BOE Meeting - August 11, 2021

001good evening it is 7 00 pm we will begin the meeting i will call the meeting to order before we rise for the pledge i would like to read a statement welcome everybody to the rockwood board of education meeting we would like to thank the administrative team and all the staff and students at marquette high school for being gracious hosts for our meeting this evening thank you also to the ambassadors who are here from schools in the marquette quadrant to assist with greeting and signing in our guests the purpose of this meeting is to conduct the business of the district hear reports about our progress and listen to the community on important issues the rockwood board of education is committed to the safety and security of all of our students staff parents and patrons to

002that end we are requiring face coverings and social distancing at our meeting tonight your cooperation is appreciated in advance we have reports to consider in business to conduct that are critical to the functioning of our school district we want to remind all of our visitors that we expect the audience to remain civil and respectful at all times as the board conducts its business calling out verbal aggressiveness inappropriate language or name calling is not acceptable if the meeting becomes unruly the board may take a recess until such time the audience is appropriate if inappropriate behavior continues by individuals they may be asked to leave the meeting if the audience becomes so inappropriate in their behavior that we cannot conduct our business the board reserves the right to adjourn the meeting we want reports presented in the

003comments of everyone who is here to speak we appreciate your cooperation and that you took the time to attend tonight's meeting please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice could i please have a motion to approve the agenda for tonight's meeting [Music] motion and a second any discussion yes i would like to move 7.0 consent agenda items to 5.0 and adjust the agenda agenda accordingly i'm making a motion to move 7.0 consent agenda items to 5.0 okay i think we have to wait on that motion until we get down to that section if i'm cool okay so hang on one second so right now just a motion

004to approve the agenda as submitted and we have a motion in a second all those in favor please say aye aye anyone opposed and that passes next could i have a motion to approve the board of education meeting minutes for july 21 2021. motion in a second any discussion all those in favor please say aye anyone opposed and that passes and next could i have a motion to approve board of education meeting minutes for july [Music] motion in a second all those in favor please say aye anyone opposed that passes i would like to make a motion to move 7.0 consent agenda items to 5.0 and adjust the agenda accordingly so the motion has been made to move 7.0 consent agenda items to 5.0 and adjust the agenda accordingly would anyone like to make that

005motion or seconded so she's asking to move the consent agenda items up right now so we approve the business of the meeting right now that will just put patreon comments right after consent oh my gosh my point is i wanted to remove 7.14 after we do this part yeah we can still do that yes he does that's my question yes we're not approving are we not no this is just moving it so we can discuss the consent yep so we still need a second a second anyone want to second the motion to move consent agenda items to 5.0 and adjust the agenda accordingly okay so the motion is to move 7.0 consent agenda items to 5.0 and adjust the agenda accordingly all those in favor please say aye aye anyone opposed all right there's one

006no thank you that passes all right so now we will do consent agenda items could i have a motion to approve the consent agenda items as submitted [Music] motion and a second to any discussion yes i would like to make a motion to table consent agenda item 7.14 for further discussion at a later date okay so motion two table consent agenda item 7.14 for further discussion at another time has a motion and a second all those in favor please say aye anyone opposed and that passes so any other discussion within these consent agenda items [Music] by artist kimberly and once again thousands of rockets on high school client series 375.00 with the program's replacement security person [Music] awesome so the motion is to approve the consent agenda items as submitted aside from the one that

007we pulled all those in favor or please say aye anyone opposed and that passes all right now we will begin reading comments i'm going to read a statement about patreon comments before we get started during patron comments citizens may address the board of education concerning issues related to the school district each speaker will be limited to three minutes when your time is up your time is up please note that at the board's discretion the board or superintendent may respond immediately to an issue raised during patron comments for clarification however our general practice is to respond to the comment at a later time via a phone call or written message if a response is needed we have a stand with microphones ready so both the board and the audience may hear the patron comments clearly as

008a reminder masks are required in our buildings and should remain on even when you are speaking the board appreciates that you have taken the time to come this evening and we value both your input and your perspective once your remarks are over please exit to your right i would like to remind everyone that we expect that you will remain civil and respectful in your remarks and if anyone becomes disruptive we reserve the right to cut those three minutes short verbally aggressive language and vulgarity in any form is not acceptable whether you are reading someone else's remarks or they are your own it will not be tolerated for your convenience our three minute time clock is ready the first speaker tonight is katie becker with eric becker as our second speaker to the back please come

009down better okay there we go my husband's actually going to um came up here to talk with me so i don't know if we can adjust the clock i actually am not ready to start yet till five minutes we're not doing any five minute adjustments tonight but you may both speak separately for three minutes i told her that they could do five because it's posted on the agenda that way okay so the data we see illustrates children do not play a significant role in the transfer of covid there are statistically almost a zero percent chance of an otherwise healthy child suffering sever severe illness and death from contracting covet 19. from february 2020 to july 28 2021 the cdc reports that 358 children have died from or with covid of those children the vast majority

010had tragic and substantial pre-existing conditions like cancer 358 of the roughly 74.2 million miners currently living in the u.s that actually makes the death rate of covet for minors 0.001 zero zero zero four eight two to further put these numbers into perspective during the 2019 and 2020 cold and flu season there were 199 reported deaths of minor miners from influenza though the cdc estimates the actual number to be 434. utilizing the number of 199 children statistically a child is 63 percent more likely to die from influenza than covid do we did we mask our kids during cold and flu season do we separate them from their peers daily at school do we stop them singing in music class and other mitigations like this covet 19 much like the seasonal flu is a respiratory virus constantly

011mutating as is the the nature of these viruses just like influenza covet is here to stay for good and scientifically improbable to eradicate adults in our school have the option to take multiple different vaccines wear as many masks as the as they please or merely take care of their immune system in an effort to protect themselves why are we putting the burden of quote protecting adults on our children furthermore the hypocrisy of seeing administrators from all over missouri with no masks on at the deci event early in august is shameful at best the real pandemic among our youth is the mental health crisis we are seeing the stunting of their development and the significant academic regression in the rockwood school district we have roughly 21 000 kids spanning 31 schools each with their own medical

012emotional academic and social needs according to district details in the 2019 and 2020 school year 311 children had ieps i was not able to obtain the data on 504 numbers how many of these 21 000 kids 21 000 students had speech language and communication delays how many are hearing impaired how many have a processing disorder how many have anxiety trauma or asthma do you even know as the board how are you quantifying this wearing a mask has dire consequences for these students physical emotional and social health how many children in rockwood committed tried to commit suicide or had suicidal ideation as a result of being forced to wear masks in schools and other dehumanizing and isolating mitigations we need the data how is this board quantifying all of this damage when will this end what

013is the goal post are these children medical are these children's medical and emotional needs even a consideration you don't understand the ramifications for masking them you don't you have no studies you have nothing on it mr khan states in the last failed st louis county mass mandate and i quote persons who are deaf or hard of hearing or someone who is communicating with a person who is deaf or hard of hearing where the mouth is essential for communication are exempt from mask wearing rockwood has not even offered such exemptions your mandate is in direct violation of the american with disabilities act by discriminating against children with disabilities that mask wearing is detrimental to the district has opened itself up to liability and litigation you do not know my children you do not know their uh

014medical and emotional and health history you do not know the effects masking them eight hours a day five days a week 36 weeks a year will have and has had on their health their development and their academics you are experimenting on our children you are taking away their bodily autonomy you are harming students in the rockwood school district you are stunting their development you are mandating a medical device be worn with zero zero data showing they are safe and effective long term where there is risk there must be choice where there is a medical decision to be made for a minor there must be informed consent by their parent or guardian you are neither it is neither your job nor this um nor this mathematic nor does your right to do so and supersede parental

015rights to make medical decisions for our children i do not co-parent with you none of you are qualified to make these decisions for my children defer to us the parents know we are looking at data know where you're looking at statistics we are looking at reading at peer-reviewed journals we are informed you are um we are consulting with our physicians mask optional is the only answer to this thank you [Applause] our next speaker is becky becky heine with marjorie rolling next good evening tonight i am not going to share my opinions regarding public health and masking i obviously have them i am a very fortunate survivor of a very rare colon cancer i rely on my medical experts to help guide me with those decisions i'm here for a very specific reason and i want

016to express gratitude for the school board over my 13 years of having students in rockwood i have developed a great appreciation for how hard our school board members work i've seen you at elementary schools music events sporting events tons and tons of events i also remember how surprised i was many years ago when i learned that the positions that you campaigned for or run for and that you guys have won don't hold a salary your salary is zero you are unpaid for the time that you donate your position requires you to donate hours and hours of your time to this district and to our kids and i thank you for that the greatest commodity in this world is time and i appreciate your willingness to give it in service to others i have heard of

017nightmare scenarios where entire school boards resign after this past 18 months i can certainly understand that i appreciate the hard work that goes into making decisions that are nearly impossible i have two kids and guiding them along with my own health concerns as guided by my doctors it's been terrible through this pandemic and it's it's awful i only have two kids you guys make decisions for 22 000 kids and i know that cannot be easy i want to simply thank you for giving us your time if i could i would recommend tripling your salaries but zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero my prayers and blessings go to all of you to all of our rockwood staff our teachers every single employee to every family in the school district for a decent school year

018and i wish you the best i have 46 seconds left so i think i'll go ahead and play some poke tunes on my harmonica to use it up but then you probably would i'll get up and leave so never mind thank you [Applause] our next speaker is marjorie rowling and the speaker after that is amy ryan hello oh no better okay first i want to thank the board for listening to the medical experts and requiring mass for all second i would like to say that i'm disappointed in um many of the audience here tonight who choose to have their masks on their chin not on at all under their nose when currently the policy is that masks are required in the building and out of respect for the board the parents the medically fragile i

019would just ask what you think you're trying to accomplish and really if that's the lesson that you want to be teaching the children of the district the role right now is masks and so if you're not then i honestly don't think that you should be um allowed to be in this building in this room if you don't have a mask on masks work cloth masks are imperfect and that is why we need everyone to wear them so that our children can attend school mass do not cause psychological harm talk to the kids they know do they like masks can this displease the interruption okay i was going to say thank you to the board and i was told that there's going to be no tolerance for heckling and mass we're going to be enforced and

020i'm kind of done i have a high risk child who actually didn't start out high risk he started out perfectly healthy until he got a virus called rsv which is also going up around right now he ended up in the hospital after he came home from the hospital he who had never had a medical problem in his life suddenly needed six different medications round-the-clock breathing treatments to help him breathe and now with this delta variant that is what is happening to some kids they are developing medical conditions that they did not have before these medical conditions asthma and other breathing difficulties are hard on kids on families and i just wouldn't want anyone else to have to go through that the reason why doctors in this area want kids wearing masks is because they're worried

