aye board member sparks aye president murdoch aye the motion carries unanimously um 2.02 and for board members this is where one of the things that we need to do is make a decision since it's a 30-day county order by us passing 2.01 we need to decide as a group when we will reevaluate the decision um keeping in mind that even though you might see this motion that is here and we can have this discussion if you'd like and we talked about it as uh dr buck vice president marshall and i that it could be evaluated or

160if something should come up sooner even than what is listed in the motion we certainly would have the flexibility to call a special session if necessary to address any all of a sudden kind of immediate information whether that be maybe the cdc jackson county health department that kind of thing changing um either a mandate or guidance principle that's going on so i just want to make sure that you understand that what is here in the motion was kind of our our way of trying to give some stability to the district um and then understanding that if we needed to go a little quicker um even in the future we could so i would entertain a motion on that before we do any other discussion i just wanted to make sure we're on the same page

161with that one i i moved to reevaluate the lsr7 mask mandate prior to the beginning of the second quarter second yeah we have a motion and a second for 2.02 on the reevaluation of the lsr7 mask mandate prior to the second quarter is there any discussion on this item board member campbell i just have a question and i probably should know this off the top of my head i don't october 22nd thank you what was it wait i what was it octo i'm sorry i i shouldn't have cut you out there but i i knew i knew october you were reading my mind that's october 22nd and one of the things by the way just so everyone is aware um that ended up becoming um kind of a break point for us because we have

162a board meeting on october the 21st as well um so we have a couple of board meetings prior to that so if we needed to have any discussion reevaluation that kind of thing um that kind of fell in line with that as well board member sparks did you have anything or did you okay uh board member hedrick so that decision um in terms of impacting what families decide for education for their students how would that us making a decision at that time affect their ability to maybe move to online if we would change mass can you know mandate and there are families that want to continue that so i just want to curious about that question great question so we we at any time probably can accommodate almost every request to move from in person

163to online we might need some staffing and some time sometimes to do that going online in person we kind of came to a spot second semester where we had every single day and it was tough because every day you had a new kid and basically saying hi to and i'm looking at heather kenny as a elementary principal it was really an elementary issue and so we kind of clumped that into every other week i think it was every other monday and we did it based on if we had space so we had a waiting list for a little while then it got cleared out because we got enough space for for kids to come back in person so we started the year last year with about online i think we ended up less than 14

164at the end of the year so we had a migration overall of about six percent more than six percent of our students moving back to in person but we did have some going the opposite direction going in person online um and i think the correct me wrong katie if tomorrow there's going to be an announcement in the morning with whatever decisions made tonight um saying if you want to change your status um we're going to open that back up in a certain way i don't know how so katie will explain it in there and try to ask for that to be done before the end of the day tuesday so then we can make staffing changes so there'll be a chance to change status of in person or online if you will well and i

165think if we need to cl clearly articulate what happens during the rest of the school year as well in that communication katie would agree with you any other questions or comments related to 2.02 mrs smith can we have a roll call vote on this one please board member campbell board member fridgey aye board member hedrick aye vice president marshall aye board member sparks aye board member alan aye president murdoch aye the motion carries unanimously um the remaining three items uh tonight for board members these are going to be just our discussion items and i would ask us obviously to just kind of keep these things relatively brief if possible the first item 3.01 is going back over the uh conference recap some of you had mentioned to hear just a little bit more about some

166of the sessions that people attended but again i would ask that we keep those decisions brief if possible give her a moment okay so um we will i think we'll just work from one end of the diocese to the other um and so um we're obviously primarily talking about the breakout sessions and if you just want to highlight one that you thought was really great that's fine too um but i will let you guys figure that out so board member campbell okay i will highlight the my two favorite sessions that i attended i attended many more and the discussion with my fellow board members dr buck linda was fantastic i appreciated that opportunity as well the two favorite sessions that i went to i attended an unschool session with folks from liberty school district and

167they shared information i think dr hedrick you and i were both there i think i can't remember board member vice president marshall if you were there as well um but this was just a great way to hear how they have changed some things in their alternative they don't have bells they work on project-based focus it's a lot of what i know we've got started and going in our district but this was really just peeling back the layers of sitting at a desk changing classes and just thinking about it completely differently and i just loved the session i thought it was great learning great opportunity for for us to continue to grow and move in ways that were already making moves so it was really exciting to hear about how effective that is with their students

