001[Laughter] 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 the liberty and justices first item on the agenda um is presentation superintendent's update yep i'm just gonna adjust this little lid is in the way there leaving board members you have the presentation the hard copy in front of you i'm just going to bring it up on the board here it's been a busy month since we last got together and uh a lot happened so i have a little bit of an update to share with the board obviously you've probably seen a ton of information in the media um and i'm here to provide you a summary of our reopened octavia strong plan highlight some key factors and some
002key items and uh to share some information with you tonight obviously i think it's also important to share with the public who's uh joining us live as well this works all right so the governor announced last week that schools were allowed to reopen and i just want to clarify that that does not mean reopen full in person every day um all the time that means that we reopen under the plans that we've submitted to the state and so we have submitted a couple of variations and a couple of options which i'll reveal again tonight uh for each of you and the audience i'm going to take my math business i am six feet away makes it easier to understand me um four important points though that i think are critical that i want us to
003be reminded of and stay grounded in is that the only reason why we're opening this because the infection rate um is below that threshold of uh nine percent i think is what he said between five and nine percent he was going to be reviewing so we are less than uh one percent in this community here which is great um so those who are watching online keep wearing masks keep doing your part with good hygiene and practicing social distancing the other thing that he said was that in personal and partial reopening would be determined locally by each individual school district so we have in our plan uh in person we have full 100 remote virtual learning we also have a hybrid experience that fluctuates in person from um every other day with fridays being virtual um
004and uh we have a three-day version for our both cct students and then we have a um special considerations group which will be here every day of the week and those would be for our students who may be self-contained english language learners or any students who may be just at risk that did not necessarily engage fully last year so those are some you know high-profile students that our teachers are recommending our principals are recommending and again this is about capacity so we want to make sure um as we collect the data and i'll share this data with you around parent choice as parents make the decision we build the model based on parent choice and so we can get more kids in person i want to be clear we'll have more kids in person but
005right now our district 2200 kids the way we build the motto was everybody wanted in person and so hopefully we'll be able to increase that knowing that the choices the department of health is reviewing the submitted reopening plans we're supposed to get notified today you may have seen in the media i think 107 school districts did not submit a plan at all and so they were kind of put on glass in the media today we were not one of those districts um that was with the department of health and so they're basically contacting us that there's some questions or concerns we have not heard anything back so we're good to go we're going to keep proceeding with our with our plans as written um and then again uh one new thing that he added at
006this press conference was that we have to have three public meetings uh with parents prior to august 21st so tomorrow we're meeting as a leadership team to set up our schedule and our agenda but um compliments to the team we already have virtual open houses planned in our reopening plan so when i dig in there i'll highlight that each of our schools and our principals is already planning kind of a virtual open house a uh kind of a town hall to talk about the processes and protocols what does it mean for me at uh application middle what does it mean for me at jk what does it mean for me at the high school and then obviously jackson so that happened on friday and one thing that i'm bringing tonight that supports our reopening plans
007and you should have a copy of this as well and it's part of our fourth factory is a change in our accountant i have worked with the batavia teachers association to make sure mark warren president is aware of this recommendation our goal here is to make sure our teachers are as prepared as possible to engage in some high quality hybrid learning where kids are in person every other day and they're remote the opposite things but also our virtual learning and i'll be the first to say we know we have to do better in that experience of virtual learning and so we are asking the board to approve tonight a change in the calendar that puts four days of superintendent's conference days at the front of our calendar and so typically we were supposed uh would
008have started on the eighth um we're looking for a change of that date uh originally we had thought that nine could be enough it would give us three days but we decided to move those days down from before labor day to after with it being the week the long weekend before we know families tend to go you know some of our staff may have had plans although who knows what's available now with our cover 19 everywhere and travel restrictions and states being on the list of travel advisory we wanted to butt up our superintendent's conference days right up right after labor day do four days with our staff members get everybody ready have our alphabet start on the following monday which will be the 14th and uh what you'll notice is because of that we
009have to have 180 school days so you're going to notice in the prior calendar there was some days that we had off so i'll give you an example april 5th was the day after easter sunday we've had that day originally scheduled as a day off in our district that would not be a day off because we have to have 180 student contact days and so with that every plan that we've proposed daily attendance and daily interaction has to be tracked and so that's why 180 days is so important and no matter what model of learning that is chosen by a family our teachers have to make sure that kids are engaged that they're taking daily attendance and that there's some kind of form of daily interaction because we're going to be accountable for reporting these
010days as attendance days for our state for the new york state so that's mainly the biggest differences you're going to see a couple holidays april 5th you're going to see the friday before memorial day break again that is a virtual learning day anyway our kids would have been home on virtual learning so our staff will be here obviously teaching virtual learning um but it won't be it will count as a student attendance day versus a day off for kids so that's another day that changed significantly here you're going to notice november 3rd was an attempt an original superintendent's conference in the original calendar we've now taken that away um because we our focus is in person learning so for the every other day kids um so this keeps us at 180 days of instruction uh
011it keeps us at 184 days for the teachers contract they're contracted for 185 days so i i want to be clear that gives us one kind of like emergency day if we needed it for some reason to make up that we could have our teachers technically still work their contract only allows them to work 185 days we built the calendar for 184 days so that gives us one kind of like emergency day if we needed it which leads me to talk about snow days so the strategy for us next year again trying to be innovative and creative right is that if we do have to close for a weather related issue we will turn to become a remote learning day where kids will be instructed to log in and teachers will be instructed to log
012in and do what they need to do they can do it from home obviously they physically can't come in given the weather related situation but it would allow us not to have to make up days as we've had in the past when we shut down and then we go over the contraction we have to take vacations we have to shorten vacations things of that nature so that was the reason why we wanted to still be a jammy day it could be a jammy day yeah that's right and then we have the two half days at the end of the year typically that's been done first like because it's usually like celebrations moving up ceremonies things of that nature my hope and prayers hope that we're fully in person by the end of the school year