021about hospital capacity as well and as rockwood is in the county and there are finite number of beds i honestly think that we do need to be concerned about that if you think that oh i'm not going to get covet and get into the icu a lot of people um thought that until they ended up and their last wish before they were intubated was to tell other people to get vaccinated when my child was born it was a perfectly normal birth with a midwife in a hospital and all of a sudden a million things went wrong at once and there was a medical team of the nicu and surgeons and anesthesiologists it took ten people to deliver him in six minutes they said if it had taken two minutes longer he wouldn't be here today

022and so medical capacity is important and it's something everybody should think about thank you our next speaker is amy ryan with alan loretta after hello my name is amy ryan i want to first express that i am not an actor or placed as a democratic operative i am part of community for over 18 years i have placed my own political ambitions on hold indefinitely to help out our hospitals before the surge and this community i want to first say this publicly to everyone in this room i am incredibly sorry that i chose aside i am incredibly sorry that i have divided i was part of the division of this community we have come to a point where now winning is the goal it is not about covert it is not about safety it is about

023winning from our own uncertainty since last summer there are people who want to use this pandemic we know there are politicians out there that wants to destroy this community for their political power they want to sow division they want to sow skepticism within our community where we can't even find a good source anymore without questioning it there are some within our community right now creating podcasts charging fees for speaking engagements all from our chaos in this room a couple of months ago i spoke to a person on the other side where we had a two-hour discussion about our views did we agree 100 no but we came to an understanding that we want the best for our children we all do in this room we all want the best for our kids both sides want

024to share the safety of our kids we just have different approaches to do it when i went to my oldest child for orientation the parents and the kids did not talk about masks you know what we talked about how we couldn't unlock a lock on the lockers it took me five minutes it was 30 years since i've been to a locker we were so frustrated and the moms that i was with we were so frustrated but we moved on so what is the resolution i don't know i don't know but i am reaching out with an olive branch and to the board whatever decisions you're going to make none of us will be happy so you have to base it on the local physicians and the local scientists and i am happy to do that

025as a scientist thank you so much our next speaker is alan loretta with jill elder after that hello thank you very much um so i gotta say this is more nerve-wracking than i would have anticipated but i've never done this before so i started watching some of the videos that have happened and i'm going to start by saying i am looking at each and every one of you at the moment those of you who i agree with those of you who i haven't agreed with and much like from the previous speakers i'd just like to say thank you thank you for the efforts that you put in to try to keep our community safe thank you for the efforts that you put in to try to make our community inclusive growing and a model for

026what we should be in st louis and in the region they'd like to say i'm sorry on behalf of what i would consider this island majority who believes in you and who trusts you but is too afraid to come up here amongst all the chaos that is taking place no one wants to wear a mask no one's in favor of having to wear mass but the reality is as a christian as a catholic jesus said whatever you do to the least of my children you do unto me we need to ensure that we are trying to do what jesus would want us to do and protect our children in whatever means possible secondly i brought this up i was using this to sort of uh relax a little bit rubik's cube you can see i

027accomplished the green side i like green my wife's irish she's go pro green and whatnot i could say i'm done i could say i've achieved what i want to achieve but if you turn it around you can see much of the rest of the cube is a mess now i can't in the time left turn this into a completely solid recreated rubik's cube but if i can after time look at it look at all the angles twist it around see what happens when i make changes understand a different perspectives and create something that completes the cube this is what we need you to continue to teach our kids in the schools we don't need we are not against green we're not against blue we're not against white we're not against any of the colors we

028need to understand the total perspective because as a community our jobs companies are looking for diver people who have a diverse background who can bring diverse perspectives to the workforce because companies that do so are eight times more likely to achieve their financial goals they're eight times more likely to grow and that's what we need you to do help our kids for our community to build kids that will track jobs into our area thank you very much for your time our next speaker is jill elder with rachel wood after hi my husband ron and i have three children our oldest graduated from rockwood summit just this spring our middle child will be a sophomore this earth fall and our youngest will be a seventh grader i would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to

029you the board for your commitment to doing what is in the best interests of the children of the rockwood school district the gifts of your time talent and your dedication to discerning and pursuing the common good are very much appreciated particularly in the light of the adversity that you've been facing i thank you i also stand behind your efforts to protect our children teachers families and community members by following the cdc recommendation that must be worn in school i'm a teacher in another st louis county public school district and i would like to share a little bit of my experience with masks in school i teach in a multi-age preschool classroom with children aged three four and five my school district last year required maths for all children ages five and up the majority of

030my children were under the age of five but every child in my class wore a mask every day in the classroom and on the playground eating and napping were the only exceptions we accomplished quite a bit with our masks on we read we rhymed we wrote we counted we drew we created we sang we danced we ran we climbed we tried to skip we shared we laughed we played we pretended we built and erupted volcanoes we germinated seeds seeds and grew green bean plants we explored the five senses including smell and taste all of this we did while wearing masks my students were social engaged and happy the number of complaints i got from wearing masks from my three four and five-year-olds last year zero not one if you've ever met a three-year-old you know

031they don't pull punches when they're unhappy about something mass allowed us to stay in school which is where these kids needed to be trust me zooming with preschoolers is quite an experience one i wouldn't wish on most people we had a tremendously successful in-person school year in masks because of masks if you ask my students what they remember about preschool this past year i promise you mass will not be high on their list if preschoolers can do their part to protect all of us by wearing masks with so little consequence so can the rest of us [Applause] the next speech speaker is rachel wood with johanna bodine next after her the board's recent actions have shown that speaking to them is a waste of time so my comments are directed to rockwood parents the parents

032who feel stuck the safest thing for you and your children is to pull them out of brockwood but for those who can't for financial or legal reasons i understand your frustration as you are forced to send your children to an institution that wants to strip you of your most basic parental rights to choose what is healthy for your child so for those of you who feel stuck here are just a few policies and steps you can take advantage of if needed first how to file a claim against the district's liability insurance not surprisingly school districts are often protected from liability just like big pharma but there are some exceptions school districts can be found negligent in cases where they have been made aware of an unsafe environment and the situation is not remedied hundreds of

033parents have reported physical and psychological damage done to their children because of the district's dangerous coveted policies this was reported on at the last meeting parents reported headaches bacterial infections hospitalizations and much more yet the environment that causes these ailments persists this makes the district negligent and liable to file a claim the next time your child is harmed by masks or any other rockwood policy first carefully document the dates of the incident and how your child was harmed include supporting evidence and the compensation you are seeking as a result of these damages send the information to the superintendent and the president of the board demand that this formal complaint be forwarded to the insurance carrier give them a timeline when you expect to hear for the from the insurance carrier if you do not hear

034back from the insurance insurance carrier by your deadline send another email and document any further delays for legal counsel second allow your child to peacefully not comply the maximum amount of time your child can be suspended is 10 days and after that time you can request a hearing with the board if enough people flood the board with these requests for hearings they will become overwhelmed document any violation of the policy if they are not able to grant you your hearing and last do not provide your child with a mask the district can provide disposable mass paid for with taxpayer and covid relief funds demand that proper mass health be observed of course ignore that pesky little thing on the box that says that the mass doesn't uh stop viruses but follow all the other things

035demand that an aid be made available to each child to pass out a clean mask every 90 minutes as per medical guidelines after every time the child uses the bathroom after lunch after every sneeze and any time a child touches her mask it's all about health after all [Applause] [Music] joanna bodine and after that will be jennifer weston good evening this is no longer about covert it is about power and control i'm not going to restate the statistics that miss katie becker stated at the beginning of the call it's tragic for any children to die of anything but her points were spot on this is not a reason to continue to mandate our children wear masks you need to let that be the parents choice at the last board meeting there were facts presented about

036actual students in the district equal to or greater than the number of those who have died of covid in this entire country we're talking about over 450 incidents that were reported to you about rockwood children who had experienced anxiety shortness of breath increased allergy symptoms asthma attacks non-covered respiratory illness strep infections headaches migraines skin rashes dental decay depression sensory issues impaired speech and language development impaired reading development inability to connect with their peers and suicidal ideation and the one that my son personally experienced suicide attempt i work for a large health core care organization and we pride ourselves on promoting wellness and prevention of the dis of disease this morning i had the opportunity to listen to our chief medical officer at my company his wife happens to also be an infectious disease doctor working

037on the front lines he shared that while his wife leans more toward the mandate side of masking he tends to take this more pragmatic approach his words pragmatic he said that his greatest empathy right now is for the children he recognizes all of the health concerns that i just rattled off to you he believes that this choice should be left to the parents while he believes there is some benefit to masking he doesn't believe it should be forced or that it is healthy for the extended periods required by the school policy it's not what he does practicing medicine in his in his previous practice i bring this up for two reasons there will always be people with different perspectives even in a household of physicians and i don't believe that rockwood has fully appreciated as

038this doctor had the extent of the long-term impacts of the health risks that i mentioned i understand the stance that this will be revisited every two weeks what i have not heard from this school is will they honor individual plans for each individual family if the health concerns that i listed before are of greater risk to our children than that of cobin [Applause] our next speaker is jennifer weston and after jennifer is kelly bursaga kelly and i are going back-to-back she's giving me her minutes good evening i'm here tonight to speak about the true issues in the coven 19 debate which are a lack of transparency and a lack of standards transparency includes looking at all sides of an issue where you can show there is no bias acceptance that what you believe to be

039may not be when you do not have transparency or standards you are allowed to pursue bias rather than the truth since you continue to use guidance from the cdc and your justification for forcing our kids to wear masks i will give you several examples of how the cdc has lacked transparency and standards over the past 18 months one of the go-to studies to support mask mandates is the may 2020 hair salon study per the study among 139 clients exposed two symptomatic hair stylists with confirmed coven 19 while both the stylist and the clients wear face masks no symptomatic secondary cases were reported among 67 clients who were tested all results were negative they concluded that adherence to the community space covering policy likely mitigated spread of probing 19. keep in mind that the cdc says

040that the coven coven 19 is hyper contagious but based on the results the cdc touted that mask were 100 effective implying that no other protections were necessary this is outside the realm of possibility a statement of such weight without obvious counterpoints supports the dangers of my opening statement as a counterpoint an appropriate supposition would be that since this was not a controlled study there was an unknown factor at play yet the cdc continues to use this study as a reason to recommend masks now let us say this study is in the realm of possibility that would mean that masks are 100 effective at stopping coven 19. which could then be interpreted as the cdc saying that we don't even need a vaccine the 2020 norway study showed that the rate of transmission from children to

