001all right this being the appointed time and place and seeing a quorum present i will go ahead and call this meeting to order if you'd all please rise and join me in the pledge over there 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 thank you here tina johnson here steve cocco here kitty marion here david trader all right this brings us to the first part of our agenda for public comments before i open it up to those sitting in the front row first [Laughter] so again ask that you please keep your comments brief please identify yourself when recognized we will be doing both in-person and those online for those online please use the raise
002your hand feature we will then identify you and turn your microphone on once you do that if you please lower your hands so we can keep track of who is remaining we appreciate that i know there are a number of people who would like to speak so again we'd like to keep your marks brief we're going to target two minutes and so therefore i'm going to open it up and do we need last time we started online preference um online first we have no hands raised okay all right so those in the room start here in the first in the room we'd like to be recognized at this time please good evening my name is laurie holland w2627 gilbert hill road in order for discussing close contact quarantines we should determine that the risks the
003benefits and the burdens are shared equally in this policy we all know by now the risks we learn every day we all know the survival rate for children we know a fact that they are not the vulnerable population we know hospitalization rates in children with coven 19 per the wisconsin department of health is not higher than husband hospitalization rates for kids with food we know symptoms are mostly mild if any we know transmission is low we know many children already have immunity and we now have a choice to get our children vaccinated if we want number two the benefits do we really know if closed contact quarantines are beneficial we have really no way of tracking we know how many children are out of school but we don't really know where they got coded if
004they do come down with it or could it just be that it's really not transmitting to students in school the burden hundreds of students are losing hundreds of hours of direct instruction direct instruction that is legally required hours are required these kids are being losing these hours for just being healthy for the most part and because of where they sit in a class students are falling behind students are being excluded from not only school but important things like sports clubs etc students are acting out and showing very concerning behaviors especially in the high school parents are taken off of work for healthy children which will make it even harder for them when their children are ever if ever sick there are seniors even the juniors that may not be ready for college these younger children
005will not learn key social skills if they're keep being forced out of the classroom these teachers are trying to find balance in teaching the burdens go on and on and on and we only have two minutes so i can't continue the risk is not equal to unknown benefits and most importantly it is not equal to the burdens that is being put on these children this exclusion of healthy children to their fun fundamental important legal right means right to an education it needs to come to an end please put in a resolution thank you [Applause] adam fillmore 621 long street thank you and i just wanted to just dive into what she's saying a little bit more and one of the questions i would have is of those kids that were placed on quarantine how many
006came down with the covet i don't think we're tracking that maybe we are i'd like to i'd like to raise some questions here and if you have any of the answers please stop me and give me the answers um i'd like to know how many kids in our school district have been seriously ill requiring hospitalization what's our numbers i'd like to know what other school districts are doing i think best practice is a really important thing when it comes to education when it comes to business we look at best practice what are the other school districts doing are they are they using this quarantine process um how many how many teachers have been impacted or is it or is it just if you're sitting close to the child within a certain uh proximity um and
007then and then beyond that you know how how uh how many how many other ways are the way to catch this covet you know can you catch it outside of the school can you catch it in other in other areas obviously you can and i don't think we have these same same things when it comes to riding in a car on a trip somewhere do we do we track that i mean there's just so many ways for us to potentially catch this one percent um problem that you know i think we should we should consider taking this away um and i guess the other question i would have is uh with with other risks in our life like alcoholism drugs mental illness do we spend as much time on those problems as we have on
008this uh one percent probability that uh people would catch covalent that's all thank you all right thank you [Applause] who else in the room greg wardman 1549 boulder road watertown uh dpi released the report card for the district just recently we took a step back compared to 2018 2019 metrics the watertown unified school district would likely be considered below expectations is this something i think i know that many teachers teaching these kids as successful as possible despite the roadblocks of the close contact quarantines and countless staff and students frequently being absent i suppose it could have been worse as a teacher you may find yourself spending countless hours preparing lesson plans and posting notes on google classroom for that child forced into truancy after a week or maybe two of missing class you might expect
009a child to have done some work at home but in reality you'd be wrong now you find yourself having to re-teach one teacher shared that they had to remove six kids from a classroom the ninth day after exposure does that make any sense you may feel a moral obligation to reduce the spread of covet by this mitigation strategy it sounds great in theory but in reality that group of youngsters is sharing that big of doritos playing video games when they should be learning in the classroom you are not reducing the spread you are contributing to learning loss as a board you work hard to invest public dollars as wisely as possible but teachers aren't able to collaborate because there are no subs one has to ask is this really a recipe for fidelity and education
010the district found it more important to utilize approximately six people and a hundred sixty thousand dollars to contact trace rather than utilize these resources for learning loss in the classroom several parents have shared that their child was sent home never to have been a close contact if you plan on spending 160 000 and take away the job from a public health authority you better get it right tracy finch 1007 west main street uh what is the purpose of quarantine during clove 19 uh quarantine is intended to reduce the risk of an affected person's might unknowingly transmitted to others it is also ensured that the person who becomes symptomatic or otherwise diagnosed quarantined can be rapidly brought to care of evaluated how long does it take to it to transfer um a person with cold aid
011can consider it infected starting two days before they develop symptoms or two days before their positive tests can you get a covey from someone who has no symptomatic yes you can according to the cdc flu viruses and covid can spread by others before showing symptoms by people with very mild symptoms and people who are asymptomatic please do not get rid of quarantine if you get rid of quarantine all together you will see cases go up up just like in several school districts like cedarburg and oconomowoc an infected person with covet can spread it to two to five others without even realizing it even if they have no symptoms or minor symptoms like no fever or sniffles um i'm sure most guardians parents are sick and tired of this sure i got colder but i got
012over it they got their children got coma they had over it but two students in wisconsin died from with the help of colby one teacher from o'connell died of koben if you don't take the easy way out like you've done so many times in the past like you did in 2020 of october when returning to to school and to school in person and like in 2021 but in may you just automatically got rid of mass without consulting with the health department you voted on the majority of vocal parents as opposed to doing the hard extra work to ensure the safety of all students no matter their health condition even if they have an underlying health issue you need to find the middle ground and by what it seems quarantine is the middle ground since asking
013has been optional you take away quarantine then masking needs required or mostly everyone here is mandated you need to look out for those with special needs within your school district you get rid of coping there are going to be other kids who possibly die without you even realizing it um i'm reading this for the person myself at least i want my address what's up yes please w5993 county road t watertown this is a note from kate van der linden i'm reading this for her her address is n8071 high road watertown i really wish i could be here tonight but i had a work conflict that i could not change thank you first thank you for this meeting thank you for realizing the importance of discussing and discussing and it needs attention separately from the regular
014board meeting thank you also for the time to speak or read and time that you are taking to hear many voices at this meeting i know this is not easy i know we want the same outcome healthy kids teachers faculty in school and learning unfortunately we may not all agree on how this can be done and that the joy and that's the joy and changing challenge of life we control we control what we can and accept what we can't we have learned over the last 20 months one we can't control a virus two others will not make the same decisions as ourselves three it is really hard to run a school in a pandemic four teachers are amazing as well as those brave homeschoolers many of us realize how much homeschooling is not for us
015five there is no ex exact science to this which is the reality of the human body we all have different responses six we want our kids in school seven we must keep sick kids home and parents we have not been doing a good job of this in the past myself included and i'll say myself included it's really hard to run a school in a pandemic i think it's worth saying a lot the question before us is not the question before us though is not of sick kids or even a pandemic it is simply does sorry i didn't read this before it is simply does being another another does does being another that's being near sorry another one who has coveted means that we might get sick or spread it the simple answer is yes yes
016being around someone who has any virus that is contagious may cause illness the truth is the truth is and has been true even before 2020. the truth is we have all caught a virus from someone we have all had the sniffles or even whole class come down with similar symptoms and we have never never prevented healthy kids from attending school so why now because we have always always used practice of stay at home if you're sick we have never ever invited kids to stay home in case they got sick do you have any do you have any idea how many kids would stay home if they did every if they did every time they might get sick talk to a high schooler they might get sick every day which is true i'm sorry we're gonna
017need to draw two quotes i can't make sure you copy that what's that yes i can make sure that all the board members get a copy message about that um yeah i have one small paragraph left and i can email it to you also other districts have chosen to no longer keep kids home who have been exposed and there have been no no upticks or spikes the stress anxiety on kids only on kids who have not have to worry about passing their own symptom sectors but also now here for their friends or others around them more detrimental than catching the virus businesses including hospitals do not require contact quarantine this means that doctors nurses people insert sterile surgery may walk into a house may walk into with a positive may walk in may walk right
018in with coped positive child at home i would hope that if a doctor can perform surgery after being exposed a child could come to school sorry is there anyone else do you recognize his time in the room hope everybody can hear me hello my name is doherty [Music] i reside at n8856 county road a watertown wisconsin thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this evening i have been a long time taxpayer resident of watertown township within the watertown school district my son graduated from watertown high school in 2020 and my daughter currently is a freshman at watertown high school i'm asking for your consideration to change the current policy regarding youth who have been identified as being in close contact to another youth that contracted covenant 19. my recommendation is to inform the
019parents whose child has been in close contact and allow the parents to monitor for symptoms along with determining when they feel it is appropriate for their child to attendance in person school school in person the current policy does not take into consideration how one child can continually be placed on close contact over and over this has happened to my daughter twice this fall already she has missed multiple days of in-person school learning while all along she had no symptoms and was perfectly healthy yet i as a parent have no voice in the matter i can't even imagine what a family with multiple students are going through my question is is going to my question is what is going to prevent this from happening to her again and again and over and over is this what
020we really want and is this really our best option for our youth in the community thank you again for allowing me to speak and i hope that you will consider my recommendations for this current policy thank you very much anyone else online cassie s again if you could please make sure to identify yourself we appreciate it thank you do you want me to wait for the timer to reset or [Music] now that i can see it go ahead works for me my name is cassie stephen list i'm at 104 north main street reeseville but i open and roll my students my children in to watertown school district because we've always liked the school district we like the teachers we have always felt comfortable sending our children there a lot has changed in the last you
021know two years my sorry a lot has changed in the last two years with all the pandemic i know it's not easy running a school right now is hard being a parent right now is hard being a student right now is hard life is hard that's kind of just the way it goes but some points that i want to bring up are the urgent care is currently still closed in the last two weeks active cases in watertown have gone up four times there have been four addition four plus deaths in the last two weeks we have to acknowledge that there's this increase getting rid of close corn close contact quarantine right now is not a wise idea with no other safety precautions i see that you guys are socially distancing you are each at your