013that there's a vaccine you know the rules of kings but we don't ever know what will happen so if you're watching the national news they're talking about you know fast-pacing some type of hopeful solution for our families do we have a game plan if the virtual [Music] typically i don't think we've been that bad too you know since the ice storm in this area but who knows right this is if anything's going to happen in 2020 that'll be the year this will be the year so hopefully not but that's a great thing we should start probably start planning one of the things that we're probably going to recommend is that teachers create kind of like um virtual learning snow day packets or some you know bodies of work that if for something like that happen
014you already have the files they're already in classroom they pretty much uh archived so once the kid's logged in it shows up and then it syncs that assignment online so hopefully that'll work but i think that's something we should definitely get ahead of so thank you for bringing that up but i just wanted to show you this we're still going to have open houses they may become virtual open houses but we want to make sure we still have them we can still have things in person they're just going to have to we just have to limit the crowd so i think it's just so important to still offer that in-person experience as much as possible and just do it with mass and social distancing and right now no gathering is larger than 50 is still
015the rule um so that's what we would do and you can hear it you can schedule it so i just want you to know though this is the calendar proposed we will if it's approved tonight we will have some work to do on communicating this hosting this giving this to our families but the biggest thing for us is that it gives us four solid days with teachers to go over all the covet 19 training all the new protocols the entry procedures um obviously we have some mandated things we do every year when it comes to training but more importantly is the online learning the hybrid learning getting online getting the syllabuses online getting their assignments online working with their peers to say hey english department these are our assignments these are the things we want
016to start doing and then practicing you know they got these webcams in these rooms they're going to be using how do you live stream from the classroom what does that look like where do i need to position it um i'm not really familiar with doing that those are the things that we're going to have to do we're going to work on the uh dr corey o'share we're doing a virtual kind of tech academy we're trying to work on with a prescription of courses or content to give to the teachers you know make sure they're comfortable doing a variety of things and our teachers are stepping up they're going to be the ones doing the training they're the ones creating the videos for us to teach their colleagues so um i won't see a lot of
017dr coy's thunder but any questions on the calendar this is a change so the so after tonight we're gonna have to do some communication because in a sense it creates another week the kids are home right after the holiday and then they start on that 14th i just want to make sure it doesn't extend the school year any longer but it does change the start okay i'm going to shift over to our reopen batavia strong plan first thing i'm going to do is just thank the committee members from the task force you should have a copy of the plan in front of you um it's the larger document with reopen the figures from the packet um if you haven't had an opportunity to look at it i encourage you just at least spend some time
018in the areas that you're passionate about but obviously wherever your children are or wherever you have representation in your communities in those schools look at them it is on our website it is located on the website in the reopening plan there's a tab you click on it it's downloadable it's searchable as a pdf you can search it you type in keywords key school highlights i think are important if you want to find the schools every single one of those principals with their leadership teams at their building levels spend time getting a little granular around what the schedule looks like and again these are proposed we know they're going to make some adjustments we know we're going to have adjustments so these are all the sections so i would tell you if you visit them it
019talks about what hybrid learning would look like what virtual learning looks like and what in-person learning will look like and kind of what the school day what the teacher expectations may look like for those folks with the student expectations and their parents so what do we expect from parents of the kids at home how to be monitored and those are things we got to continue to vet and continue to get better and continue to refine and communicate to our community but i definitely wanted to share that and again i want to thank the task force in our first meeting we had like 85 people kind of window down a little bit but we had a significant representation every of the nine subcommittees uh who which were led by an administrator in the district we had
020parents students and uh staff members and all of them so if anybody says that they didn't have an opportunity to participate we didn't tell no to anybody who wanted to be on a committee which is why we had 80 people in our larger group um because we thought it was important we have this graphic that we've sent out this one pager obviously i've already updated it for the first day of school to be september 14th the one we have posted that's a different date but this is again uh with the hope and understanding that tonight will approve the calendar change we'll get this out and up there and online i kind of want to go through this real quickly because you may have some questions as a board just so you have a clear understanding
021these bulleted items at the top and there's uh seven of them are non-negotiable you gotta have them gotta have masks in place you gotta practice social distancing and we've been getting calls and concerns that you know why can't we have more kids in the building why can't we have more when we take our classrooms and we put the six feet around every kid it literally almost cut their classrooms down 50 so a room that would have 23 or 24 now has 11 or 12 kids again we got to have desks now i want to be real clear too if we wanted to spend probably a million bucks we could have plexiglass around all the kids and then we have more kids in there but then that would be a million-dollar expenditure that was not budgeted
022for um that we could that would do that now i want to be clear because you will hear oakfield and perry and other districts have made the knowledge their scale is a lot smaller but they have made that investment so i want to be clear when you hear this district's ringing in person and that district basically bought a plexiglass around every kid's desk so that they could have more kids in person we didn't think given our financial um challenges we had this past year that spending almost a million dollars on pp uh protective was going to be in good fiscal steward responsibility knowing that when this is over we now have a lot of plexiglass that we gotta figure out how we're gonna do it and so i just wanna be clear uh on that
023point the other piece is um we have to provide daily teacher and student interactions that goes to that attendance portion where some of its attendance and some of it is again live streaming classes um we have to have a process for daily health checks so one of the things we're going to have instituted for staff is they'll have to fill out a access station or a questionnaire that they feel okay to come to work they don't have temperatures they haven't been in contact with somebody who has covert or who's out of state it's about little criteria things about six or seven items that they'll have to do it parents will also be asked to do the same thing as well prior to putting their child on the bus um that they that you know jose
024doesn't feel bad he feels good he doesn't have a temperature i'm sending him to school and when he gets here what we're going to do is because this came a real adamant through our staff is we're going to do a temperature check at the door and our staff was really adamant and our task force is really adamant that we need to do daily temperature checks of staff members and of students so each of our staff members will have to have their temperature taken and each of our students look so we're going to have processes set up at each of the buildings i can tell you here at the high school certain doors will be designated for certain grade levels we've gotten thermometers that are on stands so there's nobody touching it they go right in