041children and from children to adults was very low the study assessed 292 school-related contacts from 13 children that tested positive for cobin 19. the results indicated that the children did not pass the virus on to others and here's the kicker while safety measures were taken there was one major element missing the use of face masks keep in mind that this was a large controlled study showing no significant correlation with masks in which case you could reject masks because they can be harmful to kids but the cdc continues to ignore this study because it does not support their position in favor of masks when former cdc director robert redfield was asked why his former agency hadn't spent any money on a math study he called the question really important and said that these policies should be

042grounded in data as opposed to opinion he went on to say that oh i'm going to finish it um he went on to say that he hasn't been able to review data that supports the school masking recommendation and last week current cdc director rochelle walensky admitted that her claim that over 99 of covet patients dying in hospitals where unvaccinated was false the cdc's lack of facts makes it just their opinion not a justifiable conclusion while i have not personally known a single person that has died from covid i have known someone who has died from the flu when i was six years old my healthy 34 year old dad died from the flu my mom had to raise three young children on her own i'm grateful that i still have some memories of my dad

043my younger brothers don't have any a virus much like coven 19 took that away from them it would have been understandable if i grew up in fear of the unseen deadly viruses just waiting to strike us down but my amazing mom instilled in me other traits such as common sense resilience and curiosity she encouraged me to do my own research to never stop searching for the truth if irrefutable true science proved that cloth face masks are effective at stopping viruses like the flu i would be the first to mask up of course i would do what is needed to save other families from going through what mine went through but 40 years after my dad's death there is still not consensus that cloth masks are significantly effective in stopping a virus i believe in science

044make no mistake so here i am asking you the rockwood school board and superintendent to make decisions not based on what the cdc suggests rather based on true science which is transparent and follow standards since you are not allowing us parents to make health decisions for our own children each and every one of you are complicit how can we trust an organization like the cdc considering their lack of transparency and standards which i have shown in this presentation and i could have given you even more if i had more time how can we trust them when they have admitted to not telling us the truth thank you [Applause] [Music] our next speaker is keegan johns and after that derek pratt yes please first timer this is what we do just ask a question oh okay

045cool effective so i'm just curious if there's any way that we can see is there a stated curriculum that parents can access so we can see what's being taught to our children that's what i came here to find out tonight i don't get answers principal ricker how are you sir it's doctor i wanted to identify as a doctor this evening just like you i still like you good evening my name is derek pratt and my zip code is 63025 if you want my address i'll be more than happy to give that because i'm not scared of that please three minutes on time thank you the reason i came here tonight is to basically talk about the masks but after talking with amy earlier i realized that it's not really about the mass situation it's about

046all of us in here all of those that are on both sides of the fence we both are wanting to come to the same conclusion this mass doesn't do anything it doesn't you guys gave me one of your chinese masks from the same place that we got the virus from the sar the the copic 19 virus is actually approximately 4.7 nanometers unfortunately i'm one of those nasty people that smoke one of those e-cigarettes and the particles that i displace out of my mouth are 2.5 half of the amount of size that is in the coveted vaccine so if this mask here is supposed to stop kobit from hitting me or going out and i can blow straight through this with my electronic cigarette this is worthless what i will say is the fact that there

047are members on the board that i know that you fought hard to make an option because if you can't see this is not about a mandate the cdc doesn't mandate anything any any government agency besides the government doesn't mandate anything this group up here is mandating something so what i ask because i'm not going to be one of those people that don't push my feelings on you is i ask or recommend that when the first student steps into that school this year at seven o'clock in the morning in the middle school and the last student at four o'clock from the elementary school i recommend that every one of you on that board everyone that dice right now wear your mask i don't care if you're in your room by yourself i don't care if you're

048in your car by yourself i don't care if you're going to the bathroom by yourself you wear that mask because my child is being mandated to wear that mask respectfully because i've spoken with a few of you unfortunately i have not gotten a response from some of the other ones of you i'm still waiting on that beer dr ricker but all i'm asking and all the rest of us are asking is we're not telling anyone that they can't wear a mask we are asking that the recommendations you received to be an option make let us make a choice a choice not a mandate so if we are not allowed to have our children to make a choice i recommend or mandate you all to wear a mask from the hours of 7am to 4pm because

049that's the students that you are standing behind are wearing [Applause] them the next speaker is molly reese and after that is to hug her some more on him molly reese excuse me rice nothing like being thrown to the walls i just walked in the door i had to drive my kids around um well i just think it's grossly unfair in a huge breach of our civil liberties that you are requiring children to wear mass especially since several of them have natural immunity which science has proven to be lifelong and 6.7 times more effective than the copic vaccine so um and many children have received the vaccine in hopes that they would not have to wear a mask and and now you're mandating that um we're not even in a pandemic anymore if you don't have

050a public health background you can go look up the definition we're not in one we're in an endemic mass can decrease oxygen by up to 20 percent pre-covered health care workers only wore masks for three reasons um for sutures for surgery and when they were around infectious disease patients um and an n95 is not rated to i actually brought mass to keep out viruses nor our surgical or ear loop masks and i brought three boxes from my husband's office and you can read right on here where it says first of all you have to change it every hour for it to be effective you cannot touch it it cannot get wet it cannot get moist obviously when you're breathing it gets moist okay so should i read this is a four layer mask this is

051a level three surgical mask this these are all here we go n95 fda certified so i can read to you guys right here take the mask out of the package cover your mouth and nose with it put the ear straps behind your ears press the nose clip tightly along the sides of the nose bridge if this is not fitted properly and professionally fitted by an industrial healthcare hygienist it is not effective okay um keep dry and in cool conditions i mean it do not use more than once i mean this product is disposable and cannot be washed um may not provide full protection so people with sensitive skin should use carefully discard after one year suitable for protection against harmful particles such as dust haze and droplets this does not protect against viruses neither does

052this one i could read you the box or i'll bring it up but i'm not going to waste your time reading you the box if you want to look at it and you don't trust me then you can come look at all these different this is a level one mask this is a level three mask it doesn't get higher than this these are surgical masks okay surgical and ear loop mask that doctors and surgeons where in surgery and pre-covered no health care workers wore masks all the time okay masks only stop droplets from going into open wounds and cavities when doctors are doing surgery and sutures okay like okay and my son was in school last year and the kid next to him his nose his mask fell below his nose and the teacher said

053it because it was all stretched out from him wearing it for too many hours and the teacher said if your mask slips below your nose again i am going to drop your grade an entire increment like are you kidding me is this a miracle this is ridiculous and guess what if your masks work then we shouldn't have to wear one okay next speaker is sudhager subramaniam and camille subramanu after that okay i'm speaking on behalf of our whole family so i'm going to take my husband's time i am speaking on behalf of the subramaniam family my findings raise significant concerns both medically and legally of the current mass policy in place masks are ineffective for the purpose claimed by the mandate potentially harmful and only authorized for use by an eua it's a myth that

054masks prevent viruses from spreading the overall evidence is clear standard cloth and surgical mass offer next to no protection against virus-sized particles and we've already talked about the virus-sized particles so i'll just move past that wearing a mask to prevent catching sars cove 2 or similarly sized influenza is like throwing sand at a chain-link fence it doesn't work there's been one large randomized control trial that specifically examined whether masks protect their wearers from the coronavirus this study found mask wearing did not reduce at conventional levels of statistical significance incidence of sars cove to infection there have been hundreds of math studies related to influenza transmission done over several decades it's well established fact that mass do not stop viruses part of that evidence shows that cloth face mass actually increase influenza like link to illness

055bacteria are 50 times larger than virus particles so the virus particles can come out but the bacteria stays trapped in the mask related to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic there is almost universal agreement among experts that deaths were virtually never caused by the flu virus itself but from the secondary pneumonia caused by well-known bacteria dr fauci and his nih studied pandemics and concluded the vast majority of flu deaths resulted from secondary bacterial pneumonia all parties mandating the use of face masks are not only willfully ignoring established science but engaging in what amounts to a whole school clinical experimental trial this conclusion is reached by the fact that the face mask use of cobit 19 incidents are being reported in scientific opinion pieces promoted by the cdc and others the fact is after reviewing all of the

056studies worldwide the cdc found no reduction in viral transmission with the use of face masks additionally children have been repeatedly shown not to be drivers of the contagion and we've already heard all those statistics any intervention especially one that is prophylactic must cause fewer harms to the recipient than the infection we heard about all the symptoms our kids are having from the masks not covid since kids have the lowest death rate from covid the cost benefit of requiring kids to wear these investigational face covering with emerging safety issues especially difficult to justify furthermore the mandatory mouth mask in schools is a major threat to child's development it ignores the essential needs of a growing child the well-being of children and young people is highly dependent on the emotional connection with others which you cannot get

057whenever you're wearing a mask masks create a threatening and unsafe environment where emotional connection becomes difficult regardless of the lack of safety and efficacy behind the decision to require a child to wear a mask it is illegal to mandate emergency youth authorized approved investigational medical therapies without informed consent emergency use authorization by the fda means the products are investigational and experimental only the right to avoid the imposition of human experimentation is fundamental rooted in the nuremberg code of 1947 ratified by the 1964 declaration of helsinki and further codified in the united states code of federal regulations in addition to the united states regarding itself as bound by these provisions these principles were adopted by the fda and its regulations requiring the informed consent of human subjects for medical research the law is very clear it

058is unlawful to conduct medical research unless steps are taken to secure informed consent there are no efficacy standards on child size masks and respirators under osha but there are microbial challenges as i said and trouble with breathing because of masking requiring children to wear a mask sets the stage for contracting infection as such forcing children to wear masks or forcing use of other non-fda approved medical products without the child's or the parent's consent is illegal and immoral so this statement is your official notice that xavier and ari subramaniam will not mask my husband and i as their parents and advocates take the responsibility to make their medical decisions next speaker is barbara rosenbaum and lindsey darabessen will be up to that so i would like to thank the members of the rockwood board of education

059and dr ricker for requiring masks in our district to start the school year my son and i are grateful as i am sure the rest of the rockwood population who believes masks will stop the spread of covid in our schools thank you for basing your decision on the science we appreciate you my name is barbara rosenbaum and i am the parent of an incoming senior at lafayette high school we are supposed to take care of each other it's not a game of survival of fittest elementary school students cannot even be vaccinated yet how do we protect these students if not by wearing masks i want to be a part of a community that cares and sacrifices for each other not a community where bullying occurs because we don't agree i don't understand how some in