168and their success rate and graduations with those students and and i thought it was great i love what mr campbell is doing here in our district with our alternative school uh sra and i just applaud those folks in liberty as well it was a great session and really kind of got those wheels spinning about how exciting education is from from where we've come from from an education standpoint the other session i went to and dr buck you hit the nail on the head it was health clinic for our students you know things about being a working parent having to take off and take your child to the doctor or having to take off and bring your your sick child home and take them to the doctor all of those things that we can look at

169and do differently for our working parents and for our students for our students that don't have health care opportunities or vaccination opportunities and just really exploring how we can bring health care to our students i think that's really exciting opportunity as well so the more we can do and explore i'm all in thanks appreciate it very much board member hedrick okay um the session that board member campbell just talked about from liberty they called that personalized academic exploration which i thought was an awesome category title and i thought i like that i think i need to write that down so i wrote that out and the other session i attended was the um director of certification for the department of education and he really was really talking about bad news in terms of teacher teacher

170certifications are down and just a number of things um that they're just they're seeing a decline in every area of certification at the state level some of the stuff that he said was very alarming to me um in terms of that but let me i just want to mention a couple of things number one missouri has the lowest starting salary compared to eight eight the eight border states that's just starting salary so one thing you know as we were talking about uh growing your own they did a survey of students in the state and 60 percent of the students in the state who took the survey said they had never heard about being a teacher as a career so i think that's something we need to keep in mind as we're talking about grow your

171own just a couple of other really things that um if i can see with my foggy glasses here and we're talking about the number of teachers leaving the profession and said last less than half of the teachers who finished year five go on to finish go to year six and that like about 52 percent of the teachers hired during 2019 were first-year teachers so i think you know we talked about we've got some real issues to address as a state and um you know one of the things that we talked about was the things that are important to teachers in terms of you know why they consider leaving pay is the number one reason secondly is administrator that they work for and then the third one is the support they feel like they receive so

172again i think that from a teacher perspective those are the things that we ought to be addressing and then finally one of the things that i thought was um very important and mentioned to the gentleman from the state was that you know i think we need to be looking at our state laws in terms of salary schedule structure and benefits to see if there's some things in that area or arena that we can potentially implement uh that would help us attack attract and retain teachers and one of the things that i'll tell you from my doctorate work is that my research that i did because it was all about pay of course but one of the things that one of the article research pieces that i looked at was about national national teacher board certification

173and this research basically indicated that just the process of going through that certification made the person a better teacher even if they didn't get the certification and one of the things i thought of for us is i know we do have a stipend for national national teacher board certification who actually receive it but they were talking about maybe doing a scholarship to help pay for that because it is kind of an expensive thing as the person is going through that but then recognizing also that on our teacher's salary schedule just like we do advanced degrees so i just think that some things that gives us some options to think about as we look to addressing some of the needs in that area and that's all i'll talk about thank you thank you very much dr

174hedrick uh board member alan sounds like we have a team lee summit topic of discussion right there i see dr buck i see dr buck uh taking notes well those two are well well organized i just had some highlights in the uh program um competition competency-based learning i think that was held in the oklahoma room that was about 110 degrees so that was some folks from um liberty again right and i think was that the same i don't think it was the same piece this really centered around three pieces that i could in my notes and um truly every child being proficient and empowered in their own pace so to speak working on a very individualized empowerment program nwea is perfect for that i think right sort of pairing into that growth mindset working and

175adopt adapting to change and then ownership of their own learning right through the student and parents or guardian and family engaged high expectations and a valued member back to our belonging piece of our retreat and truly meeting the student where they are i guess the case study was around drummond elementary in pattonville and that um that was a tremendous discussion the other the other one that really stood out as far as the session goes is the recruiting teachers right teachers recruiting future teachers perspectives growing your own program and ovi from lee summit assistant principal at lee's summit high school was there and i think um i mean each person had energy but you know ovie has some passion and some energy into direction um that i was ready to to change my career um you

176may not accept me in the teaching field but he is um he he's one that um gets it gets this gets the fire lit and it just it it uh yeah i'm not gonna go into detail but took some notes on that i thought that was very intriguing and certainly facing challenges um in our world of education and um boy 2020 and the um hypersensitive uh criticism of educators at times was a little bit um a little bit much so those two stood out it board member marshall thank you president murdoch um the two that stood out to me that i attended was the legislative roundup and that morsel was a kind of a snapshot of what had happened throughout this entire year so kind of just a summary which was very helpful um with