025front it gives you the temperature and then we bought some handheld ones as well so we're gonna have a mixed method of how to address that we're obviously going to have to clean and disinfect our schools and school buses so we're working with our transportation company to go through their process they were a part of the task force so that was really great they were invested in trying to figure out what's needed our bus capacity went from 60 kids on a bus to like 22 just so you know because you can only have one in a seat so we're going to have some challenges with bringing everybody to school which is why one of the questions we asked our parents was would you be one transport your child so that we can try to get
026a handle on how do we mitigate our transportation challenges with 2200 students um obviously we're going to promote correct hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette so if you're going to call often in your arm um you know washing your hands when you go to the bathroom to make sure there's no sanitizer classrooms and common spaces where kids can um use the hand sanitizer the same thing for staff as well making sure to limit the number of kids in the restroom so that we don't have you know 10 kids in there and create an opportunity for you know germs to be spread we're going to put tape or mark which sinks are available to use which ones are not we're going to cover up water fountains as well they can't just be open like that anymore we
027have to cover them up and tell you which ones could be used so that's kind of the top box the next box on the right here it talks about cohorts and so the guidance from new york state basically asked us to break our kids up in the cohorts so we decided that awful would be the best for us because it would keep for the most part not all families um i come from a family with different last names as well that it would keep families together and if there's any exceptions that we're asking parents to call the school and say hey i have two children with two different last names can you combine them and we're making those accommodations for those families and students so you see that cohort one would come on mondays and
028wednesdays so you see them here in blue and then core 2 would be tuesdays and thursdays so you see them opposite and on the black diamond is our remote learning and on fridays it's virtual the only group that you're going to see a little bit of a different um variation to his core three those are our high school students that are at boces but genesee valley boces is going to run full day for those students monday and tuesday so we have to make them a little bit of a different group but that's a significant number of kids that's 167 high school kids just so you're aware 167 high school kids and then um those two days are done there so we wanted to make sure they had some contact with any person with our with
029our districts that are their regular you know math under science socialist teachers so we added the third day of thursday in person for them so those kids will have three days of in-person learning because part of their time is not even with us it's over across the street and then on fridays they'll be virtual as well and our core four again is that special considerations group or students who may have some targeted academic needs or students who may have some significant challenges and again it doesn't mean you have to have a disability so i want to be clear here because we're not trying to bubble kids in certain groups it's kids who have been identified who may have a special circumstance it gives the principal some leverage to work with families and their kids who
030they know maybe didn't do well from march of last year through through june that didn't engage didn't have internet and it has to make up some ground um so we know that that is the case and then our last group is uh parent choice uh parents who choose 100 remote learning one thing we heard really loud and clear was that some families don't feel sick they don't feel that we're gonna be able to maybe keep up the cleanliness or they just know just given the statistics of other communities that have reopened that there will probably be an infection in the building it may be something that happens and they just they live with a grandparent they have somebody who's also doing compromise in the house they don't want to you know risk that so we
031give them that virtual option and i do have some statistics to share on there any questions on this so far okay great we'll keep going then so we have done uh parent choice reopen uh strong registration which means we wanted to make sure every parent chose the model that worked for them so just to be clear we have done this electronically we communicated via school messenger we've posted it on our social media it's on our website but one of the charges that i told the principals was get at the building level and start calling your families individually so they have their clerical and their staff their counselors they're working on following up with each kid making sure that he has a choice this was as a friday of last week we had about 376 families
032we still haven't made contact with and or responded out of 2200 so i just give you an idea we have a good number of data already and i just wanted to show you where we were because i know as board members you may get questions in the community you may see things posted you may see emails in your inbox maybe asking questions so the numbers for virtual there's only 59 families that are asking it at jackson okay 112 at jk 102 at the middle school and 89 at the high school so there will be a group of students at each building that will be in a 100 virtual we want to honor that choice as much as possible that does help us with the in person um not as significantly as you may think because
033when we break it down by grade level and i can send this to the board if you'd like to show you which grade those 59 kids are and remember jackson is pre-k k-1 they may not all be in the same grade level maybe 15 here you know 10 here 20 here okay um same thing with jk and just for comparison at the middle school we have 670 kids and there's 102 that asks so we still have 568 kids we got to accommodate in the building um so we want to make sure that just you understand the scale doesn't change a lot in terms of bringing more kids in but we are going to try to maximize in person as much as possible obviously the in person 63 of our families chose that model uh 1386
034um pre-k i didn't break those down because i thought that was a there was kids are going to be in school in some iteration of every other day and then the other was just another thing that had come up only four percent of our families or 89 students chose that they would either homeschool their kid maybe go into a parochial or maybe transferring out of district and so just you have an idea and there's a breakdown by campus what that looks like and again our schools are following up with all these families to make sure that they understood that other didn't mean remote learning home school doesn't mean virtual learning so we wanted to make sure that that was getting done because we didn't get some questions and some confusions um and then this is
035the percentage of received so far so 88 percent of the families at jackson 86 at kennedy 80 in the middle school 81 at the high school again that number of 376 is probably almost nearly done now because they were working on it today they were finishing on friday we closed the online portal at one point so we wanted to make sure that you have an accurate account and i'm following up with the team tomorrow so i'll be able to give updated numbers to the board but the goal is to have 100 percent response so we knew exactly what we were building into the open plan yep if a parent has decided that they don't want to send their children whatever and they're doing virtually virtual remote learning can they change their mind yeah so we're
036asking families to make the commitment right now kind of indefinitely until we know where we are with everything because once we build it and we staff it if we allow movement it's going to change our ratios so anything that comes up as like a special consideration i've asked principals to really work with families really did do like what the true challenge may be but if we're going to make a change we want to try to do it at the market period so that way you know so bring us that every 10 weeks and we look at it and then we can adjust but we just want to be careful because if we start to do that then you know this week it works for me i can't find child care or i can't then i