060our community can be so confident that they will not experience catastrophic virus results if they get the virus i am scared i don't want to get covered i don't want you or your children to get covered i don't want the people in our community to get coveted maybe i can appeal to those who don't believe in mass mandates another way something we all have in common here we are parents my son has crohn's disease and he is currently on a medication that suppresses his immune system making him susceptible to catching viruses he gives himself an injection every other friday he is vaccinated but because of the immunosuppressing medication he does not receive the same 95 percent efficacy a normal person would we don't know how much protection he has if any he attended school virtually

061all last year he deserves to attend school in person for his senior year if not for this school district mandate mass mandate i would have to think twice about sending him in person i have real concerns about doing that knowing that many will not wear their mask correctly over their nose and mouth but i will send him because he really wants to go back to school i'm putting my trust in our school community we will keep each other as safe as we can please try to understand there are students and people working in our schools who do not have a choice to wear a mask a choice to wear a mask is a privilege a privilege my son and many others do not have i envy those parents who can expend so much energy demanding

062their healthy child not have to wear a mask maybe sometime during your day on friday you'll remember my comments and think about my son giving himself an injection maybe that will put things in perspective maybe you'll be thankful that your biggest worry is your child wearing a mask and embrace the sacrifice they'll make for others not so fortunate thank you [Applause] next speaker is lindsay darabesik and after that haley rogers hello it's lindsey darbachek nobody ever gets it right so it's fine no worries um i didn't have anything prepared i am just a mother coming speaking from the heart typically this time of year things are exciting we're shopping for school supplies shopping for clothes but this year none of my kids wanted to they're not looking forward to school i went to target by

063myself got all the school supplies still can't find markers it's very annoying um last year was a joke um jack let's see jack was a sophomore started you know virtual typically whenever i go and check on him he'd still be sleeping in bed had no desire to do anything which i'm sure a lot of your high schoolers were the same way he did terrible it was i mean it was depressing he hates going uh we my two smaller ones just constantly complain of course whoever was talking about like not hearing the children complain you're not hearing it because they don't want to do that to their teachers but let me tell you the minute they got in that car or we got home what was the first thing that they said to us oh my

064gosh well first they would rip off their mask and how upset they were about it because it is frustrating mine is down because i have severe asthma so i take medication daily i'm on nebulizer treatments daily um i physically cannot breathe in this thing this is the worst time of the year for me so sorry but i have to be able to breathe i would have to take my inhaler if i didn't which is terrible for my heart and my husband hates it and always checks the stupid number on the back and knows how often i'm taking it and it terrifies him because let's face it i take care of everything at the house okay he would be in the fetal position as something happened to me um i'm devastated for our children and i

065am not sheltering my kids from this i am not talking about it in private with my husband my kids are there they are hearing it i am showing them how to fight for what they believe in i am taking them out i want them to see what it feels like to have people constantly ask me to put on a mess i say no thank you you are polite you don't have to be mean about it but you also need to teach your children how to stand up for what they believe in because if you hide it from them what is what's the point what i mean isn't that what america is we fight for what we believe in teach your children do not comply my kids will not be going to school with the mask

066on send them home give me a call because you know what you're going to get from me a big no thank you they will not be wearing a mask they'll be happy to come on home especially my one that's going to be a junior at lafayette he'll be thrilled it'll just be another phone call or maybe i'll get it from the nurse because he coughed in class sorry he did get sent home 24 hours gives it a call next speaker is haley rogers after that sue dorn to the board i appreciate your attentiveness that you're giving everyone speaking today i really do appreciate that i'm a proud eureka high school alumni uh we chose to plant our roots here in rockwood school district because of the quality education that i once received i'm here to

067define the environment from my son who will be entering the school system in about a year and to defend my brothers who are entering eureka high as a freshman this year or as a freshman this year my son has medically induced asthma uh or viral induced asthma sorry in 2019 simple colds landed him in the hospital three times i've sat there watching his oxygen plummet my brothers were 24-week preemies and have a plethora of related respiratory issues that send them to the hospital every season to this day like many when this pandemic was new we took every single precaution in fact my mom and i sowed hundreds of masks for the community but things have changed we have enough data to support information on both sides of this fence enough to support that people need

068to have the freedom to evaluate and choose for themselves my husband and i have consulted our doctors and upon their expert recommendations are choosing to focus on our health taking charge of our own train to not mask ourselves and definitely to not mask my three and a half year old we are choosing to not get this vaccine because the information about its side effects is still too new he's thriving on mast in preschool my brothers however have chosen to vaccinate last year they stayed home and did virtual homeschooling it was brutal it was horrible so they're looking forward to in person school again here's the thing they are in every single definition medically fragile however masks for them are incredibly detrimental as they literally cannot breathe they can hardly breathe without a mask let alone

069with one on and they're also deaf so they rely on reading mouths for clarification exemptions are not granted but if they were they wouldn't feel comfortable standing out if these were required for all students and they don't ask others to wear a mask to protect them either they've taken their own protective measures i ask you if you feel your vaccine or mask works why does it matter if someone else does not choose to have that and despite all of our differences and how we approach this we respect each other's choices and feel safe around each other because of our own respective choices what a concept right freedom to choose the flawed notion of my mask or vaccine doesn't work unless everybody else has one is not based on anything it's conditioned manipulation from 18 months

070of propaganda the twisted mindset won't be changed with or without forced rules to deny the whole pandemic has political influences on both sides is willful blindness i ask you to protect the freedom to choose i'd prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery next speaker is sue dorn after that glory to campy [Applause] hello mr kinder it's been a long time um i'm a retired rockwood teacher i've been retired for quite a long time i hope that i don't get my retirement fund taken away from me for speaking i i've heard a lot of really interesting things from both sides of the fence and i understand it i understand if you have a immuno-suppressed child i understand if you feel as if it it's all personal choice i understand that i'd like to take a little different

071road i have a sister that is stage 4 lung cancer and stage 4 colon cancer and every time she goes in to see her doctor her oncologist she says please please take off your mask i have to see your face because i have to see the emotion that you are showing to me because i can read that if you don't think our kids don't feel the same way that they're missing out on those personal connections they did a study about babies with mothers that had masks on all the time they don't develop they don't get that emotional connection because the faces are covered all of your faces are covered i can barely i wouldn't know you on the street tomorrow probably and it concerns me but what's of a bigger concern to me is the

072word mandate that scares me keith mandate whenever there's a mandate it leads to another mandate and what's going to be the next mandate after this one are we all going to have to give our three-year-olds a shot i'm worried about my grandchildren as many of you up there might be as well and they're scared and let me tell you i did a lot of tutoring this this year those kids were depressed very depressed and i'm concerned that it's going to happen again because once we mandate one thing will mandate another because we don't have any power over everything that's all i have to say thank you next speaker is gloria decampi and after that william bennett senator excuse me good evening i'm i'll just start off i have never spoken in a board meeting anywhere

073at any time and for some reason this has motivated me obviously for obvious reasons um tell you a little bit about myself i have three children two of which have graduated here from marquette and one is a junior this year um my older two one's in the air force the other one is transitioning to another college very proud of them but um my third daughter i mean my third child my daughter um i would consider her to be just not the perfect child but the free range child always did the right thing and i was so excited for her entering marquette high school because i thought the world is her oyster she she's on a roll she's everything and then spring break of march 2020 happened um we cancelled our plans we all obeyed we

074wore our masks we did we you know we did everything we're supposed to do and we just kind of looked at that semester as a complete waste because let's face it our children were not educated that semester they all fell behind going forward to the following year online i'm working from home i am just trying to get my eager student who would study japanese on her own on the web just because she wanted to learn japanese or what have you i can't even get her out of bed to do anything so we did the uh we we managed to muddle through that online period and then we went to the the new the new marquette so to speak mask all the time one direction no socializing in a lunchroom and the mask all the time

075like um and i i can't remember her name but she's saying before the emotions you cannot read the emotions of other people and it's just it's i mean as a 56 year old dealing with this it's difficult but now as a 16 year old who doesn't have that life experience behind her it's even more difficult to deal with um now this semester this year's coming along she's junior should be a bittersweet time my child's leaving um but we're going to experience those last two fun years of high school and she's like i don't want to go to marquette anymore she just doesn't want to go to school here anymore it's depressing there's there's all that all the perks and the benefits of being in high school are gone because we're doing these you know being

076faceless is what we're doing and that and not being able to she should be making new friends now how hard is it to make new friends when you're sitting there wearing a mask and you can't really see anybody's emotions or expressions or anything along that line that is all i have to say [Music] next speaker is gloria decampi after that oh excuse me next speaker is william benedict and after that mary pat mccandless william benedict uh hello i'm bill benedict i'm a physician trained at washington university and i practiced internal medicine at barnes and st luke's for 42 years recently retired i have 10 grandchildren my daughter who has marquette student asked me to talk tonight say a few words so i said i would i'd like to all the comments tonight um [Music] are

077important it's obviously controversial probably nobody's going to change anybody's mind but i'd like to get people to consider the big picture all deaths all serious illnesses are tragic but the incidents we're talking about now we're talking about mandating masks for our children kids initially when we were worried about adults and kids because there was no science we didn't know if this coronavirus was like ebola which kills 80 percent of people who get it with no cure now we have science and mandating masks does not follow the science um the the the quoted virus is a coronavirus just like flu viruses everybody worries about the delta variant is the first of probably hundreds of variants that will come this virus will be here for decades it's not going away there's going to be repeated new vaccines

078every year the vaccine for flu this fall is different than the one from last year because there's a new variant every single year for the decades there's been no large study that has shown that masks are effective which is supported by just common sense when you breathe in and out of your mask 95 if not 99 of the air you're breathing in comes around the mask not through the mask same thing when you're breathing out there have been many studies however that show adverse effects of masks a few of them have been mentioned tonight low oxygen levels higher carbon dioxide levels shortness of breath acidosis which aggravates many medical conditions self-contamination by bacteria you're re-breathing increasing stress hormones such as adrenaline noradrenaline cortisol increased muscle tension those are all physiologic effects psychological effects stress fear