177the notes that they gave us in the presentations that they provided after the roundup was over so that way we could take it back to our constituents and let them know that all of these pieces of legislation throughout the year that had impacted schools this is how they impacted and where do we go from here and like i say in all of the previous meetings three clicks and you can contact your legislator and and state your position one way or the other uh the most impactful one um that i was very excited about was the um the msba equity policy toolkit that was led by uh miss janet tilly there and she is uh beginning the the um construction work of the equity policy from the msba standpoint so being able to participate and interact

178with other board members and superintendents from other districts across the state and helping her to craft that or just beginning to craft that rather so that eventually we will have participated in the equity policy for the entire state because that is very important work so that we can get every student what they need so they can be successful and define what success is to them um in life so that um there will be a lot more coming from msba regarding that topic appreciate it board member fridgey thank you and um janet tilly also asked us if we'd send our rough drafter when we have our rough draft of our equity policy to her too so megan i think said she would do that send that to janet our rough draft of our equity policy so

179yeah i set in on that one too uh i already mentioned at our board meeting on our reports last time but on the grow your own um paul katnick from dussey is that's how you say his name dr buck yes okay he's a friend of yours i think um he said that there's a 40 drop in enrollment in our teacher preparation programs um in the state and um that 11 of our staffs like turnover every year new hires each year and he said that's 8 000 slots in the state of missouri and when you figure that three 3 300 uh graduated and took certification exams in the state of missouri last year and you look at that number that you need to fill versus the number that are coming out of colleges we're really in

180a crisis mode in terms of needing to recruit and to promote education and i'm going to get on my little horse here and on this one i think when we see lots of negativity and people slamming you know our school district and our and some of our our our teachers and and some of the things that happen and just make it and pile on and make it a big deal this does not help us to recruit new teachers and we need to do everything we can to support our students who have would like to become teachers and grow your own is our program that we do have in the district and several districts do have that program and it was in it was great to hear from these districts and one district um it was

181columbia they said that they match each recruit in their schools with a strong positive educator and i love that because that person stays their mentor throughout their program whether that's you know usually a couple of couple of years throughout their program i think that's really important they also said they recruit students who have grit not your straight a students but students who have a gpa of 2.7 or higher and most of those are coming from their first time college for their family those students are so i i really enjoyed listening to these professionals from the different school districts in the first session and then we got down to it brass text and that's when ovi was helping with that second session north kansas city says that they have their students in their uh grow your

182own program work for their before and after school programs their bass programs so they actually hire them to directly work with the kids in their schools so i thought that was a great idea too so i mean i don't i don't know exactly how our grow your own program works i think i'd like to know more about that in our school district more than i could that we just learned from ob's presentation i'd like to know how that spreads out to all of our secondary schools and how we work on recruiting and what our system is and how we keep those kids in the system and support those kids in some school districts even if the student sticks with it they give them like they have a scholarship through their foundation that they give to

183the kids to help them with college so i think that's a great idea so you know just if we could keep working there uh ashley turner's gonna our new grow your own uh teacher by the way it was also kind of nice i was in that session too you had another district that kept referring to um uh kathy nash's her mentor getting her program started so it was kind of fun to see but yes we have our grow your own program we're lining out the details as far as when they go to college because this is the first year of a grow your own program we think within a couple years we'll be the largest in the state we have partners with ucm and we're looking at not only having a paid stipend teacher to

184be a mentor while they go through college but also the university of central missouri is going to provide an alumni so we'll have two mentors during summer school of every summer we're going to try to also have an educational experience where they get paid to work summer school but they'll be partnered with a veteran teacher at the same time and then if they meet certain metrics then um go through the hiring process as well at the end and then one of the things we're looking at too is what our capacity is and could we do some loan forgiveness at the end of that and so in a future date we'll have a work session with you but there also will be a time when we come to you and say are you okay if we

185do a contract with people before they enter college that if they meet certain xyz and they get hired by us and they work two years we forgive their loan for them so that piece is coming but we're very excited about what we're working on i can't thank jeremy um bonus and enough and the ucm crew and and kathy nash who we've partnered with paul katnick we've partnered with columbia school district went through all their processes learned from what their successes were and what their turtles were and i think we're going to hit the ground running here this year and we're pretty excited about ashley turner moving over from west high school over to be the leader of our our grow your own program and we're already one of the leaders of helping our parents become

186teachers we have a program associated with that with ucm and we have a great program there because we know our parents like kids they like the work and they're choosing to stay and move up into the teaching ranks and we have a program where we help them out so dr del sim has been integral in that piece too so thank you to dr dilson kind of mirrors a police academy in higher and how they're going about it right now so thank you board member fritzy board member sparks i'm not gonna bore you with all of the same thing many of us kind of got to be part of the same class um i did get my board certification and then also i was able i am me and kim or delegates for msba and so