037want to switch to this or i'm good now it's not working i want to go back so we are asking our parents to make a commitment right now we haven't given them a definitive date we put it out for a year commitment um but one thing that we will do is look at this ongoing and again if we can bring more kids in that's the preference everybody wants there's more kids in and that's our preference too because that's what we've been trained to do is in person learning right so um we want to make sure that we maximize that but right now we're looking internally at that every ten weeks to see if we can happen now if we have an extreme situation where there's something really bad happening or we have to move somebody
038then obviously we'll work with those families any other questions so moving forward again to go back to the press conference on last week the governor has given us some kind of marching orders so we are authorized to reopen so the good news is we will be open you know unless something else happens um which could happen the state will continue to monitor its infection rates um obviously we watch his daily reports or his tweets or his um email briefs he sends out they're gonna obviously approve our plans that they have already we haven't gotten this area known yet so we were told to operate as if we're good to go until we hear but we have to do some additional tasks and one of them is we have to put some cobia 19 testing protocols
039so i want to be clear to the audience that may be watching online and clear the board we aren't testing here but we have to provide guidance if you need to get a test where would you go where are the locations that are regionally located so we have a meeting i have a meeting tomorrow with um paul bennett who's the uh county department of health director so we will be talking to him he'll be helping us make that guidance because every everyone in this county has to have similar guidance so we want to make sure that we're consistent in what that guidance needs what it and i don't need to be a debbie downer but what is the protocol or is there a protocol set up if somebody does contract coping i mean like is
040do we have a protocol yeah there's a i didn't bring on me but we have a flowchart that we'll have that we'll share with everybody it will be real explicit but there's we have isolation rooms that are in our reopen plan if somebody were to come up even if they have a high temperature and come into the building we have to isolate them identify who they are and we're not going to know their results so if anybody wants to hear and to come into the building and we were to know that we have protocols to isolate them contact the department of health get the student or child or the staff member out of the building and then they take over which is the next one they take over the contract tracing so the governor may
041have said that we're responsible kind of we just have to share what those protocols are that means like there's that caller id in your site contract tracing if you get called by it make sure you answer the phone don't ignore it um these are the processes and the department of health steps in and takes over that piece we don't do anything with contact facing we don't share anybody's information that was in the class but they're going to call us to say you know so-and-so was in this room who else was in that room with them and then they'll call those families you know they've hired sheriffs to do this work they hire a bunch of people to do this work so we don't do that we just have to have a process outlined posted on
042our website what that process is who's involved but we don't do any of that stuff obviously there's some rules around purple and what we can share so that's why we give that to the department of health people um remote virtual learning as well uh we have to clearly post what that looks like so we are um vetting that we're building that we're refining that and we'll have a more detailed remote virtual learning plan but there is stuff in your open plan already that speaks to what that could look like and so we want to make sure that parents know what's the expectation that the kids at home for 100 when should they log in i'm a high school student one of the things that principal custer wants is whatever time your class is at school
043it's the time you log in online because we're encouraging our teachers to stream their class so that they can teach do some direct teaching give the lesson have some assignments in the google classroom and then say okay you go ahead and continue that kids could see their classmates especially who's in class you know we want to try to make it feel as much normal as possible even though it's remote but we know we have some work to do around training staffers and comfortable in that environment but we have to post that is that live like live demonstration and teaching the whole time or is it sort of like i'm going to see up the thing that you're going to be doing online and then you get to go and see yes our goal is that
044uh the classes are about 80 minutes or so in the high school so let's say the first 30 to 40 minutes you know teachers give them direct instruction kids are online showing the kids they need to be doing they can ask questions they can hear from their colleagues and then at some point they may say okay go ahead and finish off the rest of the assignment make sure you post it on the google classroom and they may hang up with those kids and then last 20 minutes may be done just kind of working with these kids individually yeah because it's a little bit different to offer in-person support and then have the kids online yeah i'm just thinking of the kids that will turn the camera off is there a protocol for what they sign
045in great but you have to see them the whole yeah so we want them to make sure that they're signed in and that we see them for the first at least 15 minutes 20 minutes we want to see the kids one thing that we've learned and some of the research that's out there is that we've also um we've invaded the kids practices right we're in their houses and for sometimes some of the products are really good because they hide the backgrounds some of our kids are embarrassing me to show you what's in the background so we want to be sensitive to that but we do want to see their faces again social emotional really big in the workforce we want to hey how you doing good morning welcome we're going to encourage our teachers to
046make sure that we see there we just don't want a kid logged in and then physically walk away so we want to make sure they're in there there's some engagement so those are the things that we got to work in this remote learning to build those expectations and to communicate at home and then to monitor them and then you know one thing that came up from both our families and our teachers with accountability so we got to give grades we can't do some of the things that we did um last year where we were more project based or maybe more participation driven we've got to kind of drive some of the grading here so we need to make sure that kids are online they're participating you know that's you know there's a little bit more
047of accountability on it because now we don't have a waiver for regents exams there's nothing so we're our kids are getting prepared to take exams so we need to make sure that they're there so great question are there going to be any like outline as far as policies regarding kids behavior at home like are they going to be instructed as far as well we're going to have some expectations for them what were they expected to do you know again we have to be sensitive they're in a home environment they may not be able to control who may walk in the background someone may say something inappropriate in the background we don't want to penalize the kid for that but we don't want to share with parents remote learning is going to expect you to find
048a quiet place for your child these are the times they should be online make sure that and when he's in that quiet place that there's no disruptions you know we're going to try to do the best we can but in some households there may be multiple kids on and that may be a burden on the family so we want to be sensitive to that but what we don't want is uh you know someone in there um again maybe we police that but we do want them appropriate on the camera make sure they have a shirt on and you know they're appropriate you don't want somebody walking in with no shirt on so we'll go over some of those things with our kids around expectations but we're not going to like give you consequences for doing