022own tables that is great but our students can't do that so with no social distancing and no masks close contact quarantine is our last line of defense and to people saying how kids can't catch it at school my son did i know he did because we don't go anywhere else we were not leaving the house to go to stores or whatever the only place he went was school and he brought it home and he got us all sick it was one year ago today actually that he tested positive for covid it's hard i understand that it's hard to quarantine over holidays it's hard to quarantine i have to miss school and activities he missed his last cross-country race of his first season this year because he had he was a contact but it was better
023than risking getting other people sick and this is about more than just the students this is what the families they go home to you don't know what these families are encountering they could have immunocompromised people at home and you could be risking their lives covet is more about just the symptoms that you get now there's long covert there's this can go on forever and ever the state department state health department recommends quarantine the cdc recommends quarantine the district itself has recommended masks and quarantine and social distancing in the past please side with science and side with the overarching health recommendations and at the minimum maintain close contact quarantine that's all we ask so look out for your neighbor thanks all right thank you anyone else online alicantes it's time to see everybody hear us hello
024there you are we can hear you you can go ahead and speak please start oh can you hear me now yes okay sorry about that um okay uh alley contest 400 chapter court uh in watertown i know we've spoke many many times about all of um the precautions and everything that need to be in place for this virus i understand the frustration quite well with quarantine my daughter just got done with a week and a half of virtual learning and it was a hassle to find someone to be with her during the day and everything but in my mind it was worth it because it was making sure that she was wasn't gonna potentially spread the virus to someone else or she wouldn't get the virus from someone else every child has a right to
025a safe and access accessible education kids that have medical conditions that make them high risk they have rights too don't forget that there are many students that have high risk family members as well it's not just about the kid getting sick it's also about them bringing it home kids can spread the virus without having symptoms which is why it's important to quarantine we need to find a middle ground those of us who take this virus seriously have rights too you need to show that you represent everyone i understand that there's been a lot of pressure and there's a lot of frustration all around but i ask that you please find some middle ground so that we still have some way of protecting our kids if you want to eliminate quarantine then i ask that you
026please consider another way to help protect the kids like maybe um having mass required when our community spread is at a certain level or um something like that like just we need to be able to know that our kids are safe and that you guys value everyone in all of our situations i i would also ask that if there's a possibility of perhaps doing a non-bias survey or something like that that gets sent out to the entire whole body uh so all parents have a chance to speak their mind without feeling um like they're being put in the spotlight i know a lot of people that are afraid to speak up at board meetings and things like that because of um they're worried about backlash so i ask that you at least consider finding some
027way to let everyone have their voice heard and find some way to find some middle ground because there's a lot of us that still want our kids to be protected and if you eliminate mass and quarantine that they're not being protected and if kids get sick that's going to be on you all right thank you thank you chris finch yes uh chris finch 1007 west main street um i just have a couple questions that i'd like you to think about as you're creating your um your as you're going through your thought process and how you should or shouldn't react to quarantine should it be there shouldn't go away the question that first question is what do you do for the immunocompromised children who for whatever reason cannot learn at home what do you tell those
028families i know we had we had a pretty creative idea a few months ago um where they thought about putting everybody who wanted a mask in a different school unfortunately that wasn't realistic for a lot of families and it didn't go through but what are what what are we going to do for those who those children who do have immuno compromises that have to be at school um the second one if you do get rid of quarantine will you still notify parents of positive cases that their children may have come in contact with and the final question is do you or as you're going through this making this decision will there be a plan in place if we have an outbreak what are we going to do at that point are we going to go
029back to virtual learning since nobody seems to like that are we going to have a staggered approach where we put mass back in place for a set number of time um it's best to have a plan you always hope for the best plan for the worst so my question would be will you have a plan in place if an outbreak happens i know you're hearing you're going to hear a lot back and forth tonight both sides people who don't want kids to be quarantined because very few kids end up showing signs of coping but there's also that other side where there's a much higher risk so i would like just to remind you to take time to think about everybody who's involved thank you all right thank you all right anyone else in the room
030here it's time i don't have like a formal speech prepared and i feel like i might pass out but like you're okay okay my name is shandy yankee and i live at 236 elizabeth street um i just wanted to make note one of my sons is part of the third grade class at douglas who was switched to virtual only effective um monday night for the rest of the week when i followed up on tuesday to see if he was actually deemed a close contact i was told no so i was like okay great so he can come back to school right no the whole class is out for the whole week for what he he's healthy and he was not deemed a close contact so now i'm off of work all week i lose wages
031he is he attends why care after school so he now can't attend that you still have to pay regardless if they're there so i've not only lost wages but now i somehow i have to pay why care [Music] just make it make sense um and then i just wanted to share two um from him he's eight years old and he said this i hate this kids should be learning at school not sitting at home doing nothing my teacher is there to help me learn and that's what school is made for i want to get smarter and it makes me sad that i can't see my friends that's all thank you anyone else in the room sir uh joe white 813 casey drive here in watertown first off i want to thank the teachers staff and
032the board for all their help over the past uh year and a half or so keep our kids safe and healthy i really appreciate it my wife appreciates it as well i currently have two kids in the watertown district and one in the genesee lake in oconomowoc two of kids are actually special needs evaluating the past 18 months my kids combined have been quarantined for over 45 days that's roughly 360 hours that i had to be a teacher that i was definitely not trained for you know um but i know there's others in this district that uh have been quarantined for even more than that for me it's time to stop the close quarantine and move this district forward like other districts have recently done i do find it kind of ironic that we used
033to have to take our sick kids to the doctor to get notes to get them back in school now we have to take our healthy kids to the doctor and get tested to get them back thank you all right thank you hello my name is tasha generic i live on county road m in watertown i currently have five children in the watertown school district i'd like to start by saying that the kovic policies the district are upholding are failing our children and are blatantly discriminative discrimination of any sort has no business in our school district and is absolutely vile i'm having a hard time believing given the position you're in that you could even write these policies without realizing that um how does um [Music] sorry i lost my space especially considering the facts which
034are public knowledge if you feel the need to do some individual research to um instead or do some research instead of following recommendations from a privately paid entity that does not have our child's best interest in mind do you do you treat kids that do not get the flu shot differently it is public knowledge that vaccinated individuals are just as likely to get and spread covet so why are we only quarantine unvaccinated children mostly without even knowing they have the virus now unvaccinated are likely to show symptoms easily detectable meaning these people will be visibly sick so ask yourself which is more dangerous folks that are spreading it without even knowing they are infected or someone who feels sick and can make the decision to stay home my family and i are done with these
035games we refuse to play them with constant covet tests and doctor's visits what a racket you are facilitating my kids will not be tested every week and my kids will not be vaccinated no matter what you try to bribe them with by the way only putting unvaccinated kids on quarantine looks darkly like coercion or a dirty bribe for instance i have had three of my healthy children forced into covet quarantine which totaled 256 missed hours just between three children that's their education their right to an education my daughter riley doty who is an overachieving top student at watertown high school producing nothing but straight a's her entire academic career go ahead and look her up if you don't believe me she has stressed to me her feelings about the quarantine by day three she was
036stressed unable to fully know what is happening in her class left her less than confident in the work she was handing in by day five she was feeling behind she was unable to hand in many assignments because there was such a lack of information transfer because many of the teachers at the high school do not participate in zooms which i can't blame them for not wanting the extra hassle but class discussions are crucial for young minds so if my so if my daughter who has her ducks in a row can feel this way what do you think this is doing to kids that already struggle with their academics on a daily basis this is not okay please do the best thing for our children and drop the discrimination and end quarantines for unvaccinated children johnny
037with 510 gray fox run watertown i was going to wait and talk more at the next board meeting which is just a regular board meeting i know this pertains just too close contact quarantine but i feel that there is a relevant situation that greatly goes along with what our school district is seeing right now with close contact quarantining and all of the things that go along with that for our children i do not doubt i do not say that covet does not exist and that people are getting sick from it at the same time we have school shootings all over our country and when our high school has had four i've received four emails since the school year started about a threat by a student over social media and the amount of referrals that are
038being reported in the high school since the school year started and when his child can walk into the high school after a threat was made and possibly walked in right next to my child knowing that she had made a threat with guns to the school or over social media i am sorry kovid is the least of my concerns when i send my child to school it is what is going on with our children based off of the things that they're dealing with not being in school not having that structure to function there the mental health is out of control and like i said sending my kid to school covered the least of my worries thank you you my name is tony jocelyn i live at 908 fox creek drive in watertown i don't have any
039kids in the school anymore my kids are all grown up i have the occasion today to have my eight-year-old great-grandson that i have to try and figure out how the hell zoom works and how to do his school work he didn't know is this you know maybe the kovid is this has been going on way too long how do we know that these kids are that sick whoever that little kid in that has caused the third grade to be out of school all week did he just have a tummy ache who knows nobody knows all i know is i spent eight hours of my day today sitting on the couch next to a little eight-year-old who said grandma i go back to school these kids have missed so much school are they going to be
040able to function in the world because they're so far behind let's get real and let these kids have the education that they deserve that's all i have [Applause] anyone steve we will have i mean we have more discussion after this okay okay one more online record okay hopefully you can hear me yes we can okay my name is kay rucker i live at 406 south montgomery street in watertown my son goes to riverside middle school in general i i am of the opinion that our kids are going to learn and get a lot of value out of being in class in school i think kids learn a lot better that way i've i've expressed that opinion before but i have a few just statements for questions i'd like to bring up for people to think
041about as you're you know reviewing this um topic so kids have been catching and spreading viruses for years and never before have schools done this type of quarantining for kids for just being in contact or being in the same classroom with someone who has a virus or illness you know we have to ask ourselves how many kids have historic historically how many kids have been ill from influenza like seriously ill from influenza versus the current serious covet cases and kids how much are we blowing this out of proportion of course it's it's bad when a kid gets seriously ill but really when you compare it to other serious illnesses how bad is really you know comparatively if kids are spreading the germs before they show symptoms then aren't the kids i mean haven't those kids
042already spread the germs to their classmates anyway so what's the the use of quarantining healthy kids and what about the kids who are quarantined for school contact but then those same kids have been hanging out together socially what is the difference what makes classroom contact so much more contagious than hanging out with each other at their houses after school or something like that so i just i guess i just want to bring up those common sense ideas basically we really need to think about this logically and common sense don't let the media uh scare people into things that's it thank you all right thank you okay board members continue or draw back to before discussions they see one more hand back there all right one more here and one more online so all the way