187we elected do officers um this year down at that session so that's all i have to say appreciate that um my two items real briefly for the board are the first one uh miss ismart and i were in a session together actually on trafficking um centered around students and the myriad of platforms and online issues that our students face and i think overall the statistics are pretty mind-boggling and not only how often new platforms are coming up that you just can't even keep up with essentially um or how well students are able to hide what they are doing um but on the flip side i think um the stat that kind of caught me was that it takes less than 90 seconds for a predator to access a new essentially target once they have posted

188either pictures a new profile whatever the case may be and so that was something that we participated in and then you know i think the end result was is the presenter was just talking about it just was further proof of the importance of student-teacher relationships and being able to identify any changes that are going on with those particular students the role of the mandatory reporters that school districts play um in some of these different issues and so i think that that was um pretty telling um as they went through that particular session and then um the only other thing i wanted to highlight for all of you and i know i've told you guys this numerous times now i did at the board president's workshop as people were describing what was going on in their

189districts throughout all of last year i just want to echo to all of you we were not alone in the i mean i i and i do think that's important that we were not alone in the issues that we faced um in the divisiveness of one topic versus another in terms of having fifty percent wanting one thing fifty percent wanting another um we certainly were not alone in that and i think ultimately it was interesting because obviously you know that workshop was um quite honestly very diverse in terms of urban suburban and rural districts that participated in that and i think the the overriding theme was is that it would have been nice at a state level to have gotten a little more backing from our legislature on some issues and that came from almost

190every single district when we were kind of talking about some of those things and then the other thing that kind of came out from it was people talking actually as we kind of started to predict this year and it was interesting because you know i hadn't met a lot of those people and we now have a group of about 45 of us that kind of message back and forth and i will tell you the issue we are going through tonight many districts are going through the exact same issue so um i just think that it's important to understand that this is not um localized um here to us and i think that that we need to remind ourselves sometimes of that so okay um we are going to go on to 3.02 this is the

191legal rfp and um i just want to give the board um a quick update here and having talked with vice president marshall and dr buck this has kind of turned more into a process item but i'm happy to answer any questions or if you guys want to discuss this after hearing from several of you in regards to the legal rfp um we kind of made the decision that we're going to hit the brakes just a little bit here um and instead of approving one general counsel essentially coming up that instead what we're going to do and i think what is supported by the board is we can approve an entire suite of firms and that could be used by the district but that would allow us as a board to then bring those same firms

192in and ask them questions those will be the top four scoring firms from the rfp and we can do that in early to mid september and bring each one of those firms in and ask some questions that are a little bit more specific to the needs of the seven of us and some of the issues that arise for us as a board and then we can make a decision as to who we would like to be our legal counsel at the september board meeting so that's kind of the update on on that it still would give the leeway to administration when they have some of those specialty needs to seek out any of those firms i think that's what we kind of agreed upon right dr buck is that still gives that flexibility to staff

193when they need specialties from any of those firms that we would approve but then gives us a little bit more insight in and allows us to ask those questions of those firms that we might have as board members so if you have questions about that let me know or if you have a thought um but that's kind of the the process that we're going to follow here for 3.02 anybody have any thoughts or questions on that or do we sum it up okay or board member sparks sorry i just want to make sure that i'm clear that we are not going to make a decision even on the sweep until after we're able to meet and interview these firms we will make a decision on the suite of firms actually before so that then we

194can interview then we can actually sit down with all four of them i'm just going to just be very open i personally don't feel comfortable with approving a sweep of the four firms until actually i'm given the opportunity to meet with them i just feel with it being an attorney or a firm that would be representing the board i feel like the board should have probably had a little bit more access to these firms prior to making a decision and again that's just my personal opinion okay and i and i think i would probably um just offer to that that um you know in terms of selecting the firms or with when we select anything in this particular case that that rfp process was extensive um and that it included a large group of people

195who will have to access those services as well so in this particular case we would still have the opportunity to select one of those firms for us and have this kind of a similar um question uh an answer period with those particular firms uh i'm going to kind of go in an order here so board member campbell i think maybe just to clarify because so let me ask this question so we went through the rfp process we have this group of firms i think what i'm hearing you say is that for questions that may come from dr buck or from his team within the district we're saying any of these firms would be open for that work the uh to me a separate bucket is a firm that will work with us and guide us