049some things you know obviously we want to make sure that we are being proactive in these conversations i mean that's what the expectation is going to be in their life for the rest of their life because this has changed everything and everything a lot of things would be online now so you're still preparing them for the future by doing that yeah but we also want to be sensitive like it could be three kids at home from one family could be a 12th grader it could be a middle schooler and an elementary and you know important maybe the family doesn't have three different spaces to spread kids they're all in one table you know they're at the table there yeah so we want to be sensitive to that but we want to share best practices or
050ideal opportunities and we again we are also exploring as much in person as possible because we know that that may come up what i would tell you back to your question as around um switching we may see a kid that this isn't working for me and we may have to talk to the family but we got to convert we want to advertise for and conduct three meetings so you're gonna see um our schools do some three meetings with the parents from each of those schools to engage we're gonna do some district-wide ones where parents can ask some questions about the plans um we're gonna have and i'll show you the next slide we have a mechanism already that we haven't really used well as a district uh product called let's talk which i'll show you
051in a minute that will allow us to start getting those questions now so we can start sharing out um but we want to make sure parents feel as comfortable as possible with the models that are coming before them and we have to do those three meetings before the 21st we also have to do one with our teachers and staff so we will have one district-wide one i'm going to encourage my buildings to do one for their building level staff but then i'll do one for kind of like district-wide if you have any questions or comments we want to over communicate in this situation um we know we're always going to run into something we may not have thought of so these things actually help us these questions and then we're going to put some faqs
052one thing we have already on our district website is a product called let's talk that's been here for a couple years not sure how much it's been maximized but one of the things that i want to do is maximize on it it's right on our page if you go to our district page anywhere you'll see this little let's talk at the bottom it says contact us if you click on it when you hit select the topic the first choice is reopening plans and so i want to just kind of give you a quick demonstration of what that looks like that will inherently allow our um parents to come here anybody you'll hit let's talk it'll pop right up you can select the topic you'll be able to select the topic reopening plans they'll be able
053to then say i'm a student employee a parent a guardian a community member doesn't have to identify them okay they don't have to fill this that they aren't required uh to put identifying so we know we're going to get some anonymous questions from various groups but we want people to feel comfortable to letting them know because what this product allows us to do is to respond back to you and to give you a response back so if you submit a question put your name and email we know who it was who it came from and the response can go right back to you versus kind of like when you post on social media you don't ever know if anybody's gonna respond to you but you put it in the comments thread and you're watching the
054live stream so we want to encourage parents to do this so we'll be sending out some communication if you have questions on the reopening plan you know use the reopening plan and again i have a question a comment a suggestion a concern a compliment because there's obviously sometimes there's good things you want to share with us so that's right there on our page it is also located um on our home page right here where it says let's talk so if you wanted to do it and the cool thing is we have this for all the areas in our district so not only just reopening plans but building youth student registration again i'm not sure how much this was used in the past but i went i've gone through and tried to update every one of
055these subject areas has an administrator assigned as the lead person so they get an email that says hey somebody just submitted a let's stop what's cool is on my phone i have a let's talk app so when i'm walking around and i get it i can respond right from my phone or if i run into a community member or a parent that says hey i submitted something i never heard and i can say really i can go in and see where it's at and i can view it oh the administrator is still working on it it's a sign of this person and i get to see a thread of the interactions which is cool because it's about customer service and this stuff so um this product is food because it lets me know when it
056was submitted who responded it if it was diverted to someone else for assistance and then at the end when it's closed it sends you back a survey that says you know how do you feel about the answer how do you feel about the service you know kind of gives us a little data on what we can do better so we're going to work on getting better with this but this is a product that obviously the board has approved a couple years back for the district you know uh used and we're gonna try to take advantage of it so that's how we're gonna engage some of our families not only with reopening but with all aspects of it so if i'm just a parent at the high school i do the same exact thing i picked
057the high schools here it is i scroll down i say what my question comment is i fill it out if they want us to contact them they put the information and they send it exactly and they can do it from their phone it comes up pretty cool so i just wanted to share that with you that that's how we'll be doing some of the engagement um so that's uh that's stopped by k-12 insight and that will be part of our work i want to close out with our community meals we've been feeding the community since this all started those numbers are pretty impressive for a community this size 108 000 meals have been provided breakfast and lunch uh to the community from march till june 28th our summer feeding started immediately after the 29th and
058the 30th actually we're part of that but we've given 44 000 meals as of right now and that was as of august 6. um and just a reminder to our viewers that we're still doing grab and go uh mondays and wednesdays and fridays at jackson kennedy so everyone's welcome to come and get some food no one's never turned down we don't id you to make sure you live in the city i want to say that cautiously but the expectation is you are a city behavior resident so that's my presentation i'll hand it over this is the summer of making plans uh it's a good thing it'll help make us stronger and uh tonight i'm going to talk to you about the district comprehensive improvement plan known as the dc you might remember it from a
059few years ago the accountability that came out last fall indicated that we might be in a little bit of trouble in some of the areas then the data did come out and show that in 2018-19 we were in good status as a district and at each school and that had changed slightly where we've been named as a target district for the 1920 accountability year all schools all other schools remain in good standing which is a good thing and i want to i want you to understand that we had a hard time understanding why would the district be cited but not for schools and it's really based on the percentage that you fall in so i'll explain that basically the high school is the area where we have some subgroups to watch for others they did
060give us guidance on some other subgroups in other places that could be potential in the future but the black sub group at the high school was marked in basically what albany told me is that the school itself doesn't qualify with the metrics but as a district when they look at our school accountability we fall into it a little bit of an oxymoron you think they would both but we're working with the high school uh to get to stay on top of it this is a little bit more of an explanation there's different scenarios that help decide which level you fall into when we fell into scenario two and it basically when you look at the metrics on the report card there were the composite performance of achievement was a level one for black students and