079mood disturbances insomnia fatigue compounded cognitive defects that affect learning and health consequences predisposition to viral illnesses headaches anxiety depression increased incidence hypertension cardiovascular disease etc if you think about the big picture imposing a mandate for our children to wear masks as opposed to allowing individual decision is like mandating adults to avoid driving their cars because they might have a car accident next speaker is mary mccandless after that kendall heard it [Applause] mary pat mccandless coming from the back oh okay well then uh kendall hearty hello and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you tonight my name is kendall and i'm an incoming junior at eureka high school and i came here today to voice my concerns about this year's mass policy last year i was not allowed to be to come to school

080because of my health i have or i am unable to wear a mask for extended periods of time and i have a medical exemption that confirms this even though i have written notice from my doctor who knows me very well i was not forced to stay virtual all last year and the only way that i would be allowed to come back would be if my parents signed me up for an iep program where an aide would follow me around all day help me to learn how to wear a mask as a life skill if my body is telling me that something's not right i need to listen to my body and an aid is not going to fix that how is it fair that because of my health i'm not allowed to come to school

081like my peers high school was supposed to be the best four years of my life and all my peers and this is being stolen from us according to rockwood's website we strive to for each and every student to have an equal learning opportunity under our mission vision and values you'll find statements like these under every student rockwood says we put our hearts at where we put our students at the heart of everything we do and we are guided by the academic social emotional and physical needs of our students under collective responsibility rockwood says we honor differences as we provide equal access for all learners and under optimized resources rockwood says we support our students with a strong foundation this means creating maintaining and sustaining operational and organizational systems that are that are thoughtfully aligned to

082to the needs of our schools and students however my experience from last school year says otherwise people can claim that i was still given an opportunity to go to school by doing virtual school but any virtual student you ask will tell you that our quality of learning was not the same quality learning as in-person learners i used to be a straight-a student but this year my grades slipped we were constantly forgotten about it was so difficult to ask questions especially when the teachers had us muted and wouldn't even bother to check the chat this was emotionally texting which in turn was extremely physically taxing to my health while i realized that school will be different this year for virtual orders i am so sick and tired of being isolated from my peers this has caused

083me to have anxiety this has caused me to have depression i want to go to school how often do you hear that from a teenager i don't need an a to follow me around at school all i'm asking is that considering my medical exemption i'm giving an equal opportunity to learn just like my peers and that the school makes proper accommodations to my health and also that the school reconsiders its decision to require mass for all of my peers thank you [Applause] next speaker is deb michaels and after that andre ong [Applause] my comment tonight is not about masks it is about transparency it was a big problem last school year especially when it comes to what you're teaching our kids first rockwood's language is not clear diversity equity inclusion it sounds great but you

084never point out hey that means there will be classroom assignments on oppression privilege black lives matter police shootings gender norms and the bodies of disney princesses it's all right here more than 80 pages of screenshots from rockwood lessons last year lessons that bothered parents the same types of lessons that 26 states have either banned from schools or are working on banning missouri is working on it second you told us rockwood doesn't teach critical race theory but terms from critical race theory are in these pages one of the examples an assignment asked kids to label groups by race gender and sexual orientation and ask them to talk about who has oppression who has privilege because of their identity the concept that you are oppressed or privileged because of your identity is a component of critical race

085theory third you didn't tell us these new lessons were coming that summer of 2020 while you talked about covid and gave us surveys on whether we wanted to have kids in person or virtual 250 teachers were writing the new lessons where was the transparency and by the way where are the academics in these new lessons why didn't the writing teams focus on lessons that will improve proficiency state data shows we have middle schools where only half the kids are proficient in math as much as 30 percent of our high schoolers aren't proficient in language arts it's worse in some of the lower schools fourth when parents started noticing these lessons and questioning them rockwood's literacy coordinator told teachers how to hide lesson content in this email there are 25 instructions how to keep parents from

086knowing what's in the lessons she wrote don't use the word privilege just pull the resource off canvas so parents can't see it delete the section remove the title publish the new one that has less information on it fifth we did a sunshine records request for this email 226 teachers and principals got it do you know how many replied and said it's not a good idea to hide things from parents none no reply about transparency 16 replies thanked natalie fallard for the help after all that this ford barely voted to fire natalie fowler the vote was four to three please realize the message we don't talk about those things in open session those are personnel issues [Applause] i only want to be respectful so i will apologize for that i didn't know i want you to

087know you did do this resolution toward equitable education last summer this summer we want you to commit to transparency i have a petition that i will give you and it will require or ask you to commit to transparency and since rockwood doesn't treat teach critical race theory then it should be easy for you to also commit to not having lessons that have critical race theory terminology in them i'll get this to you thank you [Applause] next speaker is andre ang and after that austin herte thank you very much i guess we get back to the topic of masks although that's a hard act to follow i would much rather be talking about that because i think it's much more important i think it's silly that we're still dealing with these masks and address an elephant

088in the room that i've run into a few times when we come up when uh when i come across as the anti-master a lot of people see us and you might see us those of us who are against these masks as conspiracy theorists kind of the crazy mel gibson character selfish stuck up lunatics who don't care about others don't care about others health gullible idiots maybe who get all their information from web pages that are still using html 1.0 and we get those emails you know that are all caps might see us as uneducated aggressive or stubborn and i understand how sometimes we can come across that way i was looking in the the pamphlet here for the school board and i see that the purpose here is to adopt and evaluate policies and to

089connect with the community and i have to say i actually really appreciate that you give us the time to speak and you stay there you pay attention you're listening to us and i believe that your main concern concern really is the health and future of our children and i really appreciate that appreciate very much that you are unpaid and willing to spend this much time with all of us listening now i was frantically writing all the notes i could all the evidence all the studies and experts and everything that i could bring up and then i realized you've heard it all you heard it tonight um in fact i just started checking off everything that i wrote that someone else said uh you've heard all the evidence that basically will tell you not only are

090masks ineffective they're harmful psychologically they can be harmful medically they're harmful in many ways maybe not as harmful to some as to others but they have harm and my biggest concern about the mass mandate policy is that it brings false hope it creates false hope and in creating false hope for many even of some of the parents that spoke tonight it's also causing harm so i have to ask for you to consider for yourselves when you decide to pass a mandate on our children what is behind that because i think you you you all do the research you you have the evidence here you can look it up you can study it you can ask questions anyone in this room that has brought you evidence would be happy to give you the studies in the

091research and show it to you so there has to be something else and i don't mean it in a sinister way or in a negative way i recognize that there are other motivations that could put you in a position so is it ridiculous to ask that you make decisions based on well-researched evidence and only for the health and future of our children thank you next speaker is austin hardy and after that steve cassily [Applause] hi i'm austin hurdy and i am 9 years old i have a speed problem and when i have to wear a mask it makes it hard for people to understand me this makes me not want to talk i mean this also makes me this makes me not want to talk at all this also makes me very anxious because it's

092hard for me to breathe the people who make adults and kids like me wear a mask i think i mean i should think about how uncomfortable it makes us feel please reconsider your decision to recall your masks at schools thank you [Applause] next speaker is steve cassily can i take the rest of his time i'm his mother okay um i'm sorry it's very emotional for me here with both of my children today speaking on their own behalf i thought rockwood i fought eureka high school at the end of last year with my daughter's medical exemption for her math she could not return in person to school because she physically medically cannot wear a mask we were denied over and over again my request to speak with the district nurse was also rejected instead they sent

093me to the special education department my daughter is a straight a student and has never needed special education they wanted me to label her as needing an iep in order to attend school in person so she would have an aide to walk with her through the day and help her to adjust to wearing masks as a life skill in their words this year i'm assuming we're going to be up against the same battle but mr ricker my husband has also emailed you i think we're the only ones in the district with our last name you'll probably get to know us very well this year i expect that the panel up there is truly interested in keeping our children safe and healthy and in that that also means mentally these kids mental health is deteriorating in

094the fact that teachers are up here testifying that their children are fine wearing masks they are able to play and read and laugh that's not the case when they go home as a parent let me assure you that is not the case when they go home thankfully for me and my husband we're able to financially support our children with extracurricular activities that do not involve school so that has helped them through this year so as to this point with my children the people that i could thank for their mental health are their coaches their coaches that don't make a big deal about it whenever they're at practice at hockey practice not messed up they turn their face knowing that they're there because they have no other recourse at this time because of the schools are

095so rigid so again please just reconsider as my son asks reconsider your requirement for mass optional is not going to hurt those who are wearing their masks it is hurting my children who are being forced to wear them [Applause] i will not start my kids on fire to keep my neighbor warm speaker steve cassily and then tony catalano hi my name is steve castley i'm a building contractor and independent researcher for all things covert and the politics and the power structures that control the narrative we've been dealing with i have a very brief uh statement that i want to make and it has to do with the term graphene oxide and i'll spell that that's g-r-a-p-h-e-n-e oxide e o-x-i-d-e i'll spell again g r a p h e n e next word oxide o x

096i d e and the other term is hydrogel h-y d-r-o second word gel now the reason i mentioned these terms is because the pfizer and modern vaccines include graphene oxide now you don't see that in the list of ingredients for the very reason that they don't have to put that in the ingredients um under the the terms of some you know big pharma lobby they don't have to put it in because it's a trade secret okay another thing about graphene oxide it's been reported to be in these cheapy little blue throwaway mask as well as some of the gray mask now upon study one will find that graphene oxide is a poison so i would just urge the people here to do research on that and you might not find it on some of the

097mainstream media outlets but if you dig deep enough you'll find it and some suggestions that i might make in order to discover this is um the stu peters show dell big tree and if you dare you can go to bit shoot but if you do know there's a lot of wacko stuff there but some stuff that goes beyond you know the mainstream media one can learn a lot of information that's all i have to say thank you tony catalano he's not here okay that that concludes the speakers that were signed up next item on the agenda is superintendent and board comments dr rickard thank you very much um the start of the 2022 21 22 school year is less than two weeks away and we're excited to welcome all of our students back for another

098year of learning and growing to help our community prepare for the start of school year we have a back to school page on our new web page and it contains important information about the typical things supply lists communication channels calendars and more so please visit the rsdmo.org back to school for more information uh we have a ton of new coordinators principals assistant principals administrative interns some 25 caring and talented administrators were recognized at our annual administrative conference last week and i'd like to take this opportunity to welcome our staff who have found a new home in rockwood as well as congratulate our employees who are taking on new administrative roles in the upcoming year we all look forward to our district and school communities benefiting from their leadership in the years to come lafayette high