043in the back please i'm a little nervous too um so i've sent you guys a lot of emails they're probably like really annoying um don't know sorry amber zuki is 757 nelson lane um i don't have a speech prepared but my son missed five days of school so far um he finally got to go back on tuesday wearing a mask um i asked him today on my way home from work how far behind he was and he said mom i only have a couple assignments left to do after missing a five days like how does this even make any sense these kids are missing out on so much school like what kind of lesson is this teaching them it's always acceptable to hand in late work like it's acceptable to miss all this school and
044then the teachers are just you know brushing off their homework assignments like this just makes me so incredibly like sick i talked to a health attendant at um the middle school and she basically told me that teachers are giving all these kids a break with their homework so i just like think this is totally unacceptable like my kids getting half of the amount of learning that he should be um we're not quarantined at home i have bills to pay i'm not staying home with him i'm not sitting there and helping him with his homework every step of the way i can't miss school my daughter's not in school i just i don't know i wanted to end on this quotes that i thought really hit home um it was by um a head basketball coach
045for south carolina and it says you know what makes my music to my stomach when i hear grown people that say kids have changed kids haven't changed kids don't know anything about anything we've changed as adults we demand less of kids we expect less of kids we make their lives easier instead of preparing them for what life is truly about we are the ones that change and this is all in the name of colbin right now and it is truly disgusting that's all i have for you bob and i just need to identify yourself fully pop can you hear me yes we can all right this is james tocqueville w5993 kanye road t as i said here listening to all this here i got to ask you guys a question here you all know where
046most everybody that you've heard stands here and i agree with just about everybody here now it's about time to start stop living in this fantasy world here and get back to normal and cut the and you guys all know that and listening to this everybody that's sitting here knows that you didn't know where we need to be here it's about time to pull this these uh dog-gone blinders off your eyes and start living in the real world with us here because our kids don't eat this garbage and we ain't gonna take no mores thank you [Music] there is not a set structure this discussion there's not going to be a presentation and it'll be open discussion amongst board i know steve has something that he'd like to say so nobody objects we'll start with letting
047steve speak thank you very much tony i'm not going to speak directly to the minutia that we're just we're discussing this evening but a broader overall understanding of where we are and why we're here i am compelled to make a couple of statements first and then expound upon them number one i have little faith in the present administration to lead a successful path forward to bring about significant change to interdict this present conundrum number two we cannot rely on a present legal council to appropriately illuminate our path forward as they too have demonstrated a pro-narrative position it is abundantly clear to me that over the last 20 months plus months that a narrative has been fashioned for the citizenry of america by covet cultists within our government and bureaucracies these are narcissists micromanagers and control
048freaks they have enlisted the aberrant portion of our populace to deceive the majority of the populace that they are in an in a minority not just in numbers but in authority and have no recourse but to obey and shut up science has a law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction these covered mandates which are not law has brought about the worst in a certain segment of our citizenry and has bought about the best in another men and women of ours of our uh who embrace individual liberty and independent thought reason and logic are coalescing realizing there are many inside and outside of government which are resisting these unconstitutional mandates towns cities counties states throughout america recognize the downward spiral into socialism and are calling the bluff of these sociopaths these
049covent cultists need to realize there is no allowance for emergency powers in our bill of rights nor mandates in our constitution but our administration and legal counsel have given the end to the present narrative as presented by the cdc and other alphabet agencies wanting all to believe or totally we are totally helpless and without recourse but to follow the bastardized research at asu i have stated before to the administration fellow board members and fellow citizens that we need to be bold and courageous it is a lie of the first order that we as americans are helpless in the face of this pandemic human history is replete with examples of overcoming and defeating insurmountable odds it is a certain prop it is if a certain problem is not solved by a particular methodology or is it
050effective ineffective we should not continue in that process however in this present construct we are stymied by the 900 pound gorilla in the room namely cantal culture its name is fear fear is used to control fear never built a thing in human history it only destroys it destroys human intake ingenuity in integrity and hope for solutions we cannot sit idly by ringing our hands wishing our problems would go away and play the pity party game why me which is what we are doing now and we'll continue to do if we don't take ownership for ourselves our family our community our culture and our country thank you in um a look as far as the information that we've received um as a board you know regarding cdc the public health department consulting our attorney consulting our
051insurance company um nothing has changed so we have not received any new information so in keeping with the close contact quarantine and things that we have done so a couple of um different thoughts as far as we know that close contact quarantining has to occur so we know that by state statute we've been informed that the public health department has to enforce that so whether we partner with the public health department or not it is still going to be happening so we went down that road before the beginning of the school year and realized that that did not that did not work i was in that human resource committee meeting when tony and doug were also there and tony came forward and said this is a critical situation we have to take this back over
052as a school district to manage the full contact form and that had helped people were contacted sooner it just worked smoother so what we're doing right now is working the other couple of things that um again right now we don't have any new information from or different information from the start of the school year i would also point this as a school board the school board policy number 4133 and number 5134 regarding communicable disease watertown unified school district shall collaborate with state and local public health officials state and federal laws and regulations related to communicable disease reporting and control shall be followed students and employees may be excluded from school or activities and there's a whole section on communicable disease reporting i get none of us want this communicable disease but it's classified as a
053communicable disease so just looking at taking the emotion out of it taking the coven out of it this is our responsibility to follow this if we dive into this is covid and we're not going to follow this even though it's ruled as a communicable disease what other communicable diseases are we not going to follow this for so when we take the emotion out of it this is what you know it boils down to we have another policy number 1410 relations between local governmental authorities the board encourages watertown unified school district to work with health departments point c in that is report communicable disease so this is not something new and we have it in our policy so that's how we know that part is black and white so to piggyback off of um what team
054is saying because i have you know worked in schools and i have been that teacher who's had to print out the we have this disease in our classroom you know we have to inform the public i understand that and i would propose that as a board we say we will continue to report because that is our beauty and that is what the health department says we have to do it's a communicable disease just like tina said however in sending that letter in the past we have strep throat we have fifths disease in our classes we have never ignored a substantive state said you may not come to school because you are healthy never so that is the differentiation differ and cheat differentiating factor in reporting a communicable disease that i want to make very clear
055to all of us more because we have not done that obviously lengthy research that tina has done and thank you for doing that research tina yes we have an obligation to report a communicable disease we do not have an obligation to say you are healthy you sat next to a kid with a communicable disease and you may not come to school that is the difference being factor that we all need to bear in mind when we have this discussion tonight oh well i've got a question for mary sure please um can you go through a little bit about what you're recommending as far as liability goes and how that works in with the court claims of the government of exceptions exemptions how does that work together sure um first of all i just want to
056be clear i'm not recommending anything in terms of my role as his attorney and my partners in our firm we don't make a recommendation as far as you should do this or you should do that what we are charged with and tasked with is to say based on current law whether it be statute case law orders local mandates whatever if you choose not to follow those what is the potential risk to the district in terms of if there were a claim to be filed on somebody alleging that they were harmed because they are claiming they contracted the virus in the school setting so there is a defense it's an affirmative defense if a governmental entity is sued there is a defense that's called governmental immunity which means that the entity and elected officials are immune
057from liability if certain conditions exist so but it is not an absolute immunity which means governmental immunity does not attach to every action of for example a school board there are exceptions to that and those include things like if the board um is aware of a compelling or known and compelling danger or risk to the safety of others and it doesn't act to protect people from that risk that's when there there may be claims that could arise and the person bringing the claim would say well no you're not immune from liability government governmental immunity doesn't attack in this situation for one of the following reasons and there are basically four reasons why governmental community if it were established that one of these four conditions existed then the governmental entity is not immune from liability so
058that's how it comes into play it's like the the decision of the board is the risk decision that's not my decision um so the decision ultimately for the board is okay there are these potential claims there's tort claims there's workers comp claims um there are claims about not providing a safe work environment um a number of other claims that that could arise not a number of other laws that could give rise to a claim of liability by on behalf of an individual the district as i said would normally assert an affirmative defense of governmental immunity the person bringing the claims will argue that certain conditions are met such that governmental immunity will not attach and then the district would potentially have liability for any injuries or damages if the person prevails on their plane does
059that help thank you that you provided us you talked a lot about requirements and where mandates was the words you use not guidelines and then you tied that to a jurisdiction that the public health has over us can you help me understand what mandate exists particularly what written mandate or or requirement exists and who that public health entity that we are in a jurisdiction for i'm getting confused between cdc the state the dodge county the jefferson county the city health and then guidelines versus a mandate and i noticed in yours would never use the word guidelines and it seems that's the most common where you store it right and thank you and i didn't use guidelines specifically because the specific question i was asked is with the city of watertown public health department their interpretation
060of their responsibilities in terms of contract tracing and then enforcing quarantine for isolation and beyond whether it's close contact or somebody who actually contracts the disease so i was not asked about cdc guidelines uh department of human services guidelines not adhering to those could potentially also be present some risk but my i was focusing very narrowly on the tip on when there is a specific interpretation by the local public health agency which i understood to be the city of watertown that has jurisdiction over the district and their interpretation of their requirement their statutory requirement to do contact tracing and to enforce quarantine and isolation um for communicable businesses so that's why i didn't talk about their step there there is their entity their statutory requirement correct so now how does that transfer as a requirement
061or a mandate from us well it goes into their ability to request information from the district relative to incidence of communicable diseases and your responsibility to cooperate with those requests and and that cooperation piece is is by policy that says we will cooperate so the city of watertown uh public health department says district you need to report positive cases of covet to us so your responsibility to cooperate means assisting with that request in a report not in making a decision or dictating any quarantine that takes place correct but they they are my understanding is that that relationship had transferred and come back to the district because the city was clearly not able to keep up with it and that so i heard somebody say that a student was notified eight days afterwards that they were
062close contact and so by then the student has been in school we don't know if they were asymptomatic or whatever so the issue becomes if the cooperation is between the district and the local public health agency that the district is saying you know we are going to take on that responsibility then that's how it becomes it's not a statutory requirement it's because of the cooperative relationship we have with global public health and if you take on that responsibility then in essence they're delegating that responsibility to you and you're accepting it don't if we push that back we have no there is no requirement no mandate there's no mandate that we're failing against so there's no legal argument that we failed that if we say that is not ours we're no longer taking that city health