061the combined performance for achievement along with graduation rate was also a level one when you have two ones within this matrix it would force you to have to look a little bit more carefully at why um going back in time this subgroup was the one that got us on the original list and they finally kind of caught up with us in terms of watching those cohorts of students within the high school setting the achievement levels at the high school are based on the regents exam and basically when you look at the performance for achievement from that subgroup they're united for they're not performing as well compared to all students when um when you look at the matrix for uh other things we're really doing pretty well and overall but it's certainly an area we have
062to get better at and we will so it's part of me having this status we are required to submit a plan to albany you have a copy of the full plan in front of you and i just wanted to give you some highlights they require that you have five priorities you have to pick five whether you need or want five um in the past they would it used to be three to five and we came together as a team knowing that we had to do the reopening plan and we're really thinking about other things we didn't want it to be one more thing that was going to be looked aside so we wanted to see how we could leave this the work into what we're doing to reopen school and also to make sure that
063we're really carefully looking at areas that need a little bit more of our attention we came up with five and i'm going to explain to you what the five are and how we're doing it the first three really are just building on the goals that we made last summer we picked areas that would be long-term areas that we could grow in and we wanted to really continue that work the first one is we really believe that all of our students and teachers and stakeholders within the whole school system need to focus on social emotional learning it's kind of one of the new buzzwords it really does matter with everything that you're seeing about reopening they first and foremost say take care of yourself first you want to make sure that you're strong and then know
064how to take care of the students in front of you we believe that this is true we invested in january and had a keynote come in on the wellness day to talk about what it means and that was the kickoff to every school now has a social emotional learning team and that team is part of this plan what we want each school to do is make meaningful school-wide practices and classroom practices that they can all live with kind of like these schools had a model the jk way each school is going to embrace it with looking at the five competencies from castle um specifically for this year we wanted to look at self-awareness we want everybody to really be very um in tune with what it means to take care of yourself and what does
065that look like all teens have met this summer they're meeting face-to-face with chris merrell the person who came in in january in fact this week there's two meetings john kennedy and jackson have already met and then from that they had additional planning guides uh with that goal to really make sure that we are going to start the or strong no matter which model we were in the second one is obviously when there's gaps with kids you have to know how to close those gaps we started looking at mtss last year the multi-tiered systems of supports to make sure that we have appropriate systems not only for the academics but for behaviors and some of the social emotional needs that bubble up is being the buffer of what is why they're not performing well academically we're
066continuing with that and we are really making sure that each staff member knows how what their role would be within that system we i'll be honest we didn't get as much traction as we hoped to last year march was a halting point so we're really just trying to carry forward with that and specifically looking at some data points to help guide us with that i think we're still in a really good place and we're going to continue with that goal as well some of the things with that we're going to make sure that we have stronger structures where we're really helping the school leaders to guide this process we've given a lot of autonomy to each school in terms of having data team meetings and they all do and they have it's just making sure
067that collection is going back into a place so that we can really see patterns you want to make sure that they're looking not only at different pieces of academics but also at the chronic absentee rate which you'll see is coming forward we've got to stay on top of that especially knowing that we're going to have three fifths of the time in a virtual world we need all kids engaged questions yes is there a place that everyone can see the same data from every school level or is it everything separate like is there a site that you can have where there's recording that everyone has access to systems you know so um yes we're we're trying to there's a warehouse called branching mines that's the predictive analytics tool that we started with last year i had
068a lot of hope and promise for what that would mean so we we had some restructuring to have some additional support with the data clerks and i've been working with them all summer to make sure that we can use that warehouse strategically so it really guides us along with that we um each grade each class has a cohort spreadsheet that's available to the building it follows the kit so that the data is coming up with them the meetings that we have this summer one go two four go five has really been an integral part of making sure that we're packing the baton knowing that more than ever this year is gonna be the year that where they're not coming forward with as many things as we would want them to um with that though we
069it's really important that we continue really building relationships with families we need to have them as a partner in this educational process and we focusing in on the reciprocal relationships because often you know we call we're the ones reaching out we want them to come in we invite them we want them to come to parent-teacher conferences they're not necessarily coming to us when they need us you know rarely do we have a parent say i can't get my child out of that can you please help me and we need them to trust us and say what do you have and um with this goal one of the big things is having a new location over at robert morris at the community center we hope to grow and really foster that and blossom into something more
070you know julie's done a great job um in fact i called today to see if she could help with a little something going on and i heard to me as one day left for the summer and here we've got a few weeks left you know we've got some things bubbling up so we know there's definitely a big need to build more and connect with families and we're going to have to work in the district to figure out how best to do that and what else we can do but with that we're keeping track of the number of instances so that we have data so when there's a funding source or a new grant we can say hey help us let's you know here's what we know we've this is the data that we have going
071forward and we still have massive needs yep absolutely um so knowing that um chronic absenteeism is definitely an important mitigating factor for all that i've talked about we knew that that had to be a priority you know i shared the data with you each and every school that's the one place where we fell down on a report card it's a new measure that they're looking at and every school was cited into not having the appropriate attendance rate compared to the state we do have some good baseline info that was one spreadsheet that we got going we started it last december as soon as we found out that that was going to be one of the factors and what we did was we um we wanted to make the data manageable we have it organized so
072that i can see at a glance what every grade level is across the district and the average in our district is 17 and that's what we were falling you know december january february and march along with that though we broke it down even just handing a school here's all the chronically absent kids in your school was honestly overwhelming it's way more than you think nor overall attendance is still great for a district it's right around 95 when you narrow in on this group it really it's a lot of kids in each school we broke it down then by grade level so that we could add the classroom teacher to it so we can say your classroom teacher please look at your kids you've got five chronically absent did you realize they've missed this much school