196as board members did i get that right that's that's correct we really wanted to make sure that we were honoring that rfp process with how it was scored by those team members to make sure that um the firms that were those top four scoring firms would at least have an opportunity if administration wanted to use their firms for any work that they would have that that opportunity okay thanks for clarifying and then the the purpose of being able for us to ask questions will help us have a more informed vote when we do vote on the firm that's going to represent us us correct the board attorney and that correct if i'm wrong that interviewing process or not interviewing for us excuse me questioning process would be a closed session i believe that it would

197be a special closed session i believe is is what we were told that it could be okay so i think that was probably it sounded just from the questions it sounded like that there was a bit of confusion on what we were doing and what order we were doing it in so that's just allowing us the chance to ask those questions to help us vote on which firm we want to represent the board that's correct yes uh-huh sorry just to clarify then that suite for our administration to use we're going to we're going that's going to be on our august agenda is that correct and then we would interview the firms sometime in september that would represent the board and we would make that decision for the board's representation at the september board meeting and

198well actually kind of um we can sorry no no i'm just trying to understand no it's okay from a process standpoint we could we can approve those top four scoring firms in the august meeting we can ask the questions of the firms in that special closed session we would not necessarily have to vote on who's going to be our board council because we'd already have approved all of those firms for use within our district now if we want as a public facing thing and to say hey yeah this is who it's going to be and we want to put that out into the public hey this is who we selected we absolutely could do that in the september meeting but since we've already approved all the firms we could just choose them let them know

199hey we're going forward with you as the general counsel for the board uh-huh board member fritzy yeah just for clarification because some people are probably wondering why would they need four different firms to do this so it's kind of a two-pronged question what departments were represented on the rfp team that would use these attorneys so that we can get an idea of what situations we would use different attorneys for you know what i'm saying because i know like special education law there's certain certain firms who are really um experts on special ed law so you would use them for sped issues and then certain firms would be different for like for construction issues correct whatever yeah so um on the rfp team and if i mess this up you can feel free to correct me

200we had representation from operations we had representation from special education we had representation from human resources um we had representation from business services um i was on on the team as well um dr barger was on the team and dr hill was on the team um as well so um so we had a did i miss anybody i'm sorry well i got her from operations so you know i could call you out by name if you need me to so um but uh so we had we had a wide array and those typically are the departments that use the services um the most yeah i got her oh yeah yeah business purchasing distribution sorry so all right yeah i just wanted to make sure that everybody was out there in tv land was clear that

201you you that you might use four different firms because they are experts at different things yes and we already have a couple of these firms that we're using currently so i think that that's right to keep in mind thanks no problem board member alan does the um say we get down to this list of four does that prevent us from using other firms who may not have you know been able to respond to this rfp process if we needed somebody in the area of whatever expertise we would come to you and ask for approval first so that happened this year when there was a conflict of interest for one of our approved law firm and thus we used a local law firm for that small item so we came to you and asked permission to

202add that for that limited scope okay maybe on an individualized basis at that point yeah um as well i don't want to dismiss obviously an rfp process that is working with many many situations and i may have been one that sent you a note along the way that said it'd be nice to um definitely have differentiation of the firm that's representing the board and we have clear identification of whose responsibilities are who whose or butchered that english i'm sure um so i appreciate the fact that we're able to go through that step and understand what it means i have some knowing that this was going to be the discussion i have some questions already so awesome thank you yes in september thanks it's like i can't help you with that any other questions or comments

203related to this legal rfp item okay we're going to need to rescue joe to bring him back in please if we can for the final item of this evening which is going to be a very brief um discussion about some sunshine law issues and requests that we have gotten so we'll give joe just a quick moment to get back in here hopefully he will run okay so um with 3.03 mr hatley we're going to actually start with you so you don't even have to sit down see we're just trying to help out there you go um so i was just filling in the board members so if you could kind of start us off just a little bit with um kind of the the sunshine law and i know you went over it with some

204of the closed stuff but what it is um and then go over just a little bit about some of the recent decisions associated with it and in relation to some of the requests that we have gotten and then we'll talk about as a board kind of what we need to decide sure um the missouri supreme court decided a case in late june that is having some ramifications for school districts here and and really government bodies all over the state up to that time there was some question if somebody submits a sunshine law request and it captures 10 000 documents and those a lot of times we'll get email requests which are the kind of the prime example and sometimes those emails will include there will be some confidential emails that may involve a student or