063department we'll we will cooperate we'll provide you the positive cases have fun right well and yeah there's no independent legal authority that says school district are required to enforce quarantine or isolation well so okay i yeah i heard people say that they're not getting notices for days now i don't know if that's pre when we decided that the city couldn't keep up and we decided does that happen still since we've been kind of doing the contact tracing we are turning all cases around within 24 hours so that's been our commitment to turn all those cases around 24 hours but you have to remember that there are some delays that take place so sometimes we're not getting notified because in order to be notified uh the student has to have had a positive test so they
064have to get that test result back then you go back to the day of symptom onset so when was the first day they had symptoms was it the day they took the test was it two days before they took the test and then once you get to the day of symptom accept then you go back two more days which is when they were initially contagious so that is the process uh that is established by by the cdc and that is the process that we have been following and that has been adopted by uh the larger health department by the department of health uh by the by the wisconsin department of health services so there may still be a delay but it is not the delay that we were initially experiencing where uh logistically communications between
065us and the health department were holding things up this is just a delay if the test result doesn't come back in a type of manner if the individual didn't get tested right away when they initially had symptoms and you always have to go back two days so you're never going to get anybody that doesn't at least go backwards by two days to me the schedule is johnny was in school on monday tuesday he woke up didn't feel so well stayed home wednesday mom dad said i wonder if this is covet and one maybe we should think about getting tested tried getting tested got tested on thursday weekend comes maybe come maybe gets results on saturday school school finds out on monday school gives notice hopefully on monday maybe tuesday boom we gone you know i
066mean no matter who's doing it there's unnecessary there is a timeline that looks something like that you can try to condense it a lot but it's reality mary um i have a question just from the standpoint of most of us i shouldn't say all of us but most of us came from our private industry many of the people on the board have school experience and of course we serve on the school board um if there is a covered positive case in my workplace the company itself the private industry does not actively participate in giving close contacts or enforcing quarantines it's self-reported you know joe smith he's sick he calls his employer says hey i'm sick i've got to i have told it and likely a public health official is going to be calling anybody that
067he self-identified to the county um she then called him so that means that this co-worker you know bar came in there's nothing stopping her nobody's going to stop her at the door a private employer doesn't have that obligation so you i think i heard you say that we do that now because we're cooperating with another government entity or another public entity uh if we wanted to treat ourselves as private we could try for a little while i'm sure we would run into plenty of other issues um because we have a public health nurse on our public education gilbert she is given her license by the state and she has to follow certain rules of the medical profession well in my private industry i don't have a nurse so that there is no serving of two
068masters um but aside from me trying to understand that i didn't know if there was anything that you could help maybe the rest of the board if there's additional questions the public in general uh who are here and spoke tonight um how that needs to be treated differently because we are a public entity versus a private entity that may be able to treat ourselves like a household and kind of do what we want but we're not a household and we're not a private company we're a school district and we have other obligations that i'm not fully aware of but i'm also guessing there's a lot of people in the room maybe not being fully aware so is there additional insight that you can give to that or are they one and the same they're both
069oranges they're identical no i mean there's there's not there are differences in a number of ways between public employers and private employers um and so public entities in this case have a responsibility or an obligation to cooperate with the global public health department um you see generally public entities say we follow the advice or the recommendations or the guidelines of our local public health official that's who they look to because it gives them some protection if they can say this is what our local public health department was recommending was requiring we comply with that and a private employer number one doesn't have immunity if they don't they don't do anything relative to covet and somebody says hey i got told in the workplace and you provided an unsafe workplace because you didn't do anything they
070can't argue they're immune there's no there's no private immunity it's all governmental community so that's somewhat the distinction is in order to preserve that governmental immunity as a public employer you're going to say we followed certainly if there was a mandate we followed that we've also at times looked at what are the recommendations and so if somebody brings a claim we want to be able to say governmental immunity attaches and we are not liable there is no such immunity that a private sector employer is going to potentially money that it doesn't exist for them and i i think you can see somewhat the distinction also for example you know in the legislation which you know has now been been stopped there's a way to to mandate the private sector that is not a mandate for
071public sector so there are certain distinctions that go the other way as well so so osha and generally governs private sector not public sector so that's where there are differences between the two different laws that govern different you know litigation points for public versus private sector i appreciate the explanation result katie did you have a follow-up question would we be meeting our contractual obligation if we close contact warranty but did not then require a we excuse me if we close contact trace but didn't require a quarantine would be would we still be meeting our contractual obligation i'm i'm hesitating because i'm not sure you have a contractual obligation it's the obligation that you have is is formed by board policy which says you will cooperate with the local public health department if we collaborate by
072close contact tracing but not requiring a quarantine would not be personal in all honesty i don't know the answer to that in part um there's no case law on any of this right now two years from now we probably will have some some cases that have some litigation that's worked its way through the system um but i can't tell you how important you know i can't tell you number one how the local public health department might consider what does it mean in terms of what your obligations are to cooperate with us is cooperation just notifying us of positive cases notifying us of close contacts i mean if there is there's a a range and i don't know what the global public health agency you know what how they view what they believe your obligations are
073to cooperate with them is cooperation simply a notification or is it saying right currently we have in place mandatory quarantine and isolation and if you don't enforce that then are they going to look at that as you put down pursue a claim against the district because there is language in the statute that says the local public health department has the authority and the responsibility to enforce and also to pursue people who may be debating the law i can't tell you you know this is you know in all honesty i've been this is just an aside because it just brings it home for me i've been practicing school law for over 30 years i never took a class in pandemics in public schools i i never there's no there's no there's no book that you know
074as a lawyer with 30 years of experience there's no book i can turn to that says if you do this your clients will be protected if you do this they won't be i would love it if we had black letter law to that to that level um this what constitutes cooperation what constitutes your level of responsibility because of your board policy that ultimately would be a court that would be decided now so i don't know because we i mean doug and chrisandra and i met with the city health department and i proposed and i positioned two what-ifs to them one was what if we do if we the district do not impose quarantines and under that circumstance the health district said they would seek to do something sorry they would seek to do so on
075they would take their own actions to impose reports i then posed our okay and then i said what if we didn't give you information on close contacts and they said well they'll still try and collect the information from us and if we didn't provide it then that may lead to a possible circumstance where they would seek to exercise some statutory power so two different scenarios one was where it's not imposing quarantine but we'll still give you the information and they said well we'll look to impose reports and the other one said we're not going to give the information and they said well we'll try and pursue it on our own but we may show you we may reserve the possibility of pursuing some action so tony i'm glad you brought up that meeting which i
076think we're generally aware occurred was there other say options explored id shorter quarantines quarantines with masks uh different levels of what constitutes a close contact i mean how much was the city health department willing to budge on their interpretation of the current statutes such that we can't find a middle ground where we're better off for everybody in this room from where we are and we're still not in violation of any known law or ordinance or cooperative or good faith agreement is there it was any middle ground found in that discussion between the three of you and the city that you're aware of or do you think there could be what i believe i heard was an interpretation that fits the current guidelines that we are using as a district in terms of the definition of
077point okay when i pressed again on the issue shortened quarantines because frankly we ran it at the last time they said well we would again this is it once again we'll turn people back to the district and say you need to consult with the district is where the district will meet the criteria to make you eligible for short quarantine yeah so more important quarantine according to current standards if you all see yeah that would be possible but they would send people back to the district and say the district needs to say that they're going to provide the conditions necessary basically there was no okay uh it was offered that if we one way you could alleviate it if we were fully masked it probably had full social distancing why then that would by nature but
078fully masked for the corn as opposed to the quarantine so you get seven days until it still has it doesn't matter the quarantine was going to be as it is right now on the sheet that we just sent like one of the parents sent over to us so it has a three breakdowns access sheet that is the guideline so again it was just offered that the district were operating fully masked with social distancing that would inherently reduce the duration of close quarantine and right to the point for many that it would not exceed so masking as a in who of quarantine was not either a discussed or was discussed and and voted down well there's still again they would express these to be conditions under which quarantines would occur but it was certainly less significant
079but maybe you answer the question maybe i'm not understanding your answer if we did do close contact if we did identify somebody who had to quarantine for seven days in lieu of that home orange could we say you can come back to school with a mascot no no what they were saying is that the whole district was done every building every room then that would apparently reduce the warnings not the if the single student's been an identified platform that's the question okay everybody everywhere all the time then you can get rid of them there would be things more different yep then they'd be different for the matrix that we've seen right yeah so yeah how would it react so two years ago if we were asked by the health department who is in who johnny
080has something who is he in close contact was he with within six feet of for 15 minutes or more but that standard hasn't been in place for degrees we would have said circumstances we don't know right for over half of our classes my guests are saying we don't have a seating chart they can sit where they want i just take attendance but to be clear you don't have you do not have not had in place for other communicable diseases that we've previously handled this definition of close contact yeah but if we don't work there but if we don't track that we have we can put a lot of resources on that we have put a lot of resources behind making sure we know where every kid is at every time how their relationship to other
081kids are yes if we remove that those resources so we don't have that then it's a classroom at best and maybe their close contact maybe they weren't how are we if we're doing the contact tracing and or with public health so to me as an example we know that johnny was sitting next to somebody in a class because of the seating chart we could look at that do we ask johnny who he sat with for at lunch and know that that was the case blink round playground are we doing that or are we not yeah okay yes we do so we do all the seating charge tracking uh we do not do any outdoor tracking um where they are outside uh and less likely to again be within contact for that 15 minutes or longer
082at our elementaries our they are well care principles do you want to provide any additional insight go ahead and start doctoral we try to keep those seating cards the same you know a lot of us are eating in our classrooms if they're eating in a cafeteria they're sitting next to the same group of kids that they sit next to when they go to specials like music they sit next to keep those seating charts the same so if johnny does have phobic it's the same couple kids around him to try to limit those exposures better for longer what if it's 13 so at the high school level we rely on your old teacher's seating charts obviously during the classroom time um we are not quite inflates it would be almost impossible to be able to track
083that during the lunchroom period so we are not doing that during lunches so then when we hand that case over to the health department i'm going to presume that they engage again with that family to do more contact training that's their obligation uh i can't speak to the health department reaching out to each individual family after we have done that contact racing they do household contact tracing but i unless there is a combination case they aren't doing an additional reach out to do that school contact tracing now we do have occasions when we know that kids were together at lunch or something like that in which there is additional additional close contact and we do have the cafeterias set up to provide some additional distancing but we are just providing those classrooms contacts unless uh