073and the range to be chronically absent you have to miss at least 10 percent of the school year and that factor changes it's cumulative so each month there's a new number a new target we've gathered kids who came and we also kept track of who fell off it might be on the bubble surprisingly um we had we will probably have kids that make that threshold early in the year september and october sometimes it's because they just had a really bad week and we're really really sick and we won't miss any other school and other times it's because one day a week they say to their parent i really don't want to go today and you know knowing that we have to take attendance um for the virtual school we're going to have to keep close
074track what's happening not only are they there but are they engaging with the work that we want them to do is is that a report that you're following on a weekly basis regular basis and one and two is that something protected super sensitive place because it has really very sensitive information around all the kids um we we pulled it once a month and we we built the first monday after a month ended is the day we would pull so we were consistent we were planning to start with that we don't you probably could pull it more often but i don't know that we'll need to if we do we'll certainly we had that gave us more than enough information to work with well from there though each school their sel team had to come up
075with a plan of what are they going to do when they have those names come in so that's part of it how can we achieve a 95 rate and and once we have 17 percent of those children how does that work it does not make any sense to me it's the psychomatricians of albany and how they come up with formulas you know i'll be honest i don't know i wish i knew that because it doesn't make sense when you see it and they you know that's why math is horrible well no no here's something you know we made it as a district goal a few years ago to look at absenteeism overall probably four years ago maybe and um we decided to do it because we wanted to see could we get better and we
076thought each school had a little team there and when it came out at the end of the year that we have this great attendance rate um you know we i said i knew this was coming down i asked mr daily i said hey should we study and try to dig deeper and learn about there was no reports we could pull but what we did now is at the high school especially amy burnham had just moved into the ap role she came to me and she said i have kids making like 40 and 50 days she's like i don't know what to do with this and you know we had a hunch that it was a bigger problem than we knew about but there wasn't really any report that would help us so it was it
077was decided that we wouldn't pursue it our rate was overall and honestly you know we should have you know we should have gone with our gut and tried hard yeah one thing i will tell you is that there's one way that you could be absent but the aggregate is still 95 because maybe two kids today tomorrow's 10 kids so the percentage of kids is high which is the 17 but your aggregate is still 95 so i know like you look at it by number of kids versus total like average daily attendance is the total number of kids in the building that day but that day you could have had 17 percent of your kids absent on one day but again your overall monthly aggregate still going to be 95 because five kids a day 10
078kids tomorrow 25 kids a year it's going to just fluctuate i think i told you when we met kids it's only if you think about it 95 percent i think it was like 17 absences or something of course your means you're chronically absent so you just look at one per per month if you miss one day at school that's 12 day uh 10 days you're borderline chronically absent and that's one one time and then there's legal excuses and not legal excuses so that also is there other aggregate reporting that you can pull i mean so data mapping is what what you have to do to be able to figure out and pinpoint like this this is why that's the case right now so the good thing is we made our own report i can pull
079one that's ugly and if i send it to principals honestly it would sit in their inbox and they wouldn't have time to digest it it's bad but i we found a way to make it manageable it take my secretary works on a whole day when the data comes out and it took her you know she was and we're working with microsoft access to try to find a way to get it in a more usable user-friendly format but now that we have it it really is pretty good information it lists all this critical things that we need it's just a matter of getting it in a place that you can do something yeah yeah but isn't attendance on a daily basis a weekly or monthly basis um attached to state aid so with this being 17
080on a monthly doesn't that mean our aid is [Music] that's why we made it a priority right if you'll see we listed things within the plan that are specific in terms of what we'll do but honestly it's going to be a collective effort to keep going deep none of us are proud of that right i guess the best example i'll say there's 11 kids in a class 10 of them come all the time one of them doesn't our chronic absenteeism for that kid is going to be high because he doesn't come he's 17 or whatever but that class is a group because they all come it's gonna be over nine times right so that's kind of how the formula will work for the state so when you think of 600 kids a subgroup of that
081is not a 10 million 17 of the time right but overall when you add all the kids attendance then you're over that threshold so that's the well that's the aspect of the crime correct and i would say the elementary schools they easily knew who was missing school did they pay attention to who missed the most probably but the kids who were really making that threshold they might not have noticed as much where honestly kids get lost at the middle school in the high school and i would say that's the area that we have to dig in the most to really learn and understand you know a traditional class a core class the teacher has over students you know they kind of know what's going on but now that we can hand them information on a
082monthly basis it says did you know you know i think it stands out to them because you know we're helping them to know if they didn't know and and then from there you know building those social emotional relationships hopefully they'll get to know the kids a lot better to understand why yeah so you're you're you're a bunch of data comes from your teachers and i feel like that's maybe where you should start is gonna get a consensus of teachers yeah you know they know why kids are you know in their cohorts this is well and that it's a perfect segue because this priority that we need is one that i'll be honest we you know it's one that hasn't been a focus necessarily but it's needed to be you know we were in trouble with
083subgroups before it's been whack-a-mole at times we go back and forth with some years it's black some years it's multi-racial some years it's latino what we know across the board is that the chronically absent really are the even though we're all chronically absent the disparity is much much larger and that leads to really a much bigger problem what we want to investigate and we're going to do if the instructional leadership team's going to be the brain power to really help move this effort is to look at the culturally responsive sustaining educational framework there's a great guide that we can use for it and one of the guides is a scorecard to look at our curriculum kids have told us in small pockets but we and i would say we probably haven't listened enough to know
084what is it that they want to learn and it will really engage them and bring them to life and the reality is we have to use the scorecard to guide the work you know we've we've had pockets of innovation my mantra for summer work is generally pick one unit that you want to make really really great this summer this scorecard will lead to that you know the reality is we can all do better with making sure that we have a variety of resources and materials and curriculum that really truly engages kids so we've purchased it's called think circa for the high school last year it was meant to really help teachers between yelling and social studies to learn to write has um a formula within the system that can really guide teachers to know how
085kids are doing with that process they have very compelling topics in there they have a bank of resources for around community events so teachers can now go to that and have some ready-made things that they would want to do but it's done for them and we're you know we uh have some training sessions coming up for that product just for the high school but beyond that the entire ilt will use a scorecard and that's going to be the crux of what else we need to do you know we know we have a lot of work ahead of us if you think back to the five priorities though i hope you can see how they come together they're kind of surrounding the chronic absentee going after just all facets that could possibly touch that the state's