099senior alicia allu and junior samantha zhang have accomplished a rare feat they both scored a perfect 36 on the a.c.t fewer than half of one percent of students who take the act earned that top score and we are proud to recognize two of our outstanding students who have joined those ranks i'd give them a round of applause 36 is pretty awesome our rockwood facilities crew has been hard working around the district this summer completing maintenance uh projects in all four quadrants from parking lot restructuring to tennis courts to bleacher replacements stem lab renovation we've been putting bond issue funds directly to these issues and we thank the rockwood voters for passing that bond issue in 2017. so here's a short video showing the floor replacement that took place at lasalle springs middle [Music] that concludes

100my comments um madam president until we do our presentations and i have a few before we do board comments this evening i do have a comment i had the opportunity last night to attend the vic meet and greet i want to extend a huge thank you to dr terry harris his secretary becky connor all of the administrators that attended the teachers that attended the parents and students that attended it was it was an exciting time to get together and to share their welcoming back to school i talked to students sat and had dinner with parents they're all very excited to come back this school year so thank you for getting providing that opportunity for the vic students to meet and greet with everybody here in rockwood any other board comments i just want to thank

101dr richter and janet for suggesting to move these board meetings to a larger venue this was uh this has been a treat good to see all these people in the audience it's good to get a kind of a change up get out of the annex i'm looking forward to the coming year i know we have a good schedule away from the annex and that's exciting so thank you both and all the people behind the scenes making this happen appreciate it all right any other yep tom well i'd like to like to thank all the patrons of the rockwood community that spoke this evening or felt the need to send the board of education emails regarding the start of the upcoming school year i can't speak for the rest of my colleagues but i read each

102email and have come to the following conclusions emails that i've received are down from last year last year we received 121 emails regarding virtual in-class controversy this year i only got 108 regarding the mass no mask our rockwood community remains divided we have three groups four middle and against and this categorization can be applied to any controversial topic that has occurred these past 18 months the for or against are the loudest and each side thinks the board is hearing more from one than the other prior to the august 4th announcement 40 emails 4 45 emails against after the announcement it became 5454. as you can hear it is split some of the emails that the board received are what each group is doing i have a question what do you what do you expect the

103board to do give off the detentions or out of school suspensions by the way you guys behave by the way we also have friends in each group that tell us what's going on so we're not ignorant to what what's going on in the community what is wrong with our community you're creating more drama than a middle schooler targeting other parents because they have different points of view donating hiring a tick-tocker for shaming purposes calling employers asking the boycott super smokers just because their food was mentioned jeff fitter in super smokers donates and supports a lot of rockwood school programs how dare you attack his business he did nothing wrong 75 percent of the emails received were not nice and demanding their outcome of choice isn't bullying one of our policies c policy 2612. so let

104me make this clear to everyone the board of education has specific functions all of you that are accusing us for doing things that technically are not what we're do what we're hired to do or elected to do in in pointing fingers at us is you know kind of bullying i may or may not agree with decisions that have been made but i understand why i always am willing to talk to people and will listen i have talked to numerous parents either on the phone or after board meetings once again i may or may not agree with anybody's position but i will listen after all i am a parent of school children in this community as well thank you tom any other board comments i would like to direct um as a result of the comments

105this evening and i do appreciate all the parents that that showed up tonight to talk to directed dr ricker to give us some examples of of the exceptions and and what our stance is on that in the district any health example is that health exemptions for masks and our religious exemptions can you look into that and give us everything i'd be happy to yes we have we have a group of people that are working on that and work on it on an individual case basis yes perfect thank you just so you'll be more than happy to be transparent that we are taking steps yes thank you anybody else all right the next agenda item is a back to school update information for us dr ricker thank you very much uh i've thought it very important

106for the board to be updated on all of the work that we've done really since possibly the first of the year to get ready for the school year to start on august 23rd and i thought the best people to do that are the people that are in the trenches that do the work and lead in those divisions to make sure this is all uh this orchestra actually works together so we have a series of short little presentations uh from uh the leaders in our group uh concerning their division so that you can see as a board of education that we take this very seriously and we attention to detail is important to us so we'll start with i think dr there she is dr willett good evening the learning and support services team actually began

107our work to prepare for this school year the week after the last school year ended so um no no amazing what the on button will do there we go so we've been working all summer getting ready for students to return this week we're going to welcome new teachers next week we will welcome our returning teachers and ultimately on august 23rd one of our most favorite days of the year we're going to welcome students back into our buildings so we began um in the summer at the at the beginning of june with our refresh program giving students the opportunity to refresh some of those skills that they learned in the last school year and then we offered an enrichment experience for students who were interested in july we had over 300 students take part in that

108project and the bottom picture that you'll see there is our first and second grade students who created a food truck as part of their project-based learning experience they got to show off their food trucks at nine mile garden in afton with some of the food trucks around them so it was a lot of fun to have them there the professional learning department led by dr troutier who's with us tonight offered a variety of options for our teachers to learn new things that they can use in their classrooms this summer our teachers had lots of options they could do in-person training a variety of book studies online professional learning opportunities and sharing and collaboration sessions some of the specific things that they learned about were project-based learning brain-based learning strategies adhd strategies for students in the

109classroom assessment playbook and canvas training at the annex our secretaries and curriculum team have been preparing for learning resource our learning resources for the year so we've been doing summer inventory organizing and replacing lost items this was a herculean task of the summer with kids being both online and in person we had to reframe things and get them all back put back together you can see that's just one room of some of the materials that we've been organizing and getting ready for buildings we've been preparing canvas for teacher use and developing plans for our online learners to have the resources and supplies that they need to be successful in learning in the 2122 school year you're going to see a learning acceleration approach that means that we're going to start the ground running with grade

110level material when the school year starts and work with our students to figure out where there may be gaps we are our data is showing that we have very steady growth in 2021 but we know that there may be some gaps so we are preparing by adding additional interventions and focusing on early screening and formative assessment to identify any gaps we're using a new mtss structure that we've been working on for the past several years that's part of our way forward goals including academic social emotional mental health behavior and post high school planning supports for our students in the in terms of intervention supports we have some screening data that glenn hancock our director of assessment research and evaluation and his team have put together so when teachers return to the classroom they'll have immediate

111data to use to know where their students are and hit the ground running we've also added some additional interventions to address gaps especially in the areas of math and reading and then we formed an mtss leadership team at the district level that will include building administrators curriculum coordinators and representatives from the student services department we've been really fortunate that our partnership with the special school district has led us to add three positions this year to help us in those efforts we have an early intervention school psychologist that will be joining our team and two instructional coaches so we're really excited about being able to move forward and support our students as much as we can and then lastly i want to point out that over the summer dr denny rhodes who runs our gifted department

112has taken very meticulous notes and planned mitigation strategies so that we're able to bring our kids back to the ccl this year so we're really excited about that as well next i'm going to turn it over to lease accounts and davepav we're going to talk to you about some of our back-to-school events [Music] good evening and thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk about back to school so um i think like some the parents spoke about tonight one thing that's new about this year is um we have a lot of great stuff going on for our back to school the the energy is really good in our buildings we have um just at the elementary level and preschool level we have 13 new administrators and so you can imagine the amount of um

113meet the principal meet the administrator nights that we're having and we've had several so far we've also had a lot of incoming kindergarten times for our students to come to school and those of all have had been very successful with a lot of great energy so we're really excited about that we have back to school events at all of our schools along with curriculum nights that are coming up so along with those social activities and just giving students a chance to come into the buildings to see their school and just get that energy that's necessary for kids to come back to school is really exciting for us so um that's what's happening at the elementary level i know there's a few other things that secondary that dr counts thank you very similarly we're we're doing

114lots of welcome back to school things uh grades 6 through 12. um i know even here at marquette today they had orientation going on i saw lots of kids with yearbooks so that was very fun i remember being in high school and that was like my favorite day ever was to get the yearbook and read it cover to cover so um lots of welcome back activities um it's it's great to see kids back in the building we are doing some parent events i know like dr cobb said we have a few new administrators so we're welcoming parents to meet our new administrators one thing that has that has stayed around through our online practices is we're able to offer some activities online via zoom we're able to live stream some events so we're able to

115provide some options um for some of these back-to-school activities but but again the energy is great kids are excited to be back i was at wildwood middle school last night for their orientation and it was just really great to see kids engaging with each other parents engaging with each other i'm really excited to be back in school and as tammy mentioned we had our meet me in st louis event last night i was not able to attend i was at wildwood middle school but many of you were there and the pictures that i've seen and talked with folks today and kids were just really having a great time and that's an opportunity for us to welcome our vic students back um and and their families and their parents and i know from years past when

116i've attended that event to see the the children that have come through um year after year and so we see a lot of the same families and it's it's it's just like a big family reunion so i know it was a great event um and thanks to dr harris and dr grace for organizing and putting that on so we are we're ready we're ready to have kids back um you know our little bit of a later start time um you know our calendar is a little bit later than in years past so um we're ready we're ready to welcome kids teachers are in their classrooms um preparing for students the first day of school so i think we're ready to go and are excited for the things ahead next up is dr harris to discuss

117student services thank you um let me first say uh thank you so much tammy for your kind words and for joining us last night and um we really appreciate that i want to say that it was really dr aisha grace and so she she deserves all the credit i didn't mean to leave her out i'm sorry i just want to make sure that i probably could say that and she knows that um that was her and she came in in july and i had to put this event together and and almost less than a month so thank you to aisha for your hard work also to all of the administrators who stepped up it's a wonderful event last night and i think is a good sign to what's going to come with some of our

118students for next year so student services we're going to focus on our beloved community that we started with a year ago and i think it's only fitting for us to get back here every time we do these presentations and we all have segments i get these text messages like terry don't go too long and so i'm going to remind myself not to do that but i'm really excited about our work and here's what i want to say tyrone dennis who is our safety director amy where he was our head nurse in in the district lily who's over uh drug free todd minicello who's over um counseling and we have a new person that i'm going to talk about jacqueline floyd who's over pre-k social emotional learning for the district as well as dr aisha grace

119who is over um diversity for student services we are ready we're ready we're prepared we have a plan we have supports we have resources there's a lot of conversations and a lot of talk about social emotional and we're learning for students we're ready we're ready and so we're focusing on and our question is what does it mean to have students feel welcome into the school that's really what we're focusing on how do we continue to make sure that kids feel welcome this is an activity that renee throws here myself and um brittany hogan did a few a year ago almost we asked the same question and here are some answers that our people came up with and we did this with adults we're asking this question what does it mean to truly feel welcome in