084we have additional information to provide uh jessica do you wanna yeah i would like to just add that a lot of times for that one shiny period students do share who they've been meeting with because they know that that spot where they would become a post content we also have students coming to us afterwards saying hey i eat lunch with john and john is positive and not always in that sense of like a teenager wants to go home in a sense of like i know that i know in a close contact here's the last day we were together and then we go through that question so there are a lot of those students that are being reported just not exactly through that classroom it's either from a student reporting it uh for this positive student
085reporting it or other student sessions you know their close contacts that we aren't tracing that area there's kids moving off the hallway between every single class period we had a situation recently where one of them was positive other students came and stated like i think um and so we're doing the best we can to make sure that those are that we can catch as many as we can and they're accurate um also i know that if two students are within close contact and they're both wearing a mask that has kept kids from being quarantined too where we did not have to point so if mike and i are close to each other for longer than 15 minutes of time closer probably than we are now but we are both wearing masks um and mike is
086positive i would not have to have foreign it seems as though this public health is saying the standard is here and we're saying okay we'll take care of that in our school setting and i appreciate that we're doing a reasonable job of that but then they're saying if it's almost like it's assumed that then it is done if they're not going and saying well hey johnny who who do you hang out with after school what about your after what about when you went to the y what about this they're not if it's like it's our obligation to do that and our obligation this has to stop at the school walls can't extend beyond and if the city health is saying it's our obligation then and i i appreciate it's like there's two different standards and
087i just i can't share more specifically what the hell department is doing with all of those individuals contacts i could certainly reach out and uh try to share that information back i do know they do that level uh with households i do not believe they do that level of school so i appreciate it and i don't i know from business owner we haven't had it for 12 months i don't know if you had a city health department call you at all and say i think one of your staff isn't close to in this no it's yeah it's like that standard exists please i heard the word compromise a lot tonight now i mean the missed days that kids are having is it's unbelievable i know it's you know there's got to be i don't have
088data to back me up but i'm sure that's a correlation between this isn't just the watertown issue it's the state of wisconsin issue all the kids that are out of school the testing data all all over the whole state is really down so i'm sure there's a there's a correlation there i can't say that for sure but uh we're i know we're talking about the whole court but we're missing part of the point here is that kids are missing healthy kids are missing school a lot can't we do anything about that no i can't your compromise well all right so can we do something in the middle instead of 14 days maybe seven days please try that for a while seven days and maybe require a couple tests in there or something like that there
089are things that we can do that still show that we're we're still wanting the best that we can as far as uh dealing with the code situation but along with also trying to keep the kids in school for education so i mean there's got to be some kind of a middle ground here that we can always try for a while rather than i don't know i just why do i understand we've been given three levels three options fast vaccine or quarantine you've got to pick one we've decidedly in may said that well masks aren't an option well masks are an option well then it's either vaccine or warranty and vaccines weren't even an option until just recently for the fault of our population now i'm not saying i agree with this i'm saying is that
090in order to be in compliance with the laws that we are aware of those were the three options we were given so if you're asking for a compromise i'm not this is not i don't want to direct this at you paul it's a great question i'm saying is if we're looking for a compromise going back to mass would put all of our kids back in school without warranty but i'm pretty sure that there was already a vote and a significant uh disdain for masking the children but we would get them back in school and we would get them back in school more school days than we are right now as i understand it i'm not saying this is a fact this is what i understand the way that the world works we could vaccinate them
091all they come back in a school but people don't want to do that okay so we have three options and yet we're not availing ourselves to those three options what we want to do is pretend that it doesn't exist or it's not as bad as what it is and i'm going to rephrase that i'm not going to use the word pretend it may not be there okay it may not exist it may not be that bad but every other entity that we work with and come in contact with and even if it wasn't media you know glorified we're still left with those three options and i'm more than happy to compromise on any one of them if i wanted to reduce i'd gladly reduce quarantines to zero if everybody would go back to wearing masks
092which i think the health department would concur with but when you say compromise it has to be give and take and once again paul i agree with you i hate quarantines i think they don't work at all but that doesn't matter my opinion doesn't matter here it's what's best for the school district and our fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers the assets the students the teachers for the kids it's not it's we got to look at all of them we have employees we have taxpayers we have buildings we have assets we have insurance we just can't say that one trumps the other i'm not i wish it did okay then if we if we did a compromise where maybe it was seven days and two of those would be saturday and sunday i think we're there
093now okay but i'm just saying then and maybe have a couple of tests in that week and then the student would have to wear a mask for five days what we have now it's effect regardless it's effectively what we have yeah if you want to if you want to test you can be back on these seven eight okay then why can't we do that across the board well are we doing that across the board that's that's that's what the city is telling us that's so we don't have any options but again it's apparent it's parents choices for us to say well you have we have we have the quarantine scenario as minimal as the city is projecting as the requirement that's correct here's the direction i think we need to go we need to ask
094ourselves as a board how much liability do we want to assume how much risk do we want to take and the reason i'm saying that is because nine other nearby school districts have made that decision to eliminate close contact quarantine and you know what they said at the board how much risk how much liability are we willing to take on the last last may we were courageous we said with what two weeks left of school three weeks we will make masks optional guess what we didn't have a single piece of cobit you know what people did they emailed us how dare you take away masks in my school for my kids we didn't have a single case of kobe you guys what in the world are we doing right now we are failing is what
095we're doing right now we're keeping kids out of school we're keeping parents from work why because we don't want to take on liability well guess what let's be courageous and do something let's make a resolution we're all here tonight we can all talk we can all come up with a resolution and guess what we can vote on it next week or two weeks from now we can give a survey to the public an anonymous survey asking i know there was a petition where we had 400 and some signatures of families in this district who do not want quarantines and guess what they want to take on the liability they want to say you close contact you give me a letter but guess what i'm going to choose to send my kid to school because my
096kid is healthy and i know my kid or maybe that teacher wants to say i'm healthy i want to teach i don't want to be home why can't we do it we can have answers we can so let's do it you guys let's do it let's come up with a resolution right and i'm not going to sit here week after week after week and do this garbage because honestly it's a waste of time we can do it nine other districts did it we can do it let's come up with a resolution let's vote and let's get it done with because covet is not going away and i'm not going to tell other families your kid can't come to school because it's healthy your kids healthy we have never in the history of any disease said
097you're healthy you can't come to school no i'm sorry you are healthy until proven otherwise and we need to take a stance and be bold and courageous so who's with me next question city health are they just in charge of the city students or are they in charge of all students township as well does anybody know that question when we uh when we had the local health departments doing in contact tracing they were doing the contact tracing based on the department in which the child lives or the employee lives so in other words the township kids the county would right the counties so yeah depending on what your address is so it's this joint that is going to say correct so you have city kids with the city health and you got county kids with
098the township and every department was doing something a little bit yes so that's a problem right there somebody mentioned best practices so that was good uh good comment there i i went i don't know what everybody considers best practices but i contacted the superintendent of slinger high school and just asked him about his common code case situation guidance on closed contacts and he he sent back their two-page little flyer here on what they do i asked them well how many other school districts are doing this and out of the 15 in washington and ozaukee county 13 are following the same little sheep so that's a novel idea that school districts are all doing the same thing isn't it pretty good idea and you're saying doug that's the sheet that we're following okay so the big
099thing was and what we're talking about tonight is close contact tracing it says students less than or equal to three feet to a positive case the school will contact the parent and then they have 10-day quarantine recommended which what they recommend they don't require it but not required parent discretion with exception of a positive household member and then they have a little thing that goes positive household remember this is what you do pretty simple no contact tracing including positive household member if you are vaccinated tested positive for cobit within the last 90 days and are remain symptom-free so that's it that's their close contact so i said well how do you notify the county of you know what do you have a county of washington county ozaukee they have one health department that runs both
100ozark and washington county what they do is the teacher emails the parents of that classroom saying hey we had a positive and third grade today all the parents get the email so that our notification is complete as far as notifying the parents that there is a positive in there and then that's all they do that's it so from there the county knows about the positive right because all cases are reported to the either the city or the county so and from there the city or the county takes the close to their quarantine enforcement or recommendations or whatever so there's no they they recommend that you quantum so all the parents that feel hey my child was exposed you can keep your child home for seven days and follow the procedure that we have right on
101this sheet right here go ahead you're more than welcome to do that nobody's forcing you to come back to school you were notified so again clarification i think what i heard is a they notify all parents with the talking of the students in the classroom that's correct b they do contact tracing and they notify students that are within that definition and recommend that parents consider a quarantine who do not require it that's correct and they provide that information to the county correct but what has been their experience thus far in terms of what those county health departments are doing in terms of any additional i don't have any experience with that or it seems to me that the council you know it was there wasn't any the county's calling us back hey you have to
102keep quarantining all these kids and get them back and there wasn't any of that it was just they i talked to the superintendent superintendent darren sievers and he said any board member that would like to call us and find out about our program you're more than welcome to call discuss it and then you can just go online and print this little sheet out and this is the compromise that paul's talking about gives it must follow all i ask about legal ramifications um and they said they're all they seem to be feel confident they're covered under in the liability issues they confident they're covered and that's 13 school districts out of 15 and those two columns so how listen is that then i just call them last year did you talk about any uh trends or
103numbers of what they yeah they have going on in those accounts yeah and of course there's you know they're gonna have like we have all of a sudden you have something you might have to close the classroom down or they're gonna make reactions to it it's just that it gives the one school district they said he was down they went down 67 percent on their quarantine kids out of school 67 reduction just because the parents are going to watch their kids if they come down with symptoms they don't send them to school so that's a great in my mind that's what we're looking for get kids back to school here's the other point i heard i had a great grandmother come up god bless her she has to watch her child or her grand great-grandchild
104right now who is the most person that in this room that is covered so what are we doing we're sending the kids the great grandmother and making them exposed because that's what the parents have to do there's parents here that aren't the luxury of staying home you know they have to go to work like many of them said and the lady that you know that's very emotional that's very good so to me i think if this is doing it and they're happy with it i think watertown could do this and be happy [Applause] so i have a question as far as because i know we're looking at like so we've got the city we've got dodge and we've got jefferson so all three of those health department entities cover the school district right well there