086very generous for this year they gave us 25 000 to do this work we'll gladly take it what we're doing right now is what we heard loud and clear from the remote learning period it was really emergency remote learning you know not a great way to start or end the year it was that everybody needed support with technology so we brought the teachers together we've been working with the principals we want to have a virtual tech academy for all stakeholders we want kids to know if they don't know how to do something where they can go to find that quick little simple tools we want parents to also know how they can support and do things and then ultimately teachers need to just keep getting better and better at it as well we want the
087teachers to be the voice the parents here we want that'll help to build that relationship to foster the partnership that it really is and by really having this um it's going to be part of the website and then each school is going to have a way that they'll kick things off and promote it as well it's going to be an ongoing thing we use some of the speed money to get started with it from there there will be a new school improvement grant for next year and that would be surrounded around the five priorities so that we can keep going deeper reality is this work it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of dedication and to do that beyond the school day we need to pay people to help with that work
088and that you know little sea grants can help with little things that can turn out to be very big things what questions do you have um i got you have given me this sort of in advance there are a couple things a couple of questions about terms what what is a nudge letter okay um i didn't put that as part of the presentation the knowledge letter was um a letter i went to a session last fall on chronic absenteeism with mr bishoping there's a company that worked with harvard to look at research of what makes a difference and the number one factor that could significantly change your chronic gas and t rates was what they call the nudge letter it's a letter that has a graph so um we know how many days your child's
089missing if we compare that against their peers like the other first graders and show your childhood as 12 the average first grader is two that that graph is presented to the parents and we're nudging them into realizing that the the decisions they're making for their child to not come to school don't reflect they said the number one thing is that parents don't realize how much school their child misses compared to someone else and that next letter is supposed to help with that okay um there's a term in here um it's under quantitative improvement outcomes for priority five with all ilt members instructional leadership team okay and my brain power i mean i couldn't do much of what i do without them it's a grade level in department chairs it represents k through 12. they're making
090and the let i think the last question i had was um also in priority five um what is pilot 1619 project so that's a near science project around the year that the african-americans landed here in the united states okay so we wanted to share with one of our social teachers to investigate it maybe highlight it in the class try to rule it out it's got a ton of historical artifacts i can show you the website but basically the 1695 is the year that african americans landed here um but we wanted to see if there was any interest in it and try to pilot it expose all of our kids to it so that's something we want to pilot okay [Music] so part of that whole cultural responsive sustainable framework one thing that dr koi didn't
091mention that is coming from here in the state as recommended that framework is something that we're actually putting we put it in our reopening plan that was part of our athletes thank you all right so financial report for may compared to may of 2019 it's page 83 in your packet most of the items continued as reported in the past similar decreases or increases with one exception which i'll highlight a little later on but overall revenues through may has increased almost twenty two thousand dollars or just point zero five percent i highlighted the first four items the real property tax items that's our pilots payments a little taxes those are when the uh business gets as an exemption for usually 10 years and eventually gets on the tax roll that's decreased uh 69 000 compared to
092last year or 11.47 percent we generally know what this is we have a schedule and budget for it accordingly the non-property tax items the second line down um that's our utility tax it's the lowest level it's been in 15 years through may overall it's a decrease of almost 75 000 or 12 percent compared to last year projection that we will not meet the budget uh by about a hundred thousand dollars there charges for services it's uh some tuition billings uh last year there were two years a double year tuition bill billions for special edit private parochial schools rescued 2018-19 it's a decrease of 187 000 or 93 we did most of our tuition billings this year in the month of june so that will catch up we'll still be down to uh two years for
093the special ed private parochial uh schools but the rest of this should be done jump then use the money and property uh general fund our revenue uh basically interest earnings have been uh defined significantly compared to last year it's down 97 000 or 37 the area of expenditures overall we see a decrease of 375 000 payroll up is up 664 000 throughout all categories or 3.42 again most of the other mines are pretty consistent is what was reported in the past but the area of transportation um this month we started to see it in april but uh you can see the difference here about 205 000 since uh march 16th we didn't have transportation expense and so um that's saved us uh you know some funds there now uh our contractors feel that we need
094to pay that according with the state guidelines um and uh so we're kind of uh concerned that they may be taking some legal action so at the end of the year we'll make sure that that money's uh set aside and carried over in the conference in case the money would still be there uh this will affect next year's state aid for transportation which was already budgeted because if we're not spending it we're not going to get revenue in uh you know it's a good good thing that we're not spam spending it but um also it's gonna harm us next year so just yeah just as the board understands because we ran no buses from march so june our contract clearly says we don't pay for the service but they feel that because we are receiving
095federal aid or that there's federal guidance it says we're supposed to keep everyone old it doesn't say that necessary to honor those contracts we kept all of our employees employed through the independence um they feel that they're still entitled to their full contract and we said no so that's where just i want to be clear here that we didn't do anything illegal we literally follow the contract but they still feel that they're entitled to that because uh we're receiving some federal funding by the cares act so they feel they should still beat the main hole i mean their definition of full part of their price to us i would assume is fuel and some aren't paying like us some aren't playing some are going to court deciding so that's why uh scott's mentioned we want
096to hold it because we are we don't want to come from anywhere else to be there that really concludes uh may report if you have any answering questions thank you thank you [Music] improvement plan to accept it most of my mrs bowman is there a second but goodbye mrs bromley is there any discussion seeing none um the next item on the agenda is public to be heard we have no public so we will go on to agenda alterations um under let's see it says there are two under consent items and the retirements and under old business revise um the school calendar right that's what that is um i need a motion to accept the agenda alterations questioned by mrs bromley is there a second second by mr sistery is there any discussion saying none yesterday
097um next item is consent items i need a motion to accept the items for consent most of the minus your sister is there a second second second body yes then we yes a motion to go into executive sessions um so before we go into exactly the session we need a motion for um to accept all the new business this is bowman um that's the motion is there a second sex especially history yes yes we are now in executive session sorry for this