120school and we i suspect that some of these same answers our students will say so everything that we're doing in the student services department is trying to answer this question so when we think about care we hire thank you to the board of education for allowing us to hire pre-k 12 supervisors of mentor and emotional health for the rockwood school district jacqueline floyd who is a master social worker with a licensed master social worker and her job and responsibility is to go through the entire system to make sure that we're meeting the needs of our staff members of our administrators as as they are meeting the needs of our students and so she's meeting she's met with or meeting with all of the administrators and putting together a plan to meet the social emotional needs

121for our students so any parent who have questions and want to know what we're doing and what schools are doing i implore you i ask you to ask your schools how they're meeting those social emotional needs and we will have an answer for you we have tons of resources we also thank you to um just the cabinet for believing in this dr rickard for pushing it and paul and his team for helping me write the f rfp soon we're creating a program that is i'm calling an eap program for students and thanks to amy again who brought this resource to us the eap program think about the eap program for adults right this program is designed to meet all the needs for students from a telehealth standpoint so what we know right now is that

122it's really hard to get to a counselor it's really hard to get in get certain services and so we want to make sure that kids are not going without services and so to the students who spoke tonight i hear you and i thank you for being brave enough to share your story as the executive director of student services my job is to make sure that we're helping meet those needs so that's a commitment that we would do what we need to do to make sure that you're okay and so that eap program is going to help us we also pass through our budget process um some money to create and have more trauma-informed cohorts so every single school in our district will continue to look at how trauma impacts kids and how what we can

123do to combat them and lastly i'm really excited about this we're going to create a virtual we already started last year we're going to expand with our virtual wellness center page for both staff members as well as students so any kid any parent any adult can go to this website and receive resources as they are navigating the social emotional well-being of their students or their staff or their colleagues and i won't go through all these but i just really want to show this because care is the foundation of the love of community i just want the community to know that we do care about your your students we care about our teachers and we want everyone to be well quickly go through this shelly kind of mention some of these things so the next piece

124of our beloved community is courage and we i just really want to center the top two we want to develop a multi-system uh of support that is centering scl so shelly and her team is going to do this focusing on academics and the student services department is going to focus on the needs of students we heard from our staff members and negotiation process that need to have more seo supports and we hear you and we're going to build that definitely have staff members uh that's part of this conversation aisha grace has hit the ground running and she is working with each school to create uh equity building champions the equity building champion is really working with glenn hancock and his team to figure out what are those gaps and then how do we help close

125those gaps so who are the students that are not doing well and what support and resources do we need to implement to ensure those students are doing well so that build-in champion will work directly with aisha and her team to help find the needs that are specific to that school and we talked a lot about the equity audit i can give you guys an update on that uh in october hopefully critical reflection again we ask how are the children what do they need and how do we get those things to them so working again with glenn and his team looking at our seo survey looking at some assessment data figuring out where those gaps are and what we need to implement to support our students you can just take a look at this this is

126a commitment and one thing i really want to highlight here is that we have a commitment to create multiple pathways to a high school diploma say it differently we want to create multiple pathways for students to do well and education and we have already started that work and lastly we want to make sure that we create a warm school environment that is safe right now it doesn't feel that way we have work to do our kids are going to come back to school in a couple of weeks when we listen to the board meetings and we listen to certain things that are going on it doesn't feel warm and safe anymore so we have to do a better job and so this commitment all these members here as well as the cabinet as well as

127principles we're committed to making sure that we do everything in our power to go back to creating a warm and safe environment at each and every one of our schools and i hope that you guys can join us in that commitment and i think dr rickard is going to do in the research yes i'm going to stand in for dr rubler this evening she had some other issues she needed to take care of uh that were very important to her and human resources for our district is 4 000 plus employees we hired 65 new teachers you can see where they came from new teachers begin to work in early august um basically tomorrow um we'll do a lot of uh information provide them with data provide them with training um hopefully get those first new

128job jitters out of the way uh so that they'll be ready for the students at the following week we look to do student teachers as well from the following universities that you see on the chart there we need your help and so for those out there in the youtube world um if you're listening in uh we need your help we don't have enough substitute teachers we don't have enough classroom assistance we'll hear maybe a little bit later about transportation but we could use bus drivers we could use custodial staff child nutrition people community ed people we need your help and we have good people to work with good uh systems in place we think we have a fair uh salary structure and or hourly uh pay structure along with benefits and the like that go

129with some of these positions but if there's anything i can say is we need your help so with that um we can look a little bit about average class size which people always worry about that i know teachers worry about it i know parents worry about it so as of august 6 and based on the enrollment data that we currently have you can see that the class sizes in the kindergarten through fifth grade look fairly reasonable now i say reasonable is we have new students come in we may have students leave and we'll have a better idea how that fits in after the first couple weeks of school but one of the commitments that we've always made is we'll look at that we'll contin continue to study it and if we need to make adjustments

130uh that the administrative team will work with the building principles to to make sure that that's equitable across the district and meets the needs of the children at those grade levels the class sizes at middle school and high school are a little more fluid because you have more courses but we again know that class size matters to teachers and we would like to to make sure that there's a availability for a significant adult to connect with the child and so we try our best to make that work so from there we are going to go to community ed which is uh dave's here okay and mike sepi's here with us this evening too he's down over here thank you for that um yes and community ed we could probably spend hours talking about that a

131lot of us think about nine to four o'clock or seven to two thirty but the fact is there's a lot that happens before school there's a lot that happens after school and there's a lot that happens over the summer and mike and his team do an excellent job with that providing opportunities not only for students but also for adults um i just put a few things up here highlight like i said we could talk for a long time but this is a short thing um to echo dr ricker's comments we need your help we need your help and community yet as well because the more help that we get the more employees we get the more opportunities that we can provide and those opportunities are very successful for not only our staff i mean our

132parents but also our students um adventure club is a big part of that typically in a typical year we'll have 1800 plus adventure club students um this year coming up in the fall looks like we'll have about 950 enrolled um so we need adventure club workers as well the more adventure club workers we get the more students come off of that wait list there's about 300 students on that wait list and to put that in perspective we need about 66 positions to fill so we can provide that opportunity for our students and our parents that need that service that's a tremendous service our summer experience was actually it was awesome we had record numbers of participants this year over 14 000 individuals used the resources that community have provided and it was a very successful

133summer so we're very proud of that in a pre-covered year we had about 10 000 over the summer so we continue to expand our summer experiences for not only our kids but also our adults so excited about the opportunities that we've done this summer and looking forward to more opportunities that we can provide for next summer as well and the last thing is coming up in the fall school is going to happen and we also want to provide additional opportunities for our kids so we've got 350 programs for the fall that's typical of a pre-covered year about 50 of those programs are actually new programs for the fall and so um the more help we get the more opportunities that we can provide so i'm excited the fact that with the summer experience and the

134fall experience that we're starting to see community ed and the numbers and the participants and what we offer come back to something that we're used to so excited about that [Music] next is uh mary lou pack good evening everyone uh so the biggest news for communications is our new website and it was certainly not something that we anticipated doing this year but with the attack on our systems in june it quickly became a priority and i'd really like to give a shout out to my team because we had a very ambitious goal of getting a new site up by august 1st and they made it happen we signed a contract in mid-july and two weeks later in fact it was up a couple days early on the 30th of they made that happen and so

135the vendors told us when they saw our timeline that we were crazy because it typically takes four to six months uh to implement a new site so i just really want to thank my team for seeing how important this was and and really getting the work done and making it happen uh it looks great we are populating information new information every day uh the rockwood safe together section of the website was something that we really prioritized and all of the back to school information for parents today even we updated our health indicators with employee positive cases and quarantines that we're seeing as well as vaccination we did ask our employees to volunteer volunteer whether or not they've been vaccinated or not and over a thousand employees have already indicated that they're vaccinated so we're gonna

136we're going to show that on the website under the health indicators and we're going to continue to do that i also like to mention when the mask message went out we shared a hotline and an email for folks we're trying to streamline that and make it easy so families know exactly where to go to reach someone if they have a question or a concern and we're going to continue to do that throughout the year i do want to assure our families that those hotlines and emails are monitored daily and we are responding as quickly as we can i also wanted to share that we're really going to focus you know the pandemic took us in a lot of directions and of course we wanted to keep everyone up to date on what was going on

137but we're really going to focus on the classroom this year and we're going to try and categorize our stories i mean we have so many good stories to share of the work the wonderful work that's going on in our classroom and our success and so we're going to categorize those and we're going to tie it back to the whiteboard because that is really our guiding light a lot of work went into that five-year plan and so we're going to be very strategic on the stories that we share and we're going to tie it back to that way forward just as dr count said we love seeing the kids back in school for these orientations and we're very excited to start the new year and we're committed to engaging our staff students and our families and

138network so thank you next is paul northington and he or we'll get there we go there she is good okay schizophrenic here good evening thank you for the opportunity through the family's first coronavirus response act the food nutrition services established a waiver to allow the national school lunch program seamless summer option to operate when schools open during the regular school year through june 30th of 2022 this allows schools to offer breakfast and lunch free of charge last spring we exercised that waiver and were able to offer meals free of charge to our students we served on an average day 10 517 students lunch and 1900 students breakfast every day so we had great participation and we anticipate increased participation in the school year as the award gets out that breakfast and lunch are free for

139all students as well we are receiving new registers for the point of sale next week so we'll be able to more quickly move the students through the serving lines um so they'll be able to maintain distance from each other and get their meals and enjoy those a lot of the secondary schools have increased the number of meal periods that are going to be offered so we'll be able to space out the students as well healthy meals we will have the menus posted on our website is we're still tweaking them a little bit there's been a number of shortages of different menu items so some of our popular items aren't available so we're making a few adjust adjustments chief's pretzel roll has always been very popular i just got an email today maybe they'll be available

140in january so there's some other little tweet things like that they keep appearing so our menu will be a little more narrow but we'll feed the kids and we do still have 40 vacant positions for our school kitchens we are working on hiring students to help when they can before school or during lunch we have students at all for the high schools and we're working on a couple students for some of the other schools as well we've hired bus drivers to work in our kitchens help serving lunch before and after their routes so we'll take advantage of those we're looking for more substitutes as well and we'll take volunteers at any time we have had parent volunteers at lafayette and a few other places that have come in and helped us serve lunch as well

141so child nutrition is a great place to work we offer free lunch for anybody who wants to help us and um [Music] well it's a great way to get your steps in as well so that's how we feed the students this is how we get him to school mike came in thank you and home at night hey there you go i want to thank the board dr ricker and paul northington for their support sitting here listening to everything everything that's going on in the district i can appreciate the extra effort and the sincere input that everyone has to make this a safe enjoyable uh excellent school district and it makes me feel good to be part of it um the the bus route finalization for 2022 uh currently we completed with all the home school