205personnel issue and they may be perfectly innocuous it would be public records so somebody has to sit down and go through those emails to decide what is exempt under the sunshine law a student record for instance and what is not and and that's not always cheap so there was a lot of discussion and debate as to whether a public body could charge the person who's made the request for the cost of doing that and it was an open issue under the sunshine law and and there was one case that suggested maybe they could but this case involved the governor's office and the supreme court concluded that no those costs could not be passed through under their interpretation of the sunshine law what we can charge for and i'll use my email example again because that's

206one that we're currently dealing with is for instance if we get a request for emails somebody in the technology department has to run that search we can charge for that person's cost we got another another request recently for some lesson plans that were actually going to require a survey of every teacher in the district as that as that request was written and it was going to require each teacher to do a search of their lesson plans written documents and we came up with an estimate we could charge for that so someone searching for documents or someone having to pull that information off the technology resources can be passed through but the process of sitting down and deciding what can and cannot be produced under the sunshine law could not be charged through and and that

207can be very very expensive um and and we've had a recent request and i don't want to go into a whole lot detail on it but it asked for a search of the entire email system of the district in 119 terms and we were trying to figure out exactly how to wrestle with this and and so i i suggested that let's run a search just on one of those terms and see how many hits it is and one of those terms was equity so let's let's run a search on equity we got over 700 000 emails based on that request and it occurred to us that there are going to be a lot of confidential closed emails in that for instance dr barger's former title included the term equity that might be in her email

208signature dr barger deals with some highly confidential student issues so we can't just turn over every email that has the word equity in it somebody has to go through that and that somebody unfortunately usually is ms ismart so ms ismert sat down and tried to figure out how long it would take her to go through 700 000 emails along with doing the rest of her work and she concluded that optimistically if she was able to go through what about 500 a day it would take her about eight years just for that one search the other option is to just hire out and have someone do that and i did some rough math on this and i think you're probably looking at a cost of somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand dollars for someone to

209do the search and review of just the emails hitting that one term we also looked on that in that request can we string together all these search terms in one search so that we only have to do this once and and we don't have the ability to do that apparently according to to the technology department so so that really presents presents you and a lot of other school districts with a dilemma because a lot of school districts are getting hit with some what i think are coordinated sunshine law requests uh revolving around some of the hot topics that that come before the board every month and and it's getting to be a burden and the question arises you know can you do anything about that i'd looked into this a while back and for another

210client and concluded that potentially there's a hancock amendment problem with this interpretation of the sunshine law the hancock amendment is something that missouri adopted back in the 80s i believe that essentially one of the things it does is it prohibits the state government from imposing unfunded mandates on local governments like school district cities and counties hancock amendment wasn't an issue in the supreme court case because it involved the governor's office but it would be an issue in a sunshine law case involving a school district a city or a county i've talked with msba talked with an attorney for the missouri municipalities league and we all agree that there is a potential hancock amendment violation if you as a school board had to pay a hundred thousand dollars to pay someone to go through these emails

211the the problem with the sunshine law in missouri is that it has no check there's no mechanism under which you can stop someone from simply abusing the system and and this decision simply makes that works uh in kansas for instance under kansas open records law you can make a determination that someone's making a request in bad faith uh for abu you know abusing the process and and simply refuse to honor it you have to prove that that's their purpose and and i've had to do that a couple times but it's pretty rare because most of the requests are in good faith but i'm my concern is that folks are going to see this opinion and make requests not necessarily in good faith but simply as a way to impose a burden on you or other

212school districts and i guess the question arises you know at what point do [Music] we decide okay this is one we're going to push back on uh and and i know we're communicating with the person who submitted this request but uh obviously if you multiply that cost times 119 terms and there may be ways that you filter it to get that down a little bit but you're still talking about a tremendous amount of money and at some point we have to make an effort to push back and at least test out whether the hancock amendment permits this because there are some decisions i think would support the argument that that this is a violation of the hancock amendment is there has there been anything in it from a from a school district perspective across the

213region in terms of what is considered a reasonable or unreasonable request like has there been any threshold essentially set that you know of even even on the kansas side yeah um well we've not we've never really had to deal with that before because before we we felt that the law might allow those charges to be passed through so you would say here's what this is going to cost and the person would say okay well that's not really what i'm i'm going for and a lot of times with with people you can you can communicate with them i'm dealing with this with another client right now where we go back to the person we think it's in good faith they simply ask for more than they really thought they were asking for you communicate with them