105can when we have uh students who are open enrolled or employees that work in other counties uh we may have additional health departments uh that we are working with but those are the primary health departments okay okay and so i remember in our communication we there was a letter that was signed by all three so do they all follow as far as the same as far as like okay so if you're vaccinated you don't have to close contact warranty if you wear a mask you have to close contact and then they do they also support the if you take a test at i'm sorry i don't know the details i know what the problem was talking about if you take a test that's day five and you're negative then you can or what was that
106yeah on the shortened quarantine yeah you should get that test after day six or later you can shortly take it come back as of day seven yes okay so all three of those entities support that oh they have all adopted the cdc's well the dhs the wisconsin's adoption of the cdc protocols yes okay so they're all on the same page they are all on the same page again i would just say that you know when it actually comes to some of those enforcement pieces again as we were navigating earlier in the year the way that they are navigating them looks different but uh they have all adopted those same uh guidelines they read the same guidelines but they they may not employ the guidelines in the same way i would say that is accurate yes
107something that keeps struggling with me is if if we don't change this now when when does this at all in our foresight vision for this district with this when does it never go it's not going away as much as we would all love vaccines to be the magic answer they're not the magic answer there's no we made the decision to go face to face in october and this feels all sort of to me it feels like that somewhat only in a different scenario there were comments like the plane is going to crash i mean it was like unbelievable and i looked at what i just seen i don't know i say too many papers so i pulled out one and we had a 107 active cases in watertown when we made that decision and right
108now i believe we have close to 100 again so i'm going it's like the same scenario again and like katie said how brave are we we're brave then and to me i think it was a great decision we got the kids back face face to face and now we're into this area where a fraction of our children are being quarantined mostly healthy and you look at all the numbers and we all know the numbers in here about the possibilities of something happening which would be terrible don't get me wrong that the rewards of bringing these children and the community back into into education like they should be is our as our is our thing that we need to do about that's my opinion jennifer's i'm not trying to call you officer make sure that you
109have that opportunity i was just thinking geez i'm the one that hasn't talked other so i guess any other questions at this point in time steve i just want to thank doug for his diligence i want to thank katie for her stepping up i agree that anything we do in this spain as doug is suggesting i believe is just a band-aid approach however if it gets our kids back to school and gives our parents a little more autonomy i am definitely for that other thoughts questions okay so when thinking about the information that jeff presented from a different school district they have a different poem so is interpreting the responsibility of the state statute and quarantined differently than what ours is so if we decide to change how we do the close contact quarantine as
110far as the school doing that our health department will do that no matter what we do is that correct that is what the health department communicated to us yesterday okay yes and in writing as well your thoughts questions so the expressed intent of this evening the size of discussion would be that if we were to take an action at least if it's on the table this evening so that we would intend to vote on it at our next normal monthly meeting which is a week from monday and keep in mind that next week school is out i think i read the room but i'm not sure so that's why i'm checking in with you all is there a collective will to have an action proposed on the table for that meeting and if so what
111is it again i'm not looking for a motion at this moment i'm saying what is it that you would how do we paraphrase doug's sheet of paper into a resolution i mean if there'd be a lengthy resolution unless we just say let's see attack so again what i hear is difference there from what we are currently doing is that with it only is that for close contact non-family member or without household cases that we would recommend but not require a quarantine but otherwise it sounds like it's exactly what we're doing they're still doing contact right as we're doing they're going everyone in the room just like we do and as stated they do contact they do close contact tracing and they do notify those parents but they do not require they recommend but do not
112require they are still doing quotes contact tracing but they're that's not what i ran into you know i'm not sure i'm not sure on that we would have to clarify that with and that's the situation right i don't know if they report that to the county or not i'm not sure that's it and that's so that's a separate matter of course but is that they're just the kid in the class you're but they're doing it's two levels communication they communicate to everyone every all the parents have children in the classroom but they also do identify for their standard they identify a close contact but they recommend who do not require right quarantine to me that's a that's a big difference because the amount of resources that we're not spending on educating our kids and spending
113doing contact tracing is significant right now from going to a shooting chart or doing what she said of checking out the video camera that takes a lot of time energy and effort right we're not spending teaching and reading writing and math and getting our scores up and what what i understood from the superintendent is that the teacher sends the email out to their students and that's what i understand is what the end of it was well the teacher does it but again they are doing the trace synthesis you see the policy but they are doing the tracing and they are not sure if they're reporting and that's the separate matter between other reporting accounts maybe they report the whole classroom that's what i'm thinking that's what i'm thinking they're tracing that's that's where i'm thinking
114a little bit but they have a definition for the tracing they have a definition that isn't classroom i think you read a definition of that well that's the situation yeah so they're just saying all the kids are close contacts is what i what i when i was talking to the superintendent that's what but just like any other communicable disease you do you say we have a case of life in our classroom boom everyone gets selected and then you would just sell the county if we needed to or the health department okay this is who's in the classroom with the case that's simple enough right and then they would take their whatever protocol steps they do they go out to all the kids that were in that classroom do their thing so but then it would
115take the load off our district what we're doing now in your impression in your discussion with sieber the superintendent uh say again do you think that that policy for those 14 school districts has the uh is accepted by their county board of health or is it done i mean in conjunction with because i was going to say tony that one of the differences is not just changing our policy but how our public health officials will interpret that policy if the if washington and ozaki have blessed it right that's great it works for them if our county and local health officials do not bless it what is that going to do for us or cause to happen if we enact that policy i recognize this consideration i was simply trying to get to a point if
116you wanted to propose an action right yeah the action required would actually be pretty short yep and i'm just looking at it you're right that would be a pretty short change in the resolution i'm sure there would be that has to all be worked out i'm not sure what you know he didn't go on specifics and said hey this health department is doing this he didn't i didn't maybe i didn't ask him and i like steve appreciate the uh the diligence you put into that and he said any of us that are if you want to discuss it with him he was more than open which i found refreshing that he would go through those steps of help so i'll just say this now i know the wording recommending versus requiring can mean a sacrifice
117too because that's where parents now are going to be on the hook because they've got to use because i know just like some people yeah they got to miss work yeah it's pretty hard that man you're just struggling we keep them home and kind of got a little of this or do we just let him go and go to work you know i mean it's a struggle i get it i understand the whole deal just but that that policy is gonna our appearance at the economy that's right yeah but you know it's going to be tough for them to still make those decisions while their child is sick most parents stay home their child is sick if their child is healthy and running around like what matters well that's that's the way that's the whole
118idea that's the difference it's no different than what it was like we said in past history what what did you do if your child was sick found arrangements or did something that and that's what we're sort of saying what this is when i was in grade school can't do um if we're looking at other districts and what they're doing i want to make sure also we're comparing apples to apples you know i know people bring up a con mark well i received information today that okay they're all distanced and they wear a mask well then something do you want you know so we're taking a look at other districts i would ask that we take a look at apple's apple you know um what is their you know maybe a check box you know what
119is their backing policy are they able to distance what's their community vaccination rates um you know all those different mitigating factors because maybe they're doing other things you know like it was brought up okay if y'all were wear masks then we don't have to worry about you know quarantine that kind of thing so i would want to make sure that we've got that um the only thing that i want to make sure that we remember is our health department quarantine policy guidelines sounds different than that and i was at the human resource committee meeting when you know at the beginning of the year we had put the close contact quarantine you know we were like nope we don't want to do that as a school district we're going to have the health department do that
120i was there at that meeting where the numbers and the timing had just you know gotten out of control it's not where we wanted it to be and we had to immediately take that and back sounds like we're edging towards doing that again and if it didn't work the first time i'm wondering why we think it would be different than the second time what was the issue with it not working primarily that they were not acting quick enough on cases or was there something else primary issue we were hearing from our parents in constituents was the significant delays in communication and we used in receiving notification and then secondarily confusion around who was responsible for making the call and whether short quarantine is available those are the two issues so where where i am challenged
121in the debate is i've heard some of the same people speak and say i don't want quarantine i don't want to quarantine my kids but why did it take so long to get notified well if it takes too long to get notified you're quarantining just short so i mean it feels like the wrong way to go but i mean if the city or other public health departments can't do it quick enough but we're saying we don't really want it anyway but if you don't do it quick enough then it just made the quarantine less so there's we just say not it you want if you think it should be done if the public health thinks it should be done it should be done quicker and more efficiently because it is the way to mitigate this
122then resource up and figure out how to do it instead we said they're having trouble so will resources often the reason that we decided to do it is that it was creating a lot of uh very very unhappy uh families appreciating plus our staff and our staff was also uh very frustrated with the system uh they were getting delayed notifications uh they were you know the communications as a whole were very very challenging for staff and for families um and families were understandably very frustrated uh they were getting communications from us before they had heard from the health department that referred them to their health department communications um and then were confused about if they should or should not report to school uh there was a lot of um a lot of challenges and so
123again families were understandably upset staff was understandably excited uh if we do go back to that i mean i would we would just need to figure out how to better iron that out and i don't know what the answer is to that i i don't work very hard to try to logistically coordinate it uh previously and we're not able to successfully do that so i do think that would be something that i would certainly sit down with my team with and try to figure out how we might avoid those miscommunications for their students and our families and our staff which were challenging i think it would be in our family's best interest if we kept it in the house and we were the ones doing the notifying just because we know we can do a
124better job honestly we have the resources now to do it to just send that quick pop that email out we've had a close contact in the classroom i think that's totally useful it can be part of the resolution how do we get out of it how do we get i mean how do we get our focus back on education versus our focus on contact training so we can we're saying we're doing a better job because we're spending so much time and energy and effort right doing it right when will our obligation of having those resources end and put it back on them i hear you i do i hear you i i i hear you too dave absolutely 100 um how many how what percent of your it's draining and difficult for everybody involved i
125definitely you know to katie's comment it was less stressful and less draining on people's time when we were able to manage our timeline and not rely on getting communications back and forth uh from the health department uh that because uh there were so many pieces of information moving back and forth and so little end point to those communications uh again it was it was creating anxiety not only for students and families but also for staff in classrooms and staff responsible for uh communicating with teachers and families and i guess i hear that and i believe that we probably are doing a better job but i still my seat i'm experiencing drastic inconsistencies in the story we're doing i mean to see what a parent shared with us of a nice clean sheet that the high