142routes excuse me um we uh we ended that routing with 105 home regular ed homeless school routes and eight early childhood routes for a total of 113. it's important to note we started last school year with 147 regular home to school routes as a result of covid and and the pandemic ridership numbers we're falling for our 26 percent we had to cut back on routes obviously and we kept losing drivers current ridership registration is at 9 800 students our peak since i've been in the rockwood is 13 600. so our ridership is down uh our bus refresh we've received our 20 new unleaded buses this year they're all air conditioned 77 passenger buses i'm going to get the plates tomorrow at jeff city so they'll be road ready on friday they're all inspected so we

143have a total now of 37 air conditioning regular red buses the large ones it's important because we do transfer summer school you know students and it is very hot in the summer so it's important that we continue that the district owns a total of 168 regular ed buses uh 55 currently are unleaded that we're converting the fleet to and we have 113 diesels the 55 unleaded buses are still in full warranty the 113 buses as of this year are now out of warranty they're over five years old we will continue the transition from diesel to unleaded the advantages are multiple uh less maintenance lower maintenance for fuel changes of oil filters emissions are greatly reduced so over a period of time we will save a lot of money you know with our maintenance costs on

144those we're very pleased with the performance of the unleaded buses as well also there's not the problem of gelling in the cold winter months you don't have to really plug in your unlimited buses just like your car driver staffing currently we have 125 regular ed drivers we have eight early childhood drivers and we have seven which is better than we've had in previous years seven trip drivers that will do our athletic trips or help with our live trips and i'll contribute uh some of that increase to the fact that we've had coaches that some of our high schools stepped up and have learned and we trained them and certified them as drivers so that's really helped the cause i'm really pleased with that with the staffing we have now with the reduction of the routes

145that we had to plan ahead for which was an easy thing to do we have basically 12 sub drivers we run that's about 11 percent sub coverage we have to cover drivers when they're absent we just can't transport the kids so last year i went to did the math we averaged like 16 absenteeisms last year so we're a little short on the subs but i'm hoping that maybe this you'll be a healthier year colvin get under control and and we should be fine but i feel very confident going into the school year and uh as far as transporting the students thank you thanks mike and that now paul northington is going to share with us support services related to facilities yes just real quick kudos to carmen and mike both in food service and transportation

146they've been working hard all summer to get things ready to go and once again they've done a great job in regards to our other areas of facilities and i need to um chris friend our director of facilities and his teams have been working really hard this summer again when we talk about cycle maintenance projects during the summer there's a limited time frame to get a lot of these done while school is out and chris and his team has done a good job of that just some examples of some of the cycle projects it's going to be completed prior to the start of school include uh three painting projects one at the at the pond bus transportation lot green pines elementary in the rear part of babbler elementary all of those will be done for the

147start of school also been a lot of flooring projects throughout the district and then in regards to our high schools each of the four high schools in some form have received new bleachers some in the regions and some of their uh main gyms and in regards to marquette they also got a new floor that is just absolutely beautiful so a lot of work has has gotten done uh through our facilities team during the summer they always make it work in regards to special projects that is part of our 2017 bind issue we're getting to the very end of that and in fact the marquette high school stem edition is really the last project that fits under that bond issue so we've been able to achieve all the things in in that bond issue that we

148wanted to do in fact a little bit more so this stem edition is about uh it's a second phase it's been a two-year commitment also be done prior to the start of school about a 6.7 million dollar commitment that's going to come in on time and on budget uh the other project just before that was the wildwood uh multi-purpose room which is also served as a storm safe shelter that was a 2.9 million dollar project and we received 1.2 million in financial assistance from payment so that came in better than budget in regards to cycle maintenance for summer 22 we're already starting plans for that summer 22 looks more like outdoor type projects to where we'll do continue to do some paving throughout different areas in the district also do some things with some of

149our athletic track type surfaces again the commitment for cycle maintenance for summer 22 is a little over 2 million dollars in facilities and the other part of our cycle maintenance is our also our technology commitment and that will be a three million dollar commitment for 2022. this all folds into our rolling five-year capital projects plan which we'll be bringing to the board for further discussion um this fall which is five-year capital planning includes all our resources that we have that's designed for capital projects for example it will include some of our answer funds that may be applicable to capital type projects that includes a remaining part of our bond issue funds also includes any internal funding that we derive locally and will also be enveloped in our debt service levy transition plan that we'll be

150communicating here under finances in just a minute so chris and his team are working to finalize the details on that naturally 2022 has already been resolved but we're working on the years beyond that so that's just a quick recap on facilities well paul before you go into the next phase finance yes sir this is one of the best kept secrets in our district this financial plan and the financial information that paul's going to share with you i hate that it's a best-kept secret we need to really let people know about the long-term financial planning that's taken place in previous years and it will take place in future years and it's a testament to long-range planning in the financial people here in rockwood and to the board of education as well because you've all been part

151of this and so we need to sing the praise of the fact that the rockwood school district is a good steward of the tax dollar so paul thank you senator so in regards to finances we just completed our year in 2021 and you've heard some budget presentations again the district experience study budget surplus and our ending fund balance operating percentage is is above our 22 target matter of fact quite a bit about it so we're on solid footing and enables us to do some of the things that you've heard some of our other departments uh speak to to support those operations for fiscal year 22 the board adopted a balanced budget we're very optimistic that that budget picture will stay balanced uh throughout the year we're we've got a good outlook as far as the

152local economy and state economy and our projections i think are very um realistic in regards to achieving a balanced budget the other part of our finances that's incorporating the budget is of course of our esser and cares funding for fiscal year 21 that we just completed we received the first round of monies which is about 2.8 million that we use to address ppe type items back to school technology enhancements to address virtual things of that nature going forward there's rounds of esther two and three that will be available to the district and that goes out to the next three school years through 2024 and the total of those two is about 11.3 million and we're working strategically to make sure we come up with a good long-term plan that we can look at 10 years

153down the road and say yes that was a good way to use those funds and then to dr ricker's point this is all part of our long-term planning is our debt service levy transition plan and this is something that was developed several years ago to where we were going to make that transition of taking pennies out of the debt service levy and moving them over into capital projects to fund that to get away from some of the borrowing costs associated with it the initial plan had that transitioning in the 26-27 school year the fact that economy has been better than expected we've been able to manage a lot of our projects a lot better we think we can do that debt service levy plan as early as a 22-23 school year and that would come

154in phases to where we move the first phase of 18 cents for the first four years and then it phases into a larger transition after that so we'll be bringing additional information to the board this fall on that as well naturally that will take some voter initiative but it is uh tax rate neutral so there would be a no tax rate increase in that plan so that's just a real quick summary on finances thank you dad like mary i would like to take a second and thank my team we were um temporarily disrupted from our traditional summer court and without them we would not be as far along as we are right now for the start of school so they have done a wonderful job and i just appreciate that but we begin our preparations

155for this first day of school in february that is when we are working with infinite campus and business plus so our information systems team has been working to get those things going they're all ready and we are moving forward the instructional technology teachers or specialists have been supporting our teachers all summer they have been working on developing canvas courses they have provided professional learning opportunities for canvas they had a tech fest earlier this summer where teachers were able to select topics of interest and they were able to support them with that they're ready to meet their teachers in person or via zoom to help them get the best start to the school year that they can possibly have the technology support services team is our repair team our network team our help desk our help

156desk is prepared to support our students our parents our teachers anyone who calls they are always willing and able to help and during that first week of school we get several hundred phone calls per day and some of them can take quite a while to help talk a student through how to get access to a resource or just simply change their password and log on to their chromebook but they do a great job of getting through that and they are prepared the building techs have been working diligently and i would say extra hours to ensure that classrooms are put back together the devices have been collected and prepared for a new school year the network team has been extremely busy not only with dealing with the incident but also overseeing wiring in three new earth

157new wiring in three schools so bond issue projects have been on track um e-rate projects have been on track we have a new um data storage system that was implemented and is operational so all of those things that support the work that our teachers and our other staff do is being supported along with our students and their families so that's that's where we are we're ready and willing and able to help people for the first day of school thanks deb thank you in conclusion i wanted to recognize several people that are here that some spoken some didn't but they're and they were mentioned by some of the presenters this evening that would be denny rhodes carmen fisher we heard from glenn hancock over here we've got mike came and you heard from renee trapierre right

158there amy where and chris wasn't able to come this evening but um as you can tell a lot of work went into the uh the getting ready for the start of school a lot of work goes into that a lot of us in the in the shadows that we don't get to see or hear a lot about um and so for the board members if you have any questions funnel them to me and then we'll work with uh the what i consider to be the experts in the field the people you heard from tonight and the people down here to get your questions answered and if there are any ideas or suggestions that you have they are more than willing to listen um they're a wonderful group of people to work with and they're very

159highly skilled and um i trust them to do the work that you just saw them present to you and we also know that uh the way forward is really our plan and that plan we're gonna we're moving ahead in in that plan not just in what you heard tonight but for a year for the remainder of this year into next year and so on and so forth it's a good plan and and i believe that it the community over time will see that that was very insightful on the part of past administration past boards current board and future boards to ensure that we meet the mission of of the school district which is for every child to reach their potential so thank you for listening for this i i always like to kind of do

160this at the front of this school year because it just gets me i mean razzed ready to go and whoever said we can't wait for the kids i think it was uh you know of several of them i mean that's what's fun when we go to these open houses when we saw the meet me in st louis i mean the kids are excited the kids are excited and we can't wait for them to come here so with that thank you very much for listening i'd like to have that thank you for all those thank yous i want to add a few thank you i want to thank dr tier for being here tonight because if i don't if she's not recognized you'll let me know carbon dentist thanks for being here tonight police officers we

161appreciate you more than you'll ever know and uh and then then dr steve hankins and all the administrators from marquette high school we appreciate you being here i want to thank the three people that are still in the audience thank you guys very much for hanging around four of you there's of you here's five six five okay six of them one back in the back yeah back row thank you for hanging with us for the presentation we appreciate that all right thank you dr kinder for wrapping the meeting up for me and stealing everything i was going to say so what dr kinder said before we go we just have a couple items left uh we have the proposed agenda for the august 19th board of education meetings is just next thursday so we will

162be right back here at marquette high school for that meeting and then future agenda presentations and events to attend like the planning calendar for the years attached anybody have any questions or comments about those items if not thank you again to everybody for being here keeping us safe and uh for sharing your thoughts we will adjourn the meeting