214and say look here's what's going to be involved oh i didn't know that let me ratchet it back and and here's what i'm really looking for you can communicate and work with them in my sense as long as people are willing to do that with you in good faith if you say look this is an astronomical cost tell us what you're really searching for we'll try to find that um you can work with them but short answer your question we've never really had to deal with it because we've never had this interpretation of law that we've had to deal with into what we're dealing with now we were always before able to push back and ask for those review costs and now we're being told we can't do that other questions for mr hatley associated

215uh with this board member alan thank you sir uh joe thanks for being here and thanks for um enlightening us a little bit on this issue i know we talked about it briefly uh before so email was sent in requesting that sunshine 119 terms one of those terms was equity right generated 700 000 emails because it's not just board emails it's student emails it's all of the vendor emails it's all of it right so one term seven hundred thousand emails thought that that might be parts down to a hundred thousand still that takes lend to eight years or we hire somebody to do that that's a hundred thousand dollars if i'm not mistaken a hundred thousand dollars of time and cost and effort would be in in fact taxpayer money which would be the highest

216and best use of taxpayer money i'm sure for an individual's request for a sunshine or individual sunshine request we're doling out a hundred thousand dollars for somebody's cheap thrill yeah pretty much um so that takes down 118 terms so 118 terms i don't know throw out some of those terms that were thrown in there just so we have an idea of the futility of what this might actually result in and one was i know one was critical race theory crt of course yes racism racism okay um equality equality transgender i think was thrown in they're all all the hot buttons today right so pretty much every hot button issue yeah you all have to deal with all right so the question becomes you know the seven of us may not be the ones to stand

217in the way it may be somebody out there hearing this listening to this going wait a minute whoa so linda is murder whomever is going to be assigned the task of drilling down on these things and her highest and best use of time of course is to parse through 700 000 emails because she has nothing else to do okay well hopefully there'll be some folks out there saying totally ridiculous let's talk this through to some bodies that be in jefferson city possibly my hometown that might have some sense okay thank you sir yeah one thing i'll point out is that the legislature this year did pass an amendment to the sunshine law that allowed for the redaction of certain information i believe if people write to their legislator school board member whatever and you know

218and that's sort of what i would call a government-friendly amendment and the governor vetoed that so we you know if we can't get it through the legislative process you know i think i think going through the courts is the only way to try to get some relief here board member hedrick so in the sunshine law is there any provision that would mandate or dictate the length of time that the district would have to respond to a sunshine law request you you've also hit on another conundrum because generally we're supposed to respond within three days and and normally if something's fairly discreet a lot of times we can actually get the records out within that time or at least tell someone we will have this to you within a week or you know some some reasonable

219period of time so that's the that's the conundrum you know the sunshine law wants us to get these records out fairly promptly to people if they're open but if the process of deciding what they get is so involved they don't get the records for a long time so you know the argument i used to make was if we can pass this cost through we can hire temporary staff to come in and give them instructions and get you the records you can either get them fast or you can get them cheap but you can't get both well i was just going to say i think you know based on the intent of the sunshine law probably um responding in eight years wouldn't be satisfactory so we would probably have to go the other option to do

220whatever we could to hire people so it would likely be more than a hundred thousand dollars for the one term so you know of those 119 that's only 12 million dollars that we would waste having somebody review email so you know in in that term if you put it in in that kind of sense to me it's like this this request is ridiculous and we ought to push back board member marshall just the question for clarification mr hatley so when responding to the sunshine request for the specific terms that were asked if um a constituent or someone in the community stakeholder whichever sends us an email that has those terms in there or anybody in the district sends them an email when those emails you know given that they're sanitized and all of that are

221turned over to whoever it is that's requesting those emails is the information of the person who sent it to us also given to that requester yes we we actually looked into this about a year ago or two years ago because the school district gotten a sunshine law request for some board member emails emails to board members and at that time the governor was taking the position that communications like that to the governor's office he could redact out the name of the person who sent it and there's actually some you know some theory that you're protecting people's right to petition the government under the first amendment and if you expose that information you're opening them up to harassment so rather than fight that we actually ask for the attorney general to give us some guidance on

222that and the attorney general said well even though we're taking that one position in court for the governor no you shouldn't do that so what we've had to do whenever we get requests like that is we do have to provide include the name and email address of the person who's made the request or who sent you an email thank you member uh campbell i just want to clarify a little bit because the sunshine law you know we've discussed it tonight no one in this conversation is saying that there is anything bad with the sunshine law we all respect and appreciate that that law and and what it encompasses what what we're really talking about is a good faith request versus just a cumbersome request to that that is not in good faith is that kind