126school's giving that says here's your date here's your options here's your email addresses and your contact information everything else and what i've experienced that rms you're completely different experiences you know so we're not delivering it with consistency so if no matter if we keep any portion of it we have to drive uh and i think that the high school in middle school at work to align their communication form is that still a work of congress the notification but yes you are correct we need to make sure that our communications are absolutely consistent and dave given that it was inefficient at best when we were doing it how we opened school here even though we want to be out of this business we're still seemingly better at it especially if we're going to be suggesting a
127different line of response than the city health department we're going to send out an email to an entire classroom or whatever the matrix says we can do that instantaneously or within an hour or two and not worry about the city health department if we wait that is going to be three to four days later and just mishandled up and down and especially they're going to be asking our families to do something differently than what we just asked them to do so i think in that situation we'd be better off taking the first line of communication even though we want to be out of that business we're going to be better at it giving a consistent accurate message that we endorse faster than what the health department would be able to do i think the challenge
128that i have is if we're saying i think it's on the legal and the liability side if we're saying we're not it is not our job to contract this it's not our job to to communicate or enforce any kind of quarantine that is the public health department's job to do that our obligation and our policies that pena has said is to cooperate with them that is to send them some level of information that we know johnny has it and these may be some people that johnny was near now it is their job to enforce that if we come and say we're contact tracing but we're not enforcing any quarantining that you recommend we get on a different whoa does that put us right back where we were at the beginning of the year which i
129mean would you just paraphrase this way i understood we entered the beginning of the school year [Music] that's our honest thing this is not our job to do then why are we trying to do it i i'm i mean i see that we're saying if we think we can do it better but why are we trying to do a job that isn't our job to do because of what you just said better more efficient for the betterment of families and the kids i guess i'm just concerned we're gonna go it sounds like if you are saying this maybe or not but we're going back to where we started the year which was untenable well the different significant numbers of the meetings and heartache over how we tried to manage it the difference is that the
130school will contact the parent it can be this is theirs because they're all at 10 days a 10 day school quarantine recommended so now we send out the thing 10-day recommended but not required so in other words dave knows hey my joe was exposed to somebody positive at that point it's his decision am i going to keep my child home for 10 days or send him to school or am i going to watch my child for any kind of reaction or symptoms okay that's what it is so there's no the kids come to school if they if the parents feel they're healthy okay what does it do for the parent or the teacher who has to teach that classroom good question are the teachers forced to teach a room full of kids that would otherwise
131be quarantined they would that's what they're doing now well teaching's kind of close the teachers from being close contacts when close contacts are currently administrator either by the health but the school district or by the health department how are teachers preventing from being on the close contact list and if we switch to a model which i think i understand the entire classroom would be identified and notified that they are now some form of close contact or they were in the vicinity of somebody who's tested positive and some of them may voluntarily decide to come back to that classroom will there be a willing teacher there to teach those students or will they say you know what i don't want a teacher room which couldn't have a high probability of covet in it i don't know
132what they're gonna say it's gonna vary from i'm just interested in how you think that's gonna go with over with teachers because we gotta have them in the room in order to i teach some of it depends on the teacher i mean that you know where it is a lot of our teachers are identified at the time of the whole context and then you know there's the two different or the different protocols that we go through to follow through those um as we go through i would say especially the younger grades the kindergarten first grades up through third grade a lot of them you know we have gone and our teachers are going to you know to small guided reading groups that's where it post contacts and different ones not just in your sitting part
133with your your reading group as you go through you know our teachers doing that do they weigh the benefits and costs of that absolutely because as they know what's best practice and that's with meetings um so it would kind of be on the teacher by teacher basis as far as you know their love you know that's we work with teachers just trying to help them it's something that's really we've spent a lot of time this year is trying to make sure that we're meeting the needs of all of our staff trying to make sure that they feel as comfortable as possible in that classroom and it goes also to some teaching side we have much more you know um some teachers are much you know much more close closer as far as contact moving through
134you know i can say for sure you know i stuck in a classroom last year uh when we were short of substitute and you know i went to my normal teaching style which i've been done for 10 plus years also and i sat after that and i was like oh my goodness other than a close contact like 18 of these kids yeah just for my normal old stuff like i don't say old school but you know teaching style because i hadn't been in the classroom you know in this situation that we were in last year um you know so that's that's a lot of it i would say our teachers especially at the younger grades and upper grades really try to take as many precautions as possible to make sure that they can be in
135those classrooms for other students um you know and they've weighed a lot of those possible benefits already and mark and then there's not a single solution we're going to come up with here that's perfect for every situation my main issue is is it going to be manageable by the building staff if they're asked to teach classrooms that have students showing up that would have otherwise under prior policy being quarantined and kept home will there be teachers who will not show up and teach and what type of burden is that going to put on your buildings in order to address that i mean is it and is it manageable i would say it's very the stress of knowing like because our families have done a really great job of notifying us away and i would say
136therefore the time in the beginning of the year families would say hey listen you know i can tell you what we've got text from a teacher that says family just notified me well we're sitting here you know they really want to work with us and they've done great things with us so yeah you get add stress when staff goes okay i know these four kids have been close contact you know just as an example but then they're here for the next four or five days if the stress adds when you start to see it get caught that's part of those groups and i know as a parent i have seven of my own it's it's a difficult call when you send that kid to school or not that you know that's a tough challenge and
137it just adds to that level of stress that staff already having to teach a little different than they've done in the past and trying to make those benefits you know it's also trying to make sure that they have those kids at school because you know when they go according to the kids it's like but i want that kid there i'm seeing growth it always happens to that student that i really see that growth at that moment it seems like that's what i think really adds to stress to them is when there was that delay they knew they're like well do i meet with that the other kids that could be close contact and that one's taught me do i meet with their reading group that knock out these other kids then too or a donut
138and that's where that stress of adding on to a teacher where they're already making tough decisions every single day and every single hour and they're doing the best they can then you add that next level of stress it will break the teachers down it's hard to manage that stress from your management [Music] we have other teachers that'll work the room you know what i mean they'll go in and out of the desks and and like be like yep i'm just going to do what i do and it's just really hard there will be some stress on some folks for sure jason said you know i know in the previous system you know where there would be long delays um kids talk you know i mean obviously our teachers you know should not be talking about
139you know medical conditions of any students you know in any capacity um however i mean i you know hidden classes oh i just got a text so and so is positive i mean and you know the teacher knowing in the back of their mind that the three kids around them you know would very well be close contacts um creates another level of anxiety and stress you know in a time where i mean it's teaching is is difficult and that i mean and we have a group of dedicated professionals that are absolutely serving kids in the community to the best of their ability and are working hard every single day but i mean that is is a real stressor um under the past system and before we took on um more of a role in contact
140tracing so or i mean we're also at a time where there are significant teaching shortages and sub shortages and teachers are going above and beyond to cover periods you know during their preps to be able to support that um you know so there's added layers of stress all around and what that impact may be is anyone's guess with any individual feature or classrooms i think the thing that details into that it has to hit the balance skill someplace and maybe no matter what because of the level of absences we have to but what i'm hearing is we're not engaged i shouldn't say that we have some phenomenal teachers that are engaging students heavily while they're out of quarantine we have a good number that are not and we're not engaging those kids and learning anywhere
141near the level that they were sitting in the seat so we have to solve improving that exponentially more if they're not if we have more kids out of this you know i guess i can have some of the grace of saying i'm glad our teachers are graceful if a kid actually has it at his home and it's down and out okay maybe they only have to do half their homework assignments and that's probably a nice thing to do but i'm just if they're if they're there playing video games and instead i'm not looking for a win-win-win i'm just looking for something that decreases the net overall stress on the system and i understand the parents and the students are stressed but the teachers are stressed and so i'm not going to transfer 20 off of
142their shoulders if it's going to put 40 percent on the people behind me that's that's a that dude that's a that's a lose situation okay now if we can figure out a way that we're taking 40 percent off the parents and the students and they only have to pick up an extra maybe but i just want to make sure that we're not going to have you know sickouts and people not showing up and refusing to teach in empty classrooms because there's no teacher standing at the front of it then we've achieved nothing i'm sure there's some stress on the staff right now trying to keep kids up to date that aren't in school good point yeah i mean there is a lot of i mean you've heard a lot of that where teachers are like
143how do i get johnny back up to speed and now they're spending all that extra time and effort doing that rather than doing their job of teaching the whole class as a whole because there's all that and teachers are awesome that they want every child to excel so they're going to go that extra hour and try and get johnny caught up and if you're constantly having kids all out that's all it's on your mind too is how do i get johnny caught up right so there's it's there's a game i mean it's like you said it's balancing act and that's very correct david and that's why we're all here talking about there's no it's to me it just seems like we need to for my part i'm willing to i don't say fully endorsed but
144see how that you know see it in writing right and download clarification on it yeah and make sure they're doing their staff and the teachers right staffing teachers know what communications are totally agree with that and get some more information from these school districts that are following that do a little more research right somehow that model still involves the district taking some level of ownership of notification fear yep it does is it using like if i'm thinking about okay if the school is telling them that or you know if we were to adapt something like that we're telling them this but then the health department is still gonna contact and say you have to quarantine the school is saying you just recommend it so is that in conflict i mean are they going to be
145getting two different messages on that we do in response to it each family is going to have their own choice to make in that decision my phone's run three times yes so sometimes i pick up in quarantine sometimes i do his calling we each have our own individual choices at that point what we're not doing is putting in the responsibility of the school district to choose the health department will call them i'm not suggesting that nobody pick up and not quarantine when health departments calls them and tells them to do it but you know i can't ask you a question when your phone rings and you pick it up what are you going to do when they tell you so i'm going to follow well but to my knowledge there has been no ramifications to
146anybody in the united states for not quarantined we're not following the health department but they do have that power they do they have that whole power discussion probably diamond with this point so it just highlights the second part one thing observation i have about our previous action was that we as a district did we did a bad job of communicating where our role started where our role stopped and that allowed others to be able to attribute it the way they wanted to so it is vital that if we make a change we have very clear communication that says exactly what our role is and what our role is so even for example to give you a clarification of this one if we were to adopt that general model which is seen there i would suggest
147as an example on that that when it says it speaks about quarantine that actually make a preface of issue quarantines is a matter with left to the county and local health departments again if you make a statement about it you own it and our issue the last time frankly part of our issue was that we simply removed any communication about the topic that allowed for a wide range of interpretation as to what the where the district stood on the issue because what we said was nothing and so others filled in the blank force again i want to say whatever we come up with it's really important we have communication not just in there but it has a follow-up communication to the entire district as to what the change is what the change means what our
148role in the process is and furthermore that in any communication we send out subsequently any kind of passion notification as an example before we start we say the start and stop again here's our role here's what it is [Laughter] so i think that's as in frankly as important as any change we make is that we're far better in our communication thank you for your clarification there tony i just want to um clarify what was talked about over there between tina and katie uh this a year ago this last june dodge county and jefferson actually all 72 counties in the state of wisconsin were had amendments or ordinances put before them to increase the policing powers of the health and human human resources departments of the counties jefferson county was soundly voted down by an attendance
149of over 500 jefferson county residents at the county board meeting they have not taken it up and if that ordinance is null and boy well the same thing happened up in juneau at dodge county it was called ordinance 11 and that was tabled and put away so there is no policing powers to the county health nurses and i avoid i call them nurses they are not officers that is a police terminology they are health nurses and i uh i don't know what the watertown health nurse powers are but i know that the counties do not have police authority to find to come in and quarantine to pull children out of homes they do not have that authority answer question for january as far as what i'm thinking about as far as our obligation and referring
150back to policy and you know um reporting communicable disease and working with the local governmental authorities and things like that if we don't cooperate with the health department or if we say we recommend it they you know like if there's if we're not cooperating or providing them with close contact quarantine does that go against our policy or do we have any liability for that or no i think that's what i talked a little bit about before i'm not at this point i don't think it's clear legally i think in your i think in the watertown school district case i think when you took over contract tracing notification that you also took over notifying of warranty and i don't think there's anything in the definition of cooperation i mean i think at a minimum the cooperation
151is if the health department requests for example that you notify them of close contact i think that is likely part of your responsibility under your policy if on the other hand they were to say well if we want you to enforce quarantine i think the point is i would say there's no independent statutory authority which says as a district we are responsible for doing that our cooperation is to provide the information to the health department that it needs in order to do what it is statutorily required to do so again if we're going to take action at our meeting you know on november 29th i'd like to be able to have the community aware of what the overall intended direction of that action would be and that you provide as a board sufficient direction to
152myself to work with the superintendent to be able then to bring forward to you the legislation that meets your intention so thus far what i seem to be hearing is i believe a majority interest in looking at a model similar to what was what is in place in slinger and other districts in washington and ozaukee counties highlighted with the key differences but we obviously have some questions about exactly how far they're going in terms of identification and notification is that the case that you'd like to see something similar to that with those questions answered or do you want to take it a different direction again the fundamental thing i would emphasize that still involves at some level the district is taking ownership of some kind of notification that is inherent at all support that i
153have yes i do not wish to support any further action i even wish to keep it as it is all right so i will proceed on your behalf on that basis work with doug and the superintendent to draft legislation in that regard as well as get additional clarification exactly what whether where their notification starts with their investigation for all board members you can just go on selling your website i mean if you want to read up on it um go to their colbit and then it's parental guidance to help prevent the spread of kobe 19 it's the little headings so you can read you know read it all please sure thank you all right any other comments or questions at this point in time otherwise you're going to move into our second opportunity for public
154input [Laughter] well she probably was informed by the presentation from the parents right you listened to that i did and i sat for a number of these and um [Laughter] that's a nice way to say it thank you yes you are welcome all right this brings us to the second opportunity on our agenda for members of the public to address the board and i'm going to start with in the room of spinach predictors and again if you could also just please identify yourself for the record thank you i'm jason finch i live at 1007 west main street um you guys are thinking now the easy way out it sounds like making quarantine optional these parents back here will not quarantine their kids so here's a little scenario if you go with this route and you
155make quarantine gone or optional which um a student gets sick or has asymptomatic nothing else without knowing it spreads the virus to other classmates the only thing is that they spread students they spread to some students who are immunocompromised now those immunographer my students are having some serious medical health issues parents are deeply concerned about this find out it's covered and then have no idea how their child got it the necessary safety precautions in public they take is wearing a mask and they do all the safe safety protocols of the district only to find out that their class or school had coveted and now cases are on an outbreak and they didn't even know about until like a week later or who knows how later or the parent that had the fair childhood echo would
156decide not to say anything um the parent with the child who is immunocompromised are hoping you're praying for the best for their child to heal up and have no complications long-term side effects your option of having quarantine optional is like having a mask optional which none of these parents are going to do so what happens if you guys have an outbreak how are you guys going to control it the point of quarantine is to play place is to prevent all rights from happening in cases numbers increasing too quickly if mass were worn within the classroom and school buildings quarantine would be decreased mass do help slow the spread a little bit and i don't want you guys taking the easy way out which you guys are take the extra hard work and doing what is
157best especially for those who have some health conditions and who are immunocompromised and who need the extra special help he seems like you guys are just getting rid of them by not taking their safety precaution you make quarantine optional or recommended no one's going to listen other than the parents who want to take the safety precautions and then those students with the health immuno compromise are going to get sick and i hope some of them get seriously sick or die bam i'm sorry sir first and then yeah go ahead next okay so adam tillmar 621 long street i just wanted to say you guys do a great job at contact tracing and i think maybe you should consider some work with the dmv but again i'd like to ask how many kids that were quarantined
158actually contracted this communicable disease are you guys planning to track that as far as sharing the delay dave you had that question earlier i had a child that was out for five days or i'm sorry we were told five days after and i understand now the process that goes into it so i appreciate that but the reason i was sharing that was because it just shows the absurdity of this five days they were connected with all their people all the people in their class and and then i guess the next five days or however many days that that will protect it just it just doesn't make sense to me i guess um and then i guess i just wanted to say um so for my daughter she uh she got her license this past summer
159and um they decided so the public entity that wants to keep the roadways safe decided it was safer for my 16 year old daughter to skip a driving test and just issue a driver's license surprisingly they allowed the parents to decide that this teen was ready to drive imagine that sometimes there is liability but you all should be brave and recommend recommend quarantine rather than enforce quarantine thank you kimberly peterson 814 richards avenue um thank you all for all your service to the community board members and staff and even parents um just uh one thing that i wanted to add and this i know that if i ask questions you can't respond which is fine but on the covet statistics for slinger they do actually have a contact tracing absence as well so it sounds
160like they do contact trace separately just so you know but we also presented um like 13 districts including kettle moraine waukesha hartford um oconomowoc there are like 13 different districts that we've been toting that have eliminated close contact quarantines for probably three months i've been coming to these meetings where close contact quarantine has been brought up and now you're talking about researching that's a little disappointing because three months ago when the numbers in our city were down we could have been having our healthy kids at school but they're not we're just doing it now when one of the board members decides that it's time to listen to the people of the community that's a little disappointing and i'm sorry that it's it's a hard job i get it but we've been bringing this up for
161three months now and given you exactly those examples and i'm just very very upset that it took this long to bring it to you but again thank you so much for at least starting the discussion to get our healthy kids back to school and i will say this one thing my son was a close contact he stayed home he started exhibiting symptoms i haven't tested he was negative but i kept him home because he was symptomatic and because that's what good parents do and parents who are accountable and taking responsibility for their kids um i guess i i i definitely appreciate the discussion here tonight um thank you for that uh i i do want to point out a couple of different thoughts though um that you might want to take away it's interesting that
162the city wants to rigidly enforce wants these rigid enforcement of close contact quarantines yet they've never issued an order i find that interesting um yeah in the parochial schools if your child is sick you keep your child home and by no means am i saying don't send a sick child home that's just ridiculous send a sick child home you know but when the child gets better let them come back no testing needed come on so also my voice doesn't matter at the city or the watertown public health department but yet you are you are locked into this quagmire with them and i challenge this board to take the lead on the example that doug brought tonight and work on a workable solution the water down public health department is not educators nor do they attend
163these meetings to understand the plight of these people to make a fair assessment for our community why aren't they here thank you anyone else in the room right please i'm chad bailey from uh 804 linda lane uh we've talked a lot about liability over the past three months or so and i wanted to make a few points here related to liability but maybe from a different angle wisconsin statute 11801 states public education is the fundamental responsibility of the state wisconsin statute 121.77 states elementary and high school shall be free to all pupils who reside in the school district 14th amendment of the constitution u.s constitution has had an enormous impact on protecting individual rights in public and secondary education through the u.s supreme court's interpretation of the equal protection clause and due process clause it
164provides that a state may not deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws it applies to public elementary and secondary schools as they are considered to be state actors and while it has been employed in relation to segregation in the past the language is not exclusive to that topic further the due process clause of the 14th amendment defines that states may not deprive any person of life liberty or property without due process of law without due process i.e proving a healthy law-abiding student is a threat to those around them a student cannot be denied access to education district policies do not supersede federal law however well-intentioned they may be i'd like to inform you about two federal criminal laws that the district might be violating currently one has title 18 u.s
165code section 242 conspiracy against rights which says if two or more persons conspire to injure oppress threaten or intimidate any person in any state territory commonwealth possession or district in the free exercise of any right or privilege secured to him by the constitution or laws of the united states or because of his having exercised the same they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years or both and then it goes on to talk about even more severe penalties title 18 u.s code section 241 separation i'm close title 18 us code section 241 deprivation of rights under color of law whoever under any law whoever color of any law statute ordinance or regulation or custom willfully subjects another person in any state territory commonwealth possession or district through the deprivation of
166rights privileges or immunities secured by the constitution of the united states shall be fined under this title or a prison for not more than one year or both the color of law is described as the misuse of power possessed by the virtue of state law and made possible only because the wrongdoer is clothed with authority of the state it may be the impression the board that the ccq policy has been a matter of differing opinions and inconvenience which i wouldn't disagree with but my statement informs you that the law is very clear about this infraction thank you anyone else in the room my name is tony jocelyn 908 fox creek drive here in waterdog i just have one thing that i want to say i know you guys have like a ridiculously hard job to
167do here but i have five great grandchildren in the watertown school district well two of them are homeschooled one goes to parochial school to go to douglas and i just find i don't know is this type of education that we're subjecting our children to because of this thing that's been going on for 20 months what is it doing to their mental state that's all i want to know because i have five little kids and i want them to grow up healthy and educated which right now they are not at least not the ones that are going to public school all right i'll entertain a motion to adjourn thank you everyone