223of kind of clarifying that a little bit more and i don't necessarily mean to impugn the motives of anyone who makes a request they may have a legitimate request for asking for legitimate reason rather for asking for that but when the cost of that is so exorbitant and we're looking at theoretically having no choice but to pay that or push back or simply refuse to honor it and wait to be sued that's the dilemma we're under no it's uh ms ismart i think handles quite a few such requests and they never even come to my attention or when she's able to handle those because most of them are non-controversial but you get one like this and even if the person is subjectively acting in good faith it comes at a tremendous cost for the district

224and highlighting board member allen's point about we are stewards of taxpayer dollars and that's really a driving force in that cost because when when we look at a lot of decisions that we make as a board it's a matter of spending taxpayer dollars for the education of our students and yeah and so that's really a driving force here right thank you board member sparks so dr buck with the information that um legal have just given us and would this mean for our district if we if this type of behavior was allowed that like our deaf and hard of hearing programs special education our sports programs that possibly if this behavior was allowed that we would then lose we could we were basically chancing of losing these services for our district it puts everything in in

225in play yes just give you an example giving one step to teachers and staff it's just shy of 2800 employees that cost a little over 4 million dollars so that's all we were able to give last year so if you get 10 12 million i don't know what number dr hedrick threw out there you're talking about freezing salaries and and looking at cutting programs so i just want to make sure so you know dr hendrick gave um from what she learned in msba she talked about how a lot of teachers are complaining already about their salaries and that's why they don't want to go into the field of education so that's also us even going into risk of not even having teachers to teach our students if we can't pay for them about i don't

226have the exact number 80 to 85 percent of our budget is salary and benefits thank you board member hedrick yeah just a quick question um were you able to find or in your conversation with the msba or any other attorneys any case law in regards to a supreme court decision that would have an impact on hancock that would there be some precedent for that or yeah there have been several cases and they can sometimes be confusing because but where local governments have pushed back one example was a law that required i think local sheriff's departments to conduct background checks on people seeking concealed weapons permits and the sheriff said that that cost us money and you're telling us we have to do that but you're not funding it and they said that that could be

227a sunshine law violation um it gets a little complicated because it depends upon whether the obligation to do something was in effect before hancock was passed the sunshine law has been in effect for a little bit before that but the obligation to separate the information out came after hancock and that's what the supreme court says is in my view the linchpin we're telling you government you have the obligation to do that and since there's nothing in the statute that says the person asking for it has to pay you have to pay for that and that happened after hancock and that's usually where the cases come down if the legislature imposes a cost on local government after hancock that is when you'll typically have a hancock violation and and there have been supreme court cases finding

228hancock violations arising from unfunded mandates so we would simply fit this one into that and say this is too much more like this case than the ones where you've said it's not remember fridgey yeah just a quick one um mr hatley so what i'm understanding if i'm wrong please correct me so what i'm understanding is so basically under the current sunshine law guidelines our parents our students our patrons our staff anyone who emails us or their administrators or whomever does not even yeah student to student does not really cannot have an expectation of privacy you've actually hit on the problem it depends on what the email says i'll give you an example if if a patron were to write to you and say i'm opposed to masking i think that's a bad idea here's why

229i think it's a bad idea that's probably an open record but if they said my child has xyz condition i think this is terrible and this is the effect it's going to have on my child i would say that's a closed record because that's providing personal information about their child that's the conundrum someone has to look at the email to decide which bucket it goes into and therefore whether they have privacy interest that that are are not overridden by the sunshine law thank you one thing i'll add there there is some rather sophisticated software you can you can acquire to try to win some of these emails down we use it for big document cases but even there you're you have to pay usually a storage cost for an email cert request like this you're

230talking tens of thousands of dollars a month you may get that 700 000 emails down to 100 000 or 200 000 depending on how it filters them but somebody still has to look at that so it may not be 12 million dollars it may only be 4 million dollars 5 million but it's still expensive any other questions or comments on this one i think we i think what we'll do um mr hatley is just we just need to continue to communicate uh on this issue um going forward and then if there's a true legal opinion then we can deal with that as a board as we as we go forward in these next couple of meetings even in the august meeting if we needed to so thank you very much i appreciate it okay uh

231three hours and 20 minutes we did it um so uh i do believe this concludes what no there's more right i was i was gonna get i was gonna let let them know that they could go i apologize sorry sorry yeah so this does conclude the work session we'll go back to um integrity to do a motion to go into closed real quick okay thank you all